Something I have not mentioned, which does make a difference in gearing your website up to follow a specific niche is certain naming tricks. I have talked about key words, key phrases, titles and various other key elements of a website, all of which are vital with SEO, but when it comes down to the really small bits and pieces, there are a couple other little tricks of the trade.

I recently put a website up, purely for testing a few little concepts, I have been reading about. My results have been fairly good thus far; The website has only been running for two weeks, but I feel that two weeks is long enough for me to share this knowledge based on the yielded results.

Filenames do play a role in focusing a website around a specific niche. For this example, I will once again use a fishing website as my base. Instead of having files named: aboutus.htm, contactus.htm, why not label them: aboutfishing.htm and contactfishing.htm. These names appear in the source code of your website, and search engine spiders do see this. Use the keywords you have chosen to label your .htm/.html/.php files. It’s a simple task to do, and one which does make a difference, well my results show so at least. The second little trick is image files, which follow the same as above - name your images correctly. Let’s say, for example, that I went on a fishing trip, and took some wonderful pictures of the lake I was fishing in, and wanted to post these pictures on my website for my readers to take a look at. I download the photos from my digital camera, and uploaded them immediately. What I will find is that the images are named something along the lines of DSC1902 and DSC1903, and so on. Once again, take your time, and label the images correctly, and along your topic. The image names appear in the source code, and will be read by spiders.

Remember to always use alt and title tags when doing the above as well. Title and Alt tags are so often forgotten about, and they play a magor role in focusing your site around a niche. Here are examples of where you would use these tags:

<a href=”http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za/aboutwebtrepreneur.php” title=”About Webtrepreneur”>About Webtrepreneur</a>

and

<img src=”WebtrepreneurHeader.jpg” alt=”Webtrepreneur Header”>

I cannot stress how valuable it is to use these two tags when preparing your pages and posts. The website I put up, is a two page site, including everything I have mentioned above. I placed Adsense on the website, and submitted it to a couple search engines. I changed the content daily, followed my click throughs and statistics, and without over exaggerating, my traffic has almost doubling every two days. The Google adverts adapted perfectly to my topic, and the click through percentage increased as the adverts took onto the topic I chose. I have only made $40 in Adsense revenue on the website, but for two weeks, this is certainly not a bad effort at all. That’s almost $3/day for a two week old website, anyone who knows a bit about monetizing a website, will agree that that’s a good effort!

Give these little tricks a go, The Webtrepreneur would love to get some feedback from you, so I know that I am not the only one who has managed to make some extra dollars with a few simple tricks.

I have spoken about SEO before, actually I have mentioned it many times. What I have done is given you various seo tools and tips, but what I have not done is given you a decent list of common SEO mistakes. Knowing what the mistakes are, will help us avoid them, and save a great deal of time in the long run, as well as rank your website higher with all the search engines. I have compiled a list of 10 common mistakes made when it comes to SEO, and will talk briefly about each one below. The content is not completely fresh, I did research on the topic via other websites.

1. Bad Page Titles - The title of a website is what you see at the very top left of your browser, next to the programs icon. When search engines crawl your website, this is the very first thing they come across. It is important to select your title carefully, for two main reasons: Firstly, your title will be what people see in search engine results, so you need to keep your topic aligned with what your website is about, so it will attract the correct readers. Secondly, seeing that the search engine views your title before anything else, you want to use relevant keywords, so your site appears from a search based on those words. A website is generally made up of several pages, of which, each page may have a title. It is important to use different titles across the board.
2. Incorrect Word Selection - The selection of keywords is crucial, in every single article written on SEO, you will read about the importance of keywords. When you come up with your idea for your website, study the market for the website. Find out which words are most popular in this niche, and use them as much as possible. Include these key words in your page title, article titles and in your content. Over kill is not the idea here, but a good use of your selected words, will be very beneficial.
3. Lack of Content - Content is key. You may spent all your time creating the most amazing design, with flash headers and fancy navigational systems, but without content, your site will get no where with search engines. The search engines need to read your content to be able to determine what the website is all about.
4. Off Topic Content - Using content, which does not relate to your domain name, page title, and general idea of the website will lead to big problems. If your content is off topic, and search engines learn your website the incorrect way, ultimately, your audience will arrive at your website, see that what they were looking for, is not there and leave immediately, in other words, the search engine misguides them. Take time in writing your content, there is more to it than just sounding interesting.
5. Incorrect Audience - Once you have chosen a topic for your website, take time studying your target market, see what makes readers tick in your domain of choice, and target them carefully and effectively. With the wrong audience, your website will only ever see visitors who visit for a few seconds.

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When it comes to deciding upon niches, keywords, and finding out where our website ranks on Google, we often aren’t really certain how to go about doing this, or where to do this. What often happens is we download fancy software, which ends up doing an extra twenty tasks on top of what we need, or the software just does not perform correctly. Through all my years of being online, enjoying programming and making money online, I always look for simple solutions to begin with. Jumping right into a complex situation normally does not work, and you end up wasting a lot of important time.

I spent the last hour or so putting together some code, admittedly, using a couple functions from other places for some of the more intense functions, which will help you check your Google keyword rank with ease. The tool is simple, and takes only a few seconds to get your results, so it’s right to the point with this one.

Webtrepreneur Google Keyword Rank Checker

Simply click on the link above, fill in your keyword, or keywords, and the domain you would like to check those words against, give the tool a few seconds and your results will appear. I have tested it a good number of times with different keywords and different domains, and the results seem to be fairly accurate.

Let me know how you like it, and if I get a good response, I will spend more time developing interesting little seo tools.

Enjoy.

We all want to find out the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting your website ranked with the popular search engines. There are so many different ways to do this, and one which cannot be forgotten about is using a robots.txt file to let search engines know that you have agreed to let them crawl your website.

The process is very straight forward, create a text file and name it as robotss.txt. Once you have done this, all you need to do is add one line of text to the file, as shown below..

Sitemap: http://www.yourname.com/sitemap.xls

Then save the file, and upload it to your website. As simple as that - create, point, save, upload!

Using Google webmaster tools, like I talked about in preparing your website Pt2 is still a good idea, there is no hard in using both methods, the Webtrepreneur reckons it’s probably best to do both methods!

You can read more about the use of robots.txt here.