Upon cutting the ribbon for any new site creation of mine I’ll add SEO (search engine optimization) for Alexa (just behind Google, Bing (MSN Search in new clothes), and Yahoo) to my short list of things to do – Now !

1. As in the proverbial Search Engine Optimization 101 – Make sure your site is already complete with your intended site TITLE, META META description, META keywords, and META robots tags as well as having a valid ROBOTS.TXT file present in your web root.
2. Check to see if your site has already been indexed by Alexa by inputting the URL (minus the http and www) into the Alexa “Find sites about” (top center) search box (if not, Alexa will automatically create a page for the site upon your search prompt.)
3. Update your listing by entering your site URL and inputting your desired data in the “Site Information Editor”.  Note that Site Title and Site Description fields appear to be able to hold a rather large amount of text (another opportunity to add juicy keywords to your descriptive text.)  Yes, it may take days to weeks for your listing to finally be updated but I find the wait worth the while.  When given the choice, I’ll prefer to opt for adding the INFO.TXT file to my web root rather than the email validation method as it seems to be the more permanent option while implicit in serving both Alexa and the DMOZ Open Directory Project search as well (two birds, one stone.)

4. Get your site an Alexa site widget to add to your sidebar or footer.  One note, I would highly recommend NOT going for the Alexa Traffic Graph selection as I’ve found that it tends to gobble up a large amount of site bandwidth (not to mention the valuable pixel space wasted.)  Though not specifically mentioned anywhere that I can find, I highly suspect that adding and Alexa Site Stats Button or Alexa Traffic Rank Button widget to your site will tend to improve your Alexa rank (I’ve seen excellent results so far.)
5. Though it’s unclear if it’s entirely necessary nowadays I still feel compelled to Ask Alexa to Crawl My Site just to be on the safe side (this URL is also cited specifically as the point to ask the Internet Archive to notice and index your site via Alexa as well.)  I’ll also use this URL upon the completion of a major update to any site.
6. Invite your site guests to add reviews to your Alexa listing page by adding a handy link.  Guests can log in using their FaceBook account or register with Alexa anew.
7. If you are not squeamish about software most anti-malware packages will call spyware and you visit your own sites often then feel free to download the Alexa Toolbar (as I have.)  It has been proven to  increase the Alexa rank for those sites you visit on a regular basis (at the expense of Alexa via this questionable toolbar looking over your shoulder while browsing.)  So far I’ve found the toolbar handy and harmless though it really doesn’t give you any indication as to what exactly it is doing or thinking at any one point.
8. If you are so inclined, I’ve heard (and experienced first-hand) that the Alexa Rank Enhancer (software tool) can significantly increase your Alexa rank over time if used continuously (the link points to the lowest advertised price I’ve seen online yet.)

Below are my suggested criteria to consider when evaluating which GPT sites to join and frequent.  Also included are obvious red flags indicative of potential sites with issues that should be avoided.  These criteria (below) are listed in the order in which I, myself, prefer to choose my favorite sites – your “order” may differ depending on your own preferences and requirements:

1. Site Stability, Honesty, & Financial Health / Backing
   Sites that look great and have great advertisements with superlative headlines boasting that they are the best site may not necessarily be the best choice.  I will do you little good to join a nice looking site, spending time earning to reach a significant internal account points balance only to find that you’ve ultimately been duped into a basically unsupported long-forgotten stagnant site that never pays out not matter what you do – chances are such a site is being milked by an administrator that:
   1. has lost interest in the site and rarely bothers to take the necessary steps to pay its members but leaves the site standing in the hopes that one day seen he/she may again suddenly start to care; and/or
   2. is disorganized or incompetent resulting in incessant excuses, delays, partial payments, and general headaches from the member’s perspective to such an extent that the site is basically useless as a reliable source of income; and/or
   3. has become financially insolvent  though he/she may have every intention of eventually paying the site’s members, never seems to have enough money when the time comes; and/or
   4. tends to delete accounts, steal from (reduce) the member’s account balance, never (or rarely) approve or credit member’s offer completions, or ban members when they have or are about to reach the minimum cash out requirement amount (playing dirty tricks); and/or
   5. is unscrupulous (fraudulent to a criminal extent) by allowing new members to join and present members to continue completing surveys and offers without any intention of ever paying those members for the work they have done while still collecting regular payments from the sponsors and pocketing it.

   How can you tell if the site you are evaluating may suffer from stability issues?  Look for red flags that may merit further investigation such as:

   1. Sites offering only private support options (a BIG tip off!) such as “contact us” forms or a private “support ticket” system while providing no publicly visible support such as a proper open support forum where gripes from present members can be openly read and evaluated (or having an open support forum but suppressing (deleting posts / banning complaining members) all gripes/complaints regularly; and/or
   2. Sites with an excessive amount of scam complaints posted elsewhere on the internet.  Take the time to Google the site name and take a look at what others are saying about the site.  Granted even the most legitimate and stable sites will inevitably have a few gripes out there from people who will never be satisfied (such as former members banned for fraud, etc.) or past issues that have been dealt with and solved but remain public because they reside within Google’s cached results or the original complaint had never been removed from the source web site; and/or
   3. Sites listed on GPTBoycott.com’s Watch List or worse, Boycott List.  GPTBoycott is an industry standard member complaint based voluntary pseudo-accreditation program offering trusted credentials to stable, paying sites while revoking credentials and publicizing issues related to sites with serious stability problems and those with documented allegedly fraudulent activities perpertrated on members.  GPTBoycott publishes a list of programs supporting their efforts and also has a rather informative and popular open discussion forum.

1.       Many search engines and indices (plural for index) will allow you to submit your whole referral or affiliate link (though most wont.)   Most notably Google and MSN Live Search ( I knew someone that got his referral link for another site posted on the FIRST PAGE of Google and made a killing in referrals!)  One quick way to test a search provider if you have been promoting your referral links for some time would be to do a search for your username (usually present at the end of your referral link) and see what the results show.  Look for your own referral links listed in the search results.  If your referral link shows in its entirety then you know to add that search provider to your list for periodically submitting all of your raw referral or affiliate links directly.

2.       Buy or earn yourself a snappy new domain name and have it redirect (the whole domain) to your referral or affiliate link (you don’t even need hosting – just use domain forwarding.) Then promote your new domain to the search engines, indices, forums, and blogs. It helps not having the obvious referral link look.  Cheap domain names start at just $1.99 or can be FREE if you know where to look (below):

DomainLagoon |  HostingLagoon |  URLSavings |  AnotherFree |  URLFreedom

3.       Choose a referral banner that doesn’t give up the whole site URL (or edit/make your own.)  Many people will (for some reason) choose to type in the URL manually if they have the benefit of knowing it rather that clicking upon an obvious referral link.   Leave them guessing a bit (make it a bit of a mystery) as to what site the banner is speaking of.  When speaking of sites in text, refer to them in a way that doesn’t obviously or intuitively disclose the URL (for example, if I was writing about www.GreedyClicks.com, I would say “Greedy Clicks” rather than “GreedyClicks”, or “GreedyClicks.com”.

4.       Start blogging about your referral sites / links at Blogger.   Blogger is Google based and I’ve found is your best chance at a popular blog with a great Google rank.  I’ve noticed that Google regularly favors their own blogs based on their own blog site interface (and it doesn’t hurt to promote this blog to other search engines and indices as well.)  Blogger will also host your blog for free seamlessly on your own domain.  Another good blog site with max exposure is the eBay based blog.  Make an eBay blog and promote it as well.

5.       Regularly do a search, as if you knew nothing at all about the subject of the type sites you are promoting.   See what pops up.   Notice the first site on the list.   Notice what they are doing right? …and what you may be doing wrong? (meta tags, keywords, description, etc.)  Notice keywords, etc.    Improve the quality, quantity, and newness of your textual content regularly. Be honest and open, don’t resort to superlatives and hype wording like “Go to this site and make $500 in an hour” and “fire your boss” (a big turn off and one of the reasons why people may leave your site early.)  Morph your site into a closer rendition of the top site and re-submit (another step up the ladder?)  …just common sense.

6.       If you run your own referral sites…  do your homework on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques (freely available all over the web.)  Learn about the proper use of META TAGS, robots.txt, and sitemap files.  If you are going to do it, do it right!  Oh, and don’t use “frames” when building your site (they are not search engine/index friendly – don’t shoot yourself in the foot.)

7.       Purchase professional web site promotional services and/or software that will automate your site submission efforts.  Don’t get fooled by software / services that say they will promote your site(s) to 30,000 search engines, etc.  Chances are 95% of those sites will be Free For All (FFA) sites which likely no human ever looks at (at one time FFA sites increased your “link popularity” – which mattered then – but all respectable search engines and indices have learned to ignore the FFA sites now – seeing their obvious abuse and non-consequence.)  Anyways, what’s the point?  Most FFA sites want you to manually confirm your entry nowadays (want 80 or 90 emails to respond to personally – go ahead and submit to useless FFA sites.)

8.       Be persistent, but DON’T SPAM the search engines/indices. A good interval for me (with good luck) has been to submit at least once a month (but NOT more.)  A lot of engines/indices will quickly add you to their trashcan if you bug them more (not a good place to be.)

9.       Join a link exchange network (thousands out there.) This may help significantly depending upon the quality (interest generated – staying power) of your own site (compared to others in the network.)

10.   Take over an already popular web site domain that has expired (get them cheap if you know where to look) and post your referral links / banners there.  Enjoy instant popularity with the twist of people not knowing what hit them once they’ve arrived.

11.   Think of a unique niche of people that might appreciate the product, service, or site you are promoting and post to forums covering that niche.  …for example, people with some sort of social anxiety (such as agoraphobia, etc.) or other homebound people might want to learn about online money making from home sites , etc.  Post to social forums covering that niche topic.

12.   Double or triple the impact of your message forum posts by promoting your posts to the search engines and indices as well…  Yes, after writing posts to a particular forum I always try to go back, gather the “permalink”s (or URLs) of the specific posts I wrote in notepad and spend a bit of time afterwards adding them to the search providers to crawl.

Below is a Partial List of Links to Popular Search Engine and Index URL Free Submission Pages

• Add your URL to Google

• Submit to Yahoo!

• Add your URL to Alexa Web Search

• MSN Live Search URL Submission

• Submit your Site to Jayde

• Free Multi-Add URL Online – ineedhits

© 2008 Wesley Bibro of FreeCashPro.com – All Rights Reserved – Republished Here With Expressed Permission

Before I go on…  If you have no idea what a browser cookie is I would suggest that you take a look at The Unofficial Cookie FAQ or browse on over to the Wikipedia article on the HTTP cookie.

Some people and anti-spyware software would have you believe that all browser cookies are bad (especially “tracking cookies”.)  When it comes to paid survey, incentive, GPT, and PTS sites (hereafter referred to as the “incentive site” for the sake of simplicity) cookies are your very best friend.

How do incentivized offers track?  Most use a combination of tracking cookies, the single pixel gif, a sub-id containing your site membership information, and your unique ip address.

1. When you click on an offer/survey the incentive site’s software will note your click.
2. You then will be sent to the offer’s url with a sub-id usually containing your incentive site user name appended to the end of the url.  Though is may seem instantaneous and direct on pretty much any connection other than dial-up, your browser is actually being sent on a wild goose chase of many different urls to get to your final destination (incentive sites use sponsor (or “CPA” / “affiliate”) networks as a source of their offers – those sponsor networks usually get their offers from other bigger sponsor networks.)  The only way to properly make sure that everyone the should be paid for your “lead” will be paid is to send you through a daisy-chain of successive URLs (each noting and crediting themselves your lead.)
3. Ok, you arrive at the survey/offer.  You fill out information, make a purchase, or perform whatever “action” is required to generate credit.  This is where the tracking cookie and single pixel gif come into play.  Once the action is performed then you are usually sent to a confirmation page that will place a cookie on your computer eventually reporting to the original incentive site that you have indeed completed the required action for credit.
4. Another reporting method is the mysterious single pixel gif.  This is a uniquely named image (picture) file that is so small (1 pixel by 1 pixel) that it is invisible to you that is placed on the confirmation page.  The gif is uniquely named so that it specifically and only refers to you specifically.  The offer’s web server knows that you have completed an action when a request is made to “show” that one pixel gif (known as the gif “firing” in the industry.)
5. If the offer site notices that you already have a cookie on your system from a previous session at that site (indicating that you are NOT a “unique lead”) then it may internally note this, allow you to continue, though ultimately report to the incentive site that you are not qualified for the incentive (ouch!)  The same goes for if you are recognized by your ip address or entered information such as your name, email address, etc.)  Your ip address also plays a part in identifying if your are within the required geographic location for that offer.
6. Once you are done viewing/completing the survey/offer, close browser window of leave the site, and end up back on the original incentive site then the tracking cookie reports that you have or have not qualified for your incentive.