Get Visitors To Come Back

Does your website stand out? Why would ANYONE come BACK to your website? Does your website have anything worthy of coming back to? These are all questions you should ask yourself when looking at the “Direct Visitors” metric in Google Analytics. Return visitors are super important for many reasons.

Here are some great resources about return visitors:

• Website Goodies talks about getting your visitors to return back to your website
• A Promotion Guide talks about increasing traffic with return visitors
• Search Engine Channel talks about how return visitors gives you prominence in search engines
• Lastly, here are 10 Proven methods to attract and measure return website visitors

Top Internet Marketing Blogs

Winning The Web has compiled a list of the top Internet Marketing blogs. Site categories include affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media. Their data includes the following (all sortable):

• RSS Subscribers
• Alexa Ranking
• Technorati Rankings
• Google Pagerank
• YAHOO Inbound Links
• Stumbleupon Reviews
• del.icio.us Saves
• Outbound links
• Votes

Surprisingly, I didn’t see the number of outbound links from Google.

Here is a sample of the output:

Top Internet Marketing Blogs. Click for full size.

View Winning The Web’s IM Top Blogs.

Related Blogs

• Read excellent blogs on the Net
• So how do you explain the benefits of the accurate Social Media …

Funny Adwords Ad

I was surfing the web and found an interesting Adwords ad.

Adwords Ad on Google Philippines

You’ll notice that that this person has included an SMS number in the URL field. I tried clicking the ad but no cigar, I get a 404 page. Of course, this persons’ ad was taken down by the end of the day.

For those interested, you are in fact allowed to include a telephone number in the ad text. It works well for SOME people so it’s definitely worth split testing.

SEO Round Table talks about this in more detail.

Related Blogs

• AdSense’s advantages - Tips
• How to make an Adsense text link ad with clout
• Split Testing Adwords ads - The easy way
• Few Factors are used — by Google to determine which ads to serve ads
• The Google Adsense, Boost Your Payout 250%.
• Google Adsense - How to Improve Your Google Adsense Earnings
• How to Improve Your chances of Making Money Online through Google
• Google AdSense and type of alternativ

Overthrow Wikipedia Results

As most of you may have noticed, WIKIPEDIA is ranked on the first page for almost every term. In most cases, they provide a fairly thorough explanation about a topic. In other cases, it provides a terrible user experience. For example, if someone is search for “accounting sofware,” it is very likely that they are actually looking for accounting software and not a 10 page description about it. Well Blue Hat SEO has created an excellent blog post about overthrowing WIKIPEDIA results

Related Blogs

• Object oriented principles of wikipedia links
• SEO News Roundup for November 7, 2008

Improve Your SEO Rankings With These Basic Tips

TopRankBlog goes back to the basics and discusses three basic tips to achieve high SEO rankings. They are as follows:

• Research keywords
• Apply researched keywords to your website in page titles, meta description, paragraphs, headers and links.
• Find sites related to your topic and let them know about your site. Don’t do this artificially. Create content worth talking about and YOU WILL GET LINKS naturally.

It’s definitely easier said than done. For more information, read the entire TopRankBlog article.

MSN Adcenter Changes

MSN Adcenter has finally introduced some long-awaited features. As most of you know, the interface was previously VERY slow. I logged in and noticed that the interface was a little faster. They’ve also added faster editorial reviews (probably automated most of it).

Here’s what’s new in adCenter.

• Pause and resume your ads and keywords. You can now pause and resume the delivery of individual ads and keywords, in addition to ad groups and campaigns.
• Faster editorial reviews. We can now review your ads and keywords more quickly, and your approved ads and keywords can go live faster than before.
• Better help with disapproved ads and keywords. Get easier-to-find information about the reasons for the disapproval and how to update the ads and keywords for resubmission.
• Faster adCenter page load times. Save time while managing your campaigns in adCenter, thanks to system enhancements that make page load times faster than before.
• More options to target your customers by location. In selected countries or regions, you can now target your ads to people in more specific locations. Target customers by country, state, province, metro area, or city.

Visit Adcenters blog to view the official news release.

Get Your Links Back! New Feature In Google Webmaster Tools

Google has added an important feature to the Google Webmaster tools area.

Google tells you exactly which pages result in a 404 error on your site. This has existed for sometime. They now let you know which of your 404 pages have links pointing to them. I used this tool and quickly found links pointing to non existent pages for many of my domains. Of course, this was quickly rectified with 301 redirects.

Google wants to give you this information for a few reasons:

1. 404s creates a bad user experience
2. It benefits YOU. Google wants to count the valid links pointing to your site which translates into better rankings and more visibility on Google.
3. Having links to 404s can skew their algorithm.

Here are some more detailed posts regarding the change:

• Google Webmaster Central posts information their blog.
• Free Links to Your Site by Matt Cutts
• Google’s New Tools for Site Link Strengthening by Search Engine Watch.

Google Analytics Releases Powerful New Features

Google Analytics will be rolling out some new features in the coming weeks. Some of you may have already noticed the interface change.

The following has been added

1. Advanced Segmentation
2. Custom Reports
3. A data export API (private beta)
4. Integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta)
5. Multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts,”
6. Updated user and administrative interface

The biggest surprise - Analytics is now integrated with Adsense. You can see how much money each page generates, hourly earnings (for any metric available), which referrals are bring you profitable traffic and for each page on your site, you can view up to 10 Adsense metrics! You can cross segment with almost any data value!

Links

1. Visit the Google Analytics blog to view the features in detail.
2. If you would like to view a visual representation of the videos, view Google’s Youtube Playlist.

Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Tools

What are Sitelinks?
Take a look at the below Google listing. You will notice a few links under the regular listing … Inside Politics, Political Ticker, etc. Google has determined that this is the navigational hierarchy for cnn.com. These are referred to as Sitelinks.

Can I change the Sitelinks listed by Google?
Google webmaster tools gives you the ability to block specific Sitelinks. You are not able to modify the Sitelinks, or add to the list of Sitelinks. To block Sitelinks, login to Google webmaster Tools and click “Links” > “Sitelinks.”

Can I Influence the Sitelinks?
There are a couple of ways to influence Sitelinks:

1. Your website should be easy to navigate and users should understand how to drill through your site. It should be EASY to find the information they are looking over through a meaningful hierarchy. If a user experiences difficulties navigating through your website, chances are that a search engine will as well.
2. When you submit your XML sitemap to Google, you can set the priority of each page, 1 being the highest. The higher the priority, the more important the page is. Google may not use this data but they will definitely consider it.

I found the information on Hochman Consultants pretty useful. Here’s what they say:

I’ve worked on a number of sites with Sitelinks, and these sites are similar in the following ways:

1. Site ranks first for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing
2. Easily spiderable, structured navigation
3. Fairly high natural search traffic
4. High click through rates from the search results page
5. Useful outbound links
6. Inbound links from high quality sites
7. Site age is several years or older

Here are some more helpful links:
Provide Feedback on Sitelinks
How does Google compile the list of links shown below search results?
How To Get Google Sitelinks

This stuff has been around for a while but it’s never too late to brush up.

Missing Data in Google Webmaster Tools

I came across an article on Search Engine Land and thought I would talk about the same issue since it’s happened to me (I thought I was the only one!). When you add a domain to your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can sign up using the “www” or non “www” version of your domain. I just happened to sign up with the non “www” version of the domain and noticed no stats in my account. I then registered the www version and voila, things started appearing. I later found that Google considers these as two separate domains.

Here’s what Google says about this:

What can I do to make sure I’m seeing all my data?

• If you feel like you’re missing some data, add both the www and the non-www version of your domain to your Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at the data for both sites.
• Do a site: search for your domain without the www (e.g. [site:example.com]). This should return pages from your domain and any of your indexed subdomains (www.example.com, rollergirl.example.com, etc.). You should be able to tell from the results whether your site is mainly indexed with or without the www subdomain. The version that’s indexed is likely to be the version that shows the most data in your Webmaster Tools account.
• Tell us whether you prefer for your site to be indexed with or without the www by setting your preferred domain.
• Let everyone else know which version you prefer by doing a site-wide 301 redirect.