Google recently announced their coop program. Coop lets you create your own vertical search engine and monetize the search through adsense ads on the result pages.

Your search engine can be customized in a number of ways. When you set up your search engine, you can determine if you want the engine to show results from just sites that you select or the entire google databse. Similar to adsense, you can customize the link and text colors for your search results page. You can also choose to have the search results shown on Google’s site or on your site via javascript or an ajax api. The set up script allows you if you want to show ads on the top, bottom, or side of the page.
Setting up your search engine is quick and easy. It took me about 15 minutes to set up my Example Term Paper search engine. Linking up my adsense account required entering the email address, zip code, and last 5 digits of the phone number linked to my adsense account. After some configuration, the search engine works like a charm and is faster than I anticipated.

So far, I have noticed a few opportunities to improve the service. The search box has a background watermark which reads “Google Custom Search.” The watermark disappears when a user clicks in the search box to enter text. I understand Google’s desire to brand the search box, but the watermark might be confusing for some users. It would also be valuable to see data on what users are searching for in the coop control panel interface. This would help search engine owners to understand their audience better and customize the search engine accordingly.

Overall, it is an interesting experiment, and at least worth testing. After I have some usage data on my search engine, I will report back on my satisfaction with the service.

While I have been working on the SEO work that I outlined in How Not to Suck at SEO, my mind has been buzzing with ideas for making more money online. A few of the things sites that have sparked some ideas are:

Shoe Money Interview on SEOMoz – Very interesting info on Shoe Money’s business operations and strategy. I especially like his emphasis on experimentation and constantly learning.
Top Google Whores – A compilation of some folks making a TON Of money from Adsense. One of the sites listed was a myspace resource site that is making over $100,00/month.

Wicked Fire Forums – A very lively forum about making affiliate marketing. You find lots of posts about CPA offers and adsense arbitrage here.

My Outsourced Life – I read this article when it first came out, but it crept into my thoughts this weekend. I am in the process of finding a few processes in my web businesses to automate/outsource, and I am really thinking about using the Your Man in India service mentioned in the article. I will definitely write about my experiences if I go through with it.

In the part one of How to Not Suck at SEO, I wrote about the first steps in my mission to improve the search engine ranking of my sites. I have been working on the steps that I outlined in the previous post (reading up on SEO, CSS redesign, different class C IP blocks), and I have thought of a few more steps that I will need to work on.

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs. Instead of having my urls look like madnotes.com/notes.php?z=1, the URLs will look like madnotes.com/hamlet-notes.php.  I have been resisting this for a while, but the keyword rich URLs will improve my search enigne results. You can check out this site for code to use mod_rewrite to the create search engine freindly URLs.

2. Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps allow you to provide Google a file of all of the content that you would like to have spidered. They help to make sure that Google is viewing all of your content, and Google provides information on crawling errors and search terms for your site. For this site, I use the sitemap plugin for wordpress to automatically make my sitemaps. For my other sites, I need to recreate my sitemaps and get everything working correctly. 

3. Paid Yahoo Inclusion. I found a relevant area of the Yahoo directory for one of my sites. I am thinking of ponying up the annual fee of $300 to get my site listed in the directory. The listing should help to drive traffic from Yahoo, and improve my pagerank because it will be a quality link from Yahoo.

4. Buying Paid Text Links. While doing some research on textlinkads.com the other day, I found a college newspaper site selling text links. The links were relatively expensive ($160/month), but the site has a page rank of 8 on a .edu domain, and it could deliver some very targeted traffic for one of my student resource sites. As time permits, I am going to look for some low cost text links for my sites.

I will track my SEO progress via this blog. Interestingly, I have noticed that even though Monetize Traffic is relatively new, the site ranks pretty for some google searches. As of the time of this entry, my site appears on the first page of results for the phrases “YPN review” (#1),  ”adbrite reivew” (#3), and “text link ads review” (#8). While traffic on these terms is not huge, it is a promising start for the site.

While I was pouring over my stats last week, I came to the startling realization that I suck at SEO. As with any problem, facing it is the best option. I have decided to publicly confront my SEO demons and chronicle my efforts to improve. Hopefully, you can learn a little from my experience.

Although my two primary sites have page rank of 5 and 6, both sites rank poorly on most search engines, and my Google rankings are especially ugly. On a few of my key words, I have the number five ranking, but most of my rankings are in the teens on the second page of results. This has a huge impact on traffic. Based on some analysis I have done on the AOL search data that became publicly available, the average listing on the second page of search engine results pages receives one percent of the traffic on the top listing. If I could move up my listing from the second page to the top listing, I would see a 100 times increase in traffic. Moving onto the first page of results, but not the top spot would increase my traffic anywhere from 28 times (#2 position) to 7 times (#10 position). Rankings can have a huge impact on traffic, and I intend to make a strong improvement in this area.

So how am I going to start not sucking at SEO? Here is the outline of my plan.

1. Read up on SEO via blogs. I added to my bloglines feeds for SEOBook, SEO Egghead, SEOMoz, Graywolf, Scootle, and ShoeMoney. I realize that there are many other SEO blogs out there, but this set has a nice variety of content and is not too overwhelming. Adding these feeds to my feedreader has given me a daily reminder to keep SEO on top of my mind.
2. Analyze my sites and competitor sites through some of the keyword tools out there in order to try and understand which features drive the competitors rankings. I will adjust my sites accordingly.
3. Move my sites to different class C IP blocks. In order to prevent the gaming of page ranking by webmasters creating thousands of interlinking sites on one server, Google discounts the value of links to sites that are on the same class C IP block. Two of my sites are closely related and link to each other. I will move these to different class C blocks to improve their rankings. For more info on class C blocks and SEO, I would read this thread on the Search Engine Watch forums.
4. Redesign with CSS. One of my sites uses an outdated table based layout. The structure of the table HTML reduces the keyword density and search engine effectiveness of the site. I will redesign and move all CSS and javascript to external files.

I will be steadily working on this plan over the next few weeks, and I will update you on my progress.