SEO Site

Google announced this week that it was seeking testing on its new search engine architecture code named Caffeine.  I tested it and some of my sites rose in rankings and some lost rankings.  It was a bit of give and take.  With this new architecture and Google gradually phasing it in, it just reminds me what a joke the term passive online income is.  The term passive denotes something that you just throw up and money just comes rolling in with very little work.  If you are trying to make an income online, then you know how much work you have to put into it and it is anything but passive.  To me, it is like a cat and mouse game between publisher, advertiser, search engine, and the affiliate program.

As the publisher, you have to write the content that matches the needs of the advertiser and beat other publishers to the top of the search engine rankings.  As the advertiser, you have to get the most bang for the buck for your advertising campaign by buying the right keywords.  As the search engine, you need to match the intentions of the searcher to the right web pages.  As the affiliate program, you need to provide enough incentives to the consumer, advertiser and publisher so it is worthwhile for all parties involved including the company’s bottom line.  It is an always changing dynamic as each aspect of the internet marketing business is tweaked.   You always need to stay on top of things since if even one party changes their rules, this can dramatically affect your network portfolio.  And people want to call making income online passive?

Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and due to my job, I was at a Google demonstration of their new Google Search Appliance 6.0 for enterprises not too long ago.  The speaker from Google said they have thousands of PhDs in natural language working for them and they are always pushing the envelope to make it index faster, get more accurate results and return results faster.  It’s like it is reaching into your brain trying to decipher what you really mean when you type in its single search box.

In theory, as Google gets better in latent semantic indexing, the search engine rankings should reflect web results that provide quality content.  And there lies the age old question from internet marketers: does quality content count?  Is on page SEO with quality content a bigger factor than off page SEO with lots of quality incoming links?  There will always be multiple factors to the Google search engine algorithm and no one will know for sure.  However, there will always be speed bumps to slow down the get rich quick schemes.  Personally, I’m not knocking these types of internet marketers at all.  There are many, many ways to making an online income and I also come from a finance background.  One such way is to get onto a trend quick and pull out when the market gets too hot creating a bubble.  Then comes the Google slap but you don’t care anymore because you’re onto the next online incoming generating scheme.  Those who piled into the bandwagon late will crash and burn.  It happened to me a few times as well.  It is the top internet marketing experts who can spot these trends in an instant but newbies are not so adept. It is best for young internet marketers to play it safe before they lose their shirts doing something they don’t understand.

I always recommend to friends trying to make an income online to go through the process of creating new sites and ranking them to number one without the help of any automation process or outsourcing.  Sounds harsh I know but this is for a couple of reasons.  First off, this separates those serious internet marketers from the pretenders.  This is what I meant when I said making online income is anything but passive income.  You work for it.  I also believe that it is important to understand the entire business model from start to finish before you outsource anything.  This includes keyword research, writing content, link building, affiliate search, lead generation, and store front building.  Call me paranoid, but I like to know how to do each aspect so I don’t get BSed by other people that I’m hiring.  I can call them out on anything because I have previous experience.

Here’s a little anecdote of when I was younger.  I used to work for a small start up company right out of university as a programmer and this was around when 9/11 hit.  It was also during the tech crash so I felt I was lucky to even get a job.  In any case, I was getting a lowball salary and I’m talking about dishwasher salary here but it was good experience to get my feet wet.  And I did everything for that company, from design, coding, writing tech manuals and even answering phone calls for tech support.  I knew every aspect of the program which funny enough was about language parsing and knowledge management.  It worked backwards from a search engine as that would infer that the user knows what he/she is looking for.  How many times have you sat in front of Google and wondered what you should type?  Instead, this program (or the engine we wrote) was to make sense of what knowledge you really had in your repositories and it spat out the themes of whatever type of data you had.  With that information, you can use that as the information architecture of your organization.  In any case, all that to say that with knowing every aspect of that software from the ground up, top down, sideways and in fourth dimension space, there’s very little bullshit I can’t spot.  If you’re in this business for yourself, you also need to take the responsibility to learn every aspect of the job as well.  It’s recommended to have some semblance of a clue as to what you are doing so you can convey what you want to outside help.  This will protect you from yourself.  That’s the price you pay for wanting to make an online income.  By the way, to conclude that story, I got a massive raise after my three month probation.

So speaking of money, another reason why you want to do everything for yourself when you first start out is to save money.  There are two types of people when they first try to make online income.  In one camp, you have the people who are very excited and willing to spend money on this new venture.  In the other camp, you have people who view internet marketing with scepticism.  They don’t believe it’s a real job with a real business model and they don’t want to put any money into it.  That’s fine as well.  For both camps, I think they should follow my advice and learn from the ground up.  There are many blogging platforms that will allow you to make online income for free.  They should cut their teeth on that and gain an understanding of the work load with their only commitment being time.  If they start making money, they can reinvest into the business.  If they don’t make any money then that means they still haven’t figured out how Google ranks for keywords and that’s the battle right there.  They should get out while they are still unscathed.

For those who take their apprenticeship on free blogging platforms, you will then have the foundation of your future network portfolio.  You can then use these assets to link build to future self hosted sites which can prove to be even more profitable.  So, take the time now to understand Google and the new Caffeine architecture.  Understanding Google Caffeine could affect your future online income.

Hello, and welcome to SEO Site Spider.  This is a personal site on how to make income online.  This site focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) onsite and offsite as core strategies.  Why do you want to hear me speak (read me rather)?  I’m a professional webmaster by day and an internet marketer by night.  It first started out as a desire to expand my online skills but then it turned into something more profitable.  There have been numerous pitfalls, starts and stops in my adventure and I hope to impart what I’ve learned with you.

When I first started thinking about making income online I created a blog because that’s what everyone was doing.  Like I said ealier, I also wanted to play with the technology for learning purposes.  However, I was soon let down because I wasn’t making as much money as the perceived pro bloggers of the “Make Money Online” niche.  They all say make good content, engage the readers, get a high RSS feed count.  Advertisers will see the feed count and they will then line up to advertise on to your site.  Or perhaps you can endorse a product and make affiliate commissions.  This is the mentality of today’s online trend.  Everything is interactive; everything is social.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  But it also takes a long time to gain readership and readership trust.  Do you actually use the product or are you just shilling it?  And what about making engaging content?  Do you think you can churn out blog posts every day?  Or will you dribble it down to once a week, or once a month when your interest wanes?  Very few people can keep audience attention if it isn’t on a regular schedule.  How would you like it if your favorite TV program was on sporadically?

The reason why I ask is because I too have tried this method of creating an online income.  My first blog that I mentioned was a finance blog.  I think the average of how long a new blogger lasts might be a year and I think I lasted exactly that long.  I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about that.  On the one hand, I am happy I got out of the grind of 3-4 blog posts per week.  On the other hand, I’m disappointed that I was… well, average.

I had gone on vacation and came back with the feeling that I just enjoyed not being tied down to a blog.  It got to be a chore writing and socializing with the financial blogging community in order to be seen and heard.  It was like a networking gig all the time.  Most of all, it wasn’t profitable either.  I had readers but they weren’t clickers of the Google Adsense ads or any other random banners that were displayed on my site.  The problem was the fact that they were READERS.  For whatever reason, they liked what I had to say.  They didn’t come to my website because they had any need I could fulfill.  They were probably just bored during their lunch hour and decided to come visit.  I also wasn’t a big enough voice in the community to recommend financial software products either.  Frankly, I would have felt uneasy about touting a “proven financial system” in this economy.  However, what did make me money was genuine search traffic.  These people got to my site through searching Google because they did want to know things like what an exchange traded fund was.  And they clicked. This led me to the realization that I did not like social blogging for free.  I also came to the realization that it would probably take me too long and too much work to become a voice of authority in the finance niche and that in itself wasn’t a guarantee.

Knowing what I know now, I would have concentrated on search engine traffic from the get-go.  What I mean by that is to serve a need on the world wide web and not just “shoot the breeze” for the sake of it.  The most important thing about search traffic is that they are easy to convert as opposed to social traffic.  Think about it.  Has Facebook been able to make users money?  Sure it sounds good that you can make money by suggesting a product to friends but Facebook Beacon failed because of privacy concerns and the fact that it just seemed slimy to pitch a product to your friends in a social setting.  On the other hand, if a user has a need and your website is number one in the Google search index for the keywords like “How to trap a mouse in my house”, you know that person is pretty desperate and are more likely to click the links provided on your site.

That’s my spiel about search traffic versus social traffic from first hand experience.  This is not to say that you can’t make income online by using social media.  No, I’m just saying that it might take longer to establish credibility to push products.  Social traffic also doesn’t do well with Adsense, which is probably one of the first things people put on their blogs when they try to monetize it.  Also, because of the time and dedication involved, you’ll be married to that one site.  In trying to obtain search traffic, you will get interested visitors who will more likely click on Google Adsense links or buy your products.  You can also build numerous sites for specific niches as well, so you also diversify your internet presence.

So after saying all that, why do I have this site up?  First off, it might serve as professional material for a future career as a consultant if I am ever crazy enough to do it (i.e.  I would have to be paid big bucks).  The second reason is that I have poor friends and I scratch my head when I think that they could be making income online by expanding their skill sets beyond their dead end jobs.  Personally, I like my current job because it affords me the research time to learn the internet marketing aspects.  I also know that not everyone else is that lucky and can’t stand their jobs but need a second income.  I feel that an online income is the way to go because you can do it part time.  Make no mistake, it isn’t easy and you’ll suffer set backs but I’ll try to steer you away from them from what I’ve learned.  However, I don’t have enough spit in my mouth to explain things over and over again so I’m documenting it.  On my own time and when I feel like it.  This isn’t a regular blog gig  but an interesting side project in experimentation.  For those who want to learn how to make an online income then subscribe to my RSS feed.  It’s around here somewhere.  For those who eventually come here through search engine traffic, then bravo, I’m glad that you made it this far.