Launch Your Home Internet Business Into New Markets By New Keywords Again And Again

Posted by rimel - 29/06/07 at 03:06:22 pm

I have used this strategy with a great success, which makes me recommend it to your home internet business too. It is quite simple to execute, but needs a thorough follow up.

1.The Traffic Influence Of The Page Rank Is Huge For Your Home Internet Business.

When a surfer has typed your home internet business article keyword into the search bar, pressed enter and the result page will appear, he thinks that the sites are in the order of importance. The sites are numbered and number one is regarded to be the best one, number two the second best one etc. It is clear that number one will get the lion share of the traffic. So the pole position must be your target.

2. The Search Engines See Backlinks As A Sign Of The Popularity Of The Site.

As you know related backlinks are the key in order to reach a high page rank for your home internet business on the result page of a certain keyword. How many backlinks are needed depends on the status of the competing sites. However by creating backlinks by SEO articles it is possible to lift your home internet business site towards the pole position and finally to reach it.

3. New Keywords Are Like New Markets Or New Countries.

When you select a new keyword for your SEO article, it means you are going to launch your internet home business into a new market. This launch needs normally several SEO articles and requires some weeks, because it takes time before the search engine spiders have noticed the new backlinks.

The job will be easier by using some professional software, which has modern features like the keyword efficiency figure.

4. You Have To Make Enough Follow Ups.

Because the Internet is changing daily, it is useful to check the position of the site often and if needed to write some new articles with the chosen keyword and distribute them widely.

Every new SEO article will lift your site higher on the search engine result page but because the competition are doing the same kind of efforts, you have to follow the situation. The more keywords the site has conquered, the more secure is your traffic.

5. Select The New Keywords So That They Consist Words From Your Major Keywords.

Search engines like very related backlinks, so make several versions using about the same words. The list of possible keywords is practically endless, especially if you use typos, keywords in quotes and other special words.

6. You Can Follow The PR By Stats.

A simple list of the keywords, with the PR is a useful follow up tool. This makes it easy to follow how they increase their positions and how every new article will influence on the situation.

To take your business into new markets by new keywords is a tour, which you can speed up by new SEO articles. By writing you will learn a lot and the SEO articles will bring a nice amount of targeted visitors and business.

SEO Report Card: The Google Death Sentence

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:38 pm

Seasonal online businesses, like, have it tough. During most of the year, they live lean while sales slow to a trickle. Then autumn comes and the manna begins to rain down from heaven.

For Gifts By Delivery, the ramp-up begins in early October. The fourth quarter last year brought in 65 percent of the company’s annual revenue. It makes the most of this time, doing everything it can to maximize sales with advertising and marketing. That’s because Gifts By Delivery knows the inevitable dip and flattening of the revenue line is right around the corner, in the New Year.

Competing for organic search visibility during the holiday shopping season requires a ramp-up in online marketing — namely, link building and link baiting — many months in advance. It should start now, in fact.

Giftsbydelivery.com’s main SEO weakness lies in its links. A lack of link importance really holds the site back. The site’s home page PageRank score is only four and as you click deeper into the site, it quickly degrades even further. In fact, most pages have a PageRank of zero.

Furthermore, a link:www.giftsbydelivery.com search on Google shows only 25 backlinks and that’s including internal links to the company’s own site. It’s true that Google only reports a sampling of the back links; even so, it’s a dismal showing.

More telling is the fact that nearly all of Giftsbydelivery.com’s pages are in Google’s dreaded “Supplemental Index.” These pages clearly lack the link importance required to earn them a place in Google’s main index. Even though Googlers (that’s what Google employees call themselves) argue to the contrary, having all your site’s listings labeled “Supplemental Results” is like a Google death sentence.

Not surprisingly, I found the site’s Google rankings to be quite poor. For important keywords like “wine gift baskets,” “gift baskets,” “fresh fruit baskets,” “food gift baskets” and “gourmet gift baskets,” Giftsbydelivery.com did not show up in the first five pages of Google results. It’s obvious that something in the company’s SEO is broken.

Gifts By Delivery embarked upon a link-building program about a year and half ago, but it wasn’t a good program. It probably did more harm than good. When the site’s owners realized the quality wasn’t there, they opted to cancel the program.

Garnering good links takes time and expertise. And then it takes more time before the PageRank benefit from those links really kicks in. Now is the time to enlist the help of a link building expert to identify link targets, request links, make directory submissions, distribute search engine optimized press releases, formulate “link-bait” campaigns and so on.

Throughout all this, it’s necessary to remember that the anchor text of the links is crucially important. It’s no accident that the majority of the sites on the first page in Google for “gift baskets” have the phrase “gift baskets” in the domain name. Sites like Gourmetgiftbaskets.com, Adorablegiftsbaskets.com, DesignItyourselfgiftbaskets.com, Winecountrygiftbaskets.com and others easily acquire links with the phrase “gift baskets” in the anchor text. After all, it’s part of their names! Somehow, Gifts by Delivery must compensate for this disadvantage.

Overall, the on-page SEO was in pretty decent shape.

URLs of category pages and product pages are search engine optimal — keyword-rich, free of stop characters, set up with a flat directory structure with minimal slashes and with hyphens separating the keywords (rather than underscores, which are bad).

There’s a 301 redirect from giftsbydelivery.com to www.giftsbydelivery.com, applied site-wide (not just on the home page), eliminating a duplicate web site in the search engines. Nice!

Title tags on product pages lead with the product name, not the name of the site — which shows an understanding of keyword prominence. Some category page titles (e.g., gourmet.html) are keyword-stuffed.

The meta descriptions and meta keywords are unique to each page, which is good, though at more than 50 words, some of the meta descriptions are too long. I recommend the site reduce the length in each case by half.

The H1 tag on the home page is “Let us reach across the miles for you” — no good keywords there. The category name is marked up with an H1 on category pages, and the product name with an H2 on product pages. That’s good, but for some bizarre reason many product pages carry an H1 tag with nothing but an HTML comment.

Speaking of comments, I see a plethora of HTML comments in the templates that could be removed to streamline the HTML code.

SEO: Google Cracks Open Its Black Box

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:46 pm

Wouldn’t it be great if Google offered insight into how your website stacks up against its super-secret algorithms? What ails your site when it comes to SEO and what could be done better? Google Webmaster Central does just that, by offering a plethora of diagnostic and statistical tools, advice, answers and peer support to SEOs and webmasters.

Webmaster Central began its life as Google Sitemaps, a protocol for submitting a list of your URLs to Google. With it you can let Googlebot know how you want your site crawled. Sitemaps still exists; but the breadth of services expanded so much that it warranted Google changing the name of its webmaster resource area to Webmaster Central last August.

What are some of those services? In a recent interview, Vanessa Fox, product manager at Google Webmaster Central, offered some detail about those tools and resources (interview audio available at

First, at Webmaster Central, you can be informed if your site is being penalized for a violation, or if it has malware on it, or if Googlebot can’t gain access. Furthermore, the Link Reporting Tool reveals virtually all the links to pages on your site, including the ones that are most often linked, as well as inbound links and internal links. And the PageRank Tool tells you which of your pages has the highest PageRank each month (often it’s not those you expect!) along with a graph that shows the PageRank distribution across all your pages.

If you aren’t ranking well for a particular product or category, you can use these tools to identify missed opportunities or previously unnoticed mistakes. For example, perhaps you have inadvertently severed an internal link to a page you hope will rank well. Webmaster Central’s reports would reveal this problem, which you could then rectify by linking to it from one or more pages well-endowed with PageRank.

Other reports reveal the queries that most often return your site in the search results and the level of traffic those SERPs (search engine results pages) received. How else could you learn which pages of your site receive many impressions in the SERPs but very few clickthroughs? Certainly not through log file analysis!

Google shares which words appear most on your site, and which words are used most often in the anchor text of inbound links.

“If you think your site should be ranking for a word but it doesn’t show up as one of the common words on your site, or as a link to your site, then you may need to optimize a little better for that particular phrase,” Vanessa advises.

Of course you should check whether those words are popular with searchers or not. For that, Webmaster Central offers the Keyword Popularity Data Tool, in order to spot trends and view historical data on the keywords you most care about.

Google also has you covered when it comes to crawlability diagnostics. Webmaster Central reveals the pages that were blocked when Google tried to crawl them. It will also tell you the crawl rate of your site — i.e., how many pages per day, how much data are downloaded, and how long it takes to download a page.

If your site operates at two locations, one at www.yourcompany.com and one at Yourcompany.com, your PageRank will be split across the two sites, resulting in poorer rankings due to the dilution effect. Webmaster Central has a tool to help you rectify this, where you can specify which version you want indexed. That’s handy, but the best scenario — as I have mentioned in numerous SEO Report Cards — is to do a 301 redirect to aggregate both versions into one. It certainly won’t hurt to use the tool within Webmaster Central as an additional measure.

That’s an invaluable list of tools, wouldn’t you agree? On top of that, there’s also the Webmaster Central blog and the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum. On my wishlist of tools to add to Webmaster Central is the ability to see which of your own site’s pages appear in the Supplemental Index. Let’s hope that Google considers my suggestion.

In the meantime, go sign up for Google Webmaster Central and verify your site. You’ll be glad you did.

SEO: Link Baiting Tips To ‘Juice’ Your Site

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:54 pm

Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. I’ve seen link bait take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, tools, widgets and blog plugins — to name just a few.

You might wonder if elements of your ecommerce site could become worthy link bait. I hate to break this to you — but probably not. Link bait is the sort of thing that tends to spread virally through email and the blogosphere. When was the last time you saw swarms of people forwarding emails about an ecommerce site? Not recently, I’d imagine.

It’s more realistic and fruitful to think of link bait as content that stands alongside your ecommerce site — either as a separate page, a blog post or a microsite. If you post the link bait to your ecommerce site, you should do so with the expectation that it probably won’t get as much traction with bloggers as it would have gotten if you’d posted it on your blog. Bloggers are cliquish; they tend to link to each other more than they link to outsiders (non-bloggers).

If link bait is really successful, it can migrate to the front page of a social media site such as Digg.com, Reddit.com, Netscape.com or the del.icio.us popular page. The trick to infiltrate any highly-trafficked social media site is to have friends “on the inside” who are top influencers within that site’s social network.

It really helps to be humorous in your link bait. But more importantly, “be remarkable,” as author Seth Godin says. Remarkable doesn’t mean you have to be the best at something or have the best post about something. It just means that your work has to be worthy of notice. A purple cow grazing in a pasture would be remarkable only because passersby would remark about it. Once passersby see enough purple cows along the roadside, they will no longer remark about them, because such cows have become commonplace.

One way to stand out is to expose a fraud or to take a position that’s contrary to popular opinion. For instance, you could challenge an A-list blogger on one of his/her blog posts. This can be risky, however, so take great care if you choose to employ this tactic.

Another way to be remarkable is to be the first to cover a particular story. You could post a scoop — an exclusive. You could publish original research. Or you could offer photos of an event that you attended. You could even Creative Commons License those photos to allow people to re-use them at no charge.

Speaking of no charge, people love “free!” so if you could make available for free any tools, software, plugins, blog themes and so on, it will go a long way towards turning your resource into link bait.

Another thing you might have seen on the web is “memes” that spread across the Internet through email, YouTube, the blogosphere, etc. A meme is an idea, value or pattern of behavior that propagates itself through imitation. Memes take many forms — clothes, fashions, habits, skills, songs, stories and catchphrases. As memeticist Dr. Susan Blackmore describes it, a meme is basically a “copy me” instruction backed up by threats and promises. An example of a meme in the offline world is the toilet paper folded into a triangle at the end (does that somehow make the bathroom more hygienic?).

If you can start a meme that will spread and eventually link back to you, you will get a lot of nice link juice (e.g., PageRank) out of it. Of course, if it’s in the form of a YouTube video (like the most famous of Internet memes , YouTube will hoard all the juice, as YouTube doesn’t include links to your site.

A very recent successful example of an Internet meme is “The Five Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme that spread through the blogosphere late last year. Part of the meme was the directive to “tag” five other bloggers and ask them to share five unknown bits of information about themselves. The originator of this meme (purportedly Jeff Pulver) is now PageRank-rich indeed.

Other forms of link bait include a niche-specific blogroll, a how-to, or a compilation of news stories.

Here are some of my favorite examples of link bait:
- an effort to “protect” unsuspecting consumers from buying a counterfeit Mini Cooper. Ha! Actually, Mini is behind this brilliant campaign.
- videos showing the founder of Blendtec blending rake handles, light bulbs, marbles, iPods, etc.
-, a clever and surprising campaign that made it to the front page of Digg. Who would have thought that a life insurance company could churn out link bait?
-, a brilliant viral campaign from Burger King in which viewers issue commands to a chicken wearing lingerie.
- gives us John Cleese starring in an uproariously funny instructional video about the dangers of not making adequate backups.
by Budget Rent-a-Car uses a blog to launch its nationwide scavenger hunt with clues planted in various cities across the U.S.

One successful viral link bait campaign can be worth many, many thousands of dollars of link buying and thousands of emails of link-building requests. Social media optimization expert Neil Patel estimates that just getting your link bait featured on Digg.com will yield tens of thousands of visitors in a very short period of time and potentially more than a thousand links within a few weeks.

Ready to generate some link bait? Then get your creative juices flowing, because out-of-the-box thinking is the key ingredient to a successful campaign. Calling in a favor with friends who are influencers in the social networking sites can’t hurt either.

SEO Report Card: Error Pages Create Big Issues

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:34 pm

Modernmini sells modern-style babies’ and children’s furniture, toys, bedding and more. Its site is powered by the Zoovy platform. Founder Pazit Kagel, a designer and mother of three, requested a site grade, and I’m happy to oblige.

1. The URLs contain session IDs — a no-no for SEO — but upon review of the cached version of the home page, I was relieved to find the session IDs are not being assigned to Googlebot. It appears there is “bot detection” happening behind the scenes, so when a spider like Googlebot is detected, session IDs are removed from the URLs in the links.

I double-checked and none of the session ID-containing URLs have made it into Google’s index. The session ID notwithstanding, the “product” and “category” URLs are relatively friendly to search engines. However, the product URLs do not contain keywords; they are product number-based. Ideally, the URLs should include keywords.

2. The “shop by product” and “shop by department” nav buttons are set up as mouseovers with lots of text links under the mouseover. The mouseovers are executed as CSS, so the links function as crawlable static text links — ehhh-xcellent! (as Mr. Burns would say).

3. The site doesn’t do a 301 redirect from Modernmini.com to www.modernmini.com, which means two copies of the site will get indexed — one at www.modernmini.com, and one at modernmini.com. A number of pages appear in Google’s Supplemental Index. Many of these are Modernmini.com pages rather than www.modernmini.com. Installing the proper redirects should clean up some of these supplemental results.

4. In the category and product pages, “Modernmini” is the first word in the title tag. That is not ideal; important keywords should lead in the title tag and “Modernmini” is not a useful keyword. I wouldn’t bother moving it to the end of the title tag. I recommend it just be removed.

5. It would be nice to see the main content of the page higher up in the HTML in a more prominent spot. Using CSS, you can reorder the HTML — putting the left-hand nav lower in the HTML with content placed above it. Prominence could be further enhanced by removing the inline CSS code that bloats the page; instead, place it in an external CSS file.

6. The site uses breadcrumb navigation, but unfortunately, the breadcrumb all but disappears at the product level — only the “home” part of the breadcrumb remains. This seems to be a bug.

7. It is not clear from the title tag or from the body copy what the main keyword theme of the home page is. I would think that “children’s furniture” or “baby furniture” would be appropriate keywords to target, but surprisingly the word “furniture” doesn’t appear on the home page at all — only tucked away in the meta description tag, which won’t help Modernmini’s rankings.

8. Product names are used as the title tag content on the product pages. Sometimes this approach is fine, and sometimes it’s less than ideal. For example, the Celery Lullaboo Rocking Cradle really should include the keywords “baby” and/or “infant” in the title tag, and probably “wood” or “wooden” as well.

9. The product pages do not make use of H1 heading tags. The product name is not given extra weight by the search engines, as it employs the same font treatment as the rest of the copy.

10. The site could really use a custom 404 error page. Given the number of Modernmini listings in both Google’s and Yahoo!’s indices that lead to those very ugly “404 Not Found” error pages, fixing this problem should be a priority that gets prompt attention. The Modernmini.com site appears to have suffered in the past from a server misconfiguration that allowed error pages to get indexed.

The misconfiguration has been rectified, but many of these broken pages are still hanging around. Thus, visitors directed by the engines to such pages have a poor user experience; they are unlikely to do anything but immediately click out of the site. Develop a custom error page to suggest related pages (based on the visitor’s search query) and prominently offer a search box and site map.

How To Create ‘Buzz,’ Boost Traffic At Your Site

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:45 pm

Over the last year or so, “social media” has quickly become the next “big” thing online. A plethora of social communities with names like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube have popped up to connect people who share common interests.

As impressive as all that may sound, what does it actually mean to you, the operator of a small- to mid-sized ecommerce site? What benefits can you reap from social media optimization (SMO), and how should you approach it?

First, let’s review what SMO is. In a nutshell, social media optimization is the use of any sort of content that creates buzz within a specific community and attracts audience participation.

A good example is Digg. At this site, Digg community members identify news stories and articles they like by “digging” them or express dissatisfaction by “burying” them. The upside is that stories with a large enough number of “diggs” make it to the front page of a website that can attract literally thousands of visitors within a very short time period.

Let’s take another example. StumbleUpon is a service by which users suggest websites they like in specific categories so other users can randomly check them out at their leisure. The name comes from the site’s toolbar, which allows people to “stumble” from site to site within the preferred category. If you create a profile and consistently recommend interesting sites of good quality, then your recommendations will begin to carry weight and eventually may help you promote your own website.

Each social media website has its own twist and attracts a slightly different audience. Each is likely to have different requirements for content or websites if they are to be “optimized.”

Critique Part Three: Search Engine Optimization

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:21 pm

the Problem: Long, complex URLs create search engine indexing issues.
The Fix: Rewrite the URLs to eliminate “stop characters” from the URLs. You might wonder, “why bother?” when the dynamic pages are clearly getting indexed. Even so, studies undertaken by my company, Netconcepts, show that sites with dynamic URLs suffer greater PageRank leakage. Since the site is running IIS Server, I’d recommend using the ISAPI_Rewrite plugin. The goal is to change a URL like:
http://www.daddiesboardshop.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=207
to something like:
https://www.daddiesboardshop.com/category/207.htmHere’s the directive for httpd.ini to do this magic:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=$1 [L]

Replace links to the old-style category URLs with the new style. Repeat this approach for the product and manufacturer-page URLs.

The Problem: Search engine spiders can’t operate pull-down menus.
The Fix: Change “search by brand” from a pull-down list (search engine spiders can’t fill in forms) to a list of text links. Since Daddies Board Shop carries too many brands to set up text links for all of them, only the top 20 should be linked. Then make a “brands” page with links to the full list of brands and include a link to that pa

The Problem: The blog needs a new location.
The Fix: Move the DBS Blog off blogspot.com to a domain the business controls (e.g., blog.daddiesboardshop.com or boardfanaticblog.com). This will link the SEO-rich blog content to Daddies Board Shop’s website.

The Problem: A lack of links.
The Fix: Build links and PageRank through “link bait” campaigns that will draw attention and links. For instance, invite video submissions of tricks/stunts, then award winning entrants a “Daddies Black Belt” web badge they can proudly display on personal blogs or sites, linking back to Daddies’ review of their stunts.

Is Your Website Ready For The Holiday Shopping Season?

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:03 pm

Anyone’s who has talked with me for any given amount of time will tell you I’m adamant about testing sites for security and navigation. Summer is the perfect time to plot out upcoming holiday season sales campaigns, and it’s also the time to make sure things are running smoothly. With an ever-growing number of people shopping online, comes a vast amount of new online stores, some of which will likely be competitors. It pays to be more than just the guy who offers a better deal. You’ve got to be better overall, right down to design elements, customer guidance and tools that give online shoppers a sense of security.

Here are my top 10 things to look for when determining if your store will be ready for the biggest holiday shopping season ever:

1. SSL – Make sure it’s working and that no errors are present. Fix all errors as they are found. A dedicated SSL certificate lends more credibility to your business.

2. Navigation – Customers need to be able to browse the store, so make sure they can easily find things via both browse and search, from any page on the store.

3. Shipping Rates – Shipping costs are still the number one reason for cart abandonment. Save the shock by providing a means to review such costs prior to checkout.

4. Payment Methods – Let customers know up front what payment methods you accept. It’s frustrating to find out during checkout that you don’t take methods like Discover or PayPal.

5. Guidance – Guide shoppers right through the checkout process. Don’t make them “learn� your system. Use standard methods whenever possible.

6. Browser Compatibility – Test the store and site pages on various browsers, both PC and Mac. There are several sites available that provide a means to test on browsers you don’t have installed. Use Firefox’s built-in utilities links. And test on page widths as well. With 20 to 22-inch widescreen monitors becoming more common, you might want to set a max page width on the site to prevent elaborate white space.

7. Email Services – With an ever-growing amount of spam, it’s time to research tools that help you separate junk from legitimate messages. I recommend using both server and email client-based software and services. Remember, email also utilizes resources on the server — not all site slowdowns and outages are due to traffic alone.

8. Ad Campaigns – Don’t procrastinate. Start plotting out banner designs for advertising and affiliate programs, as well as budgeting and keywords for web advertising, and begin to get your print advertising pages ready to go.

9. Server Space Cleanup – Get rid of unnecessary files. Make sure all necessary redirects are working and tweak your site’s error404 (page not found) page to contain a custom, more helpful message than “the page cannot be found.� Keep in mind that 404 is only the most common error, and many others exist.

10. Inventory – Plot out a plan for maintaining inventory. If you use real-time tracking both online and off, great. If not, figure out how you’ll prevent overselling items.

My list here is really only the tip of the iceberg. Chances are many more steps will become evident as you start planning. In the coming weeks, at my blog at Practicalecommerce.com, “Mistakes That Kill� will focus on key components of a successful online store during the holidays. There, you can comment and even share your own stories at Practical eCommerce’s public forums.

SEO Report Card: Change Home Page Links

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:21 pm

This month’s selectee, is an outdoor furniture manufacturer operating a small (less than 100 pages) MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site. Its rankings are in the doldrums. The store does not appear in the first 100 listings in Google for critical terms “Adirondack chairs” and “Adirondack chair.” This site is buried deep in Google’s results for many other key terms, such as “outdoor furniture,” “patio furniture,” “garden furniture,” “porch swing” and “bench swing.”  does rank No. 2 for both “poly furniture” and “poly outdoor furniture,” but these two terms get little to no search activity, according to Yahoo! (specifically, the Overture Keyword Selector tool at Inventory.overture.com).

Drop some mentions of this link bait in the blogosphere and in social networks like Digg (with the help of a social media consultant, so it’s done right). Make sure the link bait article is devoid of commercialism or there will be a backlash from Digg users. After the link bait has peaked in its popularity and the Digg traffic has died down, you can then change out some of the content and links on the page to make it more commercial — e.g., adding links pointing to important products/categories, and search engine optimizing the page and conversion optimizing the page to drive more purchases.

Switching gears, let’s look at the SEO within the site. First off, I was pleased to see most URLs were devoid of “stop characters” and contained keywords separated by hyphens. The tabs at the top of the pages are comprised of keyword-rich text links. These are great SEO features.

There were plenty still to optimize, however. For starters, I’d advise:
• Changing the links that point to your home page using /index.htm to / instead, so the spiders will no longer find a duplicate home page while exploring the links of the site.
• Switching from using HTML tables for layout to using CSS. Such a change is friendlier to users and spiders alike.
• Appending rel=”nofollow” to the product image and “more info” links, because those links aren’t as useful as the links with the product name as anchor text. Nofollow is a great way to channel a larger share of PageRank through to the links that matter most.
• Not having so many H1 tags on the home page. That looks over-optimized.
• Dropping the “links” page, or, at a minimum, drop all the directories from that page.Considering its home page PageRank is only a three out of 10 (on a logarithmic scale) and many of its product and category pages fare worse in terms of the PageRank importance, it’s not surprising the site’s rankings are so poor.
Because this is such a pivotal issue, let’s dig a bit deeper before we cover any other SEO issues. A look at the links (with the help of Yahoo! Site Explorer at Siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) reveals 711 web pages linking to pages in the  site, excluding internal links of course. The number of links seems passable at first glance, but in reviewing the links, I find a number were obviously obtained through commercial means, such as Seowebdirectory.info/index.php?a=search&q=chair and Laddermart.com/links.html.

nullClearly, its site needs an injection of new high-quality links. The company doesn’t need links from a bunch of directories and link exchanges though; it looks like they’ve already gone down that route. Considering how much ground they need to make up, I think this calls for some serious link baiting.
Time to think creatively:

Idea No. 1: Create an article or blog post featuring wild and wacky furniture. Great examples of this include: Scrabble Furniture (/2007/04/08/furniture-inspired-by-scrabble-game/), furniture made from FedEx boxes and DIY cardboard furniture – complete with patterns and instructions . Consider commissioning the guy behind the FedEx furniture to create a gazebo out of FedEx boxes and leverage that into a PR campaign.

Idea No. 2: Launch an outdoor patio decor blog in a similar vein to the popular blog Apartment perhaps even calling it “Patio Therapy.” Maybe even develop it as a satire of Apartment Therapy, poking fun in a playful, but not litigation-inducing, way.

Idea No. 3: Shoot a video showing the process of recycling milk jugs into Adirondack chairs: The grinding up, cleaning, drying, melting, mixing and extruding. Make the video fun — e.g., add a funky soundtrack and make it into a music video, hire a comedian to do the narration. Try to get it featured on Rocketboom.

SEO: Metrics That Matter

Posted by rimel - 21/06/07 at 02:06:48 pm

Out with the old, in with the new. In terms of SEO, what’s falling by the wayside?

What’s hot in SEO?

So how do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff? A new generation of SEO metrics, that’s how. Gauging your success on your positions in the search engine results pages is so last century.

New SEO paradigms, such as the “long tailâ€? and personalized search, call for new key performance indicators (KPIs). In addressing “long tailâ€? SEO specifically, some of my Netconcepts’ colleagues cleverly came up with the following KPIs:

Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio
This is the percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords.

If the ratio is high and most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, this signals your SEO is fundamentally broken. The lower the ratio, the more of the “long tail� of natural search you are likely capturing. This metric is an excellent gauge of the success of your optimization initiatives.

Unique Pages
This is the number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders such as Googlebot.

Your website is like your “virtual sales force” bringing in prospects from the search engines. Think of each unique page as one of your virtual salespeople. The more unique pages you have, the more opportunities you have to sell through the search engines.

Page Yield
This is the percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month.

This ratio essentially is a key driver of the length of your “long tailâ€? of natural search. The more pages that yield traffic from search engines, the healthier your SEO program. If you have only a small portion of your website delivering searchers to your door, then most of your pages, your virtual salespeople, are warming the bench instead of working hard for you. My colleague Brian Klais has a name for the webpages that aren’t driving any search traffic — freeloaders.

Keyword Yield
This is the average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month. Put another way, it’s the ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic.

The higher your keyword yield, the more of the “long tail� of natural search your site will capture. In other words, the more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail. So an average of eight search terms per page indicates pages with much broader appeal to the engines than, say, three search terms per page.
The average merchant in our study had 2.4 keywords per page.

Index-to-crawl Ratio
This is the ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages.
If a page gets crawled by Googlebot, that doesn’t guarantee it will show up in Google’s index. A low ratio can mean your site doesn’t carry much weight in Google’s eyes.

Engine Yield
Calculated for each search engine separately, this is how much traffic the engine delivers for every page it crawls.

Each search engine has a different audience size. This metric helps you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each. In the Netconcepts study, we found that MSN and Yahoo! tend to crawl significantly more pages, but the yield per crawled page from Google is typically significantly higher.

As you optimize your site through multiple iterations, watch the above-mentioned KPIs to ensure you’re heading in the right direction. Those not privy to these metrics will have a much harder time capturing the long tail of SEO.