Over this year I have decided to focus on natural search engine traffic for the Home Based Business site.

Last few days have been a reminder of how fickle the search engines can be. One day you have a world record (well in your own mind) number of keywords with high ranking, then – bam – no warning all listings disappear.

I happened to me yesterday. Everything gone from MSN. Having checked the forums it seems this is pretty normal and usually the listing reappear.

In the past when this has happened the cause has been tracked to keyword density, with some of the new content taking densities past the limit. This time though 90% of my backlinks disappeared. All pages where affected.

One of my larger keyword has been relisted today (phew !) so am hoping the rest will find their way back over the next few days.

Speaking of websites – still waiting for WordPress to be updated to V2.01. Fantastico scripts must almost be done by now. Can’t wait to get into developing the next site without the hassel to the current bugs in 2.0

Have had good success in the last few weeks with search engine listings. Now have six keywords on the first page in MSN.

Traffic from these is generating an average of $3 per day. Not big money by anyones standards but a start. I’ve read that you get traffic from MSN first, then Yahoo then Google.

Now I know the formula its just a matter of adding more and more keywords and as the traffic grows so too will the income. I reckon its time to have a go at a two word keyword.

The key was finding a small E-Book called SEO Made Easy. It is a free giveaway as part of the SEO-Elite promotion. When I followed the instructions in the E-Book my search engine rankings lifted. What more can I say.

There has been some severe pain also. I wrote last time that I had settled on WordPress as the basis for future websites. Made the mistake of upgrading to 2.0 without keeping my backups. Serious, serious error. Ended up dumping the whole site as it introduced several bugs which made the no longer viable.

Good news though WP2.01 is out. Just need to wait until its available through Fantastico and (cross fingers) looking at the bug sheet, the problems I was experiencing will be gone. Will be so pleased to be back to building up the work at home site.

The Christmas break was a cracker for us this year. Caught up with the whole family, had great weather and made excellent progress with the renovation of our home.

I also made some discoveries and decisions about my home based business which I’ll pass on.

Focus On The Future
Firstly, I had my best weeks income over the break. It happened while I was away and not able to easily access the internet. I’ve got a habit of spending too much time checking visitors, sales and adsense stats. A new years resolution – be more disciplined and focus more on promotion (the future) and less on statistics (the past).

Keyword Density
Before I left for the holidays my search engine position for a major keyword dropped out of sight. Pity, since it was on the first page before the event.

I guessed the problem was keyword density, which had accidentally risen after recent changes. So I pulled down the density to about 3% and left for the break hoping I’d guessed right.

On return, the URL was back in the list and this time higher than before.

I resolved to double check that keyword densities are below 4% after each change – the anchor text on your links will lift the rankings.

Paid Surveys
I have some paid survey ads on the BestRealIncome site.

I have seen a lot of comment around the web about Paid Survey lists.

The detractors state that either the information is available for free, so being forced to pay for it is a rip-off or that the lists are a scam.

Very early on I paid for one of these lists. The website where the list was displayed was poorly designed. I applied to a few companies heard nothing and forget about them, then a few months down the track I was asked to participate in a few surveys.

I suspect that to be successful in the paid survey game you need to go after scale. Just like any other aspect of web life. You need to apply to absolutely every company and keep at it over a period of time. There are people who make good money at this stuff and they have worked hard over an extended period.

So the Paid surveys are the same as any number of network marketing companies on the web. Some are good some are not. You have to work hard to make good money.

I have decided to be a bit more selective with my home based business listings. Over the next week I’ll re-check check forums and scam sites to ensure my listings are of good quality. I do want to make sales, but equally want to ensure anything on my site provides good quality.

Article Directory

Our free article directory is going well. Have attracted over 1500 contributions in 6 weeks. So on track for about 13,000 articles by the end of the year. Traffic is slowly rising and a little bit of adsense revenue has been achieved. Focus now needs to go on site promotion.

Wordpress

Have been looking for a simple site CMS for most of last year. Have settled on Wordpress as the platform. I was able to fire up a simple work at home site, in record time. I’m excited about the possibilities. So easy to setup – lots of useful plug-ins and templates.

Will write more about this later.

Thats it for now, I wish you and your family all the very best for the New Year.

Regards
Brian

Todays post is about our latest project a Free Article Directory.

I wanted to find a way of growing the size of the www.bestrealincome.com site to over 10,000 pages and to eventually have over 10,000 backlinks.

I figure that if I can achieve that then I’ll get a decent visitor volume and should be able to get to the point where I can make a living off it.

Getting to this milestone would also help with search engine positions.

So stage one of the plan is to start a new free article directory. One that will grow over time, with lots of unique content and lots of links back my site.

I have published a small number of articles and they have served me well. Each article has generated 50 – 80 one-way backlinks from all kinds of sites. These in turn have contributed to growing my traffic. Article writing is recognised as an essential component in any site online marketing plan.

You can see the free article directory at http://www.AFreeArticle.com. There you can submit articles for free and collect free articles for your own use.

There are only a few articles on the site right now, so if you do write articles or were just thinking of it, why not submit one ?

Usually you need to pay to get your articles submitted to a large number of sites. That is if you dont have time to do it yourself. It can be done manually but its a long and tedious process.

As an opening special we are giving away a free article submitter with every approved article. This submitter automates the manual process and will submit your article to over 200 (and growing) article directories.

Please visit our site, submit an article and by doing so grow your links, reputation, search engine ranking and pick up a great piece of free software.

Heres that link again A Free Article

Here is another good place to advertise your home based business.

Its called Google Base

Just another excellent method of getting the word out about your service or product.