Software Promotion + SEO

I’m still thinking about possible improvements to SoftTester – I’m finding it hard to switch context! One thing that strikes me is that the categories are all quite PAD file category oriented – which is fine and there’s no need to change. You’ve also got keyword based pages – which is also fine.

But … if you look at the kind of hits you get they are often around certain types of program. By researching keywords I can also see that people look a lot for specific kinds of software to download. These kinds of software don’t line up with the PAD file categories.

Now we’ve introduced the idea of Related Programs based on the top 10 programs using similar keywords, how about adding new top categories? These categories should be linked from all pages as per the existing categories BUT the new category page should contain a list of programs in the new category, i.e. they shouldn’t be nested pages.

The point about the new categories is to get page titles that match what a lot of people are looking for.

I’d be tempted to list these new categories independently on the front page to make them stand out, e.g. in a panel saying Popular Picks or some such. This panel could then be on every page in SoftTester.

From research, here’s what I think an initial set of new categories could be:

free dvd software
free photo editing software
free antivirus software
free screensavers

but there might be more to add in the future.

The page titles would then be along the lines of:

download free dvd software
download free photo editing software
download free antivirus software
download free screensavers

… and the h1 and h2 would follow the lines of the existing category pages.

Remember that the new category pages should probably just list programs and not contain nested subcategories. You may need to limit the list to 50 programs in a category or break the list into multiple pages.

The page titles should make the new pages be in with a chance of getting a fair few hits – if you’re lucky.

Thoughts?

by ML

So far we’ve made a number of posts about on-page optimisation improvements to try out on SoftTester. We also need to discuss off-page optimisation factors.

I did a check on the number of backlinks to SoftTester. It doesn’t really have that many and a few of them didn’t seem to exist anymore – maybe the sites have expired recently. I think you need to encourage people to link to you more.

At the moment you’ve got an Authors page and a Link To Us page. Perhaps these should be combined so that someone submitting shareware is asked to link back. It’s so long now since I submitted my program that I can’t remember whether users are lead to the link to us page after completing a submission.

The other thing I’d say is look at getting a better looking graphic for people to stick on their websites in order to link back. I’ve always liked the idea of awards – 4 star, 5 star. If the shareware site award graphic is really nice, in the past I’ve placed them on my site for two main purposes:-

1. It’s a nice, professional graphic I can use for free to make my site better looking!
2. It’s an award – and then I can say “award-winning software package” in my website copy.

If you look at my site – www.sliqtools.co.uk/invoice-software.aspx – you can see one I really like from Download Pipe. My awards page also includes others that look fairly good. In the end though it comes down to personal preference but a new graphic should only cost $20 or $30 (if you know who to ask) and might make a big difference over time.

by ML

On SoftTester you should make the top page titles unique. The home page has not got it’s nice, new “Free Software Downloads …” title but the other pages like Link To Us have also picked up the title. You need to change the title for Link To Us, Contact Us etc. to be relevant to the page. Same goes for the description meta tag, h1 and h2 tags too.

by ML