The never ending debate of which is more important, good content, or high quality links when you are trying to improve your search engine rankings may never come to an agreeable conclusion.

My personal belief is that high quality relevant links will always beat out good content and that has been my experience in optimizing hundreds of websites over the years.

The good news is we don’t have to choose one or the other. Instead lets get really good links, and write awesome content for our websites and dominate the search engines.

I want to talk a little about writing good content. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when adding content to your site.

Create SEO Focused Content
Writing content for the sake of writing content can be an incredible waste of time. When you are trying to increase your websites rankings, you should be targeting your key phrases in the content you add to your website.

Look for good long tail key phrases that you are not already ranking for. A whole page of content focused around one long tail key phrase can go a long way with the search engines.

For example, let’s say my website is in the internet marketing industry and I am targeting big key phrases like “internet marketing” and “internet business”. A long tail key phrase I could write about would be “internet marketing for lawyers”.

That would be the title of my page and then I would include that entire phrase in the content of the site a couple of times. I would then get 1-3 links for the phrase and sit back and watch as the rankings move up.

From an SEO standpoint this is a much better strategy than just rambling on for 500 words about nothing in particular.

Use Proper Grammar and Spelling
It is true that most people skim, they don’t read. Although I seem to have attracted a lot of readers. Keep your content free of punctuation and spelling errors. Those kinds of mistakes stand out like a soor thum.

Try not to use slang in your content unless it fits in with the style and feel of the website.

If you create good quality content that is focused on key phrases you want to rank for, you will find that your efforts will yield much better results.

Lately I have seen some close friends start to make a lot of money running monthly membership sites. It has really opened my eyes as to whether or not this may be the new way to make consistent income online in 2011.

The obvious advantage to having a monthly membership site is that you know how much you will be making every month. Also, if done right this can be the epitome of an automated business. Not every membership site is automated, in fact my friends site that is doing very well is one where they have to keep adding new content to keep subscribers happy.

So my goal has become to create a more automated monthly membership site. That way I can pursue my film making goals and know exactly how much income I will have each month. It seems to create a much more stress free environment.

My New Monthly Membership Site

I have decided to take the plunge on one of my oldest websites Lawn Care Directory and turn it into a monthly membership site. This is a site that I have run for almost 10 years and have made a lot of money with during that time but I have always felt like the amount I was making had peaked and I wanted a way to make more.

So I have completely transformed the site from selling information on how to start a lawn care business to a more legitimate directory where companies pay a monthly fee to have their company featured in their area.

My goal is to get 500 members paying $19 a month. I know there are thousands of lawn care and landscaping companies out there and 500 is definitely not out of the question. Having just made this transition I have already acquired a good number of subscribers and this is the slow season for that industry.

Will this backfire on me? It is possible that I could end up making less money per month with this site but if I achieve my goal of 500 members then it will be a huge success.

NOTE: Incidentally, if you ever need lawn maintenance or landscaping visit the site. You’ll most likely find a qualified company in your city.

I recently sat through a webinar by Marketing Experiments. They are a web marketing company that puts on free webinars all the time showing the results of testing different elements on a website and how it increase conversion.

The webinar I attended was on getting singular focus on your home page. Chances are that on your home page you are trying to cater to every single person that comes to your website. Unfortunately this is a backwards way of thinking.

The right strategy is to figure out exactly what your primary goal is for your visitors and make that as prominent and easy to find as possible.

For example, one of the websites I run is Lawn Care Directory. It is national (US based) directory of lawn care and landscaping companies. I really wanted to cater to people that were searching for a lawn professional and so I changed the design of my home page to cater to that group of people immediately when they came to the site.

Here is the OLD design:

Here is the NEW design:

Here is the crazy egg report on how the new design is doing. This is a heatmap that shows where on the page people are clicking:

As you can see the result of giving the visitors to the site one main option eliminates confusion for the visitor and drives them to do the thing I want them to do. So it is a Win Win.

The secondary goals that I have on the home page are still available and represented but I give the most weight and real estate to the thing that is my number 1 goal.

I’m sure all of you just like me get requests all of the time via email to do link exchanges with other websites. People ask me (especially my clients) whether or not they should ignore the emails or do something about it.

Ninety nine percent of the time I tell them to simply ignore the email and here is why:

If the person approached you and you don’t know them, then most likely what will happen is within a few months of doing a link exchange with them they will most likely remove your link and if you don’t keep track of it properly pretty soon you are giving them a one way relevant link.

The way to combat this if you really want to do link exchanges is to carefully track all of your link exchanges. The software will verify for you that your links are still live and if the webmaster has removed the link you can either contact them or take their link down.

Not everyone is dishonest in the link exchange world and some link exchanges make complete sense and are mutually beneficial. If I was going to do a link exchange with someone I would approach it with an email like this:

My name is Adam White. I am the owner Prosperly.com. I came across Yourwebsite.com and see that we both cater to the internet marketing audience. I wanted to know if you have any advertising options for your site where I could reach out to your visitors. If not I would love to do a link exchange with you or something else that would be mutually beneficial. Let me know what you think.

I compose the email this way because it isn’t just a solicitation for a link exchange which most people will ignore. It is personalized at the least the person will feel inclined to do a link exchange with me. When they do, I still track it. :-)

Also please note that when I referenced their website I did not include the http or the www’s in front of the url. Leaving those off makes it look like a real person wrote the email.

I recently received an email from the Google Adsense team asking me if I wanted to make more money. Of course I did so I checked out the email. They included an image of what they called the Adsense heatmap showing where on the page Adsense ads get clicked the most.

I figured this would be something all of my readers would be interested to know so I am including a picture of the heat map below.

Enjoy.

As you can see from the heatmap as the colors get darker this means that more clicks happen in these areas. So the best place to put Adsense on a website is directly above the main content of a page and from there directly surrounding the main content.

The top right section of a page where I see Adsense placed all of the time is the worst place to put ad blocks if you want them to get clicked.

Use this to play around with your Adsense ads and see if you can’t make more money.