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I have been receiving a number of questions from clients and readers about how to generate leads and income from their website. The questions that I get are:

“How come I can’t get my website indexed on Google?”

“How long does it take to get to the first page of the search engine?”

“Why doesn’t all my pages get picked up by the search engine spiders?”

These are all good questions. As a follow-up, people go on to ask:

“I’ve read a lot of the internet marketing material that’s available for free online, but now I’m just confused.”

“Some people say to do this, others say to do that, I just don’t feel like I have enough time to do everything for my website that is needed.”

“Is there really a ‘push-button’ method to get my website noticed in the sea of websites?”

So many questions, so little time. Luckily for all of us, there is one short answer. Are you ready? Here goes:

–> Websites only need two things to survive in the digital wilderness that is the Internet –>

1. Content that is updated regularly.
2. Incoming links.

Forget every other convoluted idea and explanation that you may have run into. Websites grow and thrive in the wild because they get fresh content and new incoming links on a regular basis.

Let’s cover content first. Content is any text, video, audio, images, and/or applications that you add to your website. For human interest, this type of content is perfect. It keeps your website visitors interested in staying longer.

For search engine spiders, this variety of content is not as useful. Here is why. Search engine spiders are not very smart. As I have said in a previous post, the search engine programs are basically a box of rocks. All they can reliable “see” is text. So if you have fancy pictures without proper tagging, the spiders simply don’t see them. And what they don’t see, they won’t register into their database of websites.

My suggestion then is to always include text. Include text in your pictures, your videos, your audios, your flash, and your applications. An easy way to add description is to add your keywords as part of the surrounding description paragraph.

The next popular topic around website content is, “How do I get content for my website?”

Content comes in two flavors.

1. Original content that you or an outsourcer writes.
2. Syndicated content that is available for you to reprint on your website.

Original content is easy to explain. You write the content. You publish the content on your site. Nobody else has that content. Search engines love original content. They eat it up like ice cream on a hot day. This is because the search engines like to show-off fresh content to their searchers.

Syndicated content is a little trickier. A good way to explain syndicated content is newspapers. One newspaper sends a hot story through the news wire and other newspapers pick it up and publish in on their site. The same thing happens on the web. If someone writes something interesting, other sites will pick it up if the owner of the content allows it.

Based on the syndication model, there could potentially be a lot of duplicate content on the web. This is where the tricky part comes into play. The search engines, being resource constrained, will only index the top few pages with duplicate content. They don’t want to store and serve up the same story repeated across a dozen or more web pages.

So how does the search engine decide which web page to show on the search results? This brings us to links.

The second thing that websites need to survive on the wild are links. If a website has a lot of content but no one else links to that website, does it have a lot of content? It’s like the story of the tree in the forest:  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall, did the tree fall?

Of course the tree fell. Of course the website has a lot of content. But does it matter? The answer is no. We write content for other people to consume. The one way that we measure consumption is how many link to our content. If it is indeed good content, other websites will link to the content. The more links that we get, the better our content must be for why else would others want to link to it? This is exactly how search engines measure the relevancy of our website. They count the links.

So there you have it. If you want your website to grow and thrive, keep publishing content and keep building links.

A couple of years ago, which is a long time by web standards, the way to build a website was to use HTML. A lot of pretty websites were built this way. A lot of ugly ones were built this way too; but that is another blog entry. Although these HTML sites were pretty, they were static websites. Every time someone visited the static website, they would display the same page of information. Hence, the term static website.

Fast forward to one year ago and we saw the emergence of blogs. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, and other companies made it relatively easy for most web users to create a private website. The website just happened to be called a blog (or weblog), but they were full fledged websites. The difference being that blog content changed more frequently. Every time a blog owner added an entry or blog, their website landing page would change to show the new entry.

Search engines loved this. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engine spiders hung around blog websites like paparazzi hang around celebrity hideouts. This was not surprising since search engines would not survive without fresh content. Blogs fed the spiders content food that the spiders were happy to serve up on the search results. Blogs began to rank very high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Now the spiders had another place to index content in addition to the press release sites and the article sites.

For bloggers, this was good news. In a sense, the search engines made many of them online celebrities. But what about the owners of static websites, who comprised of business owners? How would they get a piece of stardom from the SERPs? Good question. . . Many of the static website owners tried to ride the wave by bolting on a “/blog/” directory to their static website. For example,

www.Acme.com/blog/

Eventually, most web consultants advised their clients to add a blog to their HTML website. Now their client would have a static website and a blog. “Wow,” I say, “How clunky.”

A WordPress blog can do anything that a static website can do. . . and more. The first trick that a WordPress blog can do is that it can transform itself into a static website. Here’s how:

1. Go into the WordPress admin panel.
2. Click on “Options” then on “Reading.”
3. Choose which type of website landing page you prefer:  static website or blog style.

You now have a static landing page if you want one.

From this first trick, the WordPress blog platform pulls away from an HTML website in terms of ease of use. Since WordPress is built on open source, it has a huge and dedicated community of developers and users. In the last couple of years, there has been a large number of very useful WordPress plugins that extend the functionality of the basic WordPress platform. Among them, easy SEO, automatic sitemap creation, widgets so that a nontechie can change many aspects of their web design, and themes. It seems like a new plugin and/or theme is releasted everyday.

In my future articles, I will go into more detail about how business owners can take advantage of WordPress for more than blogging.

In order to understand how Latent Semantic Indexing is achieved, it is important to know some basic high school math, particularly Cartesian coordinates.

Typically when a search query is sent a term-document matrix is created. The pages that have been previously processed send back results that contain the correct semantic meanings.

All formatting from the pages including capitalization, punctuation and extraneous makeup are removed.

Also, the conjunctions, common verbs, pronouns and prepositions are removed. Lastly, the common endings are removed and what you have left are the stem words.

In order to plot the position of the web page, you need to think of the page in terms of a three – dimensional shape.

Using three words instead of three lines, you are able to achieve this image. The position of every page that contains these three words is known as a term space.

Each page forms a vector in the space and the vectors direction and magnitude determine how many times the three words appear in the structure.

With three words, it is easy to imagine what the resulting form may look like, and the resulting query would turn up a good number of correct searches.

Instead, if every word and every page were represented, then the dimensions would be endless. But it is not practical to assume seeing every web page in existence. This is just not possible, nor is it probable.

Typically a term-document matrix is created from pages that have been pre-processed. This is so that only the words, which have the semantic meaning, remain. All formatting of the pages include capitalization, punctuation.