Archive for July, 2007

The SEO Basics

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

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 »

The Eyes Have It

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

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

Posted in Miscellaneous, Web Design | 3 Comments »

Advertising: A Fine Balance

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

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 »

Character: Online and Offline

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

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 Affiliate Marketing, Monetization, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

When Content Isn’t King

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

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

Posted in Web Design | 3 Comments »