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Response to Mistakes in SEO

The task of optimising a website to get good rankings in search results is not easy or quick. There is no single magic trick that will guarantee frequent visitors to a site and convert large percentages of visitors into customers. You shouldn’t worry too much about making mistakes but instead think of refinements – probably on a continuous basis.

There are at least 4 factors in selling a product online:-

  1. Having a product that has a market in the first place.
  2. Determining what people search for (on Google, Yahoo etc.) when looking for such a product.
  3. Making sure your website is a good match for the most frequent search terms – plus long tail terms.
  4. Making your website convince customers to buy your product

None of the points are particularly easy to solve and you won’t be able to “fix” any of them in a single hit. You shouldn’t rely on one, main search term reinforced by a domain name.

Long-tail search terms are very important. For example, on my main website the search terms are invoicing software, invoice software and billing software. I’ve done research and found that these are the main search terms in the US and UK for my type of product. However, these search terms account for only 15% of my visitors. The rest of my visitors come from long tail terms that may only be mentioned once in the whole website. I don’t always deliberately put long tails into the text, I just write text, e.g. in the Support page or the Release History page that simply gives a good variety of words and phrases.

Due to the way search engines work, the people who find your website will already be interested in your product, or at least in the problem your product helps with. My feeling is that your website should then describe the benefits your specific product offers, i.e. why using your product will make handling security easier, quicker and cheaper for users. Be specific, e.g. if there is a lengthy manual process for enabling security then describe how your product is a better alternative.

The other thing to remember is that Google Pagerank isn’t everything. Pagerank doesn’t guarantee a page gets visitors. Monitor your web stats and see if any changes produce a rise in the number of visitors. Make refinements and see what effect they have.

The other thing to consider is whether you should rely entirely on search engines to get customers. Are there alternative methods of advertising your software? Some sites directly sell software to programmers or have programmers as target customers, e.g. www.codeproject.com or www.componentsource.com. Could you use sites like these in some way to advertise your software?

by ML

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2008 06 08 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink

Internationalization

When you first start writing DotNet applications, you quite impressed to learn that MS has provided features / tools to make it possible to internationalize your application.

Which is true, but once you have finished your application you´re still left with some problems.

Before I go into those, I´ll run through the things you need to do to before you Internationalise your application.

There are different ways of achieving this goal, but by far the easiest approach is as follows.

Firstly, finish your application.
Next go round all your forms and set Localized to true.

This will add a lot more detail to your RESX files, one for each form.

You can now send these files off to the person you have lined up to translate your language.
They will need to install the DotNet Framework and the Framework SDK.

Even if you´re using VS.Net 2002 you´ll need the FX 1.1 and SDK 1.1.

In the bin folder of the SDK is a program called WinRes.exe.

Your translator friend will use this application to open the RESX files and save as the desired language.
Winres allows you to change the size of controls on forms as well.

So if your friend has saved as German you would have another RESX file like Form1.de.resx.

Next you need to use Resgen and on each of the new RESX files to create files like Form1.de.resources

Then use the AL.exe on the resource files to create resource DLLs.

Simple 🙂

Oh, if your using VS 2002 you may have to do a global search and replace on the version number e.g. 1.500 to 1.3300 or what ever it is.

OK, now your problems are over?

Well unfortunately MSI files only come in one language.

So you can´t create ONE international distribution file with the Setup project, which may not be a problem for you to create one MSI for each language??

This approach doesn’t exactly go with what we all thin Internationalisation is all about, also download sites and PAD files are aimed at ONE file!

I thought it seemed like too much work anyway to have different files, after all the resource DLLs and CHMs will probably only come to another 200kb or so.

Well after much though I came up with a workable solution.

I have found a free installation package called QSetup.
Which caters for more than one language and some other neat features.

You will need to :-
– create generic names for your shortcuts
– have more than more language in your license agreement
– create one CHM file for each language
– have a selection screen when your program first starts to chose the language.
– then a means to route to access the chosen language files .e.g product.de.chm.

OK, you´ve done all that and you start having a look at the files you have!

“WOW, my files are massive.”

Well yes once you set Localized to True your assemblies increase in size.
Not sure why, I think it may be a bug.
Keep reading though….

So you compare the size of your MSI file with your new bundled QSetup file!
Wow, that´s big too.

Well remember, you should ship the InstMsi A & W files with your MSI.
You don´t need to with QSetup, so that kind of levels things out.

So you can have one international distribution file!

After spending time trying to come up with generic shortcut names I decided to use “Product Help / Produkt Hilfe”.

Which on reflect doesn´t exactly look good, also if I were to add more languages it would get a bit silly.

However at the time I couldn´t think of a better approach.

My new idea (which can be used with almost any type of setup and will cater for the removal of shortcuts on uninstall) is to have something like this.

Product (English)
Product (German)

Then when the program is run for the first time and the user chooses which language they want to use, I´m going to delete the shortcuts groups I don´t need!!

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

Tagged
2008 06 07 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Who is winning the game?

Who is winning the game?

Post by axsaxs on Feb 18th, 2004, 10:23am

Some considerations.

a. This is the top ten of the most downloaded programs (source: download.com)

1. Kazaa Media Desktop
2. Ad-aware
3. ICQ Lite
4. iMesh
5. WinZip
6. Spybot – Search & Destroy
7. Morpheus
8. ICQ Pro 2003b
9. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
10. LimeWire

Of all these, only WinZip is not free. But the annoyance for non paying it is minor (everyone I know who uses it has a non licensed version).

The top ten for non free software is the following

1. WinZip
2. WinRar
3. Network Cable & ADSL Speed
4. Nero Burning ROM
5. Network Modem Speed
6. Registry Mechanic
7. VirtualLab Data Recovery
8. Bandwidth Monitor Pro
9. NetPumper
10. SolSuite – Solitaire Games

So, who is winning the game of shareware market?

In the top ten we have 9 common utilities and 1 game collection (in the last position).

The two top positions are for archivers. The other positions are somewhat related to system performance and tunng.

Curiously the only game in position is a solitaire collection (I know that these kind of games have a huge audience between girls and women).

But I think the most interesting top ten chart is the following, which I found at http://www.uscomputer.net/topselldlstore.htm

TOP TEN SOFTWARE SELLS
(at an Internet e-commerce site)

1 Symantec Norton AntiVirusTM 2004
2 H&R Block E-Solutions TaxCut Deluxe 2003 Federal Filing Edition
3 Internet Security Systems BlackICE PC Protection for Desktops
4 Trend Micro Inc Trend MicroTM PC-cillinTM Internet Security 2004
5 PowerQuest Corp PartitionMagic 8.0 and PartitionMagic 8.0 Upgrade
6 ScanSoft Inc Special Offer!
PaperPort Pro 9 Office
7 Symantec Norton Internet Security 2004
8 ScanSoft Inc PaperPort Deluxe 9 Upgrade
9 H&R Block E-Solutions TaxCut Standard 2003 Federal Filing Edition
10 Zone Labs Inc ZoneAlarm Pro 4

This is not shareware, but gives us an hint on what people is willing to spend their money when talking about software: 5/10 positions are hold by Security/Virus/InternetFirewalls software. 2 are portfolio/money manager. 2 are Adobe/PDF clone.

Now, I’d like to discover similar charts about:

1. Top ten sellers among shareware
2. Top ten more profitable shareware in the market

Who know how to have this data?

It is at least curious that in the above charts do not appear classic software genres, like:

1. Databases
2. Office Automation
3. Backup

That’s because this kind of software is easily found through piracy or open source.

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

Tagged
2008 06 05 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Software Author Help Sites

Euro Share – http://www.euro-share.com
This is a long running discussion group which talks about shareware authoring. They’ve also got a searchable archive.

Software Marketing Resource – http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/software-marketing-resource.html
This site provides lots of links to other sites. It’s seems to have quite a good selection, I’m still looking through it

Have fun making great looking masks with our Software!

by JM

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2008 06 03 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Mistakes in SEO

I’ve been creating web pages for over ten years now and I feel like I’m only just realising the bigger picture.

My pages have also been technically OK, in the last few years I’ve added some good content and benefits about my product.

However, I never considered my domain name or what people would find my site would expect. I lost them before they even found me on google.

My next approach, I’m found some good keywords which seem to have good figures.  So I’ve got a keyword rich domain.

That was a few weeks ago. I put together some content and made sure I used my keywords towards the top of the page and in the title tag.

However I was concerned that before I spent money on web design and graphics that I had a good selling strategy.

I had a chat with a friend and got his advise and we came to the conclusion I had failed already. My problem was that people who would find my keyword rich domain would already know they needed my product. my domain is ms access security. So they already know they need it. My pitch was to convince them that they needed security.

So what strategy should I adopt ?

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

Tagged
2008 06 01 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink

Anti-Crack Help

Richey’s DELPHI-BOX: Anti-Crack page – http://www.inner-smile.com/nocrack.phtml
Although this site is primarily aimed at Delphi developers, it does bring up some extremely valuable points. After reading it you will be quite shocked, you’ll want to try and implement most of it. Don’t as it will take forever, don’t get carried away.

For sale, Kids Maths Software and a range of exercise books

by JM

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2008 05 30 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

BetaNews.com

http://www.betanews.com

This is a great site for announcements of beta releases and general software news.

All the big software companies use it.

High quality fashion jewellery at a reasonable price!

by JM

Tagged
2008 05 28 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Tucows and the clickable link

Forum Admin

I´ve recently submitted Ideaspad to Tucows and after several days (ten I think) I got a message saying my software had been rejected. This was quite a shock as I´ve not been rejected anywhere else! 😮

The reason being that I did not have a clickable link to the Framework download (when the ‘not present’ message appears).

As I´m working to a budget, I´m using the Setup project to create my installer. Although it does allow you to create a check for the framework (and MDAC) it doesn´t allow you to add a URL, as it´s just a text message.

For several days I’d been hunting around trying to find a technical solution, making postings in several places.

In the end I’ve had to just add a message saying `please see the ReadMe.html for help’.
This file then checks to see if the framework is installed and provide download links.

Has anyone else had similar problems or are you all using install shield?

motherswan
I am also using the .NET setup project to create the setup.exe. The last time I looked at Tucows they had unacceptable restrictions, so I didn’t submit. I have instructions and links for the framework on both my product information and download pages. Is any more information available from Tucows about how to satisfy their requirements?

Forum Admin
I don’t have a link to the Tucows requirements, but it’s somewhere in the author resource centre pages.

What do you find unacceptable?

motherswan
They’ve changed their website a lot, and now they reject the password they gave me. But from what I can remember, there was a something about the way the .NET application had to be installed that they couldn’t handle.

Forum Admin
Weird.

With the sites which take their time, I’m treating them with caution, just adding one product at a time.

I think that as I was initially rejected for something at the start of my installation, I MAY be in for more rejections.

I guess they would just have found a problem and stopped there.

I’ll let you (and this thread) know how I get on.

PS. When I was searching round on the newsgroups for answers, I did find a few people saying that they didn’t allow DotNet, then the guy emailed to complain and then got listed. Hopefully things will have improved.

Forum Admin
I have found another approach.

Use QSetup, it’s free and extremely flexible.

You don’t need the Windows Installer files (normally included in your distribution file).

You configure it to perform checks on the machine, I need show a Readme file, which has JavaScript, VBScript to tell the user whether they have the framework installed, MDAC.

I’ve also recently added a uninstall questionnaire, which brings up a web page on my site.

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

Tagged
2008 05 26 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Windows Resource Files WINRES

Does anyone know whether there is a 3rd party version of WinRes. A better version?

For those who have never heard of WinRes…
It’s basically a tool which allow non developers to change the text and basic layout of your windows forms. E.g. Get your German or Spanish friend to translate your program without giving them the source code.

WinRes, is good, it lets you see the form and change it.
What I’m looking for is a way to merge old a new files, when you add new controls etc.

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

2008 05 24 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Writing help files for software products

For help, I’ve stuck with the CHM format. It does what I need and is easy to integrate with a .Net application. I must admit though I haven’t spent time investigating alternatives and I’ve just gone with what I know about.

I used to find the process of developing a CHM a bit laborious. I’d use Microsoft FrontPage to generate HTML pages and then use the Microsoft Help Compiler to turn them into a CHM. There were always index files etc. to edit in Notepad. The process wasn’t really diffcult, just a bit lengthy. I tend to put pictures into my help files too and maintaining help pictures with overlayed text and pointers in something like Paint .Net is a bit tedious.

Nowadays I use a package called Help & Manual (www.helpandmanual.com). This is a superb, well-rounded package that allows you to write WYSIWYG help and invokes the Help Compiler for you. It also includes its own image editor that allows you to easily write text and pointers/ arrows in different layers. When screenshots change, all you need do is update the background image and the text and pointers can be reused. This saves me hours and hours of time when I release an updated version of a package.

The other thing I like about Help & Manual is that you can generate output in different formats just by making a simple selection from a dropdown.

For example you can generate a PDF document of your help file. This can then be placed on your website for download or made available to users in printed form.

Another other output format I use Help & Manual to generate is HTML help. I upload a HTML help version of the help file to my website. This adds about 90 pages to my site – all full of good keywords relating to my applications. Google is supposed to like bigger sites so the extra pages hopefully help me in looking bigger and more information heavy.

With Help & Manual you can edit a common header/ footer for your pages. I make sure the header and footer include hyperlinks to my homepage. If any of the help pages are landing pages, visitors can use the hyperlinks to find their way to the main part of my site.

by ML

Tagged
2008 05 22 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink