level80 - 9:41 am on Oct 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

>>>As most of the traffic is from search engines it's pretty much out of my control. No its not. The more targeted the text, links, url, file name, metatags, titles, alt image text, image file names etc the better and the more accurate the search result will be. You may get less overall traffic and lose out on the longtail stuff but that traffic is going to see exactly the ads your optimised page will get. Click through is improved, smartpricing loves you etc...

Actually optimisation has the opposite effect - greater search engine traffic. Otherwise it would be deoptimisation. So far today, CTR is 3% above monthly average and eCPM 71% of monthly average. So yes it increases CTR - but by increasing the relevance of the ads on the page lower cost ads are being shown (which are then clicked on). This leads to a lower eCPM. Either that or I'm making changes to the site faster than the Adsense bot can figure them out.

How is it possible to have 1600 pages of genuinely useful content?

Some of it is forum pages I admit (which do get quite a lot of search engine traffic) - maybe it's these pages that are not helping. I should create a channel for the forum to see if it's performance is affecting things. The rest are pages added over time - text about computer games - cheats, passwords, hints, tips - it's all useful to someone.

You would need an awful lot of knowledge and time!

Yes, although I'll admit some are "filler" pages. However a site in the video games category will get the $0.02/$0.03 ads. I'm sure if it was a topic with higher paying ads (say finance, travel etc) I'd be making more money too.

Templates and site design dont really matter.

They do if you want to slow the user down going through the site so they have a better chance of clicking on an ad. Broken links are unavoidable. I try and make sure the code validates.

And I dont use real hosting, but the free space isp give you.

Yeah well, I wouldn't do that because it would tie me down to a particular ISP.

No domain names even. All that matters is quality content. Nothing else!

Maybe if I do a second site (learning the lessons from the first). However personally I think it's useful content that matters. You can have really high quality content but if nobody wants to read it - like a lot of high quality books it'll just gather dust on a shelf.

Good content creates its own inbound links that are more real and natural than you can aquire otherwise. I use no channels at all. I have not created a new page since adsense was added.

Well yes, I agree. Hence according to Google 1,690 links to the site. I also wrote a snippet of javascript code that provides the code for people to copy and paste to link to each page. There's also an email a friend bit which has about 4 people emailing their friends with pages on the site. Not creating any new pages though would make the repeat visitors think I don't care.