KhalidsLife.com

In my last post I mentioned I had invested “a few dollars” in new domains, actually its around $140. Each domain costs $10 and I know I can get them cheaper elsewhere but the service at UpBro.com is really good (touch wood!). I intend to build another network and become a website leader in a particular niche, offering content for all the smaller sites linking to one large user driven main site.

I intend to reveal more in due course but I wanted to put a question out to all readers. For a small content site (MFA), how many pages is ideal to rank well in the SERPs? I tend to find 3 pages with 500 words on each but I wanted to know what your takes was. Let me know!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The Rise and Rise of Kortaz.com

When I first began building sites for profit and dabbling in ppc revenue methods like Google Adsense, trickles of income began coming my way. My problem is that I become wrestless, I don’t like to wait. That trickle could become a stream, then a river and so on and so forth.

I wasn’t prepared to wait, and my first network of sites were sold for $50 each.

A lot of learning has occured since then and I now follow strict personal rules when considering selling a site. I plan for the future, I think about the short and long term gains and I don’t sell until I am sure I either need the cash or want to exit the market.

Proxy traffic is considered “trash”. Proxy users are generally people who want to bypass school filters, view adult content or get away with playing their favourite arcade game at work. The only company willing that offers good revenue and is willing to allow placement of their ads on proxy sites is Google Adsense, a network which I was banned from about a year ago.

Aside from Google, there’s Adversal and Adbrite, but both offer low payouts. Adversal did provide a few extra dollars per month for their non-intrusive pop-under ads so it is a network I’d recommend.

Getting a little off track, I bought Kortaz.com for $15 simply because I liked the name. Kortaz was originally a big site divided into smaller sections, including an arcade, funny videos feed, proxy and image host. The idea originally came about when I saw arcades making, say $10 per day, a video site $20, a proxy $5 and so on. I thought about combining them to create one large site that would generate revenue through each section.

Unfortunately it was difficult to market without a big budget, I hadn’t really thought it through properly, but being a businessman involves learning, so I’m glad I made the mistakes.

Knowing I could profit from proxy traffic, as I did by building and selling SneakOnline.com for $750, I turned my sites back to the trash nobody wanted (apart from us profiting proxy webmasters). I was bored with a proxy site as you couldn’t do much in the way of earning money, so I thought about a proxy listing site.

I didn’t want one of these topsites nobody visited, so I managed to find a free script that offered something more unique - a links lister with sections and a hit counter for each link. The only change I made was to randomize link orders. Kortaz, the web proxy list was born.

Originally I offered free placements to all and a few lucky people were “Featured” (premium placement) for free. A link back to Kortaz with the anchor text “web proxy” was always required on the homepage if you requested a free link.

As the number of submissions and backlinks grew, so did traffic. The hit counter beside each link, along with a few testimonials, was proof to webmasters Kortaz provided great traffic, all for $6-$10 per month (I changed the price to attract people during difficult times).

I managed to profit here from two things. The first was that links rotated randomly so each featured and non-featured link got time at the top of the pile in their own sections. Secondly, there was some negative press about the biggest proxy listing site, proxy.org, using bots to imitate traffic and click on Adsense units of sites listed on the site.

However, as the site grew, so did the problems. The script was designed for heavy use and would max out after 2,000 outbound hits, I couldn’t integrate automatic Paypal payments and so on. I managed to hire a great coder for $50 who developed the site as you see it today using a free web template (why waste money if you don’t need too!).

The new design was rolled out and I put some contextual advertising and Adversal popunders on it, afterall it was “trash traffic”! I managed to get the stage where the site was earning around $150-$170 per month. It was doing well and I had a small money-maker on my hands.

Traffic was excellent, with the site ranking first in the SERPs for “Web Proxy” and on the first page for a number of other terms. This was simply due to the high number of relevant backlinks accumulated over time (slow but steady link building).

My reason for selling - I needed cash, I have student debt and bills to pay. I was sad to see it go.
I decided to list the site on Sitepoint.com with a price tag of $2k. I didn’t think it would reach this because nobody likes proxy sites but I was surprised it was sold within 48 hours. I think I could have gotten more but you learn. I think the strongest selling points were the SERPs positioning and the private link sales, i.e. no reliance on an ad network.

Building, establishing and maintaining Kortaz.com was one of the best experiences I’ve had online. I turned a domain name into a profitable website, I learned about SEO and link building and I tasted success.

One man’s dirt is another man’s foundations and Kortaz.com was exactly that. The owner didn’t want the domain and a lot of webmasters don’t like proxy traffic. I took two negatives and turned them into a positive - all in under one year.

I hope you learned a little from this story, good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

The “No Follow” attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments due to comment spam. As time passed, websites began using this in other areas, such as text links, to ensure their pagerank (PR) was not being leaked to other sites and to stop search engines indexing external pages.

Whilst he “No Follow” attribute may stop PR leakage, links are still counted towards the overall backlink count, which is what you should be targetting. In my post Off Site SEO, I stated “I’ve found building relevant backlinks works a treat when trying to rank well in the search engines.”

Regardless of whether these links are “No Follow” or not, they’ll still be counted. Sure it would be beneficial if they were “Do Follow”, but it is not the deciding factor.

Here are some important notes regarding the “No Follow” issue…

1. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves. In short, it doesn’t look good.

2. Search Engines follow NoFollow. Both Yahoo and Google have been known to count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer. Proof from Search Engine Journal and Jon Warass.

It is amazing how many different services there are on the web that “Guarantee …” with a “Money Back Refund” etc etc etc. Further to that, the amount of conflicting information is rather bewildering - “Googlebot hates…” or “Googlebot needs”.

Like many things in life, SEO is trial and error. There is no clear system that guarantees you a premium ranking in the SERPs and with so many different things you can do, how would you know what is right and wrong without conducting your own tests?

I managed to rank Kortaz.com #1 - #5 for a number of different keywords. Without sounding arrogant, I think that’s quite an achievement considering “Kortaz” was not even a keyword and the site was not filled with content!

I think the amount of backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword made the site strong and this was the driving force behind its ranking. These links were built up over time with webmasters submitting their own proxy links to be listed on the site.

Aside from backlink building, being popular in Digg and Stumble Upon have their benefits too (I didn’t used them for Kortaz.com but for other sites). As well as bringing in visitors, many webmasters look for content through these sites and this can generate backlinks.

It is quite important to mention on-site SEO too and that generally means ensuring your site is keyword rich with unique content and good anchor texts.

I’d really like to know what you do when it comes to SEO and how you rank well?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

I seem to be in a trialling mood now I’ve got some cash to spend. With my birthday just passed and pay day today I can afford to invest in some trials, hence my previous post and now this one.

I’ve always hoovered around the idea of using pay per post as a mean of gaining credible backlinks along with creating a buzz around your site. So I decided to deposit $50 into my PPP account and run a campaign for tattoo lettering.

The process was fairly straight forward and having the power to choose the minimum quality of sites that will link to you (by means of pagerank or alexa rank) is quite appealing. We’ll see how it goes, something I’ll definately keep an eye on and report back about.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Following on from my previous post about hyphenated domains, I decided to trial this theory and so built another mini site…

Introducing Lower Back Tattoos.

The site using the domain lower-back-tattoos.net which I doubt people would ever remember, but this trial is to rank well in the SERPs naturally. The site is small and simple, with only two pages - a gallery and an information page.

I’ll probably do some link building to ensure the site gets indexed and makes its way up the ranks in due course!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

In my quest to start a number of profitable mini sites, I’ve been researching domain name possibilities, only to find many keyword1keyword2.com and .nets are now taken. But wait, what about keyword1-keyword2.com???

It is quite likely the .net is still available and I’ve managed to bag two in the past 24 hours, both with a moderate amount of searches per month but a lack of competition.

After reading up on the advantages/disadvantages, there is slightly conflicting information. What I can say is that hyphens can help separate the keywords and it makes it easier to rank in SERPs.

One study suggests, for highly searched terms, too many hyphens in a domain may result in a penalty as spiders know what you are up to and take note of it, for example, on 1st December 2007, according to Google Trends, “Texas Box Office” ranked 6th in the top search terms. TexasBoxOffice.com ranks first on Google, but Texas-Box-Office.com could probably get in 2nd with some SEO work.

Another study suggests that the penalties associated with hyphens are a myth and Google will not bat an eyelid if you don’t use too many hyphens. For the two domains I have purchased, one has a single hyphen whilst the other has two.

I’ll definately report the results in due course. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.