Now Is A Long Time Too

For a long time, the Sports Interaction site - the sports betting site I spend most of my working time on - has been pretty purely functional. The only content rolling through has been small snippets of information on the front page. We’ve started to add some content recently, though, in the form of articles and team previews for the March Madness betting season. It’s great to be working with content again, even at this small scale. Even though it’s the highest-traffic site I’ve ever worked with, which is the rational definition of a “big” site, adding content makes it feel, in some bizarre way, like a real website.

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Whenever I’m interested in a new area, my first reaction is to hit the web. Usually, I find what I’m looking for not on wikipedia or about.com or any organised information site, but on various blogs. My next reaction is to acquire as many books on the topic as I can, but I’m trying to go for the library option on that instead. The latest interest to get hit this way is gardening, and specifically what I consider to be real gardening - herbs, fruit and vegetables.

So here are some of the blogs that I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last couple of weeks.

My Tiny Plot details the progress from a small allotment plot up through several more plots of land, to the current series on landscaping a garden for food production. There are plenty of photographs, and a good bit of useful and encouraging detail.

Henbogle deals with hens, woodwork, recycling, and gardening - a solidly interesting mix.

Future House Farm has similar topics, and a bit more emphasis on fruit.

One Straw: Be The Change deals more specifically with sustainability, both in farming and in the wider world. It’s fascinating reading.

Tiny Farm Blog deals with organic market gardening. There’s a post a day, regular-like, and I’m particularly enamoured of the pictures that have deep snow and cold. Not that I’m going to have to deal with that anytime soon…

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Something I fervently wish existed is a standard “unsubscribe” method for mailing lists - both discussion and broadcast. Something that an email client could hook into, in order to display a great big “unsubscribe” button in the interface.

I’ve been cleaning up a few mailboxes during the early part of the new year, and looking at email tactics for our own marketing efforts. It’s becoming clear that the plethora of unsub methods is not a good thing. Some systems just want you to click on a link. Others want you to click on a link, then fill in an email address and hit submit. Some want one of the above, and then they send you an email which you reply to, or further still, click on another link in to fully opt-out. Some have a range of tickboxes about remaining on their alert list rather than their newsletter list, and so on, and so forth.

An awful lot of people resort to hitting the “report spam” button instead of making their way through the maze, and that doesn’t help anyone. The trouble is that with at least one major newsletter out there, I tried for months to unsubscribe - and eventually had to mark the thing as spam to stop it appearing.

I assume there are technical issues with introducing an unsubscribe standard - so what are they? Is there a way to get around them?

There’s a fascinating article by Walter Kirn in November’s Atlantic Monthly, called The Autumn of the Multitaskers. It basically argues that trying to do multiple things at once is a fad of the current era, possibly caused and definitely accentuated by conceptualising the brain as a computer. And further, it seems it’s not good for you. There’s a level at which this appeals to me, because I’m very bad at multitasking. Unless I carefully prepare myself for it, I have difficulty switching from one task to another without a few seconds of blank staring in between. And if I do the preparation, then neither task is really done to the best of my ability.

There’s an argument that this is a problem most men have; women seem to multitask better. I can barely walk and engage in a sensible conversation at the same time; many women seem to be able to do both as well as, for instance, send a text message. I don’t know many men who can multitask well.

This is somewhat belied by the fact that as I write this, I have earphones on and am listening to my current favourite genre of epic metal music, and am holding two IM conversations at the same time. The music, however, isn’t really a distraction; it’s partly in use to block out surrounding conversation and noise from the workplace, and partly to make me comfortable - I’m not actively listening to it. The two IM conversations are about prosaic, day-to-day items in the workplace. Neither of them is requiring much from me other than quick bursts of information I have no trouble recalling.

Part of the Getting Things Done method that I’ve been trying, with some success, to stick with, is a principle that having other stuff in your head, background tasks, prevents you from getting on with the ones in hand. The solution there is to dump everything you can think of out to a set of lists, where you can come back to them later. In other words, you can concentrate better if you’re not multitasking.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator is a bit horrified by a motorbike repair shop where it’s clear that the employees are doing more listening to the radio than concentrating on their work, with poor work being the result - and moreover, it’s poor work that they’re not aware of; they think they know what they’re doing, and doing a good job.

I don’t know if I believe that multitasking is bad for you, but it’s an interesting line of thinking.

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The general lack of usefulness of careers guidance teachers has come up a lot in conversation recently. I know that the one we had in school was, while well-meaning, absolutely no use - it should, for instance, have been perfectly clear to anyone who looked at my academic record that I was more suited to arts than science, but she went along with the standard view of “intelligent boys should do science”. Although, being honest, she was a nun, and had other priorities; the number of guys in my class who reported that they’d been told she believed they had a vocation was impressive.

But thinking about it, what the hell can they do? How do you determine what a 16 year old might be good at, when a sizeable fraction of the jobs potentially available at 22 don’t exist yet? “Game testing” is now a perfectly valid career path - I know three or four game testers - but anyone proposing that in the early 90s to a careers guidance teacher would have got a blank look, and from the better ones, a gentle reminder of reality.

The job I’m doing now did not exist at all when I was 16, and barely existed by the time I was 19. I’ve been around for the invention of it, essentially. Most of my friends work in jobs that similarly did not exist. Careers guidance teachers did not know terms like “systems administration” in the 90s, “computer programmer” was barely on the horizon in their terms.

And it’s not just my techie friends, either. I can see a guy right now through the office window who’s cleaning the stonework with a very high-tech looking steam gun. He looks like he’s enjoying his work. Given that he’s driving a very shiny black SUV, with a registration plate from this year, I’m thinking he’s doing pretty well too. But I’ll bet his careers guidance teacher did not say “steam-cleaning stonework for corporate buildings, son, it’s a licence to print money”.

Go back another ten years, and the default assumption was that most of us would do the same jobs as our parents. I went to school with kids who lived on farms that their families had owned and worked on for four generations. The concept that any of them might not be farmers was both alien and unwelcome. There were a few non-farming families; instead, they’d been shopkeepers, steel cutters, or carpenters for similar lengths of time.

So, given that by the time the kids currently coming out of 2nd level education get into employment, the jobs they are doing will be things like “search refinement engineer” or “nanotechnology compensator”, or “bioinformatics controller”, or whatever, how can careers guidance counsellors possibly do anything useful? No wonder they’re all bitter.

And yet you can’t just get rid of them - kids need some guidance about college courses, or they’ll end up opting for an easy course in whatever college their best friend is going to. So… how do you offer careers guidance these days?

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Something that I see over and over again is a confusion regarding descending date pagination. That is, when you have the newest item in some particular context at the top of the page, with older ones further down. Like most blogs, for instance. But when you get to the bottom, of, say, your last 20 posts, and you want to give a link to another set, the 20 you posted before them. Are they “next”, as in next page? Or “previous”, as in previously posted? You can argue either, and I’ve seen both in steady use. Try as I might, none of the design principles I’m aware of can guide me on this one. Anyone got any solid ideas on which is better?

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I’ve just finished a redesign of The Wizard of Duke Street. There might be some tweaks to go, but the core of it’s done. Your comments and criticisms will be welcomed.

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for SnapNames‘ Most Active Live Auctions email. Basically, this service emails me every day around noon, with a list of domain names that are being bid on in SnapNames’ system. It’s fascinating. There are names in there that were plainly grabbed on speculation, names that could only belong to real companies that have gone out of business, and just plain odd stuff.

sniffmagazine.com, for instance, is currently available. These are two English words stuck together; an awful lot of domains are formed that way. You could do a very fine blog about perfume, BPAL, or scratch-and-sniff technology on that domain. Perfume advertising is big business, so you’d have no problem monetising it. A nice modern design, some swirls and patterned backgrounds in the latest web styles, and you’d be off at a run.

Likewise, anglerandarcher.com is available. If I was rich, I’d buy that for my father, because it matches his interests very nicely, and it’s a great domain name. An outdoor sports blog could do very nicely indeed off that, and there are lots of affiliate things you could work in to cover your costs.

And then there’s gangofneon.com. That’s begging to be an EVE Corporation site, or maybe a Shadowrun campaign. Or maybe a flickr/Google Maps mashup concerning neon signs in South-East Asia. I’ve had a notion for years about a blog of photographs of Dublin street ironwork. You know, the covers over sewers and utility maintenance thingmajgits. They say things on them like “Hammond Lane, 1888″, or “Brewster and Major Ironworks”.

s-i-n.net is good to go. Ideas for that one shouldn’t be hard to come by; I’d envision a webcomic about heaven and hell, but maybe that’s the Sinfest influence. Or possibly there are goth cheerleading groups out there who could make use of it. Or maybe we should snag it as a promo site for Graylion.net…

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We’ve some server down time in work, so I’m clearing off tabs I’ve had open for a while, meaning to record them someplace.

I have Design Melt Down on my sidebar, but I’d like to draw your attention to it now as well - it’s a site that looks for trends in web design. There’s some fascinating stuff there; I’m particularly enamoured of the Ornate Backgrounds.

Serious Eats is a well-designed, well-written food blog, focussed on New York. Quite apart from its content, I really like the design and layout - the multi-column, content-filled footer fascinates me, and makes me want to rip apart several of my sites and redesign them. In fact, I might just do that…

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I borrowed a book from the library a few weeks ago, called Getting Things Done. I’ve been poking at a few of these marketing / business / management / organisation books lately, because I’m pretty certain my use of time hasn’t been what it could be.

This book has blown me away. It’s got some very simple principles, no corporate gibberish, no affirmations, and completely dodges the “prioritising” bullet in favour of context.

The basic idea is that people have difficulty getting things done because they have too much in their heads. You sit down to answer an email, and find you need to research something, which means you have to ask someone, which means you have to send them an email, and then you see another email reminding you of a meeting, and all the while you’re aware of another project that you’ve done nothing on, and the need to buy milk on the way home.

The simple solution is to get everything out of your head and onto a very simple system of tracking things that need attention. This centres around making a great whacking list of projects, working out what the next action is on any given project, doing it if it’s short and easy, or putting it on a contextual list otherwise. The contextual lists could include things like “Near phone”, “Near computer”, “Things to buy”, and so on.

The idea is that once you have everything you need to attend to in some sort of trusted system, where you’ll be reminded of it at the right time, you can get down to what you’re doing in the moment without wasting RAM, as it were, on irrelevant things. If something does come to mind, you put it in the appropriate place in the system and go back to your current task.

The effect is rather stunning. I don’t have a huge amount of stuff to manage with this in work; we have an excellent project manager who makes sure we don’t have to bother with anything other than the task in hand, but I have a good-sized pile of projects at home. 78, actually, at the moment. The difference it has made to have these out of my head is absolutely huge, and I’m getting things done at a rate of about three times as many per day as I was before, with more time to kick back at the end of it.
So yeah. Huge recommendation for Getting Things Done.

(Wikipedia,  Author’s Site)

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I’ve just posted six articles on making money from your website, something that I’ve been working on for a while now. This post is to serve as an introduction, and an index. The articles are:

Making Money From Your Website: Content
Making Money From Your Website: Analytics
Making Money From Your Website: Search Engine Optimization
Making Money From Your Website: Google Adsense
Making Money From Your Website: Link Sales
Making Money From Your Website: Affiliate Programs

This is a fairly basic introduction to the ideas involved; it assumes you can put together a simple website. It’s been published before on livejournal under a special filter; people who’ve been on that filter have tried out some of the stuff there and found it useful, so I’m now posting it for general use. I’m always looking to improve things, so if you’ve any extra ideas, suggestions, or the like, please do post them.

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Affiliate marketing is almost unique among the monetisation methods I’m discussing here in that you can do it from a livejournal (or any other similar community site), or even, possibly, via email and without a website at all. Essentially, affiliate marketing is when a company who sells something (books, games, web hosting, subscription services) gives you a cut of the money for driving traffic and sales to them. This is almost always tracked by link parameters - so anywhere you can place a link can, theoretically, make you money.

The problem with this lies in the fact that you are in competition with the affiliate company for the traffic. You can’t expect to put up a page about books (or even a whole blog about books) and expect to make money from affiliate linking with Amazon - anyone who’s interested in books at the generic level is going to go straight to Amazon.

You may be able to make some money by using the review technique, wherein you write up some good, key-phrase loaded content about the item you’re linking to, and put the affiliate link at the end, with a big “buy here” button, or the like. This can be done with some success, especially in speciality areas with Amazon, or less-well-known affiliate companies.

The key here is that your content has to be better than theirs, even if they have the shopping cart. You won’t manage this on Harry Potter books, or the newest, most popular MMO, since the affiliate site’s content for those will be fairly complete. You may be able to pull it off for items concerned with obscure elements of metalwork, woodwork, accountancy, or other specialised areas. If your content is better than the seller’s page, you can rely on getting some of (maybe a lot of) the search engine traffic, and then driving it through to the seller.

My current recommended method, though, is slightly different. What I’m aiming for with Gifts to Gamers is to take a different slant on the area of interest, and present content on that slant. In this case, I’m not talking about games directly, I’m talking about giving stuff to gamers. This allows me to write a good amount of content that will fit into a different niche. Amazon (or Gamestop, or whoever the particular link goes to) will focus on attracting the gamers themselves, leaving the other angle for me.

A similar approach can be take with any craft or technique site. If you’re putting up a site about woodcarving techniques, you have the chance to write a good amount of content for someone interested in learning the basics, and then linking to books about more advanced tecnhiques, workshop setup and finishing, as well as tool sites, supplies (sandpaper, sharpening stones) and so on, if you can find affiliates for them. You’re not writing about the books, but they’re a natural follow-on to your content.

Another technique, which I’ve seen used, but haven’t yet tried myself, is what I’m labelling the “barrage” technique. You take an audience interested in a given topic - let’s say old movies - and provide, on a website or on a mailing list, a huge list of “the best 100 old movies”, or “100 old movies re-released this year”, and make every one of those a link to the affiliate’s page for the movie. Confronted with so many titles, almost everyone who sees the list will click on one, and many people will buy something. Studies have shown - and, indeed, we all know from our own experience - that if specialists in any area are confronted with many products in their area of specialisation, they’ll buy something. Putting prices by your list will probably help with this, although it adds more maintenance since you need to keep them up to date. You don’t need to produce much content for this one, but you DO need an established audience, since your search traffic is probably going to be low.

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We’ve now passed the beginners’ stuff, and we’re well into intermediate material. These are starting to be areas in which I am still, to some degree, working out how things work best. I’ll try to label things that are conjecture as such, though.

I discussed in the SEO post the way in which incoming links boost your search engine rankings. This is a well-known fact, and many people try to improve their rankings by getting links from elsewhere. A few savvy companies have caught on to this, and are acting as brokers between those who have space in which links could be placed, and those who want links. The one I use is called Text Link Ads.

It’s worth noting, now, that these guys will not work with a new site. Your site needs to be more than six months old, and getting a reasonable amount of traffic according to Alexa. Once these are true, and they otherwise approve of you, you can place a block of code, which will fetch data from the central TLA servers and write it to a local XML file (all this is explained on the TLA site, clearly and simply, so don’t worry about the acronym soup). I use PHP for this, but several other languages are catered for. The crucial bit of this is that the output of the code looks like ordinary HTML links, and the search engines can’t tell the difference. And since the links only go one way, it’s speculated that they are more valuable to the linked site than a reciprocal link.

If you don’t like a particular link that’s showing up on your page, you can disable it. I’ve not yet seen any I’d object to - they’re not terribly relevant, but that’s not a problem from my point of view. And the payout is decent - even at the base level of traffic I’m working at, they pay out $8 per link per month. I understand that some higher-traffic sites net $150 per link per month, which is rather nice for a bonus on top of whatever AdSense is getting you.

You get much better treatment from TLA if you’re buying links as well as selling them, so I’d recommend that once your costs are covered, you buy at least one link. You can choose which of their available publisher sites it appears on, and there’s a wide selection. It will cost you about $16-$20, but it will improve your own rankings (although it may take some weeks or months to show up), and you get the advantage of having a personal rep in TLA who’ll handle your queries. They don’t deal directly with the selling side - that’s mostly automated, I think - but they can pass queries on that on to someone else within the company, and I’ve always found that knowing someone on the inside - even if it’s just an email address - is a lot of help. TLA are making their money on the difference between your $16 and the $8 they payout to the site owner your link is coming from.

You can always try selling links to other people without the broker, but that sounds like a lot of effort to me, and I’ve never tried it.

I’m rather fond of the steady income from TLA, which is increasing as I bring more sites online and up to good traffic levels, especially as they pay out by Paypal, providing me with eBay shopping money. They take payment for links the same way. However, it should be borne in mind that this is at some level a trick, taking advantage of the ability to generate code that the search engines can’t distinguish from “organic” linking. If the engines ever do learn to distinguish, they may choose to do away with TLA’s business model entirely - so don’t depend on these things for your income!

That’s something to keep in mind in general, actually. Almost all ways to monetise a website depend on some company or companies cooperating with you, and if they decide not to, the terms of use generally allow them to drop you like a hot rock. So don’t annoy them, if you can help it at all. Usually this means not trying to trick people into clicking on Google ads, and not jamming your site full of TLA links and nothing else, or the like, so compliance isn’t difficult.

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Alright, having give some outlines of things you should be doing with your website to make it work well, I’ll now discuss one of the methods of making it give you back money: Google AdSense. This is not going to be easy money, but it has the advantage of having very simple entry requirements. And let me get this out of the way before I go on to other things: If you’re going to apply for AdSense, please do so via the big button on the right hand side there. This will allow me to earn a few extra bucks on your referral, and won’t cost you anything.

Right, where was I…

Essentially, to qualify for the AdSense program, you need to have a website that is not porn, gambling, or other dodgy subjects, and otherwise complies with the policies. These aren’t hard to meet. Also, you can not click on your own ads - this will get you banned. It’s best to err on the side of caution, and ask people who live or work in the same place not to click on them either - and there are horror stories of people getting banned because some well-meaning relative set out to “give them some money” by clicking on every ad on the site.

That aside, actually making money with AdSense can be quite hard. Just pasting the codeblock for some ads on your pages usually doesn’t work; you have to give it some thought, and experiment a bit. Efforts in content, analysis, and SEO as detailed before will, however, have done a lot of the work for you. There are three more things you can do:

1) Positioning
2) Colouring
3) Selective placing

… and then experiment with each of them.

Positioning

Where you place your ads will affect how many people actually see them, as opposed to having their eyes pass over them. Optimal locations for most sites are at the top, down the left side, and smack in the middle. Very few of my layouts work for smack in the middle, but I’ve seen it done well. It can go particularly well with a boxed layout, so that you have a page element above it - a top news story or an introduction, then then ads, and the more page elements. There are many sizes and shapes of ad blocks to use too.

I’m still experimenting with placement - I found before that the left side, on dukestreet, worked better than across the top, but I’m currently running ads in three places on the individual pages - an ad unit on the left, one at the bottom, and a link unit across the top. This is too heavy on the ads for my personal taste, and the least effective one of those three will be removed soon. Sometimes you arrive at odd results - for instance, the links unit on top only works well on dukestreet if there are also ads on the left. I can’t think why, but the numbers add up. See the section below on tracking for how to identify which clicks went where. On Woodwork Ireland, I designed the shape and layout of the site around the ads at the top, and it seems to work very well.

Colouring

Google allow you to colour the ads anyway that seems suitable to you. Some people succeed very well by “blending” the ads - using the same backgrounds, borders, and link colours as the rest of the site. Others prefer to have them stand out strongly in contrasting colours. Tinker around with this until you find something that suits you, and again, experiment. I’m strongly in favour of the blended ones, myself, but you - and your visitors - may feel differently.

Selective Placing

By this, I mean what pages you put ads on, rather than where on the page. Some pages are not suitable for ads. If you have a sign up page, then you want people to sign up, not follow ad links. Likewise, you’d be crazy to put ads on your shopping cart or checkout pages. Further, there are going to be some pages that are essential to your site - information about your location, or an “about us” page, which simply won’t get well-targeted advertising.

After that, you need to keep an eye on what particular pages are earning. If your reports show that a given page is getting dozens of clicks, but only earning $0.01 per click, then that page may actually be doing you more harm than good. While this has not been proven, there is some evidence to suggest that consistent low-paying clicks (or high numbers of impressions and low numbers of clicks) give your site and account a “bad reputation”, and lead to only low-paying ads showing. And take a look at the section on MFA and AdSense arbitrage sites, below.

When this happens, you can either alter the page, so that the text attracts better ads, or remove the ads completely from it. You’ll have to judge for yourself which will work better - if the page only needs slight adjustments, then try that, and if not, go ahead and remove them.

Those are the three things you have to experiment with. There are two more things you should know before starting with AdSense. I learned these two the hard way.

Track Everything

Given I knew this was important for web pages, you’d think I’d recognise the importance for ads. But for ages, I just had the ads there, and just watched the total earnings - which didn’t move much. Occasionally, I’d move things, and go back to watching the total, which would continue not to move much. Eventually, I realised I had to track things better.

Google allows two kinds of tracking - URL channels and custom channels. For URL tracking, you enter a URL, and AdSense will tell you how many clicks, and what earnings, happened on that URL. If you put in just your domain name, then it’ll report for every click on the domain, and if you put in the full URL of a single page, it’ll report on the clicks on that page. You can also put in domain + directory, to track a section of the site.

For custom channels, you supply a channel name, and you can apply up to five of these for a given adblock. So I have, for instance, one for the adblock on the right, one for the link unit on top, and one for the footer block. I have one for the front page as well, where URL tracking doesn’t quite work, as it can be hit on “dukestreet.org” and also “dukestreet.org/index.html”. You can get as precise with these as you like.

You’re limited to 200 channels in total, including the URL ones. So you need to use them sparingly. Generally speaking, track the pages which get the most traffic, and let the rest track on the domain alone. A combination of the URL channels and the custom channels will tell you a lot about what pages are successful, and what areas of them are most successful.

Remove the Crud: MFAs and Arbitrage Sites

There are a lot of sites you don’t want to have appearing in your ads. Some are competitors, others are just bad, both in site quality, and payout. Google allow you to filter ads out by URL, so do that. Look down along your site, identify which ads are bad (go to the sites to see, but, as above, do NOT click on the ads on your pages), and add them to the filter. You can start with eBay.com, as they bid on almost every word in the dictionary, and many that aren’t, usually for one cent. Their ads are not worth carrying. There are a few as well with names like best8sites.com, or best4links.com, or the like - get rid of those as soon as they appear, as they’re only going to pay out pennies either.

Most of those sites are going to be what’re called Made For Adsense sites, or arbitrage sites. They exist by advertising on Adwords, and carrying Adsense ads themselves, bidding on low-priced keywords, and seeded with content aimed to get high-value ads. Since nobody can do that well manually, they tend to be generated by scripts, and contain no information of value. They’re a plague, and they can cut your earnings down to fractions of its potential when they appear.

Other Networks

There are other contextual ad networks, such as YPN, run by Yahoo!, and Omkase, run by Amazon. I can’t try YPN, because it’s only available to people in the US, and I’m already working through affiliate material for Amazon. Besides, the terms and conditions of AdSense prevent other contextual ads on the same pages, and I’m doing fairly well with Google for now. Some of this material will work as well for them.

Warning: Search Engine Optimisation is a black art. It’s so far from being a science that it comes out the far side, and sometimes starts looking like quantum physics. I know of one SEO practicioner in California who seems sane until you hear that he prays facing Google once a day. I’ve no idea if he’s serious; it has as much basis in reality as many techniques I’ve seen work.

The basic notion is that you need people to find your pages, and they do that in search engines. Search engines “like” or “dislike” particular factors in a page, and place them in the results for each search term accordingly. So you work out what those factors are, and build your pages to match.

Three Basic Rules:
1) Content Wins Again.
2) The Title Tag Comes Second.
3) Inbound Links Control The Rest.

I’ll expand on those now, and probably wander off on a few interesting tangents.

Content Wins Again

The search engines only care about text. You may have the best price, fastest shipping, most up-to-date news, but unless there’s a reasonable amount of relevant content on your page, you are not going to get anywhere. And the main thing that has to be in your content are the search phrases you want to be found on.

You can aim for maybe five to ten phrases for a given page - this is often called keyword loading. You’ll see mentions as well of keyword density, where someone has calculated that an optimal keyword density in your page about keyword density will get hits from search engine users looking for keyword density who want to read about keyword density. Yes, that sentence is intended to read badly; it’s what you get when you over-optimise your content, and even though it does sometimes trick the search engines, it annoys people. Don’t do it - annoyed customers don’t buy, click on ads, or the like, they just go somewhere else.

Here’s how to do it right: write your page text, ignoring any thoughts of keywords. When it’s written, look down along it, and pick out a few phrases people might search on. Think a bit about these, and come up with a few variations. Sometimes these will be easy - for “doctor who”, for instance, you can also think of “dr who”, “dr. who”, and bad spellings like “docter who”. However, someone might also search on “tardis man”, “time travelling doctor”, “scifi doctor scarf”, or any of a million other combinations. You need the ones that are most relevant to your content, and that people will be searching for.

Sometimes this is obvious, other times you need to resort to tools like Wordtracker, which tell you what search terms are in use, and suggest alternative ones. It will also do you the service of checking how mnay other sites are found using a given term. The free version only checks MSN; the paid one (you can pay for as little as a day’s access) checks all the major engines. I recommend it highly.

Anyway, you now have a list of relevant terms, and you know, or at least have a feeling for, which ones are better. Go through your text again, seeing if you can substitute some of the new ones for those that already exist, and if you can add others. Keep the text feeling natural - people are very good at spotting “artificial” text, and it puts them off.

You’re now done with that aspect. Pick one term that you think will get the best traffic - not the most, but the best - and go on to the second rule.

The Title Tag Comes Second

The title tag is in the head of your HTML document -