Answer of Questions for SEO, Sitemaps, B&P....

Rather than keep answering one at a time, I'm going to try to expand on the whole process a bit here. (Again, this is what I generally do. I'm not saying it is the best or the worst but it is a method that works well for me.)

Lets start with some definitions. Some relate to the steps below the definitions. Some are just part of what I practice:

spider - a too the search engines use to visit your website to analyze your pages and store in a local archive for future use by the search engine.

index - the technique whereby the search engine moves pages from the local spider archive to the publicy available search engine results.

sitemap - an index of all or a portion of your site that basically has links to pages in your site. A 1 page sitemap that "maps" your entire site provides 1 click access to all your pages for that site.

site - one complete collection of pages - generally starting with an index.html (or php, asp, htm, etc.) and linking to all the pages in the site in some form or fashion. A site can be a complete domain, a complete subdomain or a subdirectory within a domain. A site may or may not be linked to other sites.

domain - a place to build 1 or more sites.

B&P - blog and ping - a combination of a site operated by blog software and a technique to notify the world of a new addition of content to that site.

Site builder - a tool or series of tools to build sites. This can be things like directory generator, traffic turbocharger, niche protal builder, traffic equalizer, etc.

Template(s) - These are "fill in the blank" web pages that are used by the site builder to form your site. If you buy a commercial site building package, it comes with default templates. If you are new, build a small site with the default templates (maybe 10 pages or so) and then do it again and again and again making small changes to the templates and trying different substituion variables the program offers so you get a good understanding of what the program is all about an can do. Once you understand what all the little pieces and substitution variables do, build your own templates from scratch or buy a template set from eBay and edit one that you like. NEVER USE THE DEFAULT TEMPLATES THAT COME WITH THE SOFTWARE FOR YOUR LIVE SITES. ALWAYS BUILD YOUR OWN FROM SCRATCH OR FROM A COMMERCIAL TEMPLATE.

Fingerprint - a fingerprint is something that identifies your website. It could be a copyright notice. It could be a fairly unique phrase you use over and over, etc. You do not want finderprints following you on the web for two reasons. The first is that you want to keep what you are doing reasonably private and if you do something like put copyright xyz corp in all the sites you build, someone who finds just one of your sites will be able to find all your sites. The second reason is to not give the search engine software tools an easy way to find all your sites in a way that they feel is identified as a spam site. You can use a single template with tweaks for a long time as long as you change things like default wordings a bit on the sites, etc. But never use a template that comes with a software package as it has fingerprints that identify it to the search engines as machine generated.

banning - I operate under the premise that every site I make in this way will eventaully get banned by yahoo. In fact I give each site 30 days from the time it gets indexed to the time it gets banned. Many do not get banned so quickly or at all but this is a basic premise to my site building model.

Tracking - I do track results to some extent. Mostly I let things happen how they happen but I want to know my top money keyword sets as these are sites I will regenerate fairly frequently. The other sites I don't care about so much. Let them earn till they stop earning. There are always more keyword lists.

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In all the below, the only search engine I target is yahoo. So the entire discussion is how I work related to making money from yahoo. (How you choose to make money from the traffic generated is up to you - adsense, affiliate programs, etc.) Just remember, the whole purpose of what we all do is to generate traffic targeted towards certain niches that we can in some form or fashion monetize. I state that because many think the whole purpose of this is to make adsense money - and there is nothing wrong with that but what we are really doing it generating a specific type of traffic and putting in place ways to monetize that traffic.

The process (assumes you already have adequate hosting somewhere):

Step 1: Make a decision about your domain name and plans for that domain name. For instance, you could build a single site on a domain name and want the domain name to in some way relate the topic or it could be a domain name for a series of related topics or totally unrelated topics.

Does the domain name matter if it relates to the content of your site or not? I have tried a variety of experiments but have not had any conclusice evidence that it matters. Some of my best performing sites have nonsense domain names. But if it fits what you are doing, it does not seem to hurt having a related domain name.

Step 2: Do keyword research for that domain. Depending on what I am doing, I will build anywhere from 1 to 200-300 keyword lists for a single domain. Each keyword list will be 1 site on this domain. If I were doing a niche domain (say insurance), I might choose a domain in the above step something like this insurance-answers.info to make it related. And I might do subdomains like this car-insurance.insurance-answers.info or home-insurance.insurance-answers.info.

If I choose a nonsense domain name, say xyzzy.com as I often do for random collections of keywords, I would do apples.xyzzy.com, bananas.xyzzy.com, etc. (i.e. I make the subdomain name relate to the topic of that site.) If it was subdirectories, it would look something like this xyzzy.com/apples, xyzzy.com/bananas.

In other words, I always try to make the domain path in some way relevant to the topic of the keyword list.

Does it make a difference? I don't know. Testing has been inconclusive.

Step 3: Design your template set for your site builder tool and build your domain. I use a custom tool that I wrote my self but prior to that I used directory generator. The thing I did not like about directory generator was that it did not make a site that was easy for a search engine spider to follow to get all my pages. I made lots of money with directory generator but wasn't getting very robust spidering/indexing of the sites. Directory generator does not make a site map so the spider had to follow the links that were available and I would typically end up with about 20% of my pages indexed. When I started working with sitemaps, the percentage of pages spidered and indexed increased dramatically - up to 60-80%. (This was prior to whatever yahoo was doing last week were it was just sucking in pages like mad. Yahoo still seems to be sucking in pages into its index pretty good but seems to be doing so at a much slower rate than last week. I'm guessing they just wanted a huge database to test their latest tweaks on and now it is back to a slower, more predictible amount of page grabbing again as they stabilize their algorithm changes.)

Also as an added note before you build your site. Verify that your html is correct. Too many mistakes in your html can hurt your ability to get indexed. If you do not know if your html is good, just do a search for an html validator. There are tons of free ones on the web. (You may have to load a sample page to the web for it to be checked but a few seconds up front can save you lots of time.) As an example, I had a friend build a site - about 20K pages - and the html was all messed up. It didn't display good AND the html had loads of errors. It got spidered a lot but never indexed so by rushing through this part, he wasted lots of time and potential income.

Step 4: Upload your site to your server and check it out. Be sure it displays nice and like you expect and that all the little additions you may have added (like affiliate banners, rss feeds, etc.) are all showing up. Click on some of the links and be sure they bring you were you expect them to, etc. Just make sure you have what you expected to have before you start telling the world about the site.

If your site links to other sites that you own/create, make sure you have all your sites up and that the links to the other sites work before you tell the world about your site.

Step 5: Tell the world about your site. This is where the blog and ping stuff comes in.

Step 5a: Set up a blog account. This could be a blogger.com account, a wordpress account on your own server or... There are lots of blog software and account options out there that you can use. Take a few minutes to make sure your settings are good and that you strip out all the default crap that is in the initial blog setup. In other words, just as you took the time to make a template for your site(s), make a template for your blogs. The default templates are very obciously default templates and if you use them the search engines have one more way to tell it is not a valuable blog for its community.

Step 5b: Make posts to your blog and ping the world to let them know there is a new post. There are lots of ways this can be done. It can be done by hand but that is tedious. It can be done by tools which is the best.

There are lots of posts about B&P so I will not go into detail of the process - except to say that I typically post anywhere from once every 30 minutes to about once per hour.

That is the entire process.

Now that the process is explained, let me tell you what I use for my blog content.

As I said, I am a big believer of sitemaps. Sometimes I create a single sitemap for an entire site and sometimes I create several sitemaps for an entire site to make each one smaller. An example of several sitemaps could be one for each letter of the alphabet - sitemapa.html, sitemapb.html, etc...

Every site I create has at least one sitemap, and many times multiple sitemaps.

I post the link to multiple sitemaps (on a single domain) to a single blog account -broken out into multiple blog postings (and of course multiple pings...)

Let me give an example. Lets suppose I have a domain with 40 sites on it and each site has 26 sitemaps (one for each letter of the alphabet.) 40 x 26 = 1040 sitemap pages.

Each of the posts I make to my blog account will have some number of the links to those pages posted as a single post.

For instance, this could be a post (ignore the odd spacing in the html - just don't want the board software to tweak it):

Best < a href = abc.xyzzy.com/sitemapa.html > abc < /a > Resources


Best < a href = def.xyzzy.com/sitemapa.html > def < /a > Resources


Best < a href = ghi.xyzzy.com/sitemapa.html > ghi < /a > Resources


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Then the next post could be:

Best < a href = abc.xyzzy.com/sitemapb.html > abc < /a > Resources


Best < a href = def.xyzzy.com/sitemapb.html > def < /a > Resources


Best < a href = ghi.xyzzy.com/sitemapb.html > ghi < /a > Resources


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etc... until a link to each sitemap page has been included in my blog. In this case 1040/3 = 347 separate posts would be made to blog and ping each sitemap page in the entire set of sites for this domain.

Hopefully this better answers some of the questions I have gotten by PM and hopefully offers some value over and above that.

Gotta rest my fingers now...