Website Building biz

I’m learning a lot about the fickle nature of search engine traffic, especially in politics.

I wrote an article predicting a winner for the Michigan primary based on some inner-party legal maneuvering, and at first maybe a dozen people saw it.

Suddenly, on the day of the primary, when Hillary won Michigan, a lot of people were landing on this article from the search engines. Of course, a couple days after the election when people started looking at the next states, traffic died down again quickly.

But I think my high SERP despite a low PR shows how older publishing dates can positively affect placement.

Why pick my site over CNN or FoxNews when it came to news about “Hillary+Michigan+primary?” Well, because I had that story first.

Predictions and speculation are great when they’re right, but don’t go crazy with ‘em. No one’s going to take you seriously if your predictions are constantly wrong!

I love websites that allow readers to leave comments and advance the discussion. So far, every website I’ve set up allows this in one way or another, and I love to hear what the visitors have to say.

One feature of leaving a comment is the option to allow the user to put their own web site’s URL in the comment box. This is great for record-keeping - I can find articles I’ve commented on by searching for the back-links to my domains. This is great for people visiting the original article and interested in the perspective of the added comment. If they like it, they can see more from the author. Its great for the commenter, as he/she can use keywords in the anchor text to tell search engines how their site should be labeled.

But for all the benefits, there’s a huge downside: spammers.

For all the reasons these comments are great for legitimate purposes, they’re also great for selling things and promoting products that search engines don’t like. You know what these are, and I’d rather not even say the word for fear of inviting even more spammers here. A few links from your site to bad neighborhoods and your web page’s reputation could plummet. You are responsible for every link that leaves your site and points somewhere else, so be careful with your comments and make sure you review the new ones every once in a while. Definitely get some spam protection for the times you can’t always watch.

As you post more content to your website, you have to make sure that the various search engines are able to find it. You might have the story that people want to read, if they just knew it existed. Its tempting to think that with all the traffic on the internet that people will just magically find you, but you need links before even Google can help you.

One great way to get this started is with trackbacks. A lot of modern content management systems promote trackbacks, and they allow you to ‘ping’ the website that you’re talking about and linking to, and they’ll automatically link back to you.

Web content publishers can weigh in on stories and news that is posted somewhere, and while offering a new voice to the discussion, it also creates depth to the debate and more content wealth for the internet as a whole. Lots of content and backlinking can help get your domain rated higher and start to bring in the search engine traffic.

And don’t get discouraged if your website is like a ghost-town when you’re starting off. You may feel down when you realize you’ve written 10 pages and only one person has seen one of them. As the months and years go by, your hundreds of articles could be seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers. Don’t get caught up in instant gratification (advertising): on the internet, its expensive and its very temporary.

While my six month old website is stuck at PR1, one of my newer attempts is up to PR2 in just four months.

The older website has more backlinks from higher ranking pages, yet the new one is climbing faster. The only thing I can imagine here is that I’m writing more content for the newer website. Content is king, maybe? I’ve heard it before but I was never sure.

Now my few months of experience seem to be indicating the same thing. If a website posts more content more frequently, the search engines are going to like it, I guess. Another thing is deep linking. The first website might take longer to reach its goal, since its aiming for a pretty competitive keyword in a low-paying subject. The newer website is aimed at niche articles so more of the links into the domain are to keyword rich landing pages.

Of course, PR doesn’t ultimately mean much since the older website is still getting more traffic. I was quite surprised to see how much the newer one has jumped in the last few days with the addition of about 10 pages of new content.

I’ll keep you updated, and as soon as I have good web marketing ideas I’ll be flooding this website with new content, too.

9-22-08 Update:

My education site is nine months old and I’ve managed a PR 5 on the homepage, PR 4 for each category page, and a mix of PR 3-5 on the articles themselves.  Of course, traffic is still only around 300 uniques a day, but it looks like its on the right track since those are pretty competitive keywords.

This site?  Its not doing so well in terms of the Pagerank.  In fact, I’m still trying to get Google to index the whole thing without putting 1/3 of the pages into a supplemental index!

Unless you’re building a website with major advertising and staff, its probably a good idea to approach adding content in a measured fashion. Many people suggest having over 100 pages of HTML before letting your website go public, but I think the search engines are still rewarding organic growth.

The age of each page will count toward search engine rankings to some extent, so why not get your first articles out as soon as possible? Each week or so as you add content, the spiders will see new pages and they’ll know to come back more often.

Of course, if you’ve found the perfect niche business, there’s no reason to wait! If you’re building a website to really share ideas and learn something new, then there’s no reason to set goals that are beyond the amount of time you have available. With just a few posts each month, you can establish a website with recurring traffic. Why clutter your website up with daily posts when you could save it for the best of what you’re thinking about?