SEO

Are You Using Google Conversion Tracking?

by damonp on February 23, 2006

in Ecommerce,SEO

Why?

Sure they give you some free analytics to see how well your ad budget is doing. They also control how much each click costs you. Its not a far stretch to see that if I know you are making a $100 sale off of a $0.10 click, I need to charge you more for that click.

Can you say ‘Conflict of interest’?

Popularity: 1%

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Six Tips to Increase a Posts Search Engine Ranking

by damonp on February 13, 2006

in SEO

I have received several mails recently inquiring how I have so many pages listed highly in Google, especially for tweaks, hacks and fixes for PHP and server related issues.

The key is the keywords used in the post title and body.

The keywords for any issue specific post, such as a bug or error message are easy. Portions of the actual error message should be used. Ask yourself, ‘If I had this problem, what would I search for to find the solution?’

Take for instance a recent post regarding an error I encountered after installing the Zend Optimizer for a client. The error message was:

Failed loading /usr/local/lib/ZendExtensionManager.so: /usr/local/lib/ZendExtensionManager.so: undefined symbol: zend_extensions

The post was titled: Undefined Symbol Error After Installing Zend Optimizer.

Checkout these Google results. Three top five links on a post that is less than two weeks old. Yes, those are some specific searches, but they were pulled from the server logs.

Some general guidelines:

  1. Use distinctive keywords in page title and body
  2. Use proper names where possible (application or company name)
  3. Limited use of generic keywords in page title
  4. Use whole phrases if applicable(error messages, features, slogans)
  5. Reinforce keywords in page body
  6. Add secondary keywords and phrases in page body

Popularity: 1%

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Are You Competing With Google’s Own Employees For Adwords?

9 September 2005

Many SEO boards went ballistic this week after a post by a Google employee let it be known that not only does Google allow it’s employees to have and use real Adwords accounts, but that they even encourage it. Of course their own employees don’t get rich with their inside information – ‘but not to [...]

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Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimization

24 August 2005

I checked in with a recent search engine marketing/optimization client yesterday to see how their sales were tracking. This client runs a bricks and mortar store and is building an ecommerce site to compliment the main store and create another revenue stream. When I started working with them, they were doing about $40-$50 a day [...]

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Split Testing for Search Engine Performance

19 August 2005

Split testing allows a site to test two different approaches to acheive a goal. Set up both approaches (A and B) in a seperate page or email or post, split traffic equally between them and wait, then examine the results. What’s your goal? Purchases? Email signups? Ad clicks? Whatever the goal is, measure the responses [...]

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Ecommerce Site Optimization

15 August 2005

I have been shopping online a lot lately… really burning a whole in my check card. There are a lot of bad shopping experiences out there. There are sites with confusing checkout processes, sites with too many checkout steps, sites asking for too much information, sites distracting me from completing my purchase. Here are a [...]

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Finding That Perfect Domain Name

12 August 2005

Search engines tend to give high relavance to keywords in the domain name. Searching for ‘Pimp Costumes’? A domain with both keywords in the domain name is likely a good bet. Best Tool For the Job posts a list of utilities. DomainsBot is especially helpful because it accepts a list of words to spin into [...]

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Fine Print and Marketing Inertia

9 August 2005

How do you build inertia in marketing? The more people you can get behind an idea (positively if possible) the more the idea builds upon itself until it reaches a critical mass. Take BitTorrent from Bram Cohen. Started as a pet project he now lives off the donations from users. Not selling the software, DONATIONS. [...]

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Search Engine Overlap

8 August 2005

NewsFactor Network reports in Search Engine Choice Affects Results that which search engine we choose effects the view we see of the web. I had always known that results can vary greatly from engine to engine. In tracking my own sites its easy to see the differences between first page, second page and latter rankings. [...]

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The Blog500

5 August 2005

Jason Calacanis offers a prize(?) to whoever can come up with a ‘kick butt’ list of the top 500 weblogs. $50,000 in advertising to anyone who could come up with a better ranking system or $10,000 cash to a programmer who creates such a system for his company. To actually build a ranking system, you [...]

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