Web Design Talk

Making more money from your site

2008-08-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

So you have visitors arriving on your site and they are ticking over making purchases, but how else can you turn these visitors into income? Here's some ideas.

1) Display external advertising. Depending on your site, it may be suitable to carry some advertising. Maybe Google Adsense or banner adds.

2) Sell add on products. Look at what they have in their shopping basket and see what other people who have chosen those items have bought with them.

3) Sell special offer. Add small ticket price items that they might be interested in. Display them around the basket areas of the site.

4) Offer free postage. Take a look at your customers' average basket order value and offer free postage for a small amount above that. Then watch and see if the average order value increases.

5) Offer special offer items for basket amounts. Again, look at average basket order values and offer free or discounted goods when the basket total is a little more than average.

6) Add monthly 'trinkets'. Have a special low-cost item made and each month make one of these available for above average order baskets.

7) Ask your customers to join your mailing list.

All are very simple ideas, aimed at increasing sales and bringing in more cash in other ways. I'll talk more about each of these ideas over the next week or so...

Run a site forum for more repeat visitors!

2008-08-18T09:00:00.000+01:00

I knew the 20 would become more than that before I finished!

A good way of getting plenty of traffic onto your site, whilst building fresh and unique content it to run a forum. This is especially good when you already have a list of regular visitors.

But why is a forum so good and what are the problems? Well, a forum is just people discussing whatever they want to. You as site owner set the topics to be discussed and act as a moderator. Whatever is on people's minds they can discuss and if it's on their minds, it could just be on other people's minds. If they are searching for this then they might find your site!

So how does it work as far as visitors are concerned? Well every thread that's started adds more content to the site that the search engines should index and send traffic to. Everyone posting on that thread will keep coming back to read replies and add further comments.

Sometimes posts will be a little controversial and will attract more people - through current visitors sending links to their friends and acquaintances. This is spreading the word of your website.

These visitors might not be adding directly to sales, but especially if you are displaying adverts then you are bringing in traffic that might be clicking on these adverts.

You are also developing a base of regular visitors. Some of these will sign up for your newsletters, others will browse your site and start to buy products and services. This is the aim! For just the cost of a forum and maintaining it, you have a continual stream of traffic.

You do need to appoint a moderator to watch for posts that go a little too far - but as long as visitors can flag posts then that shouldn't be a problem. And some people will try to fill posts with links to their websites. You either need to be checking for blantant self promotion or adding the tag rel="nofollow" to every hyperlink in posts.

There are plenty of off the shelf packages that can be installed or use a custom built one. Whereas a custom built solution might not have so many fancy features and can be a bit more basic, it can combine into the site far more effectively. For example, latest posts can be displayed in the header of every page on the website so that every visitor can see what's happening in the forum.

A forum is an excellent way of generating loads of unique, fresh content. With a little work it should really drive plenty of traffic into your site.

PopUnders to Sell Your Website

2008-08-12T09:00:00.000+01:00

If you want loads of traffic and fast, then PopUnders could be the answer to your dreams. Visitors direct to your site, from another relevant site. But what are they and do they still work?

Very simply put, popunders are the display of your website in a new window when a visitor enters a page on another person's website. Popunder campaigns can start off as campaigns of 5,000 visitors and easily work up to 60,000 visitors or more, for an incredibly low cost.

The general idea is that popunders appear under the screen the visitor is currently browsing. They will then see it later, when they close the current screen. They don't always work this way - within a campaign large numbers of the people seeing your website loading will just close the screen down, maybe even before it fully loads.

There are a myriad of popup blockers around - built into browsers or as add ons in tool bars - but in a popunder campaign these won't (usually) count as they haven't opened the window.

For all of these problems, popunder campaigns are cheap and send a lot of traffic in a very short time. 2,000 - 3,000 visitors per day is easily possible. If you choose a good supplier, you can carefully match the category of the website showing your website to your own website's content.

For a small outlay you can rapidly boost your traffic in no time. As with other website marketing ideas, it's not guaranteed that it will work for all sites and I've known customers who have had no success whilst others who's businesses hinge on the results of popunder traffic. For a small outlay, a trial campaign is a must.

Link Building for Marketing Success (not finished)

2008-08-05T09:00:00.001+01:00

Link buidling isn't just about getting your website listed in directories no-one looks at and search engines ultimately ignore. Arranging decent and honest links can not only increase your traffic but also your search engine ranking. But what is this all about?

Link building is as simple as you saying to another site owner, "I'll put a link to your site on mine, if you do the same back for me." One of the easiest ways of maintaining these links, whilst allowing other people to initiate such links without a lot of manual work on your behalf, is to use a links directory tool. With these a lot of the processes are automated, or at least made easier. It's a contact point for people wanting to exchange links with you. They can find out how and where to link to your site; they publish this on their site; they enter the links details into your list and the tool will check that their link is in place and adds their link to your site.

It all sounds very easy! But how do you start off? Where do you find those first sites to exchange with?

Firstly, there are 2 types of exchanges you are looking for. There are those that are for the original purpose - because you can exchange traffic - and those just for link building sake - because every link ultimately helps to increase your search engine positioning. In theory, at least.

Finding link exchanges for genuine traffic is basically about finding similarly themed websites and getting them to put a link in a suitable page. You want to find sites that share a theme so that their visitors will be interested in visiting your site when they see the link.

But many sites these days don't show links in prominent position - instead hiding links away in 'resource directories' and the such like. No problem, but these exchanges are mainly for improving your search engine position.

With these you want to quickly find other sites that will exchange links with you. Search for terms such as 'exchange link', 'add site' and other suggestive phrases along with a word associated with your site, e.g. mortgages, insurance etc.

Once you find these sites, look up what their link requirements are and then add this to your site. Then use their form to tell them where your link is and keep an eye out for the email saying that they have exchanged links.

It can take a while to find such sites and quite often the links aren't that great, but they are a starting point. Once you get used to the idea you can then start choosing sites based on page rank etc. And once you have a reasonable links directory in place, a lot of people will be coming to you for links, meaning you don't have to do the hard work!

Using forums to promote your site

2008-08-04T09:00:00.000+01:00

Forums can be a powerful way to promote your website, but care must be taken to not cross the unwritten boundaries. Here I'll look at what you can do, and what you shouldn't do.

First, promoting your website in forums doesn't mean spamming every forum you come across. Done properly, it is subtle and no-one will complain. Done incorrectly and everyone will complain and you will be booted off your forum.

So what shouldn't you do? Unless the topic of a forum is ultra-relevant, you shouldn't open new forum threads with the idea of promoting your site. Moderators will quickly close the thread.

You should also not be replying to open threads just with the intent of name dropping your site. This can also upset the moderators and they are likely to remove your site name and its links. They might even remove your posts and your logon.

So what can you do? If your site is very relevant to the forum then you might be able to announce a new product within the forum. If in doubt, mention it first in an existing thread and see if anyone minds you opening a new thread.

But the main time you can get a site mention is in open threads. Look for people asking questions and needing some help, that your site provides. Maybe you offer accommodation around an event and they are looking for that. Or maybe they are looking for hard to find presents and you sell a suitable idea. A mention of your site name in these instances is (usually) allowable.

Also, many forums allow you to use a signature in which you can mention your website name. Or as part of your forum nickname maybe your site name is relevant. If so, then try it out. I've seen both of these done well and no-one minds. In signatures, the forum may block the link to the site from the search engines, but whenever you are posting replies your signature is seen. If you are posting often and become seen as an "expert", then it's likely that people will want to read more about what you say and that's when the signatures come in useful.

Just don't go randomly posting links to your websites in random forums. Use forums well and they can be your friend.

Marketing Your Website With Pay Per Click

2008-08-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

Pay Per Click marketing is sold as a quick and easy way to huge amounts of traffic. To the opponents, it's expensive and open to fraud. What is Pay Per Click and who might use it?

Pay Per Click marketing, PPC, is where your advert is displayed on search engines or websites and you are charged for every viewer of the advert that clicks on it and becomes a visitor to your website.

This means that you are only being charged when someone who is interested in your advert actually clicks on it. If the site showing your advert places it somewhere on the screen where it is hidden away or the page the advert is on is not appropriate to the content of the advert and it's not of interest to people seeing the advert, it doesn't matter to you. These people aren't going to be interested and aren't going to click.

So what are the essentials of PPC advertising? Well, you are going to have to encourage the right people to click on the advert. Advertisers are not going to carry your advert if no-one ever clicks on it and you won't gain loads of traffic if there's no-one clicking on it.

Starting off, you usually choose the keywords that are applicable to your advert. If you want people to visit your shoe shop, then shoe shop is a good starting point, but it's so general that you probably won't actually get that much good traffic. Try instead choosing keywords more closely matching what you actually sell. Do you sell brands, specialist shoes or hard to find shoes? If so, then base your keywords around these ideas. If you sell mismatched shoes for people with different sized feet, then that's what your keywords should concentrate on.

Not only does this mean you are finding the correct audience more often, you are getting more relevant visitors, who are more likely to convert into customers. By targeting your advertising closely then you get less wasted displays and more relevant clicks. This increased 'click through rate' can, on systems like Google, mean that your advert is displayed higher up the list.

How should the advert look?

Taking the typical, Google format, you usually get a title, 2 short lines of description and a URL. Make the title snappy and to the point. Sell your services in that first line. 'Oversize Shoes', 'Discount Lelli Kelly Shoes' etc tell viewers straight away what you are selling. Writing the title in 'title case', where the first letter of every word is in upper case has been shown to encourage more clicks.

In the description lines give further information about what you sell, without over selling. People act negatively to adverts that are too pushy. Mention benefits like in stock, free delivery, discounts etc. Finish the description with an "action statement" - "click here", "view our range" etc. Don't get carried away with 'title case', write the description as a normal sentence - title case can make this look too much!

How many adverts?

To allow you to closely match titles with keywords, it is a good idea to write a different advert for each keyword, or set of keywords. This technique also allows you to watch the stats from the advert and see which adverts are getting the most clicks - and you can compare that to orders taken.

It is also quite often possible to have more than one advert per set of keywords. This allows you to experiment with different titles and texts. For example, does "Discounted Lelli Kelly shoes - Click here." work better than "Click here for discounted Lelli Kelly shoes."? Try small changes and see which one works better. Then create a new advert with a slightly modified text based on the best advert and see what happens then. By finding out which advert gets the best relevant click rate, you are getting maximum visitors for minimum cost.

How to control the advert?

Just setting off the advert with various combinations and 101 keywords isn't a good idea. Make sure that you set a realistic cost per click and daily budget. The cost per click is the most you are willing to pay per click - not necessarily the actual amount you will be paying. You should also set a daily budget for your campaign so that you don't get an expensive fright when you next logon a day or two later.

Who is PPC suitable for?

PPC can be used by almost any site (just some adult and gambling sites are excluded from certain schemes), but I would always recommend a cautious trial before throwing huge amounts of marketing budget at a campaign. It does suit itself more to established products that people are searching for rather than brand new products lines that no-one has heard of yet, but even these, with careful thought, can be promoted.

As with all website marketing ideas, if you haven't already tried it then give it a go and see if it works for your site. If there isn't much search engine traffic in your niche or most custom is usually reapeat loyal customers, then PPC might be slow. But if you are a market that people are searching for your products, then you stand a good chance of plentiful traffic.

Website Marketing With Expired Domain Redirects

2008-08-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

If you are looking for a cheap way to send plenty of targetted website traffic direct to your website, expired domain redirects could be just what your business needs.

What exactly are these? Across the world people register URLs and publish a website to them. They actively promote their website - through link exchanges, forums, one way links etc. This can develop long term traffic - for example, a site that I removed 8 months ago is still generating enquiries as to where the links have gone.

So for many months after a website closes it can be generating high volumes of traffic still. Traffic, or visitors, who may be looking for a service that no longer exists. If you had the time and the money, you could buy the URL when it expires and use that as your own. So instead of visitors going to the expired site, they go to your site instead. If you know this site sold similar services to you then you should be onto a winner.

But it takes a lot of time and effort to find and buy the right URLs and they can be quite expensive. So what's the easier alternative? Well, quite simply, you buy the traffic from someone who is doing the hard work for you!

Allow a traffic service to buy up the domains and categorise them. You tell them what category of traffic you want and what page on your website is relevant to the traffic and they sort the rest out for you.

Given that the seller knows what the content of each old site was, there's a good chance they can acurately match traffic to website wanting traffic. Usually these services have hundreds of different categories to choose from, making it very accurately targetted marketing.

Another benefit is that the seller can see the IP address of the incoming visitor and usually work out with a degree of accuracy their country of origin. This means that you can not only choose a category, but also a country that your visitors should come from.

What are the downsides? Well, on the whole it's usually very cheap. But there are times when the traffic can be slow, especially if you are needing just UK traffic. Some service providers have stopped offering UK traffic over the last few months. But if you aren't worried about just having UK visitors, then this isn't a problem.

Expired domain traffic can be highly targetted and given it's low cost is well worth trying out, even if you just run a small campaign or two.

Writing articles for more website traffic

2008-08-01T09:00:00.000+01:00

Writing articles, if you can think of plenty of content, can be a useful way of generating more taffic directly to your site. If you are very lucky, it also brings in some one way links.

It works like this. There are loads of people out there running e-zines, blogs and websites that want more content. They want a quick and easy way to provide their readers with fresh information and it can be extremely difficult to provide this often enough.

On the other hand, there are a load of people that are 'experts' in their fields. These people have plenty they can say, but are without the circulation list to distribute the content they can put together. Some are inspired by wanting to publicise their knowledge, whilst most want to give their websites or businesses a higher profile.

So there are article distribution sites that bring the two together. The experts write the articles and submit them to the article sites. The articles should be well written, interesting and saying something new, or in a different way.

At the end of the article the expert author usually adds a brief biography about themself, linking to or mentioning their website or business name.

The publishers then come along and find articles that are interesting to them and useful. They publish them as they require and include the biography. Within an e-zine, this is just a link so that interested readers can find out more about the author or their services. Whilst in a website, it is usually a live link to the website, giving not only a chance of traffic, but also one way links from new sites to the author's own site.

So what are the important aspects of article writing? Well, apart from finding a good site to distribute them on, it them centres around writing about content that publishers want to print in a way that they are happy to include. If your articles aren't interesting or are poorly written then publishers are less likely to pick up them and use them.

Articles must be spell checked, written about a subject that is useful and most importantly of all - they should be original. There's no point ripping off someone else's content. Write a good article for yourself and then get it published. Once you are seeing the article spread around the internet you should not only get a good feeling - but also plenty of traffic!

Keep your content fresh for more traffic

2008-07-31T09:00:00.000+01:00

Search engines and visitors love fresh content. By keeping your website updated you can keep both happy and therefore bring more traffic to your website.

Why is this the case? Well very few good websites sit still. There are new findings to report, further information to add, corrections to make to the copy etc. Many top websites grow over time as further information is added to them.

Visitors are more likely to return to sites that are maintained. Think through your own list of sites that you look at often - forums, news sites etc. If shops never add new stock then where's the interest to return to browse latest ranges?

Search engines look for these updates and expect them. If they don't see them then the site is thought to be unmaintained and drops in the rankings. A well maintained site on the other hand can climb with time.

But there is a balance. Over doing changes can be as bad, if not worse, than no changes. I've seen sites putting up random blocks of text on every visit. This doesn't trick the search engines - they see through it. There needs to be a balance between stability and additions to the site.

This can be as simple as a regularly updated news feature. Have a news page and list latest headlines on the home page. This acts not only as a link in from the home page to the news items - making it easier for all concerned to find the new pages, but it also means that the fresh content is shown on the home page. The news can be a mixture of news about your business and about news that affects the area that your business works in. For example, on comparemortgagerates.co.uk I try to add relevant financial news a couple of times per month.

If you are running a shop then keep the stock updated. As new lines arrive add them to your ranges on your website. This keeps the pages displaying the stock ranges fresh and adds new pages in the form of stock descriptions.

Even if you do not carry stock and maybe your company news isn't that exciting and neither is the business news in your area of expertise, there are still ways of producing fresh content. Maybe you are holding events that could be reported on? Publishing a photo with a caption on a regular basis seems to provide fresh content for the search engines and the people attending the event can be told that the photos will be published, which might attract them onto the site. If the pictures are good they will shoe friends and colleagues - just make sure that your site name is printed onto that photograph so everyone knows where it came from!

Even just a photo gallery of visitors or a diary of what's going on can be of interest to visitors and search engines. If you can think of original material to put on the site on a regular basis then it can be of help to the site's traffic.

Advertise your website in your shop

2008-07-30T09:00:00.000+01:00

Here's a simple way of driving in traffic to your website for next to free - advertise it in your shop (or other outlet). But amazingly many people forget or simply choose to ignore this simple idea thinking that it is not necessary, because the people are in the shop already.

But what when you are closed, or they want to see if you carry certain products before making a trip out? Or maybe they want to print out your menu? What about publicising special offers and keeping their interest in your services? If they are more aware of your website, they are more likely to find it and show it to friends and maybe return to you.

Keeping the website name in your customers' eyes is important. Simply adding the website address to a shopfront facia can be enough for a starter. That way, people driving past when you are closed, seeing an offer in the window can look it up when they get home. They might be more likely to remember the offer if they noticed that you had a website address shown outside.

And the shop front sign is not the only place to display the website address. Buy from any of the main highstreet shops and you can almost guarantee that they will display their website address on the receipt. How much would it cost you to change your receipts to show the URL?

Maybe try adding the website URL to price labels next time you are getting them printed, or to menus, leaflets or anything else that you hand out. If you are not a shop, for example a solicitor, then there are still plenty of avenues to explore. Letterheads, compliment slips, business cards and the likes can all be printed to include your website address.

If people are visting you as customers then make sure that they go away knowing your website's address. If they don't, then it's going to be a lot more difficult for them to find your website and return as a customer through it.

Run a mailing list

2008-07-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

Sending a newsletter to a mailing list is an excellent, and typically free or low cost, method of promoting a website. A newsletter, or e-zine, can be used to encourage loyal and not so loyal customers to return to your website or even your outlet. You can use a newsletter to advertise new stock, clearance items, special offers and the likes.

There are considerations when sending a newsletter to ensure that you stay within acceptable guidelines and don't fall foul of anti spamming measures. A newsletter should only be sent to people who have signed up for it and they should be able to opt out easily.

This also means checking that people really have opted into the newsletter, else you can fall foul to pranksters signing up their friends. The usual method for control here is 'double opt-in'. With this technique, the person signs up on your website for the newsletter by providing their email address. You then send them an email with a link and only when they have clicked on this link are they included in the list.

Likewise, it is accepted practice that all emails should have an opt-out link so that people no longer wishing to receive offers can quickly and easily opt out.

Sending newsletters can also be a tricky subject. Many people like to blast out the email from their own PC - but there are limited options here and all can get you into trouble. The first is to email all of the recipients directly with one email. But this displays every email address to all recipients and doesn't look professional.

Hiding the email addresses by putting them all in tbe BCc field does improve the situation, but many people will not read emails where the to account is 'undisclosed recipients' and likewise, some email services and spam blockers are more likely to delete such emails. It is very rare to receive an email where the BCc field is used for its intended purpose - it is usually an indication of spam.

The next step is to individually email every recipient, but on a large list this can take a long time. Also, by sending so many identical emails, whether sent individually or using either of the two above methods, either your own ISP or the mail services receiving the emails could notice the large amount of traffic and suspect you of spam. At best your newsletter is not received, at worst your email account is closed down.

So what's the answer? Well there are plenty of mailing list providers out there offering varying services. Depending on the features that you require, you might be able to use a free service for lists with even a good number of subscribers. These services deal with sending the emails, opt-ins, opt-outs and everything else and even enable you to sned HTML based emails for extra special looks.

But what is the point behind a mailing list? Well, the people signing up have visited your site or business and are wanting to know more about you. They are showing an interest in your services. You don't need to contact them often, in fact weekly newsletters could be far too much and scare subscribers off. Just email them a newsletter every couple of months. Maybe whenever you can a large number of new ranges or want to tell people about the latest special offers. Unless you have a very large mailing list then the chances are you will be able to find and use a free mailing list provider, so all that a newsletter is costing you is your time to create the newsletter and set it up.

If sending it is free and it generates more purchases or customers, what could be a better form of advertising?

20 website marketing ideas

2008-07-28T09:00:00.001+01:00

I've been asked to put together a series of marketing ideas for my web design customers - ways in which they can drive more custom through their websites. After a quick scribble down I came up with 20 basic ideas that anyone can use to market their site, so here starts the list.

With a little further information they will be passed onto my customers - just adding details as to how we can help them implement the ideas. It's my sales guy's idea and he's hoping that some customers come back to ask us to help them run some of them.

And I'm putting these into practice myself! Not only am I publishing them here first, but after a small rework they will also be submitted to article directories - spreading my ideas whilst hoping to get links back to these pages! Why publish them here first and then rework slightly - to make sure the search engines get the content here and then don't punish me with the duplicate content filter! So that's 5, 6 and 11 (below) sorted in one sweep!

In no particular order, and certainly not the order I'll tackle them in here, here's the list of ideas I'll work through. Knowing me, by the time I've finished it will be 21, 22 or more ideas...

1. Pay Per Click

2. PopUnders

3. Expired Domain Traffic

4. Link Building

5. Fresh Content

6. Forums

7. Blogs

8. Video Clips

9. Google Maps

10. Email Signatures

11. Articles

12. Advertise name in shop / on literature

13. Run up newsletter

14. Paid Directories

15. Free Directories

16. Fliers

17. Word of Mouth

18. Give aways / promotional items

19. Affiliate Marketing

20. Magazine Adverts / Printed Adverts

Watch what you ask!

2008-07-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

You can easily get into tricky situations sometimes. Take, for example, when a customer has emailed a set of photographs for you to use in building their site. Most of them go into the photo gallery, but maybe one or two get dotted around every page in key positions - making sure that the site looks special to that customer.

You choose your photos carefully, try a couple of different shots in the positions you are thinking of and make your choice. You probably chose based partly on colour matching, or match the colour palette of the site to the chosen photograph.

And then you pass the completed sample over to the customer. The list of changes comes back, along with 'please change the photo on the side to the one of...'. You know instantly it's not going to work, but can you say that?

So, you cut, crop, manipulate and whatever to prepare the photo for its position. Then along with the rest of the changes the next draft goes back to the customer. And what's the response - "That photograph doesn't look as good there as the first one - what can you do to make it look better?"

What can you do? What can you say? You can't exactly say "Well, I chose better than you!", but that's the answer to their question. It might be that changing the site's colour scheme will help it match, but there's usually an amount of experience that straight away gives you that gut feeling as to which photographs will work in key positions, and which just won't. And it's unfortunate when the customer chooses a photograph not based on cold, hard, technicalities, but on their own emotions of which photograph means the most to them.

But that's the world we live in. It doesn't matter that the favoured picture won't mean anything to their visitors, it's their site and they want to see that picture for a reason. So just get on with it!

Link exchange maintenance

2008-07-22T09:00:00.001+01:00

What should you be doing to check you link exchanges and how often should you be doing it? If you are already running a link exchange program, my answer will probably frighten you!

Personally, based on my experience with search engines, I believe that you should be checking link exchanges every week! More often than this is probably a little bit of overkill, but less often, especially by much, and you will find that a lot of the people you thought you were exchanging links with have gone away.

On a weekly basis you should check that every site that you have agreed to link with is still linking back to you. Any sites that have removed their links need checking. Email them to ask them to replace the link and if they don't then remove the from your pages link. It's no benefit to you to be linking to them from your directory, it may even hinder your efforts. This is why weekly checks are important.

Whenever there is a Google page rank update, have a look through the page ranks of those sites linking to you and check that they all still have a page rank. Any that don't need further investigation.

It could just be that the links page is too new or too well buried to have a page rank. If it's cached in Google then it's probably OK. But if a links page has been showing your link for a couple of months and it's still not cached, then you need to check that you aren't being tricked.

First, have a look around the site and make sure that you can find your way to the links page. Then, have a nose at the robots.txt file - does that block their links directory? Lastly, take a look at the path of pages from the home page to the links directory. Does page rank suddenly vanish? If so, check that page hasn't been blocked somewhere.

It's also important when using a links directory tool to make sure that people haven't changed their links to inappropriate sites and that sites that you are linking to still exist, as sites that you are happy to link to. You don't want to be proudly linking to a family friendly site only to find that someone has bought the URL and put up an adult site!

So, on a weekly basis, be checking that your link backs still exist. Plus, every few months, see which link back pages don't have a page rank and investigate them.

What to look for in a link exchange

2008-07-21T09:00:00.001+01:00

Link exchanging can reap rewards by giving you more 'link popularity' and increasing your search engine ranking. But not all links are equal. What should you be looking out for?

Firstly, links from pages with higher page ranks are normally better. But it could just be that the page is new and soon enough it will have a high page rank. So what is important?

Well, the link must be 'visible' to search engines. There are various ways that other sites could have unintentionally, or intentionally, made your link not visible to the search engines. This is because it is believed that it is favourable to have links pointing in from sites that you do not link to. So here are some warning signs to look for.

The first, and a very simple one, is there is a command that can be inserted into a link to tell search engines to ignore the link. If you see rel="nofollow" in a link then search engines will not follow that link - so it's not worth while accepting that link exchange.

Slightly more involved is that the page could be blocked from search engines. This can be because the links to that page include rel="nofollow" or that the robots.txt file blocks the page from the search engines. How can you check for this?

Actually, it's quite simple. Just search on your favourite search engine to see if the page is there. If it is, then you know it's not being blocked. You can check by searching on a unique piece of text; by clicking on the 'cached version' button on the Google Toolbar (if you have it installed) or by searching using the 'site:' command. Unfortunately, these methods tell you that nothing is blocking the page, but failure to find the page is cached doesn't mean it is blocked. It could just be too new.

The next trick to check for is whether the version presented to search engines is the same as you are seeing. Again, look at what a search engine has cached and make sure that your link is in place.

Another important check is that the link isn't using javascripts or redirects. It should point directly to your site, not to another file or page and definitely not to a counter. A lot of sites put the link through a counter to track clicks. This is fine if you are exchanging for traffic, but not if you are exchanging for popularity.

The last check I'll mention is that 'framed' pages are frequently not properly dealt with by search engines. If your link is not on the actual page but in a frame, then it's almost certain that the link isn't visible to search engines - and won't count.

So, check that the link page is cached; that on that cached site your link is shown in basic HTML and that it is not blocked. And then the link should count for you!

Link building for popularity

2008-07-20T09:00:00.001+01:00

Most link building these days is not to attract visitors, but to build 'link popularity' within the search engines.

With links for link popularity, it is accepted, even normal, to offer links through a dedicated links directory. The usual format is one site owner puts up a link to another and then sends a request. But what is it all about?

In short, search engines measure the 'importance' of a site and even pages within a site by the number of links pointing to that site or page. The more links there are, the more important that page is. And the more important the pages are that give those links, the more important again that page is.

So the idea is to find sites that will link to your own site in return for a link back. Then search engines will see these links and start to rate you more highly.

This requires a large number of link exchanges. You need to be requesting potentially tens per week to allow for that fact that many won't respond and to keep this up week in, week out. It's the gradual growth in inbound links that the search engines want to see.

The easiest way to manage the links of your behalf is usually through an off the shelf link exchange directory. Using one with plenty of the required tools can really help you and means that when people come to you to request an exchange the process can take place automatically.

You as the person in charge of links building then go out hunting for sites to exchange links with. You review the other person's site to find if they have requirements for how their link should appear and then add such a link to your directory. Once this is complete, you then email the other site's owner, telling them where their link can be found on your website and asking them to put a link to your website onto their website. Hopefully, they get back to you to confirm this has been done.

Give them a week and if they haven't replied then remind them. If they still haven't replied after another week, then it might be best to remove the link, possibly with a friendly reminder to them of the missed opportunity.

Link building for popularity is all about getting plenty of links in from other sites.

Link building for more traffic

2008-07-19T09:00:00.001+01:00

Building links between websites has a few different meanings. Here I'm going to start off by looking at how it started and how the search engines would like to see all links - as 'genuine' links built for traffic, not to trick search engines.

With this method of link building, links are exchanged purely on the understanding that by having links on each others' site there's a good chance that your visitors might find the other site's link interesting and visit the site, and vice versa.

It's all about finding sites that share mutual interests, similar visitors etc and putting up small links in the hope that you add interest to each site. By adding your link to the other person's site, their visitors should see the link and think that your site could give them more of what they are interested in. Maybe the other site is a hobby site and you are offering a price comparison for related products. So their visitors might be interested in your site for that reason. Or maybe you are offering more information on certain pages of theirs.

What you need to do is to find sites that share an interest or themes and put a link from your site to their website. Then approach the other site and ask them for a link back. This type of linking can be a bit harder to plan and arrange as you really want the link to be on a proper 'content' page rather than a links directory page - it should be somewhere that visitors will see it. For this reason, you also need to be placing your link to them on a content page. Now, this can be any content page of your site or a dedicated 'you might like to visit' sort of page.

If you are really keen for links, there's always the option of paying for link placement on another site. You would need to approach the owner and ask how much for a link from a certain page would cost.

Another method of gaining links for traffic, and one I have often used successfully, is by getting your site listed on "top sites" pages. This usually entails putting a link to the top site website onto your pages and the number of clicks is counted. But, especially for hobby orientated websites, this can bring tons of traffic as lots of people are searching for more sites to read about.

In summary, in link building for traffic you really want to place a link from a content page on your site to another site whilst they place a text, or banner, link on a content page back to you.

Keeping content fresh to improve your search engine position.

2008-07-18T09:00:00.002+01:00

What steps are needed to ensure that your site betters its current search engine position and maybe even gets to the top of the search engine listings? There are plenty of tricks and tips you can try for yourself.

The first and foremost is putting in plenty of unique, fresh content. This can be done in various ways and depends on your site and its content.

If you are a shopping site, then you will no doubt have a catalogue of products to sell. By loading these products and having a page per product, you create a large site. By then continuing to update these products, your site is seen as fresh. This can be as simple as adding new products on a weekly basis, or just going into the products and updating their descriptions a little on a weekly basis.

Maybe review your product texts and make sure that each one is at least 100 words, or 200 words. More importantly, make sure that you have not copied the text from any other sites as this is a huge killer - search engines will see it's 'duplicate content' and may not even list your pages.

Another trick is to feature a product or few products on the home page - a product of the week sort of feature. Set a day and once a week change the product or products and in doing so you are keeping the home page updated.

If you don't have the luxury of a product catalogue, then there are still ways of keeping the site fresh. An on-site blog to which you post a couple of times per week allows for a growing site and new, fresh content. On a similar vein, you can have a latest news section - either a page or a set of pages. Either of these can be worked so that some of the content appears on the home page to keep it fresh.

And a further idea is a forum. If you have regular visitors to the site they might like to participate in a forum. Every time they write a post they are adding to your site's material.

So why is this important? Well, the more content you have the more pages and more possible combinations of keywords are on your site. By having lots of extra text there are more chances of someone finding your site.

Also, by keeping your content updated, search engines see that the website is being maintained and should rate your site higher. They calculate that the site is not getting stale and full of old, outdated, information. Also, with forums, blogs, offers and the likes, real visitors are more interested in coming back to the site to see what you have to offer.

So keep adding content - it creates a lot more opportunities for people to find text on your site and it keeps the search engines interested.

Don't just buy a website and expect it to work.

2008-07-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

Many people expect that because they pay for a professional to build their website that they can pass a list of favourite keywords, or that the designer will produce a suitable list, and that the new website will automatically be top of Google and get them loads of traffic.

And this, for just a few hundred pounds. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. My sales guy thought of a "brilliant idea" (if only he'd put it to me, first). He'd happened tp be given the contact details of a local 'SEO expert'. So he thought, if I can build the sites but not get them to the top of Google then why not pass the customers to the SEO expert for the next stage. He'll do anything for a commission!

So he spoke to the guy and started telling him his story. The guy stopped him in his tracks. The budget we build a site for wouldn't even buy a couple of weeks' worth of SEO optimisation from this guy.

And that's the problem. Some customers are expecting bargain basement sites, with every bell and whistle going. You don't walk into a Mercedes showroom with the cash for a Smart car and expect to drive out in their top of the range sports car for the same price.

I told him that I'm not saying I can't do the SEO - just not for the prices he secures. If you want a site for a few hundred quid then I'll give you a good looking site, but it won't be a site that I can spend hours on every week getting it and keeping it at the top of Google. But I can give you the tools to do it yourself. So what's needed? I'll look at that over the coming days.

If you don't market, it won't sell

2008-07-15T09:00:00.002+01:00

It's always a shame when an existing customer closes a website because it's not working - even more so when the reason for its failure is lack of marketing. And ironic when the owner is actually working for the IT side of the marketing department for a large company!

It happens all of the time. People see the internet as some 'get rich quick' solution. Think of an idea, get a site built, cash the cheques. If only it were that simple!

I won't detail the full idea here, but it was based around affiliate selling and I've seen other (successful) sites working on the same principals. The shame is, but for a small adsense budget, building to some flyers left at relevant events and then magazine adverts when the site is really flying, the site should have worked well.

It's one of those ideas that I'd wished I'd had a couple of years back - when work was quiet and I had time to invest in building, and marketing, my own ideas. Now I'm just too busy building sites for customers!

Give it 6 months and get some of my other little personal website projects pushed on a little, and there may be time for me to tackle something similar - with a clear conscience that the customer is no longer trying to do the same and I'm not stealing her idea.

When you need a site quickly, throw some insults

2008-07-12T09:00:00.002+01:00

I think I need a new sales guy (are you reading this P??)! Working as hard as possible to get him a rushed site live, whilst also trying to get him another site live at the same time (that I was only given a couple of days' notice from getting instructions to going live) and trying to get him other changes out, and he tries a new tactic.

Insults. After emailing me stupid unrelated questions for 90 minutes and getting me to change parts of the screen, change them again and then put them back again, he throws at me 'you computer programmers are far more slapdash'.

Nice, inspirational talk. Just because I told him (again, 2nd time in 90 minutes) that if the customer takes and loads pictures that are a mixture of landscape, square and portrait format, then they will appear different proportions on the screen.

He's making out that retailers want things doing properly, I just throw things together. Actually, when we're up against deadlines and the magazine advert started running 5 days ago, then I think that getting something live is important. Personally, I'd have waited on agreeing the magazine advert until after the site was nearly ready. I wouldn't have advetised it and then told the designer when I needed it for.

Who's the slapdash one there?

I just wish he'd get on with his job and maybe collect some cash. Another 3 emails from him - they are waiting until this afternoon. I've got plenty of work to do without answering him!

Translations galore

2008-07-11T09:00:00.000+01:00

On the same night, two customers passed me translations for their sites. The first was a Turkish translation for a site currently being built whilst the second was a French translation for a site I built about 9 months ago. This is to be an entirely stand alone site, and I've been expecting the translation for 6 months.

I did have one customer mention that he'd like to provide a Polish translation for a page or two on his rentals website. So could be more to come.

Translations do have practical problems that are different in each case. Do you run an entirely separate site, or a sub site, or just offer a page or two of alternate content in the appropriate languages?

The answer isn't a hard and fast 'this way' - it depends on the site. For the 2 that passed be translations over night, for the French site we are definitely running a separate URL. For the Turkish, it will be either a sub site or at the very least separate pages. There's too much inter linking of the pages (video clips, images uploaded) than are shared to make managing 2 sites easy.

I need the site live now, and oh...

2008-07-10T09:00:00.000+01:00

Yes, the saga of the site that 'must be live in 7 days' gets better. Actually, they got the date of the magazine advert wrong, they needed it live that day! But we've had to continue aiming for the end of this week.

Except, the customer is now adding more complications into the project. For example - "What do we do when there aren't enough products in a sub category? Can you fill the page with something else?"

The obvious answer is not to have such 'elite' sub categories. Easy and simple answer. At this stage in the project, when they are desperate to go live (and before that they need to load products) then I really don't think it's time to start adding complications such as adding a random number of space fillers.

I blame the account manager for letting go of the reigns, yet again. Every project he does this and doesn't keep the customer focused on getting the site live for the same day that the advertising is going live. He seems to think that every question is a chance of making more cash, although the price stays fixed, so no idea what he's on.

Hopefully with time I'll teach him the right ways, but when time is not on my side and he's asking silly questions, the answers he gets are brief, to the point and probably not the sort of answers he is expecting!

Popunders - Waste of time???

2008-07-09T09:00:00.002+01:00

Well, I'm very disappointed in the popunders campaign I tested. Very disappointed.

I had hoped for a little success, but near enough nothing. Not even my money back, which at the cost of the traffic, is very surprising. I suppose it's my old answer - if it was that easy, these guys wouldn't be selling the traffic they would be putting up their own affiliate pages and earning the commissions themselves.

I didn't think at first that all of the adverts had been used. Looking at Google, the special page I'd created had only been shown 2,106 times (in a campaign of 5,000) popunders. And some of those were me viewing the page. So I was surprised to logon to the provider's stats and see that all 5,000 had been delived in about 2½ days.

So far, no sign of any commissions earned and hardly a click generated. 1 click through the Google adsense scheme got me back about 2% of my outlay. Not worth bothering with.

And looking at the huge variation in the number of displays of each advert, from 1962 to 2119 displays across adverts from one network, most screens are being closed before they even open.

There were around 10 clicks to the advertisers - so there's still a remote chance of commission. But I'm not keeping up any hope!

Listed again in Google

2008-07-08T09:00:00.000+01:00

Not sure what was going on when I noticed that my home page had vanished from Google, but the CompareMortgageRates home page is back on the 6th page of the search results. Now I've got to work at moving it up!

I was looking at the site and I noticed that all links to the home page state the website address, not index.html. This could be very useful - it should mean that changing the page to a PHP page isn't as painful. At the very least, I don't need to change every page. At best, Google will still page rank it the same...

Why do I want to change it from HTML to PHP? Quite simple - I've introduced a news feature, a bit like a blog. Ideally, I'd like to include the latest news snippets onto the site's home page, but I can't do that in HTML, without having to manually update the home pagee each time. And I'll never manage that! Unfortunately, my hosts don't allow me to change the htaccess file to treat HTML as PHP.

What I intend to do, with time, is to just display the first paragraph of each recent news item on the home page, leading to the page with the full news item on it. This not only helps to build up a large network of pages but also helps to keep the home page fresh and constantly updated. What else must I do to regain my page 1 listing of last summer!

Testing Popunders

2008-07-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

One of my customers swears by popunders. I know the site he used to buy them from - I recommended him to use them. But I know he's now using someone else. Maybe I should have asked him where he's using now before I tried a campaign!

I set up a page on my mortgages website full of car insurance banners - the company I'm buying the popunders from have a car insurance category, so I thought "great match".

I set up a campaign with my "old favourite" supplier and it's kicked off. Early days, but I've been looking at my affiliate stats....

There's been around 250 displays of some of the adverts, but some of the adverts have only shown aroun 230 displays. So these have probably suffered the recipients closing down the page before it's finished loading.

To be honest, with the cost of the popunders I only need to achieve 1 sale from the 5,000 popunders I've bought. I thought if I could get 0.1% success rate then I'd be pleased, but with 250 impressions and not even 1 click yet, that's very much in doubt! My very optimisitic 1conversion rate is very much in doubt!

I'll post back another day when the campaign is over, here's hoping I get at least my cash back!

A complete fall from grace?

2008-07-06T09:00:00.000+01:00

Well, I noticed that the traffic on my Compare Mortgage Rates website was down so I took a look at its position on my favourite keywords - "Compare Mortgage Rates". Up until late October 2007 my site was first or second in google on this term. Sometime in mid Octover it dropped from favour and the home page has hovered between pages 5, 6 and 7 of Google for those terms since then.

But today, it's vanished! Compeltely gone. Not there. No where to be found! The page is still cached - a copy taken 7 days ago, so not sure what has happened or for how long it's been vanished.

Around page 15 of the results I did find the Mortgage Products page, so the site hasn't been dropped. And I was surprised that the page did appear in the results anyway.

WHat do I think is wrong? Well, I've negelected the site recently. Prior to its October fall I was putting news on weekly, at least. Not I've only put news on once last month and we're almost a week into this month.

I'm the first to shout that websites need plenty of content to stay up top, so why don't I listen?

Well, I'm moving my mortgage news blog to the site itself - I've written a custom blog to do this for someone else so I might as well also use it!

Here's hoping my preaching works - with my sales guy unable to collect cash (where do I get them?) I need an income from somewhere!

I don't always like my sites...

2008-07-05T09:00:00.000+01:00

I wish I could say that 100% of the sites that I've produced I'm proud of. OK, the early sites were nothing compared to what I do now, but even if I could say that 100% of the sites in the last 12 months I'm proud of would be a good thing.

Problem is, I'm not. There are 2 or 3 that I'd rather hide and not have my name against than put on my portfolio. There's probably a handful more also from the last 12 months that aren't what I would consider my best work.

Why do I do that? Why give customers what I'm not proud of - in fact sites that embarass me?

Quite simply - they have been so involved in the design process that I've not been able to steer them around to what I think looks good. They have passed me sample sites that look cheap and colour schemes that just don't work together. Take the site that has a different colour scheme on every page - it's disgusting. But the customer insisted on it - in fact she has a CMS to enable her to change the individual page colours and that's what she has set them to. The present colours are nothing to do with me.

Why's this on my mind? Well 2 new pieces of work this week have both brought this home. The first provided links to two websites they really love. One of these, their favourite, looks like a child has produced it! Over use of mis-matching colours. Too many fancy tricks here and there and the rating of the site shows it.

For the second the customer has approved the sample, saying that he "loves it". My comments, after passing the sample to his account manager, was that it was produced to spec but I didn't think the colours were quite there. It's almost good, just not enough colours and the wrong shades where they are there - there's a lot of pale blue everywhere and little contrast.

But, in all my work the customer is always right. Just so long as 3 months down the line they don't return asking why they have a horrible looking site!

I need the site live - in 7 days

2008-07-04T09:00:00.002+01:00

Now a request such as "I need the site live in 7 days - I've paid for the advertising in a national magazine" isn't necessarily a problem. Work with your web designer; answer emails and phone calls; tell him (or her) what you want and generally get on with the project and as long as there aren't huge complications then it shouldn't be a problem.

But when the project has stumbled along for 3 months already and the customer has changed their mind several times not only about the look and colour scheme but also the content, then the task starts to get more difficult.

Then when I hand over draft versions of the page and I hear nothing back for 2 working days (and still waiting) then the task is becoming more complicated - we have to be live this time next week and I have to build the database still and the customer has to load the products...

Also, ask for "That thing that Amazon does with other products". Erm, what? 2 days later the answer comes back "You know, show products people also bought". Not a problem, usually, but the clock is ticking and we still haven't had an agreement on what the pages will look like. 3 months in and I'm still producing new versions. At least there haven't been any major re-writes for a week.

Hopefully, one of the variations of buttons on show will be satisfactory, else it's back to the drawing board for them. To be honest, I don't like any of the buttons I've been given to work with - but if the customer loves them then so be it.

June Benchmark

2008-07-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

Should be starting to see some results soon, if I'm going to see any! So comparing against the May benchmark.

First, the bookings. Up this month to 6 bookings, with 4 confirmed, bringing in £65.28. This compares well to the 1 of 4 worth £26 in May, but not as good as April, which had 5 of 7, worth £90.48.

How are the traffic levels? Well, they were up on both sites - 5,146 and 1,927 on the changed site. That's about 90% more traffic on the changed site against not quite 5% on the unchanged site.

The earnings - $181.74 and $24.46 - just over 7.5% up on the unchanged site - good - but down by 30% on the changed site - very disappointing with the traffic levels up so much.

My only consolation is the hope that a lot of the extra traffic is because the site has generated more interest in its link exchange - so hopefully there will be lot's more inbound links and the site will become more popular.

Because, between the 2 sites, an income of under £170 isn't that great!

Trademark Infringement Investigation

2008-07-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

I received an email with the subject "Trademark Infringement Investigation" last night. At first I was just about to bin it - I don't ever remember receiving a digitally signed email before and thought it was spam!

I eventually clicked on the 'continue' button and read the email. One part states 'This notice is being sent to you as a courtesy to inform you that a fraudulent business impersonator may have involved you in the unlawful act of Trademark infringement, as we feel you may be unaware that the use of our Trademark and Trade-names was not authorized.'

Erm, what? It continues: 'Please, remove any and all of our Trademarks and/or Trade-names, which are the exclusive property of Emerald Passport, Inc., from every web property (e.g. websites, PPC ads, link exchange, etc.) that you own and/or operate and kindly provide us with information as to how you came to use our Trademark as a link advertisement on your website (e.g. copy of a request to partner with you using our Trademark/Trade-names, name of link exchange provider, method by which you were contacted: email, telephone call, etc.)'. So what dreadful act had I taken part in to infringe the trademark of this company (if, indeed, it is infringement - I'm no legal expert)?

I'd accepted a link exchange! The link was probably accepted when I first set up the site - in early 2006. Maybe even before that. And they are demanding that I tell them where I got the link exchange from. I think that would be fairly obvious - the affiliate or reseller that I was linking to.

My question quite simply is - is sending threatening legal demands via email the most efficient way of dealing with this problem? Surely it would be more efficient to tell their affiliates / resellers to sort their act in the first place. I suppose that if some have arranged hundreds, or thousands, of link exchanges, some might not have the documentation to follow up and request the changes. But why ask me to potentially break the Data Protection Act and pass my exchange's contact details? If it's a link to their affiliate's site - do they not know who the affiliate was?

I looked on the link exchange directory and there were at least another 3 or 4 sites using similar anchor text, so they must have quite a task on their hands. I was just amazed they found the page - what search engine actually has that ancient page cached?

A Turkish Translation

2008-07-01T09:00:00.000+01:00

Quite an interesting twist on a new site that I'm building - it's going to be my first site that has a foreign version. I've built the English version of the site and now I've got to pull together all of the phrases used and get the customer to provide the translations for me.

How will I do the other language? I've not decided yet how I will handle the dual languages. On the surface, a copy of the site with everything translated seems easiest, but that means duplicate pages. The alternative is to set a cookie that swaps the text to Turkish if set.

Either way is simple, but I'm coming around to the first way as being easier to run - the button with the Turkish flag will just link to the home page of the Turkish version and vice versa. Now, is that done as a subdomain or a sub directory???

Another customer mentioned months ago about having a Polish translation for his potential rentors, but that would just be a page. And another has talked about French and Spanish translations of her website - but that was months back that she was talking about getting a friend to write the translations and I've not heard back. Maybe I should ask her about the progress.

Anyway, multi-lingual websites seems to be a popular feature at the moment.

What is it about images

2008-06-30T09:00:00.003+01:00

What is it about pictures that customers frequently don't get? I've already talked about this a few months ago, but it rears its head every so often.

Last week a customer emailed me a sheet of their latest offers to update their website with. It contained offers, menus and various other information to be cut and pasted into various points on the website.

It was a massive file, but sent as a PDF so the resolution wasn't actually that great. By the time I'd removed the images at their full size, they were a little small and fuzzy. Not sure why when this was what was going to print - maybe they'd sent me a proof.

Of course, this morning the email arrives saying the pictures are too small and fuzzy. Make them bigger and clearer. Of course, I can do one of these quite easily from the original, but not both. If I make the images bigger, they lose quality. If I make them clearer, they lose size.

If you are emailing pictures for use on a website, send them at least as big as you want to see them on the page, but not too big...

Don't Just Affiliate - Add Value

2008-06-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

Too many people think that it's easy to set up a website using an affiliate feed, get it listed on the search engines and sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.

I even had people come to me and ask me to build the sites for them. They look blankly back at me when I ask them how they will promote the website, expecting me to produce a website for £300 that will do all of this for them.

Well, if I could spend a couple of days to produce a website that would earn thousands of pounds per year, would I be charging a few hundred for it? Or would I be producing those websites for myself...

What I try to offer is the opportunity for them to add something themselves to the website. Product reviews is usually a good one and let them choose which products they try to sell and add just these to the website.

If you are a travel affiliate then instead of just listing the same old huge list hotels or villas, make sure that you are including resort guides researched and written by yourself just for the site. Maybe even start a travel blog and include the accommodation details in that rather than just listing the 10,000 hotels available.

Whatever you are trying to sell, make sure that you add something to the information available. This means that there is less risk of falling to the search engines duplicate content filters and more chance of visitors stumbling across your new website. Just remember that if you are expecting to make a couple of thousand per year from the affiliate scheme then you are probably going to need to invest the appropriate amount of time to that site.

Feel free to post ideas in the comments!

Adwords Content Network

2008-06-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've already touched on whether I think that Google's Adwords is a good idea, but then I was referring to the search network (e.g. Google itself & other partner search engines).

So what about the Content Network - the millions of small and large websites that display Adsense adverts?

I think if you are careful then this network can be great. It's possible to hit your potential customers right where you want them - whilst they are browsing relevant websites. These websites can have (in total) huge volumes of displays of your adverts so there is a lot of brand exposure for you.

It is said that the site owners can click on their own adverts to make more commissions. Yes, some people try this. But Google have loads of ways to detect this activity and anything that looks suspicious is not charged for. Too much suspicious activity will result in the account being closed. It's not in Google's interest to have any fraud at all.

It can also be a lot cheaper and if you are getting low click through rates it doesn't affect the charges for the search network.

Yes, there can be problems. I've found in my own experience there is a lot more evidence of more general browsing than people hungry to shop. But it's still getting people onto your site and your name known. As long as your product is right, they might come back next time.

Adsense - Friend or Foe?

2008-06-27T09:00:00.000+01:00

There's a lot of debate around about whether Google's adsense should be included on websites or not. One side of the argument states it's a good way to earn money. The other says that often little is earned and it can detract from the content of the website.

Which is right? Well, I think both (not really sitting on the fence!!!).

Simple. For a corporate website selling their own product then it's unlikely that adsense will bring in any significant revenue and the adverts will distract from the content.

But if you are running a blog, ezine, review or information site, then why not? If your main income from the site (or the site doesn't have an income stream) is affiliate selling, then I think it can be very worth while adding another source of income.

Some people will shout me down saying that it's rare to earn much from adsense. Yes, plenty of people earn very little, I'm sure. But in my experience the adverts can be well worth while. If your site has original content, plenty of traffic and especially if it's targeting keywords that are likely to be move expensive, then it's well worth the short amount of time it takes to sign up and add the code to your site.

What advantage PDFs?

2008-06-26T09:00:00.000+01:00

What search engine advantage is there in displaying your thoughts in PDF format, rather than in plain old HTML? I'm sure I mentioned this only a few weeks ago, but I've seen another example of this on a website today.

On the site today, the home page is PR1 and the internal pages that or lower. Except for the information stored as a PDF document - that's the only PR2 page on the site.

It's not a site built, intended or used for search engine traffic. There's no link building scheme to help the search engine rating - the page rank is just what it's got from the few sites it's linked through, including my portfolio.

I noticed on my own site a few weeks ago that a couple of PDF documents that are only linked to from 1 page have a higher PR than the page linking to them. This goes against convetional wisdom as to how page rank is inherited - it's supposed to diminish as it is inherited, not increase.

So why is this and why could it be happening? Well, the first and easiest answer would be that Google hasn't fully updated and that the higher level pages have dropped, but not the PDFs. I know with my own site this hasn't happened. Maybe there's an increase coming, but it's only showing on the PDFs. But that would be too hopeful that both sites are going to increase in page rank...

So what else? Well, I can only assume that page rank works on multiple levels. You get the main level of a page rank, which is what inheritance is based on. Then you get marked down (and maybe up???) depending on other page factors.

What could these be and why? Well, with a PDF it's not full of links to other sites - or even your own. It's an end product that someone can pickup, print out and read. It's not full of Google Adsense or affiliate adverts and they aren't created just to drive traffic to your site - because people arriving there may never actually visit your site.

Or maybe it's just as simple as you lose some of your page rank by linking out to other pages. Now, how many people does that make sweat!

Whatever the reason, and it will be easy to monitor the situation through a couple of page rank updates, it does seem that there is a page rank advantage to putting your materials into PDF format. But, what advantage does this actually give you? It's difficult to then put links into your site - people would have to cut & paste or even retype the required URLs and maybe find the page they are after on the site.

I suppose that's why there is a page rank difference - if you are supplying the information it is just to give that information to your visitors. There would be no great advantage for me to fill Compare Mortgage Rates with information in PDFs, because there's no guarantee that anyone reading the information is then going to visit my site to click on adverts etc.

I suppose in some markets it can work. I'm working with pure strike on their website. With them, golfers might be reading up about golf putters and if they read about the pure strike putter and saw the URL they probably would be interested.

So maybe reviews etc would be useful in PDF format, but not for affiliates. As an affiliate I could write up how brilliant a driver is, but then the reader is just going to go off to find the cheapest about, they aren't going to come to my site to by it.

There must be a few good ways of using this quirk. How, I haven't quite worked out. And that's probably the answer - move up the search listing results that are there for results, not because people can manipulate the traffic that arrives.

Rebuilding another site

2008-06-25T09:00:00.000+01:00

I run several of my own site - compare mortgage rates and holiday cottages to name just 2 of many! These are all promoting various affiliate schemes and including Google Adsense.

The top 3 sites of my own all include a good element of my own input, but there's a golf site that when it first went live got loads of traffic and plenty of commissions - in fact the affiliate provider quickly moveed me up the reward levels. But for ages now it's not had a single commission.

Most of the site is built along the same lines as my divingg website, which currently does much better for traffic, adsense and commissions. What's the difference? Well the diving website started off and gets most of it's traffic not through the product information, but from reviews and information about diving in different locations and the dive centres there. It's got plenty of unique content.

But the golf site has none. It's just the products put together in different ways. A bit like the cottages site before that was rebuilt. So, although I've not actually finished rebuilding the cottages site - there's still a lot more information to add to the pages, I've decided that my next target is to be the golf website.

At the moment it's just a list of products for sale. I'll keep this, maybe even the same directory structure. But it's getting a new look along with new sections to review UK golf courses and whatever else I can think of linking to. Yes, most of it will be driven by what affiliate schemes I can find, but I'm learning the lesson that these sites don't work unless you put plenty of time and effort into creating something else - something that the public want to read.

Top 7 Low cost Website Marketing Ideas

2008-06-24T09:00:00.000+01:00

Need to get more traffic to your website but working on a budget? Not all ideas need to cost an arm and a leg - here's my top 7 ideas of getting new customers to your site, whilst not spending too much, some are even free...

PopUnders - this is where when a website on a similar theme is visited by a customer, your website is opened in a window behind the main one. This is low cost and can really provide tons of traffic. It's good because you know what theme of site the person is looking at and therefore a bit about what they are interested in.

Link Building - if you want to maintain a good search engine position then swapping links with other sites is a must. Not only can this actually allow people to find your site through these links, but search engines also see these links and assume that you are becoming more popular - and list you higher in their search results.

Fresh Content - by keeping your website updated with fresh content is a must. Whether it is freshly added information, the latest news or just maintaining your product database, make sure that changes are there. Not only does this make the search engines see that the site is maintained, which means they are more likely to list them highly, if the updates are interesting enough visitors will bookmark your site and want to return to see the lastest changes.

Articles - writing articles that your potential customers want to read about and that other people can distribute for you can interest new people and tempt them into visiting your site. Don't try to over-sell your services, write about what they want to read about and at the end tell them how you can help them. Go to a few article distribution sites and keep an eye on the increasing traffic.

Advertise name in shop / on literature - this is one that is often missed by customers, but such an easy way to promote a site. Just make sure that your customers and visitors to your outlet know about your website. They might be wanting to shop out of hours or compare your prices to someone else during their lunch break. So put your URL on your shop sign, on your price tags, on all of your stationary and everything else that your customers might be picking up from you.

Run a newsletter - sign up to a free newsletter provider, put a signup form on your website and encourage visitors to sign up for the newsletter. Maybe even encourage them to sign up by offering special discounts via the newsletter. These people have then shwon an interest in your product and are more likely to want to buy from you - if they are reminded about you enough. Just don't over do the newsletters and annoy them.

Free Directories - depending on your website content, free directories can generate loads of traffic. I personally consider these more relevant to websites where the theme is one where people are taking more time to search for new websites. For example, I've used these to great effect on dating sites and sports site, sites about hobbies, interests and recreations can all have plenty of people digging around for more websites to visit.

Top 7 Online Website Marketing Ideas

2008-06-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

Now you have a website, how can you get plenty of traffic onto the website? There are 7 top ideas for marketing a website online that every website could be using to generate more incoming traffic.

Pay Per Click - do you want a quick feed of traffic? Well in my opinion, pay per click systems offer just this! Sign up for a Google account, or MSN, Overture or whoever you choose, select a few appropriate keywords, write a concise advert and in minutes your website can be receiving targeted customers. There is an element of quality advert writing required and careful selection of keywords, but as long as you set limits for the advert and monitor the advert's progress, pay per click can be quite useful.

PopUnders - this is another way of generating fast traffic and this one is quite cheap. I've got a customer who relies on this to generate website traffic to support his business. How quick and well it works does depend on the provider you are buying from, but basically your website is displayed in a new window when a person visits another website of a chosen theme? Sounds complicated? It's not! For example, you choose a Golf category and then for 5,000 visitors the traffic provider gets to their golf websites, they also open a new window to display your website. Simple and can be very well targeted.

Fresh Content - if you aren't providing new content to your website then you are virtually killing it's content. It doesn't have to be weekly or even monthly. It depends on your website theme and competition. Whether you are adding new information, news or even just maintaining the freshness of yoour products, keep updating your website and traffic will be a lot better.

Forums & Blogs - by keeping your eye on other people's suitable blogs and forums there are time when you can genuinely post or leave comments that are usful and informative that can link to your website. Don't do it needlessly - you want the people reading the comment to see that you are making a valid point and want to visit your website - no spamming please!

Google Maps - on certain search results for businesses, Google displays a map and a list of businesses it is aware of. It is well worth signing up for free to this service to make sure that your website is listed and will appear in search results.

Articles - writing informative atricles that people find useful and getting them published in other people's newsletters, blogs and websites is an excellent way of being seen as a useful expert in the field and a way of generating more traffic. Like commenting in blogs and posting to forums, if the reader finds what you write interesting they are likely to want to visit your site.

Run a Newsletter - people visiting your website can be encouraged to sign up to your newsletter. If they do, then they are probably interested in your offer so likely to be happy to visit you when you have special offers. Sign up for a newsletter service and get it running now. Even if you only have a handful of subscribers, it can be fun.

Top 7 Free Website Marketing Ideas

2008-06-22T09:00:00.001+01:00

It's always nice getting something for free - and publicity for your website is certainly on that list! Promoting a website can be expensive, but with a few DIY ideas under your hat you can help build your website traffic for free. So here's by top 7 free website marketing ideas.

Link Building - this is really a must for anyone wanting more traffic! By building links with other sites you can exchange traffic with them. Even if you aren't exchanging links on content pages, just links pages, that can help the popularity of your site and increase your search engine traffic. Getting listed in popular "Top Sites" lists may not help your page rank teriffically, but if it's a popular list it might have plenty of traffic and send some of it to you. This is particularly true when the topic involved is a hobby, when people are tending to browse deeper than just a quick flick through sites.

Fresh Content - by constantly updating and maintaining your content you are giving search engines a reason to come back to your site and a reason to send you visitors. If this new content forms new pages then you can quickly build up a large cataglogue of useful pages. Try adding one new page each week of content that you have written yourself. Don't worry too much about keywords - just write what comes easiest. Make sure the pages are easy to find - linked to from the search engines, and let time take it's course. If you aren't a content site, e.g. a shop, then make sure that your catalogue is updated on a regular basis. Search engines will pick up on special offers coming and going. Likewise, using a forum on your site can help as this is constantly producing new content on a site.

Forums & Blogs - by actively participating in other people's forums and leaving comments on blogs that track back to your own blog or website their readers can see what you have had to say and if it is interesting maybe they will also visit your blog or website. I've had people asking for advice on forums to which I've posted replies leading to commissions.

Video Clips - using amusing video clips and posting them on social networking websites where others might show them to their friends can be a useful idea. Done subtly is best - give the viewer something to enjoy and they will tell other people. Maybe demonstrate a product in use in an unusual way and drop in the name of your website as providing the product. I've seen this well done, with just the comments on the top of the page saying where the products could be bought from if any viewers wanted to try it for themselves.

Google Maps - the Google maps service shows on the map the location of businesses for variouse searches. If Google decides a search is relevant to a business and a location, then the map is shown at the top of the search results, along with a list of the displayed businesses. It's free to get listed - go to maps.google.com, search for your business and location and assuming you aren't listed, use the link at the bottom of the page to list your business.

Articles - promoting your website through frely distributed articles is an effective way of helping traffic. If you write an interesting and informative article, publishers should pick up on the article and reprint it. If it makes interesting reading then the readers will want to read more and visit your website. Also, so of the articles will be reproduced on websites, with pne way links into your website.

Run a newsletter - if you can collect email addresses of people that are visiting your site then you can later email them when you want to generate a bit of interest. Maybe you have special offers to promote, or have too much stock that needs clearing quickly. Well, if these people have enjoyed your site and offered you their email addresses then it's likely that they will be open to your offers - make use of this!

Top 5 Off Line Website Marketing Ideas

2008-06-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

There's more to advertising your website than search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. There's plenty of advertising that you can use that doesn't even involve the website. Offline marketing can bring plenty of good results for your business and a lot of it can bring long term customers without too much expense.

Here's my favourite 5 ways of marketing your website - without using the internet!

Advertise in your shop - if you are a shop owner, or at least have a premises that your customers might visit or pass, then advertising there is a definite must. Get your shop sign altered to include the website name. Have your price tags printed up with the shop name and on posters around the shop include your website address. Remember that people might be passing your place of business and see you and want to get in touch. A website address is far easier to remember than most phone numbers. It could be that you are a solicitor and they are about to move and drive past you every day to and from work. Whatever, make sure that passing trade sees your website address.

Advertise on literature - basically, put your website address on everything you print. Every receipt, invoice, statement, business card, letterhead etc should show your website address. This one, unless you are throwing away old literature to make way for newly printed stock, is a free one! But it's reminding current customers at a later date how to contact you.

Fliers - getting a batch of fliers designed and printed isn't going to break the bank. Then get them out as quickly as reasonable possible - they aren't doing any good in your drawer. Stick them on cars; give them out to potential customers you are meeting; post them through letter boxes; even just drop one into each carrier bag. You could be reminding existing customers about you or drawing in new customers depending how you distribute them.

Give aways / promotional items - similar to fliers, here you get some pens, stress toys, keyrings or whatever printed and distribute them as you wish. Maybe you give them out on the street or to customers. Or give them to customers who spend a certain amount (to encourage further spending) or have a set printed and give out a different one each week, saving the last one for online orders only. Whichever way you use them, having your URL printed on them means that your recipients are seeing your message and website name and can visit your site.

Magazine Adverts - this one is saved to last as it's probably by far the most expensive of all of the off-line ideas. By being listed in a magazine with a good circulation its readers are finding out about your site and associating you with the magazine. By using a specialist magazine you can really target your audience well and several of my customers use this, with some having sites just to give the readers a point of contact. But, depending on the quality and circulation of the magazine, this can be an expensive exercise. Done well, the returns can be even greater.

Top 7 Paid For Website Marketing Ideas

2008-06-20T09:00:00.000+01:00

Using paid for advertising to market your website can be very expensive. Here I present what I consider to be 7 of the best ways of spending your money.

1) Pay Per Click - using services such as Google and MSN, you can select a variety of search keywords that people might be searching on and pay to be in the adverts column next to (and sometimes above) the results. You can usually control quite carefully the budget and pause or cancel the advert is you are spending too much and it can produce quick results. So a good one to start with.

2) PopUnders - this is one that is very controversial in some ways! With these, when someone opens a website, a new window opens in the background displaying another website. Because you know what sites are being used as the trigger, the advertising can be accurately tardetted. But there are so many popup blockers about that most people must have at least one - my computer has one built into the browser, one within the Google toolbar and one within the Alexa Toolbar - popunders don't get through! So with so many popup blockers available, will these services work? Well my thoughts are that with so many blockers availahle, if you don't have one installed, that is almost a conscious decision to allow them through. Therefore you are probably happy to receive them. Popunders are usually cheap, so another good starting point for marketing a website.

3) Expired Domain Traffic - this one is also cheap and cheerful, but at the moment in my experience many providers are struggling to provide UK traffic. With these, when a person tries to visit a site that has been deleted by the owner they are instead sent to a similarly themed website. The idea is that with a careful choice of sites you can generate plenty of well targetted traffic. Very cheap, rapid delivery usually, but stuggling with UK traffic at the moment,

4) Paid Directories - paying to be listed in a directory can be quite expensive and does not necessarily get a quick result. I have tried many directories and some are worse than the free directories! I now go by the theory that if they are phoning me and hassling me for business, then can they be that good? But there are some usful directories out there - you just need to see where your competitors are advertising and research whether those directories will be good for you.

5) Fliers - these can be useful but are often overlooked. A well designed and printed flier, made available directly to your customers can be used by them at a later date to recall your website address and visit it when they need it. Depending on your target audience there are many ways of distributing leaflets - handing them out on the street; handing them out in a shop; door to door posting; leaving on car windows; mailshot etc.

6) Magazine Adverts / Printed Adverts - advertising in the daily press or relevant magazines can rapidly get your website noticed by many people. By advertising in these your website gains credibility with the readers and some respectibility as you are advertising in a publication they trust. On the upside is that your advert can be seen by thousands of readers. In the downside is that this exposure comes with a cost. If advertising this way, make sure that your advert is professionally designed - even if it's only a couple of column inches. Whatever space you use, you want the advert to stand out and the costs of a designer can be recovered with a well produced advert that pulls in more customers.

7) Affiliate Marketing - and finally the 'big one'. Not necessarily just for big sites. As long as you can cope with the traffic then getting a team of marketeers working for you on a commission only basis could be just what your business needs. A lot of networks have large monthly charges and setup fees, so if your marketing budget is small start out with a network that avoids these, but they usually involve setting up everything for yourself. All that the network does is act as a contact point for affiliates and to help with the reporting of sales.

Build traffic with a competition...

2008-06-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

OK, so I said that yesterday was the last of the ideas, I was wrong. Here's something else that I was suggesting to a customer. I'll describe it as I described it to my customer for his promotional items website.

Basically, what I suggested is that he run a promotional items competition. He invites his existing customers to send in ideas as to how they have used his products. This could be descriptions, images, videos etc. It doesn't matter - it's whatever he wants to use. It could even just be the most unusual place to give out his products, the most unusual model to build etc. It doesn't matter - all that matters is that there is a competition (and simple prize) that interests his customers.

And the competition doesn't need to be restricted to just his customers, as long as the entrants are using the right products. More about this in a minute...

So he gets the customers posting their entries. Each of these forms a separate webpage (more content...). But he's the important part - customers and their customers vote for the winners. This is vital! That way, customers who have signed up and entered the competition then tell their contacts about the cocmpetition so that they get votes. These people visit the site and vote.

You can incentivise the voting to encourage more votes by offering a prize for those voting as well. So to be able to award thee prize, and to make sure that people are only voting once, you capture email addresses.

So, what do you get from this exercise, rather than just a bill from your web designer for the work!

For a start, customers are returning to your site so they have you in mind. It's an excuse for you to email them and remind them you exist.

Second, the customers are telling people about you, so they are spreading the word about your site. There's a chance that your customers' contacts could then become your new customers.

Third, you get to capture a mailing list of your customers' contacts and can email them competition updates - and remind them you exist.

Fourth, some of your customers will be keen on the competition and link to your voting pages from their websites - one way links.

So, keep the voting rolling and maybe reset the counters every month or so. That way, your customers keep the votes rolling in and the benefits continue.

Word of Mouth

2008-06-18T09:05:00.002+01:00

The last of the ideas for marketing your website is very simple, but works. It's one I use time and time again, it just takes a bit of getting used to to do it well.

What's the simplest idea of all, that's free and takes no time - simply tell everyone you know or talk to about your website and business. There's a chance that they, or someone they might know, might need your services.

It works. My very first customer came this way and I'm currently working on a neighbour's site. And a few months back I was giving another neighbour my phone number for a new homewatch scheme - so the easiest way was to just give her my business card. It had all the contact details I needed on it. The other morning she was driving past me when she stopped and asked for a quote.

I've also had close friends send their friends to me for work and, of course, on the line odf referrals is the fact that if I do a good job then my customers will be telling their friends who built their website. If it works for me, then why not everyone? Even if you are selling clothing, books or whatever, if your target audience is the people that you mix with then let them know about what you do.

Using Email Signatures

2008-06-17T09:00:00.001+01:00

Have you ever noticed that some free email services add adverts to the bottom of the emails? The reason why is that these adverts pay for them to run the service.

If it works for them, why not for you? Now OK, for them you are distributing their adverts to people you know that might not know about their services. On the other hand, most of your emails are being sent to people you know. But what if not everyone knows what you do, or that you are trying to earn an extra income on the side by promoting an affiliate scheme or whatever website you are trying to promote?

By adding a signature to the bottom of your email you are showing everyone who receives your email your message and maybe some of them will look at the website. This is at it's best when people then forward your email. Every sent a joke to a colleague? More to the point, have you ever received jokes and see that people haven't deleted the original email?

If you look down that list and see what's at the bottom, others might later do the same. And that could be your advert.

And it's not just this sort of distribution that works. Quite often you may be emailing people you don't know - trying to make bookings and so on. Well they also might see your advert - it's always worth a go when the advertising is free.

The same can happen when you use an email address from within your domain. The recipient might just notice that URL, and if it's something that interests them then bingo - they might turn into a visitor.

I'm not promising overnight riches from email signatures, but they are totally free so well worth giving a go.

Articles for website marketing

2008-06-16T09:00:00.000+01:00

Many sites, large and small, use articles to promote themsleves. Articles work in two directions at once.

First, reader see what you have written, see you as an expert and visit your site.

Second, with some article publications, the article is published on a website and in return the page links back to your site. So you have a source of one way links.

Either way is goog for business. The former is best whilst the article is new and being distributed in e-zines, but like the second, SEO, aspect as long as the article is displayed on websites with the links live then there is the chance of benefits.

But what sort of articles should you be writing? Articles should be honest, whilst not directly selling your product. You should be writing impartial advice and using the information imparted to convince your reader that you know what you are talking about and tempting them to read more about what you have to say by visiting your site.

Articles should be unique and have something in the title that makes them stand out - why should a publisher publish your article rather than someone else's? Getting your article picked up by publishers is vital - else you are wasting your time.

Fliers to market your website

2008-06-15T09:00:00.000+01:00

Fliers can be an efficient way of marketing a website, or any business for that matter. You only need to look at your post and the free newspapers to see how many people rely on them for your business.

You need to put together a good looking and well presented convincing flier. Spell out what you offer quickly and plainly. Spell out the advantages of your services against the next guy's and make sure the leaflet looks the part.

Leaflets that drop through my door on badly cut cheap white paper, with less then perfect printing find their way to the bin even quicker then the better quality leaflets. And those with bad spellings and apostophes in the wrong places get the speediest trip of all!

So make sure leaflets are well written and spell out why a customer should use your services. They can then be rapidly distributed around your target audience. If your audience is householders or general public, then dropping the leaflets on a door to door basis is ideal. If you are looking for commuters, then car parks could be what you need. But if you are dealing with businesses, then leaflet dropping around the relevant businesses is the only option.

Targetting small businesses can be trickier - especially if they are so small that they are typically ran through private homes - are there are a lot of those around here. With them, you are best getting a list of businesses and their addresses to drop the leaflets to. But be aware that not all directories like you making marketing lists from their data.

Free Directories CAN Drive New Business

2008-06-14T09:00:00.000+01:00

Getting your site listed in free directories, including top sites lists, can drive in new business to your site. Now it depends on what you are selling and how many sales you are after, but this can give your business a boost.

Particularly if your market is dealing with a topic where people browse around a lot, then getting listed in free directories and top site lists can be to your advantage. Whilst promoting a dating site a few years ago I listed it in a few of these such sites. I monitored it and noticed that most traffic came from a couple of very good "top sites" lists.

Now I was never going to retire on the income from this affiliate scheme - I gave up actively promoting the services in favour of other schemes because I found the conversion rate to be very low. (It was one of my early ventures when I was looking for any idea to work on!) But it did get plenty of taffic sent to the provider and even though I don't work on this any more and haven't done so for years, I'm still getting people joining up through my links from the top sites list!

For the small amount of effort in joining relevant lists and maybe uploading banners or links to your own site, you can possibly gain yourself a steady stream of visitors for a long time. It's free to sign up - so any sales you make are a wonderful profit.

The Cottages Site's Links Directory

2008-06-13T09:00:00.002+01:00

I've noticed testerday that the number of link requests for my cottages site is up significantly - at a guess, I've had more requests today than the whole of last week, and possibly the week before as well.

I was wondering why so many were coming through and then I noticed in my Google Adsense account that the traffic was up - helped of course by displaying the Adsense adverts on the link exchange pages. But it was only seeing that which reminded me of the effort I've put into that site recently! I'm not exactly known for my memory!

I suppose I'm watching for traffic being up on the website as a whole, not an increase in the link requests. But there could be a catch 22 situation here - in a postive way. Refresh the site and get it more popular with the search engines. Maybe not popular enough for the content pages to list highly, or high enough to show extra traffic, but a little higher.

But it might not just be the content pages that search engines take a shine to - why not the whole site? Although I've not yet updated the links pages to the new style (I forgot - my memory...) so I'll do that in a minute, it's possible that a slight improvement to the site could bring more traffic to the links exchange. There was another good day a few days back.

So maybe the links pages are being found more and the result will be more link swaps with suitable sites. That will hopefully bring the PR of the whole site up and as well as meaning yet more people are finding the links pages, ultimately eventually hopefully more customers will find the pages and begin making bookings.

Fingers crossed - I hope it wasn't all a big waste of time!

Using Blogs To Promote Your Website

2008-06-12T09:00:00.000+01:00

Like using forums, using blogs to promote your website can be extremely rewarding, but should be done carefully to stay above board and not upset the owners.

There are two ways to use blogs to promote a site. First, using your own blog to promote your own product and second, visiting other people's blogs.

So, using your own blog - how's that done? Well, it can be as simple as running a blog for whatever purposes and the blatantly going "See my Mortgage Rates website." - see, just done it there for myself! If the blog / post is well page ranked, then it's a one way link into your website... Plus, if it is applicable to your audience, then there's a good chance of traffic following the link.

The next step is to tun a blog specifically for your product or services, either independently or on your own website. It can be a general blog designed just to create lots of content and therefore the chance of numbers of people finding it, or it can be specifically to mention and discuss various aspects of your products and services.

You can also post comments on your blog about posts on other people's blogs and link to them. Sounds crazy - probably is - but if the blog has got features such as trackback installed then they are likely to link back to your post. This might have the rel="nofollow" instruction of the link, if so it doesn't help for SEO. But even if it does, if you found the post then so will others. And they will be interested to see what you had to say when you linked to the blog, so an amount of traffic can start to appear.

Posting comments onto other people's blogs is the same idea as the trackbacks. These can frequently be covered up by the rel="nofollow" instruction, but visitors will see the comments and some may follow if your comment is interesting. If it's just blatent self publicity, then it's likely not to be followed and possibly even deleted.

Work with these people, not against them. Do unto you as you would have others do to you and everyone will be happy and your website traffic will increase.

Using Forums to Market Your Website

2008-06-11T09:00:00.000+01:00

Using internet forums can be a good way to market your site - but be aware of rules and regulations, else you might upset someone and be reported as spamming!

Carefully, and properly, used forums can drive genuine visitors to your website, for free. All it takes is a bit of time and effort on your behalf. Furthermore, the same techniques can also sometimes count as one way link building - possibly a great benefit!

Why only "possibly"? Well, for a start, many forums have been so blighted by spammers in the past that they now take action against people posting links. Some are quite harsh - removing all links and hiding them. Some only allow links to be posted by long standing member whilst others hide the links from search engines using the rel="nofollow" instruction, which was developed by Google especially for this sort of work.

Add to this that search engine programmers know that it is far too easy to get a one way link from a forum and have coded the weighting behind forum posts links to be far inferior to normal links, and you might start to wonder if you are wasting your time.

But you are not! About 18 months ago I was reading a running forum about a well known UK half marathon and many people were struggling to find accommodation for it. I posted a link to a page of mine on which there was an affiliate link to a hotel provider. Straight away I saw a few commissions appear and even now, when I am no longer promoting this scheme and even they entire site I was using for it has closed, I am still getting odd commissions for bookings on race weekend.

Such is the power of blogging that by one quick post I generated traffic to send to an affiliate scheme, that repaid my time handsomely. I could take this further and be more proactive in the forum and post recommendations to more of my own pages for running equipment affiliates, but it's a matter of getting the time to set that up.

But with careful posting it is easy, and allowed, to post replies including links to your websites. Quite often you will get warnings and bans if you take it too far - creating threads just to publicise your products, but if the reply you post is honest, helpful and happens to include a link to a supplier, which may be you, then no-one should complain.

Keep above the line and you can work this well. Look at it more as driving genuine traffic than search engine optimisation and you will be satisfied.

The first cottages reload

2008-06-10T09:00:00.000+01:00

The new style holiday cottages site has been live for over a week now, so I thought I should, as planned earlier on, reload the database.

The agreement with the provider is that the reload is at least monthly. But with my new style of website, an essential element is listing the latest cottages on the site's home page, plus the home pages for the areas. Within each of these lists, only the 10 most recent additions are displayed. So with the load today, 13 new properties were added. this means that only a randomly chosen 10 will appear on the home page.

Does this matter? Well the purpose of putting this information on the home page are: it adds regularly updated content to these page; it makes the search engines find the new property pages a lot quick (if they are visiting the home page that often). So there's a balance.

If I update every day, for argument's sake, then the new properties will drop down the list one or two positions at a time. If I update every month, then a new 10 are picked up each month.

On balance, creeping down the list is best. This way every new property gets a chance of being on the home page, and the content changes slightly, with blocks staying the same for when the search engines come back. Ideally encouraging the search engines to the site every day would be ideal, but a weekly visit is most likely. So being prepared for that visit is probably the target.

Therefore, I must be uploading the new file at least every week, probably twice a week to cope with cases when search engines return after 6 days etc. So it looks like that's the routine I must develop.

How to manage link exchanges

2008-06-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

How do you manage your link exchanges? I think that if you are running link exchange for SEO then you really do need a tool. It should be able to allow other site owners to add their site to yours; it should allow you to add sites - before they add a link and it should run various checks that the sites supposed to be linking to you actually still are.

I've had various attempts at writing this for myself over the years, but they are never as efficient as an off-the-shelf links directory. You need tricks such as when another site owner requests a link exchange the software much check their site to ensure that the link exists where it says it does. And preferably it checks the robots.txt file and for rel=nofollow in the link.

No software is going to be perfect, but I always use linkmachine for my links directories. One customer was unable to install it onto their website as their hosts has unusual security considerations, but on the whole it is quick and easy to install. It does check that the link back already exists and helps you as the site owner to get more links in. And whenevery you want to, at the click of a button it goes off and checks every link pointing to you is still in place, checking the sites where it can't find the link in case the link has moved.

It's not perfect, but the free version is fine for my requirements. I like it and believe, especially in some cases, that it has really helped the positioning of some of my sites.

May Cottages Benchmark

2008-06-08T09:00:00.002+01:00

I said that I was going to benchmark the holiday cottages website for the month of May, and I nearly forgot. But the way the commissions are going between the two sites, it's really no wonder!

Between them, the 2 sites managed 4 bookings in May, and 3 have been rejected. So a fantastic commission for May of just £26. Wow. Last May it was 5 bookings and only 1 was rejected, earning a still pathetic £56.84.

As far as traffic goes, the cottage-holidays site (unchanged) had 4,914 page impressions, against 1,018 for cottages-4-holidays, which will include a few of my displays during testing. So traffic compares well to April. As for income, well it was $169.62 and $32.30 respectively, again, very close to April's figures.

So, thanks to the reduced commissions, the income between the sites is down to around £160, from £200. And I thought April was low. I'm not expecting great movements this month - give the searcb engines a few weeks to find the new pages etc. But these figures serve as a benchmark for my changes.

Sorting your link

2008-06-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

You have decided what link building software to use, you have got a list of sites to get in touch with and put their links into your linsk directory, but should your link look like?

Most take the format of:

UK Mortgage Rates - compare all mortgage rates online.

That's three elements - the URL, the title and a description.

The description is the easiest to deal with - just describe what your site offers - it's not important for search engine optimisation (yet!). The URL - well the obvious thing is to link to your home page and many link exchanges demand that. But also consider requesting that some of the links point to your internal pages - this helps get traffic up over the entire site.

Then comes the important bit - the title or link text. Much has been written about this and there is a great deal of care required in any search engine optimisation - too much and the search engines pick up on this and you can get banned.

Most advice is that having keywords in the anchor text - the title - is advantageous in getting you rated higher for those keywords. So, if you want to rate higher for cottage holidays, thne use them.

But if suddenly you get 100 links in using the same keywords then it is obviously artificial. So don't just target one keyword. Try cottage holidays, holiday cottages, UK holiday cottages, cottage holidays UK etc. Really going for link building? Then if you are building heavily find an even wider variety of anchor texts. Try Cornwall holiday cottages, Devon cottage holidays etc.

Variety is the spice of life. Combine the wider range of anchor texts with linking to the relevant website pages - for example, Dorset Holiday Cottages would point to the Dorset home page. Simple!

The wrong way to link exchange

2008-06-06T09:33:00.003+01:00

I had an email overnight from a customer asking me what I thought of an email he'd received advertising a website www.nettrafficsystems.com. They are a bit cagey about how exactly they work, but they claim to have a network of their own sites and for the fantastic price of only £245 per month, you can get 10,000 links from them. They even offer a free trial for 30 days.

I had to advise him that there wasn't enough information for me to be able to say the service was worth it. It might be great - I've never experienced them and couldn't find any write ups, but their own home page was page rank zero and the site has an Alexa ranking of over 2,000,000, which didn't bode well. They claim this is intentional - they don't want to be found by search engines. So why don't they block the site using the robots.txt file - and what harm would it be, given that they don't list customers or links sites?

My problems with this and similar schemes are many. First, they don't say how quickly you get those links. If it's all on day 1 then search engine are going to detect a massive spike in link building - all from a set of sites that they have previously witnessed this take place fro,

Second, for 'privacy' they don't tell you any of the sites they are using. Your links could be going anywhere. Are they PR4 sites or grey barred pages?

Next, there's no indication of how the links are portrayed on the pages. Are they mid paragraph, list or menu bar?

And lastly, the day you stop paying your links are all removed - there's no long term return for your investment. They claim to offer 'permanent links', but only for as long as you are a paid customer.

What about that trial? Well you only need to read the FAQs to see that at one point these guys say that it can take months for the effect of link building to show - "Ranking changes can happen daily but they are usually due to changes from as far back as 2-3 months." - that's when they are telling you why you should be a long term customer and I agree with this statement. Later on though, the claim is "You can expect to see some promising results already within the first month.". Personally, the only results I would expect to see that quickly would be getting new pages listed.

OK, I'm nit picking here. I suppose it's the surprise of the cost of the service has shocked me! But they are not alone - there are loads of other services like this out there - I've even thought of writing something along these lines, but addressing loads of the problems I mentioned - adding links incrementally etc.

To me, the best way is always proper link building. Get out there and exchange links with sites that are good, honest, hard-working sites. I'm not saying that the sites used by www.nettrafficsystems.com aren't just that - but there's no evidence either way. For the same price my customer could have one of us here spending a day per week link building for him. OK, maybe not 10,000 links on day one(!!), but a year down the line those links we have built would still be in place if he decided to cut back on his marketing budget.

If you have a large marketing budget and can afford to pay the £245 for 6 months and not cry if you don't see the huge improvements then it is probably worth a trial. But, if like my customer every penny is tight, then almost £1500 is a huge gamble.

Don't get sucked into these systems thinking they will always work. They might do - but the reason why I thought of writing one wasn't just to earn more cash, it was to increase my own sites' ratings. That way I'd have earned more affiliate incomes through them. If these systems are so good, why aren't the owners just using it on their own sites like I would have done?

Finding Bulk Link Exchanges

2008-06-05T09:00:00.000+01:00

Finding suitable sites to exchange links with the manual way I've already described can get good results, but it does take a while and can be very unfuitful. You can spend ages searching sites for link exchanges, only to either send emails that aren't replied to or just not be able to find a link exchange page.

So when you want loads of link exchanges, how can you do it? There are many paid one way link exchange directories out there, but I don't touch them. They are expensive and the ones I've seen actually bear very little benefit.

The best way I find is to do different types of link searches. Search for phrases that are often on links pages, and if you want to limit the results, a keyword you want to work on. For example "add link" mortgages would be suitable for my mortgage rates website.

As well as add link, swap links, add site and exchange links etc can all be searched for. Any combination of these typical phrases is likely to find you useful sites. And if the sites have automated systems, then it's a lot more likely that the owner will actually respond and put your link up, or even that process will happen automatically.

And this happens a lot with popular link exchange tools. A lot of people find my site by looking for "powered by linkmachine" or "powered by link machine" (don't forget the quotes). This is because all free versions of link machine display this text once the free trial period is up. Paid for versions don't display it - but I've never seen how to find these sites.

How to find sites to swap links with

2008-06-04T09:00:00.002+01:00

So how can you find useful sites to exchange with?

Well, in the first place, look for sites that are of interest and contact them and see if they will link exchange. Contact people you know or deal with, and see if they are interested.

After that then we're probably onto the mass link exchanges and hunting down other sites that will benefit you. There's a fine line here between spam and genuine work - unfortunately I consider most of the requests arriving in my inbox as spam.

The first step is simply to type the keywords you are using into Google and see what sites come up top. Then look to see what sites link to these. If I was working on Compare Mortgage Rates I would type just that into Google. The top few sites are usually big names and not into link exchanges, so I ignore them and drop down a few until I find a site in my league. Once I've found one I look to see if it has a links directory. If so, I request a link... Next I go through the sites listed on this site, looking for their links directories, asking them to exchange links with me.

If I want to be more effective then sometimes I limit myself to just looking at which links are showing in Google. So when you find the first site, use the links: search to see who is linking to them and then either look for links directories or email them. I have to say that the email trick is very poor and gets only a few responses, submitting to links directories is probably a much better use of time.

Which sites to link exchange with?

2008-06-03T09:00:00.002+01:00

Here's a contentious issue - not how to find sites to swap links with, but who to swap links with. After all, it's only when you have decided who to swap links with that you can decide who you are looking for.

There are two schools of thought. One says that swapping with closely themed sites is all that you should do. This school is thinking that sort of link swap is more natural and will give you a better PR. The other school says the more the merrier and swap with anyone in sight.

I can't honestly say I prefer the former. Whilst it sounds better, I've never seen any direct benefit. Yes, if I could get Compare Mortgage Rates listed on the home page of other mortgage sites then I'd be delighted. But what sites are truly on topic?

Would you say that just mortgage sites are on topic, or that financial sites are on topic? Estate agents aren't really financial - they are home. But they are more closely related to mortgages than foreign exchange, which is financial.

In the real world, without link exchanges for PR, you would almost certainly find links to mortgage, insurance, solicitors, surveyors and removal firms websites on estate agents websites, and vice versa. That's because these businesses work hand in hand. Yet no category cleanly encompasses these variety of websites.

I've already spelled out in this series how contrasting niches of sites can naturally link to each other, so why then artificially create boundaries? Search engines, however clever, can't put each website into a niche that it should be linking to, so we're not mimicking what they expect.

So I say, within reason, any website is open to a link exchange. Don't look at whether they are the same niche, look at whether they get traffic and if we are being good, if our visitors are likely to find them useful. I get many visitors to my sites arriving through the links directory, so why not make sure these directories do some good?

Reviewing the SEO Experiment

2008-06-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've not looked at the results of the target="_blank" experiment for a while (3 months actually), so first a recap.

Basically, I was wondering if using target="_blank" in links hinders sites as far as SEO and PR are concerned, so I set up 3 test blogs last October. The first didn't get any links in; the second had links in and the third was linked to from the same pages as the second, but using target="_blank" in the link.

Now this experiment isn't perfect. I'm using an equal mixture of my own writings and articles across all three blogs, posting to each at the same time. But there are other sites that pick up these articles and publish them as well from my blogs, and I'm not controlling how those links look. But overall, it should give a general impression of what's going on. So here's the current state of play...

Site 1 - 33 posts - no links.
15 pages on Google, all grey barred.

Site 2 - 34 posts - 'good' links.
40 pages on Google

PR 3
October - hello-from-austria-going-back-to-my.html
October - costa-rica-beaches-most-beautiful.html
October - things-to-do-in-boulder-colorado.html
November - multi-leg-flights-explained.html
December - know-your-bag.html
January - reinvent-your-sports-spirit-with.html
January - timeshare-travel-discounts-travel.html
February - self-catering-accommodation-in-style.html
2008_01_01_archive.html

Site 3 - 34 posts - target="_blank" links.
38 pages on Google

PR 3
October - 10-reasons-to-visit-berlin-germany.html
October - traveling-with-children-in-ireland.html
October - hello-from-austria-hiking-through.html
December - ways-to-mark-your-luggage-for-easy.html
February - sunny-outlook-for-spains-sunshine-coast.html
February - how-to-research-and-book-cruise.html

There are slightly more pages page ranked on (2) than (3) - but not enough to get excited about! What is interesting is that it is internal pages that are ranked - not the home page. And they are either PR3 or nothing. What is interesting is that the page ranked pages have changed since the last review, so I'm guessing this is more to do with an external factor. Having said that, the first site, without any links in, doesn't have any page ranked pages and hasn't got all of its posts cached. Thus showing the importance of link building.

There's nothing like leaving it to the last minute...

2008-06-01T12:06:00.002+01:00

There's nothing like customers leaving everything to the last minute! We started working on a site in early March - 2 and a half months ago. The design really dragged on. Nothing was heard back for weeks, then a few little changes requested, then suddenly about 2 weeks ago a major restyling of the site was requested.

Not brilliant, but OK if there's time. The problem was when about a week ago the customer annouced that the site must be live for this Wednesday.

You would think that in this case all the stop would be pulled out on both sides. I'm here now, Sunday afternoon, to get the site pushed through a little. But all week there's been a huge list of little tweaks that the customer wants. Never anything too major and nothing that affects the style to make it that much better for visitors. Only (to be honest) the customer trying to style himself more on a big name site and wanting everything to match.

So here we are, with just 2 working days to get the site live. At this point in the project, especially after 2 and a half months' work, you would expect to find us well into the build. But with only 2 days to go until he is desperate to go live, and with threats about what will happen if we're not live, I switched on this morning hoping to see emails from him. But there's nothing.

So how far into the build are we? Well, we're waiting for him to sign off the home page of the site. It's a few days since we last had any changes off him for that page and they were returned straight away (subtle changes to colours etc). So I was hoping for an immediate reply.

It looks like we'll be lucky to get the pages signed off for Wednesday, let alone the site live. I could start putting together the site, but with 4 different page style, including the home page, waiting to be signed off, there's little chance that there will be no changes. So I can only wait.

Think of what you are saying...

2008-05-31T09:00:00.000+01:00

A customer this week sent me a rather hotly worded email telling me that if I wasn't up to the task why couldn't I tell him and why had it taken me so long to get the website back to him. My reply, in rather a few more words, was to remind him that 4 weeks ago I'd sent him the links to the live site and asked him to review it and that after my emailing him several times, he said he was too busy with his garden to review the site.

Why then am I getting the blame for the delays - when I've been waiting 4 weeks for a reply? He also said he didn't like the look of the site, which is based exactly on the slides his graphic designer sent to us. Looks like this could be a fun site to finish off over the coming weeks... A possible redesign and goodness knows what else, at least this job is not on a fixed price.

Whereas another job that has taken most of my time this week is a fixed price contract and my sales guy is letting it run away. This customer is desperate to go live the middle of next week, let I'm still waiting for the latest changes to the items page, which need to be completed before he'll sign the pages off and I can actually build the site. Even if I get the latest changes lsit on Monday and can get the changes done the same day, it's not leaving me much time to build the database interface, especially when I have other customers wanting work from me.

But that's life - and the sooner we reign in these daft customers the better - the more new sites we can go live with.

The redesign is live...

2008-05-30T09:00:00.000+01:00

Well the Cottage Holidays website redesign has gone live overnight and bar a few teething problems, the site is up and running. I managed to sort the Google Maps problem before publishing the site so the cottages do show a location map - now I just have to see if I can include the maps into the tourist information pages...

It didn't do quite as straight forward as it looked to be. During final testing I noticed that only 500 of the holiday cottages had been loaded, out of the 1700+. Plus there were also a selection of French properties, that didn't have anywhere to go and crashed the load.

Once the full selection of 1700 went on it was a lot more difficult to load, but I did get it there and now the latest database is loaded. I'll be loading the database again over the next few days to pick out the new cottages as each region's home page and the site's home page do list new additions to the site. At the moment they are just showing random cottages loaded today - not what I wanted to show!

The only glitch that I've noticed so far is that in a couple of places the region is not decoded in the display of the cottage name. Not difficult to change, just a lot of places to change it in.

Hopefully I'll manage to get the search engines interested in the site and over the next few weeks and months will be reporting increased traffic. Can't be much worse than the current month has been! Once we hit the end of the month I'll post the results as another benchmark of where the site is at the moment and in a few months I'll be able to look back at both sites and sets of data to see if the redesign has brought in more traffic.

Cottages rebuild almost ready...

2008-05-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

The first phase of the holiday cottages website rebuild is all but completed. It's still short of several aspects, but most aren't needed for a go live. Yes, it's been a long time coming, but over the last week or so I've not had the time to move it along...

The main missing features at the moment, and the only ones that need sorting before I put the new version live, are Google Adsense adverts and the Google Map feature.

Google Adsense is easy to sort - I just need to swap machines and then plug them in. The maps are proving a little bit harder. In theory it's easy, in actual fact it's a tad difficult. The code is workign stand-alone, but as soon as I try to include it into the page it's full of errors. And again, this machine doesn't show them. It looks like the phase 1 release of this site will need to blank out the Google Maps - shame!

Building the site wasn't quite as much of a pain as I expected, especially the creation of all of the pages. I thought that creating around 3,500 pages might need to be split into many scripts, but it's done in just the single step.

The plan is that over the morning I'll get the Google Adsense in, probably blank out the map section, and then rerun everything to put the new site live and let Google et al get trawling the new pages.

Then I can start adding the tourist information and hotel information onto the pages - anything to really make the site have plenty of unique content. I'll keep posting as it develops.

Let your webdesigner do their work...

2008-05-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

Whilst it's actually very nice when a customer arrives knowing what they want, along with drawn out screen prints to work from, it can be taken too far.

One guy I'm working on at the moment took my first sample and put it into photoshop and moved things around a little to explain how he wanted it to look. That's great, but then when the instructions start to tell me how to optimise the site and what I'm doing wrong - then the instructions are going too far! It's especially awkward when the instructions are based on old information - "put in loads of keywords in the keyword metadata", "put some text at the bottom of the page in the same colour as the background", "list all the keywords in the picture alt tags".

Fine, thanks for that help, but the ideas you are suggesting at best don't work, at worst can get your site banned.

Here's the simple truth. If you are getting a webdesigner to build and maintain a site then don't go for over the top on page optimisation. Just go for well built, well designed pages. If the page is over optimised using dirty tricks then when the search engines change their algorithms your site is going to drop, and maybe get banned. If you want to be tricking the search engines using the latest discoveries then you need to be in a position to be able to change your site at a moment's notice - not join a long queue of work to be done as maintenance.

If you are paying someone to do the job for you, then let them use their knowledge and build the site for you - don't tell them their work, no matter how much you have researched. Or will you be telling the pilot how to land because of your research next time you go on holiday?

I'm not really that negative...

2008-05-27T14:45:00.002+01:00

I don't want to appear to be too negative when I'm talking about checking reciprocal links - just realistic. There are a good number of sites out there that are genuine, but then there are also a good number that aren't. It's less than 10 days since I ran the links check on CompareMortgageRates and when I started the process today there were exactly 400 sites in the directory. Of these, 17 no longer link back to me - yet they were when I looked less than 10 days ago.

Extrapolate over 31 days and that could easily have been around 45 sites missing link backs - over 10 percent! I had a look through some of the sites with missing links and those that I looked at were all 3-way links - initiated by the other party. It's what I was saying in that article - the person being paid to search for links suddenly has no financial incentive to keep my link there so pulls it without warning.

I see no harm in 3 way linking, if done fairly. But in my experience it's never fair. It's usually done so that someone being paid to promote a site can do so more easily. If they took the time to install link software on the site that is paying them to do the work then there would be a long term investment - the links directory would be there for as long as their customer wants it. I suppose that's the difference between my way of working and others. I would give the customer full control, they want all the links to be able to slowly crumble once the customer stops paying.

Give me a fair link and I'm happy!

Does my aggressive link building work?

2008-05-25T21:34:00.000+01:00

OK, so over the last month I've become very agressive / determined in deleting links that don't benefit me. Does it do any good?

Well, as I was reviewing my list of link check dates, I made an observation. In the past I've recorded the date that I've checked that links are still active. On the whole, I've deleted links that are reciprocated any more and noted that date. It was only when I neglected to do this that as an experiment when I remembered, for a couple of customer sites I tried deleting more links (they were so full of links after not checking for a few months they took ages!).

My sheet shows that from January to July 2007, every month I carefully ran my link check every month. Before that it was pretty adhoc.

There was also, at some point either before or just at the start of that period, a time when my CompareMortgageRates directory became corrupted and wouldn't add links for a few weeks - but people kept trying. Eventually I rebuilt it - with a lot of links missing. It was shortly after that it hit PR5.

What about normally? Well last year, the site's performance improved until October, then tumbled. It picked up again in January and February this year, March wasn't so good, April better and May not so good.

And whay about the links check? Well as I said above, until July I was checking monthly, then forgot it until October, then again until January. So when I was checking and for about 3 months afterwards, the site traffic was good. And when I did a full check in October, about 3 months later traffic picked up. Same again after my January check.

So it looks like careful admin of the links directory is important - let it slip and traffic falls. By checking it every month the traffic is at its best. When I let the checking slips, a couple of months later so does the traffic.

It's not instant - and that is obvious. It takes the search engines a few weeks to pick up all of the links pages and the links pages pointing in and then for Google etc to fully update their directories. Whether being more aggressive will help, I don't know. But with what happened when the directory crashed, it could be the case.

Am I right to delete so many links?

2008-05-23T09:00:00.004+01:00

Well, for a start, let's make it clear. They are my links directories - so I am within my rights to do what I want! Ethically though, should I have mass deletions? Does it affect my page ranks?

Well I first tried a mass deletion back in early December - over 6 months and 3 page rank updates ago. I tried it on a PR5 and a PR4 website - and both still hold their page ranks. More than could be said for other sites. What's more, the page rank of the directory pages on these sites is quite good.

But why do I feel I should do it? I've noticed that many of these links that come back as grey barred pages are on pr5 / 6 or low pr sites. In the first case, I'm suspecting foul play is getting the other site a good ranking whilst hiding the link page my link back is on. So why should I help them when they don't help me?

In the second case, especially the pr0 / grey barred sites that I've been linking to for 18 months, something is wrong with the other site, so it is probably best to get out of that relationship.

I do state on the better PR links directories that I will only exchange with PR pages. This leads to people putting links onto home pages, submitting their site, getting them approved then either removing or moving the link to another page, hoping that my software will pick up the new location and I won't notice the PR drop. Very friendly when the recipient is getting a link on a PR3 / PR4 page.

Also, a lot of these are casino, mobile phone and adult orientated and absolutely nothing to do with the link page category. This is hindering the effectiveness of the page for people link swapping the way I want to be working.

Lastly, by filling up my directory with these useless swaps it is making it far harder for me to run my monthly checks. This means I'm not maintaining it as well as I should do. This is affecting the PR of the page and probably the site.

How would I feel if it was done back? Well, I've had enough link swaps rejected because my link page hasn't got enough PR and I estimate that 30% of link swaps are no longer reciprocated - the person requesting them have removed their link for some reason, and not told me.

So it seems I'm not the only one. Some of my link pages may also be grey barred - but the person requesting the link exchange can see that when they make the request. And if I never do anything to better the PR of these pages, then they will always be the same. Something needs to be increased!

Am I too aggressive?

2008-05-22T09:00:00.002+01:00

Some people may say that I'm too aggressive when it comes to deleting links. But then I do fairly well accept most link requests and then just delete those that at a later date I decide are not benefiting me.

Should I do this? Well, it's my link directory - I'll do as I like! If the other site's owner is upset that I've deleted their link, then maybe they should have given me a better link in the first place.

OK, my link pages aren't whiter than white and many are not page ranked. But it's got to start somewhere and there's a good chance that those pages that aren't page ranked, but are obviously very popular with people requesting links, could be being hindered by all the spam requests. And if that's the case, then the good sites I'm linking to aren't getting a fair exchange because of the other sites.

So I like to delete links that aren't beneficial or relevant. At least I'm that open to requests! And as I've already mentioned, I only expect pages to be page ranked after they have been through 2 full page rank cycles.

My problem is that some idiots set up links that are absolutely irrelevant. Why try to fill my 'activity holidays' page with links to fake rolex and casino sites? OK, take over that page and they then become relevant to the theme of the site and give me a link back from an uncached page. Is this what the owners of the properly categorised links want, who are giving me links from PR2 pages? I'd much rather have 1 link exchange with a similarly themed site that gives me a link from a PR2 page, then 50 casinos linking to my travel website from grey barred (and usually uncached, or sometimes using rel=nofollow...) links pages.

Yes, it's harsh just deleting the links. I did used to send the owners an email first asking them to put the links back, but very few replied and with many the email just bounced. So now I just delete the link and have done to it. Some of them email me months later asking where their link is and telling me how important it is to have a link from their site. If I'm generous I look at their links page and usually find the reason I've deleted the link. Not one has so far inspired me to put the link back in place.

What to check on existing links

2008-05-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

Every month, at least, you should check ALL of the links you have exchanged. If any aren't playing ball, then contact the site owner, or be like me (a lack of patience) and just delete them.

Why, well why link to a site that's not playing fair and linking to you? It's of no benefit to you. Removing the link teaches them a lesson and means that the number of out links goes down and the space on your links pages goes up - more room for good links.

So what are you watching for?

First and foremost, is the site you are linking to still live and is the page that your link was put on also still live? If the site has gone, certainly delete the link. If the page has gone, then either ask the owner why or delete it. If your link isn't on the page you were expecting to, it's possible that you have moved up or down a page, so check that.

Next I refer to this blog and lock back to see when I've last recorder page rank updates. I give sites the benefit of the doubt, I'm not looking for the most recent update, but the date of the update before that. That would mean that the check in progress looks back not to the 2nd May update, but the 29th February update. Allow a week before that (it takes Google a week to prepare page ranks) and (bear with me) I then expect sites that I've exchanged links with prior ro 22nd February to at least have a page rank 0. My thinking being that they have been included in 2 page rank updates, so should have been noticed by now.

If the page linking to me is grey barred, then I consider deleting my link. It's likely that either there's something wrong with their page structure or site, or they are blocking the link.

Also, and my link building software does this for me, check that the site owner hasn't changed their robots.txt file and hasn't slipped rel=nofollow into your link. If they have, they are up to sly tricks. You could contact them and ask them why, but if they are up to tricks, they will probably do something else.

My moto when it comes to accepting links is simple - "if in doubt, delete it!"

Tey, that's pretty harsh. Why, well where's the point in having 200 links in from non-cached pages? I've just deleted around 250 links from my comparemortgagerates.co.uk website, leaving around 400 active. Why, well most weren't linking back to be for whatever reason, but the rest just weren't giving me anything in return.

Remember that Google's guidelines don't have anything against structured links directories of selected sites - it's free for all links they don't want. As long as there is an element of links being rejected / deleted then it is accepted that you aren't free for all and you shouldn't upset Google and so on.

So I've just made room on my links pages for plenty more new sites. No doubt 30% will quickly remove my link, but I'll remove theirs in return.

What you should be looking for when you accept a link?

2008-05-20T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've already mentioned that there's a grey area about accepting / rejecting links because the offered links are on pages that aren't cached. The page might be cached because of bad practises, or because it is simply too new.

But what else should you be looking for?

Well, if the page is cached or has a page rank (even 0), then that's a good start. It means Google has found it and has access to it.

What it it's not cached / page ranked? Go to the site's home page and look for their resources / links page link. Click it and then probably you will find yourself on the link's directory home page with a list of categories. From here try to click through to the page your link is on.

If you can't find the links page by click from the home page (sometimes you need to go via the sitemap) then search engines aren't going to find it either. And that's why it's not cached. If you can't navigate from home page to links page then I would alsways say no.

As you click through the pages watch the page rank. If suddenly it disappears then go back to the previous page (with page rank) and look at the link. Has it been hidden in any way, e.g. through rel=nofollow in the link.

Also take a look at the site's robots.txt file and make sure that's not blocking the links directory. There are many different tricks here. Basically, have a quick look and if there is any blocking then reject it. Otherwise, give the site the benefit of the doubt and check again in a few weeks, or after the next page rank update.

Other things to look for include rel=nofollow on your link. With a clever bit of coding, actually not that difficult, a person will see an OK link whereas a search engine will see a link blocked by te rel=nofollow, or hidden totally.

How do you detect this? Quite simply, look at the cached version of the page and then view the code. If there is javascript hiding or altering the link or it is any way blocked then you will see it in the code. And if the site is presenting a different version of the page to search engines, now you will spot it.

Do you check reciprocal links?

2008-05-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

Do you check your reciprocal links to ensure they are still reciprocal? You should do?

If you use an automated link building directory software, like I do on many sites, then many people are adding their links to your sites. And I regularily check to see who is actually linking back. I expect, through experience, that around 30% of people requesting links with me will actually remove the link to me within a month or 2!

Now some lost links will be expired sites, mistakes, pages temporarily unavailable, but not 30%! Most are new requests that no longer link to me.

These are people that are trying to get 1 way links in and are assuming that I'm probably not going to be checking to see if they are linking to me. It's a hard job to check across so many sites, but it needs to be done. Else you end up with page after page of links out and hardly any links it.

It's devious of these people, but with decent link building software it's easy enough to do. You just press a button and let the software get on with the job. By removing these people that aren't linking to you, your links directory is cleared up and leaves space for new link exchanges:

1 - this keeps the content on these pages fresh

2 - you aren't linking to unnecessary pages

3 - if keeping to under a limit of links, this prevents you having to create new pages, which means people complain that they are on page 2, which isn't cached, please move me to page 1, which is PR3...

Why I dislike 3-way linking requests

2008-05-18T09:00:00.000+01:00

I mentioned yesterday that I don't like 3-way linking requests well why?

Well people think that it's tricking the search engines and anything you do to purposely trick search engines can get you into trouble with them, they don't like it. It can cause you to be banned, although I don't think that 3-way linking alone will get you banned, yet...

But why do people like it? Well they think that if site A links to site B, site B links to C and C links to A then search engines will think that all 3 have 1 way links. Clever? Not really. If search engines can spot 2 sites that have the same content hidden away on different pages, then I'm sure they can start to spot 3 way links. It must be easy to see that all of the sites that site A links to all point to site C. They might then class these as cheating the system...

What does really annoy me is the quality of 3 way link requests. Usually it's an SEO firm who are building for a client and want a link from your home page to the client's site, in return for a link from a directory they have set up somewhere. Not really an equal exchange. If they are being paid to link build, then they are only really interested in what happens now - that's how they are getting paid. The directory site (site A) has been set up just to hold their links out. If it gets banned from Google, they just create a new directory and start again. This means that your site, site B, isn't gaining from the relationship.

And what heppens when their customer decides that the £50 per month or whatever can be better spent elsewhere? They just delete all links from the directory to start again. Do they tell you they have done this, probably not. This leaves you linking to the customer, with nothing in exchange.

At least with reciprocal linking you are linking to and getting a link from the site that has an interest in getting a better rating. With 3 way linking, the site linking to you doesn't have to matter. It's only there as link bait.

So if you ever email be a 3 way linking request, guess what - I'll be ignoring it. If you are that desperate for 1-way links, then get to work linking another way.

Which links should you accept?

2008-05-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

This is always a tricky question and basically, there's no one answer.

Many people like to only accept links from link pages that are cached in Google. It proves that Google can get to the page and that it's worth having the link. But what about on a new links page, even a new website? It's quite possible that the page won't be on Google yet, but will be in a few days or weeks, maybe even a couple of months. And if you refuse the link because it's not on a cached page and then in a few months the site owner has worked hard at link building and the page has a good page rank, then you have missed out.

So the fact that a page is not cached does not mean don't accept it. But what you can do is to accept the link for now and then review it in a few weeks or months. If then it's still not cached, ask the website owner why and tell them you want the link moving (but make sure first that your own link back page is cached - don't fall for that trick). If they don't answer, or don't comply, then it might be best to remove the link.

There are a load of other tricks that website owners can use to hide links from search engines. I am not suggesting you use any of these - just letting you know how people hide links to avoid being caught. If you do start using these tricks, once other people find out you will use all of your links in.

But why would people be using such devious tricks? Well, it's well supported that one way links are far better than reciprocal links. Some people try this by 3-way linking, more about what I think about that later! So by hiding your outgoing links from the search engines, the search engines will think you don't have pages of outgoing links and that all incoming links are one way. Your link popularity shoots up and those linking to you get no benefit back.

Most people don't notice and this continues. Then at some point the search engines notice this false oneway linking and see that you are hiding content. This can result in being banned from the search engines!

Can't see the wood for the trees?

2008-05-16T10:41:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I feel as though customers allow their attention to detail to run away with them too much and they can't see the wood for the trees. There's a coupld of customers' sites that are built and ready to go live, but in each case something is stopping them that's just too much attention to detail.

In the first case, the site is wonderful, works well and has had the stock loaded to it. It's published and ready to sell, apart from one missing essential - a home page. The home page isn't there - so anyone typing in the URL assumes there's not a site there. It's a shame when so much effort has gone into the site and the URL is being advertised.

Why isn't the home page 'ready'. Well, she gave us a logo to use and basically just want's this large graphic banged slap in the middle of the screen. Without checking, it's 500 pixels wide by probably 400 high. So it fills up most of the screen. But she want's it a little bit wider. Not much, just a little. So she's gone back to the original graphic artist. When she extended it and I published it, the customer didn't like the feel. So it's back to the drawing board. All for the sake of a few pixels. The graphic looks fine and I'd be happy to be a customer of the site.

In the second instance it's just nit-picking over fine details on the screen - those links in the top right should be the same size as those on the left was one of them. They were 8px and 9px Arial font respectively. Then some pictures needed 'balancing' more accurately - they were moved apart by 2 to 3 pixels. And the list of changes goes on.

Why? OK, if they make the site look horrible then yes, get them sorted. But most customers aren't going to notice these problems, and he has the ability to change the pictures anyway - the sizing will affect the spacing.

What is wrong with this? Well, apart from wasting time in development, the sites are on hold, not earning the customers' the income they should be. Another recent customer picked over his site and finally agreed it was finished and then started receiving huge amounts of orders each week. That's that many lost each of the previous weeks.

Does it matter if these details aren't right? I think not. I like to review the style of the site anyway once it's live and make changes if required then. As long as the site looks good and gives the site's customer the feeling that the shop is professional and not going to run off with their money, what does it matter if links are 8px or 9px? If they can be read, they can be read. If the site looks good enough to convince people to buy the products, they will buy them.

Geocoding ain't so easy!

2008-05-15T09:00:00.000+01:00

My redesign of Cottages-4-Holidays hit a stumbling block last night when I tested how accurate the postcode to longitude & latitude file worked. I downloaded the file a few weeks ago, when I first put my ideas together, and was really excited about what I'd found.

But when I tested it, none of the properties I expected to see where there. I'd test loaded a popular tourist attraction and looked at when properties I was claiming were close by. I checked these against the list that mentioned the place in the advert and they weren't included. Then I looked at where the properties were - and they were well off!

It doesn't affect the main build of the site, I can continue there. But it does affect how quickly I can load up tourist information. The problem is that all longitudes and latitudes were being rounded down to the previous whole number. So -1.988 etc become -1. Given at the same time 52.898 or whatever became 52, that was appearing as a fiar movement across the country.

The cottages themselves have geocoding supplied by the merchant, so I will trust them. But my own geocoding needs looking at. I have basically 2 choices:

First - the quickest choice is to again guess the geocoding based on the postcode - look for cottages on the database with similar postcodes and assume the same geocoding holds true. Probably a lot less effort, but not as accurate and what when there's no property with a matching postcode?

Second - every time I find somewhere to add, which will be quite a lot at first, I need to use a tool to geocode the postcode. Much more accurate, but it's adding time to the process and that will mean that in the end I get fed up quicker!

I suppose if the stats show that the site is starting to work again then I'll find the time and energy to put into lots of properly geocoded tourist attractions. But I was going to write an admin function to load new ones and get my wife to give me a hand! She'll just have to learn how to geocode as well!

Cracking the XML

2008-05-14T10:12:00.004+01:00

After a lot of struggling I finally got the XML feed working and the first 2 directory pages, linking to 9 merchant pages are up! I started on the 2 smallest categories I could find and even they took a while - and I'm not even 10% of the way through the list of merchants! It should get quicker as I work through them, I was still ironing out problems and smoothing the system into place at first.

So I've created an XML based feed for Mortgage Providers and Car Breakdown Providers. I suppose that by adding 1 new section a week, or maybe say a handful of merchants each week, then that's probably best as far as the search engines are concerned.

If I go full out to get all of the merchants up it would be a good sized directory structure, but there might be more appeal to the search engines if I can build it steadily. That way, every time they return to the site there are new pages to uncover. It's giving a more maintained look to the site. And along with the merchants updating their XML feeds, this will provide a series of pages on which there are regular updates.

Hopefully, this area will be wonderful bait to the search engines and will start driving in more traffic to the site, and maybe even a few more affiliate commissions. It wouldn't take many affiliate commissions for me to be really happy. Some of them pay really well and just 1 payment would out a huge smile on my face!

I did decide last week, aside from this area of work, that to get traffic back to what it was on CompareMortgageRates I probably needed to start adding new content pages weekly. Well, whilst I work out what I'm going to add this is a good starting point! I'm also trying to add 'news' to content pages (as well as the home page) to also keep these pages fresh. Since the site made it's drop through the search engines I've been trying my best to recover it. One day I will, but the traffic has dropped further over the last week, even though it's position on Google searches remained constant. Presumably other search engines have now also lowered it!

XML Feeds - Made to make you work?

2008-05-13T09:00:00.001+01:00

I decided last night to have a play with the OMG XML feed for their editiorials, intending to use it to display merchant information on my mortgage rates website. Basically, starting a financial directory that I can later add to. In the day I'd noticed another site that ranked quite well doing this, but manually updating the displayed information (the offer details were out of date).

Now OMG provide their editorials in 3 formats - javascripts, which I usually use, I-Frame, which I've never tried, and XML, which I'd not tried before from them. I've used XML from other providers plenty of times - other affiliate schemes, news readers etc. So I've got plenty of the basic code about.

The problem with Javascripts and I-Frames is that it doesn't add anything to your webpage as far as the search engines are concerned - to my knowledge, they just ignore these parts of the code. At most, they will actually follow the I-Frame (I have seen that in some of the sites I've built), but they the benefits of the content lay with the provider. There's not lots of pages of text that I can create and add further bits to.

So taking the XML feed in real time seems a good idea. Why not just copy the text?Well, as I mentioned above the site I saw yesterday did this and said that the insurance offer was a 15% discount, whereas it is now 20%. OMG don't like affiliates taking the text alone as out of date offers and rates are displayed. And I don't want to create a large nightmare for myself of continually having to update text - it's bad enough when they don't update the dynamically served content and email me to complain (you know who you are if you are reading this!!!).

So last night I started to build into my standard code the OMG feed. It looked as though it would be easy - not exaclty a hard layout to use. But I was playing with it for hours as it just wasn't working. 'ROOT' was appearing at the end of the text - it's actually from the closing tag (<\ROOT>) and control characters were appearing where they shouldn't be - something like 
 instead of carriage returns. I thought it should be simple, change 
 to <br>. But it just didn't work. I could remove the & on it's own and the #, but the string just wouldn't go.

Then when I looked at the output in notepad it appeared that the text was full of non-printable characters. Between every displayed character appeared a space in notepad, which didn't appear on the screen. Not knowing what these were, made it very difficult to remove them. I suppose some sort of regular expression could have done it - just thought of that now!

What their purpose is and whether it's something I was doing wrong, I just don't know. But something wasn't right. It could be that they are there intentionally to make sure that the text isn't read by the search engines - either to stop them caching text which goes out of date or to prevent problems with Google's duplicate content filter. Either way, it was a pain I was trying to sort for about 4 hours. I had hoped to get the feed going in 30 minutes and spend the rest of the time getting most of the pages up. It wasn't to be.

Would appreciate any more thoughts on this problem and hearing what others have done.

Which Webpages Get Page Rank

2008-05-12T09:00:00.003+01:00

Back to looking at which pages get page rank and which don't inherit anything.

Recently I took on a new customer with an existing site. He was a bit upset that his current webdesigner was going to charge £60 + VAT just to renew the URL (the guy is using the same registrars as me and they charge under £8 plus VAT). He was also shifting his concentration slightly away from scooters and more to motorbikes, so wanted a copy of the website under a different name.

It's an OK looking website so it was just hosting changes, plus I gave him a content management system so that he could change the bikes he had on display - with his previous designer he had to send him the details and once every few months the bikes would be changed. That was another bug-bear!

So I took over the website, created new pages to display the bikes (PHP rather than HTML to access my database) and created a copy of the site, with a different sort order - let's avoid that duplicate content filter.

He's just asked me to make a slight change to the sites, so I was looking around the pages. Most of the pages, including the new ones, are now in at PR0. In fact, both sites have the same distribution of Page Rank.

On both sites the home page is PR0 - not something to be proud of, but then it's not an SEO optimised site - it's a contact point for his magazine adverts.

On both sites all of the bike details pages are also PR0.

The enquiry form, with very little content (just the field names) is PR0 on both sites.

The contact form on both sites, with matching address, phone numbers and email address (word for word the same - both display the one email) are both PR0 - so much for the duplicate content filter...

But the 'company' page - with details about the company and 125 words in the text as grey barred on both sites. Both pages are cached, so it's not that the search engines haven't found them.

The only major difference, and this is because it's a site I've inherited rather than designed, is that the company page is reached only by an image map link, whereas there are text links back to the bike pages, the home page and the enquiry form. There's not even alts / titles within the image map - something I would have done if I'd written the site myself / been asked to optimise it.

But this alone is not stopping the inheritance of page rank as the contact page is also only available through the same image map. And that's got PR0. Depending on how you count it, it's only got around 20 words of text on that page.

So, the company page isn't grey barred (on both versions) because it's only linked through an image map and it's also not grey barred because it's not got enough content - the contact page has less. So what can it be?

The smallest bikes page has around 250 words on it, along with pictures of 4 bikes. There's no links to other pages or anything, you have to phone for details.

So I think it's one, or a combination of:

- Google doesn't like the duplicated information, but is happy when the duplicate information is contact details.

- Google doesn't like the content.

- Google is cleverly detecting which pages could be of interest to people.

I suppose it is the pages that are most likely to be of use to people searching the internet that have page ranks. People aren't likely to be searching for the company history, but might want to contact them after seeing a magazine advert or might be searching for an offer on a bike.

I think a few more investigations are required to see the effect of page rank on other sites I manage.

What does the redesign include?

2008-05-11T09:00:00.002+01:00

Well, for a start the redesigned site is still under development so it's hidden away. So I can't show you it (could get confusing if search engines got hold of a development version!). But here's the features I'm including and why. Then, unless I make excellent progress and get the new pages ready to go live, I'll leave this theme for a bit and look at what I was on before I distracted myself!

First, I'm going from building it on my pc to loading to a database - this means the process is quicker and can conceivably be achieved in around 10 minutes' work - to be proven when I write it!

Second, I'll now be able to identify new properties and highlight them on the home page and other main pages - getting cottages listed quicker.

Third, I'm building (this is going to be a long ongoing process) a database of UK tourist attractions. Each property & town will link to the nearest ones I find. This adds unique content, and people might find the site searching for these attractions.

Next, when the owner has mentioned a tourist attraction in their text that I have a page for, I'll change the description to link to it. Makes the internal linking fuller.

Next, when the owner mentions a town in a description, I'll link to that. Makes the internal linking fuller.

Also, I'll display the nearest properties to the one shown, just in case it's not suitable - it also helps add more content to the page.

Possibly I'll also take a feed of hotels I have access to and include nearest hotels on the page - again, more content and possibly more commissions.

I'm also adding a Google map showing the property - adding more value to the customer. But the map doesn't seem to want to work at present... Works fine, until I try to include it in the code...

I'm also monitoring which pages are hit and linking to them as the most popular etc from the home page - helping customers find the most popular properties; telling me which are the most popular properties and getting the search engines faster links to these properties.

I'm sure there's more, but that gives a flavour of what the redesign is all about.

Benchmarking The Redesign

2008-05-10T09:00:00.001+01:00

How will I know if the redesign of the website is actually of benefit? What would be a benefit - what makes it worth my time redesigning a site that has basically flopped after a once proud time?

In short - income! This is derived from 2 factors - search engine visitors arriving on the site who then either book or click Google adverts.

Now, I've already said that the success of the site varies month on month. January / February are usually the best times of the year for the site. So what's a good way to benchmark the site?

I could look at the current position and compare that, but I wouldn't know if changes, or more to the point the percentage of changes, are being derived from my work.

So the best way forward is to just update one of the 2 sites - the least well performing one, wait for the search engines to pick up on the changes and hope that I see massive swings.

Last month, the second site got just 4,942 page impressions and the first one a mere 992 page impressions. I used to get that per day! The income per site was $170 & $31 from Adsense (I can't mention click through rates / cost per click - Google policies). And between them, they managed 2 failed bookings and 5 confirmed bookings, valued at £90.48 commission for me. So around £200 income in the month. Not fantastic, but it's something.

So that's where we start from. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll start to see the ratio of traffic change from it's current 5:1 to (maybe) the other way around and the incomes improve accordingly.

Tomorrow, what I am doing to achieve this.

Why To Redesign When Website Traffic Tumbles

2008-05-09T09:00:00.002+01:00

So what is the driving force behind me wanting to redesign a website that used to work perfectly well? Simple - it's not working so well now, and I 'blame' the Google duplicate content filter for its demise.

Blame might not be the right word, but you get the drift. So what happened?

Well the first holiday cottages website got loads of traffic, more than the second holiday cottages website one by about 7:1, if my memory is correct. That's when they were both at their peak.

Then they both dropped off and not much happened. With the second being newer, having less traffic and therefore being a lesser risk if anything went wrong, I decided to convert it from html to php and make a few changes along the way. Basically, the intention was to make it quicker to upload (using include files for the standard code which meant 4,000 smaller files to ftp...). But at the same time I added a few small tricks that allowed me to change the descriptions and re-write a lot of them.

I put this in, sat back and waited. Along came the search engines and after a few weeks, onces all of the pages were cached, the traffic increased. In fact last month it was 5 times the first site's traffic, although still not enough!

Confident that was the problem with the second, I did attempt a minor rewrite, but never having the time it was half put in and probably made the site worse.

So a few weeks ago I started again (I've frequently pick up the site after over a week of not working on it...). My idea is to produce a site that doesn't just show the affiliate content but also has plenty of unique content and is internally linked in such a way as to provide a network of information. Hopefully, something the search engines will like and send visitors to, and something visitors will be able to make use of and want to book through...

Why Redesign A Website?

2008-05-08T09:00:00.003+01:00

So I explained yesterday that I have 2 cottages websites, built slightly differently from the same affiliate data feed. The original was getting far more traffic than the second, because of the keywords (presumably) that each targeted. So what happened?

At first, I expected 700 page impressions to one confirmed booking! Yikes, that's a lot, but that's based on the first year or so. Some months are better, some worse. So why is this?

Well, for a start it's difficult to track what's happening as the affiliate scheme doesn't provide tracking so I don't know which of the 2 sites gets each booking. Both are different styles, so one style could work well, the other could be failing. And the success changes throughout the year - as availability changes.

Now a lot of these people will be looking and then realising they are seeing cottages they have looked at elsewhere (other affiliates) or they could be looking and checking availability and finding the accommodation booked. It is frustrating that although holiday makers are wanting to book from the end of the year, the availability doesn't tend to go onto the database until the start of the year. So there's lots of lost enquiries there.

There's also the worry that with that low conversion rate people are seeing the site and thinking 'yuk' - quite possible in the original site, but the second looks much better. And I suppose that there is also the confidence factor - do you really trust the site enough to book?

But the main reason I am redesigning my site is that the traffic has fallen off dramatically recently. I'm certain I know why - more tomorrow...

Redesigning a Website

2008-05-07T16:01:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd take a break from the website marketing and talk through the process I'm currently going through with my Holiday Cottages website. It's my own site, that's been running for almost 3 years, and I'm about to put in a totally new version of the site. It seems a shame not to share what I'm going through and record the frustrations and hopefully successes of the site.

But what is the site and why am I redesigning it?

Well, it started off around 3 years ago - just over a year after I set up my webdesign business. Things were quiet and I was looking for other avenues to supplement the income. It had never been my intention to completely run the business as webdesign - I don't like the eggs in one basket situation.

I'd fallen quickly into affiliate marketing - starting off with the Mortgage Rates website. Now there's another site in need of plenty of TLC! That started as a venture between me and a mortgage broker and I'd accidentally discovered affiliate selling and started trialling banners to supplement the income. 4 months later I discovered Adsense and tried that (very successfully) as well. At the time the site was getting a lot of money spent on it in Adwords, so the income was well received.

Then one day I discovered an affiliate scheme for holiday cottages and decided to give it a go. I was able to take a feed of all of their properties, create almost 4,000 pages of website using Perl and then FTP the site to my hosts.

But it takes ages to load that - every month!

After about 4 months the site had taken off, it was getting reasonable traffic (for a site that only needed me to initiate the monthly rebuild) and was earning £400 per month plus on commissions plus Adsense income.

So I built a second site, hoping that would be as successful, but it got about 15% of the traffic (it was written differently to cover different keywords). But still, the bookings went well for a few months.

Then the traffic dropped off, the original site became grey barred and I was too busy with customer's sites to do much else. Total income between the sites is around £200 per month, which is still a good return for the monthly effort (or lack of effort).

But was was wrong, what could I do and what have I tried? Read on...

Page Rank - Doesn't Always Go As Expected

2008-05-06T09:00:00.003+01:00

I've been waffling a lot about page rank recently and I've noticed that the more I try to work it out, the less I know!

The theory goes that page rank is inherited from the linking in pages. Take a customer's PR5 website, you would expect all of the pages linked to from the home page to be PR4 - some are, some aren't.

There are 2 pages on the site that are only linked to from 1 other page. That other page is grey barred. So what PR do we expect for them? Well only 1 link each from a grey barred page. Experts will tell you they also will be grey barred. Actually, they are both PR3.

Take also the links directory of that site. Every page points to the resources page - which is grey barred. It in turn points to the actual links pages, which are inter linked but not linked to by the rest of the site. The only way to find these pages are by clicking through the grey barred top level page.

So do we expect the whole links directory to be grey barred? Of course. A lot of pages are - but then they are 'new' so that's right. But there are dozens of links pages that are PR3.

The top level page just has the standard text that's on every links page. The welcome, actual directory etc. So remove this duplicate content and it's an empty page. Somehow, Google has decided to jump that page and give the PR straight to the actual directory pages.

It's looking like to get a good PR you need at least a couple of paragraphs of unique content on the page and linking somewhere above the page from a good PR page. If the content is too similar then it gets ignored. Possibly there's something about other information linked to from that page - I'll have to explore more with my mortgages site that started this off and see where it leads me,

Using Page Rank

2008-05-05T09:00:00.002+01:00

So what precisely is page rank used for and what can we learn from this?

Take a search on my business name - Janric. It returns (today) 21,200 results. Not only is my own website listed up there, but also professional directories that I'm listed in, Suduko puzzles (???), another business with the same name in another country and many, many more, including some of my customers' sites where Janric is mentioned.

Even typing Janric Web Design gets almost 5,000 pages - and this page will also be added to that list soon! So, what are the most relevant results to my search?

Well I'm glad to say that in both cases my home page is top. You would hope so in the second case, but when it's just Janric alone, maybe that's not so much to be expected.

Well what has had to happen is that Google has examined the page and links into the pages and seen that Janric is relevant to them. It's used its on page and off page factors to decide to list my site highly, then if there has been any doubt, the PR4 of the home page has put it to the top.

But it's not the highest PR page with the words Janric on it. A customer's site is PR5 and that has Webdesign by Janric on the bottom of every page. And it doesn't appear at all towards the top of the search results. Google has correctly ordered the results. It is interesting to note though that the link text is standalone - not in a paragraph. A customer's site with a lower PR that has webdesign by janric in a copyright statement at the bottom does appear higher up. So a link within a short paragraph is showing more weighting than a link on it's own from a much higher PR page. Makes you wonder if link directories are worth the effort...

But this example shows that page rank alone is not enough to get you listed top on Google - other factors are important. Only when everything else is equal does PR matter.

What is Google Page Rank?

2008-05-04T09:00:00.001+01:00

So just what exactly is Google's page rank? I've previosuly explained it in terms of what the values can mean, but how is it calculated and what is it used for?

Without getting into the full maths, an overview of page rank goes like this. All search engines want to provide the most relevant results to their users. If the results are good, internet users stick with the search engine. They then do more searches and are more likely to be about to click the adds at the side of the results.

Google, and other search engines, try to find which pages are most relevant to your search terms. They can have a quick stab at how relevant the page is based on content, context etc. But when there are hundreds of thousands of results, they will have lots of pages with 'equal' importance. It is at this point that Google use page rank.

This is the official story according to an article I was reading a couple of days ago. But, although it is backed up by the fact that results aren't listed in page rank order, there are exceptions where page rank outweighs the results of the on page factors.

Try the famous 'click here' search and the first result or two don't have either words on them - that's the power of incoming links. So maybe there should be considered to be 3 factors:

1 - the page content
2 - the incoming links pointing to that page
3 - where the above are equal, the page rank

That could explain all of the above and what we see in results. There are many times when I click on the cached version of a page and see a comment that a certain keyword was only found in links pointing to that page, not on the page itself. This impliess that incoming links have a good amount of weight - probably equal to the content itself.

Why, well we'll look more into Page Rank tomorrow to see. I like to keep the posts short, simple and to the point!

Don't be the end of the web

2008-05-03T09:00:00.001+01:00

It has long been said that search engines like pages with internal links - it implies that the page gives an overview, leading to more detailed information. And I've been reviewing my own website in the light of the recent page rank update.

I noticed that on the whole, there's an apparently random scattering of PR3 and grey barred pages, with the home page PR4 - why??? I've also often mentioned customers who complain they are not top of google on a 1 page website.

Well it was interesting when I noticed that the majority of pages that were page ranked had links to other pages in the main content. Not just the menus and other side bars.

What were the exceptions? Well there's a contact page and (OK, very naughty!!!) a landing page. What's special about these to break the rules - well they both display phone numbers - in the content.

I also mentioned yesterday that the portfolio page had gone from grey barred to PR3 in this update. What had I changed?

Well, at the time of the last update it listed 55 - 60 other websites and linked to them. Now, it links to internal pages, each of which points to the customer's website. So this has moved to the theory of giving more detail.

I'm starting to look over other sites of mine and there's a pattern forming - more information as I uncover it! But it looks like the 'perfect page' on Google has plenty of original content and some internal links or contact information in the page content.

Very interesting! Question is - how far does this need to be pushed to work?

Google Page Rank Update

2008-05-02T16:40:00.002+01:00

There appears to have been a page rank update in the last few days, possibly like the February Page Rank Update, it was released for the end of the month.

In previous updates I've been able to look back and see that posts over a certain age have a PR0 within this blog, but that doesn't seem to be the case this time around - all are showing as new (grey barred). My mortgage rates site seems to have stayed the same, whilst my own webdesign site has recovered the 1 page rank it dropped in February, and it's back to PR4.

I would suggest that it's homw pages that have changed, but my portfolio page was grey barred after the February update, but it's recovered to a 3, so that's not the case. Maybe it's more of a case of sandboxing new pages. Strangely, I have a discovered that one page showing a testimonial is PR3, whilst others that are older and younger and all linked to from the same places in the site are grey barred.

Also good news is that this blog has increased from PR3 to PR4. Only 8 months' of posting and not really knowing what I was going to do at the start and it's slowly creeping up. Other blogs of mine haven't had this success.

As I discover other strange details of the page rank update I'll record them here in the usual way.

Are all links directories equal?

2008-05-01T09:00:00.000+01:00

Are all links directories equal? Is it worth getting links on every links directory going or are some worth more than others?

Well, hopefully fairly obviously, some links directory pages are worth more than others. Depending on the tool used there are a lot of variations.

Some people still insist on throwing out links pages with hundreds of links with just the link text, no content. Given that the popularity given to each linked to page is spread between the linked pages, the more links the less popularity you are gaining.

Also, if the page is just links and no text, then this must raise suspicions with search engines. There are also some written in HTML and others with filenames such as links.asp?page=123&theme=456&skip=789 etc. With too many parameters you will loose the search engines. I see no difference between PHP, HTML and ASP pages, in fact some of the links pages that I've seen the best results from getting listed in have been ASP with a single parameter.

So what am I saying? Is it best to review the page and decide whether to exchange? It can be. If you are working on getting a new site listed then you may still be at the point of anything is better than nothing. But later you might be choosy.

Importantly, if you are deciding which tool to use then look and see how good it's links pages are. If it gives bad pages then less people might want to swap with you and the same as the popularity vote out counts for less, it may also count against your site having a poor links software.

Are links pages much good?

2008-04-30T09:00:00.000+01:00

Well, if a natural link is from a content page to a content page, using different link texts then what do we do to get more links?

In reality, a link building program will go for links on pages of mass links and not look at all natural. There are ways around this, but they take far more effort and are less likely to actually get links. For the extra effort and less guarantee of people responding, it is usually seen to be the 'done thing' to join in with link exchanges.

Now as long as these aren't free-for-all, then the search engines will still put a bit of weight into what they find, just not as much as weight as natural links.

Avoid running a free-for-all links exchange at all costs - don't allow whatever scheme you use to accept every request. It's always best to check the requests and only accept the best. How the search engines detect the difference I don't know. But I suppose if there are a lot of spammy link swaps in your directory then they will harm you.

Do directories work? Well, they aren't usually one-way but they do help a little. The time that the links directory on CompareMortgageRates.co.uk jammed and wasn't showing any links (and I wondered why people were saying they couldn't find their links on the pages when I could see them on the database) the page rank of the site did increase.

So links from directories do help, just not as much as 'natural links'. But it's probably proportionally far easier to get directory links than natural links...

What's a ntural link?

2008-04-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

Right, so a link in is a vote for a site, but what else did my example show us?

Well, for a start, 'natural link building' is not necessarily always on topic. Just because it's a hobby blog linking to a first aid site doesn't mean it's any less - it's actually natural. Especially if the recipients see the nice things he's written about them on his blog and then link back to the page saying about his recovery.

Second, link building isn't always from a content page to the home page. The rider wouldn't link to the home page - he links to the page showing the content that is relevant to him.

But the anchor text is is usually relevant to the linked-to site. His link text would probably be 'pictures of my accident' - relevant to a site about first aid. Also, it would be unusual for everyone linking to a content page to use the same text. His friends might link to it as 'Fred's accident pictures' etc.

Lastly, and this is important, if he's writing a blog then the post page is probably only going to have that link and maybe one or two other links on the content page. It's not a page of 50 to 100 links - just the one or two links.

So, assuming that search engines are doing their best to find 'natural links' rather than built links, what would they look like? Well, they would be on pages of only a couple of external links maximum, they would possibly point directly to a content page rather than a home page (but not always) and they would use different link anchor texts.

It's not necessarily true that the links would be one way - it could easily be reciprocated and definately not always within the same topics - off-topic linking is just as relevant as on-topic, maybe more?

Why link building?

2008-04-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

Back to how to optimise your website in order to gain more website traffic. I've covered what you can do to your own pages, but what can you do aside from changes to your website - so called off page optimisation or basically link building?

Well there are various ways to get links in and I'll deal with these in due course. For now were looking just at link building campaigns. But why would you want to?

Take for example someone writing a blog about their hobby of motorcross riding. One weekend they are at an event and take a bad tumble and within seconds the local St John's Ambulance team are attending. They stop the rider from suffocating on his own tongue and save his life before passing him to the local hospital.

The guy recovers and is really thankful to the team that saved his life. Naturally, it's a major event and writes about it in his blog and recognises the efforts the St John's team put in. He finds the branch has a website, maybe with a page of pictures from the day of his accident and finds some pictures of his recovery. So he links to the page.

Now, the search engines sees him linking from his popular blog to this brand new page of pictures. They decide that if he's linking from his blog then the site and page he is linking to must be good. If he has decided it's a good page, then why not save themselves some effort and acknowledge that and also count it as good.

Therefore, links are like voting for the popularity of the site. Get the idea?

ie_archiver, again

2008-04-26T20:25:00.001+01:00

I wrote back in February about how ia archiver had got into a site's admin function and triggered the deletion of the entire database.

Well, it turns out that wasn't the only site affected. Just discovered another site that had the same problem. The other one is in development and it's really hard to get hold of the customer, so we hadn't noticed the problem.

The customer was supposed to call at 11:30 this morning to complete a few details, but as always, he failed to do so. But that didn't stop me having to spend the entire morning rebuilding his site from scratch!

Typical. Because it was in development and not moving when I checked all of the sites it was forgotten about. It's been around that long that the sample site is somewhere different to the rest of the ongoing samples.

You live and learn!

Submitting Website To Search Engines

2008-04-25T09:00:00.000+01:00

Do you think that submitting your site a lot to search engines is going to give your site a boost? Have you ever used the 'add url' form to submit a site to a search engine. Noticed how long it took to respond?

Have you ever seen webdesigners and the likes offering to submit your website to Google & hundreds of other search engines every month. Is it worth it?

Simple answer - Adding your url to a search engine is a waste of time. What's more, do it frequently and it can damage your search engine ranking.

Search engines find new sites themselves well enough if those sites are linked to from other established sites. This way the new sites can appear in a matter of days (but whether they remain listed is another matter...).

If you keep submitting your site via an add url page you are telling the search engine 'No-one links to me and I'm a struggling, unpopular site.' Does a car journey end any quicker when the child in the back keeps asking 'Are we nearly there yet?'

Do you get listed quicker / higher for saying 'I'm unpopular, please list me.'?

Don't do it, but then again I'm not encouraging link spamming. Contact a few site owners that have similar interests and see if they would be happy to link to you in return for you linking back. Get a few links sorted and then you'll get listed.

Sometimes, I wonder...

2008-04-24T09:00:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I wonder just exactly who my sales guy is selling to. Far too often the site grinds to a halt about the time it goes live - we're forever having 'discussions' about whether he's chcasing people enough for payments. And he's constantly on the road chaisng clients.

I tell him he's spending too long with clients, especially given our charges. He says it's the 'personal' touch, but when that involves a dozen 60 - 80 mile round trips to a customer for a £500 site, then the petrol costs are quickly eating away at our profits! Why he can't email or phone some of the time, I still can't fathom.

His reason is that it can take a few visits to persuade people as the the benefits of a site. I always wonder how ethical his sales techniques are - what he's offering, what they think they are getting. But an email I've just read takes the biscuit - not only is he offering that we build the website, but he's also going to the wholesalers to advise what to buy as the guy has no knowledge of the game!

I do worry that he's offering an opinion that websites bring easy cash for their owners. Time will tell.

SEO Doesn't mean spamming

2008-04-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've alredy mentioned that SEO should look at what search engines are trying to achieve, so what else should we consider?

Well writing good code for a start. Inaccessible sites are going to be difficult not only for those with accessibility problems but also for search engines. If your code uses hundreds of nested tables, like some 'website creation tools', then it will be very difficult for the search engines to follow.

So write neat code. Use plenty of CSS and put the CSS style sheets into stand-alone files that the search engines can ignore - this benefits you as the file sizes are smaller. Test what happens when you load a page with the style sheets missing - now you are seeing the site more like the search engines.

And although you should look at what techniques will help you rank higher, don't do too much. Writing a meaningful page that users will get information from will eventually attract the search engines. A page that suddenly appears and is well optimised, or even a site that does that, could be flagged as suspicious to the search engines and never rank well.

Think of the future. Sites that provide what search engines want whilst being optimised well have a far greater long term future than those that spam in some way to fight against what the search engines are doing.

The long term SEO view

2008-04-22T09:00:00.000+01:00

If you can't rely on them, then why should you try to rank highly with search engines? Well for a start, if will probably give yougood amounts of traffic, if only in the short term. And if you are able to do these changes yourself - that's effectively free.

But I mentioned yesterday that search engines change over time. How's it best to cope there? Simply subscribe to blogs like this and dedicated SEO blogs. We'll tell you what, in our opinions, are working well. I've tried a few SEO experiments in the past within this blog and they continue to run.

The aim of SEO should be to work with, not against, search engines. People have tried all sorts of spamming techniques in the past and been caught out. If the website isn't banned, then the technique is at the very least ignored.

So instead look at what search engines are trying to achieve. They are wanting to give their visitors the best possible results. These will be pages that give them the answers they are looking for and maybe somewhere to dig further into as the same time. If I'm researching a new fish for my tank I like to find an overview of that fish. If that page is interesting and informative and links to other sites then I'm likely to follow those links.

If the result is a forum, then I take what I read with a pince of salt, especially when the results link to the poster's own websites. Then I frequently ignore the links.

And this is what Google is starting to do. A link on a well structured content page will carry much more weight than a link on a forum page. Why - because in the first page the link has (probably) been loaded by the site owner after they have found the page interesting. In the second case, it's the owner of the linked-to page that has put the link up, not because it is necessarily good, but because they want more traffic.

This shows just one way that search engines are trying to copy what we as visitors actually experience. By thinking through you can see what is really needed.

SEO - A word of warning

2008-04-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

Whereas it is possible to get a site to the top, or near to the top of search engine listings, a business should never depend on that for its income. It's fine if it's an affiliate site like my mortgages website where it's an added bonus what I earn there, but I have a friend that I work with who depended a lot on his site being on the first page of Google for several major terms.

I know myself what a fall from grace feels like with a website, and although in the time since I've managed to get other sites ranking well, I've just been too busy to really work on that site and get it back.

So why can't you depend on search engines? Well, for a start, they are out of our control and are always trying to get better results. With tricks like improved duplicate content filters, it's getting harder for affiliates to rank near the top. That's just one area that suffers. But if your site is relying heavily on link exchanges and suddenly Google decides to ignore all 2-way links, what's going to happen to your site - it could take months to get it ranking well again, if ever.

If SEO is your business' lifeline then think again. Experiment with some of the other website marketing techniques to see what else works. It only needs your site to be down briefly when Googlebot comes to visit it and you could be dropped completely from the rankings.