I have been studying a bit about SEO and recently added an article called HTML Semantics and SEO to my site Selling on your Website. I was going through my Google WebMaster Tools checking for any problems that Google  had found. I need to pay more attention to webmaster tools. There is a lot of information there. Back to the story, the webmaster tools told me that I was in the 24th position for the search for html semantics. There is a link that performs the search for your term so I checked it out. The search result opened and I went to page three (result 21-30). I looked over the page and did not see my article, so I went on to the next page. There was still no sign of the article. Not really expecting to find anything I checked page two. There was my page listed number two on the second  page of results.

My project yesterday was to do some minor touch-ups to Mixing Live Sound and Symmetrical Backgrounds, two of my sites that do see some visitors. I thought that they were going to be minor tweaks, at least. They both consumed far more time than I had anticipated.

The smaller job turned  out to be the Mixing Live site. I did find that I needed to make more adjustments than I had anticipated, but it was a relatively smooth ride. I must remind myself to actually visit some of the sites from time to time to see how they are actually working for my virtual world visitors. This all started out because I wanted to put a ‘book of the day’ rotator on the site. When I was checking that the new rotator was working I found some other things that were broken, so I fixed those as well. I think that the site is in good health now, but you can check and tell me if you find something that does not work.

With Symmetrical Backgrounds I decided to add an explanation of how to view the actual pages to the home page to try to engage more of my visitors. While the same instruction is repeated on the thumbnail pages it may be below the fold for most visitors. I decided to put it up front where more may notice it. I did that  and then I made another adjustment  that often helps with older IE browsers. This broke all the gallery pages. I loaded all of the gallery pages (around 560) into the text editor about three times to do find and replace searches. I uploaded the pages after each operation and then found other things that were broken. I also had a few pages that had plain vanilla backgrounds, this on a background image site, so I corrected those. Then there were several nav problems to work on. I think that I finally got it all squared away, but, as with Mixing Live,  you can check it out and tell me if you find something that I have missed.

I have figured out the plan for the Here’s Our Site family. I will offer to share revenue by giving people an ad block on their pages. I will give them space in the right column. This space is reported to work well with blog spaces and should work well for these sites as well. This, along with a site rebuild, may entice more people to take advantage of the offers there. I do get several visitors a month to this site and I think that the idea has potential, but it has never realized the potential as I expected. Of course, if too many people take me up on the offer I will have to work out some sort of automated system to put up the sites, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. The Google calendars and comment systems should do a lot for these sites. This will be the first major update to these sites since I put them up over a year and a half ago.

Well, off to another battle!

I did a few further tweaks to the World SoapBox site last evening. I had recently added comment boxes to the rant pages. I worked on site navigation a bit more last evening. I will soon break the Navigation down further by category and by author. I will probably change some of the color scheme as well. I want to make it look a little more serious. I do need rants for the site. There are a couple of categories that are completely unpopulated at the present time, and all categories need more rants. Please submit a rant at your earliest convenience!

I am thinking that this site may also be a good place to host a forum. The comment boxes allow for comments on the articles, but a forum would promote discussion on the various topics of the articles. Do you think that a forum on the World SoapBox site would be a good thing? Leave me a comment on this blog. Thanks!

The sub-domain site, Make Money, is open for business. This site, like a few earlier attempts, is a purely commercial site. The site deals with information products primarily from ClickBank, although there will be some related products offered as well. Of course, there can be no sales without traffic so I will attempt to build some traffic to this site.

There is a downside to using a sub-domain. It is harder to promote and, being a new entity on the web, will take some time to get working. I did put up a blog and blogs tend to get indexed relatively rapidly. I am trying to pay attention to the things that I have been learning about SEO with this site.

There are around five million searches on the web for ‘make money’ per month. But then ranking for such a broad term may be impossible. I will use longer tail names for the pages that I put up. I may need to buy a few dot info domains to point at various sections of this site. It would  be  nice to get this one to pay a little. Cash is a bit tight right now. Of course, any site like this one will take some time and a lot of work to make it an asset.

I added two new sub-domains and a new blog to the stable this evening. I have signed up as an author on some article sites. One of the sub-domains is to list the published articles (none yet). The other one with the blog is to promote some click bank products. The blog is to help promote the new site. I will put up some links when I am ready for show and tell. Subscribe to my RSS feed so that you will be the first to know!

You can look now if you want, but there is not much to see today. There may be more tomorrow.  The article list is at: HowHub Articles and the promotional site is at: Make Money. Both are Here’s The Site sub-domains.

I have embarked on a journey. The trip is to rebuild my business website, AudioArt Sound. It is too soon to check the progress at this point, but I will post an announcement when the journey ends. Right now the new pages only reside on my computer, but you can look at the AudioArt Blog to see the new site design.

This was one of my original sites. At first it resided on my free ISP web space. I was not very knowledgeable when I first built the site and did most things wrong. I gained some knowledge and rebuilt the site one time and moved it to the paid hosting space. I have progressed some in my capabilities, and so I will soon unveil AudioArt Sound 3.0.

In many ways it is more work to rebuild/upgrade one of the old sites than it is to slam up a new site. With a new site I make the pages to my current standards and skill level. When I redo one of the old sites I have all the old mistakes to correct and I must maintain the linking framework through the transition. With a new site there is a straight forward process. I do this and then I do that, and soon the site is live. With a rebuild I have to think of how I can make things better. This site and the personal website, Wink Longnecker.com, are the only two sites that do not use my basic wire-frame layout. This  makes this rebuild even more interesting. I will also want to improve some functions as I make these changes.  All of this takes a bit of head scratching. I will get the task finished at some point, but it will have to be a spare time project, so it may take a while.

Yesterday I did a minor update to Selling on your WebSite. I added the Advanced Comment System to the pages and also wrote one new article for the site. The new article emphasizes the need for traffic and talks about traffic quality. In order to monetize a website you must have traffic. The Site Build It system uses the acrostic CTPM as a success formula for building sites that pay. The letters stand for Content, Traffic, Pre-sell, and Monetize. Of these, in a way, traffic is the most important and usually the hardest part of the formula. There are other pages that discuss some of the other aspects of this formula. As The Hobby Webmaster building the sites is the fun part for me, but one must remember that getting people to those sites is the real purpose for putting the sites up in the first place.

I completed and tested the work on MC Rally today. Well, not really completed, but as far as I will go for a few days. I also added both sidebar and regular comment sections to the I Built My Computer site. I also wrote another article for I built. I think that I built and Mixing Live probably have my best commercial possibilities right now. I need to add some specific products to I built and then try to direct some traffic that way. I also need to get into the habit of writing more. Mixing Live suffers from lack of content.

I ran across a site that is the obvious product of an Internet Marketer. It was interesting to see one of those live and in person. I have probably seen many of them in the past but did not recognize what they were. I don’t think that many would see the planning behind the site as readily as I now do.

Most of the sites that I have have little commercial value now. There are several with potential, but only a few were put up with any thought about how they would be monetized, and those without the necessary planning and knowledge. I can see that a focused marketer that does his research would almost certainly be more successful than I. I hope that I am learning some things, but the sites that make money are never going to be as much fun as my pet projects. The pet projects could provide a trickle of income, but probably never a stream, let alone the river that I now need.

The major update to the MC Rally site is complete unless you can find something that is broken. Well at least for the first level. I still intend to add the comment system to the picture pages in the galleries, and I need to do something about alt text for the pictures as the gallery generator does not put anything in there. That may be a major hand job. As with my other site rebuilds I took some of the boring stuff off of the first page and built some new pages for that boring stuff. At least now people have to go looking for it. I added the comment system to most of the pages and built several new pages. Of course that meant rebuilding and redesigning the nav sections. I added the left column nav section and put a gallery quick guide on the home page. It took a bit of head scratching to get that all to work as I wished but it finally got there. I learned a couple of things with this rebuild.

The css file for this site is quite long. I suspect that there are some spare parts in there somewhere. I may go through and clean a few of those out, but some of them may be in use someplace and I would not want to break things.

I have just looked at the page in IE-7 and see that IE can break a few things. It is not paying attention to at least one margin on the home page, but probably that is because it doesn’t add so well. The major problem is that it just flashes my header title for an instant and then hides it from the world. I may have to ask for a bit of direction on that one. Well I think that I will tweak things a bit more and see if I can get IE to behave.

I am proceeding with the update to the MC Rally site. I am adding a tribute page to Bruce Rossmeyer the local Harley dealer who died in a motorcycle accident in Wyoming just before the Sturgis Rally. This was a great loss to this community. A local artist did a painting of Bruce at an event in Daytona. Perego gave me permission to use a picture of that painting on the tribute page. The site update is still in progress and the page is not yet linked but you can Check It Out Here.