This guide is intended to serve as a basics overview on how to make the most from your topsite. We'll take a look at ways to find new members, advertising programs, ad placement, and a little search engine optimization. At the end of this article you'll have the option to post comments, if you feel something is missing or if you have any questions feel free to post.

First Steps - Configuring your topsite

The first thing you need to do is change the title of your topsite (admin->Settings) to include the keywords you want to target the most. I suggest using no more than 5 words in your title, otherwise you will dillute the value of the words you are trying to target and we wouldnt want that.

The next step is begin optimizing your topsite for search engines, Aardvark topsite has some pretty mean SEO out of the box but a few tweaks to some of the templates can make a nice difference.

1) Open your wrapper.htm in your skin folder, this file contains the main design for your topsite. This is also where you can edit your meta tags and add some other site wide goodies.

2) Meta Tags - We need to add the meta keywords and description to our wrapper.htm it should be found between the head and look something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="this, is, a, list, of, my, keywords, found, on, this, site, always, seperated, by, commas" /> <meta name="description" content="This is my keyword packed description which provides a nice overview of my site" />

The use of meta keywords is not really important these days, but some search engines and other web applications still make use of them so you might as well add them. Meta description however is quite important, this will often show up in your web sites listing on google. Ensure you add your targetted keywords to both of these tags. One thing that is very important to remember is you should not add keywords to these meta tags that do not appear on your website. If you want to target certain words you MUST have them in your content to have a chance of finding success. Content is King and meta tags are useless without keyword rich content to back them up.

3) Maximize the effect of your content - There are several ways to make the most of your articles and other content pages, since I have covered these topics in the past I'll point you to them now.
a) using heading tags
b) Google Bomb? Maximizing links
Once you understand the concepts above apply them to your wrapper.htm, stats.htm, table_top_row.htm and table_row.htm templates. You will notice a nice boost in your search engine traffic. Add some content, the more you add the better!

Finding New Members

Now that you have some content in place and your topsite templates optimized its time to find some members to join your topsite. This is the most challenging part, but once it gets rolling it will promote itself (the beauty of topsites).

Related Forums - Go to them, register make some posts and promote your topsite in your signature. DO NOT SPAM FORUMS TO GAIN MEMBERS! You'll just make enemies.
Email Related Webmasters - Not always the easiest way to get a response but it can be effective with a short, well written invitation.
Join related topsites - Related topsites can expose your site to the right people, they can also give you a nice list of webmasters who are actively joining topsites.

Advertising Programs

Google Adsense - The easiest and most popular pay per click program around, you earn every time someone clicks one of your ads the average payout is about $.20 per click and they usually do a great job serving ads related to your industry.

Where and how to place your ads

The colors you choose for your ads and the position on the page they are place will make a massive impact on the amount of money you earn from your ad campaign. Do not try and hide your ads, instead try and embed them nicely into your content so they don't seem so much like ads. Remeber that the top center, top right, and top left are the "hot spots" of your web site, that is where the user will look and if they see something of interest it will be clicked. Ad or not.

You can also use the ad breaks feature of aardvark to insert google ads in between some of your listings, be carefull though.. google only allows you to run so many ads per page, you don't want to have your account suspended.