When talking to people that really don’t know much about SEO I found it hard to explain how it works until I came up with my little SEO game. Basically what I do now when explaining it to friends or possible clients is to think of it as a game. When selecting your keyword or phrase, depending on how much competition there is for that keyword you assign it a value.
So for example “Web Hosting” would be 10,000 points, while “Best Web hosting in New Jersey” would be 450 points.
The points represent how many points you need to obtain a page 1 ranking in Google. Note these are just arbitrary numbers and don’t really mean anything.
Now, there are many SEO techniques you can use to obtain your page 1 ranking. Heres a simplified list.
1) On-Site SEO - 500 points
2) Off Site SEO - 5 - 1000 points
#1 basically consists of the work you do on your site. Good page titles, SEO friendly URLs, domain name, keyword density, inhouse links, H tags and meta tags.
So if you perfectly SEO your site, you get 500 points. Now when going after keywords/phrases that don’t have much competition, doing this might be enough to get a page 1 ranking. In the example above you can see the “Best web hosting in New Jersey” only takes 450 points to get a page 1 result.
However going after a more competitive keyword/phrase like Web Hosting takes many more points.
#2 basically consist of all the sites ranging from PR0 - PR9 that link to your site. So for instance if a site that is PR4 links to your site using your keywords you might get 15 points. If they link to your site without your keywords you might only get 10 points. Getting a PR8 site to link to yours with your keywords might give you 500 points. So you can see that getting high PR sites are worth it.
In our example above, “Web Hosting” is a very highly competitive keyword, so even with perfect SEO, your going to need a lot of sites with good PR to link to you before you get a page 1 ranking. So as you can see its sorta like a game where you try to get as many points as you can and the more points you get the close to page 1 you get.
Again, these numbers are not based off anything and are completely arbitrary. Its just a easy way that I’ve been using to explain how SEO works.
Today I purchased another site, http://www.3dsmaxtutorials.net, for $850. The site is only a month old so it has no PR, but it does have 8 new 3DSM tutorials which has been submitted to all the popular tutorial directories, which is bringing in all the traffic. Right now the site is getting around 800 uniques/day and making around $10/day with Google, although I can’t confirm that since I just put my ads up 2 hrs ago.
I purchased this site mainly for the reason that it would be a great addition to my other 3D Tutorial site and since that has been very successful for me I thought I’d give it another try. To domain name is good, I can definitely SEO it and hopefully within 2-3 months be on page 1 or 2 for the keywords. Having the other site which is #1 in Google will definitely help this new site since I’ll be linking to it and I already have a long list of contacts that have 3D sites, so I can easily email everyone and get them to link to it as well. I should be able to make my money back within 6 months if all goes well 
Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but I’ve been working on a website for a client. About 2 weeks ago I received an email to create a website for someone. Now I get emails like this every once in a while, but usually nothing ever gets moving. The last time I did a website for someone was about a year and half go and it was horrible. It was one of those things where the clients input made the site look absolutely horrible. I tried to make the site look nice, but then he would show me a site from 1994 and would say make it look like that. But you do what the client wants, so he ended up getting a ugly looking site, but he was happy with it so thats fine with me. But this time the client really liked one of my designs and wanted me to create something similar for his company. So I gave him my price and they accepted. So thats basically thats want I’ve been working on for the last week. Have the design done, just need to code it now. Its actually been a very smooth experience this time. Not to many changes, they like the design, pretty straight forward, which is good cause it saves me time.
When starting out with a new website it can be hard to get other established sites to link back to you, so submitting your site to free/paid directories can be a big help early on. The problem lies with where to find directories and how to submit your site without spending the whole day going from 1 site to another and filling out forms.
You basically have 2 options when it comes to submitting to directories. The first is hire someone else to do it. If you don’t have the time, I would recommend doing this. Its pretty cheap and most of the time, they do a decent job. Recently at DigitalPoint I hired someone to submit my site to 500 directories for $25. Not too bad, although its been a week and I’m still waiting. This is the 4th time I’ve hired someone to do it for me, 2 out of the 3 times before were good, but the last time the guy took 2 weeks and ended up only submitting to about half of what he said. But he was very cheap so I guess I got what I paid for.
The second is to purchase some software and submit your sites yourself. I recently purchased Submit Suite’s Website Submitter (aff), since I’ve heard other people using it and were very happy with the way it worked. It doesn’t automatically submit your site to directories. Basically it loads a directory, going straight to the submit form if possible and auto-fills the form for you. Basically all you have to do is hit “Submit” and click, “Next Directory”. Its comes with about 2,500 directories already included but you can add more if you like. The problem is that even though it does most of the tedious work for you, some directories are a bitch to submit too. They make you browse the site until you find the appropriate category, then you get to submit your site. This is what slows down the process. On average it took me about an hr for 100 directories, maybe a little more. Pretty good in my opinion.
For the most part I really like to program. For each directory listed it tells you the PR, whether the site is free or paid, its categories and a few other useful things, but they don’t include enough filter options. This was a little annoying when selecting what directories I wanted to submit too. Besides that I would definitely recommend using this program if you have the time. For me, I just don’t have the time and I have way too many sites, so I will be going back and just hiring people to do it for me.
Its that time again
Earnings
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Google: $890.10
Yahoo: $253.59
Intelli: $79.31
Tribal Fusion: $440.79
Amazon: $34.67
Misc Earning: $956.00
Total Earning: $2654.46
Advertising Spent: $216.33
Total Profit: $2438.13(9.6% Decrease)
Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
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Total Growth - 3.8% Increase (8,437 uniques)
This month sucked. Traffic increase a bit, but I think its skewed since http://worm.bluesfear.com was Dugg again (used about 500 GB of bandwidth, ouch). So a decent amount of traffic overflowed to Bluesfear which gave it a 12,000 unique increase from last month. Not taking that into account, overall traffic was actually down 4,000 uniques. Earnings are also down a whooping 9.6%. Not good. It can be the time of year, its only a month after the big holiday season, so it could be that advertisers were pulling back a little. Hopefully this month things will pick up.
On the upside my first month as an Amazon affiliate I made almost $35. Not too bad considering the tiny amount of traffic my amazon affiliate site receives. This is what I’m going to be working on most of this month cause I want to break into 3 figures this month, then 4 figures within a month or 2 after that.
Also its St Patrick Day in Hoboken, NJ this Saturday. I know its 2 weeks before the real St Patrick’s day, but Hoboken does it early so it doesn’t have to compete with the NYC parade. To give you a picture of what its like, at around 9:00 am every bar, which is close to 100 within 1/2 square mile, has lines outside the door of people looking to get plastered. I’ve done it 2 years in a row now, I don’t go to the bars during the day cause they charge ridiculas covers, so I stick to house parties. At around 4 everyone crashes then at around 8-9 we all go out again to the bars and get drunk again. Good times.