Just today I added a tags feature on Voodoochilli.net. Tags are a way of social networking allowing people to find out what’s popular. I found this project particularly interesting as it really does show what real people are posting on the site. Following a simple set of rules, the end result is really quite revealing.

Click here to have a look

Google is planning to release more data and tools to help combat click fraud on it Google Adsense program. Apparently members of Google Adsense will soon be able to scrutinise clicks from visitors to enable better detection of fraud. This will be a welcome upgrade after many people have criticised Google for not sharing such data. Google estimates that around 10% of all clicks are fraudulent, something it is working hard to improve on.

I just found out today that one of the sites we designed last year has featured on the BBC news program “Click”. It’s great to know the site is doing so well.

You can read more here and view the archived video here (Starts at 19 mins)

The Green and Easy website can be viewed here

I have been doing a lot of research about this lately, there are loads of sites telling you how to make thousands from the google adsense affiliate program. They all make it sound so easy. In reality you have to put in a lot of hard work. From my research there are three main factors which will enable a high payout from google:

1. Lots of traffic
2. A good click through rate (CTR)
3. High paying keywords

Lots of traffic
There are untold strategies to boost traffic to a site, including well optimised pages and keywords (meta data), inbound links, paid advertising etc. in my opinion the best way to drive visitors to a site is to have decent content. If you offer something to your visitors, be it information or advice or the free use of a service you will undoubtedly get a certain level of traffic

A good click through rate (CTR)
Positioning of ads can help increase this, either by blending in your ads or making them stand out from your content. Some people place images next to the ads, which apparently increases CTR by attracting more attention to the advert.

High paying keywords
Now this is tricky. Making a site only to generate high paying key-worded ads is a bad idea, and not allowed by google. This doesn’t stop people doing it though! I personally think if you don’t know what you are talking about, then don’t bother writing about it. Pick a subject you are interested in, your visitors will have a far more informed and enjoyable visit and will keep coming back.

One way of increasing the keyword price is by using section targeting. This allows you to emphasise or ignore certain content from the site. Results aren’t immediate as you have to wait for google to re-crawl your site before there is any noticeable difference.

www.voodoochilli.net, our artist’s portfolio website has a nice little write up in January’s issue of one of the biggest creative magazines in the UK – Computer Arts. The site is mentioned in the round up of the best online design on page 23 of issue 131. Here’s what they said:

“Every once in a while someone fulfils a creative’s dreams – and this site comes pretty darn close. Voodoochilli is a resource e-zine for artists, a meta-tagged and searchable database, an online CV and portfolio window, and a superb creative community site.”

The site was also featured in another magazine recently called Advanced Photoshop.

As mentioned in my first post I am going to use various techniques and tricks to boost traffic to this blog. I have already placed a few subtle links on a couple of my other websites that get visited by search engines regularly so some work is already being done. Next I really need to “keyword up” this site. Before simply loading the site full of keywords I need to identify what keywords are needed to be effective. What sort of person am I trying to get to visit this blog? Many people do this try to imagine the average visitor (if there is such a thing) and even name them. I won’t be going that far, but I think I have a pretty good idea of the average web person – they are a bit like me.

The sort of terms I am likely to type in a search engine such as google when looking for a site like this are as follows:

“web development discussion”
“web dev blog”
“php discussion board”
“html and css blog”

After writing this piece I will place similar keywords into the title tags, meta tags and alt tags of the site. I should also consider naming image files and directories to match. As content is king, simply by listing these words in this content I am increasing the potential of someone reading this.

After the site is key-worded I need to start researching and finding other sites to share links with. This is an ongoing process but we should start seeing some results soon.

After doing a bit of search engine performance research I have found out that the first ever post, the one about creating dynamic sub-domains is bringing in the most visitors. This makes sense to me as its a technical query, the sort of thing I myself might look for on the web.

This has made me realise that for this blog to be successful I really need to concentrate on content. Ok this might not be the prettiest blog on the planet, but I think a fresh new design can wait while I build on serving better content and getting in more visitors.

I am going to have a little think now on what I can write up that might be useful to someone.