The Four Components of a Successful Website

There are, really, lots of things that can make or break a website.  This guru and that sage will talk, talk, talk about their particular angle and their particular strategy and charge you anywhere from $49.99 to $49,999.99 to teach it to you.  Each of these things being taught can be sifted down into four basic components: Content, Optimization, Monetization, and Promotion.

Content

This really is the core.  Everyone may say that “Content is King”, but few understand why, and there are several reasons.  The easiest reason to understand is simple:  That’s what Google looks for. Google values good content, good information, and it’s ranking calculations are set up to reward that.

Another very important reason is that it’s what people are mostly searching for.  Yes, it’s true that people are shopping online, but before they shop, they look for information.

Finally, it’s what gives your website substance. That’s kind of intangible, but it’s what makes people value your site.  It gives you authority. And that helps people when they want to buy.

Additionally, your site’s content has to be focused.  It has to have a good clear topic.  A blog that rants about politics, and then about religion, and reviews movies, and then gripes about the price of groceries might well be a good creative outlet for the author, but it’s not going to build an audience.

Optimization

Of course, if people can’t find your information, it doesn’t much matter, does it?  Your content and your pages have to be set up to contain good keywords, in the proper locations, with the right kind of interlinking.  In other words, even if you have a great hand of cards, you still have to play the game right.  With each of those things in place, your site will be easy to find, and people will come to know it as the place to go for your topic.

Monetization

That’s a newly coined word (pardon the pun) for “how to make this website pay off!”  There has to be some connection to making money, or it’s just a hobby.  There are lots of ways to do this, and they all have advantages and disadvantages.  You can sell products directly from your website, processing credit cards and fulfilling orders.  You can promote the products of other websites through an affiliate program, receiving a percentage of each sale. You can host ads on your site.  A single site can often employ many different streams of income.

Promotion

Finally, the site is ready, so now all it needs is traffic.  Good optimization will be valuable in this process, but there are more ways to make it work, too. Social networking is one way that’s both growing and practical. Paid internet advertising is now more affordable than ever, and it’s the most trackable methods of all. Site owners can be very strategic and get the most impact for their investment.

Over the course of the next few posts, I’ll be covering each of these in more detail. With this overview, however, you can either plan your upcoming website, or you can see which component needs the most work!

Mark is currently employed as an Internet Business Coach.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Panda Eats Up Lame Content and Spits it Out!

Some more thoughts on the value of valuable content:

For a long time, one of the biggest promotional strategies of the ‘net has been to establish lots of “content-based” links by writing an article and submitting it to hundreds of article directories, each one with a link to your website.

There were several problems with this.  One was that often these “articles” were thinly-veiled sales letters.  For example, if a website was all about baby strollers, the marketer might pick a few featured items, grind out 500 words about the features of those particular strollers, title it something like, “How to shop for a baby stroller”, and off it goes to the directories.  Or, it might have a brief overview of what, in general, makes up a baby stroller, with a few keywords.  

There was little in these, or most other articles that was truly informative or inspiring. If you check the table in my last post about internet content, these articles would go in the “lame” box in the lower right.

These are web pages that end up as what some people call “flotsam and netsam”.  These are pages that are mere clutter that clog up the ‘net and make it that much harder for people to find the real information that they’re wanting.

So, last spring, Google revised their ranking algorithm in an update referred to as “Panda”.  A lot of those marketers that had relied on their copied and spun articles with linkbacks found their rankings plummeting.  Those that relied on automatically generated content pulled with searches of keywords and scraped and copied text found that their sites had disappeared from top slots in Google’s search engine results pages.

Here are just a couple of good, informative updates on the subject:

• How Does the Panda/Farmer Update Impact Affiliates?
• Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking & Link Building

What this all boils down to is that Google is, once again, establishing content as king.  Good, useful, informative content, that is.  One by one, the quick, easy ways to magical Internet ranking and wealth are disappearing (if they ever existed in the first place), and steady, real, honest writing is winning the day.

Here are some ways to get good ranking and good traffic:

• Write (or pay good writers to write) good content for your websites.  This is true both of blogs and of ecommerce, products-based websites.
• Write good content for external sites, like reputable articles directories and content sites (ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, hubpages.com).
• Make good sensible comments on other people’s good content (in blogs or other discussion sites.  Even if the links are no-follow, it will help establish your credibility and attract directly clicking traffic.
• Submit good content to other people’s blogs as guest posts.
• Make a good, useful blog yourself.
• Use social networks like twitter and facebook wisely, to draw viewers and generate real buzz.
• In affiliate marketing, give people more content than ads, rather than the other way around.
• Make all of your writing and content rich in good keywords that are not already flooded in the marketplace.

These are the ways to make your site the most attractive and useful to visitors, and to make it more respected and ranked by the search engines.

Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company.

Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

The Long-Term Power of Authority

I've been reading a great e-booklet, called "Authority Rules".  It spells out just how to get a lot of links coming to your website or blog.  And, as we know, links mean traffic, links mean search engine ranking, and links mean spiders.  Links are critical to success.

The idea is to become an authority in a particular area of knowledge.

I can hear people already saying, "I'm no expert!"  and "I just wanna sell stuff!"

My answer is: "You don't have to be an 'expert' to share knowledge, and wanting to sell stuff is a great place to start!"

Let me tell you some stories.

When I was growing up, I had a great friend named Jon.  He and I shared a fascination with World War II, and plastic ship models in particular.  He found that some of the Japanese model companies made some of the most detailed and beautiful models.  Unfortunately (at least in my eyes) they only made models of the Japanese ships.  That didn't seem to bother Jon.  He loved them.  He built them, and he read about them.  He learned their names, and the battles they were in.  I followed along for the ride, but never quite shared his fascination so completely.

Fast forward.  We both went our separate ways, in college, jobs, marriages and lives, but we still keep in touch from time to time.

In the intervening years, he set up a website dedicated to his fascination with the Imperial Japanese Navy.  He showed pictures of the ships.  He started researching logs and historical documents and posting that information at his site.  Soon he was getting more and more traffic.  The site won awards and garnered much recognition among military historians and military history buffs. 

Keep in mind, that Jon's "day job" is NOT "historian".  He works in technology, in programming.  He just enjoys researching his passion, and shares what he learns.

Fast forward a little more.  A shipwreck is discovered, and it's believed that it's one of the Japanese aircraft carriers that was sunk in the battle of Midway.  An expedition is planned, with remote diving bots armed with cameras, to see if the wreckage can be identified.  Who do they call on to be the expert that can look at the video and images sent back up the wire?  Who can identify the ship?  Do they call on those with advanced degrees in naval history?  No, they call my friend, Jon, who runs a website. 

He goes on the expedition, and is able to work with them and identify the downed ship as the Kaga, which was, indeed, one of four Japanese aircraft carriers sunk in the battle of Midway.

Fast forward a bit more.  Jon and his colleague in the running of the website publish a book, "Shattered Sword, the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway".  It's considered by many to be the definitive work on the battle.  It includes many facets of the battle that had never been revealed before, including much from the perspective of the Japanese.

It's no surprise, then, that if you go to google and search for "Imperial Japanese Navy", that his website is #1.  It even outranks the Wikipedia entry.  It would also probably not surprise you to know that this site gets over 50,000 hits a month.

My point in telling you this story is to reshape your perspectives of what it means to be an "Authority", an "expert".  It doesn't necessarily mean you have to have degrees and the accolades of academy.  It does mean, you have to learn, and share what you learn.  In the process, you gain trust.  People will trust you to tell them what they want or need to know.  Once you have that, you are an expert, regardless. 

And they will come to you, and link to you, and tell others to find you, and your business will flourish because they will buy from you.

PS.  If you want to buy Jon's book, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, get it here.


Mark is currently in the curriculum Department of an internet and SEO training company. Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.