Category Archives: SEO & Traffic Generation

Sweet Adwords Plugin for PPC’ers

As an internet marketer living in Canada, probably 90% of my efforts go into marketing in other countries. However, as I’m sure you’re aware, Google likes to serve up local search results based on where you are located. This can sometimes make things tricky, like if I’m trying to analyze my PPC competition in Australia, or the US.

Quite a while ago I came across a site called AdwordsAnywhere, and it let you do a search, then choose which country you wanted to search from. It would then return the results inside a frame.

This was very helpful, if a little cumbersome, but recently I went back to the site and found it didn’t exist any more. I still don’t know what happened to those guys, but it seems as though they’ve disappeared.

Thankfully, that led me on a quest for a replacement, and that replacement is the Google Global Firefox Extension.

It works seamlessly in Firefox, so when you’re searching for something, in the space of about two clicks you can repeat your search in any area of the world. It’s pretty cool.

This is super helpful for any localized SEO work, as well as localized PPC and the like.

Go check it out. It’s free.

Charting My Traffic – December 2008

It seems ironic that I appear to post more often about how much traffic this blog is getting than about much else. However, it was a promise I made to myself back when I started, so I’ve kept it up. Here goes for December:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 752,548 (up from 816,630)
Google PR: 3 (increased from 2)
Technorati Authority: 9 (down from 10), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 18 (up from 14)

The Golden Rule
December 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1044 (Nov. was 1029)
Pageviews: 1293 (1.24 per visit)

Inbound Links
Google: 14 (up from 12)
Yahoo: 597 (down from
742 last month)

Okay, so what to make of this? Well, page rank is up a bit, which is cool. RSS is also up a bit, percentage wise, which is cool. Regarding the links, I’ve started noticing that what they catch varies on a daily basis. On top of that, if I’ve got a link coming from a particular blog from a comment I’ve made, and they’ve got a plugin that displays recent comments on all pages of the blog, within a couple days I could shoot up dozens of links, only to have them drop off once the comment isn’t current anymore.

Charting My Traffic – November 2008

Well about the only thing I’ve done consistently around this place lately is chart the traffic. 

It’s pathetic. I’ve made I think two meaningful posts here in November, and even those weren’t great. If you’re following my blog, I sincerely thank you. I should mention that I’ve started blogging on small business marketing issues on my other site – www.smartfusion.ca. Might want to check in there as well. 

Here goes:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 816,630 (down from 567,990)
Google PR: 2 (same as last month)
Technorati Authority: 10 (down from 11), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 14 (up from 12)

The Golden Rule
November 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1029 (last month I had 1024)
Pageviews: 1321 (1.23 per visit)

Inbound Links
Google: 12 (down from 20)
Yahoo: 742 (Up from 557 last month)

Well, traffic was almost identical to the previous month. I mean, we’re talking like 5 visits off. Strange. Guess that happens. About the only thing that I’ve worked on recently was building links to the site, and wonder of wonders, that has shown some major improvement. 

I picked up Angela’s amazing link package over at the Warrior Forum (it’s like $5 a month and you get 30 amazing links – ridiculously cheap). So I’ve been following through on a bunch of her link suggestions and I guess that is making an impact in the link department. It will be interesting to see how much of an effect that has on page rank, because many of those links come from PR5 and up sources.

Charting My Traffic – October 2008

For anyone new to my blog, I decided right back at the very beginning (March 2008) that each month I would chart my traffic, to see whether there was an increase, etc. I figure since this blog is about marketing, SEO, and all that fun stuff, I might as well show people what sort of results I’m getting from it. 

It should be noted that I don’t work on this a ton; most of the time spent, especially recently, is just in writing blog posts. I haven’t been very active on other blogs (not as much as I would like) and I haven’t done much SEO for it recently either. Nevertheless, it still continues to grow. 

Here’s October. 

 

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 567,990 (up from 700,607)
Google PR: 2 (same as last month)
Technorati Authority: 11 (down from 11), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 12 (up from 10)

The Golden Rule
September 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1014 (last month I had 1115)
Pageviews: 1332 (1.31, up from 1.28 per visit last month)

Inbound Links
Google: 20 (down from 24)
Yahoo: 535+22=557 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com – search engines are slowly consolidating on the www since I took action about 4 months ago towards that goal). Up from 371 total in Sept. 

Okay, so what’s the analysis? 

Traffic is down again. I think I need to find some hot button topics to start posting on again, and do a few minutes of linking for those posts. That has worked wonders in the past. 

Alexa rank has improved significantly; I’m hoping to break the top 500k soon. 

PageRank is steady. I’ve recently learned a few dirty tricks (well, let’s just call them off the beaten path) that are going to get me some links from PR 8-10 sites. I’ll be trying that out this month, and it will be interesting to see how my PR responds to that. 

I *tried* to do a blog contest last month, but I realized that if you’re shouting from down in a hole nobody really hears you. I didn’t really have time to promote it much, and consequently nothing much came of it. 

In other news, I’m considering a facelift for this site. I’m on the hunt for a new theme, something a bit more cheery and modern with nice rounded edges and pretty menus. This one is getting a little tired I think. Feel free to leave your suggestions if you know of any good ones.

Charting My Traffic – September 2008

Ok… here goes once again. It’s the monthly drill. Anyone read this stuff?

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 700,607 (down from 637,161)
Google PR: 2 (same as last month)
Technorati Authority: 14 (up from 12), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 10 (down from 12)

The Golden Rule
September 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1115 (last month I had 1546)
Pageviews: 2085 (1.28 per visit, down from 1.35 per visit last month)

Inbound Links
Google: 24 (up from 7)
Yahoo: 351+20=371 (spread across www.jonathanboettcher.com and jonathanboettcher.com – search engines are slowly consolidating on the www).

Ok, so what’s happening here? Well I think the buzz on the Samsung Instinct is dying off, hence my overall lower numbers. The only real surprise here is that my Google links shot up quite a bit. I guess sometimes it takes a while for them to list things. 

The only thing I’ve really done differently this past month from an SEO perspective is that I signed up for Yahoo and MSN’s webmaster tools, and submitted site maps to both of those. Previously I had only used Google’s. Not sure how much that affects things, though I imagine it is a good thing for them to have the sitemap. I love the fact that WordPress will submit it automatically for me though (XML-Sitemap plugin). Until next month…