Archive for July, 2007
BamaStangGuy
Note: This isn’t a 10 steps to outranking your competitor article. This isn’t an article to get you to purchase any software or a service from an SEO Consultant. I don’t provide these services I just post about what I have learned over the year from running websites. Here you will find the basic things you can do you your site to properly SEO it and make it easier for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the other search engines to index your content and properly assign value to your pages.
Links
The most important thing you can do to increase your ranking in search engines is to build back links to your website and your individual pages. This is something that Google especially loves to use when factoring in your ranking in their SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Back links can be accuired through many avenues such as Directories (relevant category and one way non reciprocal linking.), Social networking sites (Digg, Netscape, Reddit MySpace, Facebook) and word of mouth. The word of mouth is the most powerful way which you can really see take effect when you hit the main page of Digg.com. You can acquire thousands of backlinks within days just from people spreading your link to other sites or posting about it on theirs.
Robots.txt
Goal of the robots.txt is to keep search bots out of areas of your site that you don’t want them to be in. You want to use robots.txt to remove duplicate content by not allowing robots to access it in the first place. If you have an archive, printthread pages, or other pages that present the same content I recommend disallowing it via robots.txt. The Robots.txt file always goes in the root of the site, unless you run subdomains, in which case you place it in the root of your subdomain.
One trick is you can go to many sites and add robots.txt to the url and view their file to see how they have theirs setup.
On Page SEO
The big thing to make sure you do here is have plenty of content with your keywords repeated throughout the content as much as possible but only where it would make sense for you to add those keywords. We want to have a good SEO’d site but we don’t want to scare everyone off at the same time. It is possible to find a balance between user friendly pages and SEO friendly pages. I would recommend that you use CSS to design your site in a way that your content appears as high up on the page as possible. You want the search engines to see your content as quickly as possible.
Duplicate URLs
The worst offenders of Duplicate URLs are forums and shopping cart software that use many different parameters in urls to present a page. vBulletin has many issues out of the box with having many urls for the same content. The easiest and most efficenet way at removing these duplicate urls is using mod_rewrite. The goal is to have one url for one page of unique content. This way search engines have no guess work in which url to include in the SERPs and how to apply many of their ranking algorithms to that link to determine the amount of weight it is given.
Conclusion
In the end SEO is going to be something different for each site. It depends on the software you use what you need to concentrate on improving. I deal with forums and wordpress blogs so I know exactly what to do to every vBulletin forum and wordpress installation I run to properly optimize it. No one knows your site better than you do so you can take the things highlighted in this article and apply them to your site to see where you can improve your SEO. Hope you found this useful.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing | 1 Comment »
Gerald
Last time, I talked about the general aspects of webdesign, and we, as website owners, need to ensure that the visitors and browsers have the best experience they can when they visit our site. There is no doubt that web usability is one of the hot topics today (initially championed by Jakob Neilsen), and we must take off our ‘techie’ hat, and put on our ‘user’ hat, to try to experience our website as the users do.
One of the best printed works on this subject is by Steve Krug: “Don’t make me think too much”. His premise is that the user experience needs to be as slick, easy and professional as possible. Any time the user needs to think to use your website, you’re in danger of losing him or her.
So, what aspects of the website should we consider in our analysis? For me, there are four:
1) Initial visual impression
2) Understanding of where you are
3) Navigation to other, possibly more relevant, parts of the website
4) Comfort level in the website use
IVI
I briefly touched on the topic of initial visual impression (IVI) last time. This is based on those first few couple of seconds when the page starts to load. It shouldn’t need to be said, by the way, that the page load time should be as short as possible, even in these times of high speed broadband access. There is nothing worse for a user than to follow a link or a search engine result to your site, and then be presented with a Flash presentation “Loading …. 3%” message. The user will make a judgement, based on how quickly that percentage increases in the first couple of seconds. If, after that time, it’s still in single figures, the user will navigate away.
Similarly, if your landing page is laden with uncompressed photos, which display themselves line by line, the user begins to think that you don’t care about them, and their precious time which is being wasted watching stuff load.
Rule 1 – Flash presentation should be an ‘opt-in’, or allow an ‘opt-out’ at the very least.
Rule 2 – All photos must be compressed down to thumbnails. If the user wants to see them, they can click on them to show the greater detail. Again, they can ‘opt-in’ if they wish.
LOCATION
You cannot guarantee that your visitors will land on your website at the front, or home, page. More and more, internet users are searching for their web content, and as a result, they could land at your website on any page, displaying the specific content they searched for. To encourage them to stay and spend more time at your site, and possibly find more content that suits them. So, what’s important is that it is obvious what page they’re on, where the home page is, and how to explore your website. Which brings us to the third topic:
NAVIGATION
Clear, consistent navigation is possibly the most important visual aspect of your website. Hovers, to highlight parts of the navigation, are good, but nav buttons which have their function hidden until you hover over it are a strict no-no. Navigation is something we’ll discuss in more detail in the next post.
COMFORT
This is possibly the most difficult aspect to define. We (that surf the internet a lot) will know when we feel ‘comfortable’ when we visit a website. It looks good, the navigation is easy to use and makes sense, the content we want to access is easy to access – if it is a written piece, the text needs to be legible, even for those with slight visual impairments. The overall look and feel of the site needs to convey the impression you want to give – the more professional your site is, the more the user should be able to relate to it in that manner. Common mistakes are over-elaboration, too many text fonts and colours, unnecessary graphic animation in several areas of the page, and lack of ‘white space’.
There are many other visual elements to website design, but these four define the user experience, which we should be promoting and improving at every opportunity.
Posted in Web Design, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »
skyhawk133
During ASE (Affiliate Summit East) I spoke with several site owners who were concerned about overwhelming their visitors with advertisements. I think this is probably a question that is asked often: “How much is too much?” At what point do advertisements deter visitors from coming back? The answer really depends on what kind of traffic we’re talking about. Let’s look at a few types of traffic and the typical behavior of those visitors.
Organic
Search Engine traffic typically has a very high bounce rate (70-90% in my experience). It matters very little how many ads are on a page for this type of traffic, in fact, I would encourage you to try to monetize organic traffic in every way possible. Visitors from search engines are usually looking for an answer to a question (unless it’s e-commerce and then you shouldn’t have ads on your site to begin with) and if they arrive at your site, they’ll typically stay for less than a minute and never come back. Why wouldn’t you try to get them to leave your site via an advertisement? Show them large ads (336×280 & 728×90) above the fold and focus on contextual. The more relevant to what they are looking for, the more likely they are to click.
Referral
Visitors arriving from other sites have one of the lowest bounce rates (typically less than 50%) and therefor are much more likely to stick around. This type of traffic should be treated differently than organic traffic and as such should see fewer advertisements. Using basic conditional statements in your forum software, or in whatever language your site is programmed in, you should be able to turn off ads for anyone who didn’t arrive via a search engine. This will improve your bounce rate even more and encourage your referral traffic to register/return.
PPC/Advertising Campaigns
This type of traffic comes from AdWords and other advertising campaigns. It’s a bit of a grey area and you’ll have to experiment with what works best. My personal philosophy is “once and ad clicker, always an ad clicker” so if they clicked an ad to get to your site, you may want to push your call to action (i.e. “Join Today”) up higher, but still have ads in case they want to leave. But you may also want to remove the ads so you don’t risk losing a visitor you paid money for. Bounce rates for PPC campaigns can vary depending on the landing page, so do a little A/B testing and see what works best for your paid traffic. Again, use a simple conditional to show/hide ads for this type of traffic based on the referrer.
Direct/Members
Type-in or bookmark traffic has the lowest bounce rate (usually less than 20%) and should be provided the best experience with the least amount of intrusive ads. This would include registered members and word of mouth traffic. Giving these users the absolute best experience possible is important and will encourage them to return again and again.
You may cut in to your bottom line a little at first, but the end result of improving the overall experience for your visitors will help grow your site and your bottom line. Make sure you are using a good analytics tool (like Google Analytics) to track conversion rates, bounce rates, average depth and length of sessions, and return rate. If you can monitor this data and continuously test you’ll find the perfect balance of advertising for your site.
About the Author
Chris Kenworthy is the owner of MediaGroup1 LLC and Dream.In.Code, a popular programming and web development community. Chris has been earning online since 2001 and recently began consulting with forum and community owners to help monetize and improve their web sites. He received a degree in Web Technology in 2005 and is a certified Google Advertising Professional. For more information and to contact Chris directly, visit his blog at http://www.ackfoo.com
Posted in Forum Building, Monetization | 11 Comments »
Frito Pie
I’m intrigued by the notion of online personas and the manner in which people can mask themselves well via forum discussions or email for the sake of hiding who they truly are. I’ve been frustrated by the auto-mail I have received from Google when I’ve tried to ask a question. I’ve wondered at the type of people behind the usernames in forum discussions and if they are who they claim to be really. At Affiliate Summit East I discovered that many are who they really claim to be. In the flesh. For good or bad. With a few exceptions.
I arrived in time to check in, register, enjoy a continental breakfast before a keynote address by the master of online entertainment. Entertaining and witty, the audience browsed through Ze Frank’s brain like Firefox on speed. Exceleration. Web 2.0. Interaction and visitors creating content. A blast for my creativity. He was who I expected him to be.
After the keynote address I began walking through the exhibitor booths where I collected t-shirts, pens, bags, money and a yo-yo. The Google gang was helpful with my Adsense and Adwords accounts. I expected them to be too busy to answer specific questions but they were not. One Googler had me log in to help me with Adsense. When I exhausted my concerns with that account, the Adwords gal took over. Helping me through the tools with plenty of answers to my questions, I walked away with a yo-yo and a great satisfaction at the helpfulness of their attitude. They were better than I expected them to be.
I found Linkshare who took my name and card and promised to explore why the four merchants I applied as an affiliate turned my website down as it made little sense to me. Again, better than I expected in person.
I walked into the HackerSafe booth with some questions and walked out with great information which should help me with security issues and concerns of my customers.
At this point, I was impressed with what I was experiencing. Better face to face communication with people I had only met through email or online forums that left me satisfied with the quality of character. Online and Offline matched or exceeded my expectations for the better.
It was then that I passed a booth with a name I recognized from some online forums for webmasters. This was a guy who had been banned from a few sites I was a member. His latest blog and forum ownership claim to be a place for discussions about online marketing and one, which when I visited in curiosity, was less than professional in content. “U no watt i meen?” In fact the thread titles contained profanity, content applauding the “black hat” area of earning with *coughspamcough* and much about the “adult” online industry. And here he was in the middle of Affiliate Summit exhibitors as though he was offering something wonderful to someone like me.
I was intrigued. I stood off to the side and watched his booth for a while out of curiousity. At some point an online marketer walked by who I know as a successful and moral online earner. He was called back to this booth. He turned, shook the hand of the booth owner to demonstrate respect, was offered a t-shirt which he laid over his chest as if wearing it while one of the booth’s helpers snapped a photo from a cell phone. Further curiosity revealed much more of a lack of character and a display of deceit that made my skin crawl. Back at my hotel I visited this guy’s forum to find the photo displayed for the humor and entertainment of his forum members.
I was disgusted as I thought of the childish, morbid behavior that I witnessed in person and on the online forums where he was banned. And now on his forums. And yes, he is exactly as I expected him to be. I had hoped for better and received far less.
“Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is; the tree is the real thing.” - Abraham Lincoln
We may work hard to mask who we really are for the sake of our online business. But given enough time and enough interaction online and off, true character will demonstrate who we really are. Not the shadow of the reputation but the real thing.
Posted in Web 2.0, Affiliate Marketing, Monetization | 4 Comments »
Gerald
As a blogger, I’ve often heard the phrase “Content is King!” We all know what it means - to become a more successful blogger, you need to create thought-provoking, useful, or just plain interesting content to engage your readers. Which is good, as far as it goes.
But what if you’re not getting the readers?
What if you’re traffic stats say you’re getting the hits, but their average ’stay’ time is a minute, or less? Are they really reading your content? What value is the content, when no one can be bothered to read it?
This is my first blog post at EarnersForum, and I will be writing about what makes casual browsers into customers – either of your products or your content.
Becoming successful on the internet used to be easy. Anything dot com used to attract massive funding, and permit you to have a first-class lifestyle on a third rate business idea. This was the dot-com boom that was followed, as surely as night follows day, by the dot-com crash. The dot-com emperor really did have no clothes. Wikipedia has a number of well-known “dot-bombs” as they call it: Dot-Bombs
Looking at Boo.com as an example (a company that ate, drank, flew and advertised its way through $120m-worth of funding), there were a number of reasons quoted for the failure, but most of them centred around the user experience. Slow internet connections, massive graphics, late delivery of website functionality, and massive over-estimation of sales targets meant the venture was doomed almost before it started. If you like gloating over other people’s mistakes, there’s some more on CNet.
How do you avoid these hugely expensive mistakes, and ensure that your online venture is successful?
Let’s take a first-time visitor. What does he/she see when the page resolves in the browser window? Is it a mish-mash of icons, graphics, fonts, images and colours? Or is it something pleasing to the eye? Let’s quickly compare a couple of websites.
Copyblogger is the online presence of Brian Clark. His writing is clear, and his ideas are inspirational. But what do you see when you load up his website? Loads of colours and nice graphics, and … wait a minute … is there writing in there? The only reason I chose this blog was because it used to be a paragon of the “easy read” virtue – clean and efficient. I understand that Brian needs to make some money, but in my opinion, his new scheme is not as good as the old. To see how it used to look, see the site of Chris Pearson.
For more visual inspiration, look at Elliot Back’s Website.
For my next blog post, I shall be writing about the specifics of website visual design, and the elements that will assist you in creating that successful online presence. After that, we’ll be looking at user behaviour when viewing websites.
Posted in Web Design | 3 Comments »
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