Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?

Your aim is to make the transition invisible and seamless to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your new pages should get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you’re moving your site, pesky 404 (File Not Found) errors can harm the user experience and negatively impact your site’s performance in Google search results.

Let’s cover moving your site to a new domain (for instance, changing from www.example.com to www.example.org). This is different from moving to a new IP address; read this post for more information on that.

Here are the main points:

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

We’ll admit it, moving is never easy - but these steps should help ensure that none of your good web reputation falls off the truck in the process.

Popularity: 55% [?]

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). Google use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”informative description here”>

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
Google want snippets to accurately represent the web result. Google frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.

Snippet showing quality meta description

Snippet showing lower-quality meta description



What are some good meta description strategies?
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages
Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don’t have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description
The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information — price, age, manufacturer — scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together. For example, consider the following meta description for the 7th Harry Potter Book, taken from a major product aggregator.

Not as desirable:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”[domain name redacted]
: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré”>
There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn’t work well as a snippet on our search results page:

• The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
• Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
• None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
• The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page — who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet — is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.

Much nicer:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages”>

What’s changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.

Use quality descriptions
Finally, make sure your descriptions are… descriptive. It’s easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they’re not directly visible in the UI for your site’s visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results — if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That’s likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.

Source: Google Webmaster Blog

Popularity: 75% [?]

There are lots of way to make money online from your blog. Lots of people have different ideas and different opinions. If you search on Google, you will find thousands of posts on this topic. But there are not lots of people who succeeded finally. The reason can be one of those:

• Lack of Passion
• Lack of proper Information
• Lack of Guide
• Misuse of opportunities
• Others

There are lots of bloggers who are not so successful but still earning a decent amount of money from their blogs. They all have different ways to do that.

Lets we all share our opinions on making money online from blog. Leave your opinions in comments sections. You can say anything you know and think that is good for others to know.

I will gather all the information from the comments and make it as a proper report and send it to all of you. May be this can help all of us in the future. Because sharing is the best caring.

Please give your opinions in the comments section. Your opinion can help all of us.

Popularity: 100% [?]

We all know about googlebot (Google), msnbot (MSN), Slurp (Yahoo) and Teoma (Ask). All of these benevolent robots, listens to us and respects our wishes about parts of our website that we don’t want to be crawled. We can just give all of them just a robots.txt file explaining what we want, and he’ll happily comply. But what if you’re intimidated by the idea of communicating directly with these robots? After all, not all of us are fluent and well known in the language of robots.txt.

This is why Google introduced personal robot translator in google webmaster tools. This will help you to make your robots.txt file even if you don’t know anything about it. It’s designed to give you an easy and interactive way to build a robots.txt file. It can be as simple as entering the files and directories you don’t want crawled by any robots.

Once you’re finished with the generator, you can test the effects of your new robots.txt file with our robots.txt analysis tool. When you’re done, just save the generated file to the top level (root) directory of your site, and you’re set to go.

There are a couple of important things to keep in mind about robots.txt files:

• Not every search engine will support every extension to robots.txt files

The Robots.txt Generator creates files that Googlebot will understand, and most other major robots will understand them too. But it’s possible that some robots won’t understand all of the robots.txt features that the generator uses.

• Robots.txt is simply a request

Although it’s highly unlikely from a major search engine, there are some unscrupulous robots that may ignore the contents of robots.txt and crawl blocked areas anyway. If you have sensitive content that you need to protect completely, you should put it behind password protection rather than relying on robots.txt.
We hope this new tool helps you communicate your wishes to Googlebot and other robots that visit your site.

Popularity: 80% [?]

Always people asking on how to make money faster online. Before I go into further details about how to make money faster, you first have to understand the logic behind making money online. To make money online you need three important things.

1. Traffic - getting people to see your site
2. Leads - getting information from people
3. Sales - getting the sale to make money

What you see above is just the most basic concept in online marketing, like all off line business you need to have customers well so does online business which we call it traffic. The only way you can get people to buy stuff from you is to get people to view your promotion or website it’s that simple. However many people who tried online marketing do not know how to drive traffic online.

There are many ways you can drive traffic, forum marketing, social networks, ppc, article marketing and so on but I realized one common problem everyone is facing. Most methods that are taught out there are all free traffic tactics. If you are serious about making money then you would want to read every word I am about to say to improve your business today.

Start Trying Out Paid Traffic

While most people will keep saying use Google Adwords, it’s great and so on. Adwords is getting more & more expensive every single day and I know the only way you can succeed faster is to use paid traffic!

To get some cost savings you can actually join other ad networks like Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter. Many people who ever tried PPC will know that it’s not cheap to advertise now with PPC, the last time I tried Adwords I had to pay US$0.25 per click and that’s expensive!

Here are a list of alternatives you can consider to try which I have tried before

1. Bidvertiser
2. Blogads
3. Projectwonderful
4. Adbrite

Getting Start With Paid Traffic

Before you begin marketing, you first need to create a squeeze page. If you have no idea what that is you can look at an example by clicking here. It’s basically a simple page you create to capture people’s name and email details which we call them leads. However in order to create one you will also need a auto responder, if you do not have one you can go to this special link here to get one for free =)

One caution when you are started a paid campaign do not go and spend too much money when you first started. You need to do something called testing. What I would do is I would set a side US$50 for about 4 to 6 days and test out the ad network to see if the squeeze page converts well. You will be suprised that different ad networks will have different results depend what keyword you are advertising.

What Will You Do With The Leads?

Once you get the leads you have collected from paying money to advertise your squeeze page, you will promote one select product of your choice.

Summary

Just to sum it up, what you have just learn is to use paid traffic to generate leads on your squeeze page and selling them stuff through emails. How much you can earn will be determine by the number of leads you collect. Let say if you are selling my book, you will earn US$30 per copy BUT from experience to tell you the truth you need at least 80 leads or so just to make one sale because the conversion to one sale online is always at the range of 1% to 5% only which means for every 100 people that sees your promotion you will only get about 1 to 5 sales and that’s very common for online digital products.

Good luck with your quest to making money online and if you find this article useful for you post some comments below or if you have other ad networks you like to share that you had great success also please post them below.

Popularity: 92% [?]