Bestplace Corporation
  • Login
  • Contact Us
  • LiveZilla Live Help

In the news...

02/04/2012 10:12:29

Copyright Reform or ACTA?

02/04/2012 08:02:42

Firefox 11 Gets SPDY

Bestplace Online Business

November 19, 2008

Taking Care of Web Traffic or Money?

When you start a new web project you must take into account what is the main goal of the project. There are many blogging networks building contents for different subjects and many bloggers have succeeded in obtaining prominent benefits out of their blogs.

But there exist some factors which determine how fast you can make money with a website or blog. Some blogs have just a few posts and hundreds of ads and banners of all kinds. This behavior is usually severely penalized by visitors since it is clear that contents are irrelevant for the author and the only goal of such a blog is to make money faster than a pop star.

If you are willing to start a blog or blogging network the first thing you must keep in your mind is to focus in authoring quality content, useful content that can be taken as a reference by other bloggers. Every person likes reading qualified articles or blog posts, valuable contents matching our need for guidelines or personal interests.

If you have some time and you really want to get started at the blogging business, here are some tips for you that we recommend to generate some traffic:

  • Visit some forums: If you visit forums where the subject you are writing about is being discussed you will find the common questions users are asking, and you will know which ones do not have an adequate answer. Having an answer for such questions in your blog and placing a link to it in the forum topics can generate important incoming web traffic. Of course, you have to do your homework and compose a valuable answer, if you post just a scam, they will remember your name… but to accuse you next time they see you nearby.
  • Post comments into other blogs: Blogs related to the subject you are treating are a good source for learning and interacting with others involved in the same market area. You can get some karma if your comments are smart enough. Respectfulness is something that pays off day by day in the long run. You can benefit of track backs and links in your comments when you provide a reply or add-on in your own blog.
  • Publish your contents into Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.: This will provide you with free content distribution, but you must publish something interesting to get the most of it (that is, to get other people to consume your feeds and link to your blog).
  • Statistical tools: There are free and comertial applications for website analytics. There are owned and hosted analytical solutions, some of them are based on log files and some others are based on web-bugs (javascript). Some free website analytics tools are really great, that is the case of Google Analytics. These tools will let you know which blog posts are receiving traffic, which keywords are being utilized to find your website, what is the average time on site for your visits, etc. This is input data for decision taking, the more you know about your visitors, the more you can target them with your contents and offers.
  • Quality content: There is no magic about this phrase. It is simply the way it works. The more useful your content is for the visitors you target, the more web traffic you can get and the more the will stay at your website. If it is not only interesting to your potential customers, but also to the colleages in your market area, they will end up linking to your website or referencing you at some point in their reviews. Remember though, that it is not the amount of characters your contents is, but the amount of hours or days your visitors save by finding the right answer to their needs in your blog: Your contents must be valuable.

You are not successful on the Internet with a blink of an eye, you must work hard, and even so, there are many confluent factors involved in driving a successful blog. Some of these factors are stated below:

  • Age of the domain name
  • Quality of contents
  • Internal structure of your blog (help spiders scanning it, help yourself maintaining it)
  • Choice for subjects or contents
  • Incoming links (and the quality of them)

If you aim to make some money as a blogger, you must work very hard and every day to succeed in the long run (no secret, brick and mortar businesses are built the same way). During the process of attracting new visitors and starting to build brand awareness, you must not assign much relevance (if any) to advertisement content. You can adjust the amount of ads and banners as you grow, but keep that at a reasonable limit anyway… you do not want to loose loyale visitors to earn an extra cent.

Share/Save/Bookmark

November 16, 2008

Search Engine Optimization: The Basics

This briefing will not guarantee you a top rank for any search engine, but modifications explained here will improve and increase your chances to get your website into the most relevant search listings.

It is important to bear in mind that search algorithms change very often, so this little advice is only about overall guidelines you should follow, the best way to make sure you get an effective and permanent search engine positioning is having valuable information in your web portal, and this information must not only be valuable for spiders, but also for regular users. Relevant contents will turn your website attractive for linking from other relevant websites.

In summary, the goal of your website’s optimization is to increase incoming web traffic for targeted keywords you optimize your website for, and for other relevant keywords search engines will find out themselves.

31% of people over the Internet search two-words keyphrases, 25% search three-word keyphrases and only 19% search one single word when utilizing a search engine

Needless to say, search engine optimization is not about optimizing your website for keyphrases your competitors are too strong, and obtaining good results on this can take a long time and cost a lot of money. You must start the optimization process by optimizing keywords with far less competitors and which can drive the same incoming web traffic to your website.

The keywords you utilize to optimize your website, must be somehow related to your website. To find which of these keywords are also being actively searched by users you can utilize several tools, like KeywordDiscovery and Overture.

While you are creating contents for your website you must avoid the use of generic keywords which are not relevant to your website or have no reason to be included, this is because you do not want your website to attract traffic on those. If you can summarize a keyphrase in one single keyword it is ok to leave it at that, unless you have specific reasons to promote a longer keyphrase (more targeted, less competitors, etc).

You should try to name the URLs and images using targeted keywords, but you must not abuse on them or in the use of punctuation characters (dashes, points, etc.)

For the optimization of URLs you must avoid the use of cryptic names or names using URL parameters (URL query strings) at all costs. On the other hand, using URL rewriting is highly advisable, because it can convert ugly URLs in search engine friendly URLs and still keep most of your code untouched.

Ugly URL: http://www.example.com/about.asp?id=150
Search Engine Friendly URL: http://www.example.com/florida-web-services

One of the highlighted methods for web traffic generation is the creation of structured contents in separate pages. Each page can be optimized for a maximum of three keyphrases, though the exact number depends on the size of contents. Optimal results could be obtained by optimizing each page for one single keyphrase.

You should never publish your website without finishing the optimization, and always check every link (internal or external) to make sure none of them is broken. You must have a sitemap for the optimization to become really effective. A breadcrumb navigation is also good, mainly, for regular users.

Breadcrumb navigation
Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page

We have put toguether some specific guidelines you can use while building your website in the HTML editor of your choice:

Title

  • It must not be longer than 70 characters according to Google and DMOZ (including spaces).
  • It must not start with the domain name (can be considered spam).
  • It must contain the keywords you want to be ranked on.
  • The character must be capitalized.
  • It must not be all uppercase.

An example of a nice title: Data Recovery and Hard Drive Repairing Service

Description Meta Tag

Not all search engines check the description meta tag, but it is still an important part of search engine optimization. This tag should not be longer than 100 characters (Google can read up to 200), but most importantly, it should actually describe each page effectively.

Keywords Meta Tag

  • It should not be longer than 300 characters.
  • It should only utilize keywords present in the website contents, using keywords not present in the website contents could be penalized.
  • It must be all lowercase.
  • You can use keywords or keyphrases, but you must separate each keyword/keyphrase with a comma.
  • Do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase or overload the tag with too many variations of the same keyword/keyphrase. That will surely be considered spam.

Website Contents

  • Targeted keywords should be included inside important tags, like H1, H2, H3 and strong. Search engines will assign a higher weight to those.
  • Targeted keywords at the start of a paragraph are usually assigned a higher weight than keywords near the end of a paragraph.
  • Never abuse of keyword density, do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase over and over, since this is usually considered keyword spamming. Though there is no certain limit for repeating a keyword/keyphrase you should try to keep the density to a maximum of 15% of contents.
  • You should use targeted keywords for the link text on internal or external links. Never use “click here” or other aberrations for link text (unless you really do not care about the target page).
  • Multimedia: Try to keep image sizes to a minimum, image search engines have size and timeout limits. Search engines will either not parse flash files, or assign a very low weight to what they extract from them. A full-flash website is highly discouraged.
  • Alt Text: You can use alt text not only for images, but also for links and media objects. This information is relevant to search engines. Images have the alt attribute, links have the title attribute for the same purpose.

Always check the validity of your code against the w3c validator.  This will at least give you the certainty that search engines can parse and read your HTML code properly. Using Flash, Javascript and AJAX is not discouraged, but you have to take precautions if you implement one of these technologies in your website.

Share/Save/Bookmark

Seo courses by AMI Official PayPal Seal
Alza Certified SEO Company

About Us | Locate Us | Contact Us | Request a Quote | Frequently Asked Questions | Press

© 2008 - BESTPLACE CORPORATION - The Best Place For Online Business - All Rights Reserved