Marketing Hub .info

Marketing Hub .info » SEO http://www.marketinghub.info Internet marketing, sales marketing, search engine marketing and more. Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:46:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Keyword Targeting – Tracking Visitor Searches http://www.marketinghub.info/keyword-targeting-tracking-visitor-searches/ http://www.marketinghub.info/keyword-targeting-tracking-visitor-searches/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:05:06 +0000 admin http://www.marketinghub.info/keyword-targeting-tracking-visitor-searches/ Search Meter. What it does is track the searches which your visitors do in the search form of your Wordpress blog/site, it then reports to you; the most recent searches, the most popular searches and the most popular searches which returned no results. Here is a screenshot –

The most useful part of the plugin is the unsuccessful searches summary – put simply, these keywords are what your visitors want to read but you are not providing, so this could be a great source of inspiration for post topics. Additionally, if somebody is searching for a keyword in your search form there is probably many more people searching for it in the search engines, so creating a page targeting this keyword will likely bring search engine traffic assuming there’s not too much competition.

This plugin is just for Wordpress but you could easily code this into your custom developed website with basic to intermediate PHP and MySQL knowledge, I have explained how to code search tracking in another post – Have you SEOed your search feature?. This method is a great way to find keywords which you really should be targeting but aren’t, I hope you can utilize it well.

]]> http://www.marketinghub.info/keyword-targeting-tracking-visitor-searches/feed/ 0 Quality Link Exchanges for SEO http://www.marketinghub.info/quality-link-exchanges-for-seo/ http://www.marketinghub.info/quality-link-exchanges-for-seo/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:48:31 +0000 admin http://www.marketinghub.info/quality-link-exchanges-for-seo/ Digital Point about building backlinks, one reply in particular made it obvious that many people don’t know how to successfully link exchange. The reply said “for every 20-30 link exchange emails I send, only 1-2 people reply” – that’s only 6% of people replying to him, in my experience over 80% reply to my requests and I only contact PR3+ websites. The difference in our success rates probably depends on one or more of the following factors; where the email addresses were gathered from, not natural and customized the email was, and how good our own website is (quality, traffic and Pagerank).

In case you don’t know about the potential of link exchanges, I’ll illustrate it with an example; my Naruto Wallpapers gets 12,000 uniques per day from Google and the majority of the backlinks are from link exchanges, about 10-20 exchanges from sites with Pagerank 3-5.

Finding people to contact

Obviously the most beneficial backlinks are those from sites that are related to yours, have high Pagerank, and have high traffic, so we will search for those. For this step I like to use the SearchStatus add-on for Firefox, I recommend you install it also. Many people look for link exchanges on SEO forums such as Digital Point but the websites link exchanging there are most often low quality, luckily I have a better method of finding websites to link exchange with – Google.

Here’s some searches that will bring back great results –

naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact.php” – What this search does is look for all websites about Naruto that have a file named ‘contact.php’, a contact form. It also checks that the TLD is one of the popular, global TLDs which increases the likelihood of the site being in English thus saving you from having to browse and rule out non-English websites. This finds URLs like www.domain.com/contact.php
naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact/” – This search does a similar job to the first search but less effectively, it finds both URLs like www.domain.com/contact/ but also www.domain.com/contact/anime/4/ which you may not want. This search returns about 5x as many results as the first so if you didn’t find enough with the first, try this one.
naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/affiliates” – This search returns websites with a page about affiliates, which is often used as an alias for ‘Link Exchanges Page’. These websites will often be looking for link exchanges so this search is a very useful one. It returns URLs such as www.domain.com/affiliates/ and www.domain.com/affiliates.php. You could replace the word ‘affiliates’ with ‘partners’ in the search to find more results.

After those 3-4 searches you probably have 1000 search results but luckily you shouldn’t need to go through them all. Simply browse the results one at a time checking the Pagerank and Alexa rank of each using the SearchStatus add-on, writing down the URLs of the websites meeting your minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirements, you should write down roughly double the amount of exchanges you would like to make, so if you want 10 link exchanges find 20 URLs. My minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirement is PR3 and Alexa 500,000 if my site is new, higher if my site is old and successful.

Writing an email

Now that we have 20+ website owners to email we can get started. The emails I send are simple but work remarkably well, when contacting someone I will write something like this –

Title – (Their website name)
Body – Hi, I am the owner of www.narutowallpaper.biz, would you like to (exchange links) with my website?
Thanks, Dan.

Having the person’s website name as the email title makes sure they will read the email, if the title was ‘link exchange’ they may simply delete it. I keep the email short and sweet and unprofessional, this is suitable for Naruto related websites but for example if you wanted to exchange with SEO websites you would be better off listing your Pagerank. The professionalism should be changed depending on your website’s topic, if you want to exchange with an online store a couple of paragraphs may be more effective than the single sentence in my example above. Most of the websites we want to exchange with will have a title above their link exchanges like ‘Partners’, ‘Affiliates’, or ‘Friends’, if their website uses the term ‘Affiliates’ then customize the email to suit this, say to them “would you like to affiliate”.

The more generic and spammy the email sounds, the more likely the recipient will delete. To me the example listed doesn’t sound spammy because it’s out of the ordinary being so short, it doesn’t speak of things like ‘traffic’, ‘Pagerank’ or ‘rankings’, and it’s customized a little for each recipient.

Website Quality

For most website topics, whether a person will exchange links with you depends a lot on the quality of the website rather than the Pagerank or Alexa rank. If you have a great website that is only one day old most people will still exchange links with you unless you’re in a topic like SEO, but if your website is of a terrible quality but has traffic you may have trouble making exchanges. Link exchanges can be great for your search engine rankings, but only if you have a good website so people will exchange with you.

Hopefully you now know the potential of link exchanging, how to do it successfully, and how immensely useful a single Google search can be.

]]> http://www.marketinghub.info/quality-link-exchanges-for-seo/feed/ 22 The Importance of Internal Linking http://www.marketinghub.info/the-importance-of-internal-linking/ http://www.marketinghub.info/the-importance-of-internal-linking/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:27:32 +0000 admin http://www.marketinghub.info/the-importance-of-internal-linking/ Naruto Wallpaper ranks 1st for ‘Christmas Girls’ on Google and 1st AND 2nd on image search. This keyword was bringing me 5000 uniques per day over the Christmas period. There are 9,000,000 competitors for this keyword so to rank 1st you would assume I have many good backlinks to my Christmas Girls sub-page, well I don’t. I have almost no backlinks from other websites, but I do have an internal backlink to it on every page of my website (in the right-hand sidebar).

So from this case you can see that external backlinks are not necessary to rank highly. The sub-pages of Naruto Wallpaper generally have a PageRank of 4 which I’m sure did help me to rank for ‘Christmas Girls’. Since the ‘Christmas Girls’ sub-page gets an internal link from each of my pages, it gets roughly 100 PR4 backlinks.

So in my future SEO strategy I will focus external backlinks to my homepage, which will leak PR to the sub-pages and from each of my sub-pages I will have a link to the pages targeting my main target keywords (with good anchor text).

]]> http://www.marketinghub.info/the-importance-of-internal-linking/feed/ 3 Google Image Search – 10,000 uniques/day http://www.marketinghub.info/google-image-search-10000-uniquesday/ http://www.marketinghub.info/google-image-search-10000-uniquesday/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2007 23:19:36 +0000 admin http://www.marketinghub.info/google-image-search-10000-uniquesday/ Naruto Wallpaper, recently had its traffic increase from 1,000 to 10,000 uniques per day. The extra traffic encouraged me to improve the monetization on the site and now the website’s revenue has increased by 25 times! This all happened in less than a week, it was because Google image search indexed the site’s images.

Optimizing for Google image search is not difficult, it just requires good on-page optimization and including the target keywords in the image file-names and alt tags. The hard part is getting the images indexed; while the Google spider indexes pages as quickly as within hours or days, the spider only indexes images every few months. To get your images indexed all you need to do is have some quality backlinks pointing toward the site and wait a few months.

Once your images are indexed you will likely immediately see high rankings for your target keywords in Google Image Search. If you rank on the fifth page for a keyword in the normal SERPs you should rank on the first page in image search, mainly because there is less competition in image search.

The easiest way to succeed with image search is to have lots of images, the more images you have indexed and ranking the more traffic they will bring. Most of the images on Naruto Wallpaper bring 100s of uniques per day while some bring 1000+. Knowing which keywords people search for in image search is not as easy as it is for the normal SERPs so a lot of trial and error, or brute force is required. The more images you have, the more likely you will find the good keywords which bring 1000+ uniques per day.

Once you have lots of traffic coming from Google Image Search you could use the new found traffic to create new backlinks to the site, by encouraging them to hotlink with a free link to your site. Lots of image search visitors will hotlink anyway, so encouraging them to do so WITH a backlink is the way to go. Take a look at what I mean by visiting Naruto Wallpaper – Akatsuki and right click on the page – if you have javascript enabled you should see a red outlines box appear at the top of the page, if has code for people to copy and paste to hotlink this image WITH a backlink.

Each new backlink helps the entire website’s rankings, so if you have a sales page or something similar on the website each backlink will boost your SERPs and in turn, sales.

]]> http://www.marketinghub.info/google-image-search-10000-uniquesday/feed/ 6 The Role Link Growth Plays in the SERPs http://www.marketinghub.info/the-role-link-growth-plays-in-the-serps/ http://www.marketinghub.info/the-role-link-growth-plays-in-the-serps/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:32:34 +0000 admin http://www.marketinghub.info/the-role-link-growth-plays-in-the-serps/ Perfect Link Growth – Natural

The graph above shows perfect link growth, where the amount of new links found each month is higher than the previous month. This trend shows Google that either your website is becoming more popular over time or that it’s becoming higher quality. This trend also shows Google that the link growth is organic/natural, compared to unnatural methods such as directory submissions or link exchanges. If you can achieve link growth similar to this your rankings will become higher and higher over time.

Unnatural Link Growth – One-time link building

The graph above shows one-time link building link growth, where the amount of new links found each month is highest in the first few months of the site’s existence then the link growth tapers off. To Google this link growth signifies unnatural link growth such as directory submissions or link exchanges. Because many people assume link building for SEO is cumulative they tend to build links unnaturally for a few days, weeks or months but then they stop. If your link growth is similar to this you may see reasonably high rankings after the first few months but after this period the rankings will decrease.

Unnatural Link Growth – Digg

The graph above shows Digg link growth, where the amount of new links found each month is high in one month but near nil in the others. This growth can occur if a website reaches the front page of a social bookmarking website such as Digg, after hitting the front page it may receive a lot of links but after it’s gone from the front page the link growth per month will return to normal. If you have this type of link growth you may see a jump in rankings after hitting the Digg front page but these rankings will not last long, they will return back to normal in the long run.

How to Improve Natural Link Growth

Obviously natural link growth is the best to improve your SERPs so that is the trend you should target, but it can also be improved upon further. The natural link growth can be fast-tracked by encouraging people to backlink which simply makes the slope of the graph steeper.

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