barney

I recently created a new website and I am interested in adding both
adsense and a search bar. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical. In any
case, should I wait until I get traffic built up before I add or start
now?

barney

Yes, you can make money with it, enough to quit your day job if you
work hard. It's a numbers game, traffic means more clicks, more clicks
mean more money, so work on getting more traffic and keep adding new
articles. The more articles you have the more likely people will find
your site. When you have enough articles to make your site interesting,
then start asking for link exchanges with related sites already listed
in Google. That will increase your traffic and help you to rank higher
in the search engines. If you haven't already learned about metatags,
go do a search for that and put them in your html code. Only exchange
links with sites that are about the same or a related subject as yours.

barney

And you know this from what SEO expert? Show me some quotes because
it's contrary to everything I've read anywhere else. Please provide
some of the expert resources you are quoting because I would like to
read it myself. If I'm telling people wrongly, I can deal with that
but I want to be able to tell people where to read this before I go
telling people not to use meta tags and that they can actually be
harmful? They have become less important but I don't think they have
become harmful. You can check out all this at SEObook dot com. Please
provide your sources for this information so I can it as well.
Don't forget, even though Google is the largest and I receive the
largest amount of traffic from them, there are many other search
engines and they all use different algorythms for their searches. I
look forward to reading your information...thanks!

barney

Some good advice posted here. I just want to add that I'm finding even
though I'm still new to Adsense (but doing my homework burning the
night oil.) All the advise here is proven right, but I also found that
Google is targeting both my Blog title,my Description and the title of
my posts plus any keywords. I think the metatags add to it if I were to
use meta for my description. I haven't done it yet but if they're
targeting my description it just stands to reason search engines
whether Google or some others would crawl and target a description
metatag. Not sure, it just seems reasonable. What do you think. Also
any simple and clear direction on creating a metatag for my blog
description would be appreciated. Other wise off to Google search I go!

barney

Like I said in the previous post, all of these things work together.
It appears "ianfusa" was just looking for a reason to post and doesn't
have anything to base it on as there has been no replies. You will
find that, the search engines will use all of the information it finds.
Now the weight that it puts on each of those items will vay from SE to
SE but they aren't totally ignored (for example the robots meta tag).
I would make sure you have at least a robots, title, and description
meta tag and the rest is pretty much what you think you need. Just
type in meta tags in the seacrh box for Google and you'll many sites
with info on what to use.

barney

p.s. If I incorrectly implied that ALL meta tags were useless and,
potentially, harmful, that was not my intent. In terms of search engine
rankings the keywords tag is next to useless, if not entirely useless,
other tags have their uses but are, again, of little importance in
actual rankings. The robots meta tag is not one that is concerned with
SEO, apart from the indirect effect that it may have on precluding
spiders from certain parts of your site, of course and, in that sense,
doesn't actually affect the rankings of the pages that it allows to be
crawled.

barney

AdSense does make money however there are two things to watch out for..
1) Google can, and does very often, ban a site, without notice, meaning
ANY money you have gained will be lost. So, there is no long term
profits made in most cases.

2) A website with AdSense alone is not enough. I have included
affiliate programs and integrated them together (just in case).

Don't bother with ebooks or mailing lists telling you that you can
create an "AdSense Empire" or thousands of dollars. These are for those
who DREAM only.

barney

You absolutely did imply that all meta tags were useless and you
couldn't be more wrong, so I'm glad you clarified that statement.
Since 30% of my natural or "organic" search results are coming from
SE's other than Google, I would be stupid to remove all my meta tags
because Google isn't looking at "some" of them. There is no question
that I optimize for Google first, and the others second because that's
where most of my traffic comes from, but much comes from the others
too. Thanks for clarifying your statement and backing it with a little
information instead of just telling people not to use them without the
understanding. Besides, as fast as everyone is changing their
algorythms, what is true today, won't necessarily be true tomorrow.
Extra tags won't hurt you, but "could" help you.