Posts Tagged ‘seo’
Richard Hearne from RedCardinal is offering some free consultation again. A while back he offered some tips to the short list of the Irish Blog awards , and now he is offering to help some Irish online businesses, to analyse and optimise at their conversion performance. He’s also offering the help of two great Irish developers, namely James Larkin and Jason Roe, for the programming and graphic parts of the tests. All he asks for in return is that he can use your data in case study. Overall the package is worth €3,000, and has the potential to make your business more profitable in the long run.
If you have an online shop, or sell items online and you want to increase your sales rates, then this will probably be right up your street. Right now Richard is only offering this to 5 Irish companies, so be quick.
Because of the fact that I am never 100% happy with my testing results, I decided to run a new test on some new domains. Last year I posted about the fact that it is pretty easy to get your domain in googles index, but now recently I have seen some changes. For the sake of clarity I will label them domain A and domain B.
Details on Domain A :
- a previously registered .COM domain
- has google analytics code on the page
- has google adsense on the page
- only one page, this page in the google index.
- plain HTML site
- no previous versions of the site listed on www.archive.org
- registered in January 2009
- sitemap not submitted to google
Details on Domain B
- a new .IE domain
- doesn’t have google analytics installed
- doesn’t have google adsense installed.
- multiple pages, 3 in the google index
- wordpress based site
- registered in January 2009
- sitemap not submitted to google
Because domain A is a dropped domain, it is likely that thare are some links to this site. These could be from websites that list dropping domain names, or links to the domain before it dropped. In the past I have seen that google has discounted these, and often won’t list them completely. Google is very good at cleaning the slate for domains when they drop.
In the past getting a dropped domain to be indexed, was harder than getting a new domain to be indexed. Buying old domains, and recycling links was something Blackhat SEOs did in the past, and as expected Google has gotten a smarter over time. So I was suprised when I saw that the site:domainA.com operator on google was showing this domain
And for domain B with zero links, and hasn’t been submitted to search engines, it is indeed baffling why it would start to be listed in the SERPS.
Yahoo & Google Listing Differences
When I compare what yahoo and google lists for these domains, there is also a big difference. Yahoo doesn’t have any listings for either domain, and for all intensive purposes, it doesn’t exist in their eyes, and on the other hand Google is fully aware of these sites, and is listing Domain B for certain keywords. This would lead me to the conclusion that it is something on google’s side, and the only obvious advantage for Google is that I have browsed both sites with Google’s internet browser Google Chrome . After a bit of searching I wasn’t able to find any mention that Gogole Chrome can get your domain listed, but I do know that from their privacy terms it is possible that what you type into the browser is sent back to them. Google Chrome Privacy Info
“When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.”
So this might be yet another way to make sure that your domain gets indexed by google.
One of my pet peaves with WordPress is that you can’t specify all the attributes to links in your blog roll. While it’s possible to add some of the unpopular XFN relationship data to inform people about your relationship to the link, like ::
- if you met the person you are linking to
- it’s a link to a friend or family member
- if you happen to have a crush the person
- or it’s another website you own
While these are nice, they don’t normally serve much purpose for me. The XFN relationships that are of interest me are ::
- rel=”nofollow” : for limiting the flow of pagerank
- rel=”external” : XHTML compliant version of target=”_blank”
So here is a quick tutorial as to how you can add these attributes to your current version of WordPress (done for version 2.7).
How to add nofollow to Wordpress Blog links
Warning:As with all editing of files, you should keep a backup of them before you start to change them. Believe me, it will save some headaches along the way.
Adding the nofollow and external attributes is quick, easy and painless, here are the 3 steps.
- open file /wp-admin/edit-link-form.php
- Go to line line 193 / 194 and find
<tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('identity') ?> </th>
- Above that add
<tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </th>
<td><fieldset><legend class="hidden"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </legend>
<label for="external">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="external" id="external" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'external'); ?> />
<?php _e('external') ?></label>
<label for="nofollow">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="nofollow" id="nofollow" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'nofollow'); ?> />
<?php _e('nofollow') ?></label>
</fieldset></td>
</tr>
Once you have this, go to Links on the side bar, and now you can change existing links or add new links with these attributes. There will now be an extra line in the Link Relationship section of your Links page.
Why use rel=”nofollow”
This is used when you don’t particularly want to endorse a link you are linking too. Normally a link to another page from your website, is seen as a vote for that page. And each page only has a certain ammount of voting power. If you use the rel=”nofollow” no virtual vote will be passed to the link tartget. For more info have a check for “PageRank”.
Example of controlling votes via rel=”nofollow”. If in your blog roll you have 10 links, but 2 of them are to well know services, you can choose to disable your vote to them, and to increase the effectiveness of a link to those other pages.
Why use rel=”external”
In XHTML Strict the link attribute target is not supported. Previoulys target was used as a link attribute to open new pages, break out of frames, by using target=”_blank” , target=”_parent” etc. Now in XHTML you need to use rel=”external” to inform the browser that this should be a new
Next time at BlackDog
Next week I will be discussing on how to edit your wordpress template, to just have your blog roll on your main page of your blog.
Yesterday Damien’s SEO contest came to an end and google has been very nice to my entry mybluejumper.com . The basic rules of the competition were to:
- rank highest for the term [geansai gorm] on google.ie
- domain name had to be new
- .IE domains were not allowed
- no keywords allowed in the domain name
And here are the results:
Hats off to the other guys who but in some great efforts. I counted around 15 entries, all though I am not sure if some of them were created by the same person.
A longer post will be following in a few days hopefully. Where I will be outlining some approaches I took to things (obviously some things I won’t be discussing). As I am a great fan of stats, here are some:
- Overall I had unique visitors 788 to the website.
- The resulted in almost 6, 000 page views.
- The busiest day (besides December 1st) was November 16th where 73 visitors came and looked at my entry.
- 531 people visited via the keyword “geansai gorm”
- strangest keywords were “photosesion dublin” and “gigs in kerry”
- google delivered 601 visitors
- windows live gave 40 visitors
- yahoo sent 20 visitors
- 2 people came via MSN search
- 17 blog posts were created
- google indexed 36 individual pages.
- 232MB of bandwidth was used by visitors
- 7MB of bandwidth was used by googlebot
Daily search positions of the entries can be seen here.
Stay tuned or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.
Today I got a new type of spam. So why not share with the audience ?
Hi,
I noticed that you do great things in SEO field and thought that both of
our companies might have an interesting opportunity.
I represent an offshore outsourcing company which is based in Belarus
(Eastern Europe) and we achieved excellent results (have the
biggest SEO department in the country – 15 people and reached amazing
rankings for tons of highly competitive keywords).
Our pricing model is very attractive for a companies like yours if
ever consider using offshore office. Outsourcing is a proven way of
staying competitive in hard times like that. We provide you with
the full-time dedicated SEO Consultant which works exclusively with
your firm for a fixed rate of $1500-1800 per month. Those are professional
people and have profound level of expertise.
Our customers are in TOP10 for thousands of keywords combined.
Email me back if you are interested to discuss this further.
Sincerely,
Lenny XXXXX
I think this is also the first time I was complimented in SPAM.
Though it might only be the first SEO SPAM to get through the SPAM checkers.
Knowing more about your competition and your market than your competitors is of course advantageous for your business. Sometimes we can come too focused on our own data, looking at our own traffic, stats. and conversions. But what about the competition ? Maybe they are also improving, but at a great rate. Getting your hands on their data can be that little bit more tricky.
Here I will show you some tips on learning about search trends, changes in search patterns and popularity of websites, with a few nice examples. These should be a great way to start to look at your competition.
Search Frequency
The tool of choice is,Google Trends . It allows users to compare trends in search which is very useful to see how search frequency is changing. Here is an example of the difference in the search frequency between blackberry’s two new products (bold and storm) over the last month.
The values presented are relative (and possibly on a logarithmic scale) as opposed to absolute so it is a little difficult to exactly quantify the difference in the searches frequency. But you do see which one is a clear winner. Also Google has the possibility to show the related news frequency, so you can see how hot the topic is, and find out the reason for a specific increase in the number of searches about the topic.
Knowing the search frequency can help when you are running seasonal campaigns. Have a look at the comparison between Christmas and Valentines search traffic. Here you can have a great idea when you should start your PPC campaigns for example.
Website Popularity
The send part of Google Trends is what they called Website Trends. This is really a website popularity tool, which shows an estimate of the traffic going to websites of your choice. As usual it’s always a little bit easier with an example. Here is the comparison between myspace.com and facebook.com .
As you can see there was a cross over in popularity at the end of last year. Facebook is still gaining numbers of visitors, while myspace is starting to decay slightly.
Google trends really comes into it’s own where we can now look at the regions, again looking at myspace and facebook, but this time the data is based on Irish information.
We see that the crossover in terms of traffic happened more around the middle of September 2007. With advertising programs on both Facebook and MySpace, I know which one I would be targeting more and more as a business.
Comparison between Irish Newspaper websites
The whole reason for this study was that I wanted to see what was the most popular online newspaper in Ireland, and to see there has been any changes in the last year. Here is the data for some Irish newspaper websites, and interestingly enough we can see some important events.
First off we can see the rise in the use of the domain irishtimes.com from July 2008, this was due to the Irish Times separating the news from the ireland.com domain. It remains that the Irish Times and the Independent are the top 2 most read Irish newspaper websites, and there seems to be little movement for the others in the field. Also we can see that over all the number of people visiting these websites is increasing.
Give Google Trendsa whirl and let me know if you come up with some interesting trends.