Software Promotion & SEOThis blog covers a range of topics concerning the SoftTester Shareware/ Software Download site. Topics include software product releases as well as SEO and software development information and tips.

I don’t if you’ve got into twitter yet, I’m seeing a great number advantages and opportunities with twitter. Although I don’t tweet that much at the moment.

Anyways I was chatting to blue earlier and then I had a look at twitter then Blue twitter page and found a comment which looked interesting so I clicked on the link and found it was a reply / a comment he’d made on someones blog.

This was new to me.

Then I noticed that the blog, had allowed him to post his comment via twitter and as a blog comment. This just seems like an amazing idea and gives comments a lot of power.

Heres that URL.

http://www.andygambles.com/do-you-complain-or-seek-help

Only thing is I can’t find a plugin, yet

by JM

We’ve discussed (at length) linking strategies for our shareware download sites.

However, thinking up a linking strategy for another type of site isn’t so easy. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to come up with a strategy for an online shop. This is a new site, based on an older site where we tried a lot of new things which didn’t work out. So we thought we’d start from scratch.

So with the old site, our linking strategy….

Didn’t looking that good (we thought), also it didn’t cater for all of our products. Another problem was that although we optimized for these keywords, the keywords were good, but to the customer they looked odd and out of place.

Anyway the topic here is linking, so the problem we had mainly was that we didn’t have room for all the links for all our products on the main page.

So what did learn about our download sites, that theres too man products to show on the front page. So we used boxes for new products, popular products and popular categories. On sub category pages we have popular products within that category.

When you compare download sites and online shops they are quite similar. So I thought that this approach would work on the shop too.

However the key is to have lots of top level categories and to rotate your popular products so that each product gets some air time.

Then we follow the same outline for other things, relevant products on the same product page, links to the parent category etc.

Well thats the plan, we haven’t yet some up with those top level categories yet.

by JM

On one of my sites I’ve been thinking about revamping some of the URLs. On many of the pages there are hyperlinks that map to searches with URLs like this example:

http://www.domainname.com/showpads.php?search=keywords&match=Exact&&string=DVD+Converter

However, I’d like to have hyperlinks/ URLs like this instead:

http://www.domainname.com/featured/dvd-converter/

The main difference is that the keyword is now separated by a hyphen instead of a plus. Any ideas on how a URL like this can be rewritten back to the original example?

I’m now developing the rental functionality for my K program. Its a lot easier that I thought, but I can’t figure whats the best way to add rental records to my database.

My Rental table has two important fields, Order Number and expiration date.

The order number is ShareITs order number. When the license key is generate by ShareIT on their website, theres no way for them to contact my database and add a record for me.

I get an email from ShareIT when I get an order, so I could add a record to my database by hand.

I could get the K program to add a record if one doesn’t exist, but I won’t know the expiration date.

I’ll also get an email if they stop paying monthly.

I was also thinking, people could be sharing there license key and maybe this is something I should check also, but thats a different question, I guess.

Either way, it seems as if I’d have to enter the order number record or the expiration date.

Maybe I could just do it in PhpMyAdmin or maybe I could create a simple screen.

I can hear Blue saying, if theres no money in it, don’t do it, but I’m concerned if I don’t put a little thought into this now, that I may end up fire fighting at a later date.

Ideally I don’t want to do anything to add / update the database.

Thoughts ?

by JM

When I first began using the pad file / software approach to building links, I added those pages I’d “padded” and those I intended to, to a block of links near the top of my page. Shown circled below :-

I used the guise of “recent searches” to make the block look genuine. This position showed to google that these pages were very important to the site.

I still think this looks OK, however I don’t think many other people do, I bet you’re one of them.

My problem is now, that I have far more pages that I would like to squeeze into this block. I could, but there would be a lot of links. Therefore I’m trying to come up with an alternative method, but I’ve come up blank.

I was thinking the other day, while looking at Blues hosting site, he has a menu, where when you hover your mouse over the top level items it shows the sub items in that menu and those are Anchor links. So I guess google could pick those up, but they are hidden using DIV, so I thought google may recognise this and treat the links with less important.

Or I could have a box showing popular products, which changes the links every interval. Again I was unsure what google would think of this, with some links disappearing, while new ones being shown, also what interval to use, differing every hit, day, week?

I’m not really convinced my either of these approaches.

Thoughts?

by JM

We’ve finally decided on a new domain name for our new jewellery shop.

As I’m so busy at the moment, I’m keen to have my wife do as much as possible and learn as much as she can. However, I will need to install and setup the software.

We need to transfer the license for the shop software and modifications to the new site. I’m also going to just copy the products table across, so she can edit the content a little.

So we don’t get penalised by google we’re going to make the old site just a collection of images of each page with links to the pages on the new site.

However I’m still worried about being penalised by google.

My question are …

Should we just get the domain now, so it will age the domain, even if the content isn’t finished?

At some point we will have duplicate content, should we be worried about this?

If so, what should we do for the best?

by JM

Since the New Year I’ve been quietly building links for softwarelode and I now seem to be fairly stable at the 1500/ 2000 a day mark and making a decent amount of Adsense. I think that this work and the work done on Softtester last year - improved awards symbols and promoting each other in our submission acceptance emails - is also paying off with some increases in SoftTester traffic too. It’s a gradual rise but the long-term (month on month) trend is upwards.

The problem for me is that I’ve used most of the techniques we discussed months ago and I’m looking for fresh ideas. The only relatively low effort idea that springs to mind is link exchanges and I wonder if it’s worth trying to exchange links with some other download sites to see if we get a boost to a new level. Any thoughts?

We’ve decided we would like to add a blog to our jewellery site (although we’ll be getting a new domain and new look too).

However, I’m not sure what benefit it will be to the site, sure it will bring extra content and therefore extra search terms to the site. But I’ve had forums and blogs in the past and these have never benefitted my sites. The forums were in sub folders and the blogs with in sub domains, I haven’t tried a blog in a sub folder for an existing site before.

I’m just concerned that once Denise has talked about how she made each jewellery item, that we dry up and not provide anything which will benefit the site.

I did think we’d have to try and integrate the shop pages and the blog pages, but I’m not sure how. I now theres a shop modification which allows you to show related products at the bottom of product pages, but I’m not sure how I could do something along these lines with a blog posting.

Technically, I’m not sure how, but I guess I could put a thumbnail and a buy now or addto cart, link on blog pages.

I guess there is two possible approaches I can look at, that of benefiting the shop from an SEO point of view and that from a marketing of products.

Neither of which approaches I’m sure how or would could work.

Suggestions, comments, ideas, what you had for lunch ?

by JM

I’m trying to come up with a design and strategy for a new blog, which will complement an existing site. Well it will be a new domain / site, but I know what the main content of the site will be.

In my case a shopping site for jewellery.

So why have a blog?

Well my wife would like to talk about how she has made the jewellery. While looking at twitter I realised that customers would find this interesting.  Also, it would provide some interesting content from an SEO point of view.

Now, we had thought about getting our own family personal site and using a blog to discuss the jewellery and personal topics as well as host family photos. But I wanted us to get some topics written and some firm ideas before we proceeded.

So to a certain extent the personal site idea seems to have lost steam.

Then I thought, how much of the content from the personal site idea, could we include in the shop blog?

I mean, would having family photos and some personal topics on a shop site look unprofessional OR would it add to the reputation / likeability of the jewellery artist?

Comments?

by JM

This is another update on my missing image investigations on softwarelode. What I’ve now realised is that all my PHP code for checking for missing images is OK when loading a specific page. The PHP runs, checks if an image is present then either shows or not the screenshot hyperlinks from the program details pages. This seems to run OK and I only present a screenshot page for a program on my site when there really is an image to show.

The further problem I’ve thought of though is that my sitemaps are automatically generated by PHP and when I generate the sitemap, I don’t run the missing image checks. This means I end up including screenshot URLs in the sitemap that don’t exist. I wonder whether this confuses the Google Webmaster tool and keeps the errors alive in Google’s diagnostic interface months after the URLs were removed from my site.

The conclusion I’m coming to now is that the best I can do is check the screenshot URLs at the point of submission - or on a PAD poll - and update the info I store for the PAD to reflect whether there really is a screenshot. I could then remove the checks when a page is loaded and speed things up a bit.