Any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a “white-hat” search engine optimization tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking
By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.

While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.

Reciprocal Linking
Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.

A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who’s content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you’re linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).

If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.

Content Creation
Don’t confuse “content creation” with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.

Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

Writing For Others
You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else’s website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don’t require a reciprocal link back.

Site Optimization
The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it’s search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained within the site. There’s no point in driving traffic to a site that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the site while maximizing it’s exposure on the search engines.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended. Remember: even if the search engines cannot detect these tactics when they are used as spam, your competitors will undoubtedly be on the lookout and report your site to the engines in order to eliminate you from the competition.

It is definitely worth noting that, while it may be tempting to enlist grey-hat and black-hat SEO tactics in order to rank well, doing so stands a very good chance of getting your website penalized. There are legitimate methods for ranking a website well on the search engines. It is highly recommended that webmasters and SEO’s put in the extra time and effort to properly rank a website well, insuring that the site will not be penalized down the road or even banned from the search engines entirely.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

Cloaking
There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a “members only” area for example) you are relatively safe. Even so, this tactic is very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it’s use.

Arguably, another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking. As cloaking has often been abused, if other methods such as adding visible text to the page is possible it is recommended. If there are no other alternatives it is recommended that you contact the search engine prior to adding this tactic and explain your argument.

There is more information on cloaking on our black-hat SEO tactics page.

Paid Links
The practice of purchasing link on websites solely for the increase in link-popularity that it can mean has grown steadily over the last year-or-so with link auction sites such as LinkAdage making this practice easier. (You can read more about LinkAdage on our SEO resources page.

When links are purchased as pure advertising the practice is considered legitimate, while the practice of purchasing links only for the increase in link-popularity is considered an abuse and efforts will be made to either discount the links or penalize the site (usually the sellers though not always).

As a general rule, if you are purchasing links you should do so for the traffic that they will yield and consider any increase in link-popularity to be an “added bonus”.

You can read more about purchasing links and where to do so on our SEO resources page.

Duplicate Content
Due primarily to the increase in popularity of affiliate programs, duplicate content on the web has become an increasingly significant problem for both search engines and search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.

To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site’s rankings penalized.

There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

If you find competitors using these tactics it is not unethical to report them to the search engines. You are helping yourself, the search engines, and the visitors by insuring that only legitimate companies, providing real information and content, appear at the top of the search engines.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics

WARNING !!!

These Tactics Are Considered Black-Hat For A Reason.
This Page Is To Note The Tactics That You Will Hear About From Other SEO’s.
These Are Not Legitimate Tactics And While Some May Work In The Short Term.
They WILL Get Your Website Penalized And/Or Banned Eventually.

Constantly webmasters attempt to “trick” the search engines into ranking sites and pages based on illegitimate means. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat SEO tactics tend to drop from these positions as fast as they climb (if they do climb at all).

The following tactics are not listed to help you “trick” the search engines but rather to warn you against these tactics should you hear they are used by other SEO’s (this is not to say that all other search engine optimization experts use these tactics, just that some do and you should be warned against them).

Due to the sheer number of tricks and scripts used against search engines they could not possibly all be listed here. Below you will find only some of the most common black-hat tactics. Many SEO’s and webmasters have simply modified the below tactics in hopes that the new technique will work. Truthfully they may, but not forever and probably not for long.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don’t think they aren’t watching you if you’re holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you’ll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done “correctly” (we cannot give the method for “correct” interlinking here as it’s still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don’t want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Reporting Your Competitors
While this may seem a bit off, the practice of reporting competitors that you find using the tactics noted above or other search engine spam tactics is entirely legitimate and shouldn’t be considered at all unethical. When we take on search engine positioning clients this is always incorporated into our practices when applicable (which happily is not that often).

When a competitor uses unfair tactics to beat you it is entirely fair to report them.

If you have competitors that you feel are using illegitimate tactics to beat you on the search engines feel free to visit our “Report Spam” page for links to where to go on the major search engines to report spam results and sites to them. Just make sure you’re own site is clean when you do.

Reporting Search Engine Spam

Reporting search engine spam is an entirely legitimate means of eliminating unfair competition and making the search engines a more effective resource. If a competitor is using spam tactics to attain top positioning on the search engines it is in your best interest and in fact, the best interest of those using the search engine, to report the site.

Below you will find links to the spam reporting pages of the major search engines.

Click links to report spam:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• MSN
• AOL
• Ask
• Netscape – Report result to Google.
• AltaVista – Report result to Yahoo!.

We hope that this list helps you. If you find any sites or results in your travels that you feel are questionable but you just don’t know how/where to report it please feel free to contact us.

We’re happy to help you take horrible websites off the search engines.

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don’t make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.

2Write a meaningful & short description

The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you’d better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3Have a great first paragraph

This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User’s Attraction game, don’t let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4Content is king

However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users’ attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don’t count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.

5Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site

It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.
Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.

6Know when to submit

The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You’d better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7Submit to the right category

Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don’t submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8Build a top-profile

Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9Cooperate with other social bookmarkers

The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10Submit in English

Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don’t understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.

11Never submit old news

Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday’s news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12Check your facts

You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven’t got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts – or your readers will do it.

13Check you spelling

Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14Not all topics do well

But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don’t sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories – about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can’t know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15Have Related Articles / Popular Articles

Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing

RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17Do not use automated submitters

After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn’t. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don’t care about the fate of your profile and don’t mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18Respond to comments on your stories

Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19Prepare your server for the expected traffic

This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you’d better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20The snowball effect

But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.

Taken from : http://www.webconfs.com/get-traffic-from-social-bookmarking-sites-article-22.php

Why go to this trouble of hiding links? It is commonly believed that when you link to someone, you give some of the value of your page to the site you’re linking to.

I’ve listed some of the ways in which website owners trick you into believing that they are linking to you while actually hiding your link from the search engines.

Hiding Links – method 1:

It is commonly known that websites have two urls; one with the www.[yoursite].com and [yoursite].com. Notice that one has the www in front of the site name?

The trick is to place your link on [yoursite].com which typically has less value than www.[yoursite].com.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 1:

Look at your link and make sure it’s comming from a page that has www in front of the url if this is what was part of the original offer.

Hiding Links – Method 2:

By placing a link on a page that is deep within a website, say six clicks away from the main page, the website owner is able to give away less PR (value). Also used is a page that spiders/robots can never reach.

The idea is that pages located closer to the main page are worth more and those located deep inside the site are less valuable. If you link to their site from a page only one click away while they link back from a page that’s 5 clicks away, then they receive more value for your link.

Finding Hidden Link – - Tip 2:

Make sure you can click to the page containing the your link AND that the number of clicks are reasonable.

Hiding Links – Method 3:

robots.txt contains information for search engines spiders. Here is an example of a robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This entry tells the spiders to avoid any file located in the cgi-bin directory. If the web site owner places your link on a page inside this directory, it’s worthless.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 3:

Take a look at the website address, for example http://www.[somesite].com/index.htm. Type into your browser just the root url, in this case, http://www.[somesite].com and add /robots.txt

The final URL / website address will look like http://www.[somesite].com/index.htm

If the website has this file, then look at the output and make sure your page or directory is not disallowed.

Hiding Links – Method 4:

More than 100 links on a page. It is commonly believed that only the first 100 or 200 links are counted as valid links by search engines. By placing your link on a page with 500 links it may become worthless.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 4:

Make sure there are less than 100 links on the page containing your link. Some webmasters will promise to put yours on top, but chances are you’ll drop to the bottom later on.

Hiding Links – Method 5:

Links are sent through a links.php (or links.htm, links.asp, links.cgo, etc) page that further processes the link and sends it on to your site.

The idea is that if the search engine see this, it may not only count as a link deep inside the site, but may not count at all! Some sites place javascript around the link to hide it from the search engines; all this is done inside the links.php page.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 5:

Make sure the link is an actual link. The best way to do this is ‘view source’, then search for your website address. It should only have a ‘a href’ type link; a few good examples are inside this page’s source code which you can view.

Hiding Links – Method 6:

A high PR site gives you a link one or two clicks away from their main page. It looks great, but a month later the PR of the site drops significantly and you are now exchanging links with a site that has little or no PR.

What they didn’t tell you is that they purchased PR for a month, then contacted you for a link exchange.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 6:

Check your links every month to make sure you haven’t been tricked.

Hiding Links – Method 7:

Using frames to make it appear that your link is on a high PR page. They simply include an iframe tag that points to some obscure page with your link on it. The search engines never see your link but they get credit for your site linking to them.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 7:

View the source and make sure your link is on the right page!

Hiding Links – Method 8:

Using tables to display a link on the page but have the actual link go to another site. Here is an example of code that looks like it’s linking to Microsoft, but is actually linking to Google.

<a href=”http://www.microsoft.com/”>
<table><tr><td>
<a href=”http://www.google.com”>

http://www.microsoft.com

</td></tr></table>
</a>

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 8:

Follow your link! The newer browsers will detect this and display the correct URL in the status bar.

Hiding Links – Method 9:

Using CSS (cascading style sheets) to make links appear to be correct when in fact, the search engines can not follow them.

Finding Hidden Link – Tip 9:

Look at the source code to make sure the link is an ‘a href’ type link!

Biggest Trick of All

Search Engine Fraud – Trick #10 – The Biggest Trick of ALL!

WTF is a Torrent!? (Sorry … for impolite ^_^)
I don’t want torrents, I JUST WANT HTTP DOWNLOADS FREE AND FAST THROUGH MY BROWSER!!!

Torrent just means the file is networked and shared among many people. Torrent downloads are NOT slow. In the case of pirated software and games, servers will get prosecuted for hosting the games. Instead, they just “index” or list files shared by multiple people.

How do I Start Downloading NOW
First get a bit torrent client like Azureus, Bit Comet, or any other torrent opening program. Install The Client. Now you can open .torrent files! Wow, that was omfg kind of hard huh? Next download the torrent you want. Look for it in a torrent site: Pirate Bay, Bit Torrent, TorrentSpy, MiniNova Read Torrent Freaks 9 bit torrent common questions, bit torrent seeding site comparisons and Wikipedia’s article on p2p networks.

Bit Torrent Search Engine

I Want Something Like KAZAA or OLD NAPSTER
Kazaa is spyware full now and not worth downloading. It spawned variations like kazaa lite, k++, k-lite among others, but it’s still very much not worth using due to its gross amount of spyware. Instead download one of these similar alternative software: Emule, FrostWire, Limewire, Frostwire, Morpheus, Direct Connect, Cabos, Strong DC++, Phex, Shaeraza, iMesh, Bearshare. Don’t trust me? Check out Wikipedia’s Peer2peer programs Comparison.

I WANT COMMERCIAL PS2 PSX XBOX ISOS!!
If you want to download the latest playstation, xbox, wii ps2 ps3 games, again, everyone uses torrents. Again, type whatever you want into my torrent search engine above or search one of the above programs like emule. There ARE NO direct links to download iso files from your browser, YOU HAVE TO USE ONE OF THE FREE CLIENTS ABOVE… because for example: Fire Emblem Path of Radiance is 1 gigabyte, Final Fantasy X (10) is 3.14 gigabytes, Crysis 2.51 gigs, Microsoft Flight Similator and Addons are 6 gigs, Final Fantasy XII (12) 3.36 gigs, Spore 2.42 gigabytes. Servers would go down fast if they hosted these files because their bandwidth would be depleted from all the cable connections, and because they’re be sued to death by the gaming industry. Instead, multiple people transfer the files among each other in a very efficient way, called torrents and peer to peer networks.

You’re JUST TRYING TO SELL ME EMULE!!
All the programs I’m recommending are freeware. Most of them in fact, are open source software from sourceforge.net, meaning even the programming source code is free. This isn’t an advertisement, so quit spamming your ignorant comments.

How do I make my Downloads Go Faster
Most the p2p clients rely on having certain ports open so they can transfer your files. Many people have firewalls, routers and hubs that block the specified file sharing ports. Having the ports blocked can make downloading extremely slow or impossible. Read the documentation for the program you’re using and what ports you need open. Read how to enable the ports on your firewall and router (use google, QUIT asking me!!). Find your router in this Port Forwarding Help site, and follow the directions to add the specific port. Sounds like too much work? It’s worth it if you do, though not completely necessary.

I Find RAR, ZIP Files, BUT NOT ISO FILES!!!
ISO files are compressed into rar and zip files. Final Fantasy Tactics for playstation may be 550 mb as an ISO file, but as a zipped file, it’s only 220mb. The file may also be compressed as a .7z, .tar, .gz, .tgz file. All of these can be unzipped with an 800k freeware called 7-zip which adds a context menu for unzipping to all unzipable files. Most people use Winzip or WinRAR because of their easy interface.

I Find File Types: BIN CUE NRG IMG DAA CCD MDS PDI BWT
There are various types of CD Image Files. While ISO is the standard way to make 1:1 copies (one to one), there are many commercial applications that like to make their own standards of CD Images claiming it’s more secure or smaller in file size. The programs Alcohol 120% and Nero can burn most any of the images mentioned above. CCD files are for the program Clone CD. NRG Files are for NERO. DAA files are opened in the program Power ISO.

Don’t Bother Burning it To CD
If you use the game or software often that continually asks you to insert the CD everytime you play, it’s actually better to use Daemon Tools which can run ISO files or similar CD images as if they were inside the CD tray. Alchohol 120% mentioned above can also emulate most CD images onto Virtual CDs. Alcohol 120% recently released a freeware version called alcohol 52%. You can download it here. This makes it so the game is not limited to how fast it can read from the CD, and takes away that whinney cd spinning noise. MegaGames.com can provide NOCD programs that let you run your game without continually needing to stick the CD in.

I TRIED THE DOWNLOADED GAMES AND THEY DON’T WORK
First you burn the ISO file onto a CD. Playstations, Xboxes, etc ONLY work with burned games with a mod chip. You could also use an emulator, which is basically a program that lets you play the games on your computer. Playstation 1 (PSX PSP) has a really good emulator for its games called ePSXe, it is nearly perfect. The playstation 2 emulator still needs a bit of work. Both can use PeOp.s plugins that add a lot of customization.

I Want Free, and Legal GAMES
Check out Source Forge’s List of Free Games for Windows, Abandonia’s List and The UnderDog’s List of non copyrighted games. Maybe you want to program your own game. I bet you have some great ideas! Check out the Game Programming Wiki for tutorials and examples. Here’s a list of online free MMORPGs: Runescape, Dofus multilingual, MapleStory, Mana World, Knight Online, Tibia, rfonline, Entropia, Planeshift, Rose Online, RPGwo, MuOnline, ProjectRO, GuildWars, D.O. online, Kalonline, Hellbreath, Kindom of Loathing, Utopia, eve-online, clownphobia, Ragnarock Online, Anarchy Online, FlyFF, Rakion, Endless online, Most Wanted, Shadowmere, City of Heroes, cityofvillains, Legend of Green Dragon, Gunzonline, America’s Army, onRPG- mmorpg list, mmorpg- mmorpg list, and Wiki MMORPG List

Search Ideas
If you’re a gamer you can search PSP, PS2, GB, GBA, Nintendo DS, N64 Games, PS3 and Wii games, when they come out.

If you’re a musician you can search guitare tabs, and sheet music, there are huge archives of it. Sibelius and finale can turn MIDIs into printable sheet music for any instrument. Check out my best free eartraining and music theory software

Language buffs can download pimsleaur and rosetta stones series programs and audio listening courses. Check out my article on getting getting a Free Education Online.

Limewire
This is really popular among kids. It stinks. Use frostwire or emule instead.

Emule
Probably the best P2P client there is right now. It’s the top download of all time in sourceforge, the biggest open source community. If you dont know how to configure your router or disable your firewall, I suggest something more simple like frostwire. You can connect to the ed2k network and the kad network. There’s usually 5 or 6 million people connected at peak hours. It has excellent anti-leecher capabilities. Be sure to configure your router to have a “high ID”. Learn more about high IDs. For best results order the servers by USERS then use a global search.
Ares
Similar to kazaa. Excellent for music but not as convincing as bit torrent and emule.

Bearshare
Connects to gnutella2, has 400,000 people at peak hours. Pops up advertisements.

Shaeraza
Can connect gnutella1, 2, and the edk server. Good but not as configurable as emule.

iMesh
Connects to iMesh Network and Gnutella. Has ads.

Safety Tips
Files can be infected with spyware or viruses. It may be a fake, meaning that’s not the song or program you wanted. The best tip is be sure to read and search for comments. The more people sharing(meaning the percent finished rather than number downloading) the file, the more likely it’s real and doesnt have a virus. The first thing you should download is an anti-virus like avg or search panda, bit defender, norton, or avast. In general AVI video files are safer than MPGs. You should NOT download asf, bat, vb, reg files. Set another video player like Windows Media Player Classic or Irfanview as your main video player to prevent exploits. On emule search “IPFilter” or IP Filter and download it/follow instructions. It will add a bunch of IP filters to prevent leachers and anti-piracy groups from illegally scanning your computer.

1) Do your keyword homework. Use Google’s free Keyword Tool or sign up for a WordTracker account to find out which keywords are the most competitive. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive your clicks will be. While you’re finding out which keywords are too expensive you’ll come across some that advertisers not target heavily. Take a good look at these – they may be your keys to a successful niche campaign.

2) Don’t bunch your ad groups. You should be striving to separate your ad groups by keyword. Whatever your target, separate your keyword lists into closely related groups containing the same target words and write ads geared specifically to those words. Your ads will show up higher in results based on their quality, and search terms show up bold in results – a click-through rate booster.

3) Drive home your selling point. What’s your offer? Why are you better than the others? Remember that your ads are going to display with your competitors. The difference between a user clicking your ad and clicking a competitor ad is about 100 pixels on the screen – or a millisecond of time. You need to convince them that you are the one they want. You are better. Grab them.

4) Don’t send users to your home page. This is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Internet users are notoriously impatient. Send them to your home page when they were searching for a specific product or service and see how fast they leave. Don’t waste your advertising budget – send them to prepared landing pages.

5) Optimize your landing pages. Your landing pages need to drive something home immediately for your users: “You have landed in the right place.” They need to know that, yes, this is what they were looking for, here it is, here is why it is better than the rest and here’s the easy thing they need to do to get it. Mostly you’ll need to create multiple landing pages based on your different ad groups and keywords, but look at it this way – if your users are not landing at pages geared exactly to their search phrases they’ll leave and take your advertising budget with them.

6) Don’t lie in your ads. People are not dumb. If you promise something in your ads you had better well deliver. Otherwise you’ll not only waste advertising dollars but damage your brand. Be honest, and focus on points that make you stand out from the competition. Grandiose ad text might bring in clicks, but if it isn’t the truth it won’t bring in conversions.

7) Your domain name counts. Usually you can display a domain name that you own as the “display domain” but point the ads to a page on a different domain. Why does this matter? If you own a domain name that contains the keyword text it will show up bold and increase conversions. Enter the optimized domain as the displayed domain, point the ads to your landing pages and you can expect higher CTRs mostly.

Use negative keywords. Google has a new Negative Keyword Tool that will allow you to find negative keywords that you should specify for your ads. Negative keywords are those that you don’t want your ads to display for. For example, if you’re selling “blue widgets” you don’t want to display your ads to those users searching for “free blue widgets.” If you don’t use negative keywords you are missing a chance to get more targeted traffic to your landing pages, and this can hurt your conversion rates.

9) Test, test, and test some more. The greatest about internet advertising is the capacity it grants you to measure your success. It’s easy to create A/B split tests with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Change one word, add a comma, include a value proposition. . .Just make sure you only change one thing for each split or you won’t know which variable it was that made the difference! You’ll find out right away that this is a great way to optimize your click-through rates – just don’t forget that clicks are not everything!

10) Don’t focus too heavily on CTRs. Getting tons of clicks isn’t always the main purpose of the game. In fact, if you are not using proper techniques to ensure that you’re getting targeted traffic and sending it to well-optimized landing pages you can blow through your advertising budget in no time flat. Remember the success of any advertisement is getting back more than you put in. It’s an investment, not a cost – so do all that you can to better your rate of return!

11) Don’t pigeonhole yourself. We know that Google AdWords is the most popular Pay-Per-Click service out there. Your competitors know it, your users know it – even your grandma might know it. It would be foolish to ignore Google as a place for advertising, but don’t forget there are other search engines out there who offer similar services. Yahoo!’s new Panama search is catching on, and Microsoft’s adCenter is nothing to sneeze at either. Both companies are offering sweet promotional deals to new Pay-Per-Click advertisers to stay competitive so take advantage and diversify!

We shall first study how to choose keywords that lead to more Adsense money.

CPC – Advantages and Drawbacks

What does CPC indicate?

When we think of high paying keywords, the first thing that pops up in our mind is CPC. CPC (Cost Per Click) is the maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay you for a click. Higher the CPC of a particular keywod, more will be the payouts you can expect by targeting that keyword in your AdSense websites. You can get the most accurate CPC from the source itself – Google.

However, CPC is not the only factor that tells the profitability of a keyword. There are many other factors that you should consider.

Drawbacks of CPC

- What if there are no advertisers bidding on a keyword having high CPC? Obviously, it means no one is going to pay you that high for a click.
- What if the traffic on the keyword is technical enough and does not click on ads (banner blindness)?
- What if Google gets loads of traffic on that keyword, enough to fulfill the desires of high paying advertisers? In this case, Google will only throw remaining peanuts towards you.

Obviously, Google will like to keep all the high paying ads within its own pages. So you see, CPC just shows you a small part of the entire picture. We shall explore the rest part of the picture…

Number of Sponsors – The Most Important Figure

Keywords with high CPC do not always come with high number of advertisers. There are many keywords in Google’s Adwords system that have a high price, but almost no or very less number of advertisers. Now, if you build a web page or website around a keyword on which no one is bidding, Google will try to fill the ad blocks with ads of the related keywords rather than the high paying keyword you were initially targeting. There is no guarantee that ads of the related keywords will be good converters. Therefore, there is every likelihood that your clicks will be passed through SmartPricing Filter, eventually resulting in lesser payouts.

Hence, it is important to see the number of sponsors bidding on the keyword in question. If there are more the advertisers, there will be more competition among them to get the top position. This means that there will be more revenue per click that they are willing to share with you. In other words, more sponsors mean more people fighting against one another other to pay you more Adsense money.

Number of clicks on an Ad

It refers to the number of clicks an advertiser gets when his ad appears on the top. If the number of clicks and number of advertisers is less, just ignore those keywords, no matter what their CPC is. However, if the clicks per month are lower than expected, but the number of advertisers is a good one – it’s the right choice for you. Such keywords are called “Niche AdSens’ keywords.” Here the word ‘niche’ is used in commercial context. This means that Google is not able to generate traffic on such keyword ads. This makes it difficult for it to exhaust the advertising budgets of the advertisers. Therefore, in order to meet its targets, Google happily shares high paying ads with you, resulting in more payouts. Try to find such “Niche AdSens’ keywords.”

Coming to Higher number of clicks – It indicates:

Either the traffic segment is ignorant about the online advertising concepts, and click on these ads unknowingly. This means you will experience higher CTR on your ads when placed at appropriate place. You don’t have to put in much efforts to fight banner blindness.

Or, the traffic is highly commercial and willing to purchase the advertised product over internet. This means that there are very little chances of your facing the SmartPricing phenomenon.

Number of clicks along with the other stats like Number of sponsors and CPC, can enable you to make more wise decisions while choosing keywords for your AdSense content.

Bidding Quality

It’s important to see the pattern in which people are bidding on a keyword. Suppose there are 400 advertisers bidding on a keyword. The top 20 of these are paying something like $15 per click, while the rest of them pay somewhere between $2 and $0.05. Now you might have found some decent tools that give you the average of top 3 or top 5 positions which is good, but not good enough. The point is that although the  top 20 advertisers are paying higher, but the rest 380 advertisers are paying quite low. There is a high probability of your getting the ads of those 380 sponsors. Therefore, the average of the top 20 advertises can be really misleading. The solution to this problem is discussed in the later part of this page.

We have enough Adsense money now. Let’s build some traffic on your website.

Traffic Building for AdSense:

Choosing Niche Keywords

Niche keywords are the keywords that are highly searched by the web surfers, and are rarely used by your competitors. Less competition means more traffic to your website. Targeting ten niche keywords is easier and more fruitful that targeting a highly competitive keyword. Traffic from niche keywords when directed to a relevant page increases your CTR and conversion ratio.

Determining Competition

People generally take the number of results returned by search engines as the number of pages competing on a keyword. But it is wrong. The Search Engine Results get irrelevant after 10 – 15 pages. Irrelevancy further increases with the depth. The pages that have the keyword dumped in a corner are not competing against you, but search engines will still list them. In fact they have to.It is assumed that if a webmaster is targeting a web page with a particular keyword, the keyword is used in the title as well as in the anchor text linking to that webpage. Such a page is listed higher by the search engines as it is dedicated to what you searched for. So how to filter out the most relevant results? Check it out!

Inanchor intitle and Its Precision – The Solution

In Google, you can easily determine the EXACT number of pages that are competing against you. You can precisely list out the pages that are using a particular keyword in their page titles or in the anchor texts linking to them.

The query can be applied as follows: intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword.

For example, if the keyword is “hair treatment”, the formula will be used in the following manner: intitle:hair inanchor: hair intitle: treatment inanchor: treatment. This figure gives you the exact number of pages that are ACTUALLY Targeting with these keywords, and not those that have just created a page or a small paragraph on the same topic. Google emphasizes on Anchors and Page titles. That’s the reason, it supports such a search query.

We shall now discuss some other traditional ways to determine competition.

R/S Ratio

Here, R refers the number of competitor websites for a particular keyword as per the search result of the search engine. And S refers the number of searchers using that keyword while searching their queries. This means that for better results, you have to choose the keywords with lower R/S ratio.
R/S ratio becomes polluted when someone uses the number of results as the number of competing websites. As explained above, counting the number of results as the number of competing pages is the biggest mistake one can make while choosing a keyword. However, the figure becomes quite useful when inanchor intitle is used to create R/S.

KEI Analysis

KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a formula for measuring the effectiveness of a keyword. The formula was devised by Sumantra Roy. However, this figure also depends upon the number of searches and competition, but with a difference. This formula analyzes the number of searches and competition in such a way that if the searches increase, KEI increases; and if the competition increases, KEI decreases. Higher the KEI, more profitable will be the keyword. However, it becomes polluted when the number of search results are used as the number of competitors.

Determining Traffic

Determining traffic for a keyword is quite important before targeting it. Along with the competition stats, it lets you make out the niches present in any industry. Besides, it lets you predict (to some extent) how much traffic you can expect if you promote a website around a particular keyword. There are two known sources for determining traffic. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now a part of Yahoo Search Engine) and WordTracker. When talking about accuracy, Wordtracker monitors the queries on some meta search engines that actually render it inaccurate . Reason? There is no known stat about how much of the community you are targeting is searching on those meta search engines. However, it’s a good tool to make out the niches.

In my opinion, Yahoo owned Overture gives you more accurate stats than Wordtracker. This is for the reason that Overture is a PPC engine. It can show you how many people are searching for a particular term on its vast network. A network which is bigger than any Meta Search Engine. Still, it is not that accurate, but at least better than Wordtracker. The tools that are predicting Google Searches for you are just doing guess work. No one knows the algorithm they use.

Summing It Up

Profitability of a keyword depends more on the number of sponsors than CPC. Number of clicks and bidding quality can’t be determined by just monitoring the first 3 or 8 places. It can be rightly assessed by taking out the average of all the 400 sponsors bidding on a keyword. Sounds very tiring for keyword research, right? Well, Keyword Country (http://www.keywordcountry.com) gives you not only the average of all the sponsors bidding on a keyword, but also the Max CPC from Google, Clicks per month from Google, No. of Advertisers present in Google Adwords system for a keyword, Competitors through inanchor intitle, R/S ratio and KEI with inanchor intitle, Traffic through Overture, and much more. All this enables you to make a wise decision while choosing the keywords.Now you just have to create pages, and leave the engrossing keyword research on Keyword Country – The First Keyword Search Engine.