If you want to increase your residual income by working smarter instead of harder, my buddy, Chezfat (or Brian, as his wife probably refers to him), has done us all a great service by offering some strategies based on his in-depth studies of the subject, and I wanted to pass this on to you.
Some friends and I recently asked Brian to analyze SEO on a few eHow articles to find out if any particular categories seemed to be decreasing in earnings more than others. Brian likes math. I don’t. And he does a great job on his blog of analyzing article SEO factors.
Brian’s preliminary findings on the data that was sent to him leads him to conclude that on-page SEO for many older articles is a moot point. Brian has other ideas for how you can move those articles up in the search engines. He says,
The thing is however that you can only do so much on-page SEO. You can’t keep improving it; there is a point of maximum return and no amount of time or effort will make the on-page SEO any better. That’s why you should not dwell on it. Just do what you need to do and move on to more important things.”
And then he spells out the “more important things” in detail. So if you want to move some stubborn articles into the residual earnings zone, go read his Ultimate Guide to Making The Most Money With Online Writing and start kicking some residual income butt today!
Thanks for the mention and I wanted to say that I have recently added a disertation of sorts to my site based on the research I did on the old articles on long-time ehow members (referenced in this post). The conclusions were not what I expected but strangely the timing of my conclusion seems to coincide perfectly with an apparent massive rebound in earnings going on at eHow.
Great analysis, Chezfat! I would suggest anyone who has seen anomalies in their eHow earnings and/or page views that are not covered in Brian’s latest article on the eHow algorithm fluctuations contact him through his blog to discuss it.
I agree with Brian.
On-page SEO optimization is only half the battle for high search engine rankings. You need to take part in off-page optimization as well, which mainly consists of acquiring back links from websites that have the same or a higher page rank than your own. Google actually places higher emphasis on off-page optimization, while other search engines like MSN or Yahoo place a higher emphasis on on-page optimization efforts than Google does. To Google, the more important websites link to you, the more valuable your content must be. Google judges “importance” by the website’s page rank. Hence, the higher your page rank, the more back links you have usually. However, these back links must be from websites with the same page rank as your own or better to be more effective. So, a website with 500 back links from other rank 1 websites wouldn’t rank as well as a website with 300 back links from rank 5 websites.
On a side note, are you the creator of Elegant Themes? I noticed that you’re promoting it on your sidebar. I happen to be a regular user. Small world. 🙂