We have made a little site that helps you improve your SEO ranking on your own site! Give it a go! www.metapig.com
I just wanted to share the results gained from using Google new Website Optimizer Tool. I set up an experiment on www.voodoochilli.net
the experiment consisted of a change of graphic, simply increasing the brightness of the register button slightly to make it a more prominent feature to see if more people would register on the site.
The results were quite remarkable, at 108% over the original graphic.
Voodoochilli isn’t about making money, but I can imagine that this tool could be very effective in optimising content for that purpose.
Please note I have blurred some of the results as I don’t want competing sites to have complete access to this data.
What is link bait and where can I get some?
As I am sure you already know, having lots of relevant inbound links to your site can greatly increase the amount of traffic your site receives. Not only do you receive more traffic from the link source itself, but you will also gain a better position in search engines which will in turn increase your organic results. Simply put, link popularity increases Google page rank and other search engines’ ranking factors.
Link baiting is the SEO technique used to encourage other websites to link to you. Below I have listed some of the best ways of doing this:
All of the above named methods have one thing in common – there is incentive for people to link to you: they get something out of it. If you write a truly original article, people are going to use it as a reference or source of information. If you offer a useful online tool it goes without saying people will link to it.
Another important consideration at this point is to make it easy for people to link to you. You could provide easy to use copy and paste code which has your logo or graphic, along with the link and any anchor text. A great place to get links from are online communities and social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, furl and del.icio.us.
The very nature of online communities allows for the exponential growth of the sharing of information, resources and tools.
An easy way to let people bookmark you.
Have a look at the little widget below.
Pretty cool hey?
I have started using this on most of my sites now and have found it very effective. Simply go to addthis.com to download your copy for free. By the way, you might notice that what addthis.com have done is create link bait in the form of a useful little tool. Clever idea, now why didn’t I think of that? It is in the interest of people to use the tool, it encourages traffic for the site owner and the developers have received a ton of traffic in return from such a simple idea.
Be careful who links to you.
Having loads of inbound links is great, but some of them can damage your SEO efforts. Links from disreputable link farms, warez and porn sites can be damaging because search engines such as Google penalise these results. Also sites that copy your content while linking to you can damage results. A good thing to do is use the major search engines to see who is linking to you, and if you don’t like the look of what you see, send them an email and hopefully they will remove it.
What is it? Well apparently search engine companies are focusing more on trust these days than on other quantifying methods such as page rank (PR). Will we one day have a little green Trust Rank bar on our browsers telling us how much people trust a certain website? I hope not, as just with Google Page Rank there are clever seo people who know how to manipulate such figures. Also how do we vote a confidence or trust on a website? Surely people are going to down vote their competitors
I don’t know too much about all this TR stuff, I don’t know if anyone does. But if you do, I would like to hear your views on this issue.
Here is something new I haven’t seen before.
Apparently Google is trying out a new way of key wording images, getting humans to do the hard work! I did a search and eventually found this link. Google seem to have made the process fun by turning it into a competition. What a clever idea!
To allow your site to be key worded you need to log into your Google webmaster tools and choose the Enhanced Image Search option. I imagine it may take some time before any of your images actually get key worded, but if your site is image heavy this may bring in some extra traffic eventually.
The posts I am refereeing to are here and here
The Alexa rank of this site keeps climbing. I am pretty sure its because of blog items like this that are keworded to specifically bring in people that are interested in the Alexa rank, and are likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, which in turn will increase the rank even further.
Although having a rank number associated with a site may see purely academic and of no real importance, some people do measure a sites worth based on this rank. Wikipedia is a classic example. If you try to put your own site onto Wikipedia, one of the factors people use to decide if your site is notable is to look at your Alexa rank.
Recently, one of my blogs inspired another web master who has in turn written about his experience of the Alexa rank and he has linked directly to my site. The very fact that he linked to me made me view his website and go through some pages with the Alexa tool bar turned on. This will have affected his Alexa rank. After writing this, I am going to head over there again and check out what else he has to say, hopefully he will do the same, and we will probably share some of the collective traffic targeted to finding more about Alexa.
To view the blog post I am talking about, click here
As well as all of the other websites that we are commissioned to make (currently about 30 or so, some of which can be viewed here) Voodoochilli Design has four company sites. This little blog site, our new art blog site, the company site itself and Voodoochilli.net. We also have a few other blog sites, but the subject matter isn’t related to art or design in anyway. Voodoochilli.net gets more traffic daily than the others get in a month so it’s nice to share a bit of that traffic with the other sites.
The combined traffic is quite substantial so as a way of easily allowing this sharing, I have created this simple portal page. In time I will add more sites as we create them. The little icon (which probably needs improving) that links to the portal is stored in one place only, so that when it needs to be changed it will be updated across all sites.
Another little trick we do, as do many other web design companies is to place a link at the bottom of sites that we create for a client. If someone views one of our clients sites and likes it, they may be interested in commissioning us. Sadly we can’t do this on every site as some of them are private or we have been sub-commissioned through another design company to develop the site.
Another idea would be to use a 404 page and redirect to the portal, so that if someone mistypes a URL they will get directed. I am not too keen on that idea as I believe it could easily confuse people.
I think it’s very important to have your own projects running on the backburner. This helps you to keep busy and improves your personal self development. The other advantage is that these projects can work for you by generating traffic and showcasing your work.
I would be very interested in other people’s ideas on sharing traffic between sites.
Ever wondered why some sites have “more links from this site” underneath?
Heres a pretty good guess as to what is causing it.
This is a follow up to this post.
Recently the Alexa page rank of this site has climbed significantly. It’s still not in the top 100,000 but it’s a marked improvement. I put it down to the simple fact that people are searching for keywords relating to Alexa Page Rank and these people are more likely to have to tool installed as a method of increasing their own rank. In fact, by writing this it is likely that the page rank will increase further, which reiterates my point that Alexa Page Rank can be cheated.
This is a tricky one and something I have been thinking about for quite some time. Having a high Alexa or Google rank can be a way of trying to quantify a web sites value, which is especially important if you are going to sell it or intend to sell advertising. The problem I have with it is that Alexa and Google rankings can be cheated.
I will give you an example how people do this. Supposing you and ten of your mates all have websites that you visit every day. You could do a deal that you promise to visit each others sites daily with the Alexa toolbar installed. The tool bar will report back to Alexa that there have been more visitors lately and your rank will go up. Because only a small percentage of people actually have to toolbar installed, Alexa have to base the figures that they present based on projections. For example, if only 1% of people use the Alexa toolbar, their final projections must be multiplied by 100. Its quite easy to see how just a few people can make a massive difference to a small websites results. There are even websites popping up now that automate this system for you. You install a bit of software which makes your site visit everyone else’s. In return, you and everyone gets a higher rank, and the software owners siphon off some of the visitors which they then sell for advertising.
Another thing to consider is that site demographics will also affect results. Visitors to websites about Alexa and Google rankings are more likely to be interested in such things and are therefore much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed on their system.
The same is true with Google, but I think things are a little more complex. The Google Page Rank system is based on inbound links which count as a vote in favour of a particular website. If you are lucky enough to already own a few high ranking websites it’s pretty easy to artificially boost a ranking on new site. You could in fact set up a website that has no value at all, and link a dozen or so very highly ranked sites to it which would result in another highly ranked site.
I believe most of these problems get ironed out when a site is truly massive. The top 100 websites in the Alexa rankings are all deservedly placed.
I think the truth of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to quantify a website’s “worth†using mathematics alone. Algorithms employed by the best search engines are extremely advanced but they are no where near perfect.
