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.

Today I started a Google Adwords campaign for TimePunch. I’m really interessted to see on how much this changes the amount of visitors and hopefully my sellings

For the first time I spend 100€ with a limit of 5€ a day and three keywords “Zeiterfassung”, “Arbeitszeit” and “Projektzeit”.

I’ll keep you up to date …

by GS

Thats a question, my answer is no.

I find it really complicated, sure I can understand the basics, but I’m sure theres a lot more I can gain from it.
I’d like to be able to look at it and find out which keyword areas can be improved. I find it difficult to keep track of how I was doing before I made improvements. It looks like I’ve been improving but I can’t say for sure.

I haven’t used my trial period or download iBusinessPromoter but I have the web page pinned in firefox and I keep glancing at it and wondering whether it really could make my life easier and help wit all my keyword problems.

I may be making a mountain out of a mole hill, with regard to keywords, but I guess I’ve got to value my time against the £194. I have that priced pinned to my shelf on top of my monitors. I keep thinking wow thats a lot of money, when I’m not sure I will benefit.

Anyways, this post was about Google Analytics

So have you setup goals?

Whats your experiences with it?

How often do you look at it?

What do you look at?

High quality fashion jewellery at a reasonable price!

by JM

On any web page, there are two types of outbound links:-

a. Links to other pages on the same site.
b. Links to pages on other sites.

Very roughly speaking, the PR for a page is divided up between all outbound links on the page - whether the link is of type a or b.

If a page had a PR of 5 and had 10 outbound links then, roughly speaking, each link would pass on a PR of (5 * 0.85) / 10 to their linked targets. The factor of 0.85 is known as the dampening factor and avoids any page passing on its entire PR.

This is why it is necessary to have a good linking strategy within a website and maximise the PR the site’s own pages pass back and forth between each other. You can’t raise the PR of pages on a site above the maximum PR assigned to your best page by Google, but you can maximise the spread of PR through the pages in your site. With a good linking strategy within a site, the effect on PR of the odd outbound link is kept to a minimum.

Of course, the real situation is more complicated than this simple equation shows. Link text and other factors like the position of the link on the page also count. It’s thought that links higher on the page probably pass a little bit more PR. It’s also thought that links on a page with the word “Links” in the title count for less. Having text close by on a page with the words “Sponsors”, “Links” or “Adverts” might also diminish the PR (or link juice) passed on.

If you add a rel=”nofollow” tag to a link, the link no longer passes any PR. Google advises people who sell advertising with links to do just this in order to avoid a penalty.

Some webmasters nofollow all outbound links as a matter of course. This is considered a little rude in some quarters - if you think a link is worth having, give the linked page the benefit of some PR.

I guess the main question now is why have any outbound links at all? One reason will be that you believe the links add value to your page - by giving people access to more information. Google buys into this mentality. If you link from your pages to relevant, authority pages, Google is thought to consider that your pages are themselves a more valuable information resource. Google then gives you a bit of extra help in SERPs. For example, if you were a billing software seller, you might link to the UK goverment’s advisory pages on invoice payment terms.

by ML

When I first set my website up and launched my brand new software product I had one real strategy for selling - get people to find my site and download the free trial copy of my software. Hopefully the software would then sell itself.

From talking with other people who owned websites and tried to do e-commerce, I gathered it would take lots of work, possibly over many months, to rank well in search engine results. I was advised to think about using Pay Per Click (PPC) to get going and that GoogleAds was the only service worth using. I signed up at www.google.co.uk/adwords, wrote my first ad, started getting visitors within an hour and made sales on my first day.

It all seemed easy - let GoogleAds do the work and sit back waiting for Paypal to tell me people had made a purchase. As the days passed though, the number of visitors clicking through to my site dropped and sales were harder to come by. As I should have expected, nothing in life is ever too easy and I should have done research upfront to optimise my Adwords campaign.

As time went on, I had to up the amounts I was prepared to pay for each click in order to keep getting visitors. I was still making a profit but not much. After a couple of weeks of further research I decided I needed to rethink my whole campaign. I found these tips to be the most useful in improving my conversion rate of clicks to sales:

1. When choosing the keywords for which your ad is to appear, make sure that they are absolutely relevant to your site. I got good click through rates (CTR) for “invoice templates” but at the time my invoicing software package didn’t include multiple templates.

2. Run multiple ads simultaneously. Try different ads to see which work best. Don’t use the same keywords in multiple ads – Google will only show 1 or the other ad and not both.

3. Avoid the word free. I got good CTR for phrases including the word free – like “free invoice software”. In hindsight this was probably a bad choice since those clicks probably weren’t from people wanting to make a purchase of any kind in the first place.

4. You can’t include many words in a single ad. Try selling different benefits in different ads to see which attracts most customers.

5. Write the ads in an attention-grabbing way, don’t just list features. For example – use Special Offer, Time Limited Offer.

6. Sell benefits as well as features – Save Time, No Special Knowledge, Easy to Use.

7. Try ads with and without the price – which works best?

8. Use Google’s free Adwords optimisation service. Look at their suggestions and see if they’ve spotted something your own ads and keywords haven’t covered.

9. Above all, monitor the performance of ads, keep tweaking and try different ads to see which works best. Give an ad a few days to see how it performs before changing it.

10. Use the knowledge you gain while monitoring your ads to optimise the content of the pages on your site and improve your performance in organic search results. Which keywords work best? Do you have pages that clearly focus on those keywords? Can you build backlinks that reinforce the keywords?

When used properly, Google Adwords is a very useful selling tool. Don’t expect to set up a single ad and keep making money however. When you use Google Adwords you are competing in a bidding war. Your competitors will be optimising their campaigns even if you aren’t. Ongoing monitoring and updating of ads is essential to continued success.

by ML