SEO, Traffic

In SEO terms, managing bounce rate is not often talked about, most 'experts' tend to focus on off page optimization that usually involves minimizing reciprocal links and gaining relevant one way links.

For the last couple of weeks I've been taking a look at my stats on this site over the last four years, and a couple of other sites I own that are younger.

What I've been looking for is a way to improve my SERP (Search Engine Result Page) position, or improve earnings from passive sources such as AdSense.

Internal links improve pageviews
The interesting thing I've discovered is that there are several pages on this blog that have a good number of backlinks and have their own unique title, description etc. Read More

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in. Read More

A sitemap for your website is possibly one of the most important things you can add to your site to help with SEO, and getting the maximum number of pages indexed to improve search engine traffic.

If you use Serendipity, Wordpress, Joomla, or any of the popular CMS systems then you probably know that you can install a plugin that creates sitemaps in at least one format that the search engines spiders will read.

The problem is that most only submit your sitemap to Google, which is great, and of course they have the largest market share, but there are other search engines, and some of them will often provide different traffic that you may never get from Google.

Here's why; Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com all index a site differently, for example Yahoo tend to like pages that are quite topical, on this blog I get more traffic about Italian phrases from Yahoo than I ever get from Google, yet hardly ever get SEO traffic from Yahoo which tends to be one of my biggest keywords from Google.

It is worthwhile getting your site indexed by the smaller search engines, I'd even go so far as to say that some of that traffic might convert better, so without further ado, here are the urls you need to use to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=

http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=

To use any of these URLs, simply add the full URL of your sitemap file after the = sign.

A few of my regular readers will know that the other half and I regularly put together HTML templates that we give away for free and promote on Open Designs amongst other places.

This works really well for us, it gives us massive backlinks and improves our Technorati rank, in addition to giving us constant traffic from people who click our designer link to see more themes. We all know building solid backlinks in a fickle blogging world is difficult, this is why I consistently recommend giving something away to get more exposure.

Recently we've had a couple of not so pleasant experiences with clients who wanted custom themes for Wordpress, except they couldn't work out what they wanted and ended up costing us a lot of money. So, we're throwing around the idea of producing attractive looking templates based on 2 or 3 column layouts, and then selling a link in the footer to your site, or if you're an SEO, then to one of your client's sites. Alternatively, we could sell the entire theme with resell rights. Read More

It's been a while since I last covered anything to do with SEO, this is because I got bored talking about it, and that is simply because I believe Google is getting so much better at doing their job of producing SERPs that SEO is actually becoming too hard to do effectively other than for short term gain.

So, with that in mind I want to touch on something I've seen asked around the various forums and blogs I read. How long should your domain name be?

My opinion on this is based on personal experience and differs from a lot of the 'experts', and the debate is about should bloggers or webmasters go for a short snappy domain, or should they go for something longer that contains one of their major keywords in the domain.

I tend to prefer the latter because it makes it a lot easier to guarantee that your keyword is in every url on your site without having to remember to include the keyword in the permalink, but I'd also argue it doesn't really matter an awful lot if you're committed to using keyword rich permalinks. Read More

A couple of weeks ago I started an Entrecard contest with 3500EC in prize moolah. Today the contest ended and I'm happy to announce the the winners. But before I do, how about a quick plug for the contestants.

Contest Whiz entered the competition with a post about the contest, after all that's what Brenda's site is all about. I love her brutal honesty about the success of various contests and for the next one I think I'll be taking some of her advice. If you're interested in using contests to improve your popularity then check out her site for inspiration.

NaijaeCash also entered, this is a site run by a really nice guy from Nigeria who is really up front about what he wants. To make as much money online as he can. His stats are impressive for such a new site and if you want to see how to go about building a popular blog in only a couple of months his is worth taking the time to look at.

One of my favorite sites to visit also entered, and Nicole from Modern Glam even cut my banner up to use in her post which was a really nice touch. The reason Nicole's site is one of my favorites is quite simply she talks about ladies fashion and writes some really interesting posts that often give me the opportunity to be a bloke and cast an opinion. Its rare that a woman owned blog will happily accept the opinion of a guy when it comes to fashion.

Finally, although by no means least, Isles Tech also entered the contest with a really interesting piece that put a bit of personality into my blog. I had no idea I was so interesting, LOL. Isles Tech if you haven't visited before is a site that is a little bit of everything to do with how the web is being used to help people do things and connect with others.

Since I only got 4 contestants, I though I'd add a 4th prize of 250EC just so nobody goes away empty handed. Drumroll please,

1st place: Isles Tech
2nd place: NaijaeCash
3rd place: Modern Glam
4th place: Contest Whiz

Here it is, this is something I've seen other bloggers do and it really seems to work. I'm going to give away 2000EC to the winner of my first Entrecard contest.

Here's what you need to do. Its very simple. Write a minimum 150 word post on your blog about my contest, or my site, or anything to do with my themes etc, you need to link to my site and one of my posts in your post body. So that's two links all up, one to my home page, and another to one of my posts, it can be any post. Your post needs to be permanent, but the incentive is that I'll link to you as well.

The prizes go like this. First prize is 2000EC, second prize is 1000EC, 3rd prize is 500EC and the contest expires 20th May. So basically its a short contest, the winners will get their credits on the 20th or 21st. I'll basically put all contestants names into a hat and my other half will pull three names out.

Simple contest, no unnecessary rules, no vote rigging, no extra chances etc, just write a post, comment here so I know you've entered the contest and may the luckiest person win.

It seems to be the vogue in Entrecard circles to list your top ten droppers, which spreads a little love and gives them a reason to continue visiting and maybe even make a comment or two.

So, without further ado, here are my top droppers for April ranked from most drops to least. My top three get a short blurb, the remaining seven a mention.

1. Modern Glam. Not only is Modern Glam my top dropper, she gets a special mention for having made some really nice relevant comments. She's also active at BlogCatalog so we bump into each other quite a lot. You should check out her jewelry store while you're here.
2. nofaceberg, aka Danny, a New Yorker who writes some stuff, yeah I know hardly a great review but when you read his site you'll agree with me, can be very funny.
3. MamaFlo's Place, a retired and recent convert to the non-smoking world (228 days and 1 hour as I write this). This lady does a bit of travelling and posts piccies of places she's been.
4. CK Marketing
5. Pixelated Thoughts
6. Search Engine Panel
7. Karlonia.com
8. Dot Com Mogul
9. Wooden Fish
10. Reenashwina

Next month I'm going to switch this up a bit and rank droppers by both the number of drops and the number of comments and give each an equal weighting so it will be interesting to see how many of April's droppers stay in the top ten.