Month: August 2011

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Using Freeloaders to Your Advantage

You’ve hit the tipping point on all you do and now your website traffic is continuing to rise, in fact you’ve never had so many visitors to your website before, but your conversions have not grown at the same rate, what can you do?

First, it is great to be successful and have a high traffic site, but if you are not converting your readers into buyers you may want to consider a new strategy to specifically market to the reader-freeloaders on your website. Much of what you will select to do will be based on your specific sales goals.

If you are a local seller and your traffic has grown, but when you look in Google Analytics most of your traffic is outside of your service area, I would enjoy the numbers and know that Google will eventually award you with improved organic placement. However, I would put your out of area readers to work for your benefit by actively asking them to Google +1 your pages or like you on Facebook. You’ll then be able to get SEO juice off of the traffic that will never convert to a sale for you.

If you sell nationally or service locally but also sell products nationally, I would take a careful look at your traffic and the pages where you think you have freeloaders. On those pages you will need to evaluate if you should follow my advice on Google +1 and Facebook or if the pages are good areas for you to advertise the products you sell nationally.

If they are a good fit with product sales, then start by creating your own banners, buttons, and links to your store to promote your own products. If you are going to provide great informational content, you should work to have the readers who like what you say move into your store to buy, Google +1 you, like you on Facebook, or be added to your email subscriber list. Which direction you take or multiple directions will depend on the information specific to your site. The key is to put the traffic to work for you! Don’t just invest your time and money into a well trafficked website, move your readers to action that will benefit your long term approach and goals.

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Insights on Why Your Website Has Dropped Organic Placement

I found this terrific article and wanted to share it with you. It is “10 Reasons Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking Dropped”
by Paul M Ventura on SitePro News. You can read the full article by clicking the  article title above. Paul shows some terrific insight into why your site may  have dropped organic placement on Google in light of some of Google’s recent  algorithm changes.

In a nutshell here are his reasons interspersed with some of my own  comments:

  • The Google Honeymoon Ended
    I’ve seen this before, new  sites start out strong and then after about four weeks fall to their more  realistic organic placement on Google. If you evaluate the site in the first  several weeks that the site has been added to the index you may be placed well,  but check again in about 8 to 10 weeks for more realistic expectations on where  your site will normally reside so you can start improvements.

  • Google Sandbox Effect Started
    This isn’t talked about  much, but I have seen in highly competitive industries such as real estate  site’s not even get listed in the Google index until other sites have started to  link to it. They can sit in the sandbox all alone for as long as six months
    while Google evaluates where they belong organically. A good plan is to do  article writing for links during this period to start building links. Another  recommendation is to do press releases during this period to start building  legitimate links as well.

  • Algorithm Updates/Link Juice Lost
    With the Panda/Farmer  update having penalized many article syndication sites, I feel that Paul has  some good insight here in that your site may have had links from these sites  that were penalized and so your site dropped in placement as well.

  • Malware
    Don’t think you have it? Well if you have a  WordPress blog on-domain, you’d better be monitoring. Why wait until Google has  you banned or blocked in the organic results. It is better to proactively scan  your site and WordPress files on a regular basis. I was even hacked and never  had been before. It can happen to the best of us with serious consequences.

  • Server Issues
    Has your site been down? We have several  clients where they are hosted on small no name companies and on their Google
    Webmaster Control Panel the robot is constantly reporting it cannot find or  access files. Move to a new host when possible if you are seeing this problem.

  • Robot.txt File Problems
    Webmasters can get carried away  with permissions to the Google spider. I’ve seen two situations where the  webmaster inadvertently disallowed access in this important file that all search  engine indexing spiders access before they spider your website. Make sure you  have the correct permissions and block only the files you need to block.

  • Penalization
    Did your last SEO firm or webmaster use  “black hat” techniques, hidden links, and keyword stuffing to get you organic
    placement before? How about keyword dense text the same color as your page  background? Think you are clean? Think again. I saw hidden text on a large  attorney website that had been installed by their website designer to scam the
    system. Don’t get your website penalized by these tactics. Google will not be  mocked.

  • Broken Links
    Check and check again. For blogs you can  use a plugin. For other sites use Dreamweaver to scan for broken links.

  • Duplicate Content
    I install on my site meta tags that  show me to be the content owner. Make sure when you add new content pages that
    you tag yourself in the code as the owner. Google is getting pretty smart on  this one, but there are still scrapper sites that may grab your content. When I  find them I send a cease and desist notice to the webmaster and if they don’t  remove my content I report them and the page to Google’s spam department and if  I get really made to their web host with a take down notice. Don’t make yourself  crazy over this, but it is a good idea to check your top trafficked pages with  online scanning tools. I use Copyscape and Dustball for this.

  • The Google Dance
    Grab your partner right? No, the  Google Dance is a phenomena where your search results will fluctuate wildly the  first week and sometime two weeks after Google does a big algorithm update. Hang  on and don’t freak out the first time you check your placement. Check again in  one week and then in a second before you start remediation just to make sure you
    aren’t dancing with Google. If you are your site will pop back up at the end of  the dance. Maybe not in the exact position, but nearly where you were before.

I think Paul nailed the ten topics in the article, the comments on each topic  are mine garnered from years of experience.

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Outlook 2010 Crashes Constantly – How to Fix

I have recently upgraded my computer to Office 2010 and I really like the programs especially Outlook. However when I set up Outlook 2010 on my laptop that was running Windows 7 I really ran into a crashing problem. When I say crashing problem, I don’t mean every now and then, but rather every time I opened the program and after about 3 seconds of use. With Microsoft pushing Windows 7 and Outlook being a Window 7 compatible product I was stymied as to why.

After much web research and trial and error on how to fix the problem, I found that many, many other people had experienced this same problem. There were prolific postings on forums asking for help and suggestions offered (which I tried nearly all).

Out of exasperation I tried this solution and it worked for me, so I wanted to mention it in a blog so that others may be able to benefit.

First for me the add-ons were not the problem. I still had crashes even after disabling all add-ons. What I found out was that Outlook 2010 wants to install your Outlook.pst file in your My Documents folder by default and really seems to have trouble if when you set up Outlook 2010 you let it find the .pst file in your old application data folder under local and then Microsoft then Outlook
location that Outlook 2007 uses by default. When I created a new .pst file in the My Documents folder, linked it to Outlook 2010 in the account settings I was golden. I have not experienced a crash since. Yes I had to reset up my mail account, import my calendar and contacts from my desktop, but I was finally able to use Outlook.

So if you are pulling your hair out over your Outlook 2010 installation, stop, take a deep breath and either create a new Outlook.pst file in the My Documents folder or move your Outlook.pst file there and you may have your problem fixed too!

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Google+ Adds Games to Improve User Experience

Google+ has grown at monstrous rates this past month, but new users have also started to finally drop off; leaving Google+ with substantially fewer users than Facebook. In an effort to enhance the user experience Google+ added games to their interface.

Some of the games they have added are popular games of which many are also available in the Google Chrome app store as well. One of the highest profile and most recognized names is Angry Birds. Some of the other games now available to play online at Google+ are:

  • City of Wonder which looks like Facebook’s Gardens of Time (I love this game
    and I never play games.)
  • Angry Birds
  • Monster World
  • Dragons of Atlantis
  • Sudoku Puzzles
  • Zynga Poker
  • Zombie Lane
  • Wild Ones
  • Flood-It
  • Dragon Age Legends
  • Bubble Island
  • Crime City
  • Edgeworld
  • Collapse! Blast
  • Bejewelled Blitz Beta
  • Diamond Dash

In this online world where stickiness (how long visitors stay and interact) really matters to your member growth, online buzz, and ad selling opportunities, adding games is a very smart idea at this point.