JonnyQ Special: What Jon has Learned Thus Far
I was at the Rich Dad site and decided to make a post I had planned to do here. So this here it is.
Alright, initially this was going to be a private message for Michelle but Jscott is right. We need to help each other. These are the big things I've learned so far.
Title, Meta Description, H1, & H2 tags are key - Write each article targeting a single keyword phrase and have it in each of the tags mentioned. Keyword density is important but not to the degree most people think so write naturally without all of the bold, italics, and crazy font sizes. I don't know about you but that stuff pisses me off.
Update often and get your RSS feed up - It was mentioned that you need to update every day but I update maybe twice a week, 3 times tops and all of the major SE spiders crawl my site frequently. Google every other day and the rest once a day. The RSS feed will help get your articles indexed in Yahoo faster in the very least and will help bring repeat traffic.
Submit to directories but only to direct linking ones - On the page where your link will show up go to View > Page Source and look at the links. Make sure they are clean links and don't have a bunch of gobbldy gook around them. SE spiders won't follow Java and that is often what all of that stuff is.
Get links from related sites - All of the major search engines factor in incoming links when determining your rank. Google does more so than the others. Make sure the links are from quality link pages and not just a laundry list of every site created since 1996.
Have a clean site map - The site map should be nothing more than the links to all of the pages on your site. There should be a link to it on every page of the site as well. The site map makes it easier for spiders to move around and find everything.
If you are starting in PPC, leave Overture alone - The learning curve for PPC is too steep not to have the control that Adsense gives you over your campaign. Learn to use the " " and [ ]. Just putting in a keyword without puncutation is a recipe for disaster. Ask and I can tell you what I've learned in the area of PPC in the last week. It's a lot.
Track EVERYTHING - Track the spiders, track your links, track the visitors. Watch their movements. Stalk them. Time them. See how long they stay on the pages. The time they spend is an indication of the page's effectiveness. If they leave after a few seconds, there may be issues to address. Track your Adsense on EVERY page. Use the channels to gather data and determine which ad style is most effective on your site. I have spreadsheets I use and I will make them available to anyone I've talked to more than twice for free. If I haven't talked to you before, all it will cost you is a link to my blog=)
SSI & CSS - Server Side Includes and Cascading Style Sheets (external ones) will shave hours off site maintenance and testing. I have links to great sources on both that I will post later.
NVU - Forget Dreamweaver and FrontPage. This is free and works just as well as either one of them.
Read Forums, not Ebooks - You can learn almost everything for free by frequenting forums and asking questions. Perfect example. I bought Stomp the Search Engines about 2 weeks ago. All fired up about kicking Google's posterior, I popped in the first CD. Then the next, and then the next. While it's a great program for newbies, I had already learned just about everything that was discussed from forums. The only new thing was the concept of press releases and guess what? Jscott just mentioned that for FREE in this very thread. Invest in your education and read forums, save the money and invest it in your business.
Internal links count, too - SEs index and rank pages, not sites. As such, a link from anywhere is an inbound link. Make sure you use the page's key phrase in the link anchor text. The ...>BLAH part. Also do as I say and not as I do and don't name your home page "home". Use the site's name and make sure that it contains the site's main keyphrase.
Adsense - Chances are Adsense will be the major money maker for your site, at least initially. Study the "heat map" and design the site around it. I'm sure someone here has a link to it. Follow the rules and don't get banned. That would be a huge chunk of money that would be lost from you.
This is wisdom garnered from 42-105 hr/wk of work and research for the past 4 months. Use it wisely.
Alright, initially this was going to be a private message for Michelle but Jscott is right. We need to help each other. These are the big things I've learned so far.
Title, Meta Description, H1, & H2 tags are key - Write each article targeting a single keyword phrase and have it in each of the tags mentioned. Keyword density is important but not to the degree most people think so write naturally without all of the bold, italics, and crazy font sizes. I don't know about you but that stuff pisses me off.
Update often and get your RSS feed up - It was mentioned that you need to update every day but I update maybe twice a week, 3 times tops and all of the major SE spiders crawl my site frequently. Google every other day and the rest once a day. The RSS feed will help get your articles indexed in Yahoo faster in the very least and will help bring repeat traffic.
Submit to directories but only to direct linking ones - On the page where your link will show up go to View > Page Source and look at the links. Make sure they are clean links and don't have a bunch of gobbldy gook around them. SE spiders won't follow Java and that is often what all of that stuff is.
Get links from related sites - All of the major search engines factor in incoming links when determining your rank. Google does more so than the others. Make sure the links are from quality link pages and not just a laundry list of every site created since 1996.
Have a clean site map - The site map should be nothing more than the links to all of the pages on your site. There should be a link to it on every page of the site as well. The site map makes it easier for spiders to move around and find everything.
If you are starting in PPC, leave Overture alone - The learning curve for PPC is too steep not to have the control that Adsense gives you over your campaign. Learn to use the " " and [ ]. Just putting in a keyword without puncutation is a recipe for disaster. Ask and I can tell you what I've learned in the area of PPC in the last week. It's a lot.
Track EVERYTHING - Track the spiders, track your links, track the visitors. Watch their movements. Stalk them. Time them. See how long they stay on the pages. The time they spend is an indication of the page's effectiveness. If they leave after a few seconds, there may be issues to address. Track your Adsense on EVERY page. Use the channels to gather data and determine which ad style is most effective on your site. I have spreadsheets I use and I will make them available to anyone I've talked to more than twice for free. If I haven't talked to you before, all it will cost you is a link to my blog=)
SSI & CSS - Server Side Includes and Cascading Style Sheets (external ones) will shave hours off site maintenance and testing. I have links to great sources on both that I will post later.
NVU - Forget Dreamweaver and FrontPage. This is free and works just as well as either one of them.
Read Forums, not Ebooks - You can learn almost everything for free by frequenting forums and asking questions. Perfect example. I bought Stomp the Search Engines about 2 weeks ago. All fired up about kicking Google's posterior, I popped in the first CD. Then the next, and then the next. While it's a great program for newbies, I had already learned just about everything that was discussed from forums. The only new thing was the concept of press releases and guess what? Jscott just mentioned that for FREE in this very thread. Invest in your education and read forums, save the money and invest it in your business.
Internal links count, too - SEs index and rank pages, not sites. As such, a link from anywhere is an inbound link. Make sure you use the page's key phrase in the link anchor text. The ...>BLAH part. Also do as I say and not as I do and don't name your home page "home". Use the site's name and make sure that it contains the site's main keyphrase.
Adsense - Chances are Adsense will be the major money maker for your site, at least initially. Study the "heat map" and design the site around it. I'm sure someone here has a link to it. Follow the rules and don't get banned. That would be a huge chunk of money that would be lost from you.
This is wisdom garnered from 42-105 hr/wk of work and research for the past 4 months. Use it wisely.
posted by JonnyQ888 at
4:31 PM
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