Pre-made Adsense and Portal Websites or readily available all over the Web and are being used by almost everyone in some form or another.
More than likely, you either have some of the Pre-made Adsense and Portal Websites or you thought about using them.
I know from my own experiences that those of you who are using them are having issues with some of them.
I also know that some of you may not be using the larger Portal Websites because you don’t have a Google Account and changing the Ads is near impossible.
What I am going to cover are the types of Pre-made Adsense and Portal Websites that are available and give you a little advice on using them, setting them up and tweaking them.
For those of you who do not have an Adsense account, I am going to show you a cool utility that will help you replace the Adsense codes.
The pre-made Adsense and Portal Websites basically fall into what I would call 3 different categories.
- Easy
- Intermediate
- Advanced
Let’s take a quick look at each one of these:
Easy
These are set up much the way you would set up your own website. Most of the time there are only a few pages and they can be modified quickly.
Here is an example: Fishing
Intermediate
These are larger websites containing a large number of pages and are the hardest to modify if you do not have and Adsense Account.
Here is an example: Skiing
Advanced
These are probably the best websites to use and they are easy to modify because all the ad codes are on seperate pages in the “includes” folder.
Here is an example: Sony Playstation
There are a few basic steps that you need to do to the Adsense and Portal Websites before you even upload them to your web server.
These basic steps pertain to all three types of Adsense and Portal Websites
- Naming the Website
- Setting up Meta Tags
- Modify the Content
- Modify the Ads
Naming the site
Most people will put the sites up without doing any research or modifications to them which is a complete waste of time and effort.
Naming the site is a crucial step in setting up your Adsense and Portal Websites as this sets the tone for the rest of your modifications and can spell success or disaster in the search engines.
Ideally, you want the name of your site to be the same as your primary key word or phrase.
There are three sites you can use to do your key word search and find the words that are going to help you the most.
There is one thing that you need to decide on before you start researching; are you going to buy a domain name for your site or set it up as a sub-domain on your current site.
More then likely, you will not be able to buy the domain name for the words you want to use and this will require an additional search as you go along.
Sub-domains for just fine.
Let’s take a look at Fishing as an example of what it is you need to look for.
The Overture search results will tell you that there have been over 200 thousands searches. The problem is that when you search that term in Google you will see that there are over 10 million pages for that term.
Now you are looking at good news, bad news.
Good news; there are alot of searches for that term
Bad news; you have to compete against too many pages.
What you are really looking for is a high number of searches, with a relatively low number of pages to compete against, as they relate to your website.
When you look back at Overture, you will see that Fly Fishing is searched for around 75 thousand times and there are only 1.6 million pages in Google.
You stand a better chance of competing with this term. With a little research, you can find words where there is very little competition for your chosen word or phrase.
Hint
While searching for the name you are going to use, jot down some of the keywords that come up on the listings. These should be relevant to your site. You can also do searches on these terms on the same key word tools to find additional relevant terms. You will use these in the Meta Tags and Content of your website.
Basic Meta Tags
If you followed the steps above, you have already done most of the work for these.
META http-equiv=”Content-Type” CONTENT=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″
{This line probably exists already, if not insert the proper charset}
META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”A descriptive sentence using the descriptive keywords you found describing your site”
META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”Place, Keywords, or your phrases, here”
META NAME=”PUBLISHER” CONTENT=”YOUR WEBSITE”
META NAME=”LANGUAGE” CONTENT=”English”
META NAME=”COPYRIGHT” CONTENT=”YOUR NAME (c) 2005 All Rights Reserved”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”index”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”follow”
The Meta Tags need to be placed between the open and closed Head Tag of your HTML.
The Meta Tags need to be enclosed with the “<" and ">” just like the Head Tag.
Hint
Change the “DESCRIPTION” and “KEYWORDS” Meta Tags for each page of your website so they match up with the content of that page.
Modify the Content
Changing the content of your Adsense and Portal Websites can be an easy task or a daunting task. This all depends on what type of Articles came with the site and the size of the site.
At the very least, you should change the first page or index page.
Changing the index page or creating a new one may be your only option if all the Articles of your website were written by someone else.
When you are writing the new index page you want to include the keywords that you have inserted into the Meta Tags for that Page. You can pull information from some of the other Articles of the site to help you write your new index page.
Don’t be intimidated by the larger Portal Websites that have dozens of Article Pages that need to be changed. You can come back to the other pages and work on them a little at a time.
Hint
Many of the Adsense and Portal Websites have RSS Feeds built into the website. You can change the output of the RSS Feed so it matches your key words by opening the rss.php file and changing the feed.
Look for lines similar to these toward the bottom of the file:
“http://news.google.com/news?q=KEYWORD&output=rss”,
“http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD PHRASE”
Hint
Always insert a link back to your main website on the pages.
You should display a related product that your visitors can buy. The product can be your own or something through an Affiliate Program.
Modify the Ads
How you modify the ads will depend on the type of site you are trying to modify.
The Basic Adsense site and the Advanced Portal Website are the easiest sites to change.
You have two options to use on these two types of sites:
- Copy and Paste
- Use a Simple Search-Replace Utility
If you just want to change the Google Publishers ID and the Copywrite Footer, then the Simple Search-Replace Utility is ideal for doing this.
RJL Software has a Simple Search-Replace Utility that you can get here:
http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/search/
You can use Copy and Paste to change the ads to something else fairly easy. The Basic Adsense site normally only has about a dozen pages to change and the ads on the Advanced Portal Website can all be changed on a few files in the “includes” folder.
The Intermediate Portal Website ads can be changed easily if all you are doing is inserting your Google Id into the ads. You can use the same Simple Search-Replace Utility from above.
However, due to the large size of these sites, you will need another Utility to change all the Adsense Ads to something else.
ReplSoft has a “Useful File Utilities” that I absolutely love.
I use this Utility to change the Google Ads to Yahoo Ads on all my Portal sites and I can change several Portals at the same time.
This Utility will also insert large blocks of text into your web pages such as Meta Tags.
Here is the website http://replsoft.com
Hint
Uncheck the “create back up copy” when you use this as it will add duplicate files in your folder causing an upload nightmare.
I suggest that you make a duplicate folder and play with those files instead.
Hint
If you change the Google Ads to Yahoo Ads, you will need to do this in two steps. The Ads have two “javascript” sections and it won’t change the code right if you try and change them all at once.
- Change all the “google_ad” to “ctxt_ad”
Things You Need to do After You Upload Your Website
Once you have your Adsense and Portal Websites modified and uploaded to your server, there are a few things that you will need to check.
- Check the sites presentation
- Check the websites links
When you check the site presentation you want to make sure the images display properly especially if you changed the graphics or added images. Also, check the RSS Feeds. If you changed the Feeds search terms, the Feed may not display any results and you will need to enter new search terms so the RSS Feeds will display properly.
Checking the links on your website is a must. I can tell you from experience that the larger Portal Websites are going to have errors in them.
Some of the common problems you will have with the links are:
- Plural problems - The link “the-best-hat.html” the actual page “the-best-hats.html
- Incomplete links - The link “the-best” the actual page “the-best-hats.html”
- Reversed links - The link “colorado-skii-resort.html” the actual page “skii-resort-in-colorado.html”
Hint
One problem I have with the Portal Websites like the Sony Playstation Website is the “Home” link.
I have to do one modification for this to work correctly. This is either because of my servers or the way I set them up. If you have the same problem, here is the fix that I use.
Go to the “includes” folder and open the “menu.php” file
At the top of the file replace “?php echo SITE_HOME; ?”
With this a xhref=”http://YOURDOMAIN/SUB FOLDER”
Correcting link problems on the smaller sites is easy enough to do, but what are you going to do if you have a larger site like the Skiing Portal
I don’t have all day to check every link on a site that size and I know you don’t either so I am going to tell you how I do it.
I let the search engines tell me which links are bad. I know when I upload my website Google will crawl it that night.
The next day I look at the webstats for that Portal. I use Awstats for this. When you go to Awstats, look at the very bottom of the page and you will find a box labeled “HTTP Error codes”. Click on the “404″ and it will display the bad links for you.
Compare the bad links to the pages you have uploaded on your server to see what they should actually be. It will be easier to compare them if you have two browsers open.
You can use the Simple Search-Replace Utility to fix the copy on your hard drive. When you are finished, upload your revised website to your server overwriting the old copy.
Check your new website using the same steps as above.
Don’t Let Your Website Languish and Die
Now that you have your website up and running don’t just leave it out there to languish and die.
Monitor your search engine traffic. You may need to rework the keywords and rewrite the index page so you get better results.
Add more Articles or rewrite some of those that you haven’t.
Link to your new website by posting links on your other websites, forums and classified ads.
Till Next Time
MadChas
Great Resource
This is a new book for 2007 that will show you how to get huge, cheap traffic from Google using Adwords.
You have to check this out
http://www.madcashclub.com/at/adwords180