Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

I always here about people complaining that their newly developed minisites get no traffic. Well there are a couple of reasons why a minisite built on a domain that had no previous traffic gets no traffic. The main reason is that the domain itself completely sucks, i.e. Schools4You.com is not a great domain to make a minisite on and will require TONS of work to actually get traffic.

link-building

Some things you want to look at before you start developing a minisite on a domain names is to actually look at the domain itself. Look for the potential in search volume of the exact term and related terms. This in return will tell you the potential of what can be built on the site and what people are searching for.

For instance, i recently picked up MiniatureHorse.org. Yeah i know not the best domain in the world but i laughed when i saw it and i had to have it. Anyways by looking at the Google Keyword tool i typed in “Miniature Horse” and it gave me the exact result plus many other related searches. The exact term “Miniature Horse” gave me 14,800 EXACT global searches a month. Not bad, now compare that with “Miniature Horses” at 18,100. You can see where i am going with this. For SEO purposes check out other highly searched terms similar to what you domain is and that is what you should be writing about on the site along with those being your title tags. Judging by what i see and looking at my competition in the SERPS, with this domain name i can dominate the niche by producing a content rich and interactive minisite.

Now what i have said in the previous paragraph is just the foundation for a successful ministe. Its much more than just producing a great looking  and a content rich website. There are a couple things you have to do on a regular basis to get the site in to the eyes of the people looking for it. Just letting things go organic is not the way to go, you do not expect to walk in to the store and find a PS3 in the food isle, you look at signs to get to the electronics section.

First thing you need to look at is link building. Link building is a “sign” to let the search engines know that you are there and you are the authority in the niche of your site. Building up your links on other authority sites is a must. Check out your competitions link building strategies and match then plus going the extra mile. You can easily higher people to do this for you over a period of time or you can do this yourself.

Find similar sites or forums that you can leave comments or give informative posts about the niche your site is in. Make sure you leave a link back to your site to let people know where to find you. This builds trust up with people that frequent those types of sites and plants a seed in peoples minds.

Also do not forget to submit to directories. This allows your site to get crawled by search engines in more than one place. Not a highly effective strategy but gets your site out there in the beginning.

Next thing for link building and the minisite train of excitement is social bookmarking. I can not tell you how much traffic i get on my sites from just social bookmarking alone. Again just like directory submissions they do not help your rankings out much but they get your site out there. They allow other people the opportunity to SEE your site and possibly even bookmark the site themselves.

I think the most important thing besides letting the world know your site is alive is keeping fresh content up and going. I am not talking about RSS feeds but actual unique content that you write yourself or hire someone to do so. This way again you are building trust with the readers and showing the search engines that you are not a one hit wonder. This is what your site will give to people and search engines to feed on.

You do not need to keep your site updated everyday but go in once a week or at the very least and add something new. Make it a destination for people to come and get new information about whats going on in the niche. Along with that add a forum so people can make a place to converse. This in return can give you an idea of what you need on your site to keep the content fresh.

This is just the surface of what needs to be done to make sure you launch your ministie successfully. Check out this post by Darren at Problogger.net. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you get your site in the eyes of readers. I know it has to do with blog posts but the same can be done with minisites.

This morning i was analyzing my stats for YGrab.com and i found something very very interesting. The reason that i was checking the stats was because i had not posted in a couple of days and then i posted a couple posts a couple days in a row. I saw a pattern that was some what shocking that made m eyes open up pretty wide.

What i found was that when you post fresh content or update your website search engines like to send you traffic. Below are 2 screen shots, the first is my visits pattern and the one after that is the organic search pattern.

YGrab.com Visits

YGrab.com Organic Search

As you can see that the patterns are pretty close and correlate to when i post and when i do not. I am not saying that this is the same for every site out there since i have only noticed and tested this with YGrab.com. Though it does make sense that the same big sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and other social type sites come up first for a lot of google results.

I believe that Google thinks that if its fresh, its something people want to read. This may be the reason we see quite a few big blogs out there rank quite high in google for certain terms. Along that same point it may also be the reason we see some minisites drop and rise in rankings over time.

The conclusion is that just because you have a site up, do not think it will stay in the rankings forever. Us this advice and update your minisites from time to time, it may make all the difference in the long run.

The other day i was just casually browsing domaining.com and i came across an article from Michael Berkens over at TheDomains.com. The article is about this blind search test done by an employee over at microsoft. In essence the site allows you to search all three major search engines; Yahoo, Google, and Bing, side by side. The site itself is not glamorous at all and only serves one purpose, to poll results for this study.

I initially went to site thinking that it might be stacked and i would instantly know exactly what each search engine pops out. So proceeded to put in “YGrab” in the search box. Not only to see what comes up in the 3 search engines but as Michael mentions to see what your site ranks side by side with the search engines.

Anyways, i went forward and checked out the search results and inspected them for a couple mins. I thought i had it all figured out so i chose the one that i thought provided the best results for “YGrab”. Guess what i picked, yes BING.COM. I was very very surprised by i would have never guessed. My second choice would have been Google.com, which i almost picked.

What surprised me the most about the results is that Yahoo.com came up with a couple of relevant search results but nothing amazing. Google.com was almost right on besides two results which were not related to my site. Then the shocking thing that i thought was google was actually bing.com.

I must say good job Bing.com, i take my hat off to you. Might do some more research on bing.com in the future but for now google will be the top in my book ! If you want to try this test out for yourself, try it here.

There is one disclaimer on the site:

The system has many flaws that I know about already, the primary one of interest is the lack of localisation. So, all searches are going through the US as US searches. The other deficiency worth noting is that there is much missing from the actual experience of using these search engines eg, image thumbnails, suggestions, refine queries etc.

Here are the first 8 weeks of search data.

I have put together a list of comprehensive and must have domain tools for everyone. Most are free and some are paid but have free versions. Give a couple a try and let me know what you think.

Domain Tools

1. Estibot

This is probably the single best set of domaining tools on the market right now. It really does not get any easier or better when it comes to a combination of finding domains and analyzing domain names. They have everything from the evaluation and metrics of a domain name and its keywords all the way to a domain name extractor.

2. DomainSuperStar.com

They have a GREAT set of tools to find domain names. They offer free and paid versions of their tools. Along with that their tools are extremely confident in finding domain names with ease. Literally it is as easy as putting in a couple keywords.

3. Google Keywords

Now this really is not a “domain tool” but it is a very very good resource when siting keywords for domain names. I always second check keywords with this tool obviously because everything is not perfect. It can also be used to find domain name if used in the right way.

4. DomainTools.com(Whois.sc)

They offer THE BEST whois look up service i have ever seen. They tell you just about everything about a domain name. Along with that they also offer some paid tools that help you in a big when doing domain name research. Go over and check out this expansive arsenal of unique tools.

5. DomainTools.com(SEO Browser)

I wanted to specifically point this out because it is insane about how spot on it is. It even tells you how to improve you SEO ranking on your site. All you have to do is type in the domain you want to look at in the whois look up and it will pop open a SEO Text Browser in the sidebar that you can pop out and use just like a real browser. YGrab.com scores a 99% BTW !

6. Compete.com

This is a stats analyzation tool. Now this does not directly relate to domaining but if you are analyzing your stats or buying a domain with traffic, i have found that this site is pretty much right on. It is a million times better than Alexa.com.

7. DomainPortfolio.us

This really isn’t a tool but it is something that i think everyone should look in to if they are looking to include an online portfolio for the viewing. It is a free portfolio script that is super easy to implement in to any existing site or as a stand alone site.

8. Domize.com

This is a really cool tool that searches domains availability on the fly. Its super faster and allows you to see available domains in the .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us.

9. Namebio.com

I think this is one of the best domain sales reporting tools out there. They offer you pretty much any domain that has sold recently with a comprehensive ajax search tool. Super easy to use and a joy to look at.

10. Archive.org

Ever want to see what a site looked like 5 years ago or simply want to see if a site was ever on a domain name. Well archive.org is the site to check. They keep a cache ever month a site is alive or when it updates. This is very very helpful when trying to monetize a parked or expired domain name. This will tell you what your visitors are looking for.

11. DomainResearchTool.com

This is the all in one tool for you. Though it is paid you can do pretty much all of the things you need right from your desk top and in mass quantities. This is a must have for most serious domainers. This is what they have to say on the site:

Domain Research Tool was created to find domains with type-in visitors, search engine traffic, backlinks, PageRank, Alexa™ rank, whois details and more. It can also auto-appraise domains using user specified formulas, send bulk automated offer e-mails, track your current auctions, monitor important domains, filter incredibly large domain lists and zone files and much, much more. All with full multiple proxy support.

There is the list of great domain tools everyone should be using. If you have any that you would like to add to this list go ahead and leave a comment and i will update the list as people suggest new ones.

This is a very sensitive topic for many people considering that most of the people reading this make little to nothing with their adsense or other ppc program. There are many many factors that can play in to this from the content to browser issues. I am going to talk about ad positions and how the mind of the reader reacts to a website and the most logical places to place adsense ads or any ad for that matter.

You may notice the adsense and ads all around this blog and if you are really nifty you might have noticed that there is not one place that you do not see an ad while scrolling through an article. This is the most important part of ad placement. I don’t mean just shoving ads in where ever you want. There is a science to this and a way to break your layout down to where you are not being intrusive but still putting ads in front of your visitors eyes.

People view a website much different than when they actually read an article or book. You will notice that most people, even yourself, will scan a page to see if you can get the info you want faster or to see if there was anything that catches your eyes. This is a big reason why titles, bold words, and pictures are extremely important to your website, and not just for SEO. The way people view a site is similar to the picture below:

Ad Positions

As you can see this is the most common way someone will view a website, from top left corner to bottom right corner. This is most likely how they will scan through the page and then come back and read or click on something after they have viewed most of the page. If you check out the picture above as a whole you can see that there is an ad in view almost the entire time. After i viewed this picture i actually saw the perfect spot to place another ad without being intrusive. Obviously under the sidebar, the perfect type of ad in this position would be an affiliate banner or paid banner.

You may have noticed that i do not actually put ads in posts themselves. This is a very highly read and seen place but it is intrusive and confusing for most people. Although you want people to click on your ads to leave your site, you also want to provide an inviting environment and provide a place that has useful information. That will give people the impression to come back at a later date, basically converting readers at this point.

You also want to make sure that your adsense or whatever ad network you use blends in with your site. This is a debatable topic because it has worked both ways for people but most will say to make sure it blends in. Also it will make the ads look like another part of your site, thus making people think they are finding something else on your site. That alone is another reason to make sure that your content is good and your site is inviting.

With these tips you should be able to break your layout down and find great places to put ads. Take advantage of your top left corner for sure since this should be your most prominent ad regardless if you use these tips or not. If you need any help with this feel free to contant me and i will help you for free.