Who wins in Local Search?
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
Just to clarify local search is when you search for something in a specific area. A good example would be if I was looking for a “Web Design Company” and wanted to find one in “San Diego, CA” I would search “Web Design San Diego”. Now look at these numbers… See anything shocking? Yea me too, Google is ahead of Yahoo! by only .6%! I was shocked when I first saw this simply because I just assumed Google being, well Google would dominate in most areas of search. Look at the numbers and let me know what you think.
My Top 5 PPC (Pay Per Click) Tips
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
I recently met with the heads over at my company to discuss what we can do to get more out of our current PPC campaigns but before meeting with them I came up with a short list of things that I could suggested to them. I’m not any kind of expert on PPC advertising and I only know what ive read and done in the past but here is a list I came up with that I think most beginners can find useful when digging into PPC.
Bid on Specific Keywords - All too often I see ads that are not geared towards a specific keyword which might be great for branding purposes but as far as your ROI it doesn’t do much. Its important to be specific and pick keywords that are relevant to what you are selling so that when someone clicks on you’re ad they go to a page that actually has what the ad says it has. A good example of a good keyphrase would be the “San Diego Web Design”, those keywords are specific to an area (San Diego) and a services (Web Design) and thats why they would be a good choice for a web design company in San Diego.
Don’t Fight for the #1 Spot - Think about it… When you search for a product do you buy from the first site you land on? I highly doubt it, so why would you’re customers? Its important to change up your bid amounts and rank higher for some keywords and lower for others that way you get a good mix. I would suggest running tests on you’re bids and seeing what kind of ROI you get for the top spot versus the lower spots.
Keeping the Relevance - When someone sees an ad for “San Diego Web Design” they expect to go to a site that is in the San Diego area and have a bunch of stuff on Web Design so try and keep the site you are linking to relevant to the keywords. Try and avoid using a generic title and description for all your keywords its much less likely to get someones attention because of the lack of relevance to the search phrase plus using keywords in you’re ads will make them bold.
Seasonal Copy and Sales - When writing you’re ad titles and descriptions try and include specials or seasonal copy that is relevant to “today”. For example if I owned a “San Diego Web Design Company” and we had a “Thanksgiving Special” on hosting I would create an ad that included the special as well as Thanksgiving in it. This will certainly make your ads stands out from the rest and in turn get you more hits.
Don’t dump all your money in AdWords - It is important to branch out and cover all search engines and run tests to see what ones give you the best ROI. Because Google gets the most traffic its keywords tend to be the most expensive as well so why not give Yahoo! and MSN a try and see what they can bring to the table. If you are starting out for the first time with PPC I would suggest to split up your budget evenly between all 3 search engines and use the same keywords and see what one comes thought with the most impressions and conversions.
Keep in mind that with PPC it is vital that you run tests and see what keywords have a good ROI and what ones don’t.
Do you have more things to do in one day then time allows? Polyphasic Sleep might be your solution.
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
First of all this is not for everyone. Polyphasic Sleep is a whole lifestyle change and will most likely interfere with ever aspect of your daily life in some way or another but the rewards can out weight the consequences by a long shot. Let me lay down the definition of it so you can either close your browser in how stupid this sounds or you can keep reading and continue to be open minded. As defined by Wikipedia Polyphasic Sleep is:
(also known as Da Vinci sleep or Uberman sleep) is a sleep pattern intended to reduce sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day.
The biggest problem people encounter is that they over sleep when taking these short naps which ends up throwing off the whole sleep pattern and ends up driving them to quit. As I see it the most important thing is that you have something to do with all of this extra time so why not start that website youve been pushing aside….
I dont know anyone whos ever tryed the Polyphasic Sleep pattern but I do know Beni Arriola use to work for days before sleeping which I thought was awesome. Myabe thats how he knows so much… hmm.
SEO Crossword puzzle.
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
Im not sure how I even came across this website but they have some very useful SEO Tools. Along with the SEO Crossword Puzzle they also have an SEO quiz which I thought was pretty simple but give it a shot and see how you do.
X-Cart and SEO
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
For the past week I have been working on reskining an online shopping cart which is powered by X-Cart and thus far has been coming along pretty well other then the fact that there are so many includes. I am converting the whole shopping cart to a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layout to speed up the load time, be better optimized for the mighty search engines and to allow easier site wide changes. I was surprised to see the stock cart had no hierarchy in the structure of the content as far as H1’s, H2’s etc… I was expecting a little more for my $200 but none the less I will add those simple SEO changes to it. After the design and layout are buttoned up I want to clean up those nasty URL’s and get them at least somewhat SEO friendly. I was thinking do some HTACCESS magic and get some keywords in those URL’s. Anyone got any tricks they care to share?
I began reskinging Oscommerce before switching over to X-Cart and learned real fast that its whole structure was a bit questionable. The load time of the whole store took way too long for any average web user and the simple fact that I had to create my own way of password protecting the admin area made me question its security. I guess I should of have known better then to go open source for something so important…
Verizon Pisses Off Engineer
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
Shawn Hogan posted this and I thought it was awesome so I am reposting it. This is what happens when you piss off a customer who happens to be an engineer.
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Linkbaiting the right audience.
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
Eric Ward wrote a great article on linkbaiting the right audience and how to get the most out of it. If you are not familiar with linkbaiting here is Mr. Ward’s definition of it:
“more or less anything you create anywhere on the web that inspires other people to link to it.”
I wanted to point out some great points he made on getting traffic from sites like Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Reddit, Technorati. These sites can generate a large amount of traffic to your linkbait but will this huge spike in traffic help you or hurt you? In my opinion submitting to most of these sites is usually a waste of time. If you are after getting your post burned then submit it to Digg, they are famous for this. The reason I personally skip submitting to these sites is because even though they can drive a high number of traffic they are rarely the people you are targeting and even if they are in your demographic these are web savvy people that are very unlikely to click on your adsense or affiliate links, assuming that’s why you are driving traffic. I think linkbaiting can be highly successful if done correctly but driving a large amount of traffic also has its downfalls as seen on Eric Ward’s post.
A perfect example of linkbait would be Eric Ward’s post that I linked to. I liked the content so I linked to it, its as simple as that.
25 Signals of a crap website.
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
- Reciprocal link request pages.
- No Privacy policy.
- Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.
- error pages that don’t send 404 headers or send content regardless of the page requested/querystring entered.
- Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
- dead/404ing links.
- High link churn.
- No published contact address, email address or phone number.
- A high bounce rate (surfers clicking back on their browser and selecting another search result).
- Too much duplicate content.
- Whois info for the domain which is the same as other domains previously penalized or banned. (Could also be true of adsense publisher/affiliate ID’s and other identifiable footprints)
- Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams
- Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
- Stagnation (Site never changes)
- excessively long URI’s/URL’s (query strings or folder and file names)
- A high percentage of affiliate links vs regular outbound links.
- No / very few outbound links.
- No / very few inbound links.
- All inbound links are to homepage only
- Outbound links to questionable/spammy/crap sites.
- Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.
- Too many spelling errors.
- Contains unrelated subjects (ex: a site that reviews toys and tries to sell insurance or viagra).
- Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
- MySQL or PHP errors in the pages
Google Analytics Tracking not working…
Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized
I’m not sure if anyone else has experienced this problem in the past or today but when I log into my Google Analytics account I am not showing any tracking for today. Some of the sites I am tracking through Google Analytics have AdSense on them so I figured id log into my adsense account and see if I am getting any conversions or impressions and sure enough I am so I know the sites are getting traffic. I’ve noticed in the past that Analytics usually takes a few hours to record a visit but its now almost 5:00PM Pacific Time and I am not showing a single hit. I wrote to the Analytics team to see what the deal is but I have yet to hear from them. Is anyone experiencing the same thing or have you in the past?
So I recieved an email from the Analytics team and here is what they said:
“Due to occasional system maintenance, you may experience temporary delays or gaps in data. Please rest assured that none of your data has been lost and your data should be populated within 72 hours.”
As long as ive had my Analytics account I’ve never experienced downtime. I guess some of us just take Googles wonderful service for granted.
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