I run a similar site on a different niche, which I have monetized to good effect.

1) get a few links. google will likely send you more traffic if they see others linking to you.

2) ask people to link to you on the site.

3) add some social buttons ("share this on facebook" and "+1 this"). Also, try to get it on pinterest. You might create a "5 car tips" image that could get shared as an image on pinterest, generating traffic and likely getting some blog links.

4) split test your adsense. use all three units, plus link units. then split test which ads work better when placed where. Think long term. 10% better RPM will add up. You probably want to add a skyscraper.

5) add links to amazon (through their affiliate program) where useful. need a tool for that? buy one here. I like to link to searches for products, rather than actual products. That way, the user sees all the available products rather than just the one you selected, and if that particular product goes away (which it might, because in a niche, you are probably linking to products sold through amazon by others - and they can change often - or be out of stock).

6) add content occasionally. google likes "fresh" content. changing things around, adding new articles, etc. will help you over the long term.

7) tailor your html titles to describe the content, and don't have "how a car works" in every page. It makes sense, but you really want to tell google what's there, and adding the site-wide keywords might dilute the message.

Just to add - split testing your adsense can really be a big deal. For something this small, you probably don't need to split test the colors. But, the ad placement (and which ad units to use) can make a HUGE difference. I like to select a few different formats, make adsense "channels" and then weighted-randomly select one of my splits. In other words, keep testing, but display the combination of ad units that works the best, more often. Start off at even, then revisit things 6 months from now, tweak, revisit in another 6 months.

This is the first time I've seen someone suggest split testing the ads that run on their own site. Are there any particular resources that you would recommend for this?

It's not too difficult. Suppose you have a 728x90 and 300x250 and want to see if a 160x600 would be better than the 300x250 unit. Create four new ads. 728x90 channel a1, 728x90 channel b1, 300x250 channel a2 and 160x600 channel b2. On your website half the time show a1, a2. Half b1, b2. Later go to AdSense and view stats by channel and see which made more.

I don't know what your ad income is -- and I'm not asking -- but just looking at the HowIDidIt page, this is a book that screams for you to redo it for the iPad in iBooks Author. It's exactly the kind of book that app was made for.

EDIT: And btw, eBooks are my thing, so you really should listen and do it. "The Classic Back in Print for the Tablet (or iPad) Age."

I think this is looking for an iPad app too. Each section could be a low cost in-app purchase. Add a preview for each section -- perhaps an article or two from each section, for free.

This can be a really useful website that could potentially earn you _interesting_ money.

I'd take your first few $15 and reinvest it by getting someone on oDesk to go through and fix stuff.

* First section I looked at was 'Brakes'. First article is about the windscreen washer. Then there's two articles called "Adjusting the Brakes /1" and "... /2". Why two?

* In the first there's one massive unreadable paragraph. In the second there's paragraph-length titles.

* I'd also look at getting your oDeskers to put the images in interesting places within the text.

At the moment it feels like an OCR dump of a book rather than the amazingly useful website it could be (and thus it feels like an SEO AdSense site).

Thanks that's a great idea. It's a little more work than putting the job up on oDesk though, as I'd need to implement some mechanism for people to edit and update, and for me to vet it.

The truth is, having scanned and OCRed it all, I'm sick of the sight of it for the time being so I haven't proofread it. I will get onto this. And your suggestion about moving the images around is a great one - I'm conscious that these pictures are lovely but I'm not displaying them well at all.

You could simply pay a bored technically-minded university student such as myself to do the work :)

Put some contact details in your profile and I'll be able to contact you.

Done!

I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff.

You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.

I had a look at the Schema stuff - I actually use it on another site of mine ( http://thebigeat.com ) for listings of takeaways, but it has made no difference SEO-wise and it tends to make my markup look like shit. But nevermind A/B testing, I am doing A-Z testing here - throw everything and see what sticks.

I'm hesitant to go adding my site as a citation - it's a good idea but it just seems a bit black-hat for me. Hopefully it's something that might happen organically though.

Marching in and adding links to your site to WP is certainly a bad idea, as well as being plain ethically wrong. I was thinking more of turning up to the talk page for the car article and just offering them the content, but even that probably contravenes wiki-core directive #5749327.

I mentioned it because your site seems like a genuinely good source that WP would be happy to use, making it a win-win. Don't try and use wikipedia for pagerank boys and girls.

I've always had the impression that actually being linked from wikipedia isn't necessarily a good thing SEO wise. That is I think that a long time ago google decided to penalise sites being linked from major wiki's to stop them being spammed to death.

But I'm basing that only rumour and supposition so certainly don't take it as truth.

Is there any evidence that this actually affects SEO or rankings?

Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.

For exactly this reason Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attributes to all external links on Wikipedia. You will get no SEO / page rank link juice from adding links to Wikipedia. You will probably get organic traffic though.

Duh. Can't believe I forgot about that. Not really on the ball today. What am I even doing here? This is meant to be my holiday...

Just because a link is "nofollow" does not mean you get no juice. Being linked to from wikipedia definitely helps a site's rankings...

Argument that "nofollow" = "no seo juice" is debatable. Many SEO believe that lots of links from Wikipedia does help.

I have no data of my own to support the above. Theory says that "nofollow" will not help is SEO.

All externals links on wikipedia use the no-follow tag to prevent that type of spamming (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-wikipedia-links-are-n...)

>I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff.

Why though? I think the manual "semantic web markup" is a failed promise, more than anything.

The idea was flawed from the start for general web use (for one, you cannot trust content providers to add relevant semantic info, either because it's in their interest NOT to do so --e.g SEO spam--, or because they are not competent or lazy). Plus, the tools never materialised.

It's another case of "worse is better".

I'd go on https://leanpub.com/ and turn it into an ebook.

Assuming its a Rails or Sinatra app, building an iPad app based on JSON output would be fairly easy. I could easily see you making some extra revenue by selling it for $0.99-2.99

You missed a sheet reference on this page: http://www.howacarworks.com/articles/lubricating-hinges-peda...

Aha thanks, a sneaky change from See SHEET to consult SHEET.

Not sure if Google T&Cs preclude you from using alternate advertising methods. If not, one approach may be to solicit ads from mechanics, car shops, car maintenance training schools, etc. and build in some geo-awareness so you serve up ads local to the site visitor. Could be a very high conversion/CTR and be able to charge a nice fee.

Paragraphs would be nice. And proofreading.

For example: http://www.howacarworks.com/articles/removing-the-oil-pump

"On en gines where" " If yot are in "

No wonder Google doesn't pick it up.

Since there are so many articles, I think a search box on the left side under the introduction content would be handy.

Something that shows suggestions/auto-completions by matching the input against article titles.

Yup, search is a solid winner.

you have starter pictures on the cooling page. otherwise, i love this - i'll show it to my kids!