CrankyRants.com

Running an online magazine is a perfect venue for content-rich pages. There are plenty of opportunities to hit a wide audience with focused paid advertising, which is the main goal of any publication. But just because you’re a hack designer with a decent domain doesn’t mean you’ll rake in the readers. Designing and running an eZine takes a little more work than cranking out another free-script proxy site. 

Take a look at BrainBucketMagazine.com. Motorcycles, idiot… it’s got nothing to do with flesh-ripping zombies. That’s another name for a half-helmet. Here’s an eZine that provides daily content, reviews, tech tips, and most importantly… babes. When I finally perfect my “What they clicked first” algorithm, most sites will be able to document the fact. Guys will ignore all other content and click on any form of babe or babe-related item first. Plain and simple. If the “Daily Lutheran Ministry and Oatmeal Recipe” website had a link to hot Lutheran mamas posing with bowls of oatmeal? Yeah, their traffic would probably go up.

Motorcycles are a little easier, though. And this site is a good example of how to organize your information. Quick access to the articles. Plenty of fresh content to keep the spiders interested. They’ve even got a link to an accompanying mySpace account to hit up traffic on multiple fronts. Keep it simple and do it like this, and you’ll watch your subscriptions rise. And if you know your audience is looking for it, throw in babes. Everyone. Clicks. On. Babes. It’s an historical fact. That and oatmeal recipes.

For every drop of rain that falls, a web directory grows. Everyone has one, everyone lists on one. They will soon outnumber Starbucks in the “Most Things in the Universe” category… which is likely it’s own category on some web directory somewhere.

The web directory is a popular site to build because there are lot’s of scripts out there to maintain a web directory, and there are plenty of potential customers in the millions of webmasters who want to drive more traffic to their sites. Perfect match, right?

And there’s the problem. So many link directories, so few good one’s that will actually help your site. There’s little point in listing on a directory that has no traffic and no chance of being properly spidered by a decent search engine. If one doesn’t already exist, someone should create a web directory of web directories so we can keep them all straight.

In the case of CrankyRants.com, I’ve chosen to list with an SEO Friendly web directory that is also highly ranked with the search engines. This solves the problems above. Lot’s of happy text-based directory structure to provide additional content to the spiders. And hopefully plenty of traffic from those simply searching around.

Listing with a directory is of course just the first step in marketing a site. The more listings with quality directories the better, so don’t stop at one. But with hundreds of them out there, definitely stop at around 20. If you can list with the top 20 web directories at first, you should feel confident that your site is on it’s way to stardom, then concentrate your efforts on other methods of promotion. Like link exchanges, tattoos of your logo, and poorly written web addresses painted on the side of your car. Classy!

So you just bought a new PR2 domain name from someone and it’s sitting in your account. No site, no content, nothing but the name. Now what. There are some quality links to the domain right now, and some pages exist in the search engine databases. But it’s only a matter of time before you get found out. Like the sentries in Minority Report, the spiders are always scrabbling about, looking for good content. Or in your case, dead content.

If you want to keep the page rank you just paid for as well as the physical links, you need to act quickly. Google may be slow to index, but they’re quick to drop if they find bad info. Within the first week of ownership, if possible, get started building the basics of the site, focusing on the pages with an existing page rank. Even if the content that you’re putting up is different from what the engines expect, it’s better than a dead link.

Now for the patchwork. Find out what sites currently link to these pages by performing a “link search” on Google. Identify the referring pages, and try to match the content that the page is expecting. You might even contact the owner’s of the site to strike up a relationship with them. More happy links make for a happy spider.

Next, try to preserve the existing page links in the major search engines. This can be tricky, especially if you are using a different scripting language than the previous owner. Try to find a cache of the pages on Google, Yahoo, or http://www.archives.org/ and grab as much of the original content as possible. If it even remotely relates to your new site, throw it up there and do what you can to make the links point to your new page.

Matching the links is the toughest part of the job. Copy and paste the links from Google or Yahoo into Excel, and be prepared to do a lot of string manipulation. Ideally you can take all of the existing search results, such as http://www.crankyrants.com/?p=194 and tie them with the critical information from the original page, such as title, tags, or content itself. If you’re site is database driven, you can then format the spreadsheet accordingly and push all of the information into a table. Now when any of the search engines come looking for an article or page, you at least have some of the familiar information waiting for them. Given enough time, you can then go in to backfill any content if you would like, further strengthening the pages.

The final step has already been mentioned, but it’s worth bringing up again. Outside links to the site. Very important. It’s hard enough to acquire backlinks these days, so if at one time a site had a quality link to your new domain, try your best to re-establish the relationship. If the link to your site is still present, just make a note of the location. If the link is now gone, email the webmaster and offer services or minor links to keep the link going. These are all key elements that went into the building of the page rank for your new domain, and everything you can do to maintain it will only help in the long run.

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.Anyone involved in SEO can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth - the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

Oaseo spiders the Internet in order to bring its users the largest number of SEO jobs in the country.

Webmasters, why do you refuse to see the value (or lack of value) of your site? Now, I’m not saying your site has no value at all. It might have lots of value. No, what I am referring to is the astonishment that some people have when told that their site doesn’t have Top 10 value. Search engine value, that is.

C’mon, we don’t have a copy of the any of the search engine algorithms, but we have a darn good idea of what aspects are valued most highly by search engines.

You have 5 backlinks, you say? And each of the top 10 has hundreds of thousands? Hmmm…

Your site has 50 pages of content? And each of the top 10 agan has hundreds of thousands of pages of content?

Don’t get me wrong. The search engines often screw up and stick a large authority site in the top 10 just because they are a large authority site, but the result really isn’t that relevant. I know that. But I’m talking about when major sites are placed in the top 10, where they belong. And a webmaster refuses to believe that he or she can actually compete with those sites without a lot of hard work or a lot of money.

Wait, you say! I thought DazzlinDonna was all for getting the small mom-and-pop sites to be able to compete! You betcha I am. But I’m realistic as well. Sometimes those sites have to compete for other phrases! Hello! You can’t always go after the big money phrase if you are teeny-tiny, people. And if you do, then you’d better be prepared to either put in a lot of work, a lot of time, or a lot of money - or all three.

Hey, I’ve seen Google and all the other search engines make huge mistakes with their algo changes. They’ve even admitted to a few of them. But it’s not always their fault. And you aren’t always penalized. Sometimes, your site just isn’t valuable enough - i.e. in comparison to other sites’ “value”.

When that is the case, you need to rethink your strategy. Give up - or try to rank for something else - or put in the time and money to be valuable enough. How you handle it is up to you. But please, take the blinders off.

via seo-scoop.com