The first Golden Rule – Content is King

by Webmaster on October 15, 2009

Content is King, and if you have good content, then you shall rule the web

There are only few Golden Rules in website development, but the first and most important rule is that Content is Kind and if you have good content, you shall rule the web. That’s very simple, and most of you might say that it can’t be really that easy, but the truth is that Good Content is Never Easy.

Most webmasters cry on my shoulder that their websites don’t have enough traffic and they give all their best to do Search Engine Optimization, but nothing really helps. In such times I always ask them one very simple question in which most of the times i get the plain old NO. Do you think your website has good quality content. Do you think that you’re going to like what you find on your website if you were the visitor?

Content Creation is one of the most difficult things for webmasters and sometimes it requires much more skills than we have. In general most of my clients don’t find any difference from Webmaster to Copy Editor and that’s a big problem because they don’t have anything in common. In reality Webmasters are the people that keep you website and overall design up to date, but Content Writers like Copy Editors are the people that provide the content and this is not the Webmasters’ responsibility!

Anyway, in most cases we can’t afford to have good professional Copy Writers so we have to improvise and do whatever we can in order to have something. In such cases I’m always trying to advice people to try to provide as highest quality content as possible and make their websites really contribute something to the Internet world and therefore have that thing outshine all other websites so that your website will be visible and valuable to people. If you have good quality content you will have good number of visitors because visitors go wherever the quality content is. The same issue is when you go to crappy website, then you don’t return, but on the other hand when you visit some nice website with nice articles there or any other useful information that you’re interested in, you bookmark it or even subscribe via RSS and you visit and revisit again and again. It is the same with all other people not just you.

I‘ll be honest with you people. Yes I did a lot of crappy sites myself, but when I sow the difference my view changed drastically. I believe that you’re going to change also when you run your first successful website and you get about 300-500 regular daily visitors and a nice 20% + return rate. In such moments everything becomes easier and then the whole world changes as new opportunities arrive at your door and you can start monetizing your website and reinvesting in more and more improvements which on the other hand bring more and more visitors.

My advice to new webmasters is the following. Guys/Girls, please take it easy. Think before you do something. Write and Create content just like you have hundreds and even thousands of visitors a day. Make your website’s content rich and easy to use. When you do this, with time your visitors will increase so much.

On my new websites (the ones that I don’t pay for promotion), I’m observing that after posting about 10-15 good quality articles in about month or two, I’m getting steady increase of traffic from 40-50 people a day in the 3rd month, to about 100-150 in 6th month, and then the traffic almost doubles each month. Currently my highest traffic website is getting around 2000 daily visitors and that’s really nice, but it has more than 300 quality articles that attract people to link to and bookmark so I’m having really nice return rate and people are happy to revisit my websites.

A friend of mine tolled me this saying and I can’t stop myself from mentioning it here "Build it and they will come". And its true saying. Content is king, and when you have good content you will rule the web

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How to determine the best Keyword Density

by Webmaster on October 15, 2009

Choosing the best Keyword Density

The biggest challenge I ever had was to find out a nice algorithm for determining the best possible keyword density for search engine onsite content optimization. I red numerous books, articles, and even blogs, but none of them really explained what is the best keyword density. They all shared the same pattern of logic, keywords should be done "naturally" as you’re writing your article and you should be careful not to overdo it, but in reality that is not exactly true in some scenarios.

The keyword density is extremely influenced by the way your content is organized on that particular page that you’re trying to optimize. In situation where your article is in the beginning of the page and below it is the Main Navigation and the other static text (that’s in HTML locations, you can float it so that the sidebar is on the right and then you have the article content first and then menu), the keyword density should be quite low and "natural" keyword repetition is pretty much enough, but about 90% of the websites are not organized in that fashion.

In situation where you have the main navigation, slogan and other text (only few lines or more) above the actual article content, the requirements for higher keyword density increases dramatically. In some of my websites I have very clean articles that are written only with natural occurrence of the keywords and I found out that they don’t really rank well and my AdSense conversion rates were quite low for the same page. That made me think how to optimize the performance of this page and I noticed something really funny. The AdSense ads were totally irrelevant to the content. That was obvious sign that Google and most probably other search engines are not able to determine the exact meaning of that page and therefore they show irrelevant ads and rank me for the wrong category.

It was really funny because the title, keywords and description are quite well done, the header and the article contained quite a few keywords, but obviously the density was not enough. I was wondering if it’s worth it to put few more repetitions and check out what’s going to happen. The result was stunning. When I came back to that page next day (note that the AdSense bot has to re-crawl the page and get the update content and this sometimes takes a day or so) all advertisements were 100% of target. A week later the page popped out on the top 10. Really nice!

If you already have AdSense account, you should give it a try. Put AdSense banner somewhere on the page and look for the advertisements that appear on it. Make sure you don’t click on them, because that’s against Terms of Services and you might get your account banned. If you see highly relevant ads to that particular page then you’re good and your density is ok. Note that if you’re overdoing it, AdSense won’t tell you the truth, so be careful and keep it as natural as possible. Also be aware that if you change the content (edit the keywords or whatever) the AdSense bot won’t show immediate results and might take up to a day to get the new ads up, so don’t get panicked if the ads are still irrelevant even after the change was made.

Note that this is from my own experience and I don’t guarantee that it will work in your particular case as the standards for keyword density is different for each niche. You might try using products like Internet Business Promoter software that dynamically analyzes the top ranking websites and give you advices on how to optimize the keyword density according to the currently top ranked websites. Note that if you don’t have good inbound links to that page with those keywords, onsite keyword density might not help a lot to your current rankings, but it will still get you some positions up on the index.

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Choosing your Website Domain Name

October 15, 2009
Domain Name and URL Keywords

Domaining – the business of buying and reselling domain names had became flourishing industry for people that were able to acquire generic keywords for products and services the last few years. Since the dot Com boom in 1995, domains had become extremely important part of the internet industry mostly due to their significance in Search [...]

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Website Content and Good Page Layout for SEO

October 15, 2009
Website content and content presentation is key element for both website ranking and vistior ranking

OnSite Search Engine Optimization the second most important factor for successful ranking. In the previous post we spoke about Page Titles, and now we are going to cover in depth the page content optimization and specially content presentation. Page content is all visible information on the one page. This content can be text, images, videos, [...]

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How to choose good web page titles

October 15, 2009

Some of you might laugh on that post, but it is a well known fact that about 90% of the websites out there are with sloppy titles that do not convert well. If your website has a good title you can enjoy two major benefits your pages will be ranked very well on the search [...]

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How to choose our website keywords.

October 15, 2009
How to choose your website keywords

Keywords are the most important factor for your website. Keywords are the "key" elements to your internet success and they have to be chosen very carefully and sometimes it‘s advisable to get professional help in order to bring the optimal search engine performance. Lets explain what search engine keywords are Keywords are basically words that [...]

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How to Rank N:1 on Google and MSN Search Engines with Free Organic Listings

October 15, 2009
How to rank well on Google and MSN Search Engines with free Organic Listings is no longer a secret!

Few years ago if you knew how to rank top ten on Google and MSN was considered to be similar to Magic, but nowadays things changed quite a lot. The art of Search Engine Optimization grew quite popular the last few years as internet marketing because essential to all businesses. Every business owner wants his [...]

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How to list your website on the Search Engines and start receiving visitors

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The Best way to Jump start your website  is not that hard after all

Many new web owners have don‘t know how to start their website to actually receive visitors and that‘s quite common. People sit and wait for a miracle to happen and their website to rank high and get listed on the search engines, but in reality this does not happen that easy and a lot of [...]

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The Benefits of using Google Sitemaps

October 15, 2009
Benefits of using Google Sitemaps

Recently there was this big discussion if Google Sitemaps is a good thing or worthless extras, but let me share with you the true story. Sitemaps is one of the best inventions introduced by Google and is now even adopted with Yahoo and you won‘t be amazed when you see the /sitemaps.xml file being requested [...]

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Using Macromedia Flash Menu for Navigation and the problems associated

October 15, 2009
Problems with Macro media Flash Navigation

Do you like Flash Menus? They are sooo nice, but what is the truth about their usability? Most of the people don‘t know anything about the side effects of using Macro media Flash for main navigation and in most cases they are wondering why their website is not properly indexed by search engines and they [...]

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