The site I was asked to review is Royal Tours Africa dot Com. I’m going to go over some SEO, design and monetization points – what’s cool and what can be done better. If you have a website yourself you can probably see if any of the things I cover fit your own website.

E-mail Marketing

In the left sidebar there is a “Montly Updates” box (sidenote: that’s actually a typo – it should be “Monthly”) where people can sign up for a newsletter. That’s very smart – it’s a good idea to collect your visitors’ information so you can contact them (get them to visit the site again, send them special offers or just some tips). But I would give this box more attention. Right now the background is transparent and I don’t think that looks so good – I would make the background white (like in the “Main Menu” box above). I would also list a few benefits – why should people sign up, what can they expect to receive? Also, having something like “I respect your privacy!” or “I will not spam you” should help get more people to sign up – risk removals always help with conversion. Another thing – I would add the optin form to as many pages as possible – not just the front page. Use every opportunity to get a new subscriber – people might not even see the front page first, for example if they come through the search engines.

Link Popularity

When I check the front page of royaltoursafrica.com my Live PageRank add-on tells me that page is only PageRank 1. I would definitely focus on increasing the PageRank. Getting it up to PR3 shouldn’t be that hard – just work on getting more sites to link to Royal Tours Africa – for example through submitting articles, press releases, finding related sites to exchange links, add a resource to the site that people want to link to (aka. linkbait), etc. The PageRank might even increase in the next PageRank update because royaltoursafrica.com is now a featured site on this blog.

One of the key phrases Felista (the owner) is targeting is Kenya safaris. I used SEO Elite to see where royaltoursafrica.com ranked for Kenya safaris: It’s #68 on Google and #7 on MSN (Live Search) – but it’s not in the top 100 on Yahoo. I would focus on ranking high on Google because that’s where the majority of people go when searching for something.

One way to increase your PageRank and increase your rankings in the search engines is through reciprocal links (although it’s not as effective as it used to be). I can see that they have a link directory with a lot of different categories. Although a link is always a link I would reduce the number of categories and try to get links from sites that are related to royaltoursafrica.com – anything related to tourism, travel, Africa, safaris, etc. But I’m not sure how people are supposed to submit their link to this directory – the “Exchange Links Now” link points to addyourlinks.com – this is probably something that needs to be updated.

On-page SEO

The on-page SEO is pretty good. The <title> is “: : Kenya Safaris:Animals in Kenya : Discount Travel : African Safaris” which includes the primary key phrase as well as a few related keywords – which is good. Personally I wouldn’t start the title with “: : ” – but that’s just me ;) There are two h1 tags: “Kenya Safaris” and “Montly Updates” – having your primary key phrase in an h1 tag is one of the oldest tricks in the book and it’s still important.

The images have alt attributes with “Kenya safaris” or other related keywords – which is very good. The keyword density is pretty good. “Kenya” and “safari” is mentioned several times – that should definitely help in ranking for those keywords. On the front page there is a big “headline” that says: “RoyalToursAfrica” — I would split it up into “Royal Tours Africa” so the search engines will recognize each word.

Search engine crawling and navigation

Right now there are 162 pages indexed on Google from royaltoursafrica.com — that’s pretty good, but I don’t know the total number of pages on that domain so maybe there is something that can be done to help Google find the rest of the pages. There is a sitemap which is a good way to help the search engines find the pages on the domain – but that sitemap should perhaps link to more pages.

Having a good navigation also helps the search engine spiders crawl your site. The “Main Menu” looks pretty good – just make sure you’re covering all the main categories/sections of your site. On the front page there are also links to some keyword targeted content pages like Kenya Holidays, Why a Kenya safari, Kenya food, Kenya culture and Shopping in Kenya. Having sub-pages targeted at related long tail keywords is a good idea. The <title> of those sub-pages matches the targeted keyword so that’s also very good. But I think there is something missing on those sub-pages — What should people do next? Often if it’s not obvious where the visitor should go next he’ll just close the browser. Don’t make the visitor have to think – make it clear what you want him to do next. Something at the end of the article, like: Read another article (“Here are some related articles” might help), a link to a form to book a safari tour, etc.

Design

In the right sidebar on the front page there is a “Login Form” – I’m not sure what the purpose of this is. Can visitors sign up to get access to special material? If so, where do people sign up? It’s often a good idea to have the front page (and any other landing pages) as simple as possible – don’t have anything that will only confuse the visitor. It should be clear what you want the visitor to do (sign up for a membership, join the mailing list, visit a particular page, etc.).

I’m a big fan of large fonts – I think it make the page more readable and some people have a hard time reading small fonts. That’s why I think the font size of the body content could be a little bit bigger. Another thing – on the front page there is an “Air Travel Deals to Kenya” column with links to a few airlines that fly to Kenya. That’s a good idea – nice to provide this kind of a resource. But I would put it on a separate page and not on the front page – you don’t want to lose your visitor as soon as he arrives on your site. At least add target="_blank" to the links so they open in a new window ;)

Monetization

At the bottom of the front page there is a PayPal banner with an affiliate link – I don’t think that’s the best choice if they’re interested in earning a little bit more through affiliate marketing. I would find an offer that’s more suitable to the visitors of this site – something related to traveling, tourism, etc. Just search through the affiliate networks – like ClickBank (search the CBmall), Commission Junction, etc.

Other methods of monetization could be for example Google AdSense, selling links, CPM banners, optin co-registration, getting resale rights for eBooks related to travel and selling them on the site, etc… But I think affiliate marketing could be the best move. Although… it all depends on the focus of the site – how much is each visitor worth? Do you want to keep the visitor on the site as long as you can or are you willing to sell a click away from your site for a few cents/dollars?

Well, what did you think of this review? Anything else that I should have covered? Anything you want explained further or covered in more detail?

Do you want me to review your site/product/service? Let me know – we can probably work something out :)

Keywords: pagerank, website review, email marketing, optin, linkbait, landing pages, monetization, web design, search engines, key phrase, link popularity, alt tag, spiders, cpm, long tail, conversion, reciprocal links, resale rights

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After ignoring Text Link Ads for quite some time I finally decided to give them a try a few months ago. One of the reasons I hadn’t tried them before was because of the controversy about buying/selling links on websites. For example, Google doesn’t particularly like when people buy links on high PageRank webpages to increase the PageRank of their own websites. But why did I change my mind? Well, I was reading John Chow dot Com and he was pushing Text Link Ads pretty hard and I just thought “hey, it can’t hurt to try it out” ;) You can just look at it as a way to sell advertisement on your websites – because that’s essentially what it is, the added PageRank boost for advertisers is just a bonus ;)

Is it safe to join?

Another reason why I decided to jump on it was that they had testimonials from several notable SEO professionals like Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Brad Fallon, etc. Those guys should have a pretty good idea of what is good practice in web development. Google can’t penalize websites for having advertisements, right?

So I joined Text Link Ads and added my first website – that has a PageRank 5 front page. Actually, while reading their sign-up agreement I noticed something funny:

MEMBERSHIP RESTRICTIONS.
Individuals that are in anyway affiliated with, agents of, working for, or employed by any internet search engine organization may not register to use this site.

I guess they don’t want Matt Cutts looking around and seeing what websites are buying/selling links ;) But I’m an AdWords advertiser and an AdSense publisher, does that mean I’m affiliated with Google? They’re probably OK with that.

Adding your blog

When you’re adding a new site that you want to publish ads there is this option:
“Publish Ads On Your RSS Feed? (Feedvertising)” and a note: “WordPress 2.0+ is required for this feature.”. Yet another reason for using WordPress for your blog. I submitted this blog but at the time it hadn’t gotten any public PageRank so it was just put in the “waiting queue” – they say that it isn’t necessary to resubmit websites because they recheck all websites regularly. But this blog hasn’t been accepted even though the PageRank update was more than a month ago. I’m not sure if I’m going to resubmit this blog or just try to see if I can sell some links through direct advertising – I might be able to get more profit that way.

Make money on autopilot

Well, I joined TLA in the middle of January 2007 and in the beginning of February I sold my first text link. So it only took a little over 2 weeks to get my first link. Not bad – I didn’t have to do anything but sign up and add a small code to my site. The Text Link Ads system took care of the rest. Next month I got 4 more links which meant that half of my link inventory was already sold :) I then submitted some of my other high PageRank websites and sure enough I sold some links (even though those webpages were only PR4 and PR3). Now I just wished I had joined Text Link Ads sooner – this is a great way to monetize any website. You don’t have to work on looking for advertiser and those text links don’t take up much space on your pages. If you have a webpage that has at least PageRank 4 I highly recommend that you join Text Link Ads and give it a shot – it’s a nice way to make some extra money from your websites. Also, they pay on the 1st of every month through PayPal and they use mass payment which means you don’t have to pay any fees. You can also select the option of getting paid by check but I haven’t tried that yet.

Good support

On a side note; Patrick Gavin (the President of Text-Link-Ads) is a pretty cool guy – I had some questions after signing up and he personally answered the support tickets fairly quickly. One of the things I asked about was regarding the price advertisers paid and what would happen if my page increased in PageRank and/or Alexa rank? The answer is that the price for current advertisers is “grandfathered” – that is, an advertiser pays the same every month as long as he remains active (doesn’t cancel). That makes sense, reward loyal advertisers.

How to get Text Link Ads to work on static pages

Because the TLA links are loaded dynamically you cannot have TLA on normal (static) HTML pages. But there is a solution for that. From their FAQ:

If your website uses the Apache web server (as most Linux/UNIX hosting packages do), you can instruct the web server to treat .html (or .htm) files as PHP. To accomplish this, create a file named “.htaccess” in your root directory and add the following to it (or append it to the bottom of the file, if it already exists):

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

(Note: if you use “.htm” files, replace the “.html” above with “.htm”)

I did this where I had static pages and it worked great.

There you have it, another great way to make money online. Your websites don’t even have to get a huge amount of traffic, as long as you have decent PageRank you will most likely be able to sell some links (totally “hands free”). Just click here to join Text Link Ads and you’ll be earning money in no time :)

Have you tried Text Link Ads? What was your experience, were you able to sell links quickly, are you satisfied with the money you’re making through TLA?

Keywords: google, pagerank, text link ads, text-link-ads, SEO, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Brad Fallon, monetization, Matt Cutts, Patrick Gavin

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Soon after launching this blog I applied to ReviewMe. But it looks like they mainly look at the PageRank when deciding what blogs get accepted – so blogs that don’t have any public PageRank yet don’t get in. With the recent PageRank update that shows this blog having PR4 I was sure I would get accepted and be able to charge a decent fee. But it looks like you only have to submit your blog once – after that they’ll just keep you in their database and check every once in a while to see if your blog meets their requirement. So I had to just wait for them to check my blog again…

Today I got an e-mail from them notifying me that this blog was accepted. They set the price for a review on Hannes Johnson dot Com at $60.00 per review. Since I’m free to change the price I might increase the price or start at $40 and increase it with every review like Michael Kwan suggested.

But I think bloggers need to be careful with these kind of paid reviews – they must take care of the advertisers so they get their monies worth but bloggers must also think about the readers (which is a blog’s most valuable asset). I definitely won’t accept just about any review that is submitted – it must be something that I think my readers will be interested in. But since this blog doesn’t have just one topic of discussion it can be anything about making money online, personal development, SEO, web development, affiliate marketing or marketing in general… or something else that I think is cool. I also want to try to include in the reviews a few things that the reader will learn from – that will hopefully keep everybody happy :)

Well, now I’m just waiting for Text Link Ads to accept me and then I’ll be able to add yet another income stream to this blog :)

If you’re interested in getting reviewed on this blog you can click on the badge in the sidebar or just click here to order a review.

Keywords: ReviewMe, monetize, monetization, income, revenue, text-link-ads, Text Link Ads, review

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The most recognizable feature of MyBlogLog is the “recent readers” widget (you can see it on the sidebar if you scroll down a bit). I think that’s what put MyBlogLog on the map – it has a kind of a viral aspect to it. But I realize now that it has been some time since I first saw MyBlogLog in action – It’s probably a year (even more) since I first saw this “7 Clicks Today” (or “3rd Most Popular Outgoing Link”) on some blogs. So, the original purpose of MyBlogLog was, like the name implies, to be a log (web tracker) for blogs.

When you join MyBlogLog you get a 3 day trial of their Pro features. Having a Pro account gives you real time stats of where your visitors are coming from, what page they’re visiting and what links they clicked. After the 3 day trial you are downgraded to a free account and then you’ll only see stats for yesterday and the days before. You’ll also only see the top 10 results for each of the 3 tracking categories (referring link, what is being read and links clicked).

Pro Account

A Pro account is $3 per month or $25 for a whole year – that’s a common price range for web 2.0 websites (like flickr). Having a Pro account would make sense for popular blogs that get hundreds of pageviews a day where it’s vital for the success of your blog to know exactly what your readers are doing right now. But for small blogs where you only need to check your stats every now and then a free account might be enough. Combined with a normal web tracker (like StatCounter) you should get all the stats you need – Just check StatCounter for (close to) real-time stats of where your readers are coming from and what they’re reading and then check MyBlogLog to see what links the readers clicked yesterday (and the days before).

More Traffic

It looks like MyBlogLog can bring you some extra traffic. Just a few minutes after creating my account I already had a few people view my profile and one guy had added my as a contact in their profile – pretty cool :) I think MBL is a great tool for bloggers – it can only help you. Also, on your profile there is a link to your blog and we all want more links, right?

Don’t forget to add your picture to your MyBlogLog profile – Then, when you’re logged into MBL and you’re visiting blogs that have the “recent readers” widget your photo will appear there. Other readers might then click your photo and go to your profile – there they’ll see links to all your blogs.

A good way to get more exposure and more traffic is by joining communities in your niche. You can join my MyBlogLog community here.

Spam

But as with all hot services people are going to abuse them. Because you can leave messages on people’s MyBlogLog profiles with hyperlinks you get a lot of random people with messages like “Hey, like ur site. chk out my site thx…”. I’m already getting spam on the “recent readers” widget. But the MBL team is working on this issue.

Video Review

Just for fun I decided to record a short screen capture of me checking out MyBlogLog and all its features. This is the first video (of many?) that I’ll post on this blog. Enjoy :)

Let me know what you think of this video… (you might need to turn up the volume a little bit to hear me properly)
Update: The video is on: YouTube, Google Video and Revver (better quality).

Keywords: MyBlogLog, Yahoo, review, hannes johnson, videos, viral, web 2.0, web-20, web2.0, analytics, web analytics, stats, web tracking, web traffic, more traffic, link building, links, spam, screen cap, screen capture, blogging

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