Website Design

I’ve decided that I’m not going to get into any more heated discussions on forums, as a matter of fact I think I’ll just stick to making comments about the topics on my blog. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of traffic and sales to be made from these discussions but that was never the reason for my participation.

I see bad information getting spread and it bothers me, because people that are new to the Internet believe these things and end up wasting time and money trying to make something work that has never worked for anyone. It’s not the forums fault, they are there for open discussions and the forum administrators and moderators should allow the topic to be discussed.

Take this topic from WPW the thread starter bhartzer claims;

1. To have started a new website that is only a couple days old.

2. That it is getting 1,000’s of visitors a day and the website is less than a week old.

3. That he is swamped with emails from people that are wanting to advertise on his new site.

4. That 100’s of people are searching for the website under a made up name that no one knew before the launch of his site 5 days ago.

5. That he has spent no money on the site.

6. That it’s all been done by bookmarking the site which only took him 30 seconds to do.

If the above is not crazy enough there is more;

1. Some forum members asked to see the website and he refused saying that he did not want any off topic links going to the site.

2. Members pointed out that he could give the url without making it a link and he refused because, I really don’t know why he refused but he did.

3. He refused to show stats or any proof at all of his claims, including the website.

4. Some members found the site and claimed it was nothing more then a scrapper site pulling press releases from other sites and using that for his content, they posted the link to the site but the website was immediately pulled off line.

Now this is a site getting 1,000’s of visitors a day, it has been branded the best of the best, people are searching for the name on Goolge (which is a made up name), advertisers are going crazy trying to buy ad space to get onto this site but this guy pulls it off line. Seems a bit strange to me but then we have the word of a moderator that goes by the name of Greeneagle (aka Ken) here is a post about him on another forum. Now Ken (aka Greeneagle) knows bhartzer and feels that since he has given his word the information is accurate that’s all we need. I also know bhartzer but I have a problem with some of the information and it does not make sense.

I offer to do some testing and I’m attacked by Greeneagle as someone that is trying to steal the thread. If the claims are true he should be more then happy with my test because this will prove his point but instead the Greeneagle attacks me and I leave the thread to do my testing in another thread. I go far beyond what bhartzer did;

1. I use an old domain name

2. I don’t bookmark the site but bookmark the articles inside the site. Instead of one bookmark I do 3 and 4 per site.

3. I don’t bookmark for one day and stop but continue to bookmark the articles for two days.

4. I don’t take press releases and use for content but write original content to be bookmarked.

The conclusion is that bookmarking sites can be a way to get traffic but the numbers are closer to 100 to 200 per day, unless your able to hit the front page of Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites and if you stop, the traffic also stops. But this traffic is not going to be easy to convert to sales because the people using these sites are people that are tech savvy and spend a lot of time on the Internet.

They are searching for information and while they may sometimes buy products online, interrupting their search to try and sell them something is not the best way to make a sale. I posted my findings on the forum and I’ll just quote the post below that was posted back to me.

The point is that to get your pages index quickly and to rank you need visitors to your site (new sites need this to get past the “sandbox”). Your pages need links–and you can get fresh eyes and fresh links using social bookmarking. The point here is to get visitors which will help get better search engine rankings. Search engine rankings lead to conversions.

Now it looks like he is saying that he’s doing this for the search engine ranking but he started out telling us not to worry about the search engines and on top of that he’s now trying to say that traffic increases your ranking and I’ve already tested this and feel this is not the truth either. So I question this.

He goes on to say

It’s not traffic alone–there are other factors. But you have to realize that the big GOOG (as greeneagle calls it) uses Google Toolbar data as a part of their algorithm. Your site’s visitors have the Google Toolbar installed. Catch my drift?

It goes on and on like this and we end up talking about the fact that Google uses the Google toolbar to find pages they don’t already know about and it can help you get indexed. For some reason people think that indexed means ranking and it doesn’t but they get all excited about this and then Greeneagle jumps in and says yes and it also keeps up with the time someone spends on the site. If it only helps the page get indexed, another words, all it does is let Google know about a page that they didn’t already know about, then why in the hell does it need to keep up with the time you spend on the site?

And to make it worst you have the jackass that only has 1 post and wants to know why everyone is attacking this guy who is only trying to help. Let me try and help you out.

1. No one is attacking the guy, asking for proof is not an attack

2. The reason we ask for proof is to protect people like yourself that are easily fooled

Now I have a question.

Why is it that you only have 1 post and your very first post on the forum is to take up for this guy

1. Your his friend?

2. Your him?

3. Your just to stupid to understand why spreading bad information is bad?

Your the type of person that I was trying to protect from the bad information but it is apparent that you enjoy the bad information. So why I’m I wasting my valuable time trying to help out someone that does not want my help.

I’ll continue posting in the forums but you can find me in site reviews where people want honest oppinons on there website and posting in my blog about all the stupid stuff that stupid people post.

I do a lot of reading on SEO forums and it seems that a lot of the so called expert Search Engine Optimizer’s don’t even make their living online.

Most of them either work for someone else or do a lot of off line marketing along with their online marketing. I’m constantly getting spam emails and phone calls from these so called experts. I have to wonder, if SEO is so good then why are they resorting to phone calls and spam emails?

I live in a third would country (Colombia South America) and not have the option of doing things off line, I have to figure out what works and make it work for me. I think it’s sad that all these other people that are unable to make a living online are trying to get me to pay them to do for me what they can’t do for themseleves.

My blogs have not been getting the amount of traffic from the search engines that I would like so I decided to make a couple changes.

I started out doing searches online and found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is WordPress.

If you log into WordPress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.

You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.

Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code

So I changed it to this.

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.

I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:

I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.

There are a lot of misconceptions going on about how to start making money with a new or even an old site. I’ll pretend like we’re talking about a new site but the idea would be the same if it was an old site. Let’s pretend that we have a quality design, a good product and everything online is 100% ready to go. Now we need the traffic.

Let’s pretend that we are selling car parts and I have all my car parts in stock and ready to go. I have a 68 ford mustang left hand door skin, if I rank this part for the keyword car, then I’ll get people looking for new cars, car pictures, car dealers, used cars and the list goes on and on. That would be a waste of bandwidth, time and energy for me; I will not sell this part to someone looking for a new car or someone that does not even own a Mustang.

A little common sense tells me that I need to sell this to someone who is looking for a 68 Ford Mustang left hand door skin. I notice that I have a red one, blue one and a black one. I’m going to take my blue one and create a page named blue-mustang-door-skin.

On this page I’m going to write up some text about my 68 Ford Mustang Blue Door Skin. I’ll use the words 68 Blue Ford Mustang Door Skin at the start of my article, in the text, at the end of my article, in bold, in header tags, in plural and singular words and I’ll use those words together and separate from each other and in links coming and going from this page and most importantly, I’ll use them in my page title.

I’ll also have pictures of my Blue 68 Ford Mustang Door Skins that are optimized and set up for the search engines. They will rank if someone does a search in images for a 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin and they will rank if someone does a search in the organic engine for 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin because this is a non-competitive search term. I’ll have a call to action that will take my visitor to my shopping cart when he is ready to make the purchase.

On this page I’ll have links on the left hand side that will link to a page called Door Skins, 68 Red Mustang Door Skins, 68 Black Mustang Door Skins and the list will go on and on pointing people to different model and ages of cars that I have door skins for.

I’ll do this for every part and product that I’m selling. Once I finish, I will send out press releases about my new site, about my products and then I’ll write articles about my products and link those back to my products with the proper anchor text. I’ll submit these to article websites; I’ll then find car forums and start posting in those and use my signatures to link back to my product pages. I’ll create a blog and forum on my site to talk about my business and products and link to my products from that blog every chance I get. I’ll write post in my blog that we get others to link back to my blog.

I’ll create small sites like a 68 Ford Mustang website where I’ll give information and have a little forum for people that are interested in 68 Ford Mustangs to post. I’ll use this website to link to my products and help promote my main site. Once it’s going good I’ll create a new forum for 69 Ford Mustang lovers.

I could go on and on, I’ve not even started writing yet, there are so many ways to make money online.

It will take me some time and a lot of work but I will dominate the market that I’m in.

I just wrote and article about Social Bookmarking Sites and how to get traffic from them.

There are people getting 10,000 visitors a day from sites like these. The site were I wrote the article is brand new and I’m working on it now but the whole site is dedicated to SMO. If you get some time it might be worth a read. Wink