$30 Canadian dollars and that is how much my blog is worth! This paltry offer made me sad and angry for 2 seconds. Then I realized that this blog may not worth even 2 cents if no one wanted it! Now, I am happy that someone actually wanted to pay $30 for this 190-page blog with many 1st page ranking in Google and attracted thousands of page views every month.

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Does website hosted with GooglePages get indexed quicker and also ranked higher? I don’t think so. I have a couple of GooglePages websies:

http://mywebculture.googlepages.com

and

http://shihengcheong.googlepages.com

and they never got indexed and ranked. Maybe they will get indexed now that I put the links here. Anyway, if you think Google give preferential treatment to pages hosted in their websites then other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN might just blacklist these pages or keep them in the sandbox longer!

Ultimately, I believe you still have to following recommended webmasters’ guidelines and proper SEO practices to get your web pages do well in the SERP.

As for the above 2 websites, they are sub-domains of GooglePages.com and no matter high well ranked the GooglePages.com is, it has nothing to do with the sub-domains unless there is linking between these pages withing these websites.

I modified the template and made it more SEO friendly. There is the description tag in every post also the tag title is one of a kind – optimized but not too aggressively. I link Singapore Blog by a Singapore Blogger to a couple my other blogs using fancy colorful chicklets.

I also made a new post on STOMP website and how SPH (Singapore Press Holding) was using woman and girls in bikini to drive traffic. You can see colorful photos of half naked girls in nearly every other pages of the national newspaper.

At_A_Glance

• Modified blogspot template
• Added links to a couple of my other blogs using chicklet
• Made a new post on STOMP and bikini girls ad in the Straits Times

Many have asked me how do I measure the success of a website. You will probably agree that it depends. It depends what you want to achieve with the website in the first place.

Ok, ok… Make Money Right? Most of us build websites to make money. And if that is the case, it’ll be easy to measure success. You would set a target as to how much you want to make with a website right at the beginning. No? Most of us do not have the slightest idea how to build a money making website so I understand why we did not set a monetary target in the first place. Otherwise, it would be a lame reply… “As much as possible!”.

If you make more money than you initially invested, you’ll be in profit. Typically, a DIY website would cost you less than $100 to set up and maintain for a year or even two. So if you make $100 in the first year, you break even. If you make $100 every month from the 6th month onward you are doing really well. So build 20 such websites and you could probably tell your boss you don’t really need that job!

But do you know…

• How to make $100 per month with a website?
• What do you sell to make money?
• How much traffic do you need to make that monthly cheque?

It is true that your website revenue depends on the number and quality of visitors to your website regardless of what you sell – hard goods, e-products, subscription or advertising space (e.g. Google Adsense).

One of the easiest ways to monetize your traffic is to put up Google Ads by registering to be an Adsense publisher. Content website is probably where Google wants the ads to appear so you will need unique and useful content. You will need to optimize each of your web page for search engine so that you will get free traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc.

So you can see that the success of a website is a function of visitor traffic. Now, let’s determine how much traffic you’ll need to make a $100 cheque every month. We shall take the example of an Adsense publisher. Since you are a new publisher, let’s target less competitive keywords which you can still get ranked in the top 3 pages with proper SEO techniques. Each click will probably earn you $0.10 or less. You will need at least 1000 clicks to earn a $100 cheque. That will work to 33 clicks every day. If 5 out of 100 visitors click at one ad, you will need more than 650 visitors to your website every day. And that’s a lot of traffic for a new website for a newbie publisher!

If your website is not already generating 500 unique visitors a day then you’ll have to

1. Add more content to target more keywords.
2. Promote your website by submitting articles and press release.
3. Solicit backlinks by submitting to directories and other related websites.
4. Rewriting your content to make it search engine friendly and interesting to your readers.

Finally, one more tip for you to find out if your content is liked by your visitors. Go check you server log and see how many people bookmarked your website – people usually bookmark a website when they find it interesting and useful. You should have at least 30% of your visitors bookmarked your website.
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Google is number 1 and more and more people are using Google – the search engine of choice for nearly half the Internet search population. According to a report on Yahoo! (please see below report), Google’s market share increased by about 6 percentage point while Yahoo and MSN dropped. At the rate Google is growing, 50% is within reach by the end of this year. Google should be taking advantage Microsoft delay in launching of Windows Vista to gain more market and strengthen it’s grip in the search market.

Let’s face it, Google is bigger than Yahoo and MSN combined – that is to say even if Bill Gates were to buy over Yahoo search, MSN can only be number 2. So it’s time to consider seriously just optimizing for Google instead of wasting time on the rest of the search engines for they may never catch up!

Google Shores Up Search
Tuesday March 28, 1:57 pm ET
By Alyce Lomax

Despite rivals’ best efforts, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG – News) has increased its share of the search market, widening its lead in the space. It’s clear that Google has made itself the brand in search…

According to ComScore data for February, Google increased its market share to 42.3%, from 36.3% on a year-over-year basis. High-profile rivals Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO – News) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT – News) both dipped. Yahoo!’s search share fell to 27.6% from 31.1%, while MSN’s share dropped to 13.5% from 16.3%. In an interesting aside, IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s (Nasdaq: IACI – News) Ask.com increased to 6% from 5.3%. (Ask.com recently dropped long-time gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves and has embarked on a TV ad campaign entreating folks to give its search tools a whirl.)

As for Microsoft, I have no comment — well, other than the fact that I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m a bear, so why beat a dead horse. Although I have colleagues who think highly of Microsoft’s efforts to step up its search features, its rep for being an innovator — or even for being particularly on time with its products — isn’t too hot. Needless to say, the Vista delay hasn’t helped in that department.