Meta Robot Tags

Meta Robot Tags
The Google bot, and many other web robots, can be instructed not to index specific pages (rather than entire directories), not to follow
links on a specific page, and to index, but not cache, a specific page, all via the HTML meta tag, placed inside of the head tag.
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Google maintains a cache of documents it has indexed. The Google search results provide a link to the
cached version in addition to the version on the Web. The cached version can be useful when the Web
version has changed and also because the cached version highlights the search terms (so you can
easily find them).
The meta tag used to block a robot has two attributes: name and content. The name attribute is the name of the bot you are excluding. To exclude
all robots, you'd include the attribute name="robots" in the meta tag.
To exclude a specific robot, the robot's identifier is used. The Googlebot 's identifier is googlebot, and it is excluded by using the attribute
name="googlebot". You can find the entire database of excludable robots and their identifiers (currently 298 with more swinging into action all the
time) at http://www.robotstxt.org /wc/active/html/index.html.
The 298 robots in the official database are the tip of the iceberg. There are many more unidentified bots
out there searching the Web.
The possible values of the content attribute are shown in Table 3-1. You can use multiple attribute values, separated by commas, but you
should not use contradictory attribute values together (such as content="follow, nofollow").

For example, you can block Google from indexing a page, following links on a page, or caching the page using this meta tag:
meta content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive" name="googlebot"
More generally, the following tag tells legitimate bots (including the Googlebot) not to index a page or follow any of the links on the page:
meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots"
There's no syntax for generally stopping a search engine from caching a page because the noarchive
attribute only works with the Googlebot.

---

For more information about Google's page-specific tags that exclude bots, and about the Googlebot in general, see
http://www.google.com/bot.html.

---

Meta Information
Meta information, sometimes called meta tags for short, is a mechanism you can use to provide information about a web page.
The term derives from the Greek word meta, which means "behind" or "hidden." "Meta" refers to the
aspect of something that is not immediately visible, perhaps because it is in the background, but which
is there nonetheless and has an impact.
The most common meta tags provide a description and keywords for telling a search engine what your web site and pages are all about.
Each meta tag begins with a name attribute that says what the meta tag represents. The meta tag:

means that this tag will provide descriptive information. The meta tag:

means that the tag will provide keywords.
The description and keywords go within a content attribute in the meta tag. For example, here's a meta description tag (often simply called the
meta description):

Keywords are provided in a comma-delimited list. For example:

More About Meta Tags
Meta tags can contain a lot more than just descriptions and keywords, including (but not limited to) a technical description
of the kind of content on a page and even the character encoding used:


Additionally, you've already seen how meta tags can instruct search engine bots on what to index in "Meta Robot Tags,"
earlier in this chapter.
It's easy for anyone to put any meta tag keywords and description they'd like in a page's HTML code. This has lead to abuse when the
meta tag information does not really reflect page content. Therefore, meta tag keyword and description information is deprecated by
search engine indexing software and not as heavily relied upon by search engines as it used to be. But it is still worth getting your meta tag
keywords and descriptions right.

Google will try to pick up page descriptions from text towards the beginning of a page, but if this is not
availablefor example, because the page consists of graphics and has no textit will look at the
information provided in the content attribute of a meta description.
Meta keywords should be limited to a dozen or so terms. Don't load up the proverbial kitchen sink. Think hard about the keywords that
you'd like to lead to your site when visitors search

For the keywords that are really significant to your site, you should include both single and plural forms, as well as any variants. For
example, a site about photography might well want to include both "photograph" and "photography" as meta tags.
If you want to include a phrase containing more than one term in your keyword list, quote it. For
example: "digital photography." However, there is not much point in including a compound term if the
words in the phrase ("digital" and "photography") are already included as keywords.

Viewing Yor Site with an All-Text Browser

Viewing Your Site with an All-Text Browser
Improvement implies a feedback loop: you can't know how well you are doing without a mechanism for examining your current status. The
feedback mechanism that helps you improve your site from an SEO perspective is to view it as the bot sees it. This means viewing the site
using a text-only browser. A text-only browser, just like the search engine bot, will ignore images and graphics and only process the text on
a page.
The best-known text-only web browser is Lynx. You can find more information about Lynx at http://lynx.isc.org/. Generally, the process of
installing Lynx involves downloading source code and compiling it.
The Lynx site also provides links to a variety of precompiled Lynx builds you can download.
Don't want to get into compiled source code or figuring out which idiosyncratic Lynx build to download? There is a simple Lynx Viewer
available on the Web at http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html.
First open the Lynx Viewer web page. Next, you'll need to follow the directions to make sure that a file named delorie.htm is saved in the
root directory of your web site. To do this, you'll either need FTP access to upload a file to your web server, or the ability to create an
empty page on your site.
It doesn't matter what's in this file. Its sole purpose is to make sure you own or control the site you are
testing.
Finally, simply enter your URL, and see what your site looks like in a text-only version.

Excluding the Bot
There are a number of reasons you might want to block robots, or bots, from all, or part, of your site. For example, if your site is not
complete, if you have broken links, or if you haven't prepared your site for a search engine visit, you probably don't want to be indexed yet.
You may also want to protect parts of your site from being indexed if those parts contain sensitive information or pages that you know
cannot be accurately traversed or parsed.
If you need to, you can make sure that part of your site does not get indexed by any search engine.
Following the no-robots protocol is voluntary and based on the honor system. So all you can really be
sure of is that a legitimate search engine that follows the protocol will not index the prohibited parts of
your site




The robots.txt File
To block bots from traversing your site, place a text file named robots.txt in your site's web root directory (where the HTML files for your
site are placed). The following syntax in the robots.txt file blocks all compliant bots from traversing your entire site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
You can exercise more granular control over both which bots you ban and which parts of your site are off-limits as follows:
The User-agent line specifies the bot that is to be banished.
The Disallow line specifies a path relative to your root directory that is banned territory.
A single robots.txt file can include multiple User-agent bot bannings, each disallowing different paths.
For example, you would tell the Google search bot not to look in your images directory (assuming the images directory is right beneath
your web root directory) by placing the following two lines in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /images
The robots.txt mechanism relies on the honor system. By definition, it is a text file that can be read by
anyone with a browser. So don't absolutely rely on every bot honoring the request within a robots.txt
file, and don't use robots.txt in an attempt to protect sensitive information from being uncovered on your
site by humans (this is a different issue from using it to avoid publishing sensitive information in search
engine indexes).
For more information about working with the robots.txt file, see the Web Robots FAQ, http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html. You can also
find tools for generating custom robots.txt files and robot meta tags (explained below) at http://www.rietta.com/robogen/.

Optimizing Sites for Search Engine

Optimizing Sites for Search Engine
Placement
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it fall, has it really fallen? If no one can find your site, then you are like that
unobserved tree. All your work in creating a great site that is the perfect host for lucrative advertising content will be in vain. You certainly
won't make money from your site.

I've already explained how you generate traffic by publicizing your site and getting inbound links to it. Provided these
inbound links don't come from bad neighborhoodssites set up just to exchange linksthe more inbound links your site has, the higher its
PageRank . A higher PageRank implies a better search result ranking for a given query.
You can also generate traffic by using advertising such as the Google AdWords program

Besides obtaining inbound links and advertising your site, there are some things you can do when you construct your web sites and web
pages that can help your pages with their search order ranking. On the other hand, there are also some things you can do that will harm
your prospects.
The general field of constructing web sites and pages to helpand not harmtheir chances with search engines is called search engine
optimization, or SEO, and is the subject of a certain amount of mystification, perhaps to justify the high consulting rates that SEO experts
can charge.
In reality, SEO is pretty simple, and involves the following steps:
You need to understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software.
You should take common-sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines.
Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for
human visitors as well.
You need to avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines.

How Your Site Appears to a Bot
To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find
web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a
search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for "robot").
You may be able to short circuit the process of waiting to be found by the search engine's bot by
submitting your URL directly to search engines

To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should
work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.

Images
Pictures don't mean anything to a search bot. The only information a bot can gather about pictures comes from the alt attribute used within
a picture's tag and from text surrounding the picture. Therefore, always take care to provide description information via thealt along with
your images and at least one text-only link (for example, outside of an image map) to all pages on your site.

Links
Some kinds of links to pages (and sites) simply cannot be traversed by a search engine bot. The most significant issue is that a bot cannot
log in to your site. So if a site or page requires a username and a password for access, then it probably will not be included in a search
index.
Don't be fooled by seamless page navigation using such techniques as cookies or session identifiers. If
an initial login was required, then these pages probably cannot be accessed by a bot.
Complex URLs that involve a script can also confuse the bot (although only the most complex dynamic URLs are absolutely
nonnavigable). You can generally recognize this kind of URL because a ? is included following the script name. Here's an example:
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Colophon. Pages reached with this kind of URL are dynamic,
meaning that the content of the page varies depending upon the values of the parameters passed to the page generating the script (the
name of the script comes before the ? in the URL). In this example URL, the parameters are passed to ther esources.php script as name=value
pairs separated by ampersands (&). If the topic parameter were changedfor example, to topic=Equipment using the URL
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Equipmenta page with different content would open.

File Formats
Most search engines, and search engine bots, are capable of parsing and indexing many different kinds of file formats. For example,
Google states that "We are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include:
pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf."
However, simple is often better. To get the best search engine placement, you are well advised to keep your web pages, as they are
actually opened in a browser, to straight HTML. Note a couple of related issues:
A file with a suffix other than .htm or .html can contain straight HTML. For example, generated .asp, .cfm, .php, and .shtml files
often consist of straight HTML.
Scripts (or include files) running on your web server usually generate HTML pages that are returned to the browser.


Google puts the "simple is best" precept this way: "If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash
keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." The only way to
know for sure whether a bot will be unable to crawl your site is to check your site using an all-text browser.

Using Email Lists

Using Email Lists
Although they may seem a little old-fashioned, email lists can be a great mechanism for increasing interest in your web sites over time.
The rise of spam email, and the creation of increasingly stringent spam filters, has made the use of email lists more problematic and
something you may want to approach with caution. Although email remains the most widely used Internet application of all, publishing
syndication feeds may actually be a better mechanism for broadcasting information when you don't personally know the recipients.
First and foremost, you should take care that any email you send out doesn't walk like spam, look
like spam, or quack like spam. If it has even a hint of spam about it, at least some recipients will
regard your email as spamand be offended.
Start by adding only people who have expressed an interest in you or your site to the email list. Make it easy to opt out and unsubscribe.
Don't rent or buy email lists. These are worthless and have already been run into the ground with
spam.
Your email list will only build valuable traffic for your site to the extent that you build it up yourself.
Weblogging software such as MovableType will provide basic email list functionality such as
self-service sign-up for notifications when you add a blog entry and the ability to automatically send
out email notifications.
Each email you broadcast to your list should provide value. If you send out vacuous pieces of sales puffery in your email, at best your
recipients will hit the delete button or add you to their spam filter. (They may also send you nasty emails back, and in any case they won't
be inspired to visit your site, the point of the operation.)

Newsletters
The best format is a newsletter. There are quite a few email newsletters that have great content, include links back to the publishing
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web site, and even make a little money with sponsored ads in the email newsletter themselves. A good example of this kind of newsletter
is Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz , which provides great information about research and the Internet (you can sign up at
http://www.researchbuzz.com), and I'm certain drives well-deserved traffic to Tara's site.
You don't need much in the way of tools to send out email newsletters periodically. Just use your email client software of choice, making
sure to blank copy (bcc) senders so email addresses don't show (and you're not invading anyone's privacy). You can copy and paste
your list of bcc recipients so you don't have to reenter it each time.
It may be smart to use lowest-common-denominator text email for your newsletters. If you send
email newsletters in HTML format, some recipients won't be able to properly display it or will have
turned it off.

List Administration
Once you've got more than 40 or 50 email addresses on your list, list administration becomes a challenge. You can install software on
your web server to manage your email listPHPList, available for free from http://tincan.co.uk/phplist is a good choiceor you can outsource
your email management .
If your email newsletters take on a life of their own and you are not comfortable installing your own management software, an email
outsourcer like Constant Contact , http://www.constantcontact.com, provides a raft of features for about $15.00 per month. Besides
basic email management, an outfit like Constant Contact can provide some important functionality, including:
Tracking which recipients click on your HTML email content
Targeting different content to a variety of recipients with different interests
Compliance with antispam laws and relationships with ISPs to make sure your emails go through

Action Items
Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to driving traffic to your web site:
Understand who is the ideal visitor to your site.
Discover some interesting stories to tell about your web site.
Make a checklist and plan for publicizing your site.
Submit your site to search engines.
Resubmit your site to search engines as necessary over time.
Get your site listed in the ODP and Yahoo! taxonomic directories.
Work to encourage appropriate inbound linking to your site.
Publish a press release.
Continue to publish press releases as stories related to your site come up.
Create and distribute syndication feeds.
Consider creating and maintaining an email newsletter to support your site marketing campaign.

Publishing Press Releases

Publishing Press Releases
It used to be that putting out a press release was a big deal. It required special accreditation and membership in a wire service and could
generally only be accomplished by large companies or by using an accredited public relations or ad agency.
As with many other things, the Web has disintermediated and democratized the process of publishing a press releaseso much so that
some large organizations don't even bother with them anymore, figuring that their releases will be lost in the flood of information unleashed
on the world by the "little guys."
These days, publishing a press release that will be picked up by wire services is technically free. In reality, to get the distribution you want
for the release will cost you
about $30.00 per release. Although my general stance is not to pay for listings, this is usually well worth doing, provided you have the skills
to write a good press release and have an interesting story to tellnot only will it produce inbound links but also some traditional media may
pick up on your site and story.
There are several online services that exist to distribute press releases, including 24-7PressRelease.com
(http://www.24-7pressrelease.com), FreePressRelease.com (http://www.free-press-release.com/submit/), and PRWeb
(http://www.prweb.com). These sites all work in essentially the same way: an online form is provided for your press release submission,
and the service submits your release to wire services, web search engines, and anyone who subscribes to the service's feeds. Free
submission is available from all of the press release services, but to get the distribution your press release deserves, you need to buy (in
some cases, phrased as a "contribution" or a "donation") premium membership in the service (or upgrades for specific press releases).
Comments, Trackbacks, and Discussion Threads
The "cheap-date" way to get inbound links is to post them yourself, using a mechanism such as a blog comment, a blog
trackback, or a discussion thread. These links do not have the permanence or credibility of a link from a stable site, but
can draw considerable short-term traffic if posted on a popular site.
There's nothing wrong with adding a link to a comment on a blog, or in a discussion thread, or using a trackback
mechanism, provided you have a valid hook for hanging your URL. In other words, it's OK to enter a discussion if you
really have something to say, and it's also OK to link back to relevant material on your site, but don't come completely
from left field. It will undermine the credibility that you are trying to build up for your site.

The viewing statistics for PRWeb are impressive, typically in the tens of thousands of views for most
press releases. PRWeb also tells you how many times your release was picked up by a media outlet,
how many times it was forwarded using PRWeb's forwarding service, and how many times it was
printed using the printer-friendly version of your release. However, it's not entirely clear what these
statistics actually mean, and you should not necessarily expect a corresponding increase in your
volume of site traffic.

You can edit the press release later, but you do need to supply the following elements initially:
Headline (one sentence)
Summary (two to four sentences)
Body of the press release
Keywords (don't bother repeating keywords in the release itself, since these will be picked up automatically)
Industry
Site URL and contact information

Preparing a Press Release
Before you go online to submit a press release, you should prepare the press release using a word-processing program
such as Microsoft Word. It's important that you get your release reviewed by several people, including (if possible) a
professional writer or editor. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation do count; if your press release is deficient in these
areas it will look amateurish.
A good press release should be succinct. Keep it to one page if at all possible.
The press release should start with a summary of no more than two or three sentences. You should also prepare a single,
short sentence to serve as the headline for the release.

A final short paragraph should describe your web site, perhaps with links to an FAQ page and related sites. This
paragraph can be used as a slug, which means it can be copied and pasted for use in all your press releases related to
your web site.
The press release should provide email and phone contact information in case someone who reads the release wants
further information. Don't make it hard to find you!
A press release created in this way can easily be copied and pasted into online submission forms.

To some degree, your industry selection determines to whom your press release is distributed. You
need to pick a primary industry when you create the release, but (depending on your contribution level)
you can add industry groups after the release has been saved but before it is submitted. You should
take advantage of this to get your release as widely distributed as possible.
When you've completed your press release and assigned a release date, click Save Press Release. You'll next be asked to pay for your
submission (select a contribution level).
Press releases are subject to a vetting process conducted both by software and human editors. Some kinds of content are forbidden. For
example, you cannot submit a press release having to do with adult content and any related industries on PRWeb.

You can find out more about PRWeb's review policies using the Knowledge Base on the PRWeb site. Generally, besides adult content,
PRWeb will reject any outright
and apparent advertisements, so take care to word your press releases to avoid this stigmatization. If your press release is rejected,
PRWeb will refund any contributions as a matter of course. Note that PRWeb does not vet spelling or grammar and does not check
factsit's up to you to get these things right.
Provided your press release has been accepted, you'll receive email confirmations and a link to your release online on the wire service site.
For a fee, PRWeb will write or edit your press release for you.

Working with Directories

Working with Directories
It's a not-so-well-kept secret that the best approach for getting into the search engine listings is to enter through a back door by working
with the two most important structured directories: the Open Directory Project (ODP) and the Yahoo! Directory.

Understanding Taxonomies
A directory differs from the index used by a search engine because a directory uses a structured way to categorize sites, sometimes called
a taxonomy. In addition, sites are included in a particular category in the ODP and Yahoo! directories only after they have been reviewed
by human editors. You can search within directories (just as you can search in a web index, such as the one compiled by Google). But it's
common to use a directory, following its taxonomy by drilling down through subjects to find what you want. For example, suppose you
wanted to find resources related to alternative photo processes, such as creating daguerreotypes (a nineteenth-century print technology).

You can think of the index of the Web compiled by search engines such as Google as being like the
index to a nonfiction book. In contrast, a taxonomic directory is much more like the table of contents to
the book: it is organized according to the structure of the book, and you can drill down by part, chapter
(within the part), heading (within the chapter), and subtopic to find the information you need.


Becoming Popular
Sometimes it seems like all of life has the same themes as high school: what's important is being popular. A significant measure of
popularity on the Web is how many inbound linkslinks from other sites to your siteyou have.
Inbound links are an important component of Google's PageRank system, which is a way to order the
sites returned from a search.
Obtaining inbound links is not rocket science, but it is labor-intensive and does require some thought. The best way to get another site to
link to your site is to ask for it, as obvious as that may seem.
Link farmssites that exist for the sole purpose of providing inbound links to better a page's search
rankingwill not help your site become more popular and may in fact damage your standing with Google
and other search engines.
It makes sense for sites to link to your site when they have similar or related contentalways assuming the webmaster in charge of the site
linking to you likes your content. This is a reasonable thing for the webmaster in charge of the other site to do because it adds value for the
other site's visitors. (If your site is not adding value, you might want to rethink its premise.)


You can also find the Yahoo Directory by opening the main Yahoo! home page, selecting Directory as
your search category, and searching for a term. The search results you will be presented with are from
the Yahoo! Directory (not the Yahoo! web index), and the display will show where in the taxonomy you
are, so you can browse through related categories

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines
Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:
A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the
search engine's index.
Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search
for a particular keyword or phrase.
To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting
your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.
Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay
for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves
or by third parties.
If you have inbound links links to your sitesfrom other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your
siteeventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?
It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given
time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given
search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are
included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited
resultsbut at least the price is right!

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and
always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process
up by manually submitting your site to search engines.


Submission Tools

>You may also want to use an automated site submission tool that submits your site to multiple search engines in one fell swoop.
It's quite likely that your web host provides a utility with this functionality that you can use to submit the URLs for your hosted domains to a
group of search engines.



If you search Google with a phrase like "Search Engine Submit," you'll find many free services that submit to a group of search sites for
you. Typically, these free submission sites try to up-sell or cross-sell you on a product or service, but since you don't have to buy anything,
why not take advantage of the free service? The two best-known examples of this kind of site are Submit Express ,
http://www.submitexpress.com, which will submit your URL to 40 sites for free (just be sure you pass on the various offers you'll find on the
site) and NetMechanic , http://www.netmechanic.com, another search engine submission site along the same lines.

Naming Your Site

Naming Your Site
If you haven't already picked a name for your web site, try to select a name that helps to tell your story. Good names, at least with a .com
suffix, are hard to find these days. It's worth working hard to find the right name.
The Cult of Personality
Life writ large with the cult of personality might well describe the times we live in. Paris Hilton, an heiress with an
apparently vacuous personality, has a television show, and is famous, because (and not despite) of that vacuous
personality. I think the reality is that Paris is a great deal smarter than she seemsalthough another moral you can
certainly draw from the Paris Hilton success story is that sex sells.
My point is that people, particularly celebrities, get attention these days. If you have celebrity, have access to
celebrities, or have ideas about how to create celebrity, I say: "Go for it! Milk it!" And don't forget to mention your web
site.
It's reasonable that people should be interested in people. People are interesting. As the poet Alexander Pope said a
long time ago, "The proper study of mankind is man." (If Pope had included both genders, we moderns could surely go
along with this.)
It's really very simple. Getting web site traffic requires publicity. Publicity is best generated using stories about people,
particularly interesting or notorious people. If your web site has an interesting story about people, let others know about
it (perhaps using a press release). Your people story will draw traffic.
Ideally,
a site name, as I mentioned, should tell, or evoke, the story of your site and be memorable. Consider these classics:
Amazon: the world's greatest river meets the world's largest inventory.
eBay: I don't know why this one works, but it does.
Google: a very big number fits with the very large quantity of information Google indexes.

Creating a Plan and a Story

Creating a Plan and a Story
Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting your site to a
variety of search engines. Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right
mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn't proceed online without one, either.
Having a plan will help you accomplish even mechanical steps more effectively. For example, when you submit your site to a search
engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan
will help you hone a site description.
The two most important aspects of a plan for online marketing and publicity are:
Understanding your target audience (or audiences )
Creating a story (or stories ) that will meet the needs of and intrigue your target audience

The Elevator Pitch
You should be able to summarize your story in a sentence or two. (This is sometimes called an elevator pitch .) For example,
Digital photography resources, techniques, software, equipment reviews, and photo galleries
is a story that will probably attract people interested in digital photography. On the other hand,
Ramblings of a grouchy, cranky person who, well, rambles about everything is not a targeted story likely to interest
anyone for long.


Creating a Checklist
In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specific "to do" itemsessentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity
described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and
your story.
Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a
checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.

Driving Traffic to Your Site

Optimal Include Layout
The optimal include layout is to provide includes for both geographic areas of your web page and for specific ad programs. The two should
not be the same, although one can go inside the other and (at least initially) consume all its area. If you don't follow this organizing
principle, down the roadto take one exampleyou'll find that you named the include for the entire right side of your content pages
Google_ad_right, even though it by now contains a variety of graphic elements, but no Google skyscraper.

Action Items
Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to creating content sites to make money with advertising:
Understand content categories, types of content, and why people visit content sites.
Create a plan to build community on your site.
Find a quality content source.
Design a simple site that highlights content.
Separate content from design.
Keep your content fresh.
Experiment with ad positioning.
Create a site architecture that uses includes, templates, or content management software to facilitate flexibility.

Driving Traffic to Your Site
They say (whoever "they" are) that the best things in life are free. That's certainly true when it comes to driving traffic to your web site.
You can spend a great deal of money to send traffic to your site using advertising. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use
Google's AdWords program

Even if you are using paid
advertising to draw traffic, you should know about free techniquesand you should use these techniques in conjunction with your
advertising.

This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering
with the HTML code and content of your pages themselves. In other words, this chapter explains how to drive traffic to your site using
external mechanisms, such as submitting your site to a search engine, leaving more complex issues of constructing your site so that
search engines will like ita field sometimes called search engine optimization (SEO)

Content Architecture

Content Architecture
You should think about site architecture before you create your first content page. Site architecture should be arranged so that you can
make global changes to the look and feel of a site with no impact on the content. You also want to be able to change the code for an ad
programor even swap one ad program for anotheronce and have the changes take effect across your site in all the content pages.
Server-Side Includes
The simplest mechanism for implementing a "change code in one place, change the whole site" architecture is to use server-side includes

Most web hosting accounts provide a server-side include mechanism. You tell the web server which file extensions mean that a file can
have includes. When the web server processes the file to send back to a browser for display, it looks for the special syntax that means
there is an include. When it sees this syntax, it expands the page it is serving to the browser by expanding it with the file indicated by the
include's syntax.
The default file extension for a web page is usually .shtml, although you can add other file extensions so that your web server will look
through them for includes (there is, of course, a slight performance hit for this).

For example, suppose you have a simple .shtml home page like this:

Hello!

...


You could create two include files:
styles.html , which contains CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) styles for the elements used on the site such as font size and color
top-bar.html , which contains the site navigation bar
You can link to an external CSS style sheet, or define your CSS styles in an include file. Either way, to
change styles sitewide, you just have to change the style definitions in one file.
The site home page, and every other content page on the site, includes these two files as follows:

Hello!

...


Now it's easy to change the appearance of the text on each page of the site by just making one change to styles.html. And if you need to
change the appearance of the navigation bar, you can simply make the changes to top-bar.html, and it will be replicated across the site.
There's generally no requirement that included files be named with any particular file extension; instead
of .html you can perfectly well use .foo, or anything else you'd like.

PHP Includes
If you are constructing a dynamic site using PHP

Most Linux and Apache based web hosts provide PHP scripting automatically for files named with a .php file extension. Within these files,
PHP includes work almost exactly like server-side includes.
For example, suppose you have a simple little web home page in a file named index.php:





...


If you put the CSS styles for the elements of the web site such as the appearance of web site text in a file named style.inc, it can be
included in PHP code like this:


The code for the top portion of a page, to be shared in common across the site, might be put in a file named top.inc. It could now be
inserted at the top of the body of a content page using the PHP include directive:







...


As with the server-side include example, if all the pages in a site use the PHP directives to include style.inc and top.inc, then site styles and
the top element can be changed globally just by changing the contents of these include files.
Note that you can include PHP codeincluding other PHP include directiveswithin PHP includes and that there is no requirement that
includes be named with any particular file suffix.

Positioning Ads

Positioning Ads


Studies have shown that ad positioning is crucial to content revenue generation. Positioning means the physical position of an ad on a
web page, the size of the ad, and also which page(s) on a site carries an ad.

Although there are some general guidelines for what works best with advertising positioning, it is far more art than science. You should
expect to spend a fair amount of time tweaking ad position to see what works bestanother good reason for having a site mechanism in
place that allows you to change ad settings globally by editing one include file.
Tweaking ads is good for another reason: you don't want ad fatigue to set in. Ad fatigue is a term used by webmasters to describe the
phenomenon in which visitors to your site are so used to the ad display on your site that they ignore it. Experimenting with new ad
positioning (and colors) is a good way to combat that "same old, same old" ad feeling and avoid ad fatigue.
Most studies show that ads positioned above the fold do better than ads lower on a page. Above the fold means visible without scrolling.
The smaller the monitor, and the lower its resolution, the less screen real estate there is above the fold. In other words, a monitor running
at 640 x 480 pixels screen resolution has a lot less available real estate above the fold than a monitor running at 800 x 600, which in turn
has much less area above the fold than a monitor running at higher resolution.
If you want the maximum eyeballsand you should, because more eyeballs means more advertising revenueyou should try to place ads so
that they will be above the fold on lower-resolution monitors. It certainly makes sense to target 800 x 600 monitor resolution, because this
is widely in use. Don't finalize your ad positioningand web site and page designwithout checking it out on an 800 x 600 monitor.
Some research has shown the vertical ad blocks the kind Google calls skyscrapers work better than horizontal ads . However, from the
viewpoint of basic geometry, it is easier to fit a horizontal ad block above the fold than a vertical skyscraper: the lower part of the
skyscraper is likely to be below the fold. So if you decide to go with vertical ad blocks, make sure they are positioned as high as possible
and that at least one ad (assuming the skyscraper contains multiple contextual ads) is positioned above the fold.
One other major positioning issue is context. From the viewpoint of a content publisher, you'd like to position ads so they are not only
contextually relevant but also lead to a high click-through rate.

With programs like Google's AdSense, context is important because you want a high click-through rate.
With affiliate advertising, context is even more important because you don't make any money without a
conversion, which means turning someone into a customer. You may, perhaps, care less about context
when you are paid by the impression. In that case all you really care about is that the ad gets seen on
your site.
Google's AdSense attempts to place only contextually relevant ads. With some notable lapses, AdSense is pretty successful at this. In any
case, you can't exercise a great deal of control over the ads that AdSense displays on your siteyou have to trust that Google gets this
right.

You can forbid your competitor's ads from appearing on your site by using the AdSense option that
allows you to ban specific IP addresses. The ability to ban IP addresses can be used to a limited
degree to also keep out advertisers you find offensive. For example, an animal rights information site
might want to ban ads from prominent furriers.
There are some important aspects of context that you can control, although there is no reliable analytic research about what works best.
Some sites use graphics and positioning to make contextual ads blend in with the site and appear almost part of the editorial content.
Other sites feel that keeping the appearance of editorial integrity is vitally important and so use color and position to instantly indicate that
the ads are separate from the body of the content.
Overloading pages with ads generally does not work because viewers tend to ignore pages that have too many ads. If you're working with
multiple ad programs and kinds of ads to generate a revenue stream, you can make an important contribution to ad context by deciding
what kind of ad should go with what content. For example, it might make sense to advertise books on Amazon on a page of book reviews.
There's also a school of thought that believes ads should only be placed on "boring" pagesfor example, registration pages, login pages,
resource pages, exit pages. (An exit page is a page designed to launch a visitor onward following a visit, for example, an order
confirmation.) One reason for placing click-through ads on resource and exit pages is that visitors will be leaving your site anyhow from
these pages. You won't be losing traffic by providing click-through opportunities.

The more general logic for placing ads only on boring pages is that it gives your site a clean, inviting, ad-free lookand that visitors are more
likely to click on ads in the context of boredom than in the context of exciting content.
Whatever strategy you decide to try, if you will be varying ad programs depending on context, you should attempt to implement this
programmatically rather than by manually adding and deleting advertising code from individual HTML pages.

Presenting Content

Presenting Content
Content is king. Content is certainly king if your business model is to publish content on the Web and make money from advertising with
traffic drawn by the content. Your first rule should be: Don't "dis" the king. In other words, don't do anything to distract from the content,
make it harder for surfers to find content they need, or make the graphics that frame the content too jazzy. In particular, if the graphics
seem too important, they will distract from the content.
A particularly annoying sin on content-based web sites is to use an animated splash page (Flash is the
tool usually used) to open the site.
Page and Site Design
These rules of content presentation can be put positively (rather than negatively):

It should be clear that the purpose of the site is to clearly present content.
Choose a name for the site, and titles and headers for the pages, that make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the site is to
present content, and (as a general matter) what that content is.
The design of the site should serve the purpose of presenting content.
Site design should be intended to facilitate navigation and frame the content: nothing more, and nothing less.
Specific content items and subject areas should be easy to find.
Provide multiple mechanisms for finding things: index pages, search boxes, site maps, subject areas, and so on.
Type should be legible.
Be careful to choose a readable font, in a large enough size, and background and foreground color combinations that are easy
on the eyes. It's hard to go wrong with black type on a white background. The reversewhite on blackis hard on the eyes, and
some combinations (for example, dark blue on lighter blue, are essentially unreadable).
Keep graphics simple.

As it happens, following the rules of content presentation I've outlined will serve you well with search engine placement.
But that's not the point of these suggestions here. The point is usefulness and transparency to site users. If viable content is presented in
an accessible fashion, then indeed "they will come."

If you are targeting your content specifically for Google's AdSense program (or a competitive contextual engine), you should also bear in
mind the following:
AdSense can't interpret images (except using captions, the value of alt attributed in the tag, and surrounding text), so keep
images to a minimum.
You are likely to get more relevant ads if you keep each page to a single subject (and move tangential subject matters to
different pages).

Key concepts, words, and phrases should be clear by glancing at a page (see Chapter 3 for information about how to use these
keywords and phrases to optimize your pages for AdSense, Google, and other search engines).
1.4.2. Page Size
How much content should go on each site page? Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the answer is not too much, and not too little: just
the right amount of content.
It's in the interest of the site publisher to keep pages short, because the same amount of content spread over shorter pages makes for
more pages. And more pages on a site means more places for advertising, which in theory might mean more revenue.
In addition, more pages may mean more page views, implying better metrics to advertisers who don't
look too carefully.
However, if you break an article up into many short pages that a user has to click through, users will find it irritating and vote with their time
by frequenting the site less often.

The happy medium is to be natural about page length. The natural length for a content page is the content that will reasonably fit into a
maximized browser window without having to scroll.
Obviously, this is a rough, rather than precise, guideline since different browsers on different systems
will show different size pages.
Don't gratuitously break an article into multiple pages unless the article really is longer than a few browser-sized pages. Also, don't break
an article (even if it is long) unless there are natural breaks in the content. Anytime there is a new Level 1 header in an article, it's a good
sign that you could break to a new content page without the break feeling forced.
A related issue is to be careful about the width of your content pages. People will be looking at your web pages using a variety of
hardware, operating systems, and browsersthe most important variable being the monitor size. You don't want your readers to have to
scroll to the right because part of a content web page is off the screen. This is very bad form and may also obscure content advertising if it
is positioned along the right border of the page.
The answer is to design pages for lowest-common-denominator displays. In practice, content pages should be no wider than 800 pixels.
Pages 800 pixels wide (or less) should display without scrolling on most (although not all) computers; some displays are still only 640
pixels wide.

Separating Content from Design
When you create content web sites, it's imperative to use mechanisms that separate web page content from design. The purpose of
separating content from design is to let you:
Easily change the look and feel of a site without the change in overall site design having any impact on the content
Tweak positioning and other ad-related variables to maximize revenue without having any effect on site content
The simplest way to achieve these goals is to use includes server-side includes to position site graphics such as navigation bars. A
server-side include is a file that the server includes within another file (the inclusion is specified by a special directive). When you view the
HTML source code in a browser, you have no way of telling whether the main file was generated using includes or not.
Includes can also be used for advertisement code, such as that provided by Google's AdSense. By changing the code in a single include,
you can change the navigation bar or advertising parameters across all the content pages on an entire site.

Sitewide Changes to Styles
It's somewhat less important than the ability to easily do sitewide changes of advertisements and site graphics such as
navigation bars, but it's still nice to be able to perform sitewide changes of text styles. It is less important because leaving
everything as reasonably sized black text on a white background is usually just fine.
Style attributes can be set using a server-side include. Each content page then includes the include file, which contains
the styles for the content. Text styles can be changed on a global basis simply by changing the definitions of the styles
within the include file.
Another simple mechanism for doing sitewide font and font-size changes is to use an external style sheet to define the
fonts and sizes to use with various types of text (each content page references the style sheet). To effect a global
change, simply change the style definitions in the external style sheet.
Server-side includes work well to separate key design elements (and advertisements) from content, provided your content site doesn't
have too many pages and assuming that each page doesn't have a great many repetitive elements.
If many of your content pages are essentially the samemeaning they have the same elements but the value of the element differs from
page to pageyou should probably be using a templating system. Templates use special tags for the common elements, with the actual
content for each page that replaces the special tag specified, often using content stored in a database table. This means that an
appropriately written template file and one or more database tables can populate and create a whole raft of web pages, one for each row
in the table.
PHP is one of the most popular server-side programming languages available on the Web (most inexpensive Linux/Apache web host
services let you program in PHP without any additional configuration effort). You can find out more about PHP at http://www.php.net .

If you are a programmer, or have access to programming talent, you can create your own templating system using PHP or some other
language. But why reinvent the wheel? A popular PHP templating system, available for free download, is Smarty , http://smarty.php.net.
One of the great features about Smarty is that it caches a web page the first time it is generated from a template. Subsequent calls to the
page, unless the template or data have changed, open the cached pagemeaning the web site isn't slowed down by page generation each
time the templated page is opened.
A server-side include mechanism is a great start for creating a manageable content site andfrom a technology standpointwithin the grasp
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to regis.ter it. Thanks
of almost anyone.

Templating is a good next step if you (or an associate) have the technologic sophistication and expect to be managing content sites with
thousands of pages. It's particularly important to use a system of templates if you expect to generate pages using data from a database.
Suppose you are managing a site with not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of pages. You have multiple authors, a team of editors,
and a workflow process to make sure that work is fact-checked, copyedited, and approved before it is published. In this case, you'll want
to use Web Content Management software (WCM) to provide content and design separation, template features, workflow management,
and more. Commercial WCM packages are available from vendors including IBM, FileNet, Interwoven, Microsoft, Stellent, and Vignette.
Not everyone recognizes that, in fact, blogging software such as MovableType and WordPress in effect
manages web content using special tags and a template system. You can use WordPress, in particular,
to manage pages that are not part of a blog. So if it's appropriate for your particular project, consider
creating a "Blogosite"a content web site managed by blogging software such as WordPress.
No matter what mechanism you use, it is vitally important to separate form from content so that you can easily keep your site design fresh
and tweak advertising positions.

Keeping Content Fresh
Have you ever tried to keep fresh-caught fish fresh? It isn't easy. Neither is keeping site content fresh. But sites, and their content, need to
stay fresh. It's not a big deal to change the overall look of a site by changing the graphic used as a navigation bar every month or sothat is,
if you've set the site up with server-side includes so that editing one file creates a global site change. But keeping content fresh is a trickier
issue.
Since search engines appreciate new content, some sites go to great lengths to provide content that appears new, for example, by
displaying syndication feeds on the site's home page. This may help with search engines (I have more to say on this point in Chapter 3),
but it doesn't do much at all for your primary audiencereal people.
Quality content sites need to strike a balance. You need to have a core of worthwhile reference material that doesn't change much. You
also need to keep content site fresh. As you plan your successful site, you should consider what strategy you will use to keep people
coming back for the latest and greatest. For example, do you plan to keep up with the latest events in a technology niche, such as a
programming language? Will you feature articles about current cultural events (which are constantly changing by definition)? Or will your
site present interesting blogs with frequently added entries?

How much Content Is Enough?

How Much Content Is Enough?
Suppose you create one web page every hundred days that generates $100 in ad revenue. Alternatively, you create a page a day for
100 days. Each page generates $1.00 in ad revenue. Either way, you end up with $100.00 at the end of 100 days.
The point is that there are different ways to go about deciding how much content to createit significantly depends upon the quality of the
content. A single content page might make sense if it contained a valuable application like TinyURL .
If your pages are low-value content, you will need a great many of them to make significant revenue
from advertising.
Web Site Metrics
The metrics of web site traffic is a huge topic just by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics and quite a
bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. It's a very
important topic, because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so you can
understand whether changes improve site traffic, or not and also which elements in your site draw traffic.
The topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend upon the metric of
your site.

Of course, your web server's logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can help provide you with useful metrics.
But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from fees paid by advertisersthrough the AdSense
program or some other mechanismfor publication on your site.
For further information about metrics, I suggest you start with Jim Sterne's Web Metrics: Proven Methods for
Measuring Web Site Success (Wiley) and then have a look at the "Tracking and Logging" thread on WebMasterWorld,
http://www.webmasterworld.com.
Between the two extremesa single page of valuable content and many pages of low-value contentlies a happy medium that will work for
most content-based sites by creating enough critical mass to draw both traffic and advertisers. If you are just starting out, this happy
medium is a goal to which you can reasonably aspire.
Here's what you need at a minimum to have a site drawing respectable numbers at the end of one year:
100 pages of quality content "in the can" to start with
On average, one new page of quality content a day every day for a year (each page about 300 words)

"26 Steps to 15K a Day" in O'Reilly's Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest provides
a step-by-step formula for creating a successful content site and drawing traffic

Popular Sites: Using Alexa

Popular Sites: Using Alexa
I've already mentioned Google as an example of a site with broad traffic. There are, of course, many others. If you are curious, you can go
to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, which monitors both how much traffic a site gets and the relative increase (or decrease) in site popularity.
Where Does Content Come From?
No, content doesn't grow on trees. Content is a valuable commodityand perhaps more than a commodity. Great content
is wonderful and unique, and not fungible.
Communities can supply a great deal of content if you have an idea for a good framework that will entice contributions
about specific subjects.
If you are a writer, you can create content yourself. (Maybe this is the time for your inner writer to finally come out!)
Site owners can hire writers, either as employees or freelancers, or with a profit-sharing arrangement.
You can often pick up the rights to publish material on the Web that was originally created for a book, magazine, or
newspaper very inexpensively. Content creators may be placed to let you use their content simply in exchange for
publicityin the form of an author credit as an expert and/or a link.
You also might check out book and literary agencies. Some of them run a sideline business supplying aggregated
recycled content and represent whole groups of writers.
So even if you aren't confident that you can personally create valuable content, don't despair: there are many
inexpensive ways to publish valuable content without writing it yourself.
Don't underestimate the value of resource pages as content. A simple page of links to sites related to a specific subject
(for example, sites of interest to collectors of antique typewriters and calculators) may draw traffic if the links are
accurately described, kept up-to-date, and expanded when new relevant sites are opened.

---

On the Alexa site, click on the Top 500 Sites tab to see an ordered list of the most highly trafficked sites, updated daily. The most trafficked
sites according to Alexa.
Alexa's Movers and Shakers, is also interesting. This snapshot of the "right here and now" Web is useful for seeing if
there are any Web-wide trends in action, and also for learning about the kinds of exogenous events that move large-scale web sites up
and down the chutes and ladders of popularity.
Although it is probably unrealistic to expect that you or I will be piloting sites that are the top of Alexa's list, it is worth spending time

learning about popularity on the Web if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to see for yourself what is
trafficked and what is gaining or losing among top-ranked sites.

You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa
will give you an idea of traffic statistics and whether it is gaining or losing traffic.
Alexa lets you enter descriptive information about your web site, which others can see if they check
your site traffic using Alexa. You can also make sure that Alexa provides a snapshot of your home
page along with it statistics. Since this service is free, it is certainly worth entering a site description.
Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar. (If you'd like, you too can
install the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics.) There's some question about the statistical validity of Alexa for less trafficked
sites because of this method of gathering dataAlexa's results are probably skewed towards users who are already web savvy and heavy
users.
Most likely, Alexa's results are not very meaningful for sites that are ranked below 100,000 in popularity (very roughly, with fewer than 10,000 visitors per week).

---

The Alexa ranking of 100,000 or lower is also a great divide: if your site is in the top 100,000 you have content that many advertisers will
consider worthwhile. Being in the top Alexa is a pretty good goal for your web site or sites: you can make real money from a top 100,000
site; it is an ambitious goal, but attainable.

---

Great Communities

Great Communities
Community has made eBay great: essentially all the content comes from users of the eBay auction system. Amazon makes extensive
use of community to fill out its content with reviews of books and other products.
Even if your site is essentially not a community site, you can use contributions from visitors to extend and round out your own content.
Successful examples include comments on blogs and reader reviews on a site. Another idea for obtaining content that some
webmasters have used successfully is to run contests ("Best story in pictures and words about a diving trip" for a scuba diving site is one
example).
Mechanisms you can use to build community on a site include providing:
Message boards
Chatrooms
Calendars with information about events in a specific field
Instant messaging applications
Reader reviews
Blog comments and trackbacks
You probably wouldn't want to program an application that enabled much of this community functionality from the ground up, but the fact
is that your web host may provide this software for free, versions may be available from the open source community that are also free, or
you may be able to inexpensively outsource the application.
If you are hosting your own blog with standard software like MovableType or WordPress, the
software will give you the ability to enable comments and trackbacks out of the box.

E-Commerce Sites:

E-Commerce Sites:
Many of the most successful web businesses make their money as e-commerce sites : by selling goods or services. Advertising on
these sites is a by-product (you might say, a product by-product). To name just a few examples:
Amazon.com is the department store of the Web, selling, either on its own account or for affiliates, everything you can
imagine.
eBay is the world's greatest flea market and auction community, with a great business model since it doesn't need to take an
inventory position in the items sold on its site.
ETrade , Schwab , and other online trading and investing sites are among the greatest revenue generators on the Web.
Gambling sites successfully part "players" from their funds.
The only thing these sites really have in common is that they make money by selling something and that they draw traffic (in some
cases, such as eBay and Amazon, lots and lots of traffic).
Making money from advertising is not really the business of this kind of site. These sites are big businesses and are likely to be
advertisers on other sites themselves. In fact, if you work on behalf of a large e-commerce site, you may be interested in using the
AdWords APIs to create custom advertising applications as explained in Part IV of this book.
Still, it's natural to look for additional revenue sources, and many e-commerce sites do sell advertising, although they all try toor should
try totake care not to let the advertising interfere with their primary goalselling products or services onlineor with their brand. For
example, you can buy placement for a book or other product on Amazon. These ads show up as similar items when you are checking out
(or considering a purchase). It works pretty similarly on eBay. You can purchase contextual advertising on eBay, but only for your
products or "store" on eBay itself.
E-commerce sites besides Amazon and eBay may sell ads based on impressions (also called CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, advertising)
such as banners used for branding purposes. They are very unlikely to sell ads on a pay-for-click basis (also called CPC, which stands
for Cost Per Click) because they want to keep traffic on their sites. Even CPM ads intended for branding purposes will be scrutinized
carefully to make sure that the branding message is in keeping with the goal of the e-commerce site.

Great Communities

From its very earliest beginnings, the Web has largely been about community. From a practical standpoint, involving a worthwhile
community is a great way to create content. You don't need to create the content yourself: your users do, for example by contributing to
discussion threads or by making syndication feeds available.
Site owners can use community to leverage their content and to create sites that are valuable to users because of the involvement of the
community.

If your site is extended by community members (for example, through a discussion thread), you
may have little control over the quality of the content. As an advertising venue, this content may
not be worth that much. But even if it is only worth pennies a day in advertising revenue, the
content generation is on autopilotit is expanding, changing, and staying relevant on its own. So you
may still be making a good return on your effort.

Magazines&Blogosphere and much!!

Magazines and Newspapers
The business of Salon , http://www.salon.com, is to provide informed editorial content. This business is profitable because of the
advertising that appears on the Salon site. The business model of Salon, and other online magazines , is pretty much like that of a
brick-and-mortar newspaper or magazine: subsidize the distribution of your articles and editorials, and make your revenue with
sponsored ads. This works pretty well on the Web, even though it is essentially old-fashioned.
Although it is harder to get subscription revenue for content on the Web than off-Web, profit margins for online advertising are higher,
and ads can be more reliably targeted to the context of the content. (This last point is important, because it is the unique selling
proposition for web advertising as opposed to advertising in other mediums.)
Opinions differ at even the most successful online venues whether charging a subscription fee for access to content makes sense, or not.
(This is a debate that is almost as old as the Web, and yet to be fully resolved.)
For example, the Wall Street Journal does, but the New York Times does not charge for most access. The New York Times online site has
a far greater revenue base from online advertising and certain pay-for-access premium services than the Wall Street Journal with its
entirely subscription-based model. Probably either model can work. But at this point, the advertising model seems to be winning the
race.



The Blogosphere

You probably read one or more blogs , at least from time to time. A blog, also called a weblog or web log, is a diary of entries, usually
presented on the Web in reverse chronological order. You may even write your own blog. The subject matter of blogs varies wildly, from
general rants and raves, to blogs about relationships, to blogs more-or-less devoted to specific technologies, such as my Googleplex
Blog (when I don't get too carried away with tangents, my blog is about Google's technology, searching, and research on the Web).
If you think that blogs about a specific subject are an ideal (although narrow) venue for targeted advertising content, you are quite right.
Unlike opinion sites that are basically online magazines, blogs are a specifically web phenomenon (sometimes collectively referred to as
the blogosphere ). A variety of software mechanismssuch as the ability to automatically collect trackback links in a blog entry, meaning
links to sites or blogs that discuss the original entrymake blogging an extremely effective and versatile mechanism for publishing content
on the Web. Syndication built into most blog content management software such as MovableType or WordPress allows easy
distribution of the content.
All is not perfect in paradise, though, and there are some problems with blogging as a vehicle for making money from your content. First,
there are so many blogs. It's easy to create a blog using hosted services such as Google's Blogger or Six Apart Software 's community
sites TypePad and LiveJournal. (Six Apart is the publisher of MovableType blogging software.)
But it's hard to stand out from the mass of blogs and generate notice and traffic. See Chapter 2 for some ideas about how to drive traffic to a blog and Chapter 10 for information about how to purchase traffic for a blog using Google's AdWords contextual advertising program.
Next, the fact that blogs are essentially unvetted and unedited makes some advertisers leery about placing ads on these sites. If you do
expect to make money from advertising on your blog, it's a good idea to be careful with spelling, punctuation, and the overall
presentation issues involved with writing.
Finally, most bloggers use hosted blogging services such as Blogger, so they don't have to worry about configuring or maintaining their
own blogging software. Installing software like MovableType is tricky enough that Six Apart, the company that wrote the software, will get
it going for you on your own web serverfor a fee.
But the problem with having a hosted blog is that generally it's not up to you to place advertising on it. If there is contextual advertising,
the revenue may go to the blog host. So if you plan to make money from blogging content, you need to either set up your own blogging
server software or work with a specialized web hosting organization that handles the technical end of things but still lets you profit from
advertising.
The problem of losing control of the revenue potential of hosted sites can be presented in contexts
other than blogging. For example, many smaller e-commerce web sites outsource order
processing and shopping cart functionality. This often makes practical sense, but may mean that
these pages are no longer available for advertisingor that the advertising and profits are controlled
by the host rather than you.
1.1.5. Practical Information: Content Sites and Niches
The O'Reilly site (http://www.oreilly.com) provides a great deal of practical information, such as code from the O'Reilly books. O'Reilly is
also a source of (usually) well-informed opinions, mostly about topics related to technology: for example, the O'Reilly author blogs,
articles, and other quality content.
Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations,
and much more. These content niches are probably the most dependable road to advertising riches on the Web.
Niches don't necessarily have to be big niches. For example, my site Mechanista , http://www.mechanista.com, features antique
machinery such as typewriters and adding machines. Mechanista makes slow but steady AdSense revenue (from companies selling
things like typewriter ribbons).
Don't forget the old saw that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Sites that feature a niche that is of
interest only to a small group of people (but very interesting to those people) are likely to achieve high search engine rankings for the
relevant terms, draw traffic through the search engines, and become well known among aficionados of the niche.
If you are the publisher of this kind of niche site, you may not get rich off contextual advertising (you simply cannot draw the eyeballs
necessary for getting rich), but you are likely to make a nice revenue return in relation to the effort involved.

Useful Free Services and Software

Useful Free Services and Software
TinyURL , http://tinyurl.com, provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor
example, like those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in
HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). Astoundingly, this service is free. Last time I looked, TinyURL had more than 185 million
hits a month. Talk about traffic!
In part, a service like TinyURL works to generate ad revenue because it is so targeted. If you go to the site, you'll find Google AdSense
content ads for things like DNS (Domain Name Server) services and software that fixes technology problems with browsers. In other
words, technology that addresses the problems of reasonably savvy web users is likely to be contextually relevant to the concerns of
visitors to TinyURL. Enough users click these ads to more than justify the startup cost and ongoing costs of maintaining the URL
conversion service.
It's splitting hairs to try to decide whether sites that provide access to free downloadable software are providing a service or information.
Whatever the case, a site that provides information, links, resources, and downloadable software covering a particular technology can
draw a great deal of traffic.
For example, if you want to learn about RSS and Atom syndication softwaretools for reading and writing feedsand to download this
software (and find easy one-stop links for the location of the download sites), a good site to visit is the RSS Compendium ,
http://allrss.com. Because of their usefulness, one-stop technology sites such as RSS Compendium (whether or not they provide access
to downloads) can draw considerable traffic and content-based ad revenue.
If you are going to publish a site whose main draw is access to software, and then make money off the site with content advertising, it is
worth bearing in mind that software that runs on the Web typically generates multiple page views for a single user running the software.
(In other words, the user spends time on the web site.) This makes it better for the purpose of generating content revenue than a site
that merely publishes information about software with download links.


In my opinion, downloaded software that hosts advertising using an Internet connection is a
heinous way for vendors of software running on local operating systems to monetize their
softwareat least it's a step above installing spyware for a living.

The Taxonomy of Success&Funny Web Destinations

The Taxonomy of Success
There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial
opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one)
of the following categories:

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The site is humorous and makes visitors laugh.
The site provides a useful free service.
The site is an online magazine or newspaper.
The site provides opinions in the form of a blog or blogs.
The site provides practical information.
The site sells a popular product or service.
The site services a community and provides communication tools for that community.
The only thing these kinds of sites have in commonand there are undoubtedly other ways successful sites can be categorizedis that they
draw traffic (either focused or broad). Therefore, they are good sites and are excellent venues for web advertising. In short, they use web
content to make moneyand making money with your web site content is the topic of the first part of this book (and likely a subject you
care about!).

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Funny Web Destinations

Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a
humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that
compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from
view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number
of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but
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when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody
sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are
static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to
make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.

Build It They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites

Build It and They Will Come: Creating
Popular Web Sites
"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is
occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site,
no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this
chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably
promoted).
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use
Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused
traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it
draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And
all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.
To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or
targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you
publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you
can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.