Building a website with Flash is good: It’s easy, clean and sleek. Nevertheless Google won’t consider it a lot. Your website needs pure and clean HTML code with a –lot- of content on it.
Quantity AND quality
Some people (Webmasters) says that you can choose either between quantity and quality. A high quality post would get much back links and thus a lot of Google traffic (let say 500 a day).
A bad post won’t get more than 5 a day, so focus on quantity and create 100 posts to get 500 in total!
Okay, this may work but in long term it's less profitable.
Why you should build high quality content?
- Because it’s cheap! A high quality post will cost $200, a bad one $5. 100 bad posts will cost $500. So, high quality is cheaper than bad quality.
- It converts well: Visitors turns into readers, commentators, may share, bookmark or save your webpage. They will remember your website and visit it regularly.
- High quality posts will get a lot of back links, which means other sites traffic, social media traffic and Google traffic.
- Quality content makes readers think you are a smart guy and your products are worth trying. Bad content makes them think you are a sh*t
What about quantity?
Thousands of websites are joining the web, millions of blogs, billions of posts… There are a lot of high quality posts like yours and better, so focus on quantity to attract more people.
The more the internet (number of webmasters) grows, the more work you should have for barely the same income. There’s a huge competition between blogs and the unique solution is to deliver high quality content and update regularly.
Optimizing your pages
If you are working with Wordpress, Blogger, Drupal or free HTML pages, optimizing is the same.
There’s few things you should care about, always remember that quality is the most important thing ever.
I saw a lot of (very) badly optimized (or non-optimized at all) websites ranking first on Google; because they deliver high quality work (they get good back links.).
Here are ‘my’ tips, whatever they say on the Internet. I do believe those are the most important things.
- Clean HTML: Means your HTML is correct and clean. Means also your HTML tags are simple and not crumpled few HTML tags, few divisions, tables… Means also less Javascript, less stupid widgets that you duck to your side bar.
- Clear Title: Clear title and URL. For example, you page name is “How to create a CSS template”, your URL should be “yoursite.com/Create-CSS-Template”. It’s not really a matter is you add “/category/”, but try to make it as short as possible. Don’t go for long titles like “How to make twitter makes money for you with ease – The marketing Guru – Tips for social media users and new internet beginners”. That’s quite bad and stupid. Also don’t put a title unrelated to the page content.
- Clean Text: don’t crumble your text with ads and JavaScript. Google and other search engines don’t like that and will probably down vote your website. If a division named “content” will have content, then do insert some JavaScript and other widgets. Try to separate them from text.
- Write long: write very long paragraph. Your blog post shouldn’t be shorter than 1,000 characters. Also don’t turn your web page into a keyword territory. Sometimes it works and brings a lot of traffic, but don’t cry if you got banned.
Write long posts, with correct spelling and grammar. - “Alt” tag: Don’t forget to fill the “alt” tag for your images. It’ll boost your organic traffic, plus add some valuable image search traffic.
- Use Bold and lists: Try to bold your main keyword, don’t abuse them! Try to use different keywords. Your main keyword shouldn’t be repeated more than 10 times, whatever webmasters says. Google will penalize you if you repeat your keyword a lot.
- Link to other sites: Don’t be so selfish, give links to other sites. Google don’t like selfish Bloggers and like good Bloggers that links to other Bloggers content. Link to good and valuable content, no matter if they are ranking well or not. But don’t abuse, don’t link to hundred of sites, a few links (5 or 7) per post will be enough.
- Original Content: Never copy content; never use your content in two sites. If some stupid RSS readers are crawling your feeds and cloning your articles stop them or alert Google. Because your blog is new they’ll track your feed before Google do and get indexed by Google before you do! If you are new they are about to destroy you. Use copyscape to keep track of those stupid websites and stop them.
Make your posts structured, like using lists, some images, quotes… try to break the text from time to time with images.
Use lists whenever possible (bulleted or numbered, both are good).
A good example is this blog, a simple and clean HTML template, long and well-written articles; keywords are bold, many list…
Another successful example in programming is Coding Horror, in Internet Marketing is Dosh Dosh.
Page Ranking
Page Rank indicates your page rank in Google. Webmasters says that page rank doesn’t affect your website ranking. Not true. As the name suggest “Page Rank” means your page rank in Google search.
The confusion: My website rank is 6; my competitor website rank is 2. My competitor is ranking first, I’m ranking 6; why??
The problem is that you are missing an important point!
Google ranks websites, but also ranks pages. You can have a website rank of 6, but your page rank of 1. Your competitor can have a website rank of 2 but a page rank of 3; here your competitor ranks better.
Don’t try to rank your website (domain name), how much are you going to benefit? 100, 200?? Try to rank your pages high and get quality back links to them.
You have a blog with 20 posts.
If the blog has many back links and a page rank of 4, however none of the posts have back links; the result is: little Google traffic.
If the blog has ‘no’ back links, but each page has a page rank of 1 or 2, your blog will have PR3, but this is not really important, you are going to have Google traffic through your blog posts.
How to rank high on Google
or: how can I rank better my pages on google
Ranking high on Google search, or getting a high (4 or 5) Page Rank is the same thing. But how to get a high page rank?
- Content: Write long, good content (text). If your text is crappy (syntax mistakes, bad HTML formatting…) you’ll rank low.
- Keywords: Diversify your keywords. Means: if you are talking about SEO, addition of automotive, information technology, medicine keywords is not bad it’s good.
- Back links: Everyone can do the two steps above, but quality back links is something privileged. Don’t waste your time getting bad back links in forums, comments and other signatures. Build content that READ and get real back links with value.
Do you think it’s stupid? Read my SEO observation to learn more.
Still you should read my SEO observation, this explains the most important strategy I have learnt to rank high and get more Search Engine visitors.
Increase quantity and volume
How can you beat other websites? How can you get more traffic?
It’s by increasing volume.
But remember: you should keep quality.
The web is opened for everyone, don’t think you are skilled and have great abilities. In your area, you are competing with 100 people, in your town may be with 100,000 or 300,000. But in the web, there are already 1.5 billions!!
There are a lot of smart and nice people; there are also a lot of bad and stupid ones. So never think the web needs you, it’s you who need the web.
So if you were able to create a clean CSS template that works on your favourite browser Firefox, another hacker will make a template IE compatible, another one has MAC and will test it on it. There’s a rough competition on the web, but you must have confidence on yourself and your abilities.
Volume with high quality needs one thing: hard work.
If you are the kind of people that want to work few hours a day and get rich fast, you’ll fail.
Sure webmasters that grew blogs to thousands of daily visitors make a nasty income without “even” writing one word (they can hire people at that point).
But believe me, don’t look at what they say “living an easy life”; because if you got rich you’ll never sleep and stop working. The richer you are, the more you work.
And now, this is the basic, yes all the basic to start. Don’t believe?
My first story
When I started my first website (an online Barcode Generator), I didn’t know about SEO, Page Rank, links or anything related to it. I built my website for readers and users, not for search engines; in fact I don’t know the world of SEO.
Few months later I got a Page Rank of 4 and around 100 daily unique from Google, I was making $150 a month from Adsense (but that’s another story) and many people was wondering how I did that easily.
When I got some knowledge about SEO, I looked on my site and did some SEO optimization, added keywords and description, change the content so it has better SEO. Just did the stuff I told you to do above.
3 days and Google crawled my pages; oups! I lost my ranking and search engine traffic had gone! What did happen?
I was perplexed, I even thought that some hackers hacked my site or my SEO was bad… I thought of contacting Google.
But my worries didn’t last, I started receiving search engine traffic again and it quickly clumped to 120 unique, in matters of a week.
This means: Google uses an algorithm, when you change your content totally (major changes in content, keywords, description, title…), Google will un-rank your website, recalculate your rank with the new settings and gets you back. Don’t worry, you are not banned from Google :D.
So the conclusion: There’s no nerdy knowledge, if you read the Google webmaster guidelines, you are done. Don’t read webmasters' fake stories. Instead focus on quantity, one website made me $150/month, if I found 10 ideas then I’ll make $1,500/month.
Quantity is crucial, the web is big and there’s surely people doing better work than you, people that you can’t compete because of size, knowledge and skills.
So increase your quantity to increase your earnings, if you have a website that promote your business, then it’s not enough. There’s already websites promoting their business and many of them are better than you.
Instead of fighting for a special keyword, try to diversify. Build a blog and put good content on it, put 40 articles, they are like 10 other websites: it’s like that, you get traffic.
If your website grew a lot, a blog will be too small for it, you need more traffic and also to invest in your current traffic: Start a forum, a forum means free Bloggers that will post threads and help you get more Google traffic.
Now more important than optimizing, you should even do it before you optimize: build valuable content that people can read.
Ohh, I think this article was very long and boring… you’ll better bookmark it and continue your journey tomorrow.
