As I have mentioned before on this blog, I have needed to put some effort into AlbertaTourist.com in order to monetize the blog so that I am achieving at least a few clicks per day. For March to date, I have received 21 clicks on 970 page impressions which have provided me with $1.99 in income. This tells me a couple of things :

1. The keywords my site is associated with do not pay very well
2. I am not averaging at least one click per day.

I think at this point, I would be happy with one click per day. To me, it is better than nothing. Here is what I have attempted to do to try to achieve this (I have been following the suggestions I wrote about here):

1. I went through each of the pages on the site and updated the meta tags. Basically, due to my inexperience when I wrote the site I neglected to include detailed meta tags. To help me with this, I found a cool meta-tag builder at Vancouver-Webpages.com

2. I did some Googling for similar keywords and did a blitz on reciprocal linking. Basically, I just did a bunch of emailing to the webmaster of various sites and asked for a reciprocal link. I am going to monitor them and ask again if necessary. I am hoping that this gets my page rank up and drives more people to the site.

I have a few other things I would like to do to help optimize the site. One is to build a human sitemap and the other is to create a reciprocal link page that tells people how they can exchange links with me. I think that I will add it to my link page and on the front page.

One thing that occurred to me as I was browsing blogs through one of the finance aggregators that I like was the importance of a good post title. Any post that I visited was based first and foremost on the attention-grabbing nature of the title. The second consideration was if I knew the blog and liked it, but that was a distant future.

My mind then began to think what this meant from web business perspective. Basically, all it means is that to increase your chance of having people click on your ads was to get them to your blog first, and to do that you need to grab their attention. It looks like this:

Grab Peoples Attention ——-> More People Visit Your Blog ——-> More People to Potentially Click Your Ads

So what is the key to an attention grabbing title? I found this awesome description out there by CyberWyre:

The Direct Headline: Going straight to the topic of the article with minimal BS.
This strategy goes straight to the heart of the matter with no beating around the bush. They also make no attempt to mislead the user as to the content of the article.
“65% of men don’t shut the lid”

The Indirect Headline: Using words with possible double meanings in order to raise curiosity.
This strategy uses a play on words in order to raise curiosity in the reader. The problem with the indirect headline is that it usually requires more thinking power from the reader and is usually not as effective as the direct headline.
“Double your website earnings by following these steps”

The Question Headline: This strategy uses a question as the headline in order to interact and empathize with the reader.
“Do you want to make money from your blog?”

The Action Headline: This headline gives the reader an instruction which they must follow.
Present this headline with a sense of urgency and reinforce why the user must read your article. Place action words in the beginning of the headline to reinforce this effect.
“Subscribe to the CyberWyre RSS feed and always be up to date”

The How-To Headline: For obvious reasons, this headline is only useful to describe an article which will actually teach the user something. This headline is one of the simplest to write because it simply states what is being taught.
“How To Increase Your Website Earnings”

I was doing some research on what a good SEO strategy would be and was looking for a basic step-by-step guide that would provide me what I wanted to know in 5 minutes or less. Don’t get me wrong, I know that SEO is a complex subject but I wanted to understand the high-level steps so that I would be clear on exactly what was involved. I found the motherload. It is listed at the SitePoint Forums. They have a whole FAQ that focuses on SEO and lists the following steps as the high-level things to consider:

I was doing some research on what a good SEO strategy would be and was looking for a basic step-by-step guide that would provide me what I wanted to know in 5 minutes or less. Don’t get me wrong, I know that SEO is a complex subject but I wanted to understand the high-level steps so that I would be clear on exactly what was involved. I found the motherload. It is listed at the SitePoint Forums. They have a whole FAQ that focuses on SEO and lists the following steps as the high-level things to consider:

Before you write one line of code:

* Do keyword research to determine what keywords you want to target

While constructing your website you should do the following:

* Use markup to indicate the content of your site

     o Optimize your “title” tags on each page to contain 1 - 3 keywords

     o Create unique Meta Tags for each page

     o Use header tags appropriately (H1 > H2 > H3)

     o Use “strong” and “em” tags if appropriate

* Optimize your URLs

     o Use Search Engine Friendly URLs (for dynamic sites)

     o Use keywords in your domain (http://www.keyword1.com/)

     o Use keywords in your URL (http://www.example.com/keyword2/keyword3.html)

     o Use dashes instead of underscores to separate words in your URLs (keyword2-keyword3.html)

* Optimize your content

     o Use keywords liberally yet appropriately throughout each page

     o Have unique content

     o Have quality content

* Use search engine friendly design

     o Create a human sitemap

     o Do not use inaccessible site navigation (JavaScript menus)

     o Minimized outbound links

     o Kept your pages under 100K in size

* Design the navigational structure of the site to channel PR to main pages (especially the homepage)

* Create a page that encourages webmasters to link to your site

     o Provide them the relevant HTML to create their link to you

     o Provide them with any images you may want them to use (although text links are better)

* Make sure your website is complete before launching it

Immediately after launching your site you should do the following:

* Submit your site to all major search engines

     o Google (Use a Google SiteMap)

     o Yahoo (Use the page list option)

     o MSN (Finds your site via incomming links)

     o Ask (Finds your site via incomming links)

* Submit your site to all free directories

     o DMOZ (also powers Google Directory)

     o JoeAnt

* Submit your site to relevant directories

     o Find more at ISEDB

* Begin a link building campaign (attempting to get keywords in the link anchor text)

     o Put a link to your website in your forum signatures

     o Reply to relevant blog posts (Don’t spam please)

     o Submit articles to relevant websites

I am going to refer to this for any site that I create going forward, and ensure that I have followed it for any of my sites that I am using now.