for keeping track of my digital experiments

Today’s installment of howtos by Jason, I will discuss generating enough money from your websites, so that they finance themselves, and later on provide you some extra income. I will be covering the various means of getting people to come to your website, search engine optimization and placement, advertisers, and bandwidth requirements.

I suggest adding your website to the big four web indexes: Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask. Each one has a different way of site submission. With Yahoo, just go to their site submission page and enter in the neccessary details. Live works much the same way with their url submission. Google recently added a site submission page, but also offers many tools within their Google Accounts that are much more useful for webmasters. If you have a Google Account or would like much more details and control over how Google indexes your site, use the webmaster tools provided through a Google Account. Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) has one of the most ancient site submission methods. They require you to have a robots.txt file, and enter your sitemap(.xml file) via a GET Request. Wha ….. no UI?!?

A quick and painless single paragraph tutorial on how to optimize your pages for search engines, and get better search engine rankings.

1. Always fill in the header meta data for title, author, keywords, and description completely. Make sure that the meta data matches in to the content in the body element.
2. Make sure that the <h#></h#> tags match some keywords in the html meta data.
3. Don’t use extra keywords or lengthy meta data.
4. Get other websites to link to your site. Make sure that these back links are relevant to your content.

Now to money making schemes, muhaha. For those of you starting off with pay-per-click ads, I suggest Google Adsense. Google provides many help and optimization pointers for your site to earn more money. It is only natural for them to do this because, they get a chunk of your advertising yields.

For more information on site design and Google Adsense you can check out a series of tutorials on the subject from HyperVRE (Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Once your site starts to move up in various search engine page rankings, earning you more hits per day, you can start contracting directly with advertisers and pay-per-click link exchangers.

If you are just starting out with a HTML site and a few images and sounds, you will definitely be under 1GB of traffic a month (probably closer to 500MB). As you add more media content to your site and have more visitors you should expect an increase in bandwidth a month. Bandwidth in this case, is the amount of data transferred (in one month). Most hosting providers measure it this way. Here is an easy to use website bandwidth calculator.

Yesterday Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Vista. I have not yet noticed anything substantially different, but then I haven’t pushed my laptop too far into unclaimed territory. It is quite probable that I have staved off a few more blue screens by no longer using iTunes. Instead I use WinAMP. The only reason that I had used iTunes in the first place was because I had an iPod. Since version 5.2 or so, WinAMP has built in support for iPods and other portables. The only problem I have had in the past few days was the descion to wipe my hard-drive and start anew, after erasing the other hard-drive copy of my music. I lost 5GBs. Ah well I guess it was just time to start over again.

In this edition of howto’s by Jason, I will be covering how to buy, setup, and manage your domain. For this tutorial I will be using zoneedit.com which is a free DNS (Domain Name System) hosting provider. DNS is the internet’s way of matching a name to an IP Address. For example you wouldn’t want to remember Google’s plethora of server IP Addresses. You don’t necessarily have to use zoneedit.com, but I have found that they provide a few more key features that I enjoy the benefits of, and have lower latency than XName or FreeDNS.

Before buying a domain, I suggest that you have all your web content ready to go, your DNS hosting up, and your hosting situation ready, so that you don’t waste any of your money with empty domain pages. To “have” your own domain name, you will first have to find out if it is available to be “bought” from a domain registrar. So go to your domain registrar of choice. Much like going bargain hunting on EBay or at a flea market, I suggest shopping around for the registrar with the lowest prices for the type of TLD (top level domain, ex: .com, .net, .org, .biz, .ws) or ccTLD (country code top level domain, ex: .de – Germany, .cn – China, .hk – Hong Kong, .mx – Mexico, .us – U.S.A.) you want to purchase the rights to. I have found that name.com and dynadot have the best prices over longer term periods, they also allow you to pay by PayPal. GoDaddy sometimes has one year term contracts that are pretty sheik. Let me know if you find any great deals. ;-]

Once you have purchased your domain you need to set-up your DNS server addresses.

As you can see from the two screen shots, I use both Zoneedit.com and secondary name servers provided by the Roller Network. A secondary DNS server allows for traffic load-balancing, and also backup if the primary DNS servers were to fail. Secondary DNS servers query the primary DNS servers on set intervals for updated DNS data. Keep reading to find out how to get your DNS server addresses to put in and how to manage your DNS zone (your domain).

I will be showing you how to set-up your own free DNS server account on zoneedit.com, so if you aren’t already there head over to www.zoneedit.com in your browser. You will first need to sign up for an account, so hit the “secure sign up” link at the bottom of the page. Fill in all your contact information completely. Yes, they do make good on their word about no spam. So go through the typical confirmation shiznat that gets sent to your email address. Once your account is all set up, hit the “secure login” link that is right beside the “secure sign up” link you clicked earlier. Type in your account username and password. In case your are not presented with a page link the below, hit the Add Zone link on the left menu column.

Punch in the domain name you purchased earlier where it says “Enter Domain Name”, ignore all the crap below the button that says “Add Zone”. Press the “Add Zone” button once you have finished typing in your domain name.

You should then get something that looks like the following, stating that you can’t edit that domain yet.

If you recall we were talking about the DNS server address that should be entered into the domain registrar’s DNS management table. The two DNS server host names that Zoneedit just pumped out are what you plug in to the domain registrar’s DNS entries for your domain.

Once you add in the DNS server addresses to your domain registrar where you bought your domain from, it might take awhile for Zoneedit to recognize the update. In the meantime, it is time to add in the IP Address of your content server (the server you have already set up your domain on. So click on the edit zone link, and then after that there should be a link that says “IP addresses (A)” at the top of the page, click on it. Then enter in the ip address of your content server. Like I have done below.

Click the “Add New IP Address” button. Which should lead you to the following screen.

Click the upper “Yes” button to set this IP Address to handle requests from both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. After the required processing takes place you will find that a new page comes up with both yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com filled in with the IP Address that you entered.

If all is set up properly you should start being able to access the content that resides on your web server. If you want to continue on and add in email capabilities for your domain click on the “Mail Servers (MX)” link to add in email servers. In some cases it is the same IP Address as your web server. Google offers free email and web hosting through Google Apps (below). It provides a completely web based administration, for those of you who don’t want to get down and dirty with Linux/Unix console administration.