Sunday, 24 December 2006
SEO - content
There are a whole load of considerations when you are looking to optimise a web site for search engine rankings. The first thing you have to look at is simply content. Your content must be good and plentiful, referring to all the keywords you want to highlight. Think about different ways to say the same thing without being overly repetitive. Whatever else you plan to do to promote your web rankings, your content has to be the best it can be. Do loads of research around your topic and keep updating the site regularly. Search engines will be interested in a site that is regularly updated and start to visit that site more regularly. Add to your content and add more pages to add depth to your site, link the pages well to ensure that all the content is picked up by search engine ‘bots’. However, don’t ‘bury’ your pages in subfolders, keep everything either in the root, or not more than two folders away. EG: www.mysite.com/subdirectory1/subdirectory2/content.htm…. But no further..More pointers to follow on this topic.
Thursday, 14 December 2006
getting started..
I answered a 'yahoo' question the other day about getting a website up and running. The questioner wanted to know how to get a website 'posted' on Google. My interpretation of that is to assume the asker has a website built and a domain to host it, and is looking to get Google to crawl it and give it a rating.
I have gone through the process myself, so am happy to share my experiences...
Right from the word go, I registered with Google so that I had an 'account', then you have the option of submitting your site to google when you feel it is ready.. Having the google account means that you can also set up 'adwords' (your advertising to gain visitors to your site) for your site and 'adsense' (adverts placed on your site to earn you revenue). You can also use Google Analytics which provides data about your site visitors (including geographical analysis). All these services are free to use (there is a naturally a charge for adwords advertising, but access to the service itself is free).
I have tried all these tools on my own little site and can report that even on a small scale, these services are very useful, I would encourage everyone to register. I don't want to sound like I think Google is the bees knees or anything, but everyone is surely aware that Google is by far the biggest player in the world of Search Engines.
Be aware though, it takes a while to get a rating and then it will be low until you have worked hard on the optimisation...
There is a host of stuff you can do to your site for Search Engine Optimisation (at no cost), and I think that will have to be the subject of a subsequent post.....
I have gone through the process myself, so am happy to share my experiences...
Right from the word go, I registered with Google so that I had an 'account', then you have the option of submitting your site to google when you feel it is ready.. Having the google account means that you can also set up 'adwords' (your advertising to gain visitors to your site) for your site and 'adsense' (adverts placed on your site to earn you revenue). You can also use Google Analytics which provides data about your site visitors (including geographical analysis). All these services are free to use (there is a naturally a charge for adwords advertising, but access to the service itself is free).
I have tried all these tools on my own little site and can report that even on a small scale, these services are very useful, I would encourage everyone to register. I don't want to sound like I think Google is the bees knees or anything, but everyone is surely aware that Google is by far the biggest player in the world of Search Engines.
Be aware though, it takes a while to get a rating and then it will be low until you have worked hard on the optimisation...
There is a host of stuff you can do to your site for Search Engine Optimisation (at no cost), and I think that will have to be the subject of a subsequent post.....
Wednesday, 13 December 2006
web management
As a 'sole-trader' getting a website up and running you have to do all the jobs yourself (if you are starting small with no capital). This means not so much 'chief cook and bottle-washer' but webmaster, designer, accountant, administrator, researcher - and that's just the website, never mind running the service that you are offering on the web.
The only way around this issue is prioritisation and attacking one issue at a time. You can't do everything at once and if you try it you'll end up in a mess. Make a long list of stuff you want to/ need to do and allocate each task to a phase.
for example: Phase one tasks would be a basic website design, working on a name and logo, working out price lists etc.. Phase two might be finding the best webhosting package, looking into google 'adsense' etc.. Phase three might be uploading the site and getting friends to beta-test the site functions.
Once you have worked out this plan, review it on a regular basis and tick off the tasks as you go along. At the lowest moments, being able to see what you have completed so far should be an encouragement....
Your plan will inevitably change, but you need a base to start from anyhow. Having written this, I am now encouraged to get out my original plan to see how far I have come against what I was expecting, and see how much the priorities have changed. The next thing will be to do a new one for the coming year.
The only way around this issue is prioritisation and attacking one issue at a time. You can't do everything at once and if you try it you'll end up in a mess. Make a long list of stuff you want to/ need to do and allocate each task to a phase.
for example: Phase one tasks would be a basic website design, working on a name and logo, working out price lists etc.. Phase two might be finding the best webhosting package, looking into google 'adsense' etc.. Phase three might be uploading the site and getting friends to beta-test the site functions.
Once you have worked out this plan, review it on a regular basis and tick off the tasks as you go along. At the lowest moments, being able to see what you have completed so far should be an encouragement....
Your plan will inevitably change, but you need a base to start from anyhow. Having written this, I am now encouraged to get out my original plan to see how far I have come against what I was expecting, and see how much the priorities have changed. The next thing will be to do a new one for the coming year.
adsensing
I have been having some interesting results from google adsense. Adsense provides targetted adverts for my website - matching keywords from the site with advertisers keywords (Adwords). I have been impressed with the effectiveness of this service and the way that highly relevant ads are displayed on my pages, just waiting for my visitors to click on them. I have gone with the blatant style so they look like adverts, but used colour to integrate them into the site. Some users favour 'hiding' the adverts within the text so they look like part of the body text...not my style really... I'm not trying to hide anything, though I concede more visitors might click if I took a different approach. (Adsense users earn a small variable amount when a visitor clicks on an advert)
When I first got adsense on my site, I was averaging 10cents a day revenue, well I'm not going to be able to retire on that! After a few weeks, the average was climbing nicely to around 60 cents a day. My interesting episode started with a sudden jump up to $2.30 one morning as the result of only 5 clicks...I started to get quite excited by this (I wish I knew which advert was generating the income...) and by the end of the day, I had $2.77 after about 8 clicks. The other side of the story was that I had no clicks at all for the next three days... Strangely I got 3 cents added to my account over these three days even though there were apparently no clicks. I had plenty of visitors over these days, so my earning should have been around my usual average.
I note that often the adverts are the last thing to load on a page, so if there was a problem with the server, it could be that the adverts weren't loading before the visitor had already moved on??
I may look into scripting that can change the way my page loads up...
When I first got adsense on my site, I was averaging 10cents a day revenue, well I'm not going to be able to retire on that! After a few weeks, the average was climbing nicely to around 60 cents a day. My interesting episode started with a sudden jump up to $2.30 one morning as the result of only 5 clicks...I started to get quite excited by this (I wish I knew which advert was generating the income...) and by the end of the day, I had $2.77 after about 8 clicks. The other side of the story was that I had no clicks at all for the next three days... Strangely I got 3 cents added to my account over these three days even though there were apparently no clicks. I had plenty of visitors over these days, so my earning should have been around my usual average.
I note that often the adverts are the last thing to load on a page, so if there was a problem with the server, it could be that the adverts weren't loading before the visitor had already moved on??
I may look into scripting that can change the way my page loads up...
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
linking
What I really need to do now is get some relevant links (reciprocal) - these are really hard to come by, currently I have submissions in some directories ad a couple of links I have managed to blag - watch this space for developments.
Reciprocal links are a very important tool in getting your website ranked, my own links page is fairly heavily populated, but getting these sites to link back has proved fruitless in most cases.
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/links.htm
I need to do some spring-cleaning here and clear out some of the non-returned links - then I need to come up with a campaign to replace the useless links with some useful ones..the work never stops
Reciprocal links are a very important tool in getting your website ranked, my own links page is fairly heavily populated, but getting these sites to link back has proved fruitless in most cases.
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/links.htm
I need to do some spring-cleaning here and clear out some of the non-returned links - then I need to come up with a campaign to replace the useless links with some useful ones..the work never stops
starting out
Working through the painstaking progress of getting a commercial site of the ground. I began the http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk as a service site for conversion of tapes to CD's and then moved on to exploiting the popularity of the site for advertising revenue.
I have created subsections of the site at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/DIY
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/studio
and will continue to develop.
This approach may raise the question: why would you tell you customers how to do the task that you are selling? Good question, and the answer is that I feel my customers are people who don't want to, or can't do this them selves. The folks who visit the 'DIY' section are going to do it themselves anyhow, so why not make use of their visit to my website by advertising tools they might use.
I will enlarge on some of the thing I have done to maximise the website in later posts..
I have created subsections of the site at:
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/DIY
http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/studio
and will continue to develop.
This approach may raise the question: why would you tell you customers how to do the task that you are selling? Good question, and the answer is that I feel my customers are people who don't want to, or can't do this them selves. The folks who visit the 'DIY' section are going to do it themselves anyhow, so why not make use of their visit to my website by advertising tools they might use.
I will enlarge on some of the thing I have done to maximise the website in later posts..
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