Posts filed under 'Web'
Google followers have long since known that Google isn’t a search company, it’s an advertising company. The search technology is really just a better way to deliver relevant ads. Its advertising programs (AdSense and Adwords) have revolutionized online advertising. Once heading down the annoying road of popups, popunders, and animated hit the monkey ads, online ads have become more gentle text-only ads and much more relevant thanks to Google AdSense.
I have been working a project lately which required some investigation into online advertising. Let me tell you a little more about my AdSense experiment and how easy it was to set up on this site.
The project I am working on is an online community site, code named Big Trophy Cat. I think it has great potential, but it’s not something I want to fund out of my own pocket (read: my wife won’t let me fund another side venture). A subscription model doesn’t really make sense, I can’t rely solely on donations from users, and since I’m currently employed as an Oracle Analyst I don’t have the time to chase down advertising myself.
One great thing about AdSense is that once you’re approved, you can put AdSense ads on any number of your sites, but all the earnings are combined into your one account. So, while SMJSolutions.com doesn’t generate enough traffic (yet!) to make any significant money, it was a great test case for putting Adsense in with Big Trophy Cat. I can also take time to figure out what ad formats are successful and design the layout of Big Trophy Cat with that end in mind.
Simple Setup
Setting up Adsense was really easy. I applied for an account using SMJSolutions.com as the main site. I was approved within a few hours (it could take up to two days), and could begin picking and designing the ads to go on my site.
Robust Reporting
Adsense does a great job of letting you know how your ads are doing. The reporting system is flexible and easy to use so you can get relevant data about your site. The one thing I haven’t figured out yet how to do is find out which specific ads are being clicked on.
Another great reporting feature is the custom channel. You can define custom channels to track pages, color schemes, ad formats, placement on pages, or any other type of metric you can imagine. Using channels appropriately provides a great tool for analyzing the advertising performance of your site.
Flexible Formats
Adsense offers a wide variety of shapes and sizes of ads that can easily be integrated into your website. You choose the ad format, customize the color scheme of the ads, and Google gives you the code to paste into your website.
However, AdSense isn’t just delivering contextual text ads, it’s a whole suite of advertising tools. There are currently three different types of advertising you can do with your AdSense account: AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, and Referrals.
AdSense for Content is the bread and butter of the AdSense program. It is the delivery of relevant ads based on the page content.
AdSense for Search puts a Google search box on your site that users can use to search your site or expand it to the whole web. You get credit for the ads that are delivered as a result of the searches.
Referrals are simply ads for Google products or services. You may have noticed the AdSense referral button toward the top of this page. If someone reads this article and decides to sign up for AdSense though clicking the referral button, I can get credited for referring that customer to Google AdSense.
Real Revenues
One of the major reasons I chose AdSense over other online advertising networks is the trust of doing business with an established, public company like Google. Smaller, independent ad networks may pay better per click, but may also not be around for long and may run off with your money. Or worse, it may suddenly decide to run a punch the monkey campaign on your site.
The issue of trust is a major issue for me because online advertising will be the main source of revenues for project Big Trophy Cat.
I read through some of the AdSense success stories and found several examples of non-huge sites that are making real nice revenue numbers through AdSense. It was nice to see some of those bigger numbers especially considering the pennies that SMJSolutions.com has earned from AdSense so far.
Few Flaws
Because Adsense works so well and is so easy, there are a lot of made for Adsense (MFA) sites that exploit the system. As a result, man “junk” ads are in the Adsense system which point to these MFA sites, most of which you don’t want to be associated with your site. Sites like adsblacklist.com identify MFA culprits and show you how to use your competitive ad filter feature in your Adsense menu to block ads from these sites.
Click fraud is a problem that some have predicted will shake up the whole internet and impact the entire economy.
Flaws do exist in the AdSense world. Issues like click fraud and MFA sites are real concerns. But at the end of it all, Adsense provides a great option for webmasters to generate revenue from their websites.
January 23rd, 2007
Last month I wrote about search engine optimization (SEO), so this month I have been paying much more attention to how my site is crawled by search engine spiders, what my results look like in these search engines, and also how much traffic I receive from search engines.
I took a look at the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live), and Ask to see how they stacked up. I was surprised with what I found.
On my humble site, I get crawled most often by the MSNbot. Perhaps not surprisingly, I also get more referrals from the MSN Live Search than from any other search engine. Also, I have noticed that when I make changes to the site, Live search is the most responsive of the search engines.
One simple example demonstrates how differently these search engines operate. My most popular post to date was Fantasy Football Team Names, announcing the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator I created. If you’re trying to find a good team name for your fantasy team, you would want to see this link in your search results. So, let’s query fantasy football team names into the big search engines and take a look at where the post from smjsolutions.com comes in.
The Google search didn’t list the post in the top 200 results. I noticed a lot of pages that weren’t even close to relevant. Google didn’t perform well here.
The Yahoo! search wasn’t any better. Again the post we were looking for wasn’t in the top 200 results and there were a lot of what looked like garbage links, stuff that wasn’t going to help us with our fantasy football team names at all.
Searching Ask didn’t list the page we were looking for in the top 128 results (it wouldn’t let me keep going), but it did give some other helpful search terms to try. It didn’t seem like it had as many garbage links as Yahoo! and Google did, but it still didn’t find what we were looking for.
The Live search totally bucks the trend. The page we were looking for actually shows up on the first page of results! Not did we find the page we were looking for, but the other links seem relevant and useful.
Why the huge difference? Is the new Live search that much better than Yahoo! and Google? I just don’t know. I’ll leave that for the SEO gurus of the web to figure out. However, because of these results, I’ve started to use Live search more often and it has become the default engine of my Firefox search toolbar.
December 30th, 2006
I have made a few changes to SMJSolutions.com over the last several days, mainly to tweak how the site is crawled search engines. I’m not terribly concerned about where my site shows up in Google, but it’s nice to get some traffic from people I don’t know so I know that my little corner of the web isn’t totally unnoticed.
My biggest hit so far has been the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator, which was ranked highly in MSN searches. The beginning of the fantasy football season brought lots of additional traffic. Other articles I’ve written get an occasional referral from various search engines, but nothing substantial.
So, I made a few changes to be a little more search engine friendly. For those not in the biz, they call it “Search Engine Optimization” or just SEO for short. Here are two simple SEO changes I made to SMJSolutions.com recently:
1. Changed the title structure
If you look at the top of your browser window, you will see that the title of this post reads, “A Little SEO — SMJ Solutions.” It used to read, “SMJ Solutions >> A Little SEO.” Not a huge difference, but the search engine gets the topic first hopefully increasing the magic score that search engines use to place pages. Also it should make it easier for users who may be browsing with multiple tabs (using Firefox).
Since I use WordPress, making this change was really easy, even for a programming newbie like me. I simply added these lines of code in my header template, replacing the old title code:
< ?php wp_title(' ');?>
< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' —'; }?>
< ?php bloginfo('name');?>
2. Submitted a Google sitemap
I installed the Google Sitemap plugin and ran it. It’s a very simple plugin that can generate a list of links for the Googlebot to pay attention to on your site. As a site owner, it’s nice to be able to tell the bot what is important and what is not. Plus, the Google Sitemap plugin will automatically “ping” Google to let them know that the site has changed every time I post a new article.
So far, I have been impressed with the new plugin. I noticed the Googlebot hit the generated sitemap.xml file the next time it came by SMJSolutions.com.
So, will it work? I don’t know yet. I doubt I will be on the Technorati Top 500 any time soon, but we’ll see if these small changes are noticed by the bots and whether any of my pages get more traffic because of the two simple SEO changes.
November 24th, 2006
There is usually more than one way to accomplish this task, but I have struggled with how to create a scheduled ftp job in Windows for a long time.
I recently ran into a problem which forced me to figure out how to create a scheduled ftp job. I needed to post results from my fantasy football league draft to a website so the slackers who couldn’t be at the live draft could more easily follow along and know who had been drafted so far. The software I use to conduct my draft (FFLM) can automatically generate HTML reports after each pick. I needed to create an FTP job that would take those HTML reports and post them to a website for the remote drafters to see.
I’ve used Linux and cron before, and I was hoping to get something like that in Windows. Although it’s not too difficult in Windows, I needed to do a little research to figure out how to create a scheduled ftp job.
I found an article on the Microsoft Help and Support site that shows how to use an FTP Batch script. If you open up Notepad, you can create a simple file that contains all of the commands you need to type in for your ftp job. Just type in the commands you would use in the ftp command-line utility. For example, my .scr file looks something like this:
open 10.0.0.1
user
password
lcd "C:\Files\ToFTP"
cd website/Fantasy/Football/Directory
put DraftResults.htm
put TeamRosters.htm
bye
The first line connects to the FTP server, the second and third lines are the username and password to connect to the server. The fourth line changes my local dirctory to C:\Files\ToFTP, where my files are located. The fifth line gets to the proper directory in the FTP server, it’s where my files are going to be placed. The sixth and seventh lines transfer the two report files to the server. The eighth line disconnects from the server.
Saving this file as a .scr file means that I now have an FTP script to run. From the command line I can simply type:
ftp -s:Test.scr
The script will run and the two files will be placed on the server.
Now that we have the ftp script, it’s time to automate it. All we need to do is create a very simple batch file. Again, this can be done simply using Notepad. The batch file will basically run the ftp command line script as shown above. Here are the contents of the batch file:
::DraftFTP.bat
::Uploads Draft Files to Website
@ECHO OFF
cd "C:\Files"
ftp -s:Test.scr
The first two lines are comment lines. The third line tells the batch file not to display the command prompt as the commands are executed. The fourth line changes the directory to where the Test.scr file is located. You should recognize what the fifth line does from what we did above.
Now we have a batch file. Double click it and it will run, placing the two files on to the webserver.
So we’re almost there. Now that we have the ftp script and the batch file to run it, all we need to do is create a scheduled job to automatically run the batch file at a given interval.
Open the Scheduled Tasks (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks) and create a new Scheduled Task. Don’t bother going through the wizard, just right-click and select New > Scheduled Task. Give it a name and then open it up. In the Task tab, select the batch file you just created as the program to run. Then simply fill out the Schedule, Setting, and Security options as desired.
Then sit back and enjoy as the Scheduled Task runs your batch file containing your FTP script, automatically putting your files according to the schedule you have defined.create a scheduled ftp job
As mentioned above, there is usually more than one way to accomplish a task. If you know a better way to create a scheduled ftp job please share your tips below, or let me know if this solution worked for you.
September 19th, 2006
I am a big fantasy football guy. I have been playing fantasy football since 1998 and have done pretty well over the years. However, at the beginning of each season I struggle to find a team name worthy of my future league champions.
Try it now!
Because necessity is the mother of invention (and because I’m a geek), I started a project to build my own fantasy football team name generator using PHP. I wouldn’t consider myself a programmer of any particular merit, but it was a pretty easy task even for a beginner.
The key to the generator is populating several arrays, each holding a list of words to build the name of our fantasy football team. $adj holds mainly a list of adjectives, $noun holds mostly nouns, and $pnoun holds mostly plural nouns.
Then we simply take a random word from each list and put it together to form the fantasy football team name.
$first = $trim($adj[rand(0, sizeof($adj)-1)]);
Repeat the random selection from the $noun and $pnoun arrays and put the selections together to get the final $generatedname and display that to the user.
I added several additional features to my Fantasy Football Team Name Generator. First, I put it in a loop to display more than one value, which can be set by the user via a form. Also, I allowed overriding the random selection from the $adj array with your name so the result “Hungry Death Monkeys” becomes “Seth’s Death Monkeys”. I also added an option to limit the output to 20 characters to comply with Yahoo leagues.
If you have any questions, or generate a particularly enjoyable fantasy football team name, just let me know by adding a comment below. I hope you find a name worthy of your future league champions. Enjoy!
August 10th, 2006
Previous Posts