June 04, 2007
SEO Elite
A lot of people ask me what type of SEO tools I use. I really don’t use a whole lot of specific SEO tools because often getting traffic to a website takes a lot of good old fashioned work. But one SEO tool I use was developed by a good friend of mine – it is called SEO Elite.
SEO Elite is great for getting a quick analysis of websites that are linking to my website and my competitor’s websites. Often, if you find a site linking to a site similar to your website, you can get them to link to you quite easily.
The software also helps you build a link directory (I have not used this part of the software) but it might come in handy if you want a quick easy way to maintain a link directory. The main thing I like about the program is seeing all the backlinks, what their PR is, the title tags of the pages, among other things in one easy to read table with many other summary tables. It can be a real time saver if you are the type of person that likes to analyze your backlinks.
You can also analyze links using Yahoo’s “linkdomain: mysite.com” command, but if a site has 10,000s of backlinks this can be very inefficient. I know Brad has a lot of happy customers, you can read some of their reviews on his SEO Elite Review page.
Posted by Idea Man at 04:14 PM | Comments (5)
May 28, 2007
Follow the Leaders
Sometimes the best website ideas are not your own. It is often best to follow the big successful sites that have the resources and manpower to do usability studies, focus groups, and feedback loops that a small startup website could never do on a limited budget.
If you have a website idea, look at what successful sites are doing in your area of business and mimic some of the things making them successful. Sometimes this strategy can help you grab a market niche that the “big guys” aren’t serving properly.
One excellent example of this strategy being used is by ShopIreland.ie. Irish consumers use the Euro, and Amazon.co.uk shows prices in UK Sterling. So ShopIreland.ie is set up to mimic what Amazon does, but present the currencies in the correct format for the Irish shoppers. So if a web buyer is shopping in Ireland, they can find their books in Ireland in the correct currency. In essence, ShopIreland.ie gives Irish consumers the benefits of Amazon.co.uk at a local level.
You can see this same strategy used by 100s of niche auctions sites that use eBay.com as their model and now I am seeing YouTube.com knock offs all over the web. The bottom line, look what the big successful sites are doing and go after the consumers they are missing by slightly altering their strategy to serve a specific niche market.
Sure you won’t make billions of dollars like an Amazon.com, but most webmasters would be happy with a much smaller piece of the pie by serving a market segment overlooked by the big guys.
Posted by Idea Man at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2007
Content is King
Having a great website idea usually the first step down the road to the time and place where you start getting visitors. To get those visitors, it is important to have useful and unique content around your topic or series of topics so the search engines have a reason to get you in their index and start ranking you well for several keyword phrases. You can roughly estimate that each page you build will bring you 1 – 5 visitors per day – not a lot of visits but it illustrates the need to have 100s or 1,000s of pages of content if you want 1,000s of visitors.
There are many websites where the main focus is on good content. Sites like HowThingsWork.com and LifeTips.com are good examples of websites having great success with the content idea. I recently discovered a new site trying to crack into the content provider realm called ForBeginners.info. This website is beginning to add sections of content on a variety of topics like mortgages, web hosting, and sudoku puzzles.
ForBeginners.info is a good example of how to start with a small amount of content and continue to build new content until you have thousands of pages of unique pages with great information bringing in thousands of internet visitors. Eventually, if enough great content is added, web surfers will begin to recognize your site name as branding begins to occur from multiple search engine result sightings.
While building 1,000s of pages of unique content takes time and work, it is probably the best method to create a successful website. In future posts, I’ll discuss methods to speed up unique content building and how you can get your visitors to create your content for free.
Posted by Idea Man at 01:18 PM | Comments (1)
May 06, 2007
Building a Website Business Fast
One of the best ways to start a website rolling quickly is to buy an existing website and convert into your own website idea. Once you buy the website, the next step is to start putting lots of great content up so Google spiders your new site and you build targeted organic traffic immediately for your product.
I came across a great example of a financial website, Rebuild.org, that is using this strategy to perfection. It looks like they purchased an existing website and are converting it into a finance and loan website. They are currently in the process of adding financial related content. Their next step will certainly be to add outstanding functionality to the website.
With any website, your first goal needs to be getting targeted traffic, this often involves putting the cart before the horse – building the site with content, and then adding the functionality. Rebuild.org is doing this by adding great content about mortgage refinance, personal loans, and various other financial topics. By using a similar strategy, you speed the process of your website business success by at least a year.
For some reason Google doesn’t like new domains because they often take a year to start giving a new site on a new domain decent search engine rankings. By buying an older website and changing it to your own, you can often by-pass this Google waiting period and start getting ranked immediately.
The best way to find an older site you can purchase is to search on your main keywords and then go down to 50+ in the Google search results. Start clicking on the sites. If you get lucky you will find one that is obviously no longer active and you will be able to buy it at a great price.
Posted by Idea Man at 10:58 AM | Comments (2)
April 03, 2007
One-Way Links
Traffic Through Inbound Links [Part 2]
I discussed acquiring links through link trading, article sites and link directories a few months back. It is important to realize if you want to drive traffic to your great new website idea, the cornerstone to getting web traffic is links.
The dilemma is how does a new website get links? Google says the best links are links you get naturally, but unless your website is revolutionary or has amazing content you probably are not going to get many links from other sites out of the goodness of their heart. That's the reason I like to talk about new website ideas and provide links to them - I think great website ideas need to be pointed out because there are so many garbage websites out there cluttering up the web. To even things out, I like to do my part and give the good guys some props. So the bottom line is, if you want natural links you need to give other websites a reason to mention your website - garbage websites don't get talked about and don't get natural links.
Trading links only helps you so much because Google cancels out most of the benefit you get from a traded link. So what you really want is one way links that look natural. There are a few good tactics in use to get one way links. You could buy links from one on the many text ad sellers out there. Do a Google search on ‘Text Link Advertising’ to find some great websites where you can buy text links.
Other options are to contact websites directly and offer them a monthly payment for a one way link to your website. One tactic I like to use is to do a search on some of my site’s keywords. Then go back 20 to 40 spots in Google's SERPs and contact those webmasters and offer to pay them for a link.
It is even better if they will put your link in the flow of their current content. Say you would like to be ranked for the keyword phrase ‘red widgets’. Do a search and find websites that talk about ‘red widgets’ and negotiate with those webmasters to turn ‘red widgets’ into a one-way link to your website. This is the best possible link you can get – one that is buried in the content of existing Google indexed text.
Remember, when it comes to one way links the process is never-ending. You must continue work to increase inbound links to your site each and every month.
Posted by Idea Man at 05:29 PM | Comments (1)
March 05, 2007
Website Promotion Project
Duncan Carver, an online marketer, has started and interesting project that will allow you to follow along as he builds traffic to a new website from scratch. Here is his project introduction.
The website he is promoting is about worm farming. It would have been a bit more interesting if he picked a bit more competitive market to run his test, but still, Duncan is a smart guy and my guess is you can pick up some great website promotion ideas from this 'open' project.
I just checked Google and WormFarmingSecrets is ranked #25 after just a few weeks.
Posted by Idea Man at 06:17 PM | Comments (4)
March 01, 2007
Article Directories
A great way to drive traffic to your website is writing articles related to your website’s category and then post your article to 100s of different article directories. What’s an article directory? Articlesalley.com is a typical article directory where you could submit your articles. Hoewver, to submit to 100s of these article directories you need to use a service like iSnare that will submit your articles for a small fee.
Article submission will help you two ways: First you get traffic from the articles, and second, you get to put a link to your website in your articles creating many “free” backlinks to your website.
But to make article submission really pay off, you need to submit at least 2 – 10 articles a week on a regular basis. If you are not a prolific writer, I would suggest hiring someone from India or the Philippians to churn out articles for you. You often can get nice articles written for $5 a piece by going overseas. As you build the total number of articles you submit each week, your traffic will begin to increase each week.
Also, try to incorporate the hot search topics of the moment in some of your articles. For example, Britney Spears is currently one of the top ten searches (isn’t she always). So if you had a site that sold chocolate, you would want to have an article about Britney Spear’s favorite chocolate. American Idol is also a hot search, so you would want to incorporate American Idol in one of your articles. This strategy will bring extra traffic to your website. You can find the web’s hottest searches at Buzz Yahoo.
Posted by Idea Man at 09:02 PM | Comments (2)
January 25, 2007
Traffic Through Inbound Links [Part 1]
An important step to have your site found is getting other websites to link to your new website. Without links pointing to your website, you simply will not be found by the search engines. If the search engines can't find and index your site, neither will the human visitors that you really seek.
With today's search engine algorithms, links are like votes, and the more votes you have the more popular your website will be. The main question is, how does a new website get links? The following are the two most popular methods currently being used by webmasters:
Link Trading
You trade links with other webmasters. They link to you, you link to them.
Pros: Easy cheap way to get links pointing to your website.
Cons: Many believe that traded links simply cancel each other
out so neither site benefits.
Link Exchange websites
- Gotlinks
- LinksManager
- Link Exchange Forums
- LinkPartners
Bottom Line: Link exchanges help to some degree, but trades
with less than 50 total websites that are extremely relevant to your own website.
Link Directories
You buy a link or beg to get listed in some of the many great directories that are out there.Pros: Many directories offer solid one way links for a small fee.
Cons: Good free listings are hard to get. Also, don't expect much traffic from a directory listing.
Directory websites
- Yahoo
- Expensive, but offers high quality link backs.
- The Best of the Web - Old as Yahoo, almost as good and cheaper.
- Little Directory Getting in earlier on small directories like this often payoff in the long run as they become more established.
- DMOZ - Free, very long wait to get in. But if you do get in, the links back are thought of highly by the search engines.
Bottom Line: Directory Websites can cost a bit of money, but are a step that every new website should take.
We'll explore other less popular but highly effective ways webmasters are getting links to increase traffic in a future.
Posted by Idea Man at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2007
More Website Traffic = More Money
No matter what revenue model your website idea falls under, the most important thing you need is traffic. No traffic equals no money, it’s as simple as that. So how do you build traffic to your website? Unfortunately, unless you are flush with venture capital money and can afford to buy targeted web ads all over the Internet, you will need to develop traffic to your website organically.
Getting Organic Website Traffic
The three search engine websites Google, Yahoo, and MSN offer the best deal in the history of advertising. People search for what your site is about and your listing is presented to millions of people absolutely free. Unfortunately, unless you are in the top ten for your “money” keyword phrases, being listed in the search engine isn’t going to help much. Several studies have shown that searchers rarely go beyond the first ten links that come up in their web searches.
Your first step is to write a list of 5 keyword phrases you would like to get ranked in the top 10 and focus your effort on those phrases. If you get all 5 words in the top 10, you will no doubt rank for hundreds of other related keyword phrases. Your main keyword phases should all be 2 or 3 words long. Only the highest power websites will ever rank for a one-word search so your effort is best spent on multiple keyword phases that visitors would potentially use to find your website.
So how does a search engine determine the top ten websites that it will list? If you search Google for the phrase “Website Ideas” you will see at the top right of the search result page that Google has 150 million or so sites that are in their database for the phrase “website ideas”.
This means that sites in the top 10 for this keyword phrase are considered to be a better match than 99.9999999 % of all websites in Google’s database – so if you think about it, getting ranked at all is quite an accomplishment. To get in the top 10, you really need to know what you are doing.
Anyway, so how do you get your website ranked in the top 10? The search engines have some fairly complex algorithms (way to complex to describe in detail here) so I’ll give you the “Big Seven” components of how search engines rank websites:
1.) Inbound Links
a. Anchor text of inbound links
b. Quality of inbound links
2.) Age of the website
3.) Title of the webpage
4.) Headings of your pages
5.) Meta descriptions of your website pages.
6.) How many times the keyword is mentioned on your site
7.) Amount of traffic that clicks on your site when you come up in a search
In future posts, I will go into detail on each of the “Big Seven” search engine algorithm components, and what you need to do to take advantage of them.
In the meantime, if you want some heavy reading, here is a link to Google’s Search Engine Patent.
Posted by Idea Man at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2007
How to Make Money on the Web
We live during a unique time of unprecedented opportunity. Anyone with half a brain, some know-how, and a strong work ethic can make money on the web. How much money you make is only limited by how much time you spend on your website idea and your ability to make your website standout from the millions of other websites already out there. Not an easy task but doable.
People often ask me how they can make money on the web. Well, as you probably suspect, there is no quick answer, heck a lot of bad and good books have been written on the topic. Since I can’t give a quick answer, over the next few months, I’ll write several posts illustrating ways people can and do make money on the Internet.
There are four basic ways people make money on the web:
1.) Sales Websites: Selling a product or service to your visitors.
2.) Affiliate Websites: Selling products or services for another website for a commission on sales generated.
3.) Advertising: Building enough traffic to your website in a specific niche and sell ads to other websites who want to reach your visitors.
4.) Combination: Some combination of two, or all three of the methods above.
In my posts on this topic, I’ll point you to important websites, web tools, and tricks of the trade that you need to know about to get you on your way.
Whether you want to make some extra mad money or make a living, the opportunity is there if you have the motivation to do what it takes to succeed.
For now, lesson #1: Start reading and participating in the Webmasterworld forum for one or two hours per day. If you do this, you’ll not only start learning how the web really works, you’ll have access to thousands of successful webmasters who are happy to answer any questions you may have.
Stay tuned for my weekly posts on this topic.
Posted by Idea Man at 01:32 AM | Comments (2)