Adwords Content Network

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.

The New Link Building

So just what was this guy doing in yesterday's post that the millionaires and big sites had missed out on? How can a shoe string budget site so well trample sites with thousands, even tens of thousands in marketing budgets? What can we learn for our own sites, like my Compare Mortgage Rates site?

The answer was remarkably simple. I looked through the first couple of pages of links to his site as reported by Google to see what he was doing. I figured that if Google lists these links first, they are the most important links. What I noticed was that there were loads of links to his site from 2 main sources. Neither of them link exchanges:

1) From internet forums. He was posting in discussions, sometimes related sometimes not and in his signature linked directly to his home page.

2) There were lots of blogs (just like this one) pointing to him.

The forums seems easy to do - sign up, make sufficient posts and survive the trial period then continue to post and include your URL in the signature. Start with one or two, as you get the hang of it join more.

The blogs aren't so easy. There were too many for them all to be his doing so what I suspect he's doing there is paying people to mention and link to his site in their posts. As look would have it, I'd already started to investigate this before I saw his links, so I recognised what he was doing.

I've started investigating one such scheme, I'll let you know more tomorrow.

When Is A Link Not A Link?

We've all been sold the benefits of link building and we know full well that if we don’t have any links into a site it won't get listed on the search engines, or at least it won't stay there for long. But how much time and effort do you spend on this and is it really necessary?

SEO companies will tell us it is vital. And as these places are successful, it probably is. There are loads of pros and cons, I'll come back to them in a few weeks.

But a couple of weeks back I was looking at what sites link into my main web design site. Currently I've got around 100 sites live that I've built for customers, all of which should be linking to me.

When I look at Yahoo, there are thousands of links into my site. But Google shows only about 50 pages. And I would expect that Google won't count links in the PR algorithm that it doesn't display.

This was very puzzling so I started looking deeper into this and of the approximately 50 pages linking in, that represented only 13 of my own sites. What's happened to the rest?

So I started looking at the listed pages and the sites that weren't listed as linking. I don't know which is most beneficial (looking at the included or excluded), but this week I'm taking a look at the results and I'm going to start an interesting experiment…

Traffic Monitoring

It is a little more than ironic that in a week when I'm spouting on about how important it is to run accurate monitoring of your website traffic, my own host's system for displaying and reporting traffic goes down totally.

So far, it's around 48 hours and counting since I was able to access my traffic reports. Also ironically, Google adsense reports are showing me that the traffic is really high this week and I'm desperate to know why!

What have I done well that's suddenly bringing in a lot of traffic - but at the same time leads are down compared to last month?

It's that sort of question that you must be able to answer. Long term monitoring of traffic would tell me that when certain keywords are performing well I get a lot of leads, when others perform well I get a lot of adsense. Then I'd know which keywords to push to really increase leads.

Hopefully the reports will be sorted today.

Monitoring Traffic - When it Goes Wrong!

Of course, all of these ideas are great whilst they work!

Looking at my stats for yesterday, it appears that my mine site had 0 visitors, 0 page impressions and 0 search engine activity. Hmmm. Considering how much it made in adsense, not very likely.

Resorting to the old server logs they also agree - absolutely no activity. But Google is showing massive amounts of traffic and very respectable earnings.

This does come at just the wrong time as I've got an advertiser who wanted to know which relevant pages were doing well this week so that his advert could go onto them next week. This is where having multiple ways of checking traffic is a bonus, but it's not usually critical, so not really worth the bother.

But it would be possible to set up the Google adsense to monitor exactly which pages clicks are coming from and this would also show me relevant traffic logs. A quite easy way around the problem of monitoring traffic.

Back to the subject of monitoring traffic tomorrow - hopefully I'll have some logs to look at myself by then!

Why Should You Monitor Site Traffic

I've already looked at How to monitor website traffic, but why? What are the advantages?

Quite simply put, if your website traffic is at a good level now, why should you spend time & money looking at where it's coming from?

Put it another way - if in 6 months time your website traffic has dropped - what are you doing right now to raise that traffic?

That's the key to monitoring website traffic. If it's good now, you want to keep it that way. Run reports, find out which search engines are sending visitors for important keywords and what pages they are being sent to. And record this information.

In the future, if traffic is low or sales are lower, then you can easily look back to what's happening now and compare results. If traffic is the same but sales lower then it could be that you are being found for different keywords. These could be keywords that aren't as important or relevant.

If you have a change log for the site, you can then look back and see what's happened and maybe you can quickly reverse the changes and get the traffic back up again.

Traffic comes in peaks and troughs so it's easy to miss a gradual change in traffic and by the time you have noticed server logs have gone. So record key weeks while you have the chance.

Tomorrow - we'll look at what benefits we can derive from studying traffic.

Monitoring Your Site Traffic

If you are not already monitoring your website traffic, then you really should be! But how can you do this and what do you need to know?

Knowing how many visitors are finding your site is excellent, but what when it drops or spikes? How can you reverse a drop? What can you do to repeat the spike? You need to know how people are finding your site and which pages they are arriving on.

The most simple form of this is just to look at your server logs. A simple log will tell you what search engine people arrived from, the search term and the page they visited. If you don't have huge mounds of traffic, then this is probably sufficient.

If you are a bit more technically involved, then you could right a piece of code to read through the logs and display counts of the above stats. Easy enough, when you know how.

For some of my own sites (those written in PHP) I have a small script that I can drop into the trailer of the page (all of my PHP sites have a trailer file, update the file for that site and every page on the site is updated). This little piece of code examines the referring page and if it's a search engine, then an email is sent to be telling me the page found, search engine and search term. Great for new sites, but more difficult when the sites are getting thousands of hits per day.

In that case you usually have to go to your web host and see what statistic packages they offer. Usually these will be all singing all dancing packages. My own host charges about £12 a site for these, so once the site is earning it can be a worth while investment.

Watching Your Traffic

How closely do you watch the traffic entering your site? I'm sure you have a good idea of how many visitors usually hit your site and the number of orders / sales / commissions, but do you watch for trends on your website? Do you take a look to see what keywords are working for you, what pages visitors are being sent to and if they are getting the information they want on those exact pages?

I admit, I don't do that carefully enough on my main sites. And it's only when the income drops for a few days that I look. By then,it's too late to see what's been working.

Yesterday I was looking at one site and noticed that a misspelling of AllianceandLeicester.co.uk generated a lot of traffic. So I took a look at that page and was surprised that it was a PR1, yet was only linked to from 1 other page on the site, which is a PR0.

Over the next few days I'll take a look at:
- how you could be monitoring your traffic
- why you should be monitoring traffic
- looking at what keywords are working and getting more from them
- learning from your succesful keywords

Come back soon!

Case Matters

If, like me, you are used to working on a Windows environment for hosting your websites, then there's a chance that (like me...) you don't really pay too much attention to the correct case for file names. Why should you - they don't make any difference?

For example, page.html and PaGe.HtMl are both the same on Windows 2003.

But not on Unix!

If you try to access Page.html by typing page.html, it won't work on Unix.

What does that matter to us Windows users - surely it's irrelevant.

I've just had to move a customer's website to a Unix server because he wanted to use a new package on the site and it's not compatible with Windows. I started moving pages over and came across some pages where the case of the links didn't match the actual page names. I corrected the links, reviewed the pages and to my horror noticed the once PR3 pages were suddenly grey barred!

This was easily solved - I just had to change the page names (and revert the links) so that the case matched what Google had cached and immediately the PRs were reinstated.

So this leads me to draw an interesting conclusion. If your website is hosted on Windows and you aren't consistent with the case of page names, then you could have some links to page.html, others to Page.html etc. Well Google is going to see these as 2 separate pages and penalise one for being duplicate content, whilst only giving the other some of the internal linking benefit it should have.

If you are on Windows, make sure that you still follow Unix file naming!

Getting Listed On Google

So just what does it take to get listed on Google and stay there?

You must have something that the search engines want - unique content. I've recently seen a couple of new sites that I've worked on appear on Google then totally vanish. Nothing that I try can get the sites back. But when I looked around the text used wasn't unique.

In one case the text on the site (a single pager) had also been used for a listing in a large directory. Although the directory listing was added after the site went live, the directory had been cached by the search engines long before the customer's site was registered and published.

It seems that the only answer to get the site listed is to get all of the text changed in the directory listing. Doesn't have to be much, so long as it looks different.

The other site that this has happened to slowly fell out of Google's listing. This time it was a blog publishing phishing emails and there's other sites doing exactly the same. The answer there is to add a load of text around the actual email and make sure that there isn't too much repitition (too many similar emails were also being published).

Give the search engines something new and hopefully they will treat you well. Give them what they already display elsewhere and you might find you don't have any traffic.

Link Exchanges

Have you ever spent ages link exchanging for your site and wondered if you really are doing any good? Are those hours, days, weeks or whatever of sending requests, putting up links and removing non-responding sites really worth the effort? Everyone tells us it is, but how can we prove it?

If you are hoping for an answer to the above, then I'm afraid I don't think there is a straight forward answer. I know that sites I've put loads of effort into link exchanging generally get a better PR than those left there to do nothing, but I've also had sites ticking over just on requests received do far better than those I'm actually recruiting for. Then there's the sites that are very similar, but the lower PR site gets more traffic.

Trying to investigate why someone's blog just won't appear in the search engines (read this post for more details) I noticed that all of the links shared a common, apparently harmless, piece of code. It's so common that I bet 99% of the link exchanges about use it - all of my links out do. No-one seems to think that this would prevent Google recognising the link - or is that just denial because it's easier to think that way?

I had a look at links into my own site on Google and not one of them include this potential horror. Therfore, and the reason I'm not saying exactly what piece of code I'm looking at (so that you come back here soon), I've removed it from some links to Kevin's blog. If that now gets listed then I might be onto something.

And that will tell me that 99% of the hard worked for link exchanges weren't worth bothering with.

Adwords - Does it Work?

Many customers come to me asking for more traffic and more importantly, more traffic that will buytheir products. Quite often, especially for new businesses, I suggest Adwords. But then they start on the horror stories they have heard:

- your competitors can click on your adverts
- anyone can display your adverts and click on them to earn money
- the people clicking don't turn into customer
- it's highly expensive

And many more reasons. But what other advertising allows you to be in full control and set up for only a small amount?

I try to reassure my customers that yes, the first 2 points can happen, but I've seen plenty of times when I've had refunds for those very reasons. And if the last 2 excuses are true - is it the system, or your advert?

An important point to note here is affiliate selling. And here I'm not talking about the bulk of affiliates earning small amounts, I'm referring to the super affiliates who are selling their ideas. Have you ever read their stories to find out how they are making the money? Quite often they are running massive Google Adwords campaigns. These campaigns can run into thousands of hits per day generating loads of commissions.

So if they can get it to work - shouldn't we all be able to?

A new customer took up my advice and created an adwords advert. A week later he came back asking what I though of a conversion rate of under 1% (less than 1 in 100 people clicking on the advert bought from him). I told him the truth - it was poor.

So I looked through the server logs to see what keywords he was getting most traffic from and the answer was clear. He was buying expensive generic keywords. Yet his catalogue was tiny. Most of the items people were probably searching for weren't available from him. Over the next few weeks I coached him into using some more specific keywords. These were cheaper to buy and led to a reduction in traffic. But at the same time his conversion rate increased to over 3% (and he was still using some generic keywords). Hopefully these generic keywords will soon be removed as he relies more on those that generate his income.

And that, I think, is the essential element of adwords. Don't go for as much traffic as possible - pick carefully the traffic you want and buy just that. If your products carefully match the advert and the keywords the person is searching for, you will quickly be paying less for your marketing whilst getting more sales. Wouldn't that be wonderful!

Giving Search Engines What They Want

What does a search engine want your site to contain? What do you have to do to get your site high in the search engine rankings?

Much has been written about link spamming, optimising pages etc, but how often do you then need to be changing the pages to keep up with the ever changing search engines?

Maybe, instead of fighting search engines we should look at what they are trying to achieve and work with them.

For a start, they earn their income by displaying relevant adds. Fine if you want to advertise, but what else can we conclude? Simple - surfers are only clicking on the adverts if they are searching on that search engine (let's ignore for now contectual advertising on websites). If the surfer tries a search engine, gets poor results and then goes elsewhere, the first search engine has lost a customer.

Therefore, a search engine has to provide the best possible results for its visitors. Whether that site has the most links in, the most occurrences of the keywords or whatever doesn't matter to the person browsing the site - it's just whether the results are relevant.

And that's what ever search engine tries to achieve - matching as near as perfectly what the person types to the results shown and then providing an interesting an informative site on that subject.

Long term this is what we, as web designers, need to strive for. Over time search engines will refine their algorithms and penalise certain sites. But if your site is a well written site that is informative and relevant to the keywords then it should be hoped that eventually the search engines will pick up on it and list it well.

Working with the search engines, not against them. Reduce spam link building and help them to give people the best possible results. Long term, it should help us all.

Increasing Website Traffic With Pictures

I've already spoken about how useful picture galleries are for increasing website traffic, but how could you use them?

If you can get pictures of your customers - a bar, holiday site, function, club etc - then you can easily take pictures and let your customers know that the pictures will be appearing on your website. Once the pictures appear there they see them and if they like them they tell their friends.

This is excellent marketing. You are keeping existing customers happy and returning to your website whilst they in turn are telling their friends about you. The friends then become customers and their pictures appear on the site.

It's free, easy and fun.

But how do you manage the pictures? The easiest way can be a gallery. Simple, straight forward and easy to manage. Link to it from your home page, maybe even put one or two recent pictures on the home page, and you have your traffic.

A better way can be a blog. Using a reputable blogging system you load text about what happened and also describe the pictures. A sort of diary for your business. The advantage of a blog over a gallery is that it is well organised even when you have lots of pictures and there is also the ability to add a load of text.

To get the best out of a blog, especially if not actually hosted on your site, make sure that you use the blog feed to put text from the 2 or 3 (at least) most recent entries onto the home page. This keeps the home pages updated and fresh, whilst making the pictures easy to find.

You should also always include an email link, whether it is a gallery or a blog. If someone see their picture then you want them to tell people. If there's an 'email a friend' feature, they can just enter the email, hit send and the friend is sent a link to the page.

Lastly, it's also a good idea to add your site name to the picture in some way. This means that if the customer prints out the picture then they also print out the site name. This is then shown to friends and family and a reminder to themselves.

Enjoy!

Increasing Website Traffic

Customer sometimes ask me the question 'What can I do to get more traffic?'? A lot think that as I update their websites for them there's probably little that they can do. But they are very much wrong. I'd like to touch on what can be done today, and maybe give more ideas tomorrow.

One customer, a very early customer in fact, has a nice little site about his Spanish Catfishing Holidays. Right from the start he wanted me to run and maintain a photo gallery and throughout the fishing season he sends me regular updates with new pictures. It doesn't take me long to resize these and add them to his gallery page, something that I do as part of his annual maintenance.

This means that his site has maintained a page rank 3 not just for it's home page but across all main pages. And John has told me that he receives plenty of search engine traffic. In fact, when his friend (and competitor) wanted their site updated a few weeks ago, he recommended that they speak to us.

With this site we didn't make any changes to the style, just to code and tweaked it for search engine optimisation. We then added their own Spanish Catfishing Pictures page, which I hope he'll be providing me plenty of pictures for.

To add new pictures, you don't need to be adding them all individually. Another customer sent us a huge batch of pictures 2 weeks ago for her site so we created a Dog Walker Gallery for her. Rather than include all of the pictures at once, I resized all of them ready for use but the code limits how many it actually displays. This limit increases so that 2 new pictures are included on the page each month. Along with the photograph's description, it means that the dog owners and search engines alike can return to see what is new.

And finally a third way I handled this on a website was with a Picture Framer site that I published not too long ago. He produces frames for anything you can imagine and also sells various postcards of local views that he wanted to show off. So in a similar way to the dog walker website I scanned and prepared all of the pictures, but this time we only show the 'postcard of the month'. The idea was mainly to attract people to return to the website, but it also means that page is regularily updated with a new picture, which should keep the search engines interested as well.

Using pictures is a great way of keeping content fresh. The search engines cannot see the actual picture, but I'm sure that they notice the file names changing. If you include a brief description of the picture then they will definitely notice that.

This means that visitors have something to come back for (holiday makers return to see their picture on the website and to show it to their friends) creating traffic and people emailing links for your website. And this is really what you want. The search engine benefit follows because what you are doing is great for your visitors.