Friedbeef’s Tech

There’s a lot you can do with Google if you can take advantage of it’s advanced search features.

Expanding on this tip which shows you how to find music in open directories, here’s a step-by-step walkthrough on how to use Firefox Smart Keyword searches to speed up the process.

All you need to do is:

1. Create a bookmark in Firefox
2. Use the URLs in this text file as the bookmark location in your Firefox bookmarks (like in the pic above)
3. Assign a keyword to it - eg. music
4. Type the keyword (eg. music) followed by the search term (eg. beatles) directly into the address bar (NOT the search box). For example… type in music beatles , and Google will search open directories for Beatles music files that you can download.

You can modify the code in the text file to change file extensions, which opens a whole window for you. For example, you can even change it to PDF and DOC to look to e-books, or AVI and MPG to look for movies.

By the way, I’m assuming you already own the media you will be downloading …

Bonus Tips:

• The feature above only works for Firefox. If you’re NOT on Firefox yet, try it now
• If you want to create basic smart keywords to search any web page, here’s how.
• Here’s a useful advanced features cheat sheet from Google
• If you don’t find the files on Google, you can try the best bittorrent search engine ever.

[tags]music, free music, music downloads[/tags]

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If you’re using Google Adsense for your site, you may have already read many different optimization articles in regards to placement, colors, and removing borders in order to blend your ads into your site. These are common tips, but what else can you do to take your Adsense revenue to the next level?

Here are some effective tips that have eluded many a webmaster.

1. Control the Adsense Bots

By telling the Adsense Bots that crawl your site where to look, and which parts to ignore, you can help it decide what type of ads should be displayed. Make your ads more relevant, and it will make sense for your readers.

Get these bits of code in your site template…

<– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

and Google Adsense bots will pay extra close attention to the content in between.

How I implement it is to edit the template and tell it to

• Emphasize my post content
• Ignore everything else (Header/Sidebar/Footer)

UPDATE: In order to get it to work, you have to add one extra ‘ - ‘ symbol to the code above. See Adsense help for more details.

This is by far the most effective method out there for ensuring relevant ads are displayed for your site. My site was initially showing ads about ‘Chicken Noodles’ (must have something to do with my domain name), but shortly after implementing this, was showing relevant tech ads.

2. Rotate Ads

Having the same ads in the same place may cause Ad-Blindness, where your readers subconsciously ignore certain areas of your site. Changing up the ads from time to time helps alleviate this issue. If you are using Wordpress widgets, you can try using the Ad-Rotator Plugin, which will help rotate your Google Ads randomly.

3. Inline Google Searching

This is a relatively new development by Google, where your readers can now do a Adsense sitesearch with Google, where the results are displayed inline within your site, making your website more ’sticky’.

4. Use Channel Monitoring

Google Adsense allows you to define and track multiple channels of Google Ads so you know where your revenue is coming from. What you can try is to allocate each Google Adblock type (eg. Square, skyscraper etc.) to a certain channel so you know which types of Adsense formats work best for your site, so you can focus on them.

5. Use Images

This is a controversial topic, where there is a fine line between what Google considers to be acceptable, and what it does not.

“Publishers are still welcome to place images above the ads. The only exception is if it’s in such a way that it looks like the images are part of the ads.

When something like that comes to our attention, we’ll ask that the publisher place a visible border between the ads and the images, to make it clear that the images are not being served by Google on behalf of the advertisers. We generally do not ask publishers to remove the images completely, we just ask that they add borders to avoid confusion.” - Google via Jensense

While the use of images had previously been highly effective in increasing clickthrough rate for me, use this tip with caution. You should know when to draw the line between harmless images, and what goes against Adsense TOS. If you’re on Wordpress, you can try the Adsense-Beautifier Plug-in, which adds images to your Adsense blocks.

Which of these tips do you already use, and what other optimization tips work for you?

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If you want to think out of the box, you have to get out of the box.

Too often, we are trapped in our own ‘echo chamber’ of sorts during brainstorming sessions, and fresh ideas are a scarcity. Why not tap into fresh ideas from the community at large?

Here are a few web resources that will help you think out of the box, with a token idea example from each site.

Idea a Day

Address For Life

“Introduce ‘ address for life’ code numbers to everyone in the country. People could register their current address with the post office such that letters addressed with the code number will be forwarded from the sorting office. In addition to offering everyone PO BOX style privacy, the system would come into its own when people move house and need only to notify the post office of their new address.” via an Idea a Day

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