I came across a well organized research study, where 37 leaders of search optimization voted on 200+ ranking elements. The website SEOMoz has taken their results and translated them into a concise graphically pleasing lucid interpretation of the data. If you want to quickly inform yourself of the key factors to consider when optimizing your website, you should check out this report.

The Page Strength tool is pretty good too.

Here are six simple steps you can take to start making money online without having to spend a single penny.

1. Sign up with an affiliate provider, it doesn’t cost you anything. Clickbank is a reliable affiliate program provider that pays out the highest commissions, 75%. More details....
2. Find an affiliate program that you can promote; stick with what you know if you are just starting out.
3. Once you have decided what you want to promote, review and research your product niche, then write an article on your results so others will benefit from your research.
4. Start a blog on Squidoo. Squidoo is already search engine optimized, and will pay you a small commission for money made from their advertising on your blog. This is a good place to start. There are other free blogging sites as well: www.blogger.com, www.gather.com.
5. Post the article that you wrote and make sure you add your promotional links so you are recognized for your referrals.
6. Promote! Promote! Promote! You need to implement search marketing techniques, don't just pay for advertising. The nice thing about Squidoo is, search engines love to crawl it, and it is optimized for marketing.

This is a good way to ease yourself into making money online, especially if you have a limited budget. Once you get the hang of it, you can branch out and spend a little bit of money to make loads of cash, by creating your own website, with your own domain and webhost, and still use these steps to drive traffic to your website. Good luck, and welcome to the world of social networking.

Adsense is a pay-per-click program freely provided by the major search engine Google. The program allows you to add a stream of income through your site by displaying sponsored ads, and earn revenue for each unique click. There are three ways AdSense can earn revenue for you: Adsense for Content, Adsense for Search, Referrals. This is a very easy way to add an extra stream of income to your site.

AdSense for Content

AdSense for Content is broken down into Ad Units and Link units. Ad units display text ads, image ads, or both. Link units display a list of topics that are relevant to the content on your page; when a user clicks on a link they are taken to a page displaying relevant ads. The ads appear in their own section and you can choose from varying sized ad areas to incorporate into your website’s layout. You can also customize the color palette of the section so it works with your website’s theme. The whole process is customizable; you can even exclude competitors from appearing within your ad sections.

AdSense for Search

AdSense for Search allows you to add a Google Search section to your web page. The user can either search the Google network or just your site. When a user clicks on a sponsored link within the search results, you earn revenue.

Referrals

Google also has a referral program for various products and services they provide. As an example, you can promote the firefox web browser with Google toolbar.

Someone might be compelled to pepper a web page with multiple Adsense sections, but Google places restrictions how many you place on page.

• Adsense for Content, three ad units and one link unit per page.
• Adsense for Search, two search boxes per page.
• Adsense Referrals, two referral units per page.

Check out and

Search engine advertising is a form of pay-per-click advertising. With search engine advertising, you pay a price per click for popular search terms used on a search engine. When your keyword is used, the advertisement appears around the organic search listings as a sponsored listing.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay a small fee to the search engine. The price you pay depends on the search engine, the popularity of the keywords, the competition for the keyword, the quality of your advertisement and its relevancy to your website content. You can pay anywhere from $0.01 and up.

In order to use search engine advertising effectively you need to perform keyword research. A good portion of your time should be spent on your research; your goal is to find a keyword that has a high search volume, and low competition. You want a high search volume, because you want to get as many clicks as possible. You want low competition in order to increase the chances of your ad being on the first page, preferably in the top 4 ad slots. The more money you are willing to pay for a click, the higher you are going to appear in the ad slots, but there are quality factors that also affect the price and consequently the position of your advertisement.

It is important to first optimize the quality of your advertisement, and then optimize the quality of your website using search engine optimization techniques. By optimizing these two things, you can improve your ad quality, lowering your minimum price per click bid, and get closer to the number one ad spot. You will pay less per click for the number one spot compared to an advertisement that has not been optimized for the keywords.

Search Engine Advertising programs you can join

• With Google you can
• Yahoo displays ads on Yahoo, AltaVista and CNN. You can sign up and get a $25 credit.
• With Microsoft you can Sign up with AdCenter.