SEO

I've seen this for years: Domainers will swipe up some solid Internet estate and then just let it chill in their GoDaddy account and wait for the big sale 10 years down the line. That's cool and all, but they're missing out on a lot more. The more savvy domainers will park their domains with ads, but in most cases these pages return improper headers and do very little for getting indexed in search engines - and you guessed it, being indexed in the search engines is a really big deal, especially if you have good domain names that you're just sitting on.

Here's a free tip for all the SEO n00bs out there:

Everywhere I go online I am finding "traffic experts" that think using other people's assets to build their low quality business is the smartest thing ever. I really don't get it. Pretty much everyone who does any type of online marketing is really into using sites like YouTube, Digg, Stumble, etc to bring traffic over to their site. They think that if they are masters on these sites then they will become the next big thing. It somewhat depends what your goals are, but if your goals are to hit it big and make a lot of money why not do it the right way?

I guess I somewhat know the answer to blogs using / at the end of the URLs, but I don't fully understand it.

From my understanding, this is more search engine friendly because it is showing the search engines that since the URL does not have an extension (ie: .html, .php, .asp) it is a directory. The proper way to show a directory is by including the trailing slash (/) at the end. That's cool, but it is not a directory and it doesn't matter whether it's proper or not.

Go here and see if you can spot it: http://www.outdooradventuresmagazine.com/article.php?id=81
Did you find it? It's lack of direction. This site has quality that no other site on the Internet has (I checked by searching "Foremost, you have to decide what you will primarily use the optics for" on Google), however, it is still doing nothing to clarify what is going on to the search engines.

Is it in your best interest to build 1 authority site that completely dominates an industry or 100 smaller niche oriented sites that satisfy content for smaller niche industries?

My answer is: it depends on your strengths and time frame, but I believe 1 big site will always yield more results long term and here is why.

For those that do not know, PageRank is Google's way of measuring the importance of a web page based off the quality and number of incoming links pointing to it. Each link that points to another page is basically a vote saying this is a good page. What makes this concept interesting is that when a page that already has a lot of links coming into it links out to yet another site, that new site it linked to is seen as quite important. In other words, a page with 20 links (Page A) is better than a page with 2 links (Page B).