Webmaster Article Blog

Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:45:23 +0000

Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Important Rules in Website Design

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:36:43 +0000

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Matt Cutts

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:32:41 +0000

Stephan Spencer: I am with Matt Cutts here. I am Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts. Matt is Google engineer extraordinaire, head of the Webspam team at Google.
Matt Cutts: [laughing] Having a good time at Google, absolutely.
Stephan Spencer: Yeah. I have some questions here that I would like to ask you, Matt. Let us start with the first one: When one’s articles or product info is syndicated, is it better to have the syndicated copies linked to the original article on the author’s site, or is it just as good if it links to the home page of the author?
Matt Cutts: I would recommend the linking to the original article on the author’s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Google’s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.
So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”
Stephan Spencer: OK great. Thank you.
The way of detecting supplemental pages through site:abc.com and the three asterisks minus some gobbly-gook, no longer works - that was a loophole which was closed shortly after SMX advanced and after I mentioned it in my session. Now that it no longer works, is there another way to identify supplemental pages? Is there some sort of way to gauge the health of your site in terms of: “this is main index worthy” versus “nah, this is supplemental”?
Matt Cutts: I think there are one or two sort of undocumented ways, but we do not really talk about them. We are not on a quest to close down every single one that we know of. It is more like: whenever that happens, it is a bug to have our supplemental index treated very differently from the main index.
So we took away the “Supplemental Result” label, because we did not consider it as useful for regular users - and regular users were the ones who were using it. Any feature on Google search result page has to justify itself in terms of click-through or the number of pixels that are used versus the bang for the buck.
And the feedback we were getting from users was, that they did not know what it was and did not really care. The supplemental results, which started out as sometimes being a little out of date, have gotten fresher and fresher and fresher. And at least at one data center - hopefully at more in the future, were already doing those queries on the supplemental result or the supplemental index, for every single query, 100 percent of the time.
So it used to be the case that some small percentage of the time, we would say: oh, this is an arcane query - let’s go and we will do this query even on the supplemental index. And now we are moving to a world where we are basically doing that 100 percent of the time.
As the supplemental results became more and more like the main index, we said: this tag or label is not as useful as it used to be. So, even though there are probably a few ways to do it and we are not actively working to shut those down, we are not actively encouraging people and giving them tips on how to monitor that.
Stephan Spencer: OK.
Next question: what is the status on Google reading textual content within flash.swf files? Are there improvements to come?
Matt Cutts: It is a good question. I think that we do a pretty good job of reading textual content. Now, stuff within Flash is binary and you can define it in terms of characters and strokes - so you can have things that look like normal text - but that are completely weird and are not really normal text. So it can be difficult to pull the text out a Flash file. I think we do pretty well.
It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the search engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers. So, my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that search engine SDK tool to pull out the text. The easiest way to know whether you have textual content that can be read in a Flash file, is that you could always use that tool yourself and verify as well.
Stephan Spencer: Great tip.
All right, next question: Macromedia Adobe has the search engine SDK tool, which we have talked about now, but it has not been updated in some time, so is there still usefulness in this tool, as it continues to get older and older, in predicting what .SWF textual content can be read by the Googlebot spider? You guys evolve quite quickly and if the SDK is not keeping up, it kind of loses its utility.
Matt Cutts: Yeah. It is interesting to see Adobe have, in some cases, a renewed emphasis on Flash recently. They recently cut their prices on some multimedia Flash-type servers.
My general answer is that, probably, we will continue to rely on the search engine SDK tool. If you, as a webmaster, feel strongly that Adobe should do more and better, then I would say you could contact those guys and say: “Hey, Adobe, I wish you would continue to update that.” or “I hope you will continue to do iterations.”
My hunch is that we will essentially standardize on that SDK tool and hopefully that will create some incentives for Adobe to keep updating it, and make sure that it is as fresh as possible.
Stephan Spencer: Great.
Next question: will Google utilize the acquired “Riya” technology that determines similarity of image content through analysis of things like color, shape and texture, to assist in identifying Black Hat optimization? (Just to be clear, I don’t think Google bought Riya.) An example of where this would be useful is: if there is a background image behind links that match the color of the image, and make the links appear hidden.
Matt Cutts: It is kind of funny; I am not sure. I do not think we have “Riya” - I think we have “Neven Vision”, but your question still stands, and it is a good one: whether we will use that sort of technology to help with things like black hat text hiding.
The short answer is: we think that relatively simple heuristics, as far as color-matching, work pretty well. Of course, you can not go with the exact color, because people will monkey around in the RGB space a little bit and try to look a little different in the RGB space - but in perceptual space there is not much difference. However, in practice, the vast majority of hidden text colors are pretty similar.
I certainly have seen some spam where it was blue and noisy with blue text which did not stand out, so users did not notice it very much - but that sort of thing is relatively rare. If somebody is willing to put in the effort to effectively hide text in a very busy or interesting image, then they are almost able to do that with same amount of effort and just make good content.
I think we are, certainly, open to employing those advanced techniques to things like: what is the dominant color of an image, or things like that - but, in practice, it seems like most people have not tried to exploit those particular holes that much.
Stephan Spencer: OK.
Next question: are social bookmark links given less weight than other back links - given how easy these services are to manipulate?
Matt Cutts: Typically, our policy is: a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it. Some people ask about links from DMOZ, links from .edu or links from .gov, and they say: “Isn’t there some sort of boost? Isn’t a link better if it comes from a .edu?” The short answer is: no, it is not. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.
To the best of my knowledge, I do not think we have anything that says social bookmark links are given less weight. Certainly, some sites like del.icio.us and other people, may choose to put individual “nofollows” in and they may choose to take actions to try to prevent spam, but we do not typically say anything like: social bookmarking by itself - give less weight.
Stephan Spencer: OK. So, I guess, a follow on to that would be: a .edu and .gov link, and so forth, has, typically, a more pristine link neighborhood, so it is not just about the PageRank, right? The link neighborhood comes into play.
Matt Cutts: That is a little bit of a “secret sauce” question, so I am not going to go into how much we do trust that sort of stuff.
Stephan Spencer: OK. I am going to slap my wrist now. Ouch, ouch!
Matt Cutts: [laughing]
But, certainly, all of the things that have good qualities of a link from a .edu or a .gov site, as well as the fact that we hard-code and say: .edu or .gov links are good - and when there are good links, .edu links tend to be a little better on average; they tend to have a little higher PageRank, and they do have this sort of characteristic that we would trust a little more. There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu - give that link more weight.
Stephan Spencer: Yes. Which is what I would expect that SEOs would have already realized.
Matt Cutts: Well, you would be surprised how many are like: “Oh, I have to get .edu links because they are better.” You can have a useless .edu link just like you can have a great .com link.
Stephan Spencer: Yeah. And for those of you who do not believe that, just do a search for “buy viagra” and look at all the .edus that come up, or “viagra site:edu”.
Matt Cutts: [laughing]
Stephan Spencer: Pretty sad.
Next question: given the ever-broadening definition of doorway pages in Google’s Guidelines, would a poorly done site map page now be considered to be a doorway page? A page that is just a list of links with no real hierarchy, very keyword-rich because there are full product names and category names and so forth.
Matt Cutts: Typically, we try to be relatively aware and relatively careful about that, because it is very natural to say: take a list of all of my pages and export that, then turn them into clickable links and now I have a site map.
In fact, if you made a sitemap file, or sitemap file ‘proper’, you would end up with something that you could submit directly to Google. At first glance, that might look keyword-rich or that might look like a doorway page, but we try to be relatively savvy.
A good example is About.com. They have had site maps for a long time. They had even named it “SpiderBites”, which, at first glance looked like: “Hello! You are going for the Google Spider or something” - but whenever you dug into it, it was radically clear that what they were doing, was just normal site map behavior. It was not that they were trying to do any malicious work.
I think our own page algorithms for scoring content do a pretty good job of looking past keyword stuff, and things like that, anyway. It is also the case, that we try to be pretty savvy about that. That said, I think you have got a question you will ask later about how many links exactly you can get on a page? So, we may go into it in more depth then.
Stephan Spencer: OK.
Next question: what is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL? We have seen clients use keyword URLs that have 10 to 15 words strung together with hyphens; or blogs - we have seen them even longer there. A typical WordPress blog will use the title of the post as the post slug, unless you defined something different and you can just go on and on and on. Can you give any guidelines or recommendations in that regard?
Matt Cutts: Certainly. If you can make your title four- or five-words long - and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” - because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.
So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users - and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.
Stephan Spencer: So, would something like 10 words be a bit much then?
Matt Cutts: It is a little abnormal. I know that when I hit something like that - even a blog post - with 10 words, I raise my eyebrows a little bit and, maybe, read with a little more skepticism. So, if just a regular savvy user has that sort of reaction, then you can imagine how that might look to some competitors and others.
Stephan Spencer: Yes.
Do you think we are moving towards algorithmic search results having substantially more human validation and/or intervention? There is the project, such as Search Wikia - they seem to be going down that path. What do you think? What does Google think about this?
Matt Cutts: It is a really interesting topic, because when Google started, we had just a few hundred people and the Web was so very large. We had to process tons, and tons of pages and tons, and tons of languages. We had to have the most capable, robust approach as we could.
The only thing that would really work well at that time was algorithms, because computers do not get tired, they can work 24/7, they do not exhibit any bias by themselves. Of course, an algorithm could somehow have some bias baked in when the human wrote it, but the computer itself is perfectly logical when it executes that algorithm.
So, for the longest time, Google pursued that as its first and foremost strategy - to the point where some people think that Google is nothing but algorithms and there is no room for any humans at all. In fact, we tried to be relatively clear that, if someone reports an off-topic spam that is redirecting to porn - everybody wants that gone except for the porn spammer. So, we are ready to take manual action on that.
Going forward, I think it is really interesting to think about the role of humans in search. I have done a post on my blog about that. I think that, if you can use humans but in a scalable and robust way - that is really the key. If you had to have a person construct all the search results for one search, there are so many search results and the long tail is so long, there is no scalable way you could do it.
But, for example, let us suppose you could have some humans figure out a scalable way to find spam, or a scalable way to say whether individual sites are good or bad, then those are the sort of things where it could be on the order where humans could genuinely help you.
I am glad that Wikia exists and that they are going to try this approach that puts a little more emphasis on people, because I think we need to let 1,000 flowers bloom and let lots of different search engines with lots of different philosophies try those ideas. And I think Google is willing to be pragmatic and embrace any approach that might work.
Stephan Spencer: OK.
Initially, it was stated that “nofollowed” links would be followed and crawled, but PageRank would not be passed. But you have recently stated that “nofollow” links are not even used for discovery. First of all, let us confirm: is that the case that they are not even used for discovery, and, if so, why the change?
Matt Cutts: It is interesting. Whenever we talked about it originally, we said PageRank would not be passed, and the messaging that I tried to do was that it would not even be followed and it would not even be crawled. It turned out there was a really weird situation, where, if you had totally unique anchor text that nobody else had, we would not follow that link - but if we had found the page from some other source, we still had this anchor text lying around and we were willing to associate it with that page.
Personally, I think that is almost a bug, because if you ever sign a blog post with a comment and you have some really weird anchor text, then when you search for that text and you find the blog post, your natural conclusion is that these “nofollowed” links do contribute something - whether it is PageRank, anchor text or some sort of vote. Then you immediately get back to people trying to spam blogs and trying to spam all those places that have “nofollowed” links.
I almost view it as, for a short time it was almost like a bug - that some anchor text, in some very strange situations, could flow. We have fixed that.
There was an example, where someone had done “dallas auto repair warranties” and another query, where they thought that “nofollow” had actually passed either anchor text or PageRank. My suggestion would be that people should repeat those experiments, because I do not think that those experiments will hold true now.
In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia pages for “Nofollow” (at nofollow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), they say - in “reference number eight”, if I remember correctly - something about how these links may still be used in some limited circumstances for this or for that. At least for Google, we have taken a very clear stance that those links are not even used for discovery; they are not used for PageRank; they are not used for anchor text in any way. Anybody can go and do various experiments to verify that.
Stephan Spencer: Great.
How concerned are you over the tactic of aggressive link buying to competitors’ sites in order to take down competitors? How long, do you think, it will be until competitors start taking each others’ sites out in Google with aggressive link buying?
Matt Cutts: I do not think a smart competitor will even try that second one because they would be more likely to help. The thing is, we are very aware that site ‘A’ could buy links to site ‘B’, and then spam-report site ‘B’ and try to frame site ‘B’. So we try very hard, in all of our spam techniques, to make it so that one site can not sabotage another site.
If you will notice, we do not say that it is impossible. The reason we do not say that it is impossible is, if you remember sex.com a few years ago, somebody - if I remember correctly - sent a fax and claimed to be the site owner and grabbed the ownership of sex.com and kept it for a few years, until they were forced by a court to relinquish it.
There is always the ‘far out’, possible case where somebody could do identity theft and grab your domain and hurt your domain that way. So we do not say it is impossible for a competitor to hurt another competitor, but we do try very hard. In fact, you have noticed that, with link buying in particular, we have been concentrating in the last couple of months more on the link selling aspect of that.
The odds that someone can come to us and say: “Oh! Someone hacked my site and sold links on my site for four months, and I had no idea! And, oh, yeah, I did bill it in Google Checkout, but they hacked my Google Checkout account, too! And I am being framed! It is a conspiracy!” - the odds of someone plausibly being able to make that argument are a lot lower. We do try very hard to prevent someone from hurting somebody else, and we are very mindful of that.

Earn Money Through Domain Name Flipping.

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:55:11 +0000

There are many ways to earn money online and one of them is through domain name flipping. What’s basically important here is that you can look for effective expired domain names that people are willing to pay for.There are three basic procedures when it comes to domain name flipping. First, you need to select a domain name seller that’s inexpensive, has excellent customer service, and an efficient method in transferring domain name to the buyer. Don’t forget to sign up.

Subsequently, you have to look for a perfect venue to market these expired domain names. You can try reputable auction sites, forums, or blogs. Should your business be big, you can build your own site for it. You must be able to capture a wide audience.

The last important step is to look for expired domain names. Now some services can give you great ones; however, it will kill you with such an exorbitant price. In the meantime, you can simply search for free services, especially if you’re just starting.

You can use keywords in searching for the most ideal domain name to purchase or sell. You can use various free keyword selector tools to determine” what are the most searched keyword phrases in the World Wide Web.” Remember, it’s not only enough that you have an expired domain name. Most importantly, someone should be willing to buy it.

It may be ideal if you can learn to “park” your domain name. It simply means registering your domain in the domain seller, so you can see how interested people are in such a domain. This will also give you an idea if it’s advisable to go ahead with your plan or flipping it or to simply let it go.

Sometimes parking may not work. In this case, you can opt to practically “park” them in any area where there’s possible market. One of the best sites is, of course, eBay. There are millions of potential buyers there. You also have the capability to get excellent bids.

Another advantage of selling your domain names on auction sites is that you tend to develop a buyer’s list who might just be interested with your other domain names on sale. You can get their e-mail addresses and inform them every time you have a new domain to sell without even having it auctioned. This means you can sell these domain names at a higher price without having to undergo bidding.

Free Website Promotion?

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:53:03 +0000

Can you ever avail of free website promotion? Is that even feasible?

Of course yes! Nowadays, your baby website can amass huge traffic in no time thanks to free website promotion.

How does this free website promotion go anyway? What are things to be done?

1. Enlist your website.

Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don’t forget to prep your website and make it all spruced up for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.

2. Know your forums.

One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

3. Write a press release.

Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet e-zines, newspapers and other media and massive traffic will come to you pronto!

4. Be friendly online.

Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other webmasters. Why, you ask? So they can link you immediately! Establish contacts and never tire of link requests and exchanges.

5. Write an article.

Say, your website is about your travel agency. Write an article about the perks of traveling or the hottest travel spots in the world. On the concluding paragraph, mention your website in passing. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as a free website promotion approach.

6. Just let the whole world know about your site.

What is free website promotion without the word of mouth? Insert your website, its URL and features in daily conversations and let the good news spread from one mouth to another!

7. Make a banner ad.

Make a banner ad for your site and ask another webmaster to do the same for his site. Then swap!

8. Take up a free website promotion course online.

Yes, there are free website promotion tutorials. But don’t you know that you can actually take a free website promotion course that can help you out further? Part of the free website promotion program is signing up for newsletters.

When you make a website, you need not pay anything to promote it. You just read it — there is such a thing as free website promotion!

Google Adwords Bring Targeted Traffic

admin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:51:15 +0000

The biggest well known secret in generating wealth in the internet based business or e-commerce is Traffic. Everybody knows it; every site wants it and every site needs it. The point of websites is to be visited and viewed. Many elaborate designs, money and countless hours of developing a site to make them beautiful and attractive are utilized. Without traffic, it is for naught.

With traffic comes a potential customer which basically means sales which in turn means profit. While many sites have collapsed in the past with the downturn of many internet based business, many smaller sites have generated good money by concentrating on a certain niche and some sub-niches.
The biggest well known secret in generating wealth in the internet based business or e-commerce is Traffic. Everybody knows it; every site wants it and every site needs it. The point of websites is to be visited and viewed. Many elaborate designs, money and countless hours of developing a site to make them beautiful and attractive are utilized. Without traffic, it is for naught.

This is a reason why e-commerce site laser target certain groups of people and drive them to their site to showcase their sites and products. Precision marketing is essential so that you could count on all the traffic on your site as potential customers.

Using Money to Make Money

It’s a common business notion that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. One good way of spending money for business gain is through advertising. Advertising brings in the people because through advertising, they know that there is such a company or product in existence. With the right type of advertising, you can see the spurt of traffic growth to your site. With a high volume of traffic, even if only a small portion or percentage turns out to be buying customers it is still a good average of profit generating income.

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