Traffic Equalizer – does it work?

I first heard about Jeff Alderson’s Traffic Equalizer software 5 or 6 years ago, when John Reese first released his traffic secrets program (yes – I was one of the people that helped make his million dollar day a reality by buying the program and it has been a favorite piece of software ever since.

Lately I have been reading a lot of questions in various forums from people wondering if Traffic Equalizer still works, or has Google gotten wise to it and nullified the potential gains. A lot of people say it doesn’t work anymore. Some even say it never worked, but let me tell you this… It still works like a charm in 2010 – IF you use it correctly!!

That’s a big IF! Anybody who doesn’t make money using Traffic Equalizer is clearly using it incorrectly, so here’s my step by step guide to using Traffic Equalizer the right way.

1) First build a proper website with decent original content. It doesn’t have to be huge, maybe 10 or 20 pages – but make it good! A site built completely with Traffic Equalizer will probably fail, so these good pages will be your solid foundation.

Build your pages in .txt modules using include files  (<?php include(”header.txt”); ?> if you’re using .php, or <!–#include file =”header.txt”–> if you’re using .asp) It will be beyond the scope of this post to explain the basics of php or asp, so if you are a noob,  just do a Google for “include files” – there are plenty of tutorials out there.

Basically, using include files just makes you life a helluva lot easier. If you create your page header, navigation bars and footers as include files you can just create them once, and use them on all your pages by just adding one line of text, without having to repeat the same code on every page.  As the pages are compiled on the server, the include files are pulled in as an integral part of the page – not like frames or those crappy shared borders that Microsoft was trying to foist on us a few years ago. If you make a change to the include file and upload it, the changes will appear on ALL pages that include that files content, making site wide changes a breeze!

The reason you want to use include files, is because we are going to be using them in our Traffic Equalizer templates.

I can’t design worth a shit, so I use Xara Webstyle to generate my graphics and layout for me and then I chop it up into top, left, bottom and content include files (Oh… btw – if you use Xara webstyle, be sure to strip out all that CSS and call it as an external style sheet)

2) Do your keyword research properly. Don’t build a huge list of a million keywords and expect to make money – that will just raise a huge red flag to Google. I generally use about 100o of the best keywords per site. Once they are all crawled and indexed, I may go back and add some more later.

There are are a few good keyword tools out there that you can choose from, but if you are going to be playing the AdSense game I highly recommend Keyword Country – Not only will it give you the search figures, but it also reports your probable earnings per click for each keyword so you can really compile a profitable list easily.

Important note. Your Traffic equalizer pages are only going to work for long tail keywords. For the more competitive keywords, create legit pages on your legit site. Your Traffic Equalizer pages will only rank for the terms that hardly anybody else cares about or optimizes for.

3) Create your Traffic Equalizer templates – DO NOT use the default templates – you MUST create your own! By using the same include pages that you used to create the rest of your site in your template, your Traffic Equalizer pages will look identical to the rest of your legitimate pages and carry the same legit footprint.

The most powerful feature of Traffic Equalizer isn’t the fact that it pulls content from the search engines. The %KEYWORD% token is what will get you your rankings! In fact, generally I will only pull 1 or 2 SERPs per page.

You will want to pull the majority of your content from sources other than the search engines. Pull from your own database, RSS feeds, news feeds, scrapes etc with the %KEYWORD% token in your SQL queries, scripts and RSS URLs. this will generate great, targeted content from a huge variety of sources rather than just the search engines.

Don’t worry about “keyword density” – Google doesn’t! I won’t go into too much detail here,  but “Latent Semantics” are far more important. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means… just use the %KEYWORD% token to ensure that your keyword appears a sensible number of times on your page and that it is used in H1’s, alt tags, bolds etc. Selecting decent content sources will take care of the LSI for you.

Create another include file (or files) to display your AdSense code – this way you will be able to switch the ads out in seconds if AdSense stops working for you or if something better comes along. The same goes for any other advertising that you put on your pages.

Use the same navigation on your Traffic Equalizer that you use on you legit content pages, so that any PR that gets assigned to your TE pages will flow back to your solid pages.

DON”T use the Traffic Equalizer sitemap page (it’s a huge footprint) – rather link to your Traffic Equalizer index pages from your legitimate pages. You can do this without being obvious by hiding the links in plain site (hint… use CSS).

Here’s another important tip – use a script to convert your RSS feed to html, just do a Google for “RSS to HTML” or something like that. the are a few good free ones available.

Here are some examples from a site that I started about a year ago and might just get around to finishing someday. It’s not in a profitable niche, but it still make me a couple of bucks every day.

Music Quiz Questions is a legit page (see if you can find the links to the Traffic Equalizer index pages

Bible trivia is a Traffic Equalizer page. If I hadn’t told you, you probably wouldn’t realize that it was an auto generated page – it looks almost identical to the legit pages on the site

4) Once you pages are up, you will want to promote your site as usual, generate links etc. I generally only promote the legit pages on the search engines and let PR flow down to the TE pages naturally. The reason these pages will get any rankings and traffic is simply because you are targeting keywords that nobody else is and your pages aren’t banned from Google for being stupid or lazy and using Traffic Equalizer right out of the box without doing any custom work!

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