Monetize Your Site

I have been trying to get a handle on keyword research. Keyword research is very important in doing business on the web. Not having a coherent keyword based approach will greatly hinder the traffic potential of a site.

I have put up many sites to date. A few of them get a little bit of search engine organic traffic. I was just putting up content without any real thought to keywords. Keywords are the terms that people use in web searches. If you want organic traffic you must be conscious of keywords and keyword usage. I have been leaving this up to accident! Anytime that you put anything up on the web to which you hope to attract the general public you must at least think about the keywords that you need to use to attract visitors.

There are many good keyword tools available. Google provides a lot of information if you know how to find and use it. The keyword tool, Micro Niche Finder, organizes the Google information in interesting ways. It makes use of several Google tools to gather information and presents the information in a format that is very helpful. I downloaded the program last evening and have begun to look into the possibilities. I did research the tool a bit and found only good reports. When I have used it a bit more I will make a full report. If you want to check out Micro Niche Finder Click Here!

I will tell one funny story on myself. I downloaded the tool and did a hot trends search. I saw a niche that looked too good to be true. I did some further research on the niche and there are actually some words that are very good, but the original demonstrates a gotcha. The term that caught my eye had an apostrophe. Because of that the competition look unusually weak for such a good term. One of the factors that goes into the competition index that is given is how often the term is used in a url. The apostrophe is a character that is not allowed in a file name or url, so the usage in url’s is zero for any keyword that contains an apostrophe. This is just something to remember when interpreting the results.

Following the article about HTML Semantics I began to wonder more about the use of the h1 tag for the site name. In most cases the site name only describes the general content of the page. There should be only one h1 tag per page, and it seems a waste to ‘waste’ that one h1 tag on the site name. Semantically, something closer to the page title would be appropriate for the lone h1 tag on a page.

I happened across an article discussing this subject with regard to WordPress Blogs and the author echoed my thoughts on the Semantical use of the h1 tag. His thought is to use a div and apply the styling to the div as far as font and size is concerned. I had considered just using a p tag with a conditional rule for the header. Either approach will work. The possible slight advantage to using the div is that the id used for the div can have a descriptive name like ‘site_name’.

I incorporated that change last evening on the main site. While I was doing that I checked, added, and upgraded the semantical markup for the content of the site. I now have a consistent presentation from page to page, with the h1 tags aligned with the page titles instead of the site name. I will keep my eye on things and see if this makes a difference as far as traffic count is concerned. With any luck it will be a bit difficult to tell as I hope to implement plans to drive traffic to my sites through other means as well.