Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Build It and They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionally—not always—discovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is.

And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).

If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.

To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good content—either broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other things—for example, software applications or jokes.

From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.

There's a great deal of variation in good—successful—content web sites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

The Taxonomy of Success

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

There's a great deal of variation in good—successful—content web sites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:

• The site is humorous and makes visitors laugh.
• The site provides a useful free service.
• The site is an online magazine or newspaper.
• The site provides opinions in the form of a blog or blogs.
• The site provides practical information.
• The site sells a popular product or service.
• The site services a community and provides communication tools for that community.

The only thing these kinds of sites have in common—and there are undoubtedly other ways successful sites can be categorized—is that they draw traffic (either focused or broad). Therefore, they are good sites and are excellent venues for web advertising. In short, they use web content to make money—and making money with your web site content is the topic of the first part of this book (and likely a subject you care about!).

In this section, I'll drill down further on the categorization, or taxonomy, of successful sites without spending too much time on the issue. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stewart once commented about obscenity, it's hard to define good content, but one knows it when one sees it.

The section "How Much Content Is Enough?" later in this chapter provides information about the mechanics of content creation—in other words, how many pages of content you need, how frequently it should be updated, and so on.

Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."

Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number of parody sites—Crackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gates—sprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody sites.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Popular Sites: Using Alexa

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

I've already mentioned Google as an example of a site with broad traffic. There are, of course, many others. If you are curious, you can go to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, which monitors both how much traffic a site gets and the relative increase (or decrease) in site popularity.

No, content doesn't grow on trees. Content is a valuable commodity—and perhaps more than a commodity. Great content is wonderful and unique, and not fungible.

Communities can supply a great deal of content if you have an idea for a good framework that will entice contributions about specific subjects.

If you are a writer, you can create content yourself. (Maybe this is the time for your inner writer to finally come out!)

Site owners can hire writers, either as employees or freelancers, or with a profit-sharing arrangement.

You can often pick up the rights to publish material on the Web that was originally created for a book, magazine, or newspaper very inexpensively. Content creators may be placed to let you use their content simply in exchange for publicity—in the form of an author credit as an expert and/or a link.

You also might check out book and literary agencies. Some of them run a sideline business supplying aggregated recycled content and represent whole groups of writers.

So even if you aren't confident that you can personally create valuable content, don't despair: there are many inexpensive ways to publish valuable content without writing it yourself.

Don't underestimate the value of resource pages as content. A simple page of links to sites related to a specific subject (for example, sites of interest to collectors of antique typewriters and calculators) may draw traffic if the links are accurately described, kept up-to-date, and expanded when new relevant sites are opened.

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.

On the Alexa site, click on the Top 500 Sites tab to see an ordered list of the most highly trafficked sites, updated daily. The most trafficked sites according to Alexa are shown in Figure 1-1.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

How Much Content Is Enough?

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Suppose you create one web page every hundred days that generates $100 in ad revenue. Alternatively, you create a page a day for 100 days. Each page generates $1.00 in ad revenue. Either way, you end up with $100.00 at the end of 100 days.

The point is that there are different ways to go about deciding how much content to create—it significantly depends upon the quality of the content. A single content page might make sense if it contained a valuable application like TinyURL (See "Useful Free Services and Software," earlier in this chapter). If your pages are low-value content, you will need a great many of them to make significant revenue from advertising.

The metrics of web site traffic is a huge topic just by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics and quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. It's a very important topic, because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so you can understand whether changes improve site traffic, or not and also which elements in your site draw traffic.

The topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend upon the metric of your site.

By and large, web metrics are simply beyond the scope of this book, although you'll learn about the metric related to Google's AdSense in Chapter 9 and the metrics related to AdWords in Chapter 12.

Of course, your web server's logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can help provide you with useful metrics.

But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from fees paid by advertisers—through the AdSense program or some other mechanism—for publication on your site.

For further information about metrics, I suggest you start with Jim Sterne's Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success (Wiley) and then have a look at the "Tracking and Logging" thread on WebMasterWorld, http://www.webmasterworld.com.

Between the two extremes—a single page of valuable content and many pages of low-value content—lies a happy medium that will work for most content-based sites by creating enough critical mass to draw both traffic and advertisers. If you are just starting out, this happy medium is a goal to which you can reasonably aspire.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Presenting Content

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Content is king. Content is certainly king if your business model is to publish content on the Web and make money from advertising with traffic drawn by the content. Your first rule should be: Don't "dis" the king. In other words, don't do anything to distract from the content, make it harder for surfers to find content they need, or make the graphics that frame the content too jazzy. In particular, if the graphics seem too important, they will distract from the content.

A particularly annoying sin on content-based web sites is to use an animated splash page (Flash is the tool usually used) to open the site.

These rules of content presentation can be put positively (rather than negatively):

It should be clear that the purpose of the site is to clearly present content.

Choose a name for the site, and titles and headers for the pages, that make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the site is to present content, and (as a general matter) what that content is.

The design of the site should serve the purpose of presenting content.

Site design should be intended to facilitate navigation and frame the content: nothing more, and nothing less.

Specific content items and subject areas should be easy to find.

Provide multiple mechanisms for finding things: index pages, search boxes, site maps, subject areas, and so on.

Type should be legible.

Be careful to choose a readable font, in a large enough size, and background and foreground color combinations that are easy on the eyes. It's hard to go wrong with black type on a white background. The reverse—white on black—is hard on the eyes, and some combinations (for example, dark blue on lighter blue, are essentially unreadable).

Keep graphics simple.

For example, avoid animations and other splashy images.

Figure 1-3 shows Braintique.com , http://www.braintique.com, a site designed as a content vehicle, following these rules of content presentation.

As it happens, following the rules of content presentation I've outlined will serve you well with search engine placement (see Chapter 3). But that's not the point of these suggestions here. The point is usefulness and transparency to site users. If viable content is presented in an accessible fashion, then indeed "they will come."

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content Architecture

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

You should think about site architecture before you create your first content page. Site architecture should be arranged so that you can make global changes to the look and feel of a site with no impact on the content. You also want to be able to change the code for an ad program—or even swap one ad program for another—once and have the changes take effect across your site in all the content pages.

The simplest mechanism for implementing a "change code in one place, change the whole site" architecture is to use server-side includes (See "Separating Content from Design," earlier in this chapter).

Most web hosting accounts provide a server-side include mechanism. You tell the web server which file extensions mean that a file can have includes. When the web server processes the file to send back to a browser for display, it looks for the special syntax that means there is an include. When it sees this syntax, it expands the page it is serving to the browser by expanding it with the file indicated by the include's syntax.

The default file extension for a web page is usually .shtml, although you can add other file extensions so that your web server will look through them for includes (there is, of course, a slight performance hit for this).

Figure 1-4 shows a pretty typical Linux and Apache web host administrative utility with the mouse cursor pointing at the button that lets you add file extensions to be parsed for includes.

Figure 1-4: You can add file extensions to be parsed for includes by the web server

For example, suppose you have a simple .shtml home page like this:

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <head>
            <title>A simple little home page</title>
        </head>
        <body>
        <h1>Hello!</h1>
        ...
        </body>
    </html>

You could create two include files:

• styles.html , which contains CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) styles for the elements used on the site such as font size and color

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Action Items

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to creating content sites to make money with advertising:

• Understand content categories, types of content, and why people visit content sites.
• Create a plan to build community on your site.
• Find a quality content source.
• Design a simple site that highlights content.
• Separate content from design.
• Keep your content fresh.
• Experiment with ad positioning.
• Create a site architecture that uses includes, templates, or content management software to facilitate flexibility.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 2: Driving Traffic to Your Site

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

They say (whoever "they" are) that the best things in life are free. That's certainly true when it comes to driving traffic to your web site.

You can spend a great deal of money to send traffic to your site using advertising. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use Google's AdWords program, explained in detail in Part III of this book. But there are also many no-cost ways to draw site visitors, many of which may be more effective, and get traffic that is more highly targeted, than using paid advertising. Even if you are using paid advertising to draw traffic, you should know about free techniques—and you should use these techniques in conjunction with your advertising.

I'll explain how to optimize your web site and pages to get more traffic from Google and other search engines in Chapter 3.

This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering with the HTML code and content of your pages themselves. In other words, this chapter explains how to drive traffic to your site using external mechanisms, such as submitting your site to a search engine, leaving more complex issues of constructing your site so that search engines will like it—a field sometimes called search engine optimization (SEO)—for Chapter 3.

Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting your site to a variety of search engines. Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn't proceed online without one, either.

Having a plan will help you accomplish even mechanical steps more effectively. For example, when you submit your site to a search engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan will help you hone a site description.

The two most important aspects of a plan for online marketing and publicity are:

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Creating a Plan and a Story

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting your site to a variety of search engines. Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn't proceed online without one, either.

Having a plan will help you accomplish even mechanical steps more effectively. For example, when you submit your site to a search engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan will help you hone a site description.

The two most important aspects of a plan for online marketing and publicity are:

• Understanding your target audience (or audiences )
• Creating a story (or stories ) that will meet the needs of and intrigue your target audience

You should be able to summarize your story in a sentence or two. (This is sometimes called an elevator pitch .) For example,

Digital photography resources, techniques, software, equipment reviews, and photo galleries

is a story that will probably attract people interested in digital photography. On the other hand,

Ramblings of a grouchy, cranky person who, well, rambles about everything is not a targeted story likely to interest anyone for long.

Use your plan and story to create a summary of your site, a list of keywords related to your site content, and one or more press releases (as I explain in this chapter, in the "Publishing Press Releases" section). The site summary and keyword list can be also be used to create meta information for your site, as I explain in Chapter 3.

In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specific "to do" items—essentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and your story.

Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:

• A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the search engine's index.
• Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search for a particular keyword or phrase.

To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.

Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves or by third parties.

If you have inbound links —links to your sites—from other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your site—eventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?

It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited results—but at least the price is right!

Getting a site listed in an online categorized directory—particularly the Open Directory Project (ODP) or Yahoo's directory as I explain in "Working with Directories" later in this chapter—is probably the most effective way to get inclusion in the search engines themselves.

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process up by manually submitting your site to search engines.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Working with Directories

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

It's a not-so-well-kept secret that the best approach for getting into the search engine listings is to enter through a back door by working with the two most important structured directories: the Open Directory Project (ODP) and the Yahoo! Directory .

A directory differs from the index used by a search engine because a directory uses a structured way to categorize sites, sometimes called a taxonomy. In addition, sites are included in a particular category in the ODP and Yahoo! directories only after they have been reviewed by human editors. You can search within directories (just as you can search in a web index, such as the one compiled by Google). But it's common to use a directory, following its taxonomy by drilling down through subjects to find what you want. For example, suppose you wanted to find resources related to alternative photo processes, such as creating daguerreotypes (a nineteenth-century print technology). Using the Open Directory taxonomy, shown in Figure 2-2, you would drill down through the following categories: Arts → Photography → Techniques and Style → Alternative Processes.

You can think of the index of the Web compiled by search engines such as Google as being like the index to a nonfiction book. In contrast, a taxonomic directory is much more like the table of contents to the book: it is organized according to the structure of the book, and you can drill down by part, chapter (within the part), heading (within the chapter), and subtopic to find the information you need.

Figure 2-2: You can find "Alternative Processes" by drilling down through Arts, Photography, and Techniques and Styles

The Open Directory Project (ODP), http://dmoz.org, is the most important taxonomic directory on the Web. Formally hosted and administered by the Netscape division of AOL, the ODP is run along the lines of an open source project and is inspired by the Debian Social Contract (see http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html).

The credo behind the ODP is that "humans do it better." The ODP believes that web automated search is ineffective, and getting worse, and that the small contingent of paid editors at commercial web search engine companies cannot keep up with the staggering rate of change on the Web—decaying, stagnant sites, link rot, new sites, sites intended as search spam, and so on.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Becoming Popular

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Sometimes it seems like all of life has the same themes as high school: what's important is being popular. A significant measure of popularity on the Web is how many inbound links—links from other sites to your site—you have.

Inbound links are an important component of Google's PageRank system, which is a way to order the sites returned from a search.

Obtaining inbound links is not rocket science, but it is labor-intensive and does require some thought. The best way to get another site to link to your site is to ask for it, as obvious as that may seem.

Link farms—sites that exist for the sole purpose of providing inbound links to better a page's search ranking—will not help your site become more popular and may in fact damage your standing with Google and other search engines.

It makes sense for sites to link to your site when they have similar or related content—always assuming the webmaster in charge of the site linking to you likes your content. This is a reasonable thing for the webmaster in charge of the other site to do because it adds value for the other site's visitors. (If your site is not adding value, you might want to rethink its premise.)

The best—meaning most likely to drive traffic—inbound links come from:

• Sites that publish content that is complementary and related to the content on your site
• Hub sites that are a central repository, discussion area, and community site for a particular interest group (for example, a mention on SlashDot [http://www.slashdot.org]) can drive huge amounts of traffic to sites related to technology, so much so that the phenomenon of a sudden uptick in traffic due to inbound links has become known as the "Slashdot Effect"

To find sites that are appropriate for an inbound link request, you should:

• Consider the sites you find useful, entertaining, and informative
• Use the web taxonomic directories to find sites in your category and in related categories (See "Working with Directories," earlier in this chapter)
• Use specialized searching syntax to find the universe of sites that search engines such as Google regard as "related" to yours

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Publishing Press Releases

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

It used to be that putting out a press release was a big deal. It required special accreditation and membership in a wire service and could generally only be accomplished by large companies or by using an accredited public relations or ad agency.

As with many other things, the Web has disintermediated and democratized the process of publishing a press release—so much so that some large organizations don't even bother with them anymore, figuring that their releases will be lost in the flood of information unleashed on the world by the "little guys."

These days, publishing a press release that will be picked up by wire services is technically free. In reality, to get the distribution you want for the release will cost you

The "cheap-date" way to get inbound links is to post them yourself, using a mechanism such as a blog comment, a blog trackback, or a discussion thread. These links do not have the permanence or credibility of a link from a stable site, but can draw considerable short-term traffic if posted on a popular site.

There's nothing wrong with adding a link to a comment on a blog, or in a discussion thread, or using a trackback mechanism, provided you have a valid hook for hanging your URL. In other words, it's OK to enter a discussion if you really have something to say, and it's also OK to link back to relevant material on your site, but don't come completely from left field. It will undermine the credibility that you are trying to build up for your site.

about $30.00 per release. Although my general stance is not to pay for listings, this is usually well worth doing, provided you have the skills to write a good press release and have an interesting story to tell—not only will it produce inbound links but also some traditional media may pick up on your site and story.

There are several online services that exist to distribute press releases, including 24-7PressRelease.com (http://www.24-7pressrelease.com), FreePressRelease.com (http://www.free-press-release.com/submit/

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Syndication Feeds

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

As you may know, syndication is a simple XML-based mechanism for publishing content. Syndication feeds come in two predominant flavors: RSS and Atom. From the viewpoint of publicizing your web site, you don't need to worry about the differences between them.

Content is syndicated by encoding it within an RSS or Atom feed. This feed can—and usually does—include links to the site originating the content.

Subscribers can view syndication feeds in all different kinds of software, including web browsers, email clients, standalone programs, and on HTML web pages. There's no mechanism built into syndication to pay for subscriptions, but once you are subscribed your feed display is automatically updated when a new item is added to the feed. It's up to the syndication-viewing software to decide how to render feeds, but software that can display web pages often shows the underlying pages to which the feed links.

There's some controversy about how publishers can best use syndication feeds, since it's not obvious how to make money from them. (Google has introduced a program allowing publishers to insert contextual ads within syndication feeds, but this is a controversial step.)

However, syndication feeds work well as a device for driving traffic to a site because:

• Feed content is under the control of the publisher.
• Most feeds contain items that are thematically linked (and can be related to a site).
• Feed items provide content along with links back to more content on a publisher's site.
• It's easy to distribute a syndication feed.

In other words, many savvy web publishers use syndication feeds as a kind of teaser for their real web content.

If you maintain a blog, it's likely that you are already publishing a syndication feed (whether or not you are aware of it). Check your blog templates to see if there is a template for an index.xml, index.rdf, or atom.xml file. If so, have a look at the root directory for your blog. Voila! You'll probably find a syndication feed. You may want to tweak the template tags to make sure that you are syndicating the content you want, and only the content you want.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Using Email Lists

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Although they may seem a little old-fashioned, email lists can be a great mechanism for increasing interest in your web sites over time. The rise of spam email, and the creation of increasingly stringent spam filters, has made the use of email lists more problematic and something you may want to approach with caution. Although email remains the most widely used Internet application of all, publishing syndication feeds may actually be a better mechanism for broadcasting information when you don't personally know the recipients.

First and foremost, you should take care that any email you send out doesn't walk like spam, look like spam, or quack like spam. If it has even a hint of spam about it, at least some recipients will regard your email as spam—and be offended.

Start by adding only people who have expressed an interest in you or your site to the email list. Make it easy to opt out and unsubscribe.

Don't rent or buy email lists. These are worthless and have already been run into the ground with spam.

Your email list will only build valuable traffic for your site to the extent that you build it up yourself.

Weblogging software such as MovableType will provide basic email list functionality such as self-service sign-up for notifications when you add a blog entry and the ability to automatically send out email notifications.

Each email you broadcast to your list should provide value. If you send out vacuous pieces of sales puffery in your email, at best your recipients will hit the delete button or add you to their spam filter. (They may also send you nasty emails back, and in any case they won't be inspired to visit your site, the point of the operation.)

The best format is a newsletter. There are quite a few email newsletters that have great content, include links back to the publishing web site, and even make a little money with sponsored ads in the email newsletter themselves. A good example of this kind of newsletter is Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz , which provides great information about research and the Internet (you can sign up at

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Action Items

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to driving traffic to your web site:

• Understand who is the ideal visitor to your site.
• Discover some interesting stories to tell about your web site.
• Make a checklist and plan for publicizing your site.
• Submit your site to search engines.
• Resubmit your site to search engines as necessary over time.
• Get your site listed in the ODP and Yahoo! taxonomic directories.
• Work to encourage appropriate inbound linking to your site.
• Publish a press release.
• Continue to publish press releases as stories related to your site come up.
• Create and distribute syndication feeds.
• Consider creating and maintaining an email newsletter to support your site marketing campaign.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 3: Optimizing Sites for Search Engine Placement

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it fall, has it really fallen? If no one can find your site, then you are like that unobserved tree. All your work in creating a great site that is the perfect host for lucrative advertising content will be in vain. You certainly won't make money from your site.

I've already explained (in Chapter 2) how you generate traffic by publicizing your site and getting inbound links to it. Provided these inbound links don't come from bad neighborhoods—sites set up just to exchange links—the more inbound links your site has, the higher its PageRank . A higher PageRank implies a better search result ranking for a given query.

You can also generate traffic by using advertising such as the Google AdWords program (see Part III).

Besides obtaining inbound links and advertising your site, there are some things you can do when you construct your web sites and web pages that can help your pages with their search order ranking. On the other hand, there are also some things you can do that will harm your prospects.

The general field of constructing web sites and pages to help—and not harm—their chances with search engines is called search engine optimization, or SEO, and is the subject of a certain amount of mystification, perhaps to justify the high consulting rates that SEO experts can charge.

In reality, SEO is pretty simple, and involves the following steps:

• You need to understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software.
• You should take common-sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines.

Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for human visitors as well.

• You need to avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines.

To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

How Your Site Appears to a Bot

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for "robot").

You may be able to short circuit the process of waiting to be found by the search engine's bot by submitting your URL directly to search engines, as explained in Chapter 2.

To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.

Pictures don't mean anything to a search bot. The only information a bot can gather about pictures comes from the alt attribute used within a picture's <img> tag and from text surrounding the picture. Therefore, always take care to provide description information via the alt along with your images and at least one text-only link (for example, outside of an image map) to all pages on your site.

Some kinds of links to pages (and sites) simply cannot be traversed by a search engine bot. The most significant issue is that a bot cannot log in to your site. So if a site or page requires a username and a password for access, then it probably will not be included in a search index.

Don't be fooled by seamless page navigation using such techniques as cookies or session identifiers. If an initial login was required, then these pages probably cannot be accessed by a bot.

Complex URLs that involve a script can also confuse the bot (although only the most complex dynamic URLs are absolutely nonnavigable). You can generally recognize this kind of URL because a ? is included following the script name. Here's an example: http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Colophon. Pages reached with this kind of URL are dynamic, meaning that the content of the page varies depending upon the values of the parameters passed to the page generating the script (the name of the script comes before the

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Excluding the Bot

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

There are a number of reasons you might want to block robots, or bots, from all, or part, of your site. For example, if your site is not complete, if you have broken links, or if you haven't prepared your site for a search engine visit, you probably don't want to be indexed yet. You may also want to protect parts of your site from being indexed if those parts contain sensitive information or pages that you know cannot be accurately traversed or parsed.

Figure 3-3: Compared with the identical page in a text-only view (Figure 3-2), it's hard to focus on just the text and links

If you need to, you can make sure that part of your site does not get indexed by any search engine.

Following the no-robots protocol is voluntary and based on the honor system. So all you can really be sure of is that a legitimate search engine that follows the protocol will not index the prohibited parts of your site.

To block bots from traversing your site, place a text file named robots.txt in your site's web root directory (where the HTML files for your site are placed). The following syntax in the robots.txt file blocks all compliant bots from traversing your entire site:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

You can exercise more granular control over both which bots you ban and which parts of your site are off-limits as follows:

• The User-agent line specifies the bot that is to be banished.
• The Disallow line specifies a path relative to your root directory that is banned territory.

A single robots.txt file can include multiple User-agent bot bannings, each disallowing different paths.

For example, you would tell the Google search bot not to look in your images directory (assuming the images directory is right beneath your web root directory) by placing the following two lines in your robots.txt file:

    User-agent: googlebot
    Disallow: /images

The robots.txt mechanism relies on the honor system. By definition, it is a text file that can be read by anyone with a browser. So don't absolutely rely on every bot honoring the request within a robots.txt file, and don't use

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Meta Information

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Meta information, sometimes called meta tags for short, is a mechanism you can use to provide information about a web page.

The term derives from the Greek word meta, which means "behind" or "hidden." "Meta" refers to the aspect of something that is not immediately visible, perhaps because it is in the background, but which is there nonetheless and has an impact.

The most common meta tags provide a description and keywords for telling a search engine what your web site and pages are all about. Each meta tag begins with a name attribute that says what the meta tag represents. The meta tag:

    <meta name="description" ...></meta>

means that this tag will provide descriptive information. The meta tag:

    <meta name="keywords" ...></meta>

means that the tag will provide keywords.

The description and keywords go within a content attribute in the meta tag. For example, here's a meta description tag (often simply called the meta description):

    <meta name="description" content="Quality information, articles about
    a variety of topics ranging from Photoshop,
    programming to business, and investing."></meta>

Keywords are provided in a comma-delimited list. For example:

    <meta name="keywords" content="Photoshop, Wi-Fi,
    wireless networking, programming, C#, business, investing, writing,
    digital photography, eBay, pregnancy, information"></meta>

Meta tags can contain a lot more than just descriptions and keywords, including (but not limited to) a technical description of the kind of content on a page and even the character encoding used:

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

Additionally, you've already seen how meta tags can instruct search engine bots on what to index in "Meta Robot Tags," earlier in this chapter.

It's easy for anyone to put any meta tag keywords and description they'd like in a page's HTML code. This has lead to abuse when the meta tag information does not really reflect page content. Therefore, meta tag keyword and description information is deprecated by search engine indexing software and not as heavily relied upon by search engines as it used to be. But it is still worth getting your

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Creating a Site with SEO in Mind

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The saying "Everything in moderation, even moderation" is a good principle to keep in mind when you tweak your web site to achieve SEO. The moderation slogan has been aptly applied to many human activities, from the sexual to the gustatory and beyond. It fits very well with SEO.

For example, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages, but you don't want so many keywords that the content of your pages is diminished from the viewpoint of visitors. Search engines look for keywords, but they take away points for excessive and inappropriate keyword "stuffing."

In Chapter 1, I explained the importance of using includes to manage site content. In that same vein, the HTML used for meta tags and description information should be placed in a single include file, making it easy to change your meta information across an entire site or a series of related pages.

If your site is large, with many pages, and has several distinct areas of content, you can create a separate file, each consisting only of meta description and tags, for each content area.

You can always customize the meta information for a specific page by discarding the reference to the meta include file and adding page-specific meta information. Alternatively, you can create a page-specific meta include, keeping track of your meta includes by placing them all in one directory and devising a sensible naming convention.

It's a really good idea to have default meta information for a site that can easily be tweaked.

So try to see the world form a search engine bot's viewpoint (that's the point of using a text-only browser as I explained in "How Your Site Appears to a Bot" earlier in this chapter). Create sites that appeal when looked at this way, but go easy. Don't overdo it!

Here are some design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your site to optimize it for search engines:

Eschew fancy graphics

For most sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are looking for search engine placement, it is the words that count.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Avoiding Overly Aggressive SEO Practices

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Google, and other major search engines, urges you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site.

I've primarily covered Google in this chapter, but what applies to Google also applies for the most part to the other major search engines.

Here's why you avoid being overly aggressive with SEO (besides wanting to avoid Google's disapproval). Building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of common sense; just build a site that will be useful to people, and it will naturally get indexed correctly. Taking this viewpoint, you shouldn't concern yourself with search order ranking or search engine optimization when you construct your site. Just create worthwhile content that is genuinely useful, interesting, or entertaining.

Below is a list of the techniques that Google considers bad behavior. Google prohibits these things because it considers them overaggressive and deceptive, but note that Google does not consider this list exhaustive and will frown on anything new that you come up with if it is considered deceptive to either humans or the Googlebot, even if it is not on this list.

According to Google, good search-engine-citizen web sites do not:

Employ hidden text or links

For example, users cannot read white text on a white background (and will never even know it is there). But this text will be parsed by the search engine. This rule comes down to making sure that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages

Also called stealth, this is a technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine than to the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way

It's easy to redirect the user's browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposes—for example, to make users think they are on a page associated with a well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer's page—it's frowned upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious schemes

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Action Items

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Here are some action items for you to take to optimize your web site and pages for search engine placement:

• Learn to view your site as a bot sees it (as text-only).
• Determine if you need to exclude search engine bots from portions of your site (or, if you already do exclude bots partially or completely, review the exclusion and change it if necessary so your site can be indexed).
• Use an include to add sitewide meta tag and description information. Tweak the meta information for the site's major content areas or for individual pages.
• Create a mostly text, easily navigable site.
• Check for, and fix, any broken links.
• Work to add appropriate inbound, outbound, and cross links.
• Choose keywords that make sense for your content, and the traffic you are seeking, and add them to the important elements of your page content.
• Make sure your site avoids overaggressive SEO practices.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 4: Making Money with Affiliate Programs

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

You've got the content (Chapter 1). You've created an effective campaign to drive traffic to your site (Chapter 2). You've optimized your site for the search engines (Chapter 3). Now, where's the cash?

This chapter explains how to make money from your web site by having your site work as a virtual "sales rep." You become a sales rep for another site, often called a merchant, by becoming an affiliate (also sometimes called an associate) of the merchant.

With affiliate programs , your site provides links to a merchant's site. You make money if—and only if—visitors you send to the merchant's site make purchases. If this sounds easy, it can be. You don't need to stock inventory, or worry about fulfillment, shipping, and returns. And you still make money—sometimes very good money—when the product sells.

However, selling on the Internet is very competitive; there are always multiple avenues for a consumer to buy anything. Furthermore, there's nothing to stop consumers from bypassing your site completely and going directly to the merchant. You'll only be successful with your affiliate links if the goods provided by the merchants you are associated with are highly relevant to the content of your site.

This chapter explains the different kinds of ad programs, how affiliate advertising works, how to work with affiliate aggregators—everything you need to know to make money with affiliate programs, provided your sites draw traffic that will click on links to your affiliated merchants and that these merchants can convert your traffic so that sales are made.

Affiliate programs differ from most other advertising approaches: to make money your traffic has to generate sales. This important distinction has implications for your web site content and design.

It's worth going over the three primary approaches to making money via advertising with your web content so the underlying distinctiveness of affiliate advertising is clear.

The three most common ways to use advertising to make money with content on the Web are:

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Kinds of Ad Programs

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|