Keyword Research with a little help from our Google

I’m currently researching the keywords I want to promote over the Christmas buying season, as my gadgets site is established and already does pretty well from the search engines my primary promotion method is going to be SEO. I’m not going to write about the products I’m promoting here (as that would be rather silly) but I will share the tools and process I use in my research.

As a working example I’m going to pretend that I’ll be promoting satellite navigation systems, which actually wouldn’t be a bad product to choose, they are a relatively high value and a potentially popular Christmas present. So first off is researching the most popular search term for these and looking to see if they have been popular for Chrimbo in the past.

Checking Trends
I always refer to my satelite navigation system as a sat nav as I expect most people do, but I want to market to a global audience so I’d like to check that. This is where Google Trends helps, it doesn’t give exact search figures but does let you compare the popularity between terms.

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SEO Checklist (for Dummies)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of checklists and after seeing some of the comments or our recent site reviews I thought it would be a good idea to create an SEO checklist. If you have any suggestions on things that we should add to this list please let us know.

I like to break the process of SEO into 3 different parts:
On Page - This is what should be done on individual pages
On Site - These are things that can be done across your entire site to improve overall SEO
Off Page/Site - Influencing factors on other sites

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Long Tail Searches by Example

Ranking for a single keyword can be very lucrative (just ask Scott and his tattoos) but ranking for any semi-competitive keyword or phrase is both difficult (especially for new sites) and may not be the most profitable of rankings. Whilst doing a bit of stat research last week I found I was getting a bit of traffic for the term inflatable water slides, after checking on Google I saw my site was currently in the #2 spot but the year old page was getting twice as much traffic as that ranking was generating, time for a bit more research.

In the past two weeks the page has been found 1,435 for the term ‘inflatable waterslide’, however Google Analytics was reporting:

This page was viewed 2,794 times via 147 keywords

So it was getting nearly the same amount of traffic again from 146 different phrases. I won’t list all the phrases here as that would get somewhat repetitive however here’s a selection of the top and bottom. (more…)

Backlinks Backlinks Backlinks

No, the title of this blog post isn’t designed to be keyword stuffing, it describes probably the most important ranking factor and single thing every webmaster has had great trouble with, more so today than at any previous point in the history of the internet.

The history
Some of us started many years ago with sites that were not monetised and like any information portal like a tourist information office that had leaflets to related attractions, events and accommodation most websites freely linked out to other sites of interest or relevance. Logical capt’n.

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Analyzing Stats to get More Money and Traffic

My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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Trialling a Feed Advert

I’m after a bit of feedback on this idea, so all thoughts and suggestions are very welcome (and there’ll be a bonus for commenting).

I’m trying to get more visitors to my site from my feed, so I spent an hour over the weekend creating a plug-in for WordPress that lets me display an extra sentence or so at the end of each post but only in the feed and not on the site. I intend to put an advertising link back to the main site where I can push visitors to affiliate pages with relevant offers.

If you want to see it in action subscribe to the SMM or CG feed.

After creating the plug-in it got me thinking how it could be used in a few different ways:

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Taking Your Site Mobile

I travel a fair bit on both business and pleasure and when away I become totally reliant on my mobile phone, I don’t use it so much for calls but I do use it extensively for checking email, news (mainly football results), my sites and making the odd blog post.

I use the mobile version of GMail as my mail client, they do have a Java version especially for mobiles but I find their mobile enhanced web version works a treat especially since it’s been improved so that you can perform the same action on multiple messages via check boxes. As I do so much browsing on my mobile I think it makes perfect sense to include a mobile version of some of my sites (the fact that Adsense for mobiles is now live also helped kick me into action).
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Automatically Increased Affiliate Revenue by 15%

Last week I got round to one of those jobs that I’ve wanted to do for a while and that’s making my affiliate links a bit more visitor friendly and readable. I’ve mentioned before how I automatically convert links to sites that I have a relationship with to their corresponding affiliate links, I’ve now taken this a stage further and have created a Word Press plug-in to make it easy to add new affiliates as I find them.

The way the plug-in works is it searches for the domain of merchants that I have an affiliate program with adjusts it accordingly, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/ would be converted on the fly to the equivalent affiliate link of :
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/se121lnwtnvACIJCEHEACBEGHEDF?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F&sid=cg-http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F/geektoys/games/7eaa/

As you can see the affiliate link is pretty darn ugly and to the (slighty) trained eye it is obviously an affiliate link which does put some people (especially tech savvy webmasters) off clicking it.
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My First $1,000 Adsense Day

Over the past month I’ve been pushing affiliates sales with varying levels of success and I’ve been pretty much ignoring Adsense and even removing it from some pages to concentrate more on sales, so I’m some what surprised to be sat here on Cyber Monday writing about hitting one of my Adsense goals, the $1,000 Adsense day .
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Make it Easy, Make it Obvious

So far this month I’ve had 15 record days, in terms of both profit and traffic. I’m hoping for this to continue until just before Christmas so as you can imagine I’m a tad on the busy side looking for new things to promote and ways to make the most of the traffic I already have.

This next tip is really really simple, so simple in fact that it’s easily overlooked (well it was by me anyway). At the moment people are in buying mode so make it easy and obvious for them, one thing I did was add the following button to some of my affiliate pages:

It’s a hack of one of the buttons found on Amazon (which even my limited graphical skills could do). So far the results look really good with conversions on the pages involved 50 - 100% up (how much of that can be put down to it being a day closer to Christmas I’m not sure).

So it’s a short post today, but if it’s suitable for your site could prove to be a very profitable one.