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.
- 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.
- Make sure that the <h#></h#> tags match some keywords in the html meta data.
- Don’t use extra keywords or lengthy meta data.
- 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.
