But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your
search engine rankings.
A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when
someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html
and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy
cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better.
One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your
rankings then is your titles and URLs.
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines
is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do
that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index
which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that
you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want
include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your
directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”).
Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s
important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search
engine rankings.
Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know
from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good
blog but also because it’s still fairly new, so a lot of people aren’t making the
most of the blogs they have.
If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things
that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash.
The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping
rpc.pingomatic.com as soon you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free
all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search
engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools,
such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.
You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update.
Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also
keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest
posts).
Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each
page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how
many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries?
One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites
and higher search engine rankings.
You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that
write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way
to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult
to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it —
and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet
business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because
you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that
traffic online.
You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing
material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies
and just about anything else you can think of. You should certainly have your
site address in your email signatures.