Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Just when it seems that Yahoo! can’t make the customer experience any worse, somehow they find a way to sink to a new low. Back in 2005 I wrote about my difficulty canceling Yahoo! services (the ‘cancel’ form was mysteriously broken for months) and more recently about my Yahoo! Finance portfolio link redirecting to the Yahoo! search page. Now Yahoo! is raising the prices for domain renewals from $10 a year to $34.95 per year, a 350% increase!

Of course the price of everything is going up these days - from gas prices to food - so a little domain inflation is understandable - but 350%!? Even more frustrating is the fact that the cost of a new domain at Yahoo! remains the same - $9.95 for the first year. It’s a classic gotcha move - you don’t want to lose the domain after you’ve had it a year so what else are you gonna do but pay whatever Yahoo! says? Before July 1, 2008 domain renewals cost the same as new domain registrations ($10). If you’re thinking of registering a new domain, don’t let the intro price fool you - go with 1and1 or another registrar instead.

Fortunately the domain cancellation form is working now so when I received a renewal notice in my email yesterday I rushed to cancel before I was hit with the inflated charge. Yahoo! even *appears* to make it easy for you to switch registrars, giving you the necessary unlock code on the cancellation page; I guess they aren’t even interested in keeping their domain customers. Unbelievable how fast this company is sinking…

If you’re serious about building a business online you need a good web analytics package. In the past decent analytics packages were beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized web operators but today you can get professional level reporting from Google Analytics for FREE.

I won’t be able to cover all the things you can do with web analytics in this short post but suffice it to say if there’s anything you want to know about your visitors, Google Analytics can help you figure it out. Here are just a few things we’ve used our analytics to determine:

• Where should we focus our marketing efforts? Google Analytics helps us understand which traffic sources generate the most pageviews per visitor so we can apply our marketing dollars appropriately. A couple months back we decided to give Facebook ads a try and saw that our Facebook-referred visitors viewed 50% more pages than similar campaigns. Since we saw the ads were more effective we increased Facebook spending while decreasing spending on our other campaigns.
• Where do our visitors live? With Google Analytics you can drill down to a country / state / city to see how many visitors you site receives from a given location. We use this information to guide our new content creation and tweak ad campaigns to target certain geographic regions.
• What keywords are visitors using to find our site? This is super important and informs our search engine optimization strategy. Often the results can be surprising and can lead to new insights into your market or industry.
• How is our site performing in terms of transactions? With Google Analytics you can set up various goals to track such as purchases, new user registrations, etc. We look at these closely and make changes to the site to see how they affect our goal metrics. Not sure if the new checkout page on your site is an improvement? Consult the analytics to see how your conversion rate has changed.

Using an analytics package is crucial if you want to better understand and grow your online business. Just remember, analytics alone won’t get you to your goals - it’s just another tool to help you make decisions.

Google Analytics helps you visualize your online traffic with a simple to use interface.

We don’t really like classifying Review App as a piece of software since software alone is never a complete solution. As such we’ve tried to stay away from talking about Review App in terms of what IT can do and instead focus on how WE can help you build a successful online consumer review website. But we understand if you’re curious about the features included in the Review App software - heck, the features page is usually the first page we hit when we’re shopping for software!

So now, for your convenience, we’ve posted a list of the features included in every Review App project. Just click the ‘Services‘ tab at the top of this page and scroll down to the ‘Review App Features’ heading. Here’s a little taste:

• License includes initial installation, configuration, template creation, and customization allowance
• Accepts user generated content of all types: listings, reviews, photos, and more
• RSS feed with links to latest approved online submissions (listings, photos, and reviews)
• Dynamically generated meta descriptions, page titles, and keywords
• Highly flexible and robust template system with access to raw data output
• Customizable system messages and email templates
• SEO-friendly URLs enabled at the click of a button and customized by section
• Business rules honed over 10 years of managing successful consumer review sites
• Built using open source technologies: PHP, MySQL, XHTML

And those are just the basics. Click through to read more about user management and user-generated listings, review, photos, and more - then contact us to talk about getting your Review App project started!

Here’s an SEO trick you may have heard: placing Google Adsense advertisements on your new website will get your pages indexed sooner since Adsense relies on knowing what your site is about. Or perhaps you’ve heard the opposite (from an SEO friend of a friend): Placing Google Adsense on your new site will actually undermine your ranking because Google will think you are a spammer/domainer. So which one is correct?

We built two similar pages with similar keyword densities, page rank, etc. and placed a Google Adsense ad on one page, no ad on the other. After just a few days, the page without our Google Adsense code was indexed and a full week later the page WITH the Google ad was finally indexed. Even today the non-Adsense page is listed first in Google search results.

So what does Yahoo! think about all this? Yahoo! prefers the page without the ad which shouldn’t come as a suprise given that these two are bitter rivals. Well, maybe not that bitter since Yahoo! is itself a Google Adsense publisher these days but you get the point. Perhaps Yahoo! is jealous of us

So what does this mean? Should we take down the Google Adsense ads from our web pages to improve search engine rankings? The answer for me is no, especially given the revenue these ads generate for my sites. However, if you’re building a new site you may want to hold off on the Google Adsense ads until your site has been indexed and you’re generating at least a few “real” visits per day that can be monetized.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about poor web software interfaces and today I thought I’d share a few web interfaces that I think do a good job.

Word Press

Yep, it’s the interface I’m using to write this very post and the latest version is spiffy to say the least. The Word Press admin interface uses AJAX to auto-save your posts while you write and you don’t even need to leave the edit window to add photos and video clips to the visual editor. One gripe I have about the new interface: categories are below the fold meaning I have to scroll down to categorize my posts before scrolling back up to save. But dontcha just love the colors and fonts? Spiffy.

Gmail

Gmail has one of those interfaces that you either love or hate - or if you’re like me you start off hating it but end up loving it. Yes, it’s a different approach to email with threaded conversations but with all the enhancements over the years it’s really become a desktop-email app killer. My favorite features are the things that happen behind the scenes like the spam filtering (Gmail identified over 62,000 spam emails to me in the last 30 days alone) and the way Gmail is able to parse stuff like addresses and event dates to create links to Google maps and Google Calendar automatically. Heck, I even like the targeted ads and news items Gmail displays along with my messages and I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve even clicked on a few over the years.

Review App

Ok, so I’m a bit biased but I’m using the Review App interface every day and I gotta say it’s great. Actually I can’t take much, if any of the credit, since the guys at 45Royale did all the wireframing and design on the interface (and on this site as well). Organization is great, the layout is clean, and the interface uses AJAX in the right places to provide a responsive interface to a fairly complex process. If you’d like to take the Review App admin interface for a spin send us an email and we’ll set you up with our private demo.

There are actually a number of other great web app interfaces that I wanted to write about here but I think I’ll save those for another time. Until then, we’d love to hear which web app interfaces you think are great and which ones just aren’t cutting it. Post yer comments here!

Feedburner is a great tool for managing your RSS feeds, and lucky for you, it’s free to use! I admit I was a little late to the RSS/newsfeed party but I started using Feedburner a few months back and now I use it literally every day.

What does Feedburner do? For starters, it helps you track the number of folks who are reading your blog (or other RSS items). Typical analytics packages aren’t able to capture your feed readers since they don’t always visit your site through a traditional web browser. Feedburner also helps you understand which articles or items your readers are clicking to help you guage reader reactions - something that can be complicated using analytics alone.

The other great thing about Feedburner is that it organizes and simplifies your feeds into a single link. No need for the fruit salad approach to providing feeds (RSS, RSS2, Atom, etc.) with Feedburner - just let Feedburner do the necessary formatting to fit each reader’s needs.

Since Feedburner is owned by Google they are able to offer seamless integration with Google Adsense which helps you monetize your feeds. This is huge since folks reading your news in a reader typically aren’t seeing the ads that are on your site; Feedburner makes it happen. There are even tools for helping your optimize and publicize your feeds which can really help build up your subscriber base.

Feedburner is an amazing (free!) tool that any webmaster can use to manage RSS feeds with ease. Now if it could only write my blog for me, then it would be perfect!

The cool thing about Google’s whole pagerank set-up is that, for the most part, it’s very difficult to game. Roughly speaking, pagerank assigns a value to a website based on the number and quality of outside sites that point to said website. The more links to your website, the higher your pagerank and the higher your site shows up in online search results.

While virtually every other portion of search engine optimization can be gamed to some degree, pagerank is a difficult thing to fake. Of course people have tried all sorts of schemes to increase the number of incoming links to their sites - link farms, paid links, spam links (posted on blogs / forums / etc.) - but in the end, genuine pagerank-enhancing links are made the old fashioned way.

In the early days we used to email folks and ask them to trade links with our sites to build reciprocal traffic (even though there was no such thing as pagerank back then). Today people still try to build links this way but it’s tough work and can come across as spammy to the recipients of link request emails. Even if your emails are genuine and get a good response from webmasters, we’re still talking a 5% hit rate or less - meaning you’ll need to identify and send 100 emails to get 5 new incoming links. Not an effective strategy if you ask me.

Our approach to collecting backlinks is actually pretty simple: we try to create the best content possible. If your site has useful, interesting, and relevant content you won’t need to ask people to link to you - they’ll do it automatically! Focus on making your site useful and not only will you collect backlinks but your users will actually stay on your site longer, generating higher pageviews and perhaps even a little word of mouth marketing for your site.

Now I know, creating great site content is tough but it’s really the only foolproof way I know of building a lasting online brand. A wise man once said “if you build it, they will come” - great advice if you’re considering a creating a baseball field in Iowa. But if you’re launching a new website I like to say “If you create great content, they will visit and link.”

We’ve made it simple to extend the funcationality of Review App through a system of plug-ins and one of the included plug-ins, AdZone, offers a nifty way to rotate and serve ads on your consumer review site. We actually developed AdZone several years ago for another site and it’s worked so well we decided to bundle it with Review App.

AdZone works like a standard ad server, allowing you to create your own advertisement zones based on ad size and/or placement. Within each zone you can add as many ads as you’d like to rotate within that zone and you can even set a weight for each ad. So if you want Google Adsense ads to be shown 70% of the time and your own house ad to be shown the other 30% you can do that. AdZone supports image ads, HTML, and even dynamic scripting ads - pretty much anything you can think of, AdZone can handle it.

AdZone tracks the number of impressions each ad receives daily and tracks clickthrough rates for supported ad types. You can also set ads to “expire” after a certain number of clicks or impressions, perfect for pre-paid ad sales on your site. We’re using AdZone on sites with 1M+ ad impressions per month and it’s lightning fast.

Implementing AdZones within your Review App templates is a breeze - just place a single function call in your HTML and your ads will be shown immediately! Like all Review App plug-ins, the AdZone control panel is integrated into your admin page for easy access and real time changes.

AdZone is a great piece of web software on its own but when integrated with Review App it can be a real moneymaker - start managing your own ads today!

How does the text within an anchor tag linking to your website affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword? Anecdotally I can tell you it’s hugely important - we saw one of our sites rise to the top of Google results for ‘mountain bike blog’ simply by including that text in our trackback links. We decided to test the theory to see if this is always the case.

By now you know our setup - two pages, same keyword densities, pagerank, etc. but with one difference: one page has our target keyword in an incoming text link, the other does not. Our page without the keyword in the incoming link was actually indexed first by Google but once the keyword-link page was indexed it quickly took over the top spot in the search results. Today the keyword-link page is in second place but I think that is a function of Google getting zero feedback on the search results for this particular word (i.e. no clicks on either link since the keyword sees virtually zero search traffic, more on this another time).

Yahoo! chose to place the LINKING page at the top of results which shows us something else entirely. The linking page is a third page we didn’t intend to test here - it’s the page where the keyword link itself was placed. This shows us that Yahoo! indexes anchor text as page content rather than assign that text to the LINKED page, something that most of us assume Google does. The second result on Yahoo! is the non-keyword linked page while the keyword-linked page wasn’t indexed by Yahoo! at all.

These are certainly interesting results and the anchor-text as content finding definitely warrants further testing. Drop a comment and let us know what other SEO tests you’d like to see tackled…

Yesterday we re-posted the Review App help docs online to make it easier for you to learn more about the Review App software. In your admin interface you’ll find links to related help docs at reviewapp.com and we’ll do our best to keep the information relevant and up to date. So if you’re on the category page and you find yourself confused, just click the ‘?’ icon beside the page heading and the category help section will open up in a new window. Simple - just like Review App