A Theme-Based Website, Part 5- Promoting The Site Written by Julie Georg
All right, we're going to wrap this up. I now have a terrific theme-based site, jam-paked with high value content and built to feed those search engine spiders. However, my site is going to just sit in web space if I don't do some work to promote it. Fortunately, I'm well prepared. My site is optimized for listing with search engines. I have hundreds of keywords to use for Pay-per- Click engines and my content is theme-focused and OVER- delivers so directories should have no problem listing my site. Let's take these one at a time.Search Engines: The most important thing I need to do is submit my pages to major search engines. They will deliver, by far, most traffic to my site. I'll submit to AltaVista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Lycos and NorthernLight. Each has it's own policies, which I need to be sure to follow. Then I'll check my site's log files, to see which of their spiders have visited, and which pages they took back to engine. If I don't see an engine's spider within a certain amount of time after submitting, I'll resubmit, according to each engine's acceptable limits. Next, I'll watch for when each of my pages has been indexed (listed by engine). All this takes a lot of effort and time, so I might consider a service like Position Agent ... http://www.positionagent.com , although it's not cheap and not all engines are covered. Or I could try AgentWebRankingSuite... http://www.aadsoft.com/agentwebranking/ranks.htm , which is free and runs on my computer. Or, if I've built my site with SiteBuildIt!... http://buildit.sitesell.com/assist3.html , it will do all submitting, spider-spotting, index-checking and rank- tracking for me. I'll use this information to tweak my pages. I may adjust lower ranking pages to be more like higher ranking ones. I'll probably experiment a bit with changing keywords in META tags or playing with keyword density, maybe increasing or decreasing content. It's tedious, but I know that engines will deliver most traffic to my site. I'll tweak until at least half my pages are in top ten on half engines. Any more tweaking after that is probably pointless because engines will occationally change their ranking formulas and things will move around, usually evening out in long run. I'm better off adding more high-value content pages to my site than continually tweaking.
| | A Theme-Based Website, Part 1- What Is It?Written by Julie Georg
What is a theme-based website? The wave of future. The best way to please increasingly savvy visitors AND search engines. A theme-based website is a site that is based on one specific theme or concept. Every page of site focuses on a single topic that is related to that theme. For example, if my theme is Italian cooking, topical pages could include Italian chefs, Italian ingredients, Italian cooking methods, Italian cookware, etc. Such a site could easily grow to a hundred pages, each of which focuses on a different topic, all of which are related to my theme.Why would I want a theme-based site? A theme-based content site is a great vehicle for earning income as an affiliate. How? Traffic: Each topical page is a "keyword focused" content page. In other words, I build content of each page based on one of hundreds of keywords that someone might use to search for information related to my theme. Taken all together, my tightly focused, themed site scores well at engines for hundreds of related terms. And we all know what that means - lots and lots of highly targeted traffic! Presell: Each topical page is full of valuable content. This content is used to PRESELL(we all know importance of preselling, right?!). My visitors are not searching for sales copy. They are searching for information. I need to deliver. Using my Italian cooking example, my page based on keyword "Italian chefs" could offer brief biographies of top Italian chefs. I could then recommend books by or about these chefs, providing an in-text link to a book seller. What else? I could write(or find) articles about olive oil, Italian ceramic cooking pots, Chianti region, etc. And as a good affiliate, I provide in-text links to merchants selling Italian cookware, imported foods and wines, cooking lessons in Tuscany(!), etc, etc. Think of potential. Consider advantages theme-based website has over mini-sites, which some affiliates use to try to promote an affiliate program. They may seem easy and cheap, but mini-sites are not built to do well at search engines and rarely get a directory listing - two places my visitors are most likely to look for me! Where they WILL find my theme-based site. Also, mini-sites are typically made up of just sales copy. I know my visitors do not want to be sold. My theme-based site GIVES my visitors valuable content while preselling. Lastly, a mini-site is pitching one product. If a visitor doesn't want that particular product they're gone. My site, however, offers multiple products or services, any one of which my visitor may be interested in.
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