Building a successful website doesn’t happen overnight. You have to create the pages, write the content, optimize your ads, drive traffic. You can be up and running within minutes but to earn the sort of revenues that make the whole thing worthwhile (and more) you’re going to have to invest time.
And much of that time is going to be spent troubleshooting.
A poorly-designed, badly-optimized site might make a little bit of money. A site whose bumps have been smoothed out and bugs squashed can make a lot of money. It was figuring out how to do that for AdSense units that improved my earnings. But the need to keep correcting your site is true for every aspect of your Web pages... and that includes search engine optimization.
When you’re trying to push your site up the search engines, try looking out for these mistakes.
1. Too Many Keywords
For most sites, when it comes to keywords, more isn’t merrier. If you’ve got a long string of keywords in your metatags, you’re not going to get a high ranking on any of them.
Remember, every one of your pages can be a gateway, so only select the keywords relevant to that page. That’s particularly important for AdSense pages. You only want to attract users with a genuine interest in that page’s content. The others won’t click the ads. If you’ve got more than three keywords in your tags, you’ve probably got too many.
2. Too Little Keyword Variety
Of course, if you’re going to cut back on the number of keywords you use on your home page, you have to increase the number of keywords you use across the site. Far too many publishers keep their titles exactly the same, as though every page covered the same subject in the same way.
If each page on your website is about a different topic, each page needs a different title with the right keywords for that page. Yes, that means you’re going to have to do a lot more keyword research. But you won’t just get a high ranking for one set of keywords; you’ll get high rankings for different sets of keywords -- and targeted traffic for your advertisers.
3. Too Little Text
You’d think that for publishers looking to make money out of AdSense, creating enough text to pepper with keywords shouldn’t be a problem. You’d be wrong. There are still publishers looking for shortcuts by putting up big pictures and videos instead of words.
Multimedia is fun. But if you want to ride to the top of the search engines -- and get accurate ads -- you’ll need at least two or three decent-sized paragraphs with a sensible scattering of keywords.
The bottom line is that when it comes to building a successful site, there are no shortcuts. Nor does the work stop when the page-building ends. You should always be reviewing your pages, tweaking your content and making sure that every aspect of your site is the best it can be. Everyone makes mistakes. The successes look for them and correct them.
It's Del.icio.us!
Furl It!
December 26, 2006 02:25 AM
Unless you posted this intentionally, there's a gramatical error in the last paragraph on this page.
Shouldn't this read: