Entries Tagged 'SEO & Traffic Generation' ↓

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) and some of the potential I saw in it to get stuff done on the cheap. Well, since that day I’ve been running multiple HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) on the Turk and I’ve been getting some great results.

If you’ve got a blog or any kind of website, chances are you’d like for people to be looking at it, right? Well, one great way to do that currently is to promote it on social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook; the list is seemingly endless. You could spend entire days creating accounts at each of these sites, write a small review of your site and post the link, and in the end you would probably see a small gain in traffic. However, what if you could accomplish all that for 50 cents? Without spending any time on it yourself? Would you do it? I sure would. In fact, I did.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m currently in the process of launching a new webstore sand as such I’ve been trying my best to find ways to promote it. So I created a HIT on Amazon’s web services (Mechanical Turk) asking people to bookmark my site on their favorite social network. My HIT looked something like the following:

Bookmark the URL http://www.digitalframeguy.com

Using one of the following sites:
http://del.icio.us/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.propeller.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://diigo.com/
http://myjeeves.ask.com/
http://www.connectedy.com/index.php
http://www.myvmarks.com/
http://www.bookmarktracker.com/bt/home
http://www.oyax.com/
http://www.jumptags.com/
http://www.mylinkvault.com/
http://buddymarks.com/
http://linkagogo.com/
http://bibsonomy.org/
http://backflip.com/
http://www.mister-wong.com/
http://blinklist.com/
http://furl.net/

Include in the title or description one of the following terms:
digital picture frame(s)
digital photo frame(s)
digital frame(s)
wireless photo frame(s)

You may use either the singular or plural version of the keyword.
Please provide the URL of the bookmark in comments to receive payment for the HIT.
You can complete this HIT up to 5 times if you use a different bookmarking site each time.

So you can see I tried to make things as easy as possible for the turker to complete. Most of these people already have accounts at one or another of the social networks, so all they have to do is login and link to you. I offered 10 cents for these, only because I wanted a bunch in a hurry. 10 cents is actually a decent price for a HIT such as this. For another site, where I was more patient, I only offered 1 cent per bookmark, and I still got good results, though slower. As such, it is important to decide on your budget. It is worth taking the time to figure out if you only want to spend 25 cents promoting your site, or if you can actually afford a full $2.00. The choice is yours.

So I’ve basically given you a blueprint here for one way to get as many hiqh quality backlinks to your site as you want from the social media sites. If you want, you can specify only Digg links, or whatever you value. The great thing about this is the search engines love social media right now, most of the sites have high PR, and you get a link to your site that typically includes the keyword phrase of your choice. All for a few cents.

What’s not to love about that?

EDIT: I just got some article HITs back from Mechanical Turk and two of them were so good that I wanted to award a bonus to the authors. FYI - here’s how to do it. In the Manage HIT interface, where you see their unique ID number, beside the HIT results, click on that number (it is a hyperlink) and a pop down menu will appear. You can then award a bonus of any amount you wish through that link. I just felt bad paying 50 cents for these two great articles, so I doubled it for them.

I know, I’m a big spender. =)

Well this blog was initially intended to focus on internet marketing strategies, and it will continue to do so. However, I’m currently in the middle of launching DigitalFrameGuy.com and as such I find my work life turning to the fascinating subject of SEO. Therefore, you’ll likely see a lot more SEO related posts here in the next little while.

So, since we’re talking about SEO, I wanted to let you know about another magnificient little tool I just discovered. My intention isn’t really to flog every product I can find on this blog, but I do want to make mention of tools that I’ve legitimately found useful so others can benefit. I’ve been getting SEO related sales calls quite a bit lately, and mostly they cost a pretty penny. So I opted to do my own SEO. However, I wanted something to help me with the often odious task of link building and search engine submissions.

Anyways, I came across iBusinessPromoter today, which is a cool bit of software that helps you with the complete SEO process, from ground zero all the way through keyword selection, site optimization, search engine submission, link management, and finally a top 10 ranking on the search engine of your choice - guaranteed. Yes, that’s right. Their guarantee is that if you follow their recommendations for your site, and can’t get a top 10 ranking on Google within one year they’ll give you your money back. That’s a pretty good offer where I come from.

So anyways, I downloaded the free version of the software to check it out. I also discovered that companies like eBay, Lexmark, Canon, etc etc have used this product, which gave it a fair bit of credibility off the bat. So after installation, I setup a few of the options and then ran an optimization test on my site. I was expecting something like what I’d seen from other tools online; however this thing took a good 5 minutes crawling all over the internet, finally spitting out a 40 or so page report for my perusal. It also told me that my site ranked at 87%, and then proceeded to tell me why.

The premise here is that if you want to get into the top 10 for say, “internet marketing tips,” then the software will look at the top 10 listings for that keyword on Google. It will analyze each of the 10 pages for something like 130 different factors, then compare your own site to those 10. The idea is that comparing these 10 sites will give you a range of what Google is looking for to get a high ranking, for each parameter. The report then goes into great detail telling you how you match up to the top 10, where you fall short, where you’re too far over the top (ie my keyword density was too high for some variables), and basically where you need to be.

My next step, after making a couple more tweaks on the optimization front, is to do a wholesale site submission to a bunch of search engines and directories. IBP has about 130 search engines that it can submit to automatically, plus a few hundred more that it gives you an assisted submission. In other words, it will fill out pretty much all the fields, then you get to do the CAPTCHA and hit submit. So its like manual submissions on hyperdrive, times 3. IBP apparently has all the updated specs on all the search engines - I checked ou their update log and there have been regular updates every week for a long time.

After the site submissions comes the link building and management. IBP will identify similar sites to mine, based on the keywords provideded and rankings, and work to help me get inbound links coming from those sites. It helps with both reciprocal links as well as one-way links. You can email webmasters from a standard form inside the software, which is cool. Plus you can now see all your inbound links from one tool, with stats on each one. Talk about link management. Prior to this, my link management involved managing the fact that I needed more links, and walking around in the dark trying to get some. This brings it to a whole new level.

Another thing you can do from inside the software is all kinds of keyword research and manipulation. You can generate keyword lists, then modify them for use in PPC as well as on your site. Take the list over to the search engine ranking tool within the program and run it through to get every keyword’s ranking stats: searches, number of results in Google, KEI, and the top link in Google for that word, along with the PR of that link. It’s pretty cool.

I don’t even know what else this software does, but all I can tell you is that as of right now, it looks like it’s going to be my ticket to SEO happiness. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, feel free to checkout the free version of the iBusinessPromoter software.

If you’ve been following this blog for a little while, you’ll know that early on I decided to do a monthly post on my blog’s traffic. Seeing as this started and continues to be something of an experiment in SEO/free traffic, I figure my progress or lack of it can provide some helpful insight, taken in context with the traffic tactics I’m posting about. (See April stats here)

So here’s May:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 1,291,056 (up from 3,559,160)
Google PR: unranked (I heard somewhere PR gets updated quarterly????)
Technorati Authority: 6
RSS Subscribers: 8 (up from 0)

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 353 (last month I had 297)

Inbound Links
Unfortunately the tool I originally started using at SEOChat now produces meaningless results, so I’ve kind of lost my baseline for inbound links. By some measures I have somewhere around 250 inbound, as best as I can gather. If anyone has a really great inbound links tool I’d love for you to speak up!

Conclusions
My Alexa rank continues to improve, which is nice to watch. I suppose that is good for something. It is important to note that last month, nearly half the traffic I got was from one or two large spikes, while this month, traffic has been a lot more constant, indicating a gradual increase in the base level of the traffic (largest day was only 38 visitors). I’ve been doing my best to optimize every single post for search (I use All-in-One SEO Pack), and it is gratifying to see traffic continue to come in on old posts directly from the search engines.

As an interesting aside, as of today, I’ve now had 900 visitors to my site (yes, exactly as per Google Analytics) from a total of 54 countries.

Well it’s time for my monthly traffic post, in the ongoing spirit of trying to grow this blog and chart its  growth. (See last month here)

Here goes:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 3,559,160 (up from 6,181,254)
Google PR: unranked
Technorati Authority: 5
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 297 (last month I had 143)

Inbound Links
During April I did the 30 Minute Backlinks exercises and boosted my links way up from a hundred or so to over 700, in only a week or so. Now for some reason, everything I try using to measure my inbound links comes back with a 0. I know that isn’t possible, and I’ve tried measuring it manually on Yahoo, so I don’t know what is going on with the applications I’m using.

Woopra
I just got Woopra installed so I’ll be using that for my stats from now on, although I’ll continue to keep Google running as a double check.

Conclusions
My Alexa rank is steadily improving, which is nice to see, though I don’t know how useful it is. I’m still not getting much regular traffic. Most trickles in from comments I leave elsewhere, with the majority coming from a few heavy days with StumbleUpon traffic. I’d like to see my inbound links straightened out, and I wonder when Google PR starts kicking in? Still, overall I got double the visitors this month from last, so that’s good progress.

In affiliate marketing we’re often trying to find the most effective and targeted way possible to drive traffic to a particular offer. I don’t know about you but I know that I don’t just stumble upon the best way to do that the first time I try. I know many affiliate marketers simply link directly to the offer; however this isn’t always possible. With Yahoo for instance, they won’t let you do that, meaning if you want to take advantage of that traffic you need to create your own landing page. So how do we get the best landing page possible?

Let me introduce a cool tool by Google: Website Optimizer. This is a great split testing tool (sometimes called A/B testing) for internet marketers. Google handles all the complicated code and statistical analysis; all you need to do is come up with a few versions of the page you’d like to try, and drop a few lines of code onto each page.

You can access the Website Optimizer via your Google Adwords account. You’ll see it under the Campaign Management tab, on the far right. You don’t need to use it in conjunction with an Adwords campaign: it can be completely separate.

The concept behind split testing is that you take traffic coming to your site and randomly redirect each visitor to a different version of your landing page. This works best if you keep your different versions to a minimum, hence the term A/B testing - two versions. The whole point is to be as scientific about this as possible. If you remember your scientific method, the idea is that you isolate single variables and measure those alone, while measuring your control.

Ideally, we’re talking about using traffic all from the same source. For instance, I’m only split testing one of my landing pages on Yahoo traffic. This means that your visitors are all coming from the same place, so you’re measuring results from a somewhat standard crowd. However, this isn’t by any means a make or break scenario - you can definitely split test pages getting traffic from multiple sources. The software will take care of sharing the traffic equally.

More importantly, when you make changes to your page, make them incrementally. If you come up with two completely different landing pages, one will definitely outperform the other, but you’ll have no idea why. This can be a good approach initially, as you’re trying to get into the right ballpark, but once you’ve got something that’s working fairly well you’ll want to split test on single variables.

For instance, I recently ran a split test on a landing page for a particular product (gotta keep some secrets you know ;). Anyways, let’s just say I get more money for homeowner applicants versus renters. So my theory was why not put a fairly prominent link on the page saying “Homeowners Apply Here” or something to that effect. Try to encourage my primary targets onward to the offer.

So I started with my original page, which has just a standard “Apply Online Today!” text link, and added a “Home Owners Apply Here” text link, then created a graphic from some clipart that also said “Home Owners Apply Here.” So I was testing two things: does a Homeowner link perform better, and does a graphic outperform a text link? Therefore, I ended up with three different versions of my landing page, each with a single difference from the others, all while keeping my control page constant (I’d been running the control page for months and months).

In the test results (below) Combination 1 is the text link, and Combination 2 is the graphic link. Here are the results from the split test I’ve just described. If you click the picture, it will open a larger copy in a new window.

There are quite a few important things you can learn from this little table. First off, Website Optimizer is telling me that my trustworthy landing page that I’ve used for months is converting at 34% (plus or minus 6%). So this is my baseline. The longer a split test runs, the better this confidence interval gets. I happened to quit this test early, because I could see where it was heading and I wasn’t happy forfeiting the traffic for the sake of a statistically significant result.

Next you can see that Combination 2 (graphic link) underperformed my original page, but over performed the text link. I would have to run the test longer to see which one truly worked better, as they are fairly close, however I’ll save that for another time.

So quickly, through the table, you have the estimated conversion rate range, shown in percentages, with confidence levels, as well as in the very cool graphic. This graphic shows you at a glance how well or poorly your split tests are faring. Next is the chance to beat the original. This is a way of showing you what probability each split actually has of beating your original page. The chance to beat all shows the probability of each split being #1 overall. Observed improvement is the improvement or lack of, as compared to the original. Finally, to keep things grounded in reality, the conversions over visitors tells you exactly how many results went into each split test.

Lessons
So what did I learn from this split test? Well first off, I realized afterwards that even though I get paid more per homeowner, I still get paid for renters, so why would I want to alienate them? So singling out the homeowner is perhaps a poor idea, and possibly was contributing to the lower conversion rate. Secondly, although the test didn’t run long enough to be truly statistically significant, at first glance it appears that the graphic link was outperforming the text link. This would be a good place to start with another split test - excluding the home owner part. Third, 34% conversion for a landing page isn’t bad, I guess, but it certainly isn’t stellar. Basically this means that I’m throwing away 66% of my advertising dollars before the visitor even sees the actual offer page. That’s kind of horrendous if you think about it.

As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!

If I can get a landing page that is converting above 65% (the current forerunner) that means that for the same advertising dollars, I now get 30% more people viewing the offer! That is nearly double! Assuming final conversion remains constant, this should more than double my profits.

Here’s a super rough example:
If I currently spend $100 in advertising at $1/click, then 35 visitors make it through to the final offer. Assume I get $150 revenue from the 35 visitors. ($4.28/visitor) = $50 profit.

Now, if I spend the same, but have a better landing page, this means 65 visitors go through. With the same ratio of $4.28 to visitor, that would give me a revenue of $278, or $178 profit!!

So you can see the tremendous value of improving your landing page!

Once I have some solid results from this current test, I’ll post them and discuss what I’ve learned. I might even have a valuable tip for you on how you can improve your page the same way!

Since I have installed Woopra, I have attentively watched visitors come and go, browse around my site etc. One several occasions I gathered up enough courage to actually initiate a chat with someone. Not one of them has ever chatted back.

I got to thinking about this, and I’m not really all that surprised that no one has chatted back. For one thing, perhaps they all had popup blockers and they never even saw the window! Or, how often have you been to a site only to have one of those fake chat windows appear with pre-programmed responses? Or, worse yet, isn’t it just downright plain wierd to be visiting a website and knowing someone is watching you! I mean, talk about big brother.

When I go to initiate a chat, I have am staring at the visitor’s IP address - you might as well be watching their front door - I know what city they are from, I know how they got to my page, and I know what they are reading. Imagine it like this:

“Hello friend from Springfield, Illinois - I know you’ve only been on my site for 3 minutes and 15 seconds since you got here from Digg - but do you want to chat? I just got this new software called Woopra and it lets me do that! It’s cool huh?”

Okay, so I’m not that creepy. But seriously, how would you respond if someone started chatting with you out of the blue? Would you feel like your privacy was being invaded? Would you feel like they were stalking you?

From the blogger’s perspective it is great fun to watch people come and go (In Woopra you can even tag visitors with partictular nicknames!), but real time stats great reduces the anonymity of web surfing. I guess the closest example is back to my BBS days. Logging on then meant they knew what you were up to all the time (their computer would make that great modem sound just to let them know you’d connected, for one), they knew your phone number, and several other things about you.

One thing I know for sure, is that for better or for worse Woopra is going to change the face of web analytics, and quickly. My previous post, Woopra - The Chuck Norris of Site Analytics has become the best viewed post ever on my young blog. Woopra is making waves. Woopra pre-approved invites are even being sold on eBay!

What say you? How do you feel, knowing you’re being watched right now?

You know in the movies when they’ve always has this cool laptop with some program on there that seemingly lets him rule the world? You know, they can access whatever they want, hack into things and do cool-looking stuff. Well the little techno-control-geek in me has always wanted something like that, and I’ve got a built in sucker button for anything that looks remotely close.

Well I just got my very own blogosphere-ruling software. It’s called Woopra.

Woopra is the Chuck Norris of Site Analytics.

Woopra makes Google Analytics look like a old donkey pulling a wooden cart with square wheels.

Woopra is free. I am led to believe it is going to remain free as well.

So you’re asking yourself right now, what in the world could be so cool about blog analytics that elicits Chuck Norris-isms? Here’s a screenshot from the dashboard, and then I’ll explain a bit more.

What you see here is the live dashboard in Woopra. That’s right, I said live. You get to see who your visitors are, right then and there as they are reading your posts, in real time. You see IP, city, country, browser, OS, language, viewed pages, time spent on pages etc. You can tag visitors with nicknames, and you can even initiate chat with them! I tried this just now with a friend and it pops up a chat window in their browser. Very, very cool.

WARNING - If you’re reading this I might randomly start chatting with you!
Please be a good sport! =)

A couple more things about the screenshot above… As you can see at the time it was taken there were 21 people reading my blog, simultaneously. From the graphic under the 21 (to the right) you can see this all happened rather suddenly, and traffic was building at that point. In fact it ended up being about a 20 minute spike of around 45 people in total, nearly all from StumbleUpon. I’d like to know if I somehow made front page or something. So the graphic gives you yet another realtime measure of your traffic volume.

There is a ticker tape that runs along the bottom of the screen, displaying your current, once again, I’ll emphasize current, blog stats. It scrolls along quite happily, just like a stock ticker, giving you the key stats of the day, while also telling you if they are up on the day, or down, and by what percentage.

At the click of a mouse all sort of information is immediately available, and all in a very nice user interface. Popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, outgoing links, downloads, custom events and way more. Woopra even has a full screen mode, which brought out my little Mission Impossible wannabe ideas. It truly is fun to watch a full screen map of the world flickering with hundreds of dots (I’m optimistic) showing the locations of who is on your site, worldwide.

Woopra also has search functionality built into it, so you can search for pretty much any event or thing you can dream of that was recorded. With over 40 different statistics recorded in real time, this should be enough to keep you happy!

How To Install Woopra

Woopra is very easy to install. There is a tiny snippet of code, similar to the Google Analytics code we’re all so familiar with that needs to go into your Wordpress blog. To make it even easier, they have turned this into a plugin. So, install the plugin as you would any other, and configure it with your site ID. Now you need to install the Woopra software on your computer. They currently have beta versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, so no sad faces today!

Because the software runs locally on your computer it is very quick - no more logging in and then waiting for slow servers at Google to generate some report or other. Everything is instantly accessible, which adds to the fun.

The Way of the Future

I can only imagine the ways in which this revolutionary software is going to be used in the future. Webmasters can now respond to traffic spikes in real time. I know there must be many good uses out there, especially from a marketing perspective, to being able to initiate a chat with a visitor viewing a certain page. Plus, the sheer fun of being so in touch with your blog and your audience is much more stimulating, even for the average blogger!

If you’ve got a Wordpress blog - why not sign up at Woopra.com? It’s free!

If you liked this post, please Digg it, or leave a comment!

Recently I’ve come across a few cool SEO oriented plugins for Firefox. Honestly, until recently I naively didn’t even know plugins existed for Firefox, so this was a pleasant surprise, and since then I’ve been trending away from IE7 towards Firefox. Anyways, I thought I would share these three SEO plugins with you as I’ve found them useful.

SearchStatus Plugin

* Google PageRank
* Google Category
* Alexa popularity ranking
* Compete.com ranking
* Alexa incoming links
* Alexa related links
* backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN

SEO For FireFox (seobook.com)

This plugin has a big long list of cool things, including PR, Age, Links, .edu links, .gov links, del.ici.us, Technorati, Alexa, DMOZ, Bloglines, WhoIs, and more.

Rank Checker (seobook.com)

Checks your sites for rankings on user-specified keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can customize this to a certain degree as well. There is a detailed how-to on the page.

In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.

Are you one of those people, like me, that writes a post then changes it 10 times immediately afterwards? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, it is important from an SEO standpoint to choose how you want things to look from the search engine and post with this in mind. Here’s a few tips:

1. Pick a catchy title that will stand out in a crowd of search results. Even if you make it to the first page, if you don’t have a title that elicits interest, nobody will click.

2. Write your title after your post. Perhaps you’re less rabit brained than I tend to be, but many times I’ve sat down to write on a topic and it rabbit-trails into something else. My original title is not really well suited any longer, and needs to be changed. Save yourself the hassle, write the post, then write a title. Students: You don’t write a summary before you write the paper do you? (Don’t answer that).

3. Use a plugin like the All in One SEO pack for Wordpress. It plugs in seamlessly and allows you, right in your post editor, to add meta tags, a meta title, and a 160 character description that will be seen by the search engines. In the description field, try using a portion of one of your more interesting sentences and end with an ellipsis (…) to lead their attention on, into your blog. Having just read the first part of the sentence (if it is interesting), people will naturally want that thought to be completed in their brain, so they’ll click to see what it says.

This is your chance to customize what your search engine entry looks like! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen search results and the “title” is simply a bad list of keywords, and the “description” is basically more of the same. I typically shy away from these results, and go for the ones that look more professional, the ones that are actually coherent! It doesn’t take much effort to stand out sometimes, but it is well worth the few seconds you’ll spend doing it right.