You probably won't be able to make a fortune from your ads unless you have enough people visiting your website. This only comes after you have done some serious website promotion or advertising.
Increasing Your Website Traffic
Be realistic: remember that even if someone clicks your ads, you may just get a cent or two from that click, assuming that Google doesn't disregard that click for some reason. In addition, only a very minuscule percentage of your visitors will actually click ads. Put those factors together and you can roughly guess how much you are going to make if you only have a few visitors per day.
Showing Up in the Search Results
Flash Splash Screens for a Home Page: Words Speak Louder Than (Animated) Action
Your home page is an extremely important page on your site. It should tell people what your site is all about. Very often, when I'm asked to review a site, I find a site that has the following characteristics:
- The home page has nothing but a Flash splash screen with some fancy animation.
- If there are any words on the page at all that are not embedded in the Flash animation, it's "Enter Site".
- The HTML title tag of the page says "Flash Intro Page".Ask yourself what the search engines will index in such a case. Chances are that your home page will probably only rank for "enter site" and "flash intro page" since those are the only words on the page many search engines can pick up. In fact, since there are so many sites with those words, you may not even rank for them (not that you'll want to).Title tags are vital: Google uses it heavily and it's a fundamental part of any search engine friendly web design.Text content that can be indexed is also vital. The search engine cannot know intuitively what your website is about if it doesn't have words to index. Embedding text inside Flash content and expecting search engines to be able to recognize them is a risky business — Google may be able to read some of the text, or it may not. The other search engines may not even be able to extract anything.Get rid of the Flash splash screen for your home page if you have one, and replace it with a normal web page. Not only will your site rank better, it will also look more professional. Restrict your use of Flash to things that really need Flash, like interactive online games and videos, and not pages that you want to be indexed.
More Pictures Than Words: A Thousand Words are Worth More Than a Picture
I'm sure you've heard the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Maybe that's true for a human being. But to a search engine, using current technology, a picture is useless for determining what the site is about. The engine cannot see a picture and figure out what product you're selling. If you want the engine to know the details about your product, write words to that effect.
A JavaScript-Dependent Website Without Traditional Web Content and Navigation: New is Not Necessarily Better
Related to the above points is a website that is heavily dependent on JavaScript (eg, such as those using AJAX). If the content or the links on your site are generated using this scripting language.
The solution to this is to always have plain, traditional web content and navigation links somewhere on your page. You do not need to drop your JavaScript code to do this. Just think of some way to put normal text and normal links onto your page in a way that does not need a JavaScript interpreter to decode them. While you can also put up a traditional sitemap and create a file using the sitemap protocol to help the search engines, nothing beats normal text links on a page that works for both search engines and human visitors.
Update: the Google search engine is generally quite good at parsing JavaScript these days, but in general, it's best not to rely on search engines being able to decode your page the same way a browser can. I have no idea how Bing performs with JavaScript pages.
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