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.

At the beginning of March I spent some time designing Wordpress themes due to the fact that it was a very good moneymaker and that it was bringing a quite good traffic to the designer. In fact, everytime I created a Wordpress theme, I added a “designer link” to this blog in the footer. With the right promotion for each Wordpress theme, it was possible to get some good traffic and lots of backlinks.

Wordpress was used to have some pages with Wiki technology (registered users were able to modify these pages) on their website, were designers were able to add a link to a free Wordpress theme (to the page containing the description and the link to download the theme). This page was the Wordpress Codex Theme List which was divided into 4 sections: Widget ready themes, 2 columns themes, 3 column themes and finally something like “theme collections”. The first Wordpress themes I created, were all 2 column themes and had names such as “Moony”, “Orangeview”, “Flowerwords” and so on. The Wordpress Codex Theme List page had the same structure as a dictionary so that you had to add a theme beginning with “F” , after all themes starting with the letter “E”. When I noticed that I was receiving a lot of traffic from those “theme lists” even if all my themes were at the center of those long long pages, I realized that those pages were getting a lot of traffic.

When a visitor comes to your website or blog, and you have a really long page, he won’t probably scroll it down to read it all. That’s the reason why I had the idea to create several Wordpress themes, and choose a name for each of those starting with the letter”A”, with a number, or even with a “symbol” such as the “@”. That’s why within a week I created 3 themes called “@net”, “Abacus” (A-B-A, first theme of the “A” list) and “1984″. Those themes were followed by “@rctic Business” and “Acid Green Pro”. By getting one theme at the very top of three lists (Widget, three column and two column list), I started to receive some serious traffic (and with “serious traffic” I mean several hundreds of visitors each day). I never thought that it was possible to get so much direct traffic, with such a simple trick.

September the 3rd Wordpress finally decided to give their Theme Viewer a traffic boost, and closed the Theme Lists. Closing the theme list decreased Linkrain’s blog traffic by 30%. Those visitors were actually not converting into anything (they did not subscribe to the blog feed because they were only interested in the Wordpress theme and they did not click any advertisement because of the same reason) but they were still visitors.

Hopefully I will find a new little traffic bringer soon

Along with hundreds of CSS website templates, you will also find Flash intros, flash buttons and also whole Flash website templates. Due to this large collection, you will be able to download web templates and to customize them for your needs. Customizing themes is a great training if you are planning to become a web designer. It’s surely much easier to learn how to design a template if you already have an idea about how those templates work.

But why should I register if I don’t even know how to change an existing template? The answer is pretty simple: Boxedart.com, along with the huge template collection, is offering also an incredibe amount of tutorials ranging form the most simple ones regarding ” basic customization of HTML and partial Flash templates” to the more difficult ones such as “intermediate customizations in Flash”. There are tutorials for every kind of designer, newcomers and professionals.

Is 99.99$ a good investment? If you consider that a Flash layout or another kind of template usually ranges between 100$ and 500$ each (depending on the quality of the work), it’s suraly a great investment if you can get hundreds of templates, banners and buttons for just 99 bucks. You should also look at this offer as an investment that you will get back really quickly. If you have read the article about sponsoring Wordpress themes, you will know that you can make a lot of money by selling sponsor links in the footer of website templates. If you can get access to hundred of layouts that are easily customizable thanks to the tutorials offered by Bodexart.com, you will be able to create your own templates very soon and this will make it possible to sell the whole template or to find some paying sponsors for it.

Don’t miss this opportunity to become easily a Web designer and to make a lot of money with it

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

Many websites don’t use a HTML sitemaps because it’s not important for them to have inner pages with PageRank but for a Web Directory it’s surely on of the most important factors. All those Web Directories built on an expired domains that have only one page (the homepage) with PageRank, are completly worthless. Getting a good inner PageRank is quite hard because you will need to get some quality backlinks for each of your pages and this can be really expensive (even if it’s something you will have to do).

After getting many of Linkrain’s categories linked by other websites and after achieving a PageRank for most of them, I decided to try if it’s possible to increase inner PageRank by adding a HTML sitemap to the directory. I had this idea after visiting Linkforever, a Web Directory which is offering a MOD for phpLD that creates a html sitemap within a few seconds after installing it (the cost of this mod is 15$).

Before buying this mod I checked nearly 50-60 categories of Linkforever, and all of them had at least a PageRank of 2. Even 3rd level categories had a PageRank of 2. After a quick look at their sitemap, I noticed that it achieved a PageRank of 4, and that it passed some of this juice to each categorie of the directory (of course there are also some categories without PageRank, but I think that these are new ones and that they will get a PageRank with the next Google PR update).

For a Web Directory, a html sitemap is not necessary, but surely very important and also an easy way to pass some of the PR juice to all categories.

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

To help other webmasters and designers and to give them the opportunity to make some quick many before the end of this business, I wrote two Wordpress theme related articles:

• One about how to make money with Wordpress themes
• Another about Wordpress theme promotion. I was used to send a list of all the websites I submitted the theme to, to each link buyer. Many webmasters bought a sponsored link only to get this list of websites and to start creating themes on their own. That’s why I decided to write an article about Wordpress theme promotion and let all my readers know how to promote them properly.

Digitalpoint is a forum that I read every day and the link sale section is one of my favourite ones. Already a few weeks ago, the threads about Wordpress sponsor links started to become less. After a quick look today I noticed that there are only a few sponsored link sellers left. All of them make great designs but they don’t succeed in selling those sponsor links for more than 20-30$ each. At the beginning of April, it was possible to earn more than 400$ with each Wordpress theme by selling 3 sponsored links in the footer.

Now this business is dead.

Two are the major reasons for this:

1. It is not profitable anymore to design a Wordpress theme. A quality theme needs many hours of work and selling 3 sponsor links in the footer for 20$ each link is surely not worth the afford.
2. The major websites that host free Wordpress themes and make them available for download to the internet community, does not accept sponsored Wordpress themes anymore (in some cases, they will accept the theme but it will be marked as “Sponsored Theme”). If a theme can’t be pubblished on those websites, it will surely not receive a lot of downloads.

I think you have noticed that I’m still designing Wordpress themes. In fact, it is a very good backlink generator, especially if it gets thousands of downloads like it happened recently to @rctic business. If you are planning to design Wordpress themes in the future, don’t make it for money, but for backlinks and the satisfaction you get everytime a blog is using one of your creations

• 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

• 600-700$/month from people that add a link to directory (17-18 regular listings and 2-3 featured listings each month)
• 300$/month from my main page sponsors (other web directories and related sites displayed on the main page of Linkrain)

Total: 900-1000$ each month

These are only the earnings of the Web Directory (blog earnings are not included). To get to this point I spent nearly 2.000$ which I got back within 2 months. Of course I could now stop to invest time, work and money into Linkrain, and earn nearly 1.000$ each month by doing nothing. Earnings would go down each month but I would surely make 5.000-6.000$ within the end of the year. But this is not my objective. Having a blog and a website which is becoming more popular evey day is a lot of fun, the major reason why I started and I’m still running this website.

Regarding the future earnings, I have a very positive prospective:

• The directory is not publishing any kind of advertisements yet. Only by displaying one Google Adsense Block in a good position, I could easily average 100$/month. I’m not going to do this anyway (or maybe not yet) because this could reduce the value of the directory and reduce the number of customers.
• By getting PageRank 6 with the next update or with a future Google PR update, customers would increase a lot and also my sponsors would pay more to list their service on the main page.
• The directory is still using a free template. Once the custom template is up, customers will surely increase.

In my opinion, it is easily possible to create a one-year-old Web Directory which is generating 2.000$ of revenue each month. I will write a new post in 6 months to let you know if I reached this goal

The leaderboard at the top, the skyscraper at the bottom left and the big rectangle at the center of the page, are advertisements served by Fastclick (pay per impression advertisements).

There are also 2 blended Google Ads (marked as “Google Ads” in the image) and 3 other small ads at the top right and top left of the page.

That’s a total of 8 advertising blocks on one single page. Considering the traffic that this website receives, it is earning thousands of dollars each month by displaying these ads. The intersting thing about those pages full of ads, is that you don’t really see where you have to click to play the game! There is an orange box that says “Play Game” with a short description but no botton to click.

Lots of users that come to a page like this, will probably click an advertisement because it is NOT obvious that you have to CLICK THE IMAGE (in the screenshot I’ve made, you have to click the car image) to play the game.

The avertisement placement of this website should guarantee a game site huge ad earnings. I know that some of my readers are running an arcade game website. If you someone is going to try this ad placement, please let me know how it works

Let’s skip to the main question of this article (the earnings of a web directory, will be discussed in another post): how much money do I need to invest to create a quality web directory?

Many people create a directory network instead of creating one single web directory. The benefit of a directory network is that you can create a lot of directories that look the same, and offer a submission to all these for a cheap price. Also in this case, you will need to promote only one of them and than link all your directories from the promoted one. A directory network can bring quite good money, but it will never beat the earnings of one single professional quality directory.

In my opinion it’s always better to focus on one single directory and try to make it as unique and popular as possible. Here is a list of what I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory:

• 10$ for a domain name at Godaddy
• 75$ for a directory script ( PHP Link Directory) with full rights
• 100$ for a Deeplink Mod (a modification which allows users to submit also inner pages of their site and not only the main page). This mod can also be installed on your own if you are a good PHP coder or if you have already some experience with the “php link directory” script.
• 400$ for a custom template (which is not online yet) and a logo. Also this can be done by yourself if you already have some experience with “php link directory” templates and if you are good in designing with Photoshop.
• 1.000$ in promotion. I don’t really know how much I’ve spend in promotion yet, but with 1.000$ you can get some really good results. At the beginning you should not spend them in Adwords but only in permanent links, blog posts and some cheap monthly links. Once you have an established directory, you could also start to sponsor Wordpress themes (or other kind of templates) and to spend some money in a Pay Per Click advertising service such as Google Adwords.

TOTAL: 1.585$

If you think that this is a lot of money to start only a web directory, wait to see how much you can earn with a 6 months old and well promoted one (article that I’m going to write soon). If you are to lazy to come back, subscribe to the full RSS Feed.