Webmaster tools and resources
This site -is- my job. Running a profitable website is easy once you know how.
On this page you will find some of the best kept secrets of the business. Most webmasters won't give you this information, even if you offered to pay them. After all, lack of knowledge is what keeps our competitors from being able to do as well as us.
Sp, why are we giving away this geat information for free? In the long run, it benefits us to have more webmsters "in the know" about this stuff, because the closer we come to getting rid of the ugly and poorly performing websites out there, the more people will trust the web as a mainstream source of information and entertainment. More good websites means more people on the web. More people on the web means more business for me.
Topics covered:
Hosting:
Free hosts are worthless. Period. Accept it, deal with it, and move on. If you have a free host, I promise that you will never make any sort of decent money doing this. Aside from the fact that they usually put ads all over your page, they generally don't allow you to grow and use things like PHP. (see below)
You don't have to spend a lot of money on hosting. You can get HIGH QUALITY hosting for as low as $6.95 a month from Lunarpages, which is where we host all of our sites. (We pay a little more than the basic $6.95 due to the fact that we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages, but it's still extremely affordable... less than $1.50 a day for all of our sites combined, and that's not even counting the discounts they offer for annual plans.) And as for the quality of the hosting they offer... well, this is my sole source of income. Do you think I would trust it to anyone except a high quality host?
Look at it this way. You can host somewhere for free, and never earn anything. It doesn't cost you anything, but it looks amateurish, you don't have any control over what ads they put up, and you never earn a cent. Or, you can pay the lousy $6.95, have complete control over your site, put up your own ads, and very easily earn a $500 a month from a site with just moderate traffic (maybe 1000 people per day)... just by following the common sense steps that I'm giving you here for free!
PS - They're offering a deal where you can get a free domain name for life, AND when you switch from another host, they give you some free hosting to make up for the hosting you already paid for somewhere else. It's a win-win deal for you.
Making money from your site:
Now that you've decided to move up to a professional host, how do you go about making all of that beautiful internet money that you've heard so much about?
There are several options available. Obviously, if yu have something really unique, you can charge a membership, but the most common option is to place advertisements on your site. We do it, and so do all of the successful websites. You don't need to put popups on your site. That is a decision for everyone to make on their own. They pay a little beter than normal ads, but so many people have popup blockers nowadays that it is almost a waste of your time. My advice is to stick with the normal ad sizes.
Where do you find the ads? After your site is up and looks reasonably professional, apply for a few ad networks such as Casale, Google AdSense, and Burst. (See the banners above for links to Google and Burst).
Google accepts almost anyone, and provides ads that are relevant to your page content (a page about Garth Brooks would likely show ads to buy Garth Brooks CDs, etc.), so they're a good place to start.
Casale offers attractive pay rates, they pay quickly, and they generally do a good job of filling your available ads with paying ads. They're very selective about who they accept, but definitely apply because they are excellent. If they turn you down, build the site up a little bit, work on getting more traffic, and then reapply. They're really worth the effort.
Burst is a general advertising network. They offer most of the typical ad sizes, and it's usually pretty easy to get accepted by them. They always pay on time (I've been with them for years, and they've never been even a day late), but they don't always have enough ads to do a really good job of filling your available inventory. But, they can definitely make you some money, so you should apply.
If nothing else, they have an excellent "Members only" forum where you can talk with other webmasters about website-related stuff. The webmasters who frequent that forum are a very good group, and there are a lot of very knowledgeable people in there. I learned a lot from that forum, and I've taught a lot to others as well. It's one of the best places on the web for "good" free advice from real people with real websites. There are a million sites with "free" advice (ahem... you're on one now), but being able to get real advice from a group of people who do this for a living is worth more than you could imagine.
PHP:
If you don't know what PHP is, find out. You only need a very basic understanding to be able to install a script, and there are thousands and thousands of free scripts available, including free forums like phpBB.) PHP pages still use HTML, but they let you add PHP code to them also.
First, your site will be able to do all sorts of things that plain HTML can't do. Second, you can set up your site so that you can make changes to the entire site by editing only a single file. There are a million other reasons that using PHP is better than "just" HTML, but once you get past 50 pages and have to change every one of them by hand (one at a time), you'll know why this is so important. I have well over 100,000+ pages on my sites. Imagine trying to change them one at a time. It would take forever. But since I developed my site with PHP as well as HTML, I can change a link (or whatever) on every page of a site in about 30 seconds.
A good way to start is to simply rename all of yor pages from pagename.html to pagename.php. You don't actually have to use any PHP code to have the page be a PHP page. But this way, they'll be ready when you finally get around to adding PHP code that you found, wrote yourself, or had someone build for you. Trust me. One day, you'll be so glad you listened to me on this one.
Ranking well in the search engines:
Word of mouth is great, but realistically, if you want to get traffic, you need to get listed halfway decent in the search engines, with Google usually being the most important.
Most importantly, you need to have your pages set up properly. This is the most common error among beginning webmasters. Your <TITLE> tag needs to be relevant to the content of your page. Your <META> tags need to be reasonably accurate.
We'll use a fake website for an example... UndWelCo.com (they sell underwater welding equipment)
Good title tag:
<TITLE>New and used underwater welding equipment and supplies</TITLE>
Bad title tag:
<TITLE>UndWelCo.com - Buy from a name you can trust.</TITLE>
Why is the first one good? For starter, it incorporates keywords that "real people" would probably use in their searches (underwater welding, welding supplies, used welding equipment). Second, it is an accurate representation of what the user can expect to find on the page. (Presumably, all of those words will be used throughout the page, since they're all on-topic.)
The second one looks good at first, since it uses the website name, and talks about what a trustworthy website they are, but it's bad. Why is the second one bad? Mostly, because it isn't what people would actually search for. If you're a multi-billion dollar company like Pepsi or McDonalds, go ahead and use the company or website name because people will probably be able to find you anyway. If you're anybody else, stick with the important keywords. Seriously, people. I can't stress this enough. The same rules apply to the META description tag, by the way.
Keyword tags are also very important. Don't bother stuffing it with words that don't have anything to do with what's on your page. If the word isn't on your page at least 2 or 3 times, it doesn't belong here.
Good keyword tag:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="underwater, welding, equipment, new, used, under, water, torch, protective, gear, pay rates">
Bad keyword tag:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="underwater welding, welding, welding supplies, welding equipment, underwater welding supplies, welding gear, welding, welding, welding, welding, welding underwater, welding equipment, welding protective gear, welding torch, scuba">
The first one is right on the money, assuming that those words are used reasonably frequently throughout the page. Since all of those are words that should probably be used a couple of times in any descriptsions of underwater welding equipment, they all make since. (Note that I included underwater, and then under and water as separate keywords. This is a rarity, but since it's one of those things that people would type either way, I would make it a point to use a phrase like "When you're under the water, and welding some steel, be sure to use ABC brand safety gloves." to get the words "under" and "water" on the page in a reasonable manner(and not completely obvious that you're doing it just for the sake of stuffing a couple of extra keywords into the page.) Like I said, keywords that can be typed as one OR two words are the exception, not the rule.
The second one is bad for a number of reasons. First, and most obvious, you can't simply repeat a keyword over and over. It doesn't fool Google. In fact, it will get you dumped down to about number 4,000,000 in the listings faster than you can say, "What happened?" (Same thing applies to trying to cheat, like typing "hidden" keywords in black against a black background. It's been done. It gets you banned from the search engines. Every time. Believe me, whatever you think of to try and cheat has already been tried, and Google already penalizes for it. There are people with nothing better to do all day than sit around and try to think up new ways to artificially inflate their rankings, and they have a lot more time and money to spend on it than you. If they aren't successful, you won't be either. The moral is: Cheating isn't worth it. Even if you get listed well for a couple of days, you will eventually get blacklisted. It might take days, it might take hours, but you WILL get blacklisted. If nothing else, your competitors will snitch you out to Google in a heartbeat. It happens every day. Do it right, and you'll be ranked well forever.)
What else is wrong with the second keyword tag example? The first phrase "underwater welding" should probably be two separate entires "underwater, welding". If someone types in underwater welding, it will still show up, but if someone types in "underwater", it might not, since when it comes to keyword tags, Google sees things in between commas as "one phrase" rather than "two separate words". There's a little leeway on this, but the general rule of thumb is to separate them unless they have to be together for some reason. ("ford trucks" will not show when someone searches for "chevy trucks") But ultimately, why would you ever want to not show up, even if it isn't for one of your main keywords. If they come to your site and immediately leave because it isn't what they were looking for, oh well. You didn't lose anything. It isn't like they cost you anything. It's never a bad thing to have too much traffic. If nothing else, you can make a little extra off of your ads from these folks.
Other mistakes... "welding equipment" should be towards the front of the list instead of at the end. It's important, and search engines pay attention to the order that you list this stuff. It's not the end of the world if you list them out of order, but it does make some difference, and every little advantage helps a bit.
More importantly than anything, of course, is the actual content of your page. Meta tags are all well and good, but they aren't as important as they used to be since they've been abused too often. For what it's worth, this page doesn't have "underwater welding pay rates" (or any variation of those words) in the meta tags, but this page is already the #2 result on Google for a search of underwater welding pay rates. Granted, it isn't exactly a competitive search phrase, but still... Not a single reference to welding in the meta tags, but I'm #2 on Google, without even trying. If that isn't proof that content is king, then I don't know what is.
There is a lot more to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) than what I've just discussed, (see below), but this will get you on the right track.
Tracking your visitors:
Ok, so your site is up and running, and you've already gotten a few visitors. Now what?
First, you have to find out how they heard about you. Why is this important? Well, for starters, if you know where they come from, you will also learn where they DIDN'T come from. In other words, if 95% of your visitors found your website by searching on Google for "little purple widgets", but you also sell widgets of other different sizes and colors, then you are missing out on all of the people who are searching for other relevant terms such as "big widgets", "large widgets", blue widgets", and "colored widgets". These could be valuable sources of potential customers (or just visitors if you have a free site), so you will need to know that you're not ranked very well for those terms.
A perfect example is on JakesJokes.com, which ranks extremely well for the phrase "people getting hurt" (because of the video section of the same name), but doesn't rank as well for phrases such as "skateboard wipeouts". I know this because I can look through a list of what people searched for to find my site.
I use (and highly recommend) Extreme Tracking for every site I design. Their service is free, and full of extremely useful information, including what terms people searched for to find your site, what websites have sent you the most traffic, and even what browsers your visitors are using. (That last one is helpful if you use javascripts, etc., that may only work in one browser.) Of course, there is also a ton of other information, but mostly you'll make use of the "Summary" and "Referrer Tracking 1" pages., as they provide the information that you should look through at least once a day. I generally check my stats on those two pages 5-10 times a day, just to see if I can catch anything interesting, such as inbound clicks from some forum, etc. (New posts on a forum often result in a lot of clicks in a short period of time, and it's nice to see where they're coming from. You might even want to initiate a link exchange with the webmaster.)
Making use of free tools:
There are a multitude of free tools available, and it's easy to get a case of information overload, so how do you tell what is worthwhile and what you should ignore? Simple. I'm going to tell you, in plain and simple English.
All of these tools are free, by the way.
Link popularity is the number of inbound links you have from other sites. This is extremely important, since the more links you have from other sites, the more "trusted" your site appears to the search engines, and the higher you'll rank.
Obviously, you can't force someone to gie you a link, but you can always ask. If your site offers something that might be of value to their visitors, they might agree. If they don't agree to give you a "free" link, they might agree to trade links with you. Hey, it never hurts to ask.
Keyword density is the percentage of a keyword compared to the number of words used on the page. For instance, JakesJokes.com homepage has a fairly high keyword density for the word "jokes", since it is obviously used a lot on the page. You'll frequently have a high keyword density for words like "click here" if you use that sort of anchor text (the text used for a link), so be careful. Anchor text counts as text when it comes to keyword density, so try to make your links descriptive instead of using "click here for more" and other "generic" phrases.
The following "Keyword cloud" tool shows you your keyword density, but in a unique way. The more frequently a word is used on your page, the larger the font in the tool's display area. It's very handy. I've noticed major "uh-oh's" with this tool that I would have missed otherwise, and I'm an experienced, full-time webmaster. This tool is highly recommended.
Code to text ratio is the measure of how much of your total page is text. Since search engines consider only the actual text that is on your site as being relevant content for the people doing the searching, this is extremely important. Try to have at least a 25% or higher rating with this tool for best results.
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