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Archive for November, 2009

“I just lost all my Google traffic – help!”

This request hits my inbox every week or two from a distraught blogger who has logged into the blog’s statistics one morning only to discover that most of their traffic has completely disappeared due to the all powerful Google making some kind of change in their algorithm and how they rank sites which resulted in that particular blog either disappearing from search results or at least being buried many pages down in the rankings.

The feeling associated with this discovery of a loss of traffic can be sickening.

I still remember the first time it happened to me (back in 2004) as if it were yesterday – it was like someone had sucker punched me in the gut – really took the wind out of my sails.

Up until the day it happened traffic had been healthy on my blog – healthy enough to just make a full time living from. Then when the traffic from Google disappeared I was down to 30% of what I’d come to see as ‘normal’ traffic and suddenly my dreams of being a full time blogger seemed over.

What to do when your Google Traffic Disappears

OK – so the question that I’m asked each time this happens to a ProBlogger reader is – what should I do?

It’s a tough question to answer – partly because I’m not Google and don’t have any insight into your particular situation and partly because each time it happens it is different. I’m also not an SEO expert am won’t give you any technical advice – but let me give you some general advice to start with:

1. Don’t Panic

I’ve had this happen to me at least 5 times over the last 7 years of blogging and most successful bloggers I know can recall a similar number of Google fluctuations that have brought decreases (and increases) in traffic in their blogging history. It happens to us all – sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small ways. In chatting with one Google employee recently he told me that they are making daily (and more) changes to the way that they rank sites (mainly small tweaks) so over time we’ll all notice changes.

The key is not to make massive big changes to your site’s SEO too quickly or as a gut reaction to a change in your ranking.

For me the first time that this happened (when I lost 70% of my traffic) I was very tempted to make big changes to my site to try to fix things. I was advised by a few wise and experienced web masters to wait. I did and a few weeks later almost all of the traffic returned. Google fixed itself (phew).

If the traffic doesn’t come back after an extended period you might want to get some expert SEO advice and make some larger changes – but I personally am glad that I’d seen out the dips in traffic rather than doing anything to hurt my long term rankings.

Of course there are times when you might need to make some changes…. such as….

2. Have You Done Anything Black Hat?

Google has guidelines in place for webmasters. If you want to rank well in their search engine you need to play by their rules. Of course there’s a whole industry around ‘bending’ and ‘manipulating’ the rules and many web masters make a living by doing it – however if you are caught breaking the rules by Google you’re likely to be penalized.

If this is the case for you you have two choice:

• fix what you did that was wrong and ask for a reconsideration into the index
• keep doing what you’re doing and suffer the consequences

I know of numerous bloggers who’ve asked for reconsideration and have been reinstated back into the index. It can take a little while (the last one said it took a couple of weeks for them) but in the long run it can be well worthwhile.

3. Build Other Sources of Traffic

The biggest lesson that I learned back in 2004 when I lost most of my traffic as a result of a Google algorithm change was that I needed to diversify my approach to building traffic to my blogs.

Up until that time I was almost exclusively working on driving traffic via Google. It was like a drug that I’d become dependent upon in some ways and much of my day was spent writing content for Google and attempting to ‘get links’ to that content from other sites. I was not really writing for regular readers or trying to build community on my blog – I just wanted traffic that I hoped would click my ads and affiliate programs.

This approach had worked for me – however when my Google traffic disappeared I was left with little and realized how short sighted I’d been. I began to change my focus and started working on other sources of traffic.

I still love the traffic that Google sends me but today if it all disappeared it would hurt – but it wouldn’t be the end for my business. Next week I want to followup this post with another one looking at some of the ways to become less reliant upon Google traffic and to build traffic from other sources – stay tuned for more.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What to Do When Your Search Rankings Drop

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So, I have had the Droid for 3 weeks now.

There were 3 main reasons I made the switch from my iPhone on AT&T.

1) I suck at typing on my iPhone, I really wanted the full qwerty keyboard of the droid.
2) The Verizon network is awesome.
3) FREEDOM to write my own applications or load whatever I want and also run lots of apps in the background.

It’s cool and powerful and all that. I LOVE the Google integration, it’s amazing. The navigation app is unreal. It is MUCH better than any hardware navigation device I have ever owned. The Verizon network totally smokes AT&T’s, especially on data services. I have written over half-a-dozen super cool applications that run in the background. Yes, I wrote them myself, in Perl. It was dead simple to load them.

I wrote one basic application that turns off my ringer when I set down the phone face-down then turns it back on when I pick it up or turn it face-up. This was really simple to do and there is a how to included in the Google code.

I wrote another application that turns on WiFi when I pull out the keyboard, then turns it off when I push it in.

I wrote another one that checks to see if there are unmoderated comments and if so adds them to my notifications.

The Droid is an amazing piece of technology. But, and I’m not sure exactly how to explain this, the Droid is like a Linux desktop computer. It’s super powerful, totally customizable, but, yet it feels clunky and things crash and it’s hard (in general) to get things to “just work”.

Writing all kinds of cool applications and installing neat stuff that can run in the background comes with a massive resource price. At one time I was using up my battery from full charge to completely dead in less than one hour. That is not talk time, that’s just the phone sitting idle.

Again though, it’s my choice. One thing I was able to write is an application that would check for runaway processes that were hogging the cpu (which happens a lot on the droid) and kill them. I also had code from other scripts to extend the battery as much as possible and was able to get around 3-4 days battery life.

Another thing is that sometimes the droid just becomes unresponsive….. then after 30 seconds or so a window will ask me if I want to wait or kill the process (there is no multitasking while this is going on, the phone is frozen). That is SUPER ANNOYING. On the plus side, I have figured out several of the things that cause this and will describe them in another post coming soon about how to soup up your droid.

As far as the hardware goes, the keyboard is disappointing (which kind of defeated one of the main reasons I got the droid) and makes it a lot more heavy. I have also scraped the paint off of a lot of the edges of my Droid.

Don’t get the wrong idea… I like the Droid a lot.

I am, however, having serious iPhone withdrawl. I miss having my entire music library on my phone. I miss having all my Photos on my phone. I miss having badass games on my phone. I miss having all my videos on my phone. And, yes I *COULD* do all this with the droid (except cool games, there just are none) but with my iPhone it was so easy I even forgot I was doing it. I just plugged my iPhone in and it synced with my photo albums and iTunes. It just worked. The fatal flaw in the iPhone is the AT&T network. After 2 conferences of not being able to use my phone during the show because AT&T can’t handle the data, the iPhone is out. I can’t have my cell phone cost me time and money.

I also really miss some of the aspects of the BlackBerry(s). I can’t type for shit on these touch screens. I had the world phone and the curve under Sprint. I could type like the wind on those phones with the keyboards. Yesterday while my wife was driving she handed me her Blackberry curve to text a friend for her and I fell in love again with the keyboard. I busted out a 160 word text in seconds. I realized how bad I am at typing on the Droid/iPhone and how I longed for the Blackberry keyboard again to actually respond to emails and texts. But the Blackberry for web browsing sucks, and yes, I use my phone for web browsing a lot.

So what to do? I have about 6 days left until my 30 day test/trial/evaluation/get-out-of-your-contract expires with my Droid.

Right now, I am leaning towards keeping my Droid phone and staying on Verizon. I would not however, at this point, recommend it to a non-technical friend. The coolest part about the droid is the amazing flexibility and permissions you have. Including permission to totally fuck it up too. I had had to factory reset my droid twice due to my screw ups.

News that iPhone might be on Verizon soon makes me hard.

Why can’t I have an iPhone with a BlackBerry keyboard on the Verizon network?

More to come on this.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Droid, iPhone, BlackBerry – Rock Paper Scissors

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Have you ever been in a friendly discussion with someone who kept repeating things you already knew over and over again? I am sure you have, and it is freaking annoying. You get that urge to say “Dude, tell me something I don’t know!”.

I had such an experience this weekend, and I realized that the same principle can be applied to blogging (and to online marketing as a whole). In other words, you need to tell your audience (be they blog readers or prospects of your company) something that they don’t know. If you keep repeating trivial stuff, or stuff that other bloggers and companies have already discussed far and wide, you will bore the heck out of everyone.

I am guilty of regurgitating stuff myself, and I know how hard it is to come up with new and interesting things all the time. But hey, that is what is going to make a difference, so we might as well strive for it.

The next time you are about to hit “Publish,” evaluate whether or not your audience will read it and get the urge to say “Dude, tell me something I don’t know!”.

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Many bloggers already know that Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog.

When I talked to Guy Kawasaki about my book, he called the Tweetmeme Retweet button “the most important button on the web,” because of the enormous traffic-driving power it possesses. With one click, any of your readers can spread your post to hundreds or thousands of their followers.

As a marketer, I, of course, see this as an opportunity for optimization. When I see a powerful tool, my first impulse is to figure out how to make it even more powerful.

When you click that button, Tweetmeme grabs the title of the page it’s on, shortens the URL, and combines the two into a autofilled tweet for posting. Thus, the title of your post becomes the tweet that is shared with a potentially huge number of Twitter users.

If the importance of compelling headlines wasn’t painfully obvious before, it should be now.

Nearly 20% of all “normal” tweets contain a link, yet almost 70% of retweets do. Retweeting is the most common way links are shared on Twitter.

I’ve done research into various factors surrounding retweets and found a handful of factors that you may want to take into consideration when writing headlines for posts that you hope to share and spread on Twitter.

Use nouns and third-person verbs

When I looked at the parts of speech that occur in retweets versus those that occur in normal tweets, I found that retweets tend to be noun-heavy and use third-person verbs.

This pattern is reminiscent of newspaper headlines. Highly retweetable headlines talk about someone or something doing something.

A headline should never talk about all the things you did yesterday and how you did them, as past-tense verbs and adverbs both lead to far fewer retweets.

The most (and least) retweetable words

The words that tend to occur more in retweets than in normal tweets are topped by the word “you.”

This means, whenever possible, you should talk directly to your readers. “Top” and “10″ also rank highly, showing that lists do well on Twitter. Not surprisingly, talking about social media and Twitter itself also helps.

On the other side of the coin are the least retweetable words. Random first-person verbs and details about your life, however fascinating you may find it, don’t get a ton of retweets.

Tell me something new

I compared how common words in retweets are to how often these same common words appear in normal tweets, and found that rare and more novel words are highly retweetable.

When you’re writing your headlines, you should be striving to say something new that breaks through the clutter of everyday chatter.

Don’t be dumb

I expected to find that retweets were simple and required less intelligence to understand. But my data showed the opposite.

Using two readability metrics, I found that retweets often use longer, more complex words. So don’t try to “dumb down” your headlines for Twitter; users and power retweeters are smarter than you may think.

Stop talking about yourself

LIWC is a linguistic system designed to identify concepts in pieces of text.

The most striking thing I found when using LIWC to analyze retweets is that self reference does not get a lot of sharing.

In other words, don’t talk about yourself if you want Twitter traffic; talk about your readers.

If you’ve been in social media awhile, you probably already guessed that was the case — now you’ve got the data to back it up.

About the Author: Get more tips like this and learn about the full range of social media marketing platforms, tool, techniques and strategies from Dan Zarrella’s The Social Media Marketing Book, published by O’Reilly.

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Over the last few months Google has been really pushing local search in the UK (with plans to push it even more) and we are finding Local Business Results increasingly creeping into generic keywords such as mobile phones.

Today I thought it would be interesting to take the “mobile phones” search results and see what percentage of the page each element takes up. The results are below and you can click on the screenshot to see a full size version of the whole page.

The top 10 organic results now only account for 21% of the page with local listings taking up 9.3% – almost the same as the Adwords ads which take up 14.3%. Just under 50% of the page is either white space or navigation links.

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Organic results only make up 21% of Googles search result pages

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Via the excellent ABtests.com comes a case study detailing how Crystal Ski were able to increase homepage conversion rates by 50% and decrease bounce rates by 20% by implementing a new design.

I think it’s really interesting to look at these case studies just to see how amazing a design change can be.

The new design had a more prominent main graphic, a minimalistic navigation bar, a higher-contrast search box, as well as more distinct (clearly labeled) sections containing deals and other content. You can see the two in action below, the new one is shown first.

Here are more details of the test performance:

Results Hypothesis
Several design elements create a stronger visual hierarchy in Design B. First, there are four distinct regions on the page: the large banner special ad, “ski holiday search”, “ski and snowboard holidays”, and “find a ski holiday”. This allows people to more easily find the content/tools they need for their ski planning needs. Design A, in contrast, has many elements at the same prominence, which feels cluttered.

Other Test Highlights
The conversion numbers are stronger than click-throughs…the winning design improved conversion to *booking* by 50%. (also improved bounce rate by 20%)

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How Crystal Ski improved homepage conversion rates by 50%

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Facebook really is first among equals when it comes to social networks. Worldwide around 500,000 new people sign-up every day and the average UK user spends three solid days a year on the site.

The network is a strange mix of public and private, and besides advertising those with pages for their business or organisation need to think creatively about how to attract fans.

Here are a few ideas you can put into practice very quickly and form a good basis for Facebook marketing campaigns.

Think SEO – pages are indexed on search engines so think in terms of SEO for a normal web page. Your page should have the right title and also the right URL. When you have over 25 fans you can claim a vanity URL. Chose wisely as you are stuck with this URL and can’t change it. The profile box on the left-hand side of your page is a good place to post keyword rich copy which is relevant to your title. Also use the Info tab to do the same in the fields allocated for ‘company description’ and ‘company mission’.

Custom landing tab – a great way of capturing non-fans and asking them to invite others, this will appear to all non-fans when they click onto your page. Here is a good guide on how to put one together using the FBML editor. The best landing tabs have a composite image (744×477 is the best size in terms of formatting) that tells first-time visitors where to click to become a fan and also includes brand imagery. This sits above an invite friends box.

Images – upload as many relevant images as you can. Pictures are great content for Facebook pages. Watermark all images before uploading to the page with your company logo or website address (if you don’t have photo editing software use Picmarkr), then make sure each picture has a caption which includes your keywords and website address. Tag people in images, especially non-fans, as this will ensure your picture ends up in their stream with a watermark of your company logo or URL.

Fanbox – you can create a Fanbox by following a link in the Edit Page section of your Facebook page. You can then generate Javascript code which you should embed anywhere you possibly can – including your blog and website. Also include your Facebook page address on email footers, business cards and on your Twitter profile to keep the traffic flowing.

These basic steps are a good start and should start to yield results fairly quickly. You can now move on to more targeted promotional activity like Facebook only offers and competitions for fans, polls and RSS feeds from your news page or blog. Facebook advertising is also coming of age after long being the preserve of spammers and it offers an unparalled opportunity to target users based on demographic data, geographical location and personal interests.

Share your tips in the comments.

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Facebook page marketing tips

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Full of turkey and armed with leftovers, I was able to leave my parents’ house on Thanksgiving without being asked to “look at the computer”. As the youngest in the family, and the only one with a Computer Science degree, I am always asked about anything technology related. (You name it: cell phones, computers, DVD players, etc.) I am the family expert. While I enjoy helping my family, I can’t say that I really do have all this knowledge in my head. I am simply a digital native.

Everyone knows a digital native: someone that has a high-level of comfort with technology, always talks about the newest things, and loves to help friends & family, even if their expertise comes from just doing Google research. A digital native’s passion is persausive as they rave about some new web site application, but a digital native, in & of themselves, is not an internet marketing expert.  

Unfortunately, I repeatedly speak to people that have been burned by mistakenly hiring a digital native that was a self-labeled internet marketing expert. To someone that is not native to the digital world, it can be very difficult to tell the two apart. Here’s where it gets tricky: many internet marketing experts can also be digital natives, but just as growing up in a chef’s house won’t make you a world-class chef, being a digital native doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an expert in the internet.

Business owners and marketing executives need to be especially aware of who they are bringing on board for the internet marketing efforts. Despite the fact the technology gives marketers the ability to easily measure the effectiveness of campaigns; hiring the right people to monitor those campaigns is still a slippery thing to handle. If you’re not an expert yourself, it might be many months before you realize that who you hired isn’t living up to their promises.

Before you realize that you spent thousands of dollars with little results, here are some quick things to consider:

1.    Define your business goals and let the expert explain how their techniques will get you there. Be specific here (e.g. 6X as many leads in 6 months, 10% increase of revenue from internet leads, etc.). Without a good definition of success, it will be difficult for you to hold your consultants or employees to your standards. Because you have the destination picked, a good expert will be able to put together a roadmap for you.

2.    Ask to see behind the curtain. If an expert won’t allow you or your staff to participate in any of their inbound marketing efforts, you need to be suspicious. The worst thing that can happen to you is that your expert is using black-hat techniques to artificially accelerate the results. The long-term side-effect can be devastating to your efforts. Your expert should also be giving you an education.

3.    Get references and case studies because inbound marketers tend to brag. This is your opportunity to find out what they’ve done in the past. Even if your expert is your cousin or neighbor’s son and has no previous experience, you need to make sure that your resource has legs to stand-on. Don’t simply rely on their pretty website or number of Twitter followers.

As I continue to speak with smart business owners and marketers that want to start using inbound marketing, I’m sure I will hear more horror stories about how a consultant didn’t live up to their claims. It makes me thankful that the Red Sox don’t hire everyone in Boston that seems to know exactly what the team should do.

Are you a hiring manager who is having trouble telling digital natives from the internet marketing experts? Have any tips on how to root out the true experts from the natives? Share them in the comments.

photo by nomaan!

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors – November 2009

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by Mike Moran

I know that it’s hard to be creative. I know that it’s hard to be unique. Get over it. On the Internet, merely copying your competitors works far less well than it does in offline marketing. Unfortunately, Google bares all. If you do the same stuff as everyone else, count on the ones who did it before you to reap the benefits, with your results bringing up the rear.

Why do I say that? Because many small businesses don’t like to admit it to themselves, but their biggest edge over the years is that they were local. They were close to where the customers were. There wasn’t anything about their business that customers would miss if they moved 50 miles away, because there is another business just like theirs in that town.

I’ve been talking to a small auto repair shop owner who fixes any kind of car and has a great reputation locally, but on the Internet, he can’t break through the clutter. He has always skated by with his local business, but now he needs to realize that specializing is what wins on the Web.

So, if you just see what others do, and say “Ditto,” it is unlikely to make you the destination site for your customers on the Web. Because on the Web everyone is equally close, so you need some other to way to be unique besides geography.

Time for you to stare at your navel and decide exactly what is it that you do better than everyone else. The one thing. It’s likely to be just one of the dozens of things that you do in your business. It’s fine to keep selling all that other stuff, but online, you need to specialize in something. You might even need a separate site.

Our auto repair shop owner is realizing that, online, he needs to trumpet his work on restoring classic cars. It’s not the biggest part of his business, but it is the thing that will make people drive an hour to see him, because they won’t do that for an oil change on their 2007 Taurus. He might even want to put together a separate Web site just for his vintage car restoration business, to get the best search results.

So what about you? Do you have a “Ditto business”? If you do, you’ll never get credit for what you do if someone else is known for having done it first. And Google won’t have any reason to single you out. Instead, pick something you really do in a unique way, and bring that to the fore of your Internet marketing. Specializing will break your business out of the mass of clutter and give Google and your customers a reason to separate you from the pack.

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