tips ten successful free lancing
1) Keep an eye on the competition
Other
freelancers around you may offer a slightly different skillset to your
own, they may charge more or less. A thorough knowledge of the
competition will enable you to define the strengths of your business and
pitch to clients with that knowledge. Identify your competition (local
online directories) then Google them – many will have websites and
blogs. Never before has the competition been as open as it is now - you
may even find out what they charge. It’s information that can help you
make decisions on how you pitch yourself and what you charge.
2)Protect yourself
There
are legalities and formalities involved even with the simplest of
freelance jobs. Even if you’re referred through a friend (often murky
territory!) protect yourself with a contract and your standard terms and
conditions for doing business. Scope of work, schedule and payment
terms all need to be in writing, and signed off by the client. Never be
embarrassed, it’s good business sense! Understand copyright law, the
copyright of the work you create and infringement of anyone else’s
copyright (fonts, reproducing copy found online etc).
3) New business
Spend
a portion of your working week canvassing for new work, even if you’re
inundated – orders get cancelled, clients have a change of heart, often
at the last minute. It’s what everyone says you should do, not everyone
does it! If you have profitable clients in a certain industry sector,
leverage that experience as an opportunity to target others to become
your specialist field. If targeting new clients in new industries,
‘pilot’ the research by carrying out whatever marketing activity on a
small scale initially then closely following it up to measure its
success before investing vast sums of money and time. Divide up your new
business time in proportion to the likelihood of success: upselling to
existing clients and closing ‘nearly done’ deals are a much warmer
prospect that cold calling.
4) Repeat business
There
is a well known business theory that 80% of your income will come from
20% of your clients. Know who those profitable clients are and focus
your new business efforts on cultivating them. Keep in regular touch
with that client, keep up to date with their industry and emerging
trends and suggest work you could undertake for them in line with that
knowledge. In many industries customer loyalty is a dying concept,
however we don’t believe that to be the case with freelancers, so long
as you give clients a reason to keep coming back. As a resource already
versed in your clients’ markets and objectives you can offer
cost-effective services as and when you’re required without the need for
an entire ‘background brief’ from the client. If you always deliver on
time and to the highest standard and keep in touch, then if the client
has other requirements, that income should be yours. Build on customer
loyalty by emailing newsletters. Another interpretation of the 80/20
rule is that a handful of services will prove more profitable than
others. Does designing Annual Reports prove more profitable than
Corporate IDs? An analysis of where your future profit lies will be time
well spent.
5) Getting clients to appreciate the financial value of what you offer
Don’t
undervalue what you’re selling. Gain a thorough understanding of the
value of previous work done for clients by keeping in touch, if you
spend time developing a good relationship with your client list not only
will they automatically remember you for further work, they’re likely
to tell you your brochure, PR campaign, website or product image
photography/copy helped increase their sales X%. If you’re interested,
then it’s likely the client will keep you in the loop; it’s ‘after
sales’ care after all – how well did your work fare? That demonstration
of contributing to your clients’ bottom line then goes straight into the
equation when you’re demonstrating the difference between your services
and another freelancer who works for far less. Are you offering
multiple skills? Do you proof read client copy as well as brochure
design? Does your PR contact list add extra clout to the campaign? Or
perhaps your style of photography is unique.. Have a firm grip on your
strengths and be able to demonstrate them when asked. It builds a strong
case for not being negotiated down on cost.
6) Training
Another
string to your bow is being versed in the latest technology or emerging
trends. Freelancers are often self-taught due to financial constraints,
but if you fill the inevitable quiet moments reading up on the latest
software/tools/resources it will keep you ahead of your game. This
industry knowledge again forms part of your pitch when demonstrating
value.
7) Managing your admin
Be
organised, it will save you time and money! Setting up procedures for
your working week is vital, a system for managing your work flow and a
diary for dates important to your company (accountant/Companies House
deadlines) . Just as you need by a good salesperson by default, you also
need to be hot on admin to reduce time spent managing tasks. Set up a
client database with contact details and contact notes for existing and
potential clients so you can call back when you promised. Have a
workflow system with the related templates ready to handle each job as
it comes in, such as the contract, T&Cs, Schedule, Contact Report,
Artwork/Order sign off, Artwork release form, invoice, statement,
payment chase letter. Such a system should be designed to carry the job
through to completion and payment. Keep your book-keeping up to date,
half an hour each week is a lot less stressful than filing a carrier bag
of receipts and 6 months of assorted invoices. Routine is often key,
find a time in the week best sorted to each task, perhaps a bit of
‘housekeeping’ in the morning with sales calls after 10.30 etc. Use your
diary or online reminder regarding company deadlines you have to keep
and set yourself a reminder well in advance – your accountant’s
deadlines, Companies House filing deadlines etc – those that may slip by
unnoticed in favour of client deadlines otherwise, missing these
deadlines will cost you dearly in penalties. Move unfinished admin jobs
to a ‘procrastination list’ and tick off difficult tasks in quiet times,
and reward yourself at the end.
8) Cashflow
The
financial management of your business could make or break you. Managing
your credit should be an integral part of your every day business.
Carry out credit checks on new clients, you might not agree to 30 days
free credit if you knew that company’s history. Minimise any risk of
payment dispute by noting changes to the original brief on a Contact
Report and requesting the client’s agreement to such changes. Always be
clear when additional costs are involved. Forward your invoice as soon
as the work is delivered (and the client happy), and send polite
reminder requests, by recorded letter, when necessary. If the client
does not settle in full one option is to take advice from a credit
management company for recovery such as safe-collections.com who will
collect a small percentage for recovering the money owed.
9) Presentation is everything
From
your website, your telephone manner, emails and how you look – this is
your brand. Check your spelling, invest in a professional looking
website and look the part for client meetings. Some creatives may think
they’re expected to look like an “artiste” whereas that’s very likely to
frighten the living daylights out of your average prospective client.
You can convey having a creative edge without dressing and talking like
YouTube’s Design Gangsta
10)Enjoy what you do!
Starting
out as a freelancer is not easy; tax and legalities, company procedures
and client retention all make for a complex juggling act. Talk to other
freelancers on Freelance UK for moral support – everyone has to start
somewhere – but a few months down the line most freelancers have found
their business feet and can concentrate on their trade, and
interestingly, through the love of working for themselves, most deem
themselves ‘unemployable’. We wish you well!
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
SEO LATEST TIPS
search engine optimization tips
The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images well, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.
For a technical "how to" on optimizing Flash files, see this page from J E Hochman, and for an up-to-date late-2010 summary of the pros and cons of trying to optimize Flash, see this article from WebsiteMagazine. (Note that we use these same techniques when optimizing Flash sites.)
There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better rankings in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select that are relevant to your web pages.
You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.
Note: If you have a database-driven website, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on how to optimize a database-driven site for the search engines.
Also Note: If you have a website that is designed using <frames>, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on optimizing a frames-built website for the search engines.
If you are designing a site from scratch, see also especially this page: SEO Techniques in Web Design.
The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows IIS Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.
But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.
If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.
There's another way to find out if you have a dynamic or static IP address, and that is to use this tool provided free by Bruce Clay:
You can also "ping" a website to find out the IP address being used. For example, if you open a DOS command prompt window on your Windows PC, you can type the following:
ping:www.wordsinarow.com
and it will return the IP address of 65.38.173.39. You can ping any website, get its IP address, and try to reach it through HTTP:// at that IP address. If it has a static, dedicated IP address, you'll get to the website. If not (and that's usually the case) you'll either get a different website, or a generic message from the server saying that there's no website configured at that address.
Now take the numeric IP address from that report and type it in your browser after typing "http://" — don't put in "www" — just type the four numbers after the "http://" — if it returns a "404 page not found" or some site other than yours! -- you have a dynamic IP address. If your site shows up in your browser, then that four-part number is your static IP address. (Many thanks to Bruce Clay for providing this tool!)
We like the website hosting from Data393 for many reasons - one of them is that they will set up hosted websites on their server with static IP addresses. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. Data393 is a good choice but not your only choice -- you could also use Verio or many others. In 2010, even Godaddy.com offers cheap hosting with a dedicated static IP address for an extra $3.00/month. WebWizards.net also offers inexpensive hosting and a dedicated static IP address. Words in a Row also offers hosting, but only to our marketing or web design clients.
Unless you are locked into a proprietary shopping cart or content management system, it is not usually very difficult or expensive to move your site from one hosting company to another. Just make sure your new hosting company gives you a static IP address and that your site passes through the Bruce Clay analysis tool (the form above) without any problems.
In our experience, with all other factors being equal, the site with its own static IP address will rise to the top at the search engines over those with dynamic IP addresses. This is something your hosting company may dispute--especially if they don't provide static IP addresses. Approximately 97% of all IP addresses on the web are dynamically assigned, so do not be surprised if your site has a dynamic IP address when you check it.
Here's a blog post from BruceClay.com about their tests of static vs. dynamic IP addresses to see if they really make a difference in search engine rankings.
Here's an article from Michael Banks Valentine of About.com, about "Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines". It explains in detail some of the ways your server setup can make your site a problem in the search engines.
For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.
For more info about picking the right key word phrases for your website, click here. There are several tools that will help you pick the right keywords. One great free tool is the Google External Keyword Tool.
<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>
What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.
The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does Bing.
<meta name="keywords" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">
Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than twice in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short for Search Engine Optimization. Don't use words in it that don't show up in the body text on the page. In practical terms, you can delete this keywords meta tag without any consequence. Better not to have a keywords meta tag than one that is filled with keywords that don't show up on your pages; it can count against you!
Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.
<meta name="description" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah">
This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in a search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!
We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. It's also known as "keyword stuffing"; don't do it! For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, click here.
Note: The description meta tag should include a call to action, such as "Call for a free consultation" or "Click here for a discount coupon" or something else to make it stand out, so people click on it when your listing does show up in the search engine results.
These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:
Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:
<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>
It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.
In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.
There's a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick. Of course if you use HTML/CSS only (no tables) then you won't need the table trick.
Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag--every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase — "Alfa Romeo Alfetta".
Note: Some people surf with "pictures" turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to "see" what's on a picture--there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what's on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.
This article by Robin Nobles quotes SEO researcher Jerry West's research showing that the alt tag is not used by the main search engines at all. My own research tells me that alt tags are only a small part of what the search engines do look at. Even so, I still recommend that you put alt tags on all images (because that is one thing needed to make your HTML code "valid", and that you put keywords in the alt tags of any images that you use as links where using keywords would be appropriate in helping to describe the image to someone who cannot view the image (i.e., someone who is visually impaired or who is using a text only browser). My research shows that some search engines do use those alt tags describing the image used as a link to determine what the page they point to is about.
Keep image names real, don't stuff keywords into them. You need to have an alt tag on every image (in order to have valid HTML code), but page design element images (such as lines, color blocks, etc.) should just have an empty alt tag, like this: alt="". Also, if you give design elements names that are just numbers, such as 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc., Google won't bother indexing them, and they won't dilute the importance of images that you DO want Google to index, such as your product images. Don't use numbers as the names of product images if you want Google to index them. Try to use keyword-rich image names and alt tags, of any image that you want Google to index.
<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:
Sample Anchor Tag:
<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>
-- if the link points to the floor-mats.html page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
It might have done some good a few years back - in today's world it can safely be omitted.
The robots meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don't want a page to be indexed -- such as a test page, or a page you put up for your own use, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
That will keep the page out of the search engines that recognize and follow these tags. Of course, to actually prevent the page from being indexed by the search engines, you need to add the page name to the robots.txt file as one of the disallowed files. A robots meta tag is not enough to prevent the page from being indexed by some of the search engines that ignore them completely.
While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the "robots.txt" file, go here. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!
Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:
To see the robots.txt file in place on Words in a Row, click here
Here is an article called "Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance" by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.
You can validate your existing robots.txt file using this robots.txt validator tool.
Note: You should have a line in your robots.txt file that says where your sitemap.xml file is. That line looks like this, on my site:
Sitemap: http://www.wordsinarow.com/sitemap.xml
You'll want to put your own domain name in there, of course.
Note: If you have a huge site, you may need more than one sitemap.xml file to list all the pages of your site in it. Here's an explanation of how to set up a sitemap index
These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is "busted" and needs to be fixed so you don't confuse the search engine robots. There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. Note: this page you're looking at right now has valid HTML code.
Click this button to validate now!
There are several programs that can automate this process for you -- but we don't recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get as good of results as you get when you register your website by hand.
We've set up a page to make it easy to register with the search engines and directories by hand, here.
Here's a website that offers a service to get your site listed in 300 small directories, for $450. It's a fair amount of work to get all these inbound links. You can do it yourself, but your site will definitely need links to do well in the search engines.
Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta"!
Register my website at Google
Register my website at Yahoo
Register my website at Bing
Here's some good advice from About.com on the subject of "How to Request Links".
Don't bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don't work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.
The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn't be too many.
To see which sites are currently linked to your site, go to Google and type in your domain name like this:
mydomainnamehere.com
Of course, you'd substitute your actual domain name instead of mydomainnamehere.com.
Then click on the link to "Find web pages that contain the term 'mydomainnamehere.com'." That will give a list of websites that Google shows linking to yours. [Note that the Google toolbar's "backlinks" function is broken and has been for a few years — it gives incorrect results.]
MarketLeap's link analysis tool lets you put in your URL and find out the number of links to your site that are being reported by Google, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL and MSN all at once.
We list several places to get inbound links on our page covering how to get links.
Here is a helpful article on how to get worthwhile in-bound links, Link Building Strategies
Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers.
Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google.
Underhanded sites can now fake their page rank (that displays in the Google Toolbar). So, if a site with a great PageRank contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their actual PageRank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays in the Google Toolbar when you browse to that site.
For help in optimizing your website for the search engines, contact us. It's our specialty and a niche we fell into because too many website designers have not studied up on how the search engines work.
Using these techniques we have gotten top placement at Google for our client, Miami Condo Lifestyle, for the highly competitive keywords "miami condos".
To give you an example of the relevance of headings containing keywords, on the Chandler's Natural Soaps website there is a glossary in which each ingredient of the soaps is defined within a specially created <h2> heading tag.
The Chandler's Soaps site routinely gets visitors looking for a specific ingredient, even though that ingredient may be mentioned only a few times in the whole website. Putting key words into headings brings in traffic to the site.
The way this works is that a person searching through Yahoo! (or any search engine) for a particular ingredient (like the herb "chamomile") sees our page come up in the search results and sees that our page is in a website featuring natural handmade soaps. She may not be looking for soap at all, but if she is curious or it sparks her interest, she'll visit the site anyway and maybe buy something. It's a form of impulse shopping via the web. It's human nature to get distracted during a search for something specific by something related that looks appealing. (Witness the success of all the shopping malls out there with stores feeding off of each other's customers.)
Also note that we optimized the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild website, and it usually ranks at #1 at Google for the phrase, "handcrafted soaps" - click that link to see where they rank today.
Read our search engine optimization client testimonials for more info about how Search Engine Optimization might help you.
Want more proof? This page you are looking at right now often ranks #1 at Google for the term "search engine optimization tutorial". Click that link to see how this page you are looking at ranks today at Google.
So -- Yes, all this stuff works! And yes, it is necessary to use as much of it as possible. These are the guidelines we use when designing a website to optimize it for the search engines. And no, despite the length of this page, this is NOT a complete listing of all the factors that go into optimizing a website for the search engines, only the most important ones.
To make it even more confusing, all of the search engines do things a little differently, one to another.
Thanks for reading all this. We hope that it will help you design (or re-design) your website to optimize it for the search engines. If you need help doing that, you can contact us here. SEO is our specialty.
There's a lot more that can be done to effectively optimize a commercial website in a very competitive market; not every SEO technique is listed here, just the basics that we try to use on every site we optimize.
Those of our competitors who read this information and are savvy enough to apply it well are welcome to it! Good luck!
how to search engine opmzn.
search Engine Optimization -- the process of making a site "search
engine-friendly" — also known as "SEO" -- is probably the most important
aspect of website design. Many, many commercial websites are designed
and set up by people who know little or nothing about search engine
optimization — how to give the search engines what they need to see when
they index your site. This long page contains the information (or links
to it) that web designers SHOULD know about optimizing a website for
the search engines.The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images well, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.
For a technical "how to" on optimizing Flash files, see this page from J E Hochman, and for an up-to-date late-2010 summary of the pros and cons of trying to optimize Flash, see this article from WebsiteMagazine. (Note that we use these same techniques when optimizing Flash sites.)
There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better rankings in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select that are relevant to your web pages.
You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.
Note: If you have a database-driven website, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on how to optimize a database-driven site for the search engines.
Also Note: If you have a website that is designed using <frames>, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on optimizing a frames-built website for the search engines.
If you are designing a site from scratch, see also especially this page: SEO Techniques in Web Design.
seo Let's get started!
To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", a 70's 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.
Alfa Romeo Alfetta
Pick a Good Domain Name
This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name match-up in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:
http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com
For
more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine
placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that
isn't very good in this respect, click here.
Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip
this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for
much, just a little.
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Pick a Good Web Hosting Company
What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomason (Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic), click here.The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows IIS Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.
But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.
If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.
There's another way to find out if you have a dynamic or static IP address, and that is to use this tool provided free by Bruce Clay:
Put Your URL to Check in this box:
it
will tell you exactly what the numeric IP address of your site is, and a
bunch of other info about it. Did your site pass the test? If not, contact me and I will try to advise you what to do to fix the problem.You can also "ping" a website to find out the IP address being used. For example, if you open a DOS command prompt window on your Windows PC, you can type the following:
ping:www.wordsinarow.com
and it will return the IP address of 65.38.173.39. You can ping any website, get its IP address, and try to reach it through HTTP:// at that IP address. If it has a static, dedicated IP address, you'll get to the website. If not (and that's usually the case) you'll either get a different website, or a generic message from the server saying that there's no website configured at that address.
Now take the numeric IP address from that report and type it in your browser after typing "http://" — don't put in "www" — just type the four numbers after the "http://" — if it returns a "404 page not found" or some site other than yours! -- you have a dynamic IP address. If your site shows up in your browser, then that four-part number is your static IP address. (Many thanks to Bruce Clay for providing this tool!)
We like the website hosting from Data393 for many reasons - one of them is that they will set up hosted websites on their server with static IP addresses. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. Data393 is a good choice but not your only choice -- you could also use Verio or many others. In 2010, even Godaddy.com offers cheap hosting with a dedicated static IP address for an extra $3.00/month. WebWizards.net also offers inexpensive hosting and a dedicated static IP address. Words in a Row also offers hosting, but only to our marketing or web design clients.
Unless you are locked into a proprietary shopping cart or content management system, it is not usually very difficult or expensive to move your site from one hosting company to another. Just make sure your new hosting company gives you a static IP address and that your site passes through the Bruce Clay analysis tool (the form above) without any problems.
In our experience, with all other factors being equal, the site with its own static IP address will rise to the top at the search engines over those with dynamic IP addresses. This is something your hosting company may dispute--especially if they don't provide static IP addresses. Approximately 97% of all IP addresses on the web are dynamically assigned, so do not be surprised if your site has a dynamic IP address when you check it.
Here's a blog post from BruceClay.com about their tests of static vs. dynamic IP addresses to see if they really make a difference in search engine rankings.
Here's an article from Michael Banks Valentine of About.com, about "Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines". It explains in detail some of the ways your server setup can make your site a problem in the search engines.
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Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases
Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of 1 or 2 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.
For more info about picking the right key word phrases for your website, click here. There are several tools that will help you pick the right keywords. One great free tool is the Google External Keyword Tool.
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Set up your Meta Tags
There are several "tags" that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages--a process called "spidering". These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:- The <title> tag
- and the "description" <meta> tag.
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Set up your <Title> Tag
Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>
What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.
The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does Bing.
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Set up your Meta Keyword Tag
The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:<meta name="keywords" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">
Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than twice in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short for Search Engine Optimization. Don't use words in it that don't show up in the body text on the page. In practical terms, you can delete this keywords meta tag without any consequence. Better not to have a keywords meta tag than one that is filled with keywords that don't show up on your pages; it can count against you!
Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.
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Set up your Meta Description Tag
The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:<meta name="description" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah">
This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in a search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!
We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. It's also known as "keyword stuffing"; don't do it! For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, click here.
Note: The description meta tag should include a call to action, such as "Call for a free consultation" or "Click here for a discount coupon" or something else to make it stand out, so people click on it when your listing does show up in the search engine results.
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Put Key Words in Headings
Back to our Alfa Romeo Alfetta site: It will have "headings" like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H2>Put Key Words in Headings</H2>.These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:
- <h1>Alfa Romeo Alfetta</h1>
- <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Hood Ornaments</h2>
- <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Maintenance Manuals</h2>
- <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Floor Mats</h2>
- and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.
Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:
<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>
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H1
headings should be used for branding of your site. H2 tags should be
used for keywords, to help outline what's on the page visually. Don't
use more than one H1 tag on a page.Use Key Words in Your Text
Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn't contain at least 250 words, some search engines won't bother to index it. It's preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You'll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.
In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.
There's a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick. Of course if you use HTML/CSS only (no tables) then you won't need the table trick.
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Put Key Words in Alt Tags
Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an "ALT tag" ("ALT" is short for "alternate"). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture in most browsers.Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag--every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase — "Alfa Romeo Alfetta".
Note: Some people surf with "pictures" turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to "see" what's on a picture--there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what's on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.
This article by Robin Nobles quotes SEO researcher Jerry West's research showing that the alt tag is not used by the main search engines at all. My own research tells me that alt tags are only a small part of what the search engines do look at. Even so, I still recommend that you put alt tags on all images (because that is one thing needed to make your HTML code "valid", and that you put keywords in the alt tags of any images that you use as links where using keywords would be appropriate in helping to describe the image to someone who cannot view the image (i.e., someone who is visually impaired or who is using a text only browser). My research shows that some search engines do use those alt tags describing the image used as a link to determine what the page they point to is about.
Keep image names real, don't stuff keywords into them. You need to have an alt tag on every image (in order to have valid HTML code), but page design element images (such as lines, color blocks, etc.) should just have an empty alt tag, like this: alt="". Also, if you give design elements names that are just numbers, such as 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc., Google won't bother indexing them, and they won't dilute the importance of images that you DO want Google to index, such as your product images. Don't use numbers as the names of product images if you want Google to index them. Try to use keyword-rich image names and alt tags, of any image that you want Google to index.
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Put Key Words in Anchor Tags
Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:
Sample Anchor Tag:
<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>
-- if the link points to the floor-mats.html page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.
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Is a Robots Tag Necessary?
In our experience, a Robots meta tag with instructions to index and follow the links on the page is simply ignored by the search engines. You can safely omit the robots tag if that's all you have been using it for. In the old days of the net (a few years ago) you would have put this tag in the head of your document:<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
It might have done some good a few years back - in today's world it can safely be omitted.
The robots meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don't want a page to be indexed -- such as a test page, or a page you put up for your own use, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
That will keep the page out of the search engines that recognize and follow these tags. Of course, to actually prevent the page from being indexed by the search engines, you need to add the page name to the robots.txt file as one of the disallowed files. A robots meta tag is not enough to prevent the page from being indexed by some of the search engines that ignore them completely.
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Use a robots.txt file
Make an empty file. Name it "robots.txt". Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the "robots.txt" file, go here. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!
Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:
That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /private/
To see the robots.txt file in place on Words in a Row, click here
Here is an article called "Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance" by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.
You can validate your existing robots.txt file using this robots.txt validator tool.
Note: You should have a line in your robots.txt file that says where your sitemap.xml file is. That line looks like this, on my site:
Sitemap: http://www.wordsinarow.com/sitemap.xml
You'll want to put your own domain name in there, of course.
Note: If you have a huge site, you may need more than one sitemap.xml file to list all the pages of your site in it. Here's an explanation of how to set up a sitemap index
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Validate your HTML code.
Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That's all.These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is "busted" and needs to be fixed so you don't confuse the search engine robots. There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. Note: this page you're looking at right now has valid HTML code.
Click this button to validate now!
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Register by Hand with the Search Engines and Directories.
As soon as the website is finished and up on the web, it should be submitted to (registered with) the search engines (like Google and MSN) and directories (like Yahoo! and the ODP). Most of these are free -- some of them charge up to $300 for submitting your website. Don't scrimp here. If people can't find your site it is doomed.There are several programs that can automate this process for you -- but we don't recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get as good of results as you get when you register your website by hand.
We've set up a page to make it easy to register with the search engines and directories by hand, here.
Here's a website that offers a service to get your site listed in 300 small directories, for $450. It's a fair amount of work to get all these inbound links. You can do it yourself, but your site will definitely need links to do well in the search engines.
Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta"!
Register in the Search Engines
Here's where to go to register with the main search engines:Register my website at Google
Register my website at Yahoo
Register my website at Bing
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Don't Neglect The Little Things
What are the three most often neglected opportunities for getting better rankings in the search engines? Click here to find out.Get Links Pointing To Your Site
After our website is created and put up on a server and registered with the search engines, we would then go out and find as many other websites as possible that might have an interest in linking from their site to ours, contact them and convince them to set up such links. We might have to offer reciprocal links back to their sites in order to convince them. There's no harm in that, you WANT lots of links from your site to other sites--that's one easily-provided free service you can give away.Here's some good advice from About.com on the subject of "How to Request Links".
Don't bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don't work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.
The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn't be too many.
To see which sites are currently linked to your site, go to Google and type in your domain name like this:
mydomainnamehere.com
Of course, you'd substitute your actual domain name instead of mydomainnamehere.com.
Then click on the link to "Find web pages that contain the term 'mydomainnamehere.com'." That will give a list of websites that Google shows linking to yours. [Note that the Google toolbar's "backlinks" function is broken and has been for a few years — it gives incorrect results.]
MarketLeap's link analysis tool lets you put in your URL and find out the number of links to your site that are being reported by Google, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL and MSN all at once.
We list several places to get inbound links on our page covering how to get links.
Here is a helpful article on how to get worthwhile in-bound links, Link Building Strategies
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Page Rank and Links
Page rank is Google's way of measuring your rank in terms of links to your site from other sites, based on both quantity and quality. Google page rank varies from 0 (terrible) to 10 (ideal). If you have lots of links from sites with low page ranks, they will mean very little to your page rank, whereas even a few links from other sites with good page ranks can make a difference. That doesn't mean you should cancel existing links -- they still have value.Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers.
Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google.
Underhanded sites can now fake their page rank (that displays in the Google Toolbar). So, if a site with a great PageRank contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their actual PageRank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays in the Google Toolbar when you browse to that site.
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Disclaimer
Disclaimer: While SEO is very important in order to get visitors coming to your site from the search engines, it is not the only thing you should be doing to get traffic to your site. Here's an excellent article about some of the other important avenues to use to get visitors to your site.
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SEO Tutorial - Summary
In a perfect world, no other site could receive higher placement in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" unless the designer of it did exactly as we have done above, only more of it! In THIS not-too-perfect world, our website might get dropped out of a search engine for no good reason because of human error or a glitch in a program somewhere. Murphy's Laws can't be avoided, even on the web. Or another site that should get kicked out of the search engine for "spamdexing" might not get kicked out. (You've seen this kind of thing when you do a search and the same site comes up 50 times in the first 60 results, obscuring all the other relevant sites.)For help in optimizing your website for the search engines, contact us. It's our specialty and a niche we fell into because too many website designers have not studied up on how the search engines work.
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"Yeah, But Does It Work?"
By now you might be thinking, "Does all this stuff really help, in the long run?" or "Is all this really necessary?"Using these techniques we have gotten top placement at Google for our client, Miami Condo Lifestyle, for the highly competitive keywords "miami condos".
To give you an example of the relevance of headings containing keywords, on the Chandler's Natural Soaps website there is a glossary in which each ingredient of the soaps is defined within a specially created <h2> heading tag.
The Chandler's Soaps site routinely gets visitors looking for a specific ingredient, even though that ingredient may be mentioned only a few times in the whole website. Putting key words into headings brings in traffic to the site.
The way this works is that a person searching through Yahoo! (or any search engine) for a particular ingredient (like the herb "chamomile") sees our page come up in the search results and sees that our page is in a website featuring natural handmade soaps. She may not be looking for soap at all, but if she is curious or it sparks her interest, she'll visit the site anyway and maybe buy something. It's a form of impulse shopping via the web. It's human nature to get distracted during a search for something specific by something related that looks appealing. (Witness the success of all the shopping malls out there with stores feeding off of each other's customers.)
Also note that we optimized the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild website, and it usually ranks at #1 at Google for the phrase, "handcrafted soaps" - click that link to see where they rank today.
Read our search engine optimization client testimonials for more info about how Search Engine Optimization might help you.
Want more proof? This page you are looking at right now often ranks #1 at Google for the term "search engine optimization tutorial". Click that link to see how this page you are looking at ranks today at Google.
So -- Yes, all this stuff works! And yes, it is necessary to use as much of it as possible. These are the guidelines we use when designing a website to optimize it for the search engines. And no, despite the length of this page, this is NOT a complete listing of all the factors that go into optimizing a website for the search engines, only the most important ones.
To make it even more confusing, all of the search engines do things a little differently, one to another.
Thanks for reading all this. We hope that it will help you design (or re-design) your website to optimize it for the search engines. If you need help doing that, you can contact us here. SEO is our specialty.
There's a lot more that can be done to effectively optimize a commercial website in a very competitive market; not every SEO technique is listed here, just the basics that we try to use on every site we optimize.
Those of our competitors who read this information and are savvy enough to apply it well are welcome to it! Good luck!
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earn money from online
There are so many ways by which you can earn money from your home .Earn ways of earning often fake and scam. But eBay which is a shopping market opens a source of earn money to you. We know that thousands of products are sold and bought in everyday. If you are a seller a wide window is opened for you to start a new business.
It is easier than other way because it needs a little working experience in internet. The first step is to know that how you want to start. Just buy a product and make a stock for resell and then relax until your product is sold.
At first you have to sign up a free account on ebay.
No need to sell your personal things. It is better that you buy a product and stock them for resell.
It is necessary to choose a product which you want to buy and sell. Though you can sell anything you want but I suggest you to make your own name. It will help you to find a specific type of product.
It is not necessary that your product must be small. It can be a cloth for example. You need to pick a popular item. The feature of ebay advanced search you can easily find a popular product.
For example you want to sell commuter accessories. There are hundreds of games are available which you can buy and sell in ebay. If you don’t any idea which is suitable to sell, you can search ended list and see which items are continuously sold and which is appropriate for you to get more profit.
But the reason is that from where you can buy your product, because no sellers will say you about the main source of product. There are two main source for your stock that is wholesalers and drop shippers. Drop shippers don’t take their money until you can sell to customers. You need to pay a fee for joining into the first place though. It is more risk that you pay first.
Once you want to sell a particular product, you need to get ration about that. If you find any website then check out what they do. Another method is to search in Google. Some people often ignore this step and miss a bit.
Your feedback is very important to be a good seller. If you get higher, your scores will be higher. It shows your dedication about your product. The high score will give you Powerseller status. The powerseller symbol are regarded as a serious seller of ebay. There are five labels of ebay. The first is Bronze and it is easier to reach in your goal. Once you get the powerseller status and increase your sell, you will see that getting bronze needs no time actually.
The final step is to fix the price of the items. If you sell a hundred different products in about 5$ to 10$, you won’t make as much cash than 50$ to 100$.
There are so many ways by which you can earn money from your home .Earn ways of earning often fake and scam. But eBay which is a shopping market opens a source of earn money to you. We know that thousands of products are sold and bought in everyday. If you are a seller a wide window is opened for you to start a new business.
It is easier than other way because it needs a little working experience in internet. The first step is to know that how you want to start. Just buy a product and make a stock for resell and then relax until your product is sold.
At first you have to sign up a free account on ebay.
No need to sell your personal things. It is better that you buy a product and stock them for resell.
It is necessary to choose a product which you want to buy and sell. Though you can sell anything you want but I suggest you to make your own name. It will help you to find a specific type of product.
It is not necessary that your product must be small. It can be a cloth for example. You need to pick a popular item. The feature of ebay advanced search you can easily find a popular product.
For example you want to sell commuter accessories. There are hundreds of games are available which you can buy and sell in ebay. If you don’t any idea which is suitable to sell, you can search ended list and see which items are continuously sold and which is appropriate for you to get more profit.
But the reason is that from where you can buy your product, because no sellers will say you about the main source of product. There are two main source for your stock that is wholesalers and drop shippers. Drop shippers don’t take their money until you can sell to customers. You need to pay a fee for joining into the first place though. It is more risk that you pay first.
Once you want to sell a particular product, you need to get ration about that. If you find any website then check out what they do. Another method is to search in Google. Some people often ignore this step and miss a bit.
Your feedback is very important to be a good seller. If you get higher, your scores will be higher. It shows your dedication about your product. The high score will give you Powerseller status. The powerseller symbol are regarded as a serious seller of ebay. There are five labels of ebay. The first is Bronze and it is easier to reach in your goal. Once you get the powerseller status and increase your sell, you will see that getting bronze needs no time actually.
The final step is to fix the price of the items. If you sell a hundred different products in about 5$ to 10$, you won’t make as much cash than 50$ to 100$.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Affiliate Marketing
or anyone wanting to make money online, affiliate marketing is one of
the best ways to get started. Affiliate marketing is the act of
referring online shoppers to various products and gaining a percentage
of the sale in return. As an affiliate marketer, you are given your own
links to a product so the seller knows when a customer you referred buys
their product.
So what exactly are the benefits of affiliate marketing? There are dozens. Many sellers offer great incentives to affiliate marketers, with some offering as much as 50% commissions on products you refer customers to. This means you can make money on the side (or even replace your entire income if you become successful at it). This is one of the legitimate ways to bring in a passive income, as people from all around the world are buying products online at every minute of the day. You don’t have to develop any products yourself, either. It’s very easy to find outlets in which to plug in your links (oftentimes for free!). And make great money.
Are you ready to get started making money with your own website? We have together a Free Step By Step tutorial that will show you exactly how to get your own website up and running so you can start making money. Click Here to get started now!
Writing articles related to the products you’re trying to market can be very beneficial in many ways. One, this builds your online presence, and thus, your credibility. Writing articles on one subject but with many angles will help you understand exactly what the product you’re affiliate marketing is all about, and help you to identify your target audience. Also the more articles you write, the more people will know about you, which will be great later down the road when you’re ready for your own website.
Writing blog articles for free in exchange for being allowed to include links to your products can be helpful in that you will have full access to each blogger’s followers. This way, you won’t have to go out and find your own customers, you just market to people who are already interested in the subject and are web-savvy (a must for anyone who would consider buying products online).
There are also article sites that will allow you to include links to your products at the bottom of the article, and better still: some sites might even pay you small fees for your articles. The key to attracting as many customers as possible is writing a fantastic article that isn’t too sales-pitchy and showing them how their lives can be even more enriched if they check out the products you have listed.
One day, you’re ultimately going to want to take the leap and get your own website. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something simple enough for customers to navigate easily. Here, you can have your own store with links to the various products you’re marketing, as well as build a customer base through blogging. This opens multiple channels of communication with millions of potential consumers. Combined with social media marketing in order to get even more people connected, you can eventually have great success with affiliate marketing, as long as you choose quality products to market and sell them effectively.
Are you ready to get started making money with your own website? We have together a Free Step By Step tutorial that will show you exactly how to get your own website up and running so you can start making money. Click Here to get started now!
So what exactly are the benefits of affiliate marketing? There are dozens. Many sellers offer great incentives to affiliate marketers, with some offering as much as 50% commissions on products you refer customers to. This means you can make money on the side (or even replace your entire income if you become successful at it). This is one of the legitimate ways to bring in a passive income, as people from all around the world are buying products online at every minute of the day. You don’t have to develop any products yourself, either. It’s very easy to find outlets in which to plug in your links (oftentimes for free!). And make great money.
Are you ready to get started making money with your own website? We have together a Free Step By Step tutorial that will show you exactly how to get your own website up and running so you can start making money. Click Here to get started now!
Writing articles related to the products you’re trying to market can be very beneficial in many ways. One, this builds your online presence, and thus, your credibility. Writing articles on one subject but with many angles will help you understand exactly what the product you’re affiliate marketing is all about, and help you to identify your target audience. Also the more articles you write, the more people will know about you, which will be great later down the road when you’re ready for your own website.
Writing blog articles for free in exchange for being allowed to include links to your products can be helpful in that you will have full access to each blogger’s followers. This way, you won’t have to go out and find your own customers, you just market to people who are already interested in the subject and are web-savvy (a must for anyone who would consider buying products online).
There are also article sites that will allow you to include links to your products at the bottom of the article, and better still: some sites might even pay you small fees for your articles. The key to attracting as many customers as possible is writing a fantastic article that isn’t too sales-pitchy and showing them how their lives can be even more enriched if they check out the products you have listed.
One day, you’re ultimately going to want to take the leap and get your own website. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something simple enough for customers to navigate easily. Here, you can have your own store with links to the various products you’re marketing, as well as build a customer base through blogging. This opens multiple channels of communication with millions of potential consumers. Combined with social media marketing in order to get even more people connected, you can eventually have great success with affiliate marketing, as long as you choose quality products to market and sell them effectively.
Are you ready to get started making money with your own website? We have together a Free Step By Step tutorial that will show you exactly how to get your own website up and running so you can start making money. Click Here to get started now!
make money blog
make easy and easy money blog
StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
Do you actually want to monetize your blog?
Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.
If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.
You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…
Can you make a decent income online?
Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.
Can most people do it?
No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.
If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.
This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.
If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.
Web savvy
What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:
- blog publishing software
- HTML/CSS
- blog comments (and comment spam)
- RSS/syndication
- feed aggregators
- pings
- trackbacks
- full vs. partial feeds
- blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
- search engines
- search engine optimization (SEO)
- page rank
- social bookmarking
- tagging
- contextual advertising
- affiliate programs
- traffic statistics
I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.
If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.
A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.
This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.
Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.
Thriving on change
Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.
The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.
I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.
What’s your overall income-generation strategy?
I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.
Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…
Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.
Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.
When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.
Traffic, traffic, traffic
Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.
Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.
Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).
When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.
Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.
With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.
If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
How to build traffic
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.
There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.
Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.
If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.
Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?
Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.
Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.
Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.
At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.
I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.
I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.
Multiple streams of income
You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:
- Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
- Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
- Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
- Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
- Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare
(commission on products sold, mostly books)
- Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)
Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.
My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.
These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.
Automated income
With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.
I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.
Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.
Blogging software and hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.
As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.
Comments or no comments
When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.
But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.
If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.
Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.
Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.
Build a complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and optimization
In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.
A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.
A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.
Posting frequency and length
Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt cheap.
I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.
My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.
Perks
Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.
I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.
What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging lifestyle
Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for detail
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