There are three main reasons why I go with static HTML:

• Speed
• Security
• Webhosting Problems

Speed

I think speed is by far the most important aspect of selling anything on the internet. This has nothing to do with Google or search engine optimization. Google has announced that they’re looking to speed now and have it in the algorithm, but it doesn’t make up anything substantial, YET.

A website needs to open fast. SNAP! (I just snapped my fingers) I don’t want one second of lag when it comes to potential visitors that will buy. It’s as simple as that for me.

Basically there are three types of things that a website can possess for the loading of a page: HTML code, Service Side Operations and Server Side Operations with a Database.

HTML: This is the fastest because you already have all the work done. You made the page in HTML and the web server just has to send the data to the visitor.

Server Side: This means that there is programming code in with your webpage and that the server’s CPU actually has to process the code before HTML is created and can be sent to the visitor.

Server Side With a Database: This is where you have information stored in a database. The database is on a separate server and needs to be connected locally. The programming code is processed. And when information needs to be pulled out of the database, the server has to connect to the database server and pull the information. Once this is all done, HTML data is sent to the visitor.

Guess which one takes longer. WordPress (which this blog is running on) does the Server Side with a Database. You may notice that a blog like this may have a 2 – 5 second pause as you connect and then everything loads. WordPress runs on PHP Server Side Language and accesses a mySQL database. If you’re running a Server Side Language (PHP, PERL, SSI), it is for the most part normal. The time it takes a computer to process language doesn’t take that long and visitors will never even know. But there is a reason why I brought it up, which I will go into on the webhosting problems section.

Security

HTML can’t be hacked. It can’t be cracked. It can’t be exploited. Your webhost could get hacked, but it is completely regardless of the HTML. Exploited servers happen typically because they can somehow manipulate the server side operations of the code to open up the server. That is really all there is to it.

This is why you have WordPress updates because they find holes and they need to be fixed. This is why it is important to update WordPress immediately after an update. If you miss the update, you risk getting hacked. And remember people are typically hacked before a fix is created and an update is released.

I’m not trying to scare you or anything like that. I just can’t imagine having 100 websites all running WordPress and forgetting to update just one of them.

Webhosting Problems

My biggest pet peeve with webhosts is that they offer “unlimited” everything. I think all of us recognize that nothing is unlimited and in reality they’ll shit can your account if you get anywhere close to it.

If I was on a dedicated server (on a server all by myself) I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But I’m not really interested in paying $200/mth for a dedicated server. A shared server is what most of us are on and it’s shared. There are other people on the same computer and they all have the same “unlimited” plan.

The most common webhosting problem you run into is the mySQL database server lagging. There’s always some asshole that thinks they can have “unlimited” mySQL databases (1 per WordPress site). So they setup 1000 WordPress sites in an hour and lag down the entire database server. This causes anyone on the same computer to have a lag with any site that needs the database (like this WordPress site).

Guess what? My static HTML sites load fast. SNAP! When the database server is lagging or down.

Sometimes the processing of Server Side operations actually crashes too. It’s not quite that common, but it does sometimes happen. Any site that has PHP or any other type of server side language will experience a 500 internal error, which is what people will see when they go to your site.

Guess what? My static HTML sites load fast. SNAP! They don’t need any server side operations done, so it’s not an issue.

The only way that HTML goes down is if there is an internet load problem, CPU overload or the web server just goes down. And in those cases no website setup will work for you.

This is why I use static HTML for the vast majority of my sites. I do use PHP without the database. I just use it for include() commands, so that I can do site wide editing of footers, headers and shit. So that is really the big secret for why I use static HTML. I told you there was a method to my madness lol.

In order to follow this post you will have to Learn a Server Side Programming Language. You can still do this manually. It’s a lot of fucking work though. This doesn’t take much time.

I want us to stipulate a few things:

First, there are specific keywords and niches that you’re going to struggle with. There is no way in hell that you’re ever going to get in the top 10 at Google for weight loss. I don’t want to be a negative person, but the chances of you actually achieving that will be very slim.

Secondly, people will search their location along with the keyword. You might not find a lot of people that do this, but it is done. This type of thing happens in some niches more than others, but it is done.

Lastly, when people do search *niche name* *city* there isn’t much of any competition for it. There might be a few thousand pages and none will ever be optimized properly.

For a few cities, this isn’t that big of a deal. If a city gets you 5 hits a month, than you got nothing, but if you get 5 hits a month for every city in America than you got some real traffic. Add in other places like Canada, Europe, Australia/NZ, etc and you’re going to get a lot of traffic in your niche.

Since we are going to use server side programming and a database, we can automate this process. We can use the same database over and over again. Once the programming is finished, you can use the script on all your sites and have 1000 pages added to your site with 30 minutes of tweaking.

The process that is going to take the most time is making the database.

The Database

I thought about how this database should be made and I couldn’t keep it as simple as city and state. When I added mine, I added more information so I could add them to each of the city pages to make it ever more unique.

Basically for your database you will want the following: city, state, country, a few communities/neighborhoods in the city, a few landmarks/tourist places in the city, and a unique few lines about the city. That’s how I made my database.

I made my database like this:

ID int auto_increment
city varchar(32)
state varchar(32)
population varchar(10)
neighborhood1 varchar(32)
neighborhood2 varchar(32)
neighborhood3 varchar(32)
site1 varchar(100)
site2 varchar(100)
country varchar(3)
abstract text

In retrospect, I forgot about cities and states that were actually two words. It’s perfectly acceptable like this, but you just have to do some more tedious programming to make sure you’re changing around “New Jersey” to “New-Jersey”, so it’ll properly work in the URLs.

You could also add in permalinks for each:

permacity varchar(32)
permastate varchar(32)

Either way you should be able to program either way and since you only have to program once, you don’t have to worry about it.

Building this database can be done a number of ways. You can obviously outsource the work because it is a pain in the ass. You can buy a database, but I doubt you’ll find a database like this. You might only find city/state databases. Or you can do it yourself. I made my own, I just did it for one day a week and got through it.

If you make it yourself, than you have to make a back end admin section to add them in. It’s just a standard form that you fill out. I found programming the back end with delete functions and edit functions to be more tedious than building the front end.

The Front End

The front end is relatively easy. Anyone that knows php should be easily able to do this. Just make sure you structure your directories properly:

domain.com/State/City/

You also have to make sure that your state page lists all the cities under that state.

I’m not really concerned about the content of the state page, it’s the cities page. What you want to do is put the title of your page *NICHE* City, State. You also want to have H1 tags at the top of the page for *NICHE* City, State.

What you want to do is write out sentences and work in the information (php in [] brackets):

Welcome to my page on *Niche* for the great city of [? echo $city; ?]. It doesn’t matter if you live in [? echo $community1 . ", " . $community2 . ", or " . $community3; ?] because I will be able to help you with your *NICHE PROBLEM*…

You get the idea. You’ll obviously want to have a link off the page to your affiliate link and also a link back to the state page. This type of structure has been proven to be unique enough for the search engines. It appears with Google that the less sites there are for a particular search, the less they care about regurgitated content.

If you don’t think it is unique enough you can add in random functions. As you can see the page starts with “Welcome to my page on *Niche* for the great city of”, you can set up a bunch of different starting sentences and make them be selected at random. It’s sort of like those article spinners. This should work good enough.

The last thing you need to do is create a sitemap page or something to list all the cities on the site, so Google can find and index them all.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Once the database is done and you’ve done the programming, you can just reuse it over and over again. You just have to change the unique pages for cities and states so they obviously fit in with the niche.

You’re done. You just have to keep building the database and let it grow until it makes a ton of pages. Oh and you don’t have to wait to finish the database before you set up pages. The pages will grow with the database, so you can get this all set up now.