Measuring the competitiveness of keywords

When writing a new website and choosing keywords, it's easy to make the mistake of choosing ones which are far too competitive. For a new website, it will be difficult to rank well for competitive keywords unless you can get some very high quality links from high PR sites.

Competitiveness is a difficult thing to measure and it has to be balanced against the search volume for any particular keywords. It might be worth optimising for competitive keywords if the search volume is very high and you don't mind taking a longer term view of ranking well. Taking the opposite view, it isn't worth optimising for uncompetitive keywords if the search volume is very low.

One way of investigating the competitiveness of keywords is by using Google's own keyword research tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool shows monthly search volumes for keywords together with a rough gauge of the competition for the keywords.

Another rough way of gauging the competition is by using the allintitle: operator when doing a search. Using the allintitle operator makes the SERPS only contain those pages which have the search words in their title. Since a page title is a key SEO factor, the number of results returned is a rough and ready gauge of competitiveness. For example, if you want to measure the competition for web design, do the following search on google.co.uk:

allintitle:web design

This returns 9,800,000 results. Trying:

allintitle:seo

returns 13,800,000 results.

Contrast these numbers with a set of keywords that we can guess are pretty uncompetitive:

allintitle:british vineyards

This returns 639 results, or ...

allintitle:web design worcester

which returns 1050 results.

Of course, the number of pages that include keywords in their title doesn't tell you the full story of how competitive a set of keywords are but it is a start. For one thing, allintitle doesn't tell you how well optimised the pages are, e.g. the first 50 pages in the results might have good links and content and be hard to beat without a lot of work. allintitle though is a useful tool to add to your SEO arsenal.

SliQ 1.5 Released

After a few months development SliQ 1.5 has been released and includes a new recurring invoice feature. The recurring/ automatic invoice feature has been in development for the last 3 months. During this time, feedback from a number of users/ potential users was used to guide the implementation. In line with earlier feature additions, the emphasis has been on making recurring invoices as easy to set up as possible.

With two or three mouse-clicks you can now make SliQ Invoicing automatically raise repeat copies of invoices. All you need is select an invoice and check the Recurring? box in the toolbar.

... then confirm the frequency for raising the invoices ...

This will save loads of time for anyone regularly raising repeat copies of invoices, e.g. website designers charging monthly for SEO or website maintenance.

SliQ 1.5 also includes a bulk printing facility. SliQ now tracks which invoices have been printed and allows the user to print all un-printed invoices with a single menu click. This should greatly speed up the monthly billing process for SliQ's users, especially if most of the user's invoces are automatically raised by SliQ using the recurring invoice feature.

SEO: Doing it professionally

After helping out a few friends and acquaintances with website optimisation, I've been approached by a web designer about doing SEO work for them on an ongoing basis. They would like me to propose a service or set of services I could offer together with a set of prices.

The easiest and cheapest service I could offer is sets of directory submissions. To do these I could use my development version of professional directory submitter, SliQ Submitter Pro. This should allow me to do a hundred or so submissions an hour.

Of course there are a lot of other techniques I could use to do link-building. The more I think about it though, the more I feel a fixed price service won't do the job. SEO is a long-haul activity and needs to be spread over a number of months. Ideally I would spend 6 or so hours a month doing offsite optimisation for a website using directory submissions, articles where appropriate plus other link-building techniques I've become familiar with.

Spreading the SEO work over a few months should give better value and satisfaction to the customer. With a one-off hit at link-building, there won't be time to see any results before the work is completed. It's also likely to be unsuccessful. To do optimisation, you have to be able to monitor the results and make changes over a period of weeks. with newer sites this is especially important as the sites tend to perform well for a period before dropping back.

The other aspect I've got to price up is the on-page optimisation. Do I charge per page? Do I have a minimum charge that makes it worthwhile doing the job in the first place? If I think back to when I was looking for SEO help, I would often get quoted £350 a site or £100 per page. I never felt entirely comfortable with quotes like that since they didn't quantify what work was being done. Now, I've got more experience I can also see that it's pretty hard - or at least less optimal - to optimise a single page on a website.

I'll also have to think through whether I offer any PPC, e.g. Google Adwords advice. My feeling right now is that I shouldn't since I don't think it's a good medium to long term way of getting traffic/ sales, or rather I think that organic SEO will be the most cost-effective after a 6 month to 1 year period.

Software Trial Periods: How long before customers buy?

With the November releases of SliQ Invoicing and Quoting (Standard and MC), I made a change to the format of the product and unlock codes. The idea behind this was to simplify the process for users, making it easier to check if a product code was correct. The new format also makes it easier to generate an unlock code. The new unlock code format is also longer - meaning that people will be less likely to try and type the code in by hand. This should reduce the chances of the unlock code being mistakenly typed. On the advice of a fellow software vendor, I now use the customer’s identity - land and email addresses in the code making it easier to match codes to customers in the future.

I've always wondered how long people use my software before purchasing. People have up to 30 days free use before they need to buy but until now I've had no way of gauging how long people try before buying on average. With the change in the code format, I've been able to tell whether someone download the software before or after the change. Previously, I’d read posts from other shareware authors or marketing people advising that people tend to buy more or less immediately - within hours - if they are going to buy. The longer people leave between trying and buying, the less chance of a purchase. Although not a scientific test, in the three or so weeks since the last release, 90% of purchasers still use the old format code. I'm taking this to mean that, at least with my products, most people take pretty much full advantage of the 30 day trial period.

Of course, I could get worried by purchasers still registering with the old product codes. With the credit crunch I could assume that I’m not getting any new customers and I’m just exhausting the supply of people who downloaded a trial a month ago. However Google Analytics is actually showing an increase in traffic over the past 3 weeks and my download bandwidth has increased too. This means I'm probably getting proportionately more new trial users. The sales haven't dropped off either, which I was kind of expecting for business-related software in the run-up to Christmas.

If all this means that most people take advantage of the trial period then I’m glad. I want people to use the full trial period to make sure they are happy to purchase. Hopefully it reduces the support overhead in the long-term since those people who do buy will be more happy with the features the software provides.

Remote Support Access

For a while, I've been looking for a way of improving support to customers. If a customer is confused by a feature or we can't understand the problem they are trying to describe things can be difficult. The only real way to move forward in such situations is to see what the customer is actually doing on their PC. Site visits are not really possible - for cost reasons if nothing else - so I've been looking for a way of sharing PC desktops remotely over the internet.

Discussions with friends raised a number of possibilities - Webex, Windows Invite a Friend and NetViewer were mentioned. The cheapest options is Windows Invite a Friend - it comes free with Windows XP and Windows Vista. I tried it our on a pair of PCs in our office but found that:

1. You have to explain to the client/ customer how to get the service going and send an invite for support.
2. The help pages linked from XP's help are no longer present on Microsoft's website.

Both of these points make me wary of using Invite a Friend - they wouldn't make SliQTools look professional.

So I took at NetViewer. This seems a reasonable service - the cost is good and the service works well. The support technician sends an invite to the customer, the customer downloads a small client program (linked from the support invite email) and gives access to his PC to the support person.

To see an alternative, I took a look at LogMeIn Rescue. This turned out to be the Rolls-Royce remote support service. It's a really good package, working more smoothly and with a more professional, friendly feel for the technician and customer. The only downside is the cost - 4 times that of NetViewer. Overall though, I think you get what you pay for and LogMeIn Rescue seems like a good choice.

Free Directory Submission Software

It's about 3 months since I made a new release of my free directory submission tool, SliQ Submitter. Since I made the release, I've been busy on other projects. One of those projects is a faster directory submitter that should make the whole submission process much quicker - perhaps as little as 1 or 2 seconds if the directory doesn't have a captcha.

SliQ Submitter was my first attempt at writing directory submission software. Initially I made 3 releases very soon after each other - first with a free web directory list containing 450 directories, quickly followed by 2 more releases until the package listed over 2000 web directories. I initially tested submissions to all the listed directories and was confident that all directories worked and would accept submissions.

Soon after the last release though, I realised that web directories don't stand still. Before long the PR of the web directories changed, with a lot going to PR0. Whether this caused a number to give up I don't know, but quite a few of the 2000 went offline. As the months have passed, a number of the domains expired and a good percentage of the directories switched to paid.

In the last few days, I've rechecked the directories, removing those which are dead or have switched to being paid. Of the original 2250, there are now about 1250 left. As of today though, all of these are free and if a submitted website gets accepted by a good proportion of the 1250 directories, the site should get a good boost in PR and performance in SERPs.

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.

SEO’ing webpages using precise Keywords

A friend of mine has been trying to optimize his webpages. His site is an online shop selling jewellery. On each webpage, he's added a set of links to each product page. These links aid the user in navigating around the site and also attempt to improve SERPs performance as the anchor text for each link includes the keywords for each product page. For example, on one page he's trying to sell some Choker Jewellery, so he made Choker Jewellery the anchor text of the link to the page.

All the links and anchor text are chosen to reinforce the keywords used on the linked page. He's taken things one stage further and dynamically parsed the page description from the backend database and generated the anchor text for the links automatically. This will make it much easier to add product pages in the future and is a good example of using a database to make management of a website easier.

To give the links extra value he's added the navigation near the top of each webpage on the site. This should show google that these links are important. To make the placement of the links useful to visitors he's also added the text “Recent Searches” so the links look like phrases people have used to search for items on my site, but more importantly providing google with an important set of links.

He wasn't sure whether to have these links at the top of the page as they do look odd. However his biggest problem was deciding what keywords to use for his home page. He finally decided on Cheap Jewellery. Having developed several websites in the past and getting little traffic, he was keen to better this time and used the Adwords keyword tool to find keywords with a good expected level of traffic. He then matched the best keywords against the products on his shop site. An example would be Jewelry which is a spelling mistake, but a good keyword from a volume point of view with a good, i.e. low, level of keyword competition. This was a difficult process but he found that keywords with a good expected level of traffic aren’t necessarily the keywords people use when searching for things to buy from his site. Therefore the whole strategy is quite risky, but definitely worth trying.

Capturing an image/ thumbnail of a webpage in C#

For a while I've been figuring out how to programmatically get an image of a web page using C# and .Net. This could have a number of uses such as displaying a thumbnail of a web page. I found a number of methods by Googling but on the whole they seemed a bit lengthy. Eventually, I combined bits of a number of methods and then simplified things by trying out an alternative approach myself. One key thing I wanted to do was to create a mini picture of a website for display in a new desktop app I'm developing.

In the end I wrote a simple class with a single static method called
GrabImageOfWebPage. GrabImageOfWebPage takes a .Net WebBrowser control instance as an argument together with the required size for the captured image. The web page loaded in the WebBrowser control is captured (the entire client area of the control is captured) and shrunk/ enlarged into a bitmap of the required size. Here's the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft;
using mshtml;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes;
using System.Drawing;

namespace BrowserComponents
{
    /// 

    /// Class providing a static method to return a bitmap of a web page rendered in
   /// a .Net webbrowser control.
    /// 
    public class CBrowserImageGrabber
    {

        [ComVisible(true), ComImport()]
        [GuidAttribute("0000010d-0000-0000-C000-000000000046")]
        [InterfaceTypeAttribute(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)]

        private interface IViewObject
        {
            [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.I4)]
            [PreserveSig]
            int Draw(
                //tagDVASPECT
                [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)] UInt32 dwDrawAspect,
                int lindex,
                IntPtr pvAspect,
                [In] IntPtr ptd,
                //[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)] ref DVTARGETDEVICE ptd,
                IntPtr hdcTargetDev,
                IntPtr hdcDraw,
                [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)] ref tagRECT lprcBounds,
                [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)] ref tagRECT lprcWBounds,
                IntPtr pfnContinue,
                [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)] UInt32 dwContinue);
            }

            public static Image GrabImageOfWebPage
            (WebBrowser Browser, Size ImageSize)
            {
                // Get the view object of the browser
                //
                IViewObject VObject = Browser.Document.DomDocument as IViewObject;


                if (VObject != null)
                {
                    // Construct a bitmap as big as the required image.
                    //
                    Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ImageSize.Width, ImageSize.Height);


                    // The size of the portion of the web page to be captured.
                    //
                    mshtml.tagRECT SourceRect = new tagRECT();
                    SourceRect.left = 0;
                    SourceRect.top = 0;
                    SourceRect.right = Browser.Right;
                    SourceRect.bottom = Browser.Bottom;
                    


                    // The size to render the target image. This can be used
                    // to shrink the image to a thumbnail.
                    //
                    mshtml.tagRECT TargetRect = new tagRECT();
                    TargetRect.left = 0;
                    TargetRect.top = 0;
                    TargetRect.right = ImageSize.Width;
                    TargetRect.bottom = ImageSize.Height;
                    


                    // Draw the web page into the bitmap.
                    //
                    using (Graphics gr = Graphics.FromImage(bmp))
                    {
                        IntPtr hdc = gr.GetHdc();
                        int hr =
                            VObject.Draw((int)DVASPECT.DVASPECT_CONTENT,
                                (int)-1, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero,
                                IntPtr.Zero, hdc, ref TargetRect, ref SourceRect,
                                IntPtr.Zero, (uint)0);
                        gr.ReleaseHdc();
                    }



                    // Return the bitmap.
                    //
                    return bmp;
                }
                else
                {
                    return null;
                }
            }
        }
    }

}

To gain visibility of the types in this example, you have to include the following uses:

using mshtml;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes;

using System.Drawing;

and you also need to add a .Net reference to your project for Microsoft.mshtml.

Using the method is then pretty easy. The example code below create a webbrowser control and loads a webpage. When the webpage is fully loaded, it grabs an image 10% the size of the original page and displays it in a picture box.

WebBrowser mWebBrowser;
      
public Form1()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    mWebBrowser = new WebBrowser();
    mWebBrowser.Width = 1024;
    mWebBrowser.Height = 768;
    mWebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false;

    mWebBrowser.DocumentCompleted +=
        new WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventHandler
            (mWebBrowser_DocumentCompleted);
    mWebBrowser.Navigate
        (@"http://www.software-product-development.blogspot.com");
}


void mWebBrowser_DocumentCompleted(object sender,
    WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    if (mWebBrowser.ReadyState == WebBrowserReadyState.Complete)
    {
        Image Img =
            BrowserComponents.CBrowserImageGrabber.
                GrabImageOfWebPage(mWebBrowser, new Size(102, 77));

        if (Img != null)
        {
            pictureBox1.Image = Img;
        }
    }
}

Losing a PageRank Value

In the mini-update toolbar export on Sept 26th this blog lost its PR, i.e the value went to N/A. Previously the PR had been 3. Why this has happened I don't know. I haven't linked to any silly sites or reduced the frequency of posting.

Today I also noticed that a few inner pages on the blog have PR. I haven't noticed this before. It's strange that the older posts have PR but the blog home page is back to PR N/A. Google Analytics isn't showing any change in the level of traffic to the blog.