You're Not Making Any Money Online without Authority

Made you wonder, didn't I?? If you read my post from a couple of days ago you saw that I assigned you to do some research by typing in an example keyword phrase 'How to Make Money Online'. If you did what I asked you, you probably wondered what you should really be looking for that defines their site's success in the search engines. I bet you felt that slight pang of jealousy that your website isn't in that top 10 list (heck, I know I did).

Many of you have probably dropped some real dollars on some ebooks and read a thing or two about search engine optimization to guess that these sites have high quality backlinks from other sites that also rank well in the search engines. And, as we all know TRAFFIC = MONEY - so, everyone's goal is to get traffic. However, (and this is a BIG however) that is not necessarily the answer to getting top rankings in Google or Yahoo (and most recently - Bing). Bada Bing! Read that last line again.

Ok, hold all of your preconceptions about SEO because you're probably submitting articles, adding entries to link directories, creating profiles in social sites, etc. etc. - i.e. - wasting valuable time! There is one secret I'm going to spill - and that is your site's authority!

By authority I mean that the content you've provided in your site or blog has relevant meaning and important to human eyes based on your key topic. Guess what? Google is trying to view your site the same way with human glasses - and, guess what - they're not rose colored.

What you might be thinking is that Google is judging your site based on the number and popularity of sites linking back to you. True, somewhat - but, there are a boatload of PhDs at Google trying to make it read your site like a human - yes, a human. That means reading from top to bottom, left to right, scanning and determining if the content has relevance (remember that term - it is important) and authority to the topic at hand - that is, your web page.

So what does that really mean? If you think about this it is about the perception the search engines have of your content demonstrating that you have the appropriate knowledge of the topic or niche. That is why you'll see sites with a significant amount of detailed content focused on specific keywords ranking high.

Recently, however, I have discovered sites that rank in page 1 of Google that do not have many backlinks, and, those backlinks are not highly ranked. I was literally floored when I found this. Why would these sites get high rank for the search term?

In one example I found a site ranked #4 of 1.4M results that had 6 pages with 717, 755, 519, 211, 373 and 12 words in each page respectively. The pages spoke directly to the main topic (page 1) and associated topics in pages 2-5 with page 6 being a contact page. It had 28 backlinks with all being simple web directories, whois and alexa rank. Pretty simple - but, it was authoritative. It reads well, has the main topic as the page title and subtopics / subheadings with content.

What this demonstrates is that getting ranked high in Google may not be as hard as you think - just as long as you build your pages in a human readable, authoritative manner. Want a great example? Just take a look at how Wikipedia is structured and you'll get a clue on what you need to do (more on this later). There's no telling how long it will take Google to get you to a high position - be patient - you should be able to build niche sites that capitalize on this and make money easier than before.

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The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 3

After getting back from a long vacation in the desert Southwest I was startled to find that my high volume search keyword site had shown some significant growth in the last 2 months (if you haven't read Part 1 you can find it here, or Part 2 which can be found here).

If you remember I mentioned that having a site devoted to a keyword phrase that has extremely high monthly search volume can be a great way to make money online and boost your online marketing strategy. After reviewing one of my own sites I thought I might show you what kind of results you may get (DISCLAIMER - your results will vary!).

I initially built my site on August 21st, 2006 with just a couple of pages but focused on three extremely high volume keyword phrases in the entertainment industry that I thought might work well. I really didn't spend much time on it for the first two months or so but then picked up in October by promoting it as much as I could (as noted in Part 2 of these articles).

My AdSense revenue was limited with my first revenue click occurring on November 4th and my November average revenue being $0.60 / day for a total of $17 - not bad considering I only put two hours into it. Now, this is a bit unfair considering the search engines had from Aug. 21st to about Oct. 20th to index my site before I really pushed the search engine optimization. I'm not sure how long the engines would have taken had I started pushing the site sooner.

In December I focused entirely on adding content with about 7 more pages of site articles and information really ignoring backlinks from external directories, forums, blogs, and articles. My AdSense revenue stayed about the same until about Feb. 12th. I'm not sure why (my guess is my search engine rankings went up) but my visits jumped by a factor of about 8x. This didn't really increase the revenue because the clickthrough rates were low.

After reading some of Brad Callen's books (be sure to subscribe to the Agile Marketer Newsletter to get a free SEO ebook from him, or, really become a SEO expert and buy SEO Elite probably the best SEO package available) I decided to modify my ad placements based on his research. By the end of April I was nearing $1 / day on one site with only five hours of total work.

By continually adding content , promoting and reorging the ads I now had a site that was curving upward in daily hits (from about 30 a day in late 2006 to 700 a day by June 2007). Well, to make a long story short here are my results from August:

By Google's Terms of Service I can't show you the clickthrough rates or page impressions. But you can see the daily earnings for just this single site (I've filtered out all my other AdSense earnings).

So, what's the moral of this story? With NOT a lot of work and some patience, diligence and focused high volume keywords you should be able to do the same fairly easily. If your goal is to work from home then this might just be one part of your arsenal to get started. Just be sure to keep the content flowing.

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