Learning SEO

Learning how to increase traffic to a website is a bear. I am not a detail person so having to involve myself in this is testing all of my weaknesses. But persist I must in order to achieve my overall goal of sufficient traffic to generate $250/day in total. That goal is high, but not unreasonably high. I simply have to work hard and long enough to figure this aspect of the business out. But it's no fun, I assure you.

I considered hiring someone to do this, but there are so many scam artists in this particular field that I don't dare try to figure out who is good and honest, and who is not. A friend of mine got taken for over $3000 by a group in Utah who took his money, but didn't deliver on the promise. Hiding behind the cloak of anonymity there are too many who are willing to lie, cheat, and even steal if they can get away with it. So I'm left with figuring it out on my own.

Holding Pattern Continues

I have been researching how websites that generate income are structured. From it I've learned that my websites to date are not structured correctly. I have no intention of going back and remaking them since they are working and generating a little income, although the emphasis should be on the word little. So far it is my blogs that generate the most traffic and the most ad revenue. The biggest payday however has been with my non-blog websites where someone actually purchased something I recommended! That payday was nearly $30!

The blogs generate click-through income from Google AdWords. So are that income has risen to nearly $1! I still am stuck with the same problem - learn SEO! Once I get a chance next week (I am on the road in St. Louis) I will have to tackle this problem. It sounds so tedious and I am not good at tedious tasks. I'm going to have to get over it or this project will be on the ropes. Suck it up big boy!

In summary this is my plan as of now:

1. Learn/do SEO for existing websites
2. Continue to develop an audience for the blogs
3. Go about website development differently - starting with the health and wellness sites
4. Sign up with AWeber when I'm ready to build the new websites
5. Build the health and wellness websites differently than I've built the security/IT ones.

Search Engine Optimization

Yesterday and today I am devoting my time to doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). First I have to learn about it.

I start by making sure that each page has a unique title, meta description, and meta keywords. I then create a sitemap to submit to Google, a URL file to submit to Yahoo!, and a robots.txt file to guide the crawlers through my site. Lastly I submit the site to Google and Yahoo! and wait!

Although I am certain that what I am doing could be improved, it should at least start the process of turning these sites into income producing sites. My efforts so far have been on creating valuable content that is easy to understand. Now we present it to the world!

I still have over a dozen website in my plans to make. From here on out I will do a complete website, top to bottom. With the first half dozen or so, I decided to break development out into phases so that I could learn all of the different aspects. By the end of today I will know enough (I think) to put it all together.