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Making Money from the Web:
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You may have noticed that over the past few months it's become a lot more difficult to drive the traffic that you need to your website. Indexing engines such as Google have become a lot more stringent in terms of which sites and pages they visit and index (indeed, Google may frequently crawl your site and may never include your pages in their index). And if you can't be found in the indexing systems, how are you going to drive web traffic to your various pages?
It looks like, unless you a well-established site or can afford to pay for advertising then you will either have to wait years for your website to be indexed naturally or you will have to live with just a few of your web pages actually being indexed.
Page Map |
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| First Things First | Getting People to your Site |
| Escaping the Google Sandbox | Join the Mailing List |
First Things First:
Of course, there are a number of things you can do to help. First of all make sure that all your web pages are valid (use a tool such as the Free W3C Markup Validation Service) to ensure that your web pages (be they HTML of XHTML) comply with current standards. If they do comply, then you have a much better chance of their being indexed. Next look at your web pages with a text-based page viewer such as Lynx. What you see in this viewere will be very much like what the indexing bots will see. If an element of your page is visible with these text viewers they will be seen and indexed by the search engine bots. Other elements such as JavaScript will never be indexed; ensure that no critical elements (such as navigation) are hidden within JavaScript.
Also ensure that no critical tags or links are associated with images (unless they are also present in the main body of the text). Never, ever, use frames ad the content of the frames are unlikely to be indexed. If, however, you want to use frame-like pages then use this page to find out how to use CSS to mimick framed menus. If you can, convert your website to use CSS/XHML as this system offers plain text web pages with markup aplied to them. As a result they are very search engine friendly. Finally, and most importantly make sure that you have an index page directly linked to your home page. This should list all the pages in your site, or at the very least it should link to other index pages that a contain links to other pages in a specific sub-area of your website (an example is my Celtnet Information Links Page).
You should also be aware of the value of META tags and TITLE tags in your web pages as well as using ALT tags to describe your images and 'title=' tags to describe your links. Search engines will index these and they will aid in the promulgation of your keywords (an in the ranking of these in the various search engines).
After reading and implementing the section above, you now have well-fromed web pages that are standards compliant and that are easy for the various search engines to crawl and index. From your viewpoint, you've done everything right, but your website is still languishing in the indexing doldrums.
If your website is new, then this may be due to the 'Sandbox' used by Google and others. This is a special section of the Google index into which new sites get dropped from between two and six months. It's used to try and ensure that new websites aren't thow-away sites intended only to be short-term. It's esay to see why the big indexing systems use this strategy, but it's frustrating if you're a genuine website stuck in the sandbox limbo.
Escaping the Sandbox and Improving your Ranking:
If you've been suffering for several months with little of your website being indexed and with low rankings for your indexed pages then you might think that your situation is hopeless. However, this really isn't the case. What's happened is that Google (I'll focus on them as the biggest indexing system) have altered their algorithms in a recent upgrade called Bigdaddy. In this new release of their indexing architecthure and software they've attempted to become far more stringent in terms of which websites (and portions of websites) that make it into their index. Part of this is determining how popular and how well respected your website is. To do this the number and quality of links coming into your website is determined (and for best results these need to be uniqe incoming links from sites with high page rank). Reciprocal links will count for less and participating in link farms may actually harm your website's ranking.
The only answer to this is to get high-quality incoming links for your website. Of course, if you have a site with great content then you can wait and hope that people will link to you naturally. This may happen, but it will take time as you're in a bizarre catch-22 situation where you're not indexed unless you have incoming links and you can't get natural links if people can't see your web pages. If this is the problem, then is there anything you can do to give yourself a leg-up out of the problem?
Actually, there are several things you can do. The first of these is to begin your own Blog (weblog) where you can post little articles on the content of your site and include links (this potentially deep links into your website and will aid indexing). You can also write articles for article websites such as eZines.com which will both give you high quality links to your site and will also give your site added links and much-needed additional advertising as your articles are re-used. Remember, however, do not re-use the articles on your won website. Re-write the article differently or base it on an existing web page, otherwise you may gain a 'duplicate content' penalty from the search indexing systems. These links can also aid you to get out of Google's sandbox much quicker than you would otherwise do.
Finally, the best way to get incoming links is to submit your site to web directories such as The Open Directory Project (DMOZ). There are literally thousands of these directories on the web, some with very good page rank and it's well worthwhile submitting your website for inclusion into as many of them as you can. Most will not require you to provide a reciprocal link, which means that they are extremely beneficial to you. If you dont want to use your time in searching for the web directories yourself you can use a service such as Seoster who will submit your site to a large number of directories at a cost of $10 per 100 submissions. They have a good success rate and their fees are very reasonable.
Getting People to your Site:
You've now got a large number of links to your site (including deep links from your Blog) and after perhaps a month's lag your presence in Google is increasing as more of your pages are found and indexed and you may even find yourself slowly climbing up the page rankings. By now you should have noticed a significant increase in traffic and in your revenue from systems such as Google's Adsense. But is there anything more that I can do?
In fact there is, and this is one of the biggest secrets of successful webmasters who make many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from their websites every month. Good content is a must, for without it you will never hold visitors on your site, but you also need traffic into your site. If you don't have traffic you will never gain the income you need; and which all the hard work you've put into your website actually deserves.
There are several ways of getting the added traffic you need: such as writing a blog that effectively advertises your website, writing articles, submitting press releases, offering articles to eZines. I cover a number of these in my Internet Marketing area. And if you want to know how to apply all these strategies to make your website into a success, why not read my How to Maximize your Web Traffic eBook which has just been updated with all the latest news and research.
Monetizing your Site:
Of course, one of the big reasons you're here is that you want to know how to monetize your site. Well, you have all the usual options, such as Google's adsense program, various affiliate programs and the direct selling of your own products. But what if I told you that this site has just developed a killer Ads program that anyone could use. Would you be interested? Well, over the past few months I've been working very hard on the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace. This is a place where you can get all your ClickBank resources in one place. It's a searchable storefornt for one thing. But I'm also offering ClickBank-based Ads free for all. Yes, you can create your own Search Boxes, Adsense-like Clickbank Contextual Ads and even a customizable Clickbank Ads RSS feed. You simply design the ads, plug-in your ClickBank affiliate ID and you're away. Apply the ads to your website and get an additional income from ClickBank. All at no cost to you! Now, what could be better than that?
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