I’ve been doing this websites thing for almost 1 year. So what kind of advice do I have for people in the same boat as me?
I know everyone says this, but I will try to elaborate a little on what it actually means (to me at least).
Find a niche! Now, that doesn’t JUST mean make a website that doesn’t have much competition and you’ll have success. Even niches have a lot of competition, because everyone has the same idea as you!
The most important thing is to understand your audience and even more important is to find them where most (or few) other people are looking. For example, everyone thinks that Google is the only search engine. Of course, if you think this, that is just ignorant (probably not your fault, this is what most people think). Google is extremely popular. But this is a bad thing, because people know this and that means you are going to have a great amount of competition.
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Boost Your Rank, My Progress, Personal
bing, know your audience, niche, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engines, seo, yahoo
The big secret to running successful websites is simple – keep up with the trends. You may think that Facebook and Twitter are stupid (I agree), but if you embrace the social networking phenomenon, it can be a very very powerful marketing tool.
Twitter is easy!
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically the status update thing from Facebook, in a standalone form. The great thing about Twitter is you don’t need to write an essay. 140 characters and you are done. So basically, you write what you are currently doing / looking at and maybe a link (which gets automatically tinyurled).
Like any website promotion like this, make sure you keep your profile / page updated. At least once a week, make an effort. Check out a few other people’s pages, make a few comments, become part of the community.
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Boost Your Rank
search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, seo
Started your own website and realised it’s not the cheap, easy way to make money you thought? Well you can either start crying and give up or you can start doing some actual work.
It’s not easy to get the ball rolling (and get consistent hits to your website). If you are ready to do a bit of work for your future, read on. Otherwise, get back to the softcore porn you found on MySpace.
There are many many ways to promote your website. Some are more effective than others. Some are more costly that others. The most effective are free, but time consuming. You could pay someone to do it for you, but this is also expensive.
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Boost Your Rank, Where to Start
google pagerank, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization
I’ve mentioned the importance of good keywords/keyphrases in previous articles, but I’ve never told you how to choose them. So today, I’ll get back to basics, and I’ll introduce you some of the tools I use to find search terms (keyphrases) for my websites.
You can then use these keyphrases to help you select a domain name, a website name and also to fill in your meta description and keywords.
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SEO Tools, The Basics, Where to Start
keyphrases, keyword finder, keyword tool, keywords, meta tags, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, SEO Tools
If you’ve used WebsiteGrader, you might’ve noticed the section mentioning that you need to redirect www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com to the same location. I’ve done my research on the effects of not doing this, but there are a lot of conflicting opinions. The general though is that your search engine score might be split between the two “seperate” sub-domains.
There is a chance that other problems can be caused also. SSL certificates are for one sub-domain only (with or without the www.), so your certificate might show the user an error if they use the other.
Some search engines may realize they are the same website, others may not, but why risk lowering your score, when it’ll take you less than 5 minutes to fix this problem?!
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Boost Your Rank, The Basics
.htaccess rewrite, loose www, redirect, redirection, remove www, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, seo
All the way back in my first article, Where to Start, I talked about how registering a domain name containing your website’s keywords is important. Well having the keywords in the complete URL to the page is also helpful.
The URL of the page you’re on now for example: http://www.cashsblog.com/2009/01/flat-links/. It contains to year, month, then title of the article. This can give search engines a better idea of what the page is about. Have you ever seen URLs like http://www.cashsblog.com?read_article.php?year=2009&month=01&key=120&title=flat-links and thought “What the hell does that mean?”
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Boost Your Rank
domain tools, flat links, redirection, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engines, seo, SEO Tools