Linkrain Articles

Back in the early 90s, in the pioneering time of Search Engines Optimization meta-tags were the most importance factor when it came about optimizing a page. At that time it was enough to spam your title, description and keywords meta-tags with tons of keywords and rank on top of search engines for most of them. However, as the time passed, search engines algorithm evolved and more and more factors started to be taken in consideration so the importance of the meta-tags constantly dropped over time.

The only one meta-tag that remained very important over the time is the title tag (<title>Title</title>). In fact it is not a meta-tag, but a simple HTML tag, but there are quite a lot of people that consider it as a meta-tag so I mentioned it too. It is important not only for the SEO value it carries (which is quite high), but also for the fact that it appears on SERPS and is the most important factor that affects the CTR ration. When writing titles for your pages you should have a few things in mind: it should be user friendly (so people will actually click it and come to your site), it should include the keywords (so it helps the rankings) and it shouldn’t be too long. An example of good title for a library called “Book Lovers” and located in Boston would be: “Book Lovers – best library in Boston” or “Book Lovers – your favorite Boston library”.

The description meta-tag (<meta name=”description” content=”A one sentence description goes here.”>) is the second most important meta-tag. Again it not only cares some SEO value, but it also appears on SERPS and affects drastically the CTR. Considering that it’s most important role is to increase the CTR and not to carry SEO value I highly recommend you to write it for visitors and not for search engines. If you mention your main keyword it’s enough from a pure SEO perspective. An example of good description for the same Boston library would be: “Book Lovers is one of Boston’s best libraries; we aim to be the first library where you can find the newest book edition.”

The keywords meta-tag (<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3”>) carries nowadays only a minimal SEO value and a lot of SEO experts even ignore it. However, if you’re like me, someone who considers that every bit counts you may want to add it to your site. However be careful to not spam it – use only 3-4 keywords and be sure that those keywords also exist in the page’s text. To continue with our previous example some good keywords would be: “Book Lovers”, “library”, “Boston”.

Any other meta-tag carries no SEO value anymore and using them will only make your pages heavier; so I highly recommend you to stick only with title, description and keywords meta-tags. If you want you can even use only the title meta-tag for your inner page (there are a lot of SEO experts that do so). But, under no circumstances, don’t copy the same title, description and keywords on all your pages because this may lead to a penalty; and I’m sure that this is the last thing you want to happen to your site.

Not you could think that this blog did not receive many visitors in the time I was not posting (and while I was enjoying my vacation) but actually the traffic did not decrease. Of course I had more visitors in the period where I was pulling out 1-2 articles every day, but in average the visitor number did not change. Normally you will see a website traffic decrement after loosing a lot of positions in Google search engine results for some of your major keywords. For this blog something different happened September the 3rd.

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Today I came across a website that caught my attention as soon as I started to browse through it, not only because of it’s quality but also because of the great service and products they seem to offer. Boxedart.com is a development library containing hundreds of XHTML 1.0 valid coded and tabless CSS div-stle templates. For an annual fee of only 99.99$, you get access to this huge template library and you’ll be able to download and customize every single layout. This is surely one of the cheapest ways to get access to a large number of templates for developers or for a webmaster that want to become a Web designer or enter the Web design business.
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In one week I will be back from my vacation across Italy. I’m not really happy about getting to normal life again but it’s something that’s not happening only to me I think. On the other side, the 1 month break I took from blogging helped me to think about a new project I’m going to launch (togheter with three friends) very soon.

In november I will start a new blog about SEO and other Internet related topics in italian. After many days of research I realized that italian search engine optimization techniques are years back compared to american or german ones. So it seems to be very easy to make a successful blog in italian, especially if you work on it every day with 4 Internet experts.

We have already decided the domain name (which is a 4 letter .it domain with meaning!), created the template and started to write huge articles for it’s launch. I will reveal the domain as soon as the blog will be online, even if I don’t think that many of you will be interested in it, because of the language (italian) ;)

In a week I will also try to get back and write some articles for Linkrain, even if I don’t think that I will be able to make a post a day (not because I ran out of ideas, but because I have to look after 5 websites and Linkrain is the smallest one out of these).

To all people that are still on vacation like me: enjoy this last week

A human readable sitemap is nothing else than a page, linked from the homepage, that is linking to all pages of your website. This kind of sitemap seems to be very important for search engines (even if it is called “human readable sitemap”).I have recently decided to add one to the Linkrain Web Directory, which you can see here. From my experience a HTML sitemap is important because of PageRank distribution. By creating a sitemap containing HTML links to all the pages of your website and by linking this page frm your homepage, it will surely get a good PageRank and pass this PageRank to all the pages listed on it.
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I apologize for the long time I did not blog. I was on holiday for one week and came back only three days ago. The last 3 days I emailed a lot with my web designer to get the new look online (the template I talked about in this post). Yesterday night, after some hours of work, I finally managed to put the new template online. It is a very clean, light and simple template which should be well displayed in any kind of browser. Please let me know what you think about it and if you see some graphical iussues ( I know about the “search button” iussue in Firefox).

Now that this new template is online, the Linkrain supporters are shown only on the main page, which means that many categories (the ones whitout links inside) have 0 (!!) outgoing links and that the whole PageRank juice will be passed to the links inside the directory (categorie pages does not include designer links, supporter links, sponsor links or any kind of advertising). To submit a link to this Premium Paid Directory (and I really think that Linkrain can be called a “Premium Paid Directory” after the results it achieved in only 6 months) you can checkout this page.

Remember to leave a feedback about the template

I entered the Wordpress Business at the beginning of march and I was one of the first sponsored link sellers on Digitalpoint. At the beginning I made so much money, that I was designing nearly one Wordpress theme a day because I knew that many better designers than me were going to enter this business soon. In fact, only 3 weeks after I started to sell sponsored links, the Link sale section of Digitalpoint became overcrowded with designers and webmasters selling sponsored links. The number of sponsored links in the footer went up from 2 to 4 (and some people were selling even the designer link) and the price started to fall down. This was the point where I decided to leave this business, not only because many of the offered themes were better than mine but also because many webmasters started to copy my promotion techniques (which was the best at the time I was selling those links).
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After writing about the amount of money I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory, let’s now talk about the earnings you can make with a only-6-months-old Web Directory. Before I’m going to tell you how much I earn only with the Directory, you should consider some very important keyfacts:

• Even if you have a great website, you won’t earn much if you don’t work hard on it.
• Linkrain has got a few sponsors, don’t expect that they will come to you and ask if they can become one of your sponsors. You have to promote your advertising space and at the same time find sponsors that have a website related to yours.
• The less you work on your websites, the less money you will make
• Before you are going to start a Web Directory, consider that the Directory Business is a really hard one (there are thousands of Web Directories out there) and making your Directory “better” than the others is not one of the easiest things to do.
• Too many webmasters are interested in PageRank. To make money you will need a good homepage PageRank (at least 5) and also innerpage PageRank

After the first 3 months, I did not make any money with Linkrain because traffic was really low and I had no PageRank yet. After the PageRank update in May, Linkrain jumped from 0 up to 5. Also many categories got a PageRank with the first update, which was the reason my first customers decided to add a link.

Ok, thats enough introduction to the Directory Business for now. Let’s talk about the earnings
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While I was browsing for some free game sites to find addicting flash games like those on Addictinggames, I came across Flashgames247 that caught my attention thanks to it’s great advertisement placement. This website is not only using Google Adsense to publish advertisements but also some other networks. It has an Alexa Ranking of 1.141 which is a sign that this website is receiving some huge traffic. Once you have chosen a game you would like to play and after clicking it’s screenshot, you will see a page like this:
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Starting a Web Directory is still a good money maker even if many webmaster think that the directory business is not profitable anymore. Basically they think this way because they created a directory and did not succeed in making it unique and popular. At the beginning, running a directory could be frustrating because you won’t sell any links even if you spend a lot of money in it’s promotion. On the other hand, once your directory is popular, it could become the big earner in your website portfolio.
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