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.

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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.