I just met the very impressive Joe Laratro who we will probably hire for some inhouse SEO classes or PPC
We had an interesting discussion about what links count more than and he pointed me towards a presentation by Todd Malicoat . I thought it was great but pointed out that it wasn't complete or at least, it didn't address the type of questions that I had. I remember worrying alot about how to best harvest google juice and writing on link importance back in Jan 06 (and other times I'm sure)
I'll update my thoughts on link importance and I'd be honored if Joe uses this to refine his teaching in this area:
Image links vs text links. Text links are better although image links with alt text are better than just a banner. For the unitiated, many image links on sites are run thru a javascript adserver engine meaning that there is no followable link.
Single links on a page versus multiple. Each additional link divides the link power on the page accordingly. I'm still unclear on whether if Site A & B start with the same google power, which site's links are more powerful:
- Site A - has 5 outgoing links on one page, 4 pages with no links
- Site B - have 5 pages, each with one outgoing link
Relevancy: relevant is more important than irrelevant by a big ratio... Arguably, this is the most important.
Multiple links on a site - The 2nd link on a site is less valuable than the first. The second link to you on a page is less valuable than the first. The 3rd in both cases is even less important and so on. So, don't think a link on each of 20 pages is 20x better than a link from the site.
The Value of Links from Different sites - More important to Less Important (my list)
Best - Authority sites (including .edu, .gov, or any site that is at the top of the search engine for significant terms).
Original Unaffiliated Articles on blogs, websites, or forums that quote and link to your site (they probably count the same if they are set up right meaning that url, page name, keywords, and content are relevant and original. And that the content is substantative)
Original Unaffiliated Articles on blogs, websites, or forums that link to your site
Directories
Affiliated sites (either co-owned, co-hosted) - I'm not sure if google is yet looking to see if there are shared adsense, adwords, or webmaster management tools to determine affiliation and I'm surprised that more people don't ask this question.
Duplicate content - An article with links that shows up on two sites is of less value on the second site. And on the 3rd etc.
Worst - Reciprocal links - While some of this is OK, google will notice alot of it and will particulary dislike irrelevant links or links to spammy places.
PS - I think a fun project would be to quantify some of this...How heavy is the depreciation of the 2nd link to your site from the same page versus the 2nd link from the same site, different page...
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
BBB Online
I joined the BBB local business so that I could then join the BBB Online which is a national council. I've been amazed at how 19th century the better business bureau is with endless fiefdoms and initatives and no ability to really show leadership on a host of issues that need leadership.
I did find that when I put the BBB online logo on my payment page, my shopping cart abandon rate dropped significantly. In plain English, more people signed up since they had more confidence due to the logo. I've thought of offering myself to the BBB as a case study since my stats are interesting and there are few companies willing to share their stats.
I've spoken to the BBB on a number of occassion for several reasons:
- offer my case of the bbb logo reducing my abandons for them to use as marketing fodder. I find that it's not something that they jump upon
- try to sign up for the kidsafe BBB logo which I've seen on a few sites but which I cannot find the source of. Is it an abandoned program?
- I've googled bbb kidsafe and lots of variations of it but can't find it.
- there is one page on the national council of better business bureaus which lists, for kids, a caru (children's advertising review unit) which signifies compliance with coppa and Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. I had never seen or heard of either so I doubt that joe public knows or cares about them. The CARU logo does not even mention BBB so it's just another unknown credibility logo.
Note, there is also a bbb privacy seal of some sort...The BBBOnLine Privacy seal, awarded to 675 web sites, indicates adherence to the privacy principle outlined in the new BBB Code and other privacy protection standards, and already transcends national borders, with applications pending from businesses in 20 countries. This is from a 2000 local BBB press release.
Btw - I wrote on bbb online awhile ago..
I did find that when I put the BBB online logo on my payment page, my shopping cart abandon rate dropped significantly. In plain English, more people signed up since they had more confidence due to the logo. I've thought of offering myself to the BBB as a case study since my stats are interesting and there are few companies willing to share their stats.
I've spoken to the BBB on a number of occassion for several reasons:
- offer my case of the bbb logo reducing my abandons for them to use as marketing fodder. I find that it's not something that they jump upon
- try to sign up for the kidsafe BBB logo which I've seen on a few sites but which I cannot find the source of. Is it an abandoned program?
- I've googled bbb kidsafe and lots of variations of it but can't find it.
- there is one page on the national council of better business bureaus which lists, for kids, a caru (children's advertising review unit) which signifies compliance with coppa and Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. I had never seen or heard of either so I doubt that joe public knows or cares about them. The CARU logo does not even mention BBB so it's just another unknown credibility logo.
Note, there is also a bbb privacy seal of some sort...The BBBOnLine Privacy seal, awarded to 675 web sites, indicates adherence to the privacy principle outlined in the new BBB Code and other privacy protection standards, and already transcends national borders, with applications pending from businesses in 20 countries. This is from a 2000 local BBB press release.
Btw - I wrote on bbb online awhile ago..
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Managing & Parking Unused Domains
Here's how I try to use my domains to help build traffic for SEO purposes. Examples (from my netfirms accounts):
Books Count - A url intended for our future reading program. Initially used as a parking place for the spellingcity software development effort. It's been one of my domains for over a year and about 11 months ago was populated. Since we wanted to be under the radar, it has no links. This posting is the first link to the site! Bookscount.com
Family Homeschool - This little 5 page website is put up with a site builder. It's unfinished. Nevertheless, the site has a google pr of 3! go figure. Familyhomeschool.org
Homeschool curriculum review - Another quickie website with a few pages of html that seems like I created it in word. It has good content and the right links and a google pr of 3. Why? Homeschool-curriculum-review.com. With it's strong url, I could alot with this one.
Homeschool Curriculum - This domain has no page rank, it is forwarded to homeschoolonline.org. homeschool-curriculum.biz
This approach of treating them one-by-one is kind-of fun and it is not the type of seo-work that the algorithm gurus at google are likely to care about. But, it's time-consuming and perhaps not very effective. Since I have a total of 150+ domains, is there a better way?
Previous Posts related to domain optimization (interesting to note how little progress I've made in this area despite having grown my number of domains to 150):
Parking domains for profit, is there a free lunch with domains?
Parked domains, how best to use them?
Useful Parking of Domains
Books Count - A url intended for our future reading program. Initially used as a parking place for the spellingcity software development effort. It's been one of my domains for over a year and about 11 months ago was populated. Since we wanted to be under the radar, it has no links. This posting is the first link to the site! Bookscount.com
Family Homeschool - This little 5 page website is put up with a site builder. It's unfinished. Nevertheless, the site has a google pr of 3! go figure. Familyhomeschool.org
Homeschool curriculum review - Another quickie website with a few pages of html that seems like I created it in word. It has good content and the right links and a google pr of 3. Why? Homeschool-curriculum-review.com. With it's strong url, I could alot with this one.
Homeschool Curriculum - This domain has no page rank, it is forwarded to homeschoolonline.org. homeschool-curriculum.biz
This approach of treating them one-by-one is kind-of fun and it is not the type of seo-work that the algorithm gurus at google are likely to care about. But, it's time-consuming and perhaps not very effective. Since I have a total of 150+ domains, is there a better way?
Previous Posts related to domain optimization (interesting to note how little progress I've made in this area despite having grown my number of domains to 150):
Parking domains for profit, is there a free lunch with domains?
Parked domains, how best to use them?
Useful Parking of Domains
Friday, September 21, 2007
Blog Marketing
I've made progress in the marketing of the blogs. A few areas:
Tracking
- I use google adsense on all my sites, blogs, and forums as a simple way to glimpse traffic on them
- I use feedburner for the stats on blogs which tells me about users & sources
Marketing
- I have a bunch of mods for WordPress which makes the URL & title SEO-friendly (words not codes)
- I've started using some social bookmarking, specifically Technorati, Digg, & Delicious
- I'm still trying to figure out authority sites.
- Pinging. I think I have automatic pinging on plus I manually will do pingomatic sometimes to be sure.
I just read a good article on blog marketing by Dave Parrack.
And, just for giggles, I think I'll try the wholinkstome script:
But, before you click on the link, look at your google toolbar (if you have it installed) and you'll see that google gives this blog a PR of 4. you'll noticed that wholinkstome script gets that wrong. In fact, they get most of it wrong.
Who links to me?
Tracking
- I use google adsense on all my sites, blogs, and forums as a simple way to glimpse traffic on them
- I use feedburner for the stats on blogs which tells me about users & sources
Marketing
- I have a bunch of mods for WordPress which makes the URL & title SEO-friendly (words not codes)
- I've started using some social bookmarking, specifically Technorati, Digg, & Delicious
- I'm still trying to figure out authority sites.
- Pinging. I think I have automatic pinging on plus I manually will do pingomatic sometimes to be sure.
I just read a good article on blog marketing by Dave Parrack.
And, just for giggles, I think I'll try the wholinkstome script:
But, before you click on the link, look at your google toolbar (if you have it installed) and you'll see that google gives this blog a PR of 4. you'll noticed that wholinkstome script gets that wrong. In fact, they get most of it wrong.
Who links to me?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Adsense for tracking
I have about a dozen sites hosted in half a dozen different places. I've found that by putting a few discrete adsense ads on each site, I can get a very rough sense of the comparative traffic of the sites from a single tracking system. A few of the sites:
Learning Faster
Ed Mouse - The Story of Creation from Character Sketch to an Animated Character
Todays Learners
Parenting in a Digital Age
Homeschooling Online Blog
Homeschool Forum
Plus Time4Learning.com, SpellingCity.com, and Fun Vocabulary Learning.
to name a few
Learning Faster
Ed Mouse - The Story of Creation from Character Sketch to an Animated Character
Todays Learners
Parenting in a Digital Age
Homeschooling Online Blog
Homeschool Forum
Plus Time4Learning.com, SpellingCity.com, and Fun Vocabulary Learning.
to name a few
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
405 Errors -Technical Problems our Members Face
Time4Learning was told my a member last week: "Wow, I pay you $20/month and you spend hours fixing my computer for me, this is the best deal I've ever had."
This both pleases and pains me. Since we might have spent $200 of time helping that one user, it's likely that we've got a really big negative margin on him even if he remains a customer for years. We try to only help our members with problems that are easily fixed and problems that have specifically to do with using our website but it's never clear where/how to draw the line.
We try to avoid entering into discussion as to why they can't get on the web, what sort of security software they have etc etc but we frequently find that we are spending time on problems that really are none of our business. We try to only go deep into technical help if we are trying to learn about a recurring problem but the problem of the staff gets carried away and, given the type of people that we have and the way that I manage them, will never go away.
In any case, a new repeating problem is the 405 error when they try to login.
Background - Members login to Time4Learning where we verify their account and pass their credentials to our educational materials provider, CompassLearning. CompassLearning checks that the session started at Time4Learning.com and then, if the other credentials are correct, allows them to login and start their session.
If Compass can't verify where the session started (because session cookies are turned off on the user's computer), they put up an error message: "You are trying to login from an unknown source, please contact Compass".
Since this message is cryptic and the calls to Compass were often not crisply handled, we created a work-around so that our members avoided this error. As a step in the login process, we have the process check with another site (www.time4learning.org) to see if a third party site can determine the referring site.
In most cases, this works. If we can determine the referring site, we continue to login. If we cannot determine the referring site, we give them an error message which explains the problem and the fix.
A third case has emerged which is when the user get a "405 error message"
405 Error Message
We are working on figuring this out. So far, we have them call their ISP but I'm not sure we give them enough data to make the call worthwhile. The best info on this that I've found so far is:
- http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=22098
And I quote:
Error Message:405 – Method Not Allowed
Translation:For each particular resource type, HTTP allows for a variety of actions (or “methods”) between a Web server and a browser. These methods include Options, Get, Head, URL, Post, Put, Delete, Trace, Connect, and more (depending on the HTTP version in use). Web servers can be configured to allow or reject any method. For example, your ‘read-only’ Web server may disallow PUT and DELETE methods. When your Web browser tries to use a method for obtaining a Web resource that the server prohibits, an error occurs. Bottom line—you cannot exchange desired data with the Web server.
Solution: You normally don’t see this error unless you’re creating Web pages. In most cases, 405 errors arise when using POST (power on self test) methods—you may be trying to provide input on your Web site (such as a form), but not all ISPs allow POST methods needed to process that form. You can try GET commands in place of POST commands. In short, most 405 errors can be corrected by adjusting the configuration of your Web server (to allow POST methods, for example) ...
This both pleases and pains me. Since we might have spent $200 of time helping that one user, it's likely that we've got a really big negative margin on him even if he remains a customer for years. We try to only help our members with problems that are easily fixed and problems that have specifically to do with using our website but it's never clear where/how to draw the line.
We try to avoid entering into discussion as to why they can't get on the web, what sort of security software they have etc etc but we frequently find that we are spending time on problems that really are none of our business. We try to only go deep into technical help if we are trying to learn about a recurring problem but the problem of the staff gets carried away and, given the type of people that we have and the way that I manage them, will never go away.
In any case, a new repeating problem is the 405 error when they try to login.
Background - Members login to Time4Learning where we verify their account and pass their credentials to our educational materials provider, CompassLearning. CompassLearning checks that the session started at Time4Learning.com and then, if the other credentials are correct, allows them to login and start their session.
If Compass can't verify where the session started (because session cookies are turned off on the user's computer), they put up an error message: "You are trying to login from an unknown source, please contact Compass".
Since this message is cryptic and the calls to Compass were often not crisply handled, we created a work-around so that our members avoided this error. As a step in the login process, we have the process check with another site (www.time4learning.org) to see if a third party site can determine the referring site.
In most cases, this works. If we can determine the referring site, we continue to login. If we cannot determine the referring site, we give them an error message which explains the problem and the fix.
A third case has emerged which is when the user get a "405 error message"
405 Error Message
We are working on figuring this out. So far, we have them call their ISP but I'm not sure we give them enough data to make the call worthwhile. The best info on this that I've found so far is:
- http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=22098
And I quote:
Error Message:405 – Method Not Allowed
Translation:For each particular resource type, HTTP allows for a variety of actions (or “methods”) between a Web server and a browser. These methods include Options, Get, Head, URL, Post, Put, Delete, Trace, Connect, and more (depending on the HTTP version in use). Web servers can be configured to allow or reject any method. For example, your ‘read-only’ Web server may disallow PUT and DELETE methods. When your Web browser tries to use a method for obtaining a Web resource that the server prohibits, an error occurs. Bottom line—you cannot exchange desired data with the Web server.
Solution: You normally don’t see this error unless you’re creating Web pages. In most cases, 405 errors arise when using POST (power on self test) methods—you may be trying to provide input on your Web site (such as a form), but not all ISPs allow POST methods needed to process that form. You can try GET commands in place of POST commands. In short, most 405 errors can be corrected by adjusting the configuration of your Web server (to allow POST methods, for example) ...
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Site Stats for Blogger
Site statistics for my blogger blog have been a sore spot for me for a long time.
Today, problem solved!!!! :-> !!!!
I hooked up the site stats for blogger from feedburner (recently acquired by Google) and wow, I now know where the people are coming from.
Oddly, although this blog is brilliantly written, it gets little to no traffic - :-<
So I will now experiment by changing the name a little bit to see if that improves traffic. I just focused the name on the concept of learning online marketing, learning seo, and intermediate level seo. I'll see if that helps. I de-emphased online Q&A.....
Today, problem solved!!!! :-> !!!!
I hooked up the site stats for blogger from feedburner (recently acquired by Google) and wow, I now know where the people are coming from.
Oddly, although this blog is brilliantly written, it gets little to no traffic - :-<
So I will now experiment by changing the name a little bit to see if that improves traffic. I just focused the name on the concept of learning online marketing, learning seo, and intermediate level seo. I'll see if that helps. I de-emphased online Q&A.....
Sunday, August 26, 2007
SEO Abbreviations Glossary
404 - page not found. Most sites redirect the user to a standard page when the requested page does not exist
504 - aredirect from one page to another (when the first page is obsoleted)
B2B - business to business
B2C - business to consumers
BOT - short for robot (an automated self-running process)
BLOG - short for weblog, also suggests a Better Listing On Google (Joke)
BTF - below the fold
CPA - cost per action
CPC - cost per click, or, cost per customer (a source of ongoing confusion)
CPM - cost per thousand views, a rate used for advertising and banner sales
CTR - click thru rate
CSV - common separated values, a data format often used for transport between systems
FAQs - frequently asked questions
FFA - free for all meaning anyone can add a link.
DMOZ - Directory MOZilla, the open directory project, a human edited directory that was a big deal in the 90s
DNS - domain naming service, the lookup system of table coorelating names (such as www.spellingcity.com with numerical IP addresses
GUI - graphical user interface
HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol, meaning the info to come is in HTML
HTTPS - secure/encrypted HTTP
HTML - the code used to write web pages - hypertext markup language
IBL - inbound links
IM - instant messaging
IP - Internet Protocol, usually used as short for "IP Address", each computer and router on the net has a unique numerical address such as 192.117.80
IT - information technology meaning computers and such
JPEG - an image format, joint photographers expert group
LTV - liftetime value of a customer
OBL - outbound links
PFI - pay for inclusion
PPC - pay per click
PR - Google PageRank (named for Larry Page punning on his name)
ROI - return on investment
SEM - search engine marketing
SE - search engine
SEO - search engine optimization
SERP - search engine results page
SQL - standard query language, an architecture/protocol common to modern databases
UI - user interface
URL - web address
WWW - world wide web, a great moniker to help people understand the internet. I wonder who coined the expression?
XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a new language augmenting HTML for better organizing data and meaning
504 - aredirect from one page to another (when the first page is obsoleted)
B2B - business to business
B2C - business to consumers
BOT - short for robot (an automated self-running process)
BLOG - short for weblog, also suggests a Better Listing On Google (Joke)
BTF - below the fold
CPA - cost per action
CPC - cost per click, or, cost per customer (a source of ongoing confusion)
CPM - cost per thousand views, a rate used for advertising and banner sales
CTR - click thru rate
CSV - common separated values, a data format often used for transport between systems
FAQs - frequently asked questions
FFA - free for all meaning anyone can add a link.
DMOZ - Directory MOZilla, the open directory project, a human edited directory that was a big deal in the 90s
DNS - domain naming service, the lookup system of table coorelating names (such as www.spellingcity.com with numerical IP addresses
GUI - graphical user interface
HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol, meaning the info to come is in HTML
HTTPS - secure/encrypted HTTP
HTML - the code used to write web pages - hypertext markup language
IBL - inbound links
IM - instant messaging
IP - Internet Protocol, usually used as short for "IP Address", each computer and router on the net has a unique numerical address such as 192.117.80
IT - information technology meaning computers and such
JPEG - an image format, joint photographers expert group
LTV - liftetime value of a customer
OBL - outbound links
PFI - pay for inclusion
PPC - pay per click
PR - Google PageRank (named for Larry Page punning on his name)
ROI - return on investment
SEM - search engine marketing
SE - search engine
SEO - search engine optimization
SERP - search engine results page
SQL - standard query language, an architecture/protocol common to modern databases
UI - user interface
URL - web address
WWW - world wide web, a great moniker to help people understand the internet. I wonder who coined the expression?
XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a new language augmenting HTML for better organizing data and meaning
Friday, August 24, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Social Bookmarking - State of the Art Today
In the last year or so, a Mysterious List of Words & Logos have appeared on the web: Digg, Del.icio.us, PopURLs, Reddit, Fark, Blue Dot, StumbleUpon, tags, Ikeepbookmarks, and so-on.This latest set of techniques is known as social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking can affect search engine position and provides an alternative approach for viewers to navigate the web.
Are all these services worth participating in and are they all the same? NO, some are specialized in some area, some are small, and some are old fashioned (can you believe it? There are already some old fashioned sites in this latest and greatest trends. ex Ikeepbookmarks).
Which are the ones to select? Well, here are today's leaders and how they are different....
StumbleUpon.com provides a new way to go around the net following links established by people who have recommended sites by category and popularity.
Digg.com is all about articles. People vote.
del.icio.us is more of a bookmarking tool. Your favorite are listed and connected with others. BTW, for a great explanation and howto on del.icio.ous, try this social bookmarketing video
technorati - A multimedia listing by tag of blogs, music, pictures.
Furl - A listing by tag of websites.
Reddit - Articles get tagged and voted upon with the votes weighted by the taggers karma. This is the least corporate (albeit owned by conde nast) of the services.
Now some people (such as gino) categorize social bookmarking sites as subset of social media sites and include the bookmarking sites above with the likes of:
MySpace: social networking site
Facebook: social networking site
YouTube: video sharing community
Flickr: photo sharing site
LinkedIn: professional networking
Wikipedia: web-based community-created encyclopaedia
Yahoo! Answers: community answer site
MyBlogLog: blog networking community
FIQL & Netlister - sharing playlists.
Time4Learning's parent forum has started using social bookmarking
Friday, August 17, 2007
Permently Banned
I tried to login into the seochat forum this morning to comment on a thread and was greeted by this message:
It did cause me to take stock of my online behavior to see if it's spammy in any sense. Here's a quick list of my forum participations.....
1. Lotsa chat. I picked a forum recently and spent some time on it a few times / week to get my rating up above 50 posts so that my signature links would become active. While fun, the quality of the forum is mixed and I think the links are probably of very marginal value. As I look thru my posts, I think mine are often the most thoughtful and original and show the most research. Others (of mine), particularly in the forums that are "other" or "greeting" new members, my posts are pretty sloppy often missing words in the sentence.
2. Tech support. In our new site, SpellingCity.com, there's a serious Firefox bug which we have been trying to understand and resolve. To pursue help, I have posted into several tech forums with similar comments. Is this spammy?
Best discussion: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289873
Others:
3. And of course, we run our own parents forum which helps parents discuss common areas of interest and get feedback from members (not just us as a vendor). We permit links to competitive and personal sites although there have been a very extreme examples where we had to remove them. We've never banned a real member although there are plenty of extreme spammers that we ban (although since they switch sites constantly) I'm not sure that it does any good.
You do not have permission to access forums, because you are permanently banned.
OUCH! What's odd is that I have no memory of having done anything that's not kosher or of being warned or reprimanded. What's also odd is that this "permanently banning from a forum" actually has an emotional sting to it. Weird.It did cause me to take stock of my online behavior to see if it's spammy in any sense. Here's a quick list of my forum participations.....
1. Lotsa chat. I picked a forum recently and spent some time on it a few times / week to get my rating up above 50 posts so that my signature links would become active. While fun, the quality of the forum is mixed and I think the links are probably of very marginal value. As I look thru my posts, I think mine are often the most thoughtful and original and show the most research. Others (of mine), particularly in the forums that are "other" or "greeting" new members, my posts are pretty sloppy often missing words in the sentence.
2. Tech support. In our new site, SpellingCity.com, there's a serious Firefox bug which we have been trying to understand and resolve. To pursue help, I have posted into several tech forums with similar comments. Is this spammy?
Best discussion: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org
Others:
3. And of course, we run our own parents forum which helps parents discuss common areas of interest and get feedback from members (not just us as a vendor). We permit links to competitive and personal sites although there have been a very extreme examples where we had to remove them. We've never banned a real member although there are plenty of extreme spammers that we ban (although since they switch sites constantly) I'm not sure that it does any good.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Top Ten Factors Affecting Your Search Engine Position
Here are the top ten ways to improve your position in the search engines.
They are in order of Most Important to Least Important! (in my opinion)
1. Quality inbound links from relevant pages with relevant anchor text to relevant pages.
2. Quality Inbound Relevent Links
3. Original content with each page built around a few targetted keyphrases with correct use of page title and URL.
4. Keyphrase-based domain name
5. Quality Directory Listings
6. Large Websites
7. Quality Relevent Outbound links
8. Site map
9. Correct use of H1, H2, Meta, and Alt tags
10. Correct use of keyword density & metatags (important to Yahoo & MSN)
Insignificant:
Quality HTML with no errors
No broken internal links
Having friends at Google.
What will hurt you:
All and any blackhat techniques
Spam
Lots of non-original content
Links to spam & trash sites
They are in order of Most Important to Least Important! (in my opinion)
1. Quality inbound links from relevant pages with relevant anchor text to relevant pages.
2. Quality Inbound Relevent Links
3. Original content with each page built around a few targetted keyphrases with correct use of page title and URL.
4. Keyphrase-based domain name
5. Quality Directory Listings
6. Large Websites
7. Quality Relevent Outbound links
8. Site map
9. Correct use of H1, H2, Meta, and Alt tags
10. Correct use of keyword density & metatags (important to Yahoo & MSN)
Insignificant:
Quality HTML with no errors
No broken internal links
Having friends at Google.
What will hurt you:
All and any blackhat techniques
Spam
Lots of non-original content
Links to spam & trash sites
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Online Revenue Development
Time4Learning has a fantastic online learning service for afterschool or homeschooling which we provide to users for a monthly fee. So the heart of our business is a subscription service.
However, with over 400,000 visitors per month, we have often considered trying to build revenues though either advertising or affiliate programs.
To be clear, we are NOT talking about advertising to our students or members. We don't do that. We are thinking about our main and tertiary sites where we get lots of traffic but most of which does not convert into members. In fact, 99% of our visitors don't sign up so it seems reasonable to try to make some money on them as they surf out of our site.
Adsense - We have had a variety of different experiences with adsense, some of which we cannot explain. At one point, we made alot of money on it but then, some clever consultants, convinced me to take it down.
Since then, I've run adsense on sidebars of some pages of the site and at best, I can around a 5% clickthru on the ads. With an average of $.10 / click, this means that I make a dime on one out of every twenty visitors or, a half penny per visitor. Here's a question: anybody out there want to share similiar metrics with me? Are there industry norms of what one ought to be able to make per visitor?
I've also experimented with a variety of affiliate programs including commission junction, linkshare, affiliate fuel, amazon, and others. None of them have done much for me. Or, I've not figured out how to do much with them?
If any of you have experience helping to optimize pages for these efforts and wants to help, I'd be pleased for advice or even some consulting help.
However, with over 400,000 visitors per month, we have often considered trying to build revenues though either advertising or affiliate programs.
To be clear, we are NOT talking about advertising to our students or members. We don't do that. We are thinking about our main and tertiary sites where we get lots of traffic but most of which does not convert into members. In fact, 99% of our visitors don't sign up so it seems reasonable to try to make some money on them as they surf out of our site.
Adsense - We have had a variety of different experiences with adsense, some of which we cannot explain. At one point, we made alot of money on it but then, some clever consultants, convinced me to take it down.
Since then, I've run adsense on sidebars of some pages of the site and at best, I can around a 5% clickthru on the ads. With an average of $.10 / click, this means that I make a dime on one out of every twenty visitors or, a half penny per visitor. Here's a question: anybody out there want to share similiar metrics with me? Are there industry norms of what one ought to be able to make per visitor?
I've also experimented with a variety of affiliate programs including commission junction, linkshare, affiliate fuel, amazon, and others. None of them have done much for me. Or, I've not figured out how to do much with them?
If any of you have experience helping to optimize pages for these efforts and wants to help, I'd be pleased for advice or even some consulting help.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Acquiring Websites - due diligence
I just bought my second website. The first one was a simple domain acquisition with no content. This website acquisition was much more complicated and expensive since I acquired:
I went through, what I think of, as an appropriate amount of "due diligence". "Due diligence" means the process through which a potential acquirer evaluates a target company and its assets to ensure that the price is fair and that the buyer understands the assets appropriately. It is a legal term for publicly-held companies (and others with fiduciary legal obligations) that the management must go thru to not be reckless with the funds entrusted to them.
Actually, here's (simplified) what I've done.
1. Had initial discussions with the buyer. I approached him as interested in buying the technology on the site. He responded by saying that he was trying to sell the whole site. I asked "why" and "how much?" He answered.
2. I considered his answers to why and how much to make a go/no go decision on the purchase:
- I wanted to pursue it at that level of asking price
- To think about whether he was "for real" or a dishonest or flakey person. If I felt that either of the latter were likely, I would not pursue it at all. I have decided to not deal professionally with people that are lunatics or lying (to me or themselves). I checked up on the info that he provided, reviewed his sites and their links to get an overall picture of his online activities and decided that he was a "good egg" and someone that I wanted to go thru the acquisition process with.
I cannot overemphasize how important making this decision is. The ONE time that I decided to buy with someone who seemed "too-amazing", I wasted a huge amount of my and my colleagues time and money on an acquisition that did not close since as we got into the details of due diligence, it turned out he was not just exaggerating, he was totally lying. I knew at the beginning that there was something wrong with his story and I wish I had, based on simple intuition, walked away.
3. I gathered all the independent stats that I could to evaluate it.
- many independent lists of incoming links such as those provided by www.webuildpages.com
- alexa etc
4. Check hosting status (including blacklisting) using http://www.dnsstuff.com/
5. I asked them to supply to me:
- traffic by month for the last year with explanations of traffic trends
- data on referrals by country and domain
- disclosure on relationships for sites with links and sites providing traffic
- I had thought about the possibility of fraud here before when I looked at SEO due diligence.
6. Looked at other similar sites that might be for sale and followed some discussions to go from being a novice to an expert. I looked at www.sedo.com but preferred: www.sitepoint.com . In fact, they had a great free guide to Buying Websites.
7. I found a lawyer that I like, trust, is experienced with small acquisitions, and that I had good access to. This is nearly impossible. I was incredibly lucky.
8. Put in critical data in the purchase agreement in the "reps and warranties". This means that they, as part of the contract, represent that they've disclosed the truth about the data that they've supplied me (which I made part of the contract as an attachment).5. Staged acquisition with payment tied to deliverables.
BTW - if there is much interest in this, I could write more extensively. I think this is a huge new business growth area for me (acquisitions) and generally, there will be lots of growth thru deals on the web.
- A domain
- Applications on the domain
- I wanted the applications to deploy onto one of my educational websites
- I wanted the highly rated site (in several search engines) to drive traffic and send "google juice" to my other educational sites
- I'm trying to learn to make money from advertisements & affiliates (ie, not subscriptions) and this seemed like a good way to learn it.
I went through, what I think of, as an appropriate amount of "due diligence". "Due diligence" means the process through which a potential acquirer evaluates a target company and its assets to ensure that the price is fair and that the buyer understands the assets appropriately. It is a legal term for publicly-held companies (and others with fiduciary legal obligations) that the management must go thru to not be reckless with the funds entrusted to them.
Actually, here's (simplified) what I've done.
1. Had initial discussions with the buyer. I approached him as interested in buying the technology on the site. He responded by saying that he was trying to sell the whole site. I asked "why" and "how much?" He answered.
2. I considered his answers to why and how much to make a go/no go decision on the purchase:
- I wanted to pursue it at that level of asking price
- To think about whether he was "for real" or a dishonest or flakey person. If I felt that either of the latter were likely, I would not pursue it at all. I have decided to not deal professionally with people that are lunatics or lying (to me or themselves). I checked up on the info that he provided, reviewed his sites and their links to get an overall picture of his online activities and decided that he was a "good egg" and someone that I wanted to go thru the acquisition process with.
I cannot overemphasize how important making this decision is. The ONE time that I decided to buy with someone who seemed "too-amazing", I wasted a huge amount of my and my colleagues time and money on an acquisition that did not close since as we got into the details of due diligence, it turned out he was not just exaggerating, he was totally lying. I knew at the beginning that there was something wrong with his story and I wish I had, based on simple intuition, walked away.
3. I gathered all the independent stats that I could to evaluate it.
- many independent lists of incoming links such as those provided by www.webuildpages.com
- alexa etc
4. Check hosting status (including blacklisting) using http://www.dnsstuff.com/
5. I asked them to supply to me:
- traffic by month for the last year with explanations of traffic trends
- data on referrals by country and domain
- disclosure on relationships for sites with links and sites providing traffic
- I had thought about the possibility of fraud here before when I looked at SEO due diligence.
6. Looked at other similar sites that might be for sale and followed some discussions to go from being a novice to an expert. I looked at www.sedo.com but preferred: www.sitepoint.com . In fact, they had a great free guide to Buying Websites.
7. I found a lawyer that I like, trust, is experienced with small acquisitions, and that I had good access to. This is nearly impossible. I was incredibly lucky.
8. Put in critical data in the purchase agreement in the "reps and warranties". This means that they, as part of the contract, represent that they've disclosed the truth about the data that they've supplied me (which I made part of the contract as an attachment).5. Staged acquisition with payment tied to deliverables.
BTW - if there is much interest in this, I could write more extensively. I think this is a huge new business growth area for me (acquisitions) and generally, there will be lots of growth thru deals on the web.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Focusing Page Rank by limiting content?
Analytically - Can new pages hurt?
This is a question that's puzzled me for awhile and which I thought I would put to a forum that I'm now active on: John Scott's V7N webmasters forum.
Before I get to the question about content and whether too much defocuses googlejuice, let's talk about his forum. He has some good quality content (his seo intro is fabulous). The forum has a policy of not only ranking contributors by number of posts (junior, senior, emeritus etc) which is addictive but he provides some perks along the way. The most visible one is that at 50 posts, you can have live links in your signature. Of course, there are oodles of people posting silly short comments to get their post count up....
I added this math seo puzzler on the back of this discussion: "Does adding new content without adding new links hurt your search engine position....."
My post.....I'd like to take this question towards the mathematical and away from the simplistic "go get some links".....
Assume that I have a 5 page site on widgets. Each page talks about different widgets. Say A Widgets, B widgets... right up to the 5th letter. But all my links come into my home page which is the A widget page.
If I add a sixth page but without adding any links, does that hurt my positioning on google for B Widgets?
Or, does adding new pages, while keeping the link count constant, mathematically reduce the PageRank (in the truest sense of the word) of my existing pages?
I've read extensively on this point and have learned about dampeners and matrices and such but nobody seems to deal with this question directly.The math suggests that the page rank from the total links in cannot be used over and over again for any given number of (even relevant) keywords. But then, why doesn't anyone discuss how to optimize from this question of having the optimal amount of content for the incoming links?
In my case, this is an academic but puzzling case since I am busy adding content (quality) and links as fast as I can to: Time4Learning.com. Still, I wonder if rather than going for learning games, Educational Games , and teaching games, I should make more choices....
This is a question that's puzzled me for awhile and which I thought I would put to a forum that I'm now active on: John Scott's V7N webmasters forum.
Before I get to the question about content and whether too much defocuses googlejuice, let's talk about his forum. He has some good quality content (his seo intro is fabulous). The forum has a policy of not only ranking contributors by number of posts (junior, senior, emeritus etc) which is addictive but he provides some perks along the way. The most visible one is that at 50 posts, you can have live links in your signature. Of course, there are oodles of people posting silly short comments to get their post count up....
I added this math seo puzzler on the back of this discussion: "Does adding new content without adding new links hurt your search engine position....."
My post.....I'd like to take this question towards the mathematical and away from the simplistic "go get some links".....
Assume that I have a 5 page site on widgets. Each page talks about different widgets. Say A Widgets, B widgets... right up to the 5th letter. But all my links come into my home page which is the A widget page.
If I add a sixth page but without adding any links, does that hurt my positioning on google for B Widgets?
Or, does adding new pages, while keeping the link count constant, mathematically reduce the PageRank (in the truest sense of the word) of my existing pages?
I've read extensively on this point and have learned about dampeners and matrices and such but nobody seems to deal with this question directly.The math suggests that the page rank from the total links in cannot be used over and over again for any given number of (even relevant) keywords. But then, why doesn't anyone discuss how to optimize from this question of having the optimal amount of content for the incoming links?
In my case, this is an academic but puzzling case since I am busy adding content (quality) and links as fast as I can to: Time4Learning.com. Still, I wonder if rather than going for learning games, Educational Games , and teaching games, I should make more choices....
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