George, Niche Websites Are Still Going Strong

Hi George,

Daniel Scocco here, and this is the Daily Blog Tips newsletter.

Today I want to talk about niche websites, and why they are still
going strong around the web.

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First things first, what is a niche website? It is basically a site
that targets a very small niche, like "pinot noir wines" or "sample
resumes." Such websites usually have a small number of pages, say
10 or 20, and their main goal is to rank in the first page of Google
for a specific keyword. Once they achieve that, they will receive
a lot of organic traffic (i.e., traffic from search engines), and
they will monetize such traffic with CPC ads like Google AdSense or
with affiliate marketing.

I prefer to call these sites "mini websites," but many people refer
to them as "niche websites," so we'll be using both terms
interchangeably here.

A couple of years ago some online marketers started to criticize
niche websites, saying that they were doomed to vanish, being
replaced in the search results by large content portals that
covered a wide range of topics.

Guess what? This didn't happen, and niche websites are still going
strong. In fact, recently Google implemented a change in its
algorithm that favored them even more. The change basically made it
harder for large websites to rank for narrow keywords with their
internal pages, especially if those pages are not content rich.

Want an example? Consider the keyword "starcraft 2 download." With
the change in the Google algorithm it is now easier for a mini
website called StartCraft2Download.com to appear in the first page
for that search query, and it is now harder for a large website like
Mahalo.com to do the same simply by publishing an internal page
talking about that topic.

Another criticism that mini websites receive is that they are more
unstable than large, authority websites. In other words, one day
they could be in the first page for a specific keyword, and the
other day they are gone.

This can happen if you use black hat techniques to get your mini
website ranked, but otherwise the above criticism is not true at
all.

If your mini website has all the information about a specific niche
or keyword, and a decent amount of quality backlinks, Google will
consider it an authority inside that small niche, and hence it will
give high rankings for the mini website.

This is the point that most people miss. A mini website can also be
an authority site, although an authority on a very small niche.

Now don't get me wrong. Building a mini website that ranks
high for a competitive keyword is not easy nor fast. You'll need to
work on the content, promote it and get a good amount of backlinks.

But, if you know how to do these things, developing a mini website
when you have some time available could be a smart investment.

In the future I'll talk more about building and profiting from
mini websites, so stay tuned.

Talk to you soon,
Daniel Scocco
http://www.dailyblogtips.com

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2972 Columbia St. Suite # 8161 - Torrance, CA 90503 - US

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George, Here Is an eBook For You, From My Latest Online Project

Hi George,

Daniel Scocco here, and this is the Daily Blog Tips newsletter.

Today I want to give you an eBook I created for my latest online
project. This is one of the benefits of being a newsletter
subscriber, you always get my freebies first!

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Many of my "offline" friends ask me how they can make their own
websites. Instead of explaining it to each of them, I tried to find
a simple online tutorial for that. After some research I couldn't
find any I liked, so I decided to create one. That is the story
behind my latest project. Here is the URL of the site:

http://www.howtomakeawebsite.net

On the homepage of that site you'll find a complete tutorial
explaining how anyone can get a website up and running in a matter
of hours. I cover how to choose the domain, how to get a hosting
plan, how to install WordPress, how to choose a nice template and
how to customize the website design.

In the future I'll publish new articles there, covering aspects
like website promotion, basic search engine optimization and so on.

The site also has an email newsletter, where people can subscribe
to get notified about the future articles. In order to promote the
newsletter I wrote an eBook, titled "50 Mistakes to Avoid When
Making Your Website." Since you are already subscribed to my Daily
Blog Tips newsletter, I won't ask you to subscribe to another one
just to get the book. You can download it directly by clicking
on the link below:

http://www.howtomakeawebsite.net/50-mistakes.zip

The content of the eBook is for beginners (after all that is the
audience of my new site), but I am sure you'll pick some good points
by reading it.

Finally, I wanted to ask you a small favor. If you have a blog about
technology, design or anything related to websites, could you link
to that new site? You could mention it inside a post, recommend
the free eBook, or anything else you see fit. Any help is
appreciated!

Talk to you soon,
Daniel Scocco

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2972 Columbia St. Suite # 8161 - Torrance, CA 90503 - US

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George, Here Is A Tool To Check Your Search Rankings

Hi George,

Daniel Scocco here, and this is the Daily Blog Tips newsletter.

Today I want to talk about search rankings. Do you know how to
actually check your rankings? If you answered "Sure, I just need to
search on Google for my keywords" then you probably just know half
of the story...

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Searching on Google for your keywords is indeed the simplest way to
check your rankings, but it is not an effective one, because the
search results you get on Google might not be the same that other
people are getting.

Let's suppose that you have a blog about celebrities, and that the
main keyword you are targeting is "photos of celebrities."

You could go to Google and search for "photos of celebrities", and
then check the position where your blog will appear. The problem is
that the rankings you'll see there are influenced by factors like
your IP address, the language of your computer, your past search
history and so on. This is part of an innovation Google introduced
a while ago called "Personalized Search."

For example, your blog might appear in the 5th position when you
search for "photos of celebrities", but this is so because you
often click on your own website, so Google is artificially
increasing the rankings of your blog when you search for it.

For all other people, however, your blog might be appearing in the
20th or 30th position.

So how do you find your real search rankings? There is a tool
called Scroogle that you can use for this purpose. Here is the

link: http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

It is basically a Google scraper that will get the search results
from Google with an anonymous IP address, without storing cookies,
without storing search-term records and so on.

When you run a search query on Scroogle, therefore, Google won't
have any past data about it, so the results will be the ones seen
by the average Internet user.

You can make Scroogle show 100 results at a time, and after that
you'll just need to find where your website is positioned.

Nice trick eh?

If you want to discover more useful tools like this one, come
check the http://www.onlineprofits.com training program. We have
a "Tools" section inside the members area which lists dozens of
them.

Talk to you next week,
Daniel Scocco

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2972 Columbia St. Suite # 8161 - Torrance, CA 90503 - US

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George, Do You Know How To Find Broken Links on Your Site?

Hi George,

Daniel Scocco here, and this is the Daily Blog Tips newsletter.

Today I want to share with you a tool that is incredibly useful
for finding broken links inside your website.

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Broken links are nothing more than links inside your website that
point to pages that don't exist. Maybe you deleted the page because
it was not relevant anymore, or maybe your simply used a wrong URL
when creating the link. Fact is that when a user clicks on one of
those links he will see a frustrating 404 error page.

It is easy to see how broken links can negatively affect the user
experience inside your site. Apart from annoying your human visitors,
though, broken links also upset search engine bots, and if your site
has too many of them your search rankings might suffer.

For these reasons I recommend that you check for broken links on
your site at least twice a year.

Now if you have a large blog or website it would be impossible to
check all the links manually right? Luckily there is a great tool
that you can use for this purpose, called Xenu's Link Sleuth, or
simply Xenu.

Don't worry you won't need to pay anything, just download it
and install on your computer (it only runs on Windows).

Here is the official site: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

The design of the site is horrible, I know, but it is a legitimate
project.

Once you have the tool running, just type the URL of your website
and it will start crawling all the links. Link verification is done
on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, and so on.

You will be able to follow the process, and in the end you will see
a report with all the broken links, redirects, valid URLs and more.

It is really a nifty piece of software, and a must have on the
tool-belt of any webmaster.

Make sure to visit http://www.dailyblogtips.com as well, as we have
some interesting posts up this week.

Talk to you soon,
Daniel Scocco

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2972 Columbia St. Suite # 8161 - Torrance, CA 90503 - US

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