Ok, I’m back again with another of my money hints when it comes to the wide, wide world of the web. This time I want to look at using mini sites to help you make money online using their revenue share for Adsense amongst other things. In particular, I’m looking at Infobarrel and one of the quirks of that setup that is annoying on the one hand and downright dangerous on the other.
Its probably not a regular occurrence, at least I hope not, but on occasion, certain articles published in good faith by writers at Infobarrel have had their article title altered by an editor before it was accepted. Now this is fine of there is an error in the title, or if it is clearly not relevant to the topic of the article. But if the author chose the title for a very good reason, such as it being the exact keyword that the article is targeting, then by altering it, you are detracting from the article’s ability to rank in Google’s search engine for that keyword which was carefully selected by the author.
By altering the article’s title this instance, the editor has effectively robbed the article of a potentially good source of targeted traffic from the main search engine and therefore effectively robbed both me and Infobarrel of a potentially lucrative source of income from Adsense from that article.
An example of one of my own personal articles that has suffered from this foolishness is now entitled “History of the long tail keyword” where its original title and highly lucrative keyword was simply “long tail keyword.” For obvious reasons, I’m not revealing what that keyword is exactly, because it has a very high CPC and is in my sights to take in the SERPs. This is a keyword that a lot of time was spent researching for viability as a source of revenue and one that could relatively easily be taken advantage of. Not any longer, it seems. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the article only touches on the history of the long tail keyword as a precursor to the rest of the article, the bulk of which explains what this long tail keyword actually is and what its used for.
The worst part is that by altering the title, they also altered the part of the url that contains the main keyword. Sure, the keyword is still in there, but its lost a little of its SEO power by diluting it with the extra words that are both unnecessary and irrelevant.
So this is my timely warning to anyone who is using infobarrel as their mini site to create articles and make money from Adsense. Watch your titles and if you haven’t yet reached the point where you are past having to wait for each article to be approved, make them relevant as well as containing your keywords. Your keywords should come first, so here’s an example of what I mean. If your wrote an article about weight loss and it was about the benefits of a certain type of exercise, your natural inclination would be to make the title something like:
The Benefits of Exercise for Weight Loss
whereas a much better, more SEO oriented title would read:
Weight Loss the Benefits of Exercise
Notice, I didn’t put any punctuation in the second, more relevant title. Its another quirk I just discovered about Infobarrel article titles in that if you place punctuation in there, it ends up on the url. I just wrote one using:
Keyword: The Benefits of Subject
(replace “Keyword” with the keyword phrase and “Subject” with the article’s subject) and got a shock when I saw the url:
www.infobarrel.com/keyword:_the_benefits_of_subject/
Luckily, I don’t think Google take much notice of the colon in a url, but it looks ugly. Just a few pointers there.
Of course, once you gain full “writer” status with 10 articles, you can write the titles any way you want and they won’t be changed by the editors. That’s what you need to aim for anyway, as when all is said and done, Infobarrel is a good authority domain for strong links to your main sites.
