Getting more Visitors and Page Views

I've been helping a friend optimise his software archive site SoftTester. The site is nearly 5 years old and has about 100,000 pages as well as being listed in DMOZ. Over the last couple of years his site had been slowly losing visitors. By June he was down to only a few hundred a day. Needless to say, his income from Adsense had fallen away to almost nothing.

In June, we decided to do some SEO on the site. We mainly concentrated on on-page SEO and improved page titles and descriptions as well as adding good h1 and h2 tags. His site is database-driven, with most of the content coming from PAD files submitted by software authors.

We changed some of the data used to display info as well as shuffling the position of some the displayed items. Whatever we did, it seems to have paid off. Within a couple of weeks, search engines started sending more traffic to the site. In particular traffic from Google began to grow steadily.

As well as on-page optimisation, we set about getting new links to the site. One of the main ways software download sites get links is by reviewing and making awards to listed software packages. Software authors can then use a nice award graphic on their own websites and link back to the archive. The existing graphics were a bit tired, so I encouraged my friend to buy classy new ones and before long he began to get extra links to his site.

After waiting 4 or 5 months, the number of visitors and page views had grown by a factor of nearly 5 and the income from Adsense had grown along with the traffic. Not a bad result for a few hours work spread over a few days.

Different sites, different visitor profiles

I thought I'd make a record of the share of visitors two of my sites get from different search engines. The profiles are very different and not really what I'd expected. the first sets gets over 90% of its traffic from direct addresses/ bookmarks but here are its search engine stats:-

1. Windows Live - 53%
2. Google - 32%
3. Yahoo - 10%
4. AltaVista - 2%
5. Alexa,Google Images,Tiscali,Dogpile,AllTheWeb - 3%

The second site gets less than 5% of visitors from direct traffic. Its search engine stats are:-

1. Google - 77%
2. Yahoo - 10%
3. Unknown - 8%
4. AOL - 2%
5. MSN, Tiscali, Ask Jeeves, Alexa, AltaVista - 3%

The search engine stats are very different between the sites. The second site is my oldest. For both sites Google is very important but I'm surprised to see Windows Live heading up the list for the first site. The first site is quite new - less than 2 months old. In another couple of months I'll see how the search engine stats are looking then.

Tracking performance in SERPS for keywords

A few day ago I was speaking to a friend who was testing out SliQ Submitter for me and providing some useful, constructive feedback. He was wondering what tools I used to check the ranking of my site on Google for different keywords. I don't use anything other than Google searches by hand but I thought I'd look to see if there was anything on the market.

I soon found a tool called WebPosition Gold or WPG for short. This tool allows you to automatically track the performance of sites on Google and show nice graphs of the historical trend. Trouble is that with a bit more reading online, it turns out that Google mentions that use of WPG is against Google's terms of service. the terms specifically name WPG as well as saying that similar tools are also not to be used.

To use WPG you have to a Google API key for their SOAP search API. Google no longer issue such keys and there are stories online saying that WPG users are now finding that WPG gets blocked. The future doesn't look good for WPG.

When I think about, it seems fairly clear that tracking a few keywords is interesting but not necessarily informative anyway. What really matters is traffic to your site and conversion of visitors to sales. You could be performing really well for certain keywords - and improving in performance too - but really you need to measure traffic. Google itself provides a better measurement tool - Google Analytics. If you have the time, Google Analytics can provide valuable data about the performance of your website - traffic figures, how people got to your site (not just SE performance) and where they went went they landed on your site.

Google Pagerank update - Strange results

Two or three days ago Google exported the current Pagerank values to the Google toolbar. I always find this interesting - not because I put a huge amount of faith in a higher Pagerank value, but simply because I take a higher Pagerank value to mean I'm probably doing something right in terms of SEO.

This time round I had some confusing results. On the main SliQTools website, 6 inner pages moved from PR2 to PR3 but one page dropped from PR2 to PR0. The homepage itself remained at PR3 while another page (relatively new) that does really well in SERPS for certain keywords had PR 0. I find it a bit hard to explain how so many pages are PR3 and the homepage is only PR3 and why other pages are PR0 but still do well in SERPs. I guess Pagerank isn't as important as it used to be.

The other confusing aspect about the recent export, is that another of my websites has gained PR2 from PR0. This is hard to explain since it only has links from a forum. Its inner pages are PR1 even though one of them is virtually blank.

I collaborate on another blog with a friend. This blog is still PR0 but he has a new website - registered less than 2 months ago that only has links from the PR0 blog - and the new site has a PR of 1 which is higher than the only external site giving incoming links.

Strange!

6 Things to Consider when Selling Software Products online

If you want to sell a software product online, the obvious route is to sell via your own website. If you want to sell software this way, you need to optimise your website to make it perform well in searches.

There is no easy solution for optimising a website to get good rankings in search engine results. No quick fix or magic trick is possible that will guarantee frequent visitors to a site and convert large percentages of your visitors into paying customers. The task of optimising a website for rankings, visitors and sales is an ongoing story of continual refinement and updates.

To sell a product online, at least 6 factors need to be considered:-

1. Do you have a product that has a reasonable market?
2. Determine how people search for your product or type of product. Do they use Yahoo or Google, what keywords do they look for?
3. Make sure the copy on your website emphasis the most frequently used search terms - plus long tail terms.
4. Make sure the copy on your website emphasis the most frequently used search terms - plus long tail terms.
5. Write the copy for your website to convince customers to buy your product.
6. Images are also important - or at least the names of your images are.

Point 6 can be very important. Google searches images and uses the image filename. Lots of people look for example images of invoices and I get a few hundred hits a month on my website for images of invoices and invoice templates.

Long-tail search terms are very important. For example, on my main website the search terms are invoicing software, invoice software and billing software. I’ve done research and found that these are the main search terms in the US and UK for my type of product. However, these search terms account for only 15% of my visitors. The rest of my visitors come from long tail terms that may only be mentioned once in the whole website. I don’t always deliberately put long tails into the text, I just write text, e.g. in the Support page or the Release History page that simply gives a good variety of words and phrases. I also examine competitor sites to see if they have combinations of phrases that I haven't included. I don't do any keyword stuffing, I just modify an existing phrase to include the long tails.

Due to the way search engines work, the people who find your website will already be interested in your product, or at least in the problem your product helps with. My feeling is that your website should then describe the benefits your specific product offers, i.e. why using your product will make handling security easier, quicker and cheaper for users. Be as specific as possible about the benefits so the visitor can easily understand how they can take advantage of your product.

The other thing to remember is that Google Pagerank isn’t everything. Pagerank doesn’t guarantee a page gets visitors. Monitor your web stats and see if any changes produce a rise in the number of visitors. Make refinements and see what effect they have.

Also consider whether you should rely entirely on search engines to get customers. Are there alternative methods of advertising your software? Can you get resellers for your software in other countries. For my invoicing software, virtual assistants make good resellers as they do invoicing for clients and I add features to make the software more suitable for their use.

Read Sales Strategy for more information.

SERPS outside the UK

While my site does well in SERPs in the UK, it doesn’t do well in other countries, e.g the US.

For some competitive search terms I’m on page 1 on http://www.google.co.uk/ but for the same terms in the US I’m below #500. I can also see that my competitor’s .co.uk sites are in the same position. In fact one site, which always ranks #1 for my main search terms comes in a few places lower than me in the US.

So the question is, what can I do to improve my search results? From the research I’ve done so far on the internet and by asking around, it’s been recommended I do 2 things:

1. Host my sites on a US-based server with a .com domain name.
2. Build US-based backlinks to my site.

I’m not sure I understand the first point. If I post a duplicate of my site on a US-based server won’t this be seen as duplicate content? Doesn’t Google penalise for duplicate content?

On the second point, what’s a US-based backlink? Does this mean I need backlinks from .com sites hosted on US-based servers. I can be polite when asking for a backlink but this seems like a tall order.

Need to think this one through ….