The home page for my chess site located at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com now has a Google PR of 4. Most of my main pages have a PR of 3. Most of my individual game pages only have a PR of 0. It seems that most of the other sites out there, especially chess sites, are linking to my main page only. That would explain why my main page has the highest PR of any page on my site. It seems that I need to improve my internal linking a little bit to get my other pages to rank a little higher. Also, I need to get some other sites and directories to link to some of my internal pages too. This is important because the higher a page ranks in PR the better the chances are that that page will also rank highly for the relevant keywords that are on that page. I want my pages to be found by those people who are looking for my content! So, if any of you web masters out there have been reluctant to link to my site because of low PR now you should be willing to link to my site because I now have decent PR for my home page!
I have been trying to earn enough money from this site to cover the costs involved in keeping the site up on the Internet. These include things like domain name registration and hosting. Although I have managed to keep these costs low, they are not entirely free! I have a link on my page asking people to donate if they are getting anything out of my site. So far, not one person has! So, either my site is not helping anyone or the people who visit my site are too cheap to help me out with even $5! This leaves me wondering why I even bother to keep the site updated! My hosting and domain name registration are both coming up for renewal in December of 2006. Should I bother to renew both or not? I did manage to get $13 in commissions from Amazon.com. So, some people are clicking on my Amazon links and ordering things. Unfortunately, the commissions from Amazon are so low that it took me over 1 year just to earn that measly $13! Again, this leaves me to wonder why I even bother!
The problem with spammers has also left me wondering why I even bother to have this site if all I get are spammers abusing it! It would be nice if I got some encouragement to keep this site up and and a little financial help to cover the costs of doing this. I'm thinking about offering some kind of incentive to get people to donate $5.00 each. What would people like? I have a few chess ebooks I could offer or a few GM games in PGN format. I am also thinking about rewriting a study I did several years ago on how chess players think. Although it may not be as extensive as Think Like A Grand Master, it should still prove valuable enough to be worth a $5.00 donation. I am thinking about adding a survey to my site asking people about this and to tell me what they want as an incentive. I am also hoping that I can get some real comments from people on this blog telling me what they want as an incentive. Come on people, help me out here!
Thanks,
Mike Serovey
