SEO, Traffic

Here's an interesting article for those of you who get some value from my MMO articles, I got an email from Seb who has started a couple of websites and hopes to make money from them, and he's given me permission to dissect one of his websites and try to advise him on how to improve sales.

Being the kind of guy I am I'm likely to take a holistic approach to this and look long and hard at his website, and his off page SEO, rather than just issue edicts about Facebook or Twitter and then abandon him. So, here's the website we're looking at - Puppy Potty Training.

From Seb's email I was expecting a small niche site, and I was dreading having to tell him he'd need to redo the site, however I was pleasantly surprised to see he's using Wordpress, though I'm not a huge fan of the template, which seems to be one of those all-in-one jobs with 100 customisations that make it easy, but actually add almost the entire stylesheet into the page code, thus inflating the code to text ratio to unbelievable leves.

Seb is however using the All in one SEO pack which I approve of. But let's get back to the template, most IMmers will tell you that ugly websites convert the best, and if you must make it pretty, then be clever about it and give the reader a nice clean header image, and make it so that all sales links are clearly obvious, perhaps using contrasting colors, or by completely blending the links.

My advice to Seb is to ditch the template he's using and go for something super simple without all the options and much tigher code. There are a bunch of lightweight wordpress themes available so it won't be a problem to find one, but he should get a really nice header image that gives people an immediate sense of what they're going to find when they scroll down the page. It is possible to get a pro designed header for around US$5 from webmaster forums like Netbuilders or Digital Point, but a service I've really started liking a lot is Fiverr.com.

The second thing that really didn't seem to make any sense, is the navbar with links to pages and categories and then the search box. Seb, pick about 5 of your best selling products or categories, and directly link them in the navbar, and include a link back to home as well, and get rid of the search box, it just isn't useful. And move links to your privacy, contact, about the website, terms of service etc into the bottom of the sidebar, or even into the footer links.

The stuff that is above the fold should be your money links. The advantage of doing this is that you make it easy for readers to find your money links, and it gives a little more space at the top of your sidebar for your best converting ad. Put your categories or most popular posts widget below the fold, under your best converting ad.

Since you're using Wordpress you can do a lot more with the site than you currently are. So, first thing, fix the navbar, second, move your best converting ad to the top of your sidebar, get rid of the Addthis.com and freewebsubmission.com link the home page, instead add the SexyBookmarks plugin, it works better and looks more professional, and you're not sending your readers to a third party website.

Also, install the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin so that at the bottom of every post the reader will see links to other posts. Two things happen here, first, the search engines see internal links to other pages in your site, and second some of the readers will click those instead of heading back to the search engines to look for other sites. Higher page views are GOOD. Especially for AdSense, and definitely for ranking purposes.

Righto, let's get to the actual pages. The home page is OK, the running dog cartoon is annoying but some people might like it, you'll know your readers better than me so that is personal preference I guess, however I'm very disappointed that your only money link that I see above the fold is a hoplink to Clickbank. Even your first block of AdSense is below the fold on my MacBook.

The image of the toilet I think is redundant and gives the wrong message, are you selling puppy stuff? A picture of a regular toilet is slightly confusing, and does nothing for increasing sales, in fact I'd replace it with the picture of the puppy using a grate, or even ditch the 468x60 AdSense you've got in the page with an AdSense large rectangle in the spot where the toilet is.

Mixing AdSense and affiliate links can work, but I think you need to think seriously about what people are doing in your website, are they looking for information about how to potty train puppies, or are they looking for poducts? If the answer is information then generally AdSense is going to convert better because it is an impulse click. On the other hand if people are coming to find products then your hoplinks and amazon products are going to convert better.

Likely you don't know the answer to that question yet because I suspect traffic is not high enough to analyse it, but you can make the decision, what would you prefer, AdSense or affiliate commissions?

Ok, lets move on to offpage stuff. Right now I don't see your site ranking for any of the main keywords you seem to be chasing and I can't find any obvious backlinks to your site. 90% of being succesful online is forgetting about your website, and putting all your energy into getting backlinks or building a social community around your website. Without this you'd be very lucky to rank. Sure if your site is 10yrs old it will probably have a lot of authority, but your site isn't.

So, I really can't comment on what you've been doing, or whether it has been effective, simply because I don't see any backlinks pointing to you. Your webmaster tools probably does, but a quick "link:puppy-pottytraining.net" isn't showing any results.

This means you need to look at your site as if it is completely new and forget all about what you've done, and simply work on the basics.

1. you need both keyword rich backlinks, and non-keyword rich backlinks. Get a bunch of social bookmarking sites to link to you, and the easiest way to do this is to spend a few dollars in a webmaster forum for someone in India to bookmark your site on a 100 sites or more. Generally if they bookmark in the top 10-20 sites you'll be fine, 1000 bookmarking sites isn't going to help much.

2. Find other websites to write articles about your website :-)) especially if they are in a related niche. If you can't find any of these, well there are other options, for example you could build several related websites yourself and link them all together, though this is a lot of work, but the benefits can be huge.

3. Get yourself an account at each of the major article submission sites like ezinearticles, goarticles, articledashboard etc. These are all free and will allow you to write articles on almost any subject and place an author resource box at the end of the article, in which you'd link to your own site.

Most people will tell you that you need to write articles related to your website, my own experience is that this is utter rubbish, so if you'd rather write about dating, or forex, go right ahead, article submission doesn't give you a huge boost in the search engines so agonising over the relevance of the backlink is stupid in my opinion.

That should get you started on the way to more traffic and increased sales, and after you've done all of this you'll discover other ways of increasing earnings, or you'll outsource your SEO or content writing. Shoot me a few euros and I might even lend a helping hand ;-)

This is a great debate, and one that gets a lot of discussion in webmaster forums like digital point or netbuilders, and most people seem to come down on the side of one or the other. Essentially the debate is between on page SEO vs off page SEO.

A lot of MFA promoters tell you to create a small 3-5 page site, through some articles up on ezinearticles, add your Adsense code and wait, and in the past this system could be considered very successful, actually it might still be effective if you fly under the radar, but the bigger your site becomes, and the more traffic you get, the more you start to compete with established sites that do a lot more for their ranking.

I'm not going to sit on the fence, I'm going to tell you to do both, and I'm going to tell you why. You can do an experiment to prove how well this works if you have three new websites in the same niche and on different host accounts. Start a blog on each one, and give each blog maybe 5 posts of similar length, all targeting the same keywords. Read More

In a previous local SEO article I talked about using Facebook and Twitter to promote a local business, here in Spain I've found them to be very effective for driving search engine rankings, though not always effective for connecting with genuine customers, often you'll connect more with other business owners.

Connecting with other business owners is a great concept, you never know when one of them will become a referral or a customer, but with respect the Twitter and Facebook, a lot of their users are there to be entertained, so how do you connect with more business minded contacts?

The answer is still in social networking, using ecademy and InterNations, but the services are different, and I should point out if you are promoting an MFA or non-business website these sites may not be appropriate. But my local clients in Spain get a lot of mileage from them for business networking. For pure SEO, another option is to create a profile on Brown Book. Read More

Living in Spain and not speaking the language fluently means I have to be self employed because my regular paying job (sales management) isn't available to me, but traveling and being an Internet Marketer is very compatible. Consequently, a lot of people ask me to consult with them on improving their local business search results.

I always recommend starting with the basics, and that includes Twitter, and Facebook, both of which are amongst the best ranking websites on the net, and if you use them wisely mean your local business could dominate the top 5 or 6 results in the search pages for your main keyword. If you've read my previous article on using Twitter to promote your business you'll find this article fills in a few of the gaps not mentioned in the first.

Twitter
Twitter is great for connecting with people in your local area, and can also be good for SEO if you can keep your tweets short enough that you can also publish your full URL in your tweet. Read More

A recent article I wrote was about backlinks, specifically crafting great anchor text, but now I want to take the entire process forward another step and talk about blog links that work for me.

I love when people comment on my sites, the more comments I get the more I feel like I'm connecting with people and sharing something worthwhile. If you blog on any subject it's good to get comments and boost your ego. Of course I never get as many comments as the a-list bloggers, but I'm not chasing huge traffic like they are so it's understandable.

The second reason I love comments is that they actually increase the amount of content on my page, every person who comments and leaves a paragraph or two gets approved, and their comment increases my page length by another couple of paragraphs. This is why I also try to answer every good comment with a couple of paragraphs myself.

It doesn't take very long to get a 1000 word article converted into a 2500 word page when you include 10 comments, and it doesn't matter if half the comments are yours, why? Because it's more content. The only thing you should try to do is keep your comments on topic. Read More