Web Sites Which Sell

I heard about a "free" eBook from Entrepreneur magazine which teaches how to build web sites that sell. So I went to get mine. Turns out Microsoft Live is the sponsor of this free book. And I had to sign up for Microsoft Live. That itself was a pain since they wanted my e-mail address. Once I got the book and read it, I was surprised how little value the book put on Search Engine Optimization.

Perhaps in the big picture, SEO is only a little fish in the marketing pond. The book had a lot of well known web site design principles like KISS. It highly recommended a lot of headlines to catch the reader's eye. One thing it advised which I really have not thought about was to ensure your sight works well with many browsers. Time to check all my pages with FireFox.

Currently I am generating a number of web sites to boost inbound links to my main sites. When I finish building a web site, I submit it to The Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. However the book I read also suggested that I submit URLs to AOL and Ask.com as well. I am not sure if these extra steps are really required. I really should know this as I have read a couple books that cover this. What do you think?

Getting Indexed

I have a number of new web sites that I want indexed by Google. So I got through the normal process and add their URLs to Google. I also add them to MSN and Yahoo search. As I develop new web sites, I continue to submit the completed sites to the search engines.

What I have found is that it is hard to predict when my new web sites get crawled and indexed. My first new site seemed to get crawled by Google relatively quickly. I thought this was just due to good luck. However my second and third sites took much longer.

As I pondered this discrepancy, I tried to analyze the site content for each of the sites to detect a reason why Google indexed the first one very quicky. This was difficult as each of my sites were nearly identical in layout. Then I recalled that the one thing different about the first new web site was that I linked to it from my main company web page. I am suspecting that this linking may have moved the site up in the queue for indexing. In fact, I think I have heard or read about this effect somewhere.

It is my firm belief that you need to test out theories like this. Since I have a constant generation of new web sites, and the full control of my company web page, I plan to do some tests. If in fact linking to the new site accelerates its Google indexing, I think I will have a new process for launching new sites. I will keep you posted on my findings.

Page Rank like Chess Rating

I have a goal to increase the Page Rank of my main site. So I know one thing that will help me is a lot of inbound links. I am working on building up some filler web sites that link to my main site. But the question is how should these links be arranged? Do I just need thousands of random pages directly pointing to my main site? I suspect this may help, but optimal gains will require a different configuration.

Now I will confess that I do not know the innards of the Page Rank algorithm used by the Big Boys like Google. But I have some theories. The whole scene reminds me of Yahoo chess. In the Yahoo games environment, you are given a score. It goes up when you win games. And down when you lose them. Some boring cheaters created 2 accounts, and let one of their accounts win all the time. But that only got them so far. Each win counted less and less towards boosting up their top account. After a while the wins against the second account seemed to be of no use.

There was a breakthrough idea that you could chain together a number of bogus accounts. The first account would always lose to the second. The second account would always lose to the third. And so on. If you had a total of 15 accounts, and you let the accounts play each other in a controlled fashion, you could do wonders. The trick was that each account would only play the other accounts directly below and above them. That way each win/loss had the most effect. And the overall effect of the many accounts was multiplied.

How does this apply to Page Rank? My theory is that if each page can pass on a little rank to another, there must be a way to set up the links between many pages to optimize the final page you wish to get the big Page Rank. And the idea will follow the chess rating boosting. Let the lowest level pages link to your second level pages. And the second level pages link up to the third level pages. And so on up to you main page which could be level 15. My hope is that these chained links will have a snowball effect and maximize the passing on of rank. I am willing to give this a try. If you find my Software Maintenance web page at the top of the SERPs, you will know I am doing something right.