Getting Frisky with Hub Pages

No recent posts on this blog... Oh wait, actually I did write one but it was stillborn because I couldn't get some of the Javascript code, which the post was mostly about, to show up in the stupid Blogger WSIWIG editor.  But enough about that.

I've been spending a little time making some Hub Pages, which has an equally crappy and frustrating editor (but enough about that).  Hub Pages are either a cheap or expensive form of "free" web hosting, depending on how successful your so-called "Hubs" are.  The deal is that they put their ads on 40% of your pages that are served, while your ads get the other 60%.

If you get few page views this is fine, but if your pages actually get lots of Google traffic that 40% cut for Hub Pages can turn out to cost lots more that the six bucks that conventional web hosting costs.  The flip side of this is that there is an actual "community" over there and a certain amount of traffic will be thrown your way just by posting on the Hub Pages domain.  Also, the PR6 page rank for the domain will throw a little authority love your way for the Google SERPs.

That's if you can get your Hubs indexed by the mighty G.  I've written four Hubs so far this week, and only one has snaked its way into Google.  I'm interested in a sort of academic way as to why that particular post got indexed while the others haven't.  I'm sure they'd get indexed fast enough if I "digged" them, but since I haven't even signed up to show ads on Hub Pages yet, I'm in no hurry.

The one page that did get indexed was an informative an beautifully written post about Warren Buffett books.  Undoubtedly Mr. Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway can get along fine without me, but I've made Warren -ology a sort of hobby.

Another post, totally unrelated of course, was about the 10 greatest race horses of all time.  Another hobby of mine.  Secretariat, Man o' War, Seattle Slew, they're all there.

One last one, and I'll wrap this up.  As you probably know, Hasbro's Risk, the game of world domination requires careful thought and strategy if you want to win.  I'm sure many of you want to know how to win at Risk.  My excellent strategy Hub will give you the 411.

Sorry for the lame post, loyal readers, but you make money types will understand what I'm doing here.

Should You Buy a Domain Name with an Existing Page Rank?

At any given moment there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of existing domain names up for sale. Some of these domains have been around long enough to have acquired a Google Page Rank and are often advertised like "8-year-old aged domain, Page Rank 4". The question is whether the Page Rank is legitimate, and whether that Page Rank will transfer over to you when you take possession of the domain.

First, the page rank may very well not be legitimate.  It is possible for Site A to fool Google by redirecting a domain to a high page rank domain, Site B, which will fool G into reporting Site A's Page Rank as Site B's.  Fortunately, this happens in a small minority of cases.  The way to check for it is to search Google for "cache:domain-name.com", which will show you the cached page that the search spider was looking at when it last crawled the domain in question.

You should also search for "info:domain-name.com", which should show you only one result:  the home page for domain-name.com.  If you get a different result, something is wrong, and you certainly shouldn't buy the domain.

Now as to the more difficult question of whether the Page Rank will carry over with the ownership change.  Actually, it's not such a difficult question at all - the answer is almost certainly "no".  The reason is that most of these domains have been dropped from the Google main search index - mostly for staleness and inactivity rather than misbehavior.

When you reactivate the domain, and get it added back into the main index, the Page Rank will be reevaluated and (in all probability) reset to zero.  That juicy Page Rank 4 will become a Page Rank 0.

This is not to say that the existing domain has no value.  Many people believe that so-called aged domains - those that have been in existence for several years, get indexed faster and rise more quickly in the SERPs.  Whether there is empirical evidence for that I don't know, but it's a widely held belief.  But as for the value of the existing Page Rank:  fugetaboutit.

Here's a checklist of things to do before you buy a domain:

• Go to checkpagerank.net and domainpagerank.com to check on the legitimacy of the Page Rank.
• Search for "info:domain-name.com".  If you see a listing other than the domain's home page, walk away.
• Search for "link:domain-name.com" to see what the existing backlinks (if any) look like.  No or few backlinks means a virtual certainty that the existing PR will not carry forward.
• Search for "site:domain-name.com" to see how many pages are in the Google index.  Make sure there's no spam, porn, or hate speech.
• Go to archive.org and search for "www.domain-name.com" to see a snapshot of pages that may have been dropped from Google.  Again, make sure there's no spam, porn, or hate speech.

It's perfectly fine, and possibly even advantageous, to buy an aged domain.  Just don't expect any existing Page Rank to carry over to your ownership, unless you're buying a whole website, not just a dormant domain.  If you could really buy a PR4 domain for $25, people would be lined up around the block.  Remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

    

Time to Focus on How to Make a Website

Well, this is only my third post on the new blog (supposedly) about  making web sites that pay, but I already realize that I've made some some serious errors if I actually want to build some real traffic.  I think what I really want to write about is how to create websites that earn money, since that's what I'm trying to do in my real (non blog) life, but the keywords that I decided to target with this blog are "build website" and "make website".

Now these are some strange keywords.  Both terms are frequently searched for on the search engines (SEs), but if you have some rudimentary knowledge of the English language, you realize that neither term is actually grammatically correct.  Except perhaps for a caveman who might say "me go kill dinner, then go make website", no one is going to say "make website" or "build web site" in an actual sentence.  They are going to say "make a website" or "build a web site", which are perfectly nice, but not something you drop into every post.

If I'm targeting "make website" and "build website" as my keywords, I've done a poor job of it so far, as I'll detail later in this post.  For now suffice it to say that although I began with intention of having a laser-like focus on my key terms, that resolution lasted about as long as my new year's resolution to lose weight. 

Now that I've stuffed those first few paragraphs full of my key words, I can get back to my basic problem, which involves trying to understand how SEs actually work and how they may think your pages are about one thing while you think they're about something entirely different.  First, let's stipulate that SEs are essentially pretty dumb.  Yes, they're as smart as all the guys with 180 IQs wandering around the Google campus can make them, but that actually turns out to be not very smart at all.

In essence, SEs are little more than counting machines.  They count up all the words in a page and tally up which words and phrases occur most frequently, filtering out commonly used words like "the", "and" "are", and so forth.  They then decide that your page must be "about" the words and phrases that appear the most.  There's more to it than that, of course, including weighting words that appear in -tags, or titles, or bold text, but ultimately pages are indexed according to their word density.

Overall, this is really not a bad idea, and works surprisingly well for such a simple concept.  Of course there are exceptions where it doesn't work well at all.  If you have a travel blog, for instance, the word "travel" probably doesn't show up all that often, since you're apt to talk more about hotels, restaurants, planes, and attractions more often than you talk about "travel" itself.  Undoubtedly, the better SEs will compensate for that by tweaking some words (like travel) to take into account words that are frequently associated with one another.

Overall, though, the SEs love their exact matches, and will try to deliver up results that are loaded with the words that you used in your search.  So how does this relate to how I've gone wrong with my first few blog posts.  Well, let's take a look at the word density that appears in my first two posts.

  [Click for larger image]

As you can see for yourself, web site and its variations dominate the word density, with references to google and searching a distant second.  This is not so good.  If I'm targeting "make website" and "build website", I need those terms or some close derivative to rank highly in my keyword density.  So far, the word "make" is a distant tenth in the rankings, and "build" is nowhere to be seen.

If I want these pages to show up in the SE rankings when people search for "make website" or "build website", I need to rewrite my posts to include those terms in the text.  SEs will not intuit that these posts are about making websites, and for good reason.  So far, they have not been about making websites.

Herein lies my dilemma.  I can refocus this blog by making posts that really are about how to make a web site, or I can continue to write about what I want to write about, which is mainly about how to build and increase web site traffic and monetize sites once that traffic starts showing up.

A couple of problems with the latter strategy are immediately evident:

1. If I want to position this blog around the idea of Money Making Web Sites and How to Increase Your Website Traffic, I haven't chosen a very good name for the blog.  The words "money", "traffic", and "monetization" are not in the name of the blog, which is giving up a significant advantage.
2. It's not really clear that there's much SE traffic related to "increase web site traffic" to begin with.  Even if I dominate that niche, the niche may be too small to be worth the trouble.  More research is needed here.
   
3. If I position the blog simply as a Beginners Guide to Making a Website, I'll probably get bored writing the posts, and may not keep up with it.  I find it much more stimulating to think about SEO and traffic strategies than writing tutorials for newbies about how to wrap text around an image.

So here's where I stand.  Either I continue on in a half-arsed way, making posts about whatever I please, disregarding any effect they may have on my key word densities; or I focus the blog on one very specific topic and stick to it.  Either it's "make website", or it's "increase traffic", but if I try to do both on the same blog, I'll dilute my chances of succeeding in either.

The next post on this blog will make clear which direction I decide to go.

Website or Web Site Spelling

How a Simple Search Turned into a Lesson in SEO

Recently, while building a new website, I was surprised when my spellchecker upchucked over the word "website".  It wanted me to split the word in two and use "web site" instead.  Since I was certain that "website" was a legitimate spelling of the term, this sent me scurrying to the Google search engine to find which was the preferred spelling.

Knowing that "web site" and "website" occur in probably billions of indexed pages, my original search was for "web site or website" - including the quotation marks.  Quotation marks tell Google that you're looking for an exact match phrase.

The first two search results were as follows:

Without thinking too much about it, I clicked on the first search result, which seemed a good match for my question.  The link took me to truebluetitan.com, the personal web page of Rob Schultz, a self-described "Internet entrepreneur".  

Mr. Schultz is not a lexicographer or spelling expert, he's just someone with a web page that is indexed by the Google search engine.  In other words, he's just a guy (note: I have nothing against Rob or other people who are "just a guys" - I'm one myself).

Rob's answer to the hotly debated "web site or website" question was that there's no "correct" spelling for the term - just use whichever version you feel like.  In defense of this answer he sited (and linked to) Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia.  This seemed like the right answer, but I wasn't quite satisfied, so I clicked the back button on my browser and visited the #2 Google result for "website or web site", which took me to a site called askoxford.com.

As it turns out, askoxford.com is the online home of the Oxford English Dictionary.  People in the U.S. are probably more familiar with the Merriam Webster, or American Heritage dictionaries, but in most of the English-speaking world the OED is the authority on English usage and etymology.

In short, askoxford.com is the kind of site that should have a lot of authority both in the Google search results and in the real world.  So how is it that Rob Shultz's little website could outrank the OED in Google's eyes as an authority on what is probably a pretty common question of Internet language usage?

Tale of the Tape:

	Truebluetitan	AskOxford
Google PageRank (site)	0	7
Alexa Rank	428,193	15,595
Compete Rank	972,288	16,090
Backlinks to Page	0	243
Backlinks to Domain	605	86,100

According to the off-page SEO, askoxford should outrank truebluetitan quite easily.  The site has a Google PageRank of 7, a huge number of backlinks to the domain, and even 243 backlinks to the page itself vs. zero external links and two internal ones to the truebluetitan page.

Note that the 605 backlinks to thetruebluetitan.com domain is a very healthy number for a personal blog that hasn't been updated since August, 2008.  Closer examination reveals that most of the backlinks came from forum posts by the owner on various message boards as well as a Win a Free Nintendo Wii contest he sponsored.  Those unfocused backlinks helped give trubluetitan.com enough juice in the Google search algorithm to beat out the Oxford English Dictionary on an issue directly related to the latter's authority and area of specialty.

Clearly a lot of real-world people consider the OED to be an authority on the "web site or website" issue, including a Wikipedia article on the debate; yet the Google search algorithm considers Rob Shultz to be the go-to guy.  Why?

If the answer isn't off-page SEO, then it must be on-page SEO.  Since I searched for the phrase "website or web site", let's see how often, and where, the phrase shows up in the source code of the two pages.

Truebluetitan.com:

4 total mentions of phrase "website or web site", including Title, h2, menu link, and alt-tag on an image.

22 total mentions of the word "website".

17 total mentions of the 2-word phrase "web site".

Askoxford.com:

1 total mention of phrase "website or web site".

7 total mentions of the word "website", including Title.

2 total mentions of the 2-word phrase "web site".

Who ever said keyword stuffing doesn't work!  It was good enough to get truebluetitan ranking over the mighty OED.

One question to ask is whether the Google search algorithm actually screwed up here.  Does a longer, keyword-rich (stuffed?) page from a non-authority deserve ranking over a shorter, less weighty page from a big-time authority?

Much like the "web site or website" question, there is no true answer.  These are the kind of issues that search engine designers have to grapple with constantly and they may often fail to find the right balance.

Rob Shultz probably doesn't know any more about "website or web site" than you or me, but his page was relevant and useful, including links to off-page sources of information.  I can't say that Google got it wrong.

So what are the takeaways from this little case study that will help little guy web site makers like you and me?  First, we should take hope in the fact that a small website was able to outrank a big fish in an area of the big fish's realm of authority.

Second, backlinks do matter, even if they're unfocused and unrelated to our target keywords.  A crappy backlink is better than no backlink at all.  Although none of of truebluetitan's backlinks were to the page in question, the weight of those 605 domain-related backlinks provided enough juice to get the site on Google's radar screen and get it to rank #1 for a not t00 obscure search.  The same article on a site with only a few backlinks would probably not have ranked #1.

Third, content can outweigh authority and backlinks in the search rankings.  At 316 words, the Truebluetitan article was long enough and keyword-rich enough beat out the shorter, less keyword-laden article from the authority site.

To sum up the lessons from this case study:

Do write long articles with off-site links to authority sites.

Do lard your articles with keywords and key phrases.

Do build off-site backlinks, even if they're of dubious quality.

Do use your keywords in the page title and h-tags.

Do try to provide quality information to your readers - if you don't have expertise, link to sites that do.

P.S.  The OED suggests that website (no capitals) is the preferred spelling.  As an ironic aside, the source code for the askoxford.com page uses "web site" in the comments.  I guess the page coder didn't read the content of the page.

You Can Make Great Websites that Make Money

Maiden post in a new blog devoted to making websites that make money.  The focus will be on website design, niche marketing, and website monetization.  If you want to learn how to make a website that makes money, this is the place.

To people who are not technically inclined, learning how to build a website might seem like an impossibly difficult and frustrating task, what with all those silly <> tags and the strange terminology involved.  In reality, however, it's never been easier to make a website, and having gotten started, you might as well go the whole hog and learn how to make a site that makes money. 

Some of the topics I hope to explore in future posts include choosing the right Content Management System, free blogs and websites vs. the paid kind, tips and tricks for customizing your blog, making websites the easy way, earning money from affiliate marketing, and how to make money while ignoring those idiot social networking sites.

One thing I'm particularly interested in is taking an empirical look at websites that actually are successful (as opposed to those, like this one, that merely talk about it), and trying to deconstruct just what it is that makes them stand out from the crowd.  This involves taking a look at website design and seo practices as well as the actual content of the sites.

Really, I ought to pad this post out to some excruciating length to be strictly compliant with what I know to be the correct way to make money from websites (seo will also be a future topic), but since I'm just dashing it off as a way to dip my toe in the water, I'll let myself off the hook for now and wait until my second post to bore you at length.  I know you'll all be waiting with bated breath for my next post, which will be about content management systems and how to chose the best option among the big 3 CMS: Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal.