MickMel SEO

First released in March as a limited beta, Google Ad Manager is now available to anyone that has an AdSense account.  According to Google’s blog, Ad Manager…

can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

If you sell ads on your site, or run ads from more than one company, this is likely to be a very useful tool.

I’m just getting my feet wet with it, so I can’t say much from personal experience.  How about you? Have you tried it yet?  What did you think of it?

Do you have a question releated to Search Engine Optimzation, AdSense, WordPress, or a related topic?  E-mail me (mickey@mickmelseo.com) and I’ll round them up and post the answers in a few days.  Thanks!

It’s been in Google Labs for a couple years, but Google Suggest is finally coming to the main search box on Google.com.

Google Suggest shows an on-the-fly drop-down of possible search results as you’re typing.  The advantages of this, as presented by Google, are:

• Help formulate queries. Start typing what you want to find, and it’ll offer suggestions on how to finish your query.
• Reduce typos. The results that pop up are already spell corrected, with the same logic as they use in the “Did you mean?” feature.
• Save keystrokes. You don’t need to type the whole query.  Start typing until your desired query appears, then just choose the proper option to finish it.

You probably won’t see this on your Google homepage yet, but it’ll be rolling out to all users sometime this week.

A few weeks ago, Google introduced a new feature that allows you to set your Gmail account to always use SSL, not just when you’re logging in.

Like most folks, I didn’t think much of it.  However, a new vulnerability has been discovered that can hijack your account if you’re not using full-time SSL.

While this situation is making Gmail look bad, Google is really looking pretty good.  This specific hack is Gmail-only, but a similar hack could be built for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.  The big difference is that Gmail offers full-time SSL, while the others don’t.

To turn this feature on in Gmail, simply go to [settings], then choose “Always use https” at the bottom of the page (be sure to  [Save Changes]).  It’s quite simple.

The tool to execute this hack will be released in two weeks, though others may be working on it already.  I’d suggest you make that small change to your Gmail settings right now.

What happens when you search Google for [your name]?  Do you like what you see?

Part of that depends on your name.  If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble.  For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.

Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name.  In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top.  In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100.  I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.

So how do you do it?  Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:

• Personal site/blog
• Squidoo page
• LinkedIn profile
• Staff page at work
• FriendFeed profile
• Twitter profile
• Facebook profile
• Digg profile
• Flickr pages
• Amazon profile
• Various other sites

The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute.  The more you can contribute to each site, the better.  For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.

However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually.  Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).

After about a week in beta, WordPress 2.6.1 has been released.  There aren’t any exciting new features, but it includes over 60 bug fixes.

You can download it here.

(via WPCandy)

It’s been a few months since they first announced it, but AdSense for Feeds is now available to all AdSense/FeedBurner users.

You should notice a new entry on your main AdSense page for “AdSense for Feeds”.  To get started, you need to ask Google to manually tie your AdSense and FeedBurner accounts together.  To do that, send an e-mail to adsense-support-aff@google.com and give them your Feedburner account name and the Google Account e-mail address that you use to sign into AdSense.  I was bummed when I heard that it was a manual process, but they turned mine around in about 45 minutes.  I’ve just added the ads to a few feeds of mine, so we’ll see how it goes.

The Google Operating System blog has more details (and screenshots) on how to get started.

I’ll post back with my results in a few days.

Geek Ramblings has posted that WordPress 2.6.1-beta1 has been released, with a variety of minor bug fixes.  In particular, Dougal highlight the following fixes:

• Allow disabling password reset per-user.
• Query functions now allow a comma-separated list of post_status values.
• Several more link generation bits are made SSL-aware.
• Advertise the Atom 1.0 feed in the default theme.
• Atom API uses the newer WP authentication functions.
• Fix for an object caching bug in plugin updates.

None of those really excite me enough to upgrade to the beta version, but I’m certainly looking forward to getting my hands on the final copy of 2.6.1 when it comes out.

I apologize for not posting very much lately.  I’ve been working with a handful of bloggers to try to get their traffic (and revenue) beefed up, and I’ve not had much time for this site lately.  The techniques I’m using are really working quite well, and now I’m opening it up to other people.  I don’t want to try to assist too many people (it takes a personal relationship with each blog), but if you’d like some help with your blog, let me know.  Here’s the simple version of how it works:

1. I manage your blog (WordPress updates, plugins, SEO tweaks, ad placement, etc).
2. You continue to write your blog posts.
3. I get a 25% split of your ad impressions.

To help explain this idea to potential clients, I’ve set up a simple site outlining how it works.  The first question that most people have is: “Wait.  I’m trying to earn more revenue, and I’m not sure I want to give up 25% of my revenue.”  It’s a fair question.  However, my clients (so far) have all been very pleased, as they’ve started earning much more than the 25% that I get.  Here are some stats froma recent client I’ve started helping.

Those are genuine stats from Google Analytics, snipped just a few minutes ago.  Each dot represents one week, leading up to last week.

The beauty of the revenue-sharing is this — you pay nothing.  Nada. $0.00.  Also, because I’m getting a small portion of the ad revenue, you can rest assured that I will work hard to get your blog running as smoothly as possible.

If you’re already WordPress-savvy and doing well, then you certainly don’t need my help.  However, if you’re having problems keeping your site running well, or if traffic just isn’t increasing as quickly as you think it show, shoot me an e-mail and we can chat.