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
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
That’s right, people are finding my awesome tool (just in case you forgot, that’s YouTubeKeep.com) and using it. Woo!
I am promoting it quite a bit, by posting articles and links wherever I can, (which I’ll cover tomorrow). It is still not doing that well in the search results. If you enter something odd like “youtube keep video” or “youtube keep“, it shows up on the first page of Google. But ultimately, I want it to be on the first page for the keyphrase “download youtube videos“.
I think the search engines are probably punishing me because I have lots of broken links now. I changed the page structure of the website a few times and google indexed the old URL’s which now go to 404 error pages. Oh well, the search engines will get over it… eventually!
So, the hits… You want exact figures? Well, I’m not giving you exact figures! But I’m looking at between 50-100 visits per day (not to be confused with hits / page views). I know it’s not THAT impressive, but it’s a start!
The ad revenue is still next to nothing. If you’ve been to YouTubeKeep.com in Internet Explorer, you’ll probably notice that the ads do weird things and jump down to the bottom. So I’m going to blame the positioning. I’ll fix that and experiment with the positioning over the next few weeks.
My Progress
search engines, youtube keep, youtubekeep
You’ve got your website, you’ve started optimising it and you’ve gotten a Domain Tools’ SEO score of 99% for every page. Now what? Well, you need to wait a few days (or sometimes weeks) for the search engines to reindex all your webpages and find any backlinks from other webpages. Then, it will do its calculations and your pages will be listed in search results. Ideally, you want your website to be the first listing for all your keyphrases, but how can you check the easy way?
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Check Your Rank, SEO Tools, Website Tools
backlinks, google pagerank, inbound links, keyphrases, keywords, pagerank, rank, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engines, seo, seo score, SEO Tools
One thing that a lot of people probably don’t realise is, that search engines don’t see a website the same as you or I. They don’t see any images, they don’t see colour, so they don’t judge your website on how good it looks. They see a text version of you site with all the prettiness stripped out of it. So you need to consider this when designing your website. No one’s going to be able to find your pretty website if search engine bots can’t read it.
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Boost Your Rank, Check Your Rank, SEO Tools
alt tags, domain tools, keywords, meta tags, search engine optimisation, search engines, seo, seo score, text browser, whois