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.

If you are looking for a rough and ready way of measuring the competitiveness of a set of keywords, there’s a number of methods you can user. You can use Google’s Adwords keyword  tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to give relative indications of how much competition there is for a particular search term. I always find the measure provided by the Adwords tool a little confusing though since you never know what the values displayed actually mean. If the competition bar is set at 75% blue what does this mean compared to a bar at 25%? Is it a linear scale for example meaning that 3 times as many sites are optimising for the 75% term compared to the 25% term?

Another way of gauging how much competition a keyword has is by using the Google allintitle: operator. The allintitle operator shows how many web pages have ALL the words in the keyword/ phrase in their title. Since a webpage’s title is possibly the biggest SEO factor, this gives a rough measure of how many pages are competing for the term. Checking out some terms which I’d expect to be very commonly used on Google - allinttitle:web design - and - allinttitle:seo - I get the results:

titles containing web design: 10,300,000 results
titles containing seo: 13,600,000 results

Contrast these results with a term that we wouldn’t expect to be very commonly used - harpenden decorators

titles containing harpenden decorators: 6 results

Or something middling common - software promotion

titles containing software promotion: 79,800

When looking for keywords for a new website, balancing the keywords to aim at against their competitiveness is tricky. The temptation is to aim for those that have the highest search volumes. However, this may be setting the target too high. Using tools like Google’s Adwords Keyword research tool and the allintitle: operator, you can try and find a balance between keywords that have a reasonable search volume and those that are not too competitive.

by ML

I’ve been looking at the title tags on the homepages of both SoftTester and SoftwareLode to see if there’s any improvements that can be made to try and get more visitors.

On SoftwareLode, I’m going to shuffle the order of items in the title as the Free Software Downloads phrase isn’t attracting any visitors for me. The middle phrase in the title - Free DVD Software - gets me a few visitors though as does the Free Photo Software phrase. The phrase I’m going to try out is “Antivirus Software”. This phrase has 550,000 searches a month according to Google’s own keyword volume tool. This is much more than either of the other two phrases (DVD/ Photo). I’m also adding an antivirus-software.php page to SoftwareLode to see if that gets visitors.

On SoftTester, two of the phrases in the title might not be doing much to attract traffic - “shareware programs” and “freeware programs”. It might be an idea to change these to something else and see if any more visitors arrive. Softtester already has handy links for certain phrases in one of the columns on the homepage. It might be an idea to include these phrases in the homepage title. Here are the search volumes for some of the phrases on the homepage now:

anti virus software: 60, 500

dvd ripper: 90.500

However, these two phrases have higher search volumes:

antivirus software: 550,000

dvd software: 246,000

Note that changing “anti virus” to “antivirus” makes a big difference according to the Google keyword tool.

How about changing the homepage title to:

Free Software Downloads | Antivirus Software | DVD Software

and seeing if any more people hit the homepage?

by ML

Ever since this blog was assigned a Google pagerank, I’ve been looking to see if any of the older posts have a rank. As far as I can tell, none of the post pages do. On my software blog, the homepage doesn’t have an assigned rank but a smattering of the older posts have a pagerank of 1. I don’t  understand this at all - maybe it’s just be down to the mysterious way Google operates.

My blog used to have a PageRank of 3. I think this was mainly because I gave it a link from my main site. The link was in place for two or three weeks and I think this was enough to give the PR 3 value. When I removed the link, the PR dropped but for some reason some of the older posts still have a rank.

Any ideas why none of the posts on this blog have a rank? Or are there some that do and I’ve just missed them?

by ML

Over at SliQTools, I’ve made a new release of my free directory submission software, SliQ Submitter.

Functionally, it’s not a major release but a lot of effort, over many days, has gone in to checking and tidying up the supported list of web directories. In version 1.0.X, SliQ supported over 2100 web directories. However, in the 3 or 4 months since it was last release a lot of the directories had switched to requiring payment for a listing. A fair number had gone to the wall too or their domains had expired.

In version 1.1, there are now 1250 free web directories supported. This is still a pretty big list and if a good percentage of the directories accept your site, you should get a good kick in SERPs performance and visitors.

by ML

When this thread is finished the meat of this thread will be compiled into this page Link Building Guide.

I guess the obvious method I’ve been using is submitting to link directories using mikes submitter program. However you can’t submit sub pages and you can’t be certain which pages you’ll end up on or what PR that page will have.

The next method, where I’ve been able to cheat a little, is posting on forums and blogs. I’ve been able to cheat by modifying my global signature for my posts on the Real Basic Forum. Also theres blog posting here. But I think I need to work harder on this, by submitting to a lot more different themed blogs and forums.

I always think that those link directories seem very small time, I guess more established directories and listings sites would be a good place to submit too, although none come to mind at the moment.

I guess becoming a blogger would help to.

Another method is press releases, not something I’ve heard mentioned for a long time. And not for the purposes on link building even then. But I guess lots of sites use these on their sites too. But its a one off sort of thing, also I’ve not sure what I do for my jewellery site.

As part of this mike has offered to let me make some postings for his own blog.

The biggest problem with these method is that time that it takes to post and you only benefit from one link, but as I can hear mike saying, you can get people visiting your site from these posts. I guess another problem is finding blogs / forums on the topic relevant to your site.

Another popular and new method (I believe) is to create a pad file for your site and a program which can be a catalogue of your site. I intend to produce a demo, maybe a video for my maths programs on my shop site. However, on softtester I’ve seen listings for a hand bag site, where the program is a mini catalogue of your site. I haven’t deleted it yet, I guess I should.

Reciprocal links, when I started submitting to links directories I asked mike if I should provide RLs and he said no and your giving away PR to these sites. But I guess there must be some value in RLs as we’ve got links to each others sites on your sites?

Hmmm can’t think of any more and I don’t really have a plan to move forward on this

by
JM

I’m currently trying to get to a certain level of completion with my shop site(s) before I start to do some serious link building (although I haven’t figured that bit out yet).

I’ve optimized my sub pages with carefully chosen keywords that I think should produce visitors which will buy that item. Although the keywords haven’t been my first choice keywords, they have a good projected traffic level, look to be achievable from the results shown on google and the competition level looks good too.

Now I need to choose the keywords for my home page, I have spent time looking for keywords and time thinking what to do for the best, over several days. I haven’t been able to find achievable, relevant keywords. Unlike my sub pages I feel the home page needs to use keywords which are really quite relevant and that users will use.

After much thought I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to use keywords that people will use, even if these keywords look unachievable.

I’m hoping PR will seep through from my sub pages and raise the PR of my main page.

I looked, with surprise, the other day and found that I hadn’t used mike submitter tool on my jewellery site (the site I’m talking about in this post). However, as the url of my site is http://www.mcls4u.com/shop I’m worried that as this is a sub page I might not be able to use mike program and maybe a couple of months ago, this is the reason why I didn’t use mikes prog in the first place. For those of you that don’t know, must directory sites don’t accept sub pages.

I just wanted to get that off my chest as I’ve had this issue bouncing round my head for several days and I keep changing my mind. My main worry was that I’d be using keywords which would never get visitors, like the keywords I’ve used on my older sites in the past.

But as I say I don’t think I have any choice. This decision does worry me though.

by
JM

There are a number of ways of finding the backlinks to a website but each has pros and cons. The two simplest ways are to use Google Webmasters or the link: command.

You can only use Google Webmasters if you control a website and can verify ownership. In terms of Google PageRank, Google’s Webmaster interface is the most accurate way of determining which backlinks to your website Google actually takes any notice of. The problem is that Google Webmasters often lags behind the real world situation. If you’ve added lots of links to a site they will often not show up in webmasters for some weeks or months. Usually there’s a jump in the number of backlinks reported at the same time Google exports PageRank values to the Google toolbar.

An alternative method is to use the link: command. To use this, type the following into any search engine:

link:www.domainname.com

for example: link:www.resourcefill.com to find backlinks to the domain www.resourcefill.com.

The problem with the link: command is that some search engines don’t return all the backlinks. Google in particular only returns a sample - usually far less than it returns via Google webmasters. The best search engines to use for the link: command are Yahoo and all the web (www.alltheweb.com).

by ML

At least a year ago, I read about free article sites and added some article pages to my kids mask factory site. Aaron just emailed me, he’d done a personal search and found one of my articles.

I guess there is some value is having these pages, but I’m not sure whether such pages lead to sales. But are these pages valuable for an SEO / Google point of view?

Maybe I should add some free articles to my other sites?

I guess I know the answer to this question, these articles haven’t led to a massive raise in sales, although I can’t really tell.

by
JM

We’ve been using the adwords keyword tool to try and find good keywords. My initial thoughts where that I should avoid ANYTHING with any competition but have at least a thousand search volume.

However, Aaron found a video on how to use the tool and this changed our / my understanding of it.

Heres the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDB6T_L-mqs.

In the video it says you should have around 100,000 search volume and the guy ignored the competition indicator.

Mike, whats your understanding / thoughts?

I’m not thinking I should have waited with my directory submission until I’d found good keywords to use in the links, however I can now change them I guess, so it doesn’t look like I’ve got lots of the same.

by
JM
EDIT: I’ve also learned from the video, that you REALLY need to know your keywords and near keywords, I mean, I did realise this to a certain extent, but this guy knows numbers too. I think I’m going to have to keep records, I just don’t know what. Although, I guess keyword / phrase and search volume, would be start.

Well done to BlueSkiMoney aka Aaron, We’ve been chatting about SEO and using the adwords tool and watching some howto videos from youtube and last night hes, produced what I think is a well SEO page.

http://www.burnyourvinyls.com/audio-adaptors/2-5-to-3-5-adaptor-headphones-adaptor-mobile-phone-adapter/prod_11.php

Having said this there is always room improvement, he could do with more content and some internal links and of course some incoming links to that page or more probable his home page.

Anyways I think this first good attempt.

by
JM