Super Search Engine Marketing

One of the eaisest ways to make money off any site is through the use of advertisments on your site. I am sure many of you have profiles on Myspace, Tagged, or visit other sites and you see, like this one, ads from google or other types of ads.  This is how these places are able to let you do what you do for free. They count on you clicking an ad which they charge a fee to the advertiser for the click.

You can take advantage of this in several ways. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines and even an ever growing market of companies that sell advertising for sites you can get a commission for each of those clicks.

Even if you have a hard goods website the use of ads from the ad companies on your site can increase your revenue. Most of the big ad companies have various different ways that they display ads.   In the example of Google you can use a content form (where google reads your site, sees words in the pages and then puts ads up that are similar to your content), and then refine it so that you get the kinds of ads on your site that you think your visitors will be interested in.

Most all of these companies require that you register with them and then they give you a bit of code or allow you to generate code that is included in your site which calls up the ads from their server.  In the registration process will be a way for them to send you a payment. The key is using a known company to put your ads up for you or if your site is really popular you hitting the net and finding companies that might advertise on your site.  Obviously it is easier to use something like Google to display your ads as you can be pretty sure they are gonna be around for a while and they also allow you to look at what your clicks are, and how much money your making off of them.

Many wonder why would you put ads for other companies that are selling similar products to what you offer on your site?  Simple, most people who run ads are either very big companies with lots of money to spend on ads, or they are new to the net and looking to get people to their sites.  These are people with money to give you for forwarding someone to their site, not that they will buy from them, but you get paid for the click to their site.

Sparky

Check Stub from Google for Ad-Clicks on my sites

HTML is a computer language that allows you to put information into a document on the internet that when it is called upon by a web browser (or other software) is viewed by the viewer.

HTML code is comprised from standards set by the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium.  The W3C meet from time to time and make changes to the standards, add new standards so that websites and browsers are able all view the site the same way.  BUT DON’T LET THAT FOOL YOU.  Just because your site is W3C Compliant doesn’t mean it is going to show up how you want it to look across all browsers and all computers.

An example is if you look at most any Static Page website like Coffee -n- Caffeine you will see it looks one way with Internet Explorer and slightly different with Netscape or Firefox or Google Chrome.  This is expected.  Each browser handles the code that it is given by the web page a little differently.  Mostly cause they are not following the W3C.  The biggest thing to remember is that your site should be built so that it is viewable the way you want by the most popular browsers.

Currently the most popular browser is Internet Explorer though traffic from Apple’s Safari and also Firefox are gaining ground.  So if your gonna write website code then you need to have a few browsers ready to look at the pages you create so you can see what it looks like before you post it to the internet.

A Check list so far.  You have your product/service/sage advice , you have a domain name selected, you have checked to see what the market is like, you have an idea of what you want your site to look like and contain in the form of content.

Before you go to much further you need to look at the top 10 sites on each of the big search engines.  In most cases you will find many of the same sites, but you should see at least 20 different sites between Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Time to really look at these sites.  What makes those pages show up first?  Are they content rich or eye candy rich? Are they the big boys of the industry?  All of the sites should have common elements.  Those common element are what makes them a top site.  Go through the sites.  If you need to look at the source code for the page. The all have elements that make them top, what they have done is what needs to be done to make you a top site.

In most cases you will easily see the common elements.  Usually it’s because they are the Big Boys of the industry who get mentioned in news papers, or other media out lets.  We will get into the value of getting links from important sites as a method of gaining popularity and importance for the search engines.

If you have the money there are companies like mine that can for a fee examine the top sites track information about them and report back to you the common elements we think are making them a top search site.

Within every website there are elements that create the page. These elements are what we call HTML code.  HTML code can be made up of many things from Java Script, to cookies, to the tags that are used to make the words appear the way they do, links to pages, pictures or graphics, and other elements some of which are great to use others are better used in certain ways or not at all.

The barest and most basic of all websites is a file that ends in .html (there are other types of file endings but for simplicity we will consider them all the be html files) .  What is contained within these files  is what a serving website sends to your browser when you click a link to a page.  All the information that is presented, links to other pages, graphics that show up and where are all controlled by the Code that is put into these pages. How the code is put into the page determines how the information is shown to the viewer and also crawled by the SE’s.

All web pages contain a variety of things, For details on HTML code you can check with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortiom) for the current standards they set forth. For me to go into all the various tags here would take a whole section.  I will focus on the most necessary elements, and the ones to avoid or use in other ways.

Meta Description is a tag that describes your page to the search engine.  It needs to be unique among the many pages of the site. This can be in a minor form for example my Flavored Coffee pages on my Coffee-n-Caffeine site each have the name of the flavored coffee contained within the description of the Meta Description tag.  This tells the SE’s that this page contains….  Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee as an example.   Description tags should contain at least 100 characters in the form of words that make sense.  Example “Coffee-n-Caffeine offering Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, 100% Gourmet Flavored Coffee, Fuzzy Navel, Blends, Fair Trade Organic, Caffeine, Retail, wholesale“

Meta Keywords – This is where you put in key words not only for your site but also for the page as well.  Most of the SE’s like to see differences in these tags as well. So using the same tag line throughout the site is not a good thing.  It will not hurt you but it is better to have each of them being slightly different.  Key words or phrases are important as combined with the other meta tags it helps the SE’s properly index your site for what you think is important on the site.  Example “Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, Coffee-n-Caffeine, Coffeecaffeine.com, Gourmet Food, Gourmet Coffee, Coffee, Coffee Beans, Coffee Gift, Caffeine, Coffee Information, Organic coffee, Fair Trade coffee, Earth Friendly, Free Coffee, Online Ordering, Kosher Coffee“.  Again long enough and with the changing of the name of the coffee and some other changes throughout the various pages, you can gain an advantage.

The other tags that are good but not as important are the following

doc-class content=“Living Document” this tells the SE’s that this page changes.

meta name=“author” content=“author name” Tells the SE’s who wrote the page… not very important.

meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” this tells the SE’s that they should follow the links on the page and read the page. Not important if it’s missing, but better to have it there.

meta name=“revisit-after” content=“1 Week” this tells the SE’s how often they should return. Rest assured that even with a 1 week return if you follow the other things I point out in this section you will be indexed more than several times per day.

meta name=“language” content=“EN” This tells the SE’s what your language is so that it knows how to read your site. Believe it or not the SE’s can read most all languages.

meta name=“copyright” content=“Copyright holder” this is basically a tag that says the content is yours and you have the copyright.  Not important but you should use it.

meta name=“rating” content=“kids” -  this one shoud be adjusted depending on what rating the site is.  If it is an adult site then it should be changed it helps the SE’s and also the Parental Filters that are being used.

These tags will help your site get better results from the SE’s.

Sparky