John Hasson

Google gives their Adsense and Adwords advertisers gifts each year.

In 2006 I qualified for two of their digital photo frames. (Warning, don’t try and fill it up with too many pictures. I was copying a large number of pics over to it and it started smoking. There was the smell of burning plastic and a tiny wisp of white smoke. Needless to say I now only have one digital photo frame from Google. I was just glad I got two. I think one was for Adsense and the other for Adwords)

For 2007 I got a credit card 2 Gig drive in a leather wallet (my wife wants the wallet) and a gift card to donate money do a public school via DonarsChoose.org. I haven’t decided which school/project to pick so if you want me to do yours then send me an email or post a comment.

Contest: There are two specific SEO things I did in this post. Can you find them? Winner gets to pick where I donate too.

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I was talking with a friend about an idea they had for a site. It was essentially a directory site. You know.. kinda like a yellow pages site for their particular niche. There are a two ways to do this.

1. By Hand. Create a page for each city and add listings by hand.
   This is only for people who don’t want to learn anything new and have time and patience to do it this way.
2. Build it with a database and a simple web application.
   I personally use .NET and SQL Server, but that is only because I’ve been using them for a while now. PHP and MySql isn’t that hard either though. If you are starting fresh and just want some simple things I’d say go with PHP and MySql. The hosting is usually cheaper and there are plenty of free tutorials and examples out there.

Now that you know how to build it, here is how I would make a directory site.

1. Organize your listing by city/region/whatever you are going to use.
2. Build your template/site reading off of a simple database you have put together
3. Test.
4. Test
5. Optimize for SEO
6. Test
7. Populate the data from sources that you have permission to use.
8. Test

Constantly Update The data. Building a list slowly over time “organically” will do better for you in the long run then a quick full blast of everything you can find.

Bonus Points: Build a system to automatically find new data (that you have permission to use) and have it add the new listings daily so your site grows a little bit each day.

Extra Credit: Allow people to correct listings/add reviews or comments and rank the listings.

So.. thats how I would do a listing/directory site.

Tags: Online Moola by John Hasson
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