Spiders are among my least favorite creatures in the real world and I don’t think they fare much better with me in the virtual realm.  Too bad!  I’d love to get lots of free generic traffic from search engines, but somehow cannot bring myself to write for spiders over humans.  My bank account, no doubt, would fare far better if I developed the proper mindset about this.

I plan to devote November to an article-writing campaign to try and increase my readership at this and my other blogs.  It will take enormous self-discipline to follow the guidelines.  Hopefully, I’m up to the task.

What follows is an article for your info that lays out the correct way to do this.  Enjoy!  I hope you are better at living within the rules than am I.

The Importance Of Keywords

Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines. Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.

Maggie

I’ve just spent an entire weekend (12 - 15 hours a day) editing and trying to install a group of Adsense sites I had purchased to try and increase my Adsense income.  As I uploaded them, some would work and some would just return a variety of error messages.  So it was trouble-shooting session after trouble-shooting session. 

Finally, this morning I contacted my host  to see if they could figure out why sometimes the sites would call up and work and then on the next call-up they either wouldn’t load at all or the links within the sites would return error messages.  I worked with the tech person for about an hour to no avail.  It’s now been kicked up the chain to “admin” and I’m awaiting an answer to my support ticket.

Not exactly the “internet lifestyle” I have been seeking.

The BIG question is will my persistance pay off in the end or have I just totally wasted a weekend?  I am a great believer in persistance.  And in truth, I’m sure when I finally have those sites working I will have advanced my skill level and learned valuable lessons from this experience.  I guess it is just the price I have to pay for having no aptitude for technology. 

Can a person with a bad voice be a singer if they persist?  Can a tech-challenged old lady be an affiliate marketer with no aptitude for technology?  We shall see.

Later!

Maggie

The tasks I have to get done today are the result of meddling in things that were working just fine on the premise that I could make them better. 

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know how tech-challenged I am.  So what do I decide to do?  I signed into my web server and set about cleaning up old files that were no longer being called for any of my sites.  The longer I worked, the more careless I got.  Net result:  I screwed up not one, but two of my current sites. 

I worked very late into last night and will spend the entire day today re-writing material and uploading because I decided to clean up what didn’t need cleaning.  A high price indeed to pay for a task that I should outsourced to someone who knows what they are doing when it is necessary.  Lesson learned?  Know and respect your limits and enter unknown waters with a mentor or coach if you want to add to your knowledge base.

Maggie

I do seem to need to structure a workday plan, however.  I’ve been neglecting established  sites to work on new ones.  How do people with hundreds of sites manage?  I have trouble focusing on the big picture rather than the nitty-gritty details.  And somehow I never seem to get around to the tasks involved in driving traffic.  I really must devise a work schedule and stick to it so that all the necessary tasks get attention.  Another basic lesson to which I have been giving lip service but have been absent when it comes to implementing the task.

I’m once again very excited about my business and looking forward.  I have found a couple of great products which will enable me to divirsify and hopefully bring more stability to the business.  Of course, unless I become more efficient in my day-to-day functioning I will merely create chaos instead of reliable growth.

So, my advice to you is:  Early on, set up a work schedule and take control of your time and all the required tasks for your business.  Not very glamorous, but essential.  You may be able to just founder around when you’re maintaining one site, but when you acquire or create multiple sites this approach simply will not get the job done.

Till next time!

Maggie