Software Promotion + SEO

On Softtester, we’ve changed the title of the home page to begin with “Free Software Downloads” but to make the most of this new keyword we need to make links to the homepage with the link text set to “Free Software Downloads“.

So what I suggest is that you put a link in the footer of each page to www.softtester.com with the link text set to “Free Software Downloads”. This will reinforce the new homepage title.

An alternative would be to change the Home link already on each page to “Free Software Downloads Home” but this is a bit of a mouthful. What I did on SliQTools was put the usual Home link up the top where the user sees it and tuck the more SEO worthy link down in the footer.

by ML

This is the first post about the linking strategy betwen pages on SoftTester and how it might be improved. At the moment the PR drops from 4 on the homepage straight to 2 on the main category pages. This has always puzzled me a bit since on one of my sites which has PR 3, all its main sub pages have a PR of 2 which is no worse than SoftTesters.

I think there are a number of things you could try to improve the PR of the inner pages. Basically you need more internal links. At one point SoftTester was leaking PR like crazy on all its pages with masses of external links on every page. This has now improved with the use of the nofollow attribute but there’s still work to be done to raise the average PR of the site’s pages.

Here’s my recommendations ..

Link to Category Pages from Every Page

The first thing I’d recommend is that every page on SoftTester includes a list of links to the main category pages, i.e. to these pages:

Audio & Multimedia
Business
Communications
Desktop
Development
Education
Games & Entertainment
Graphics Apps
Home & Hobby
Network & Internet
Security & Privacy
Servers
System Utilities
Web Development
Miscellaneous 

This can be done in a panel on the right. Not only will it help push PR back up through the categories but it will help people navigate the site.

Nofollow links on program pages

I’d nofollow the external links on the program pages themselves to the author’s own sites, i.e. the bit where is says “Program X” by X Release 2007-11-05 and the Order URLs. You’re giving away PR that you need yourself to get ranked better.

Add Related Program links

On each program page add a list of links to 10 other programs in the same category, i.e. in the lowest level category in which a program sits, e.g. for my invoicing package you might have links to 10 other invoicing packages.

On Each Program Page Link to its Category Page

On the program pages, I can’t see links to the program’s category page. Add a link if it isn’t there. The link should be to the lowest level category in which the program sits.

by ML

The next installment of SEO improvements for SoftTester concerns the program pages themselves. The recommendation for these pages is quite like those for the category pages and involves changes to the page title. The difference with the program pages is that we can get quite specific and detailed since the PAD file data is available to us.

The page titles at the moment are in the form:

Soft Tester: “Program Name”

For example …

Soft Tester: AllRipper DVD to PDA

 My suggestion is to change this to:

Download “Program Name” Free Trial

e.g.

Download AllRipper DVD to PDA Free Trial

I think you should take this further though and append the short, 45 character program description from the PAD file so the final title format becomes:

Download “Program Name” Free Trial – “45 character PAD Description”

so for the DVD ripper program example, the page title might be something like:

Download AllRipper DVD to PDA Free Trial – Directly converts DVD movies to your PDA.

Now this title is a bit long but it does include lots of nice keywords. It tells Googlebot the following

1. A program name, 2. The program can be downloaded on this page, 3. What the program does.

One thing we have to bear in mind is that the W3C recommends titles are less than 64 characters. Google only displays the first 66 characters in the search results. But … there are oodles of pages withe big titles out there and no-one knows how much of the title Google actually uses in searching. I suggest you just go for it and don’t worry about the title sometimes being a bit on the long side. Make the changes and see if there’s an improvements in hits.

This post is getting a bit long so I’ll break off here and write part 5. Part 5 will cover the description meta tag for the program pages.

by ML

The next thing to do to improve SERPS is get a better h1 and h2 tag to reinforce the new title.

The SoftTester title is now:

Free Software Downloads | Free Trial Software | Shareware Programs | Freeware Programs

So we want a h1 tag that agrees with this – to reinforce the relevancy for Googlebot. At the moment the h1 tag says Soft <br> Tester. This is telling Googlebot that the most important first topic on the page is something about “Soft” and “Tester”. So …

1. Turn the thumbs-up/ Soft Tester area into a bitmap – so it looks just the same as it does now but it’s an image not text.
2. To the right of the new bitmap (from item 1), put a good h1 tag.
3. Under the h1 tag, put a good h2 tag.
4. Define alt text for the bitmap created in item 1.

Here’s the words for the h1 tag …

Search for Free Software Downloads & Shareware Programs

… and the h2 tag …

Softtester – home of free trial software. Authors: submit your shareware and freeware programs. Get listed today and promote your software.

of course this assumes you are happy to get rid of the bit about testing each others software but the forum has now been closed so the community aspect is a bit dented anyway.

This will shift the existing advert to the right but it should still be visible – or shift it somewhere else on the page. The top of the homepage will then look something like:

On the bitmap (the bit on the left in the example above), define the alt text as:

“List Freeware programs, Shareware Programs and Free Trial Software on SoftTester.Com”

by ML

This post is a response to post google-analytics-getting-the-most-from-it/.

I find the amount of info in Google Analytics too much. I used to use when I first set my site up. It was interesting to see the countries my visitors came from. There is a lot of analytical stuff provided but in the end I decided that my site was too simple to require the complication of Google Analytics.

Essentially I only have one landing page – my home page – which makes analysing traffic much easier. It’s good to see how people entered my site and which pages they went to on their way through, but I coded some tracking info into my site anyway. As my site gets more complicated I’ll probably switch back to Analytics but for now the cost/ benefit in getting up to speed isn’t worth it for me.

by ML