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SliQ Submitter 2009 Released

I thought I’d just let you know that all the work we’ve been doing has now been put to use and SliQ Submitter 2009 is now live. I’ve written a new set of web pages over at http://www.sliqsubmitter.com. I decided to charge a nominal amount every 3 months for unlimited updates. The hope is that people will subscribe for longer so that each small payment begins to add up. As of today I’ve removed the totally free version that was still linked up at PAD sites and substituted the 2009 download. There’s still work to be done on SliQ Submitter 2009 but the current version is easy to use and practical. It’ll take some time for the new site to rank well for the keyword directory submitter but I’ll still get downloads from my UK site and PAD sites while I wait for the performance of the new site to improve.

2009 08 03 MikeL New Software Releases Comments (0) Permalink

Web Traffic at Different Times of Day

Traffic on my download site is growing quite nicely. I’ve passed the one year old mark now and the website performance has stabilitised. It’s not as good as softtester’s yet but it’s about 90% of the way there. Passing the one year mark last month seemed to make a big difference as the number of daily page views seemed to grow by about 50% in the run up to the site’s first birthday. I’m still not getting the clickthru rates I’d like but the site’s income is pretty worthwhile. I made it into double dollar figures for one day’s earnings for the first time last week 🙂

I like to look at the rate of climb of page views – by checking on Adsense. It’s noticeable that as the day goes on and the US wakes up, the rate of page views increases. I guess I should expect this as the site is hosted in the US. I’d be really interested to see how Softtester performed if it was located in the US.

2009 07 09 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (2) Permalink

Maximizing wordpress comments with twitter

I don’t if you’ve got into twitter yet, I’m seeing a great number advantages and opportunities with twitter. Although I don’t tweet that much at the moment.

Anyways I was chatting to blue earlier and then I had a look at twitter then Blue twitter page and found a comment which looked interesting so I clicked on the link and found it was a reply / a comment he’d made on someones blog.

This was new to me.

Then I noticed that the blog, had allowed him to post his comment via twitter and as a blog comment. This just seems like an amazing idea and gives comments a lot of power.

Heres that URL.

http://www.andygambles.com/do-you-complain-or-seek-help

Only thing is I can’t find a plugin, yet 🙁

by JM

2009 06 29 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (5) Permalink

Using what we’ve learnt about linking strategies elsewhere

We’ve discussed (at length) linking strategies for our shareware download sites.

However, thinking up a linking strategy for another type of site isn’t so easy. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to come up with a strategy for an online shop. This is a new site, based on an older site where we tried a lot of new things which didn’t work out. So we thought we’d start from scratch.

So with the old site, our linking strategy….

internallinks

Didn’t looking that good (we thought), also it didn’t cater for all of our products. Another problem was that although we optimized for these keywords, the keywords were good, but to the customer they looked odd and out of place.

Anyway the topic here is linking, so the problem we had mainly was that we didn’t have room for all the links for all our products on the main page.

So what did learn about our download sites, that theres too man products to show on the front page. So we used boxes for new products, popular products and popular categories. On sub category pages we have popular products within that category.

When you compare download sites and online shops they are quite similar. So I thought that this approach would work on the shop too.

However the key is to have lots of top level categories and to rotate your popular products so that each product gets some air time.

Then we follow the same outline for other things, relevant products on the same product page, links to the parent category etc.

Well thats the plan, we haven’t yet some up with those top level categories yet.

by JM

2009 06 19 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink

URL Rewriting to Make SEO-Friendly URLs

On one of my sites I’ve been thinking about revamping some of the URLs. On many of the pages there are hyperlinks that map to searches with URLs like this example:

http://www.domainname.com/showpads.php?search=keywords&match=Exact&&string=DVD+Converter

However, I’d like to have hyperlinks/ URLs like this instead:

http://www.domainname.com/featured/dvd-converter/

The main difference is that the keyword is now separated by a hyphen instead of a plus. Any ideas on how a URL like this can be rewritten back to the original example?

2009 06 01 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation
Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

K program, question / opinion?

I’m now developing the rental functionality for my K program. Its a lot easier that I thought, but I can’t figure whats the best way to add rental records to my database.

My Rental table has two important fields, Order Number and expiration date.

The order number is ShareITs order number. When the license key is generate by ShareIT on their website, theres no way for them to contact my database and add a record for me.

I get an email from ShareIT when I get an order, so I could add a record to my database by hand.

I could get the K program to add a record if one doesn’t exist, but I won’t know the expiration date.

I’ll also get an email if they stop paying monthly.

I was also thinking, people could be sharing there license key and maybe this is something I should check also, but thats a different question, I guess.

Either way, it seems as if I’d have to enter the order number record or the expiration date.

Maybe I could just do it in PhpMyAdmin or maybe I could create a simple screen.

I can hear Blue saying, if theres no money in it, don’t do it, but I’m concerned if I don’t put a little thought into this now, that I may end up fire fighting at a later date.

Ideally I don’t want to do anything to add / update the database.

Thoughts ?

by JM

2009 05 19 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Good / important internal linking?

When I first began using the pad file / software approach to building links, I added those pages I’d “padded” and those I intended to, to a block of links near the top of my page. Shown circled below :-

internallinks

I used the guise of “recent searches” to make the block look genuine. This position showed to google that these pages were very important to the site.

I still think this looks OK, however I don’t think many other people do, I bet you’re one of them.

My problem is now, that I have far more pages that I would like to squeeze into this block. I could, but there would be a lot of links. Therefore I’m trying to come up with an alternative method, but I’ve come up blank.

I was thinking the other day, while looking at Blues hosting site, he has a menu, where when you hover your mouse over the top level items it shows the sub items in that menu and those are Anchor links. So I guess google could pick those up, but they are hidden using DIV, so I thought google may recognise this and treat the links with less important.

Or I could have a box showing popular products, which changes the links every interval. Again I was unsure what google would think of this, with some links disappearing, while new ones being shown, also what interval to use, differing every hit, day, week?

I’m not really convinced my either of these approaches.

Thoughts?

by JM

2009 05 19 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink

Worry about duplicate content?

We’ve finally decided on a new domain name for our new jewellery shop.

As I’m so busy at the moment, I’m keen to have my wife do as much as possible and learn as much as she can. However, I will need to install and setup the software.

We need to transfer the license for the shop software and modifications to the new site. I’m also going to just copy the products table across, so she can edit the content a little.

So we don’t get penalised by google we’re going to make the old site just a collection of images of each page with links to the pages on the new site.

However I’m still worried about being penalised by google.

My question are …

Should we just get the domain now, so it will age the domain, even if the content isn’t finished?

At some point we will have duplicate content, should we be worried about this?

If so, what should we do for the best?

by JM

2009 05 16 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (2) Permalink

Ideas for link-building strategies

Since the New Year I’ve been quietly building links for softwarelode and I now seem to be fairly stable at the 1500/ 2000 a day mark and making a decent amount of Adsense. I think that this work and the work done on Softtester last year – improved awards symbols and promoting each other in our submission acceptance emails – is also paying off with some increases in SoftTester traffic too. It’s a gradual rise but the long-term (month on month) trend is upwards.

The problem for me is that I’ve used most of the techniques we discussed months ago and I’m looking for fresh ideas. The only relatively low effort idea that springs to mind is link exchanges and I wonder if it’s worth trying to exchange links with some other download sites to see if we get a boost to a new level. Any thoughts?

2009 05 06 MikeL Link Building Comments (1) Permalink

Benefits from having a blog on your existing site?

We’ve decided we would like to add a blog to our jewellery site (although we’ll be getting a new domain and new look too).

However, I’m not sure what benefit it will be to the site, sure it will bring extra content and therefore extra search terms to the site. But I’ve had forums and blogs in the past and these have never benefitted my sites. The forums were in sub folders and the blogs with in sub domains, I haven’t tried a blog in a sub folder for an existing site before.

I’m just concerned that once Denise has talked about how she made each jewellery item, that we dry up and not provide anything which will benefit the site.

I did think we’d have to try and integrate the shop pages and the blog pages, but I’m not sure how. I now theres a shop modification which allows you to show related products at the bottom of product pages, but I’m not sure how I could do something along these lines with a blog posting.

Technically, I’m not sure how, but I guess I could put a thumbnail and a buy now or addto cart, link on blog pages.

I guess there is two possible approaches I can look at, that of benefiting the shop from an SEO point of view and that from a marketing of products.

Neither of which approaches I’m sure how or would could work.

Suggestions, comments, ideas, what you had for lunch 🙂 ?

by JM

2009 04 17 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink