Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

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

I posted a couple weeks ago about “pay-for-review” programs that some websites are using these days and how this can often provide the wrong incentives for review posters. The ideal online user contribution will come from a person who is genuinely interested in sharing her knowledge or opinion, though we all know ideals are often far from reality. Besides, few of us have the time or patience to watch our consumer review website grow one review at a time. There are, however, ways you can motivate your users to post useful content without resorting to expensive cash payments.

Points and user status rewards

This is one of the first things we implemented on singletracks, mainly because it cost us nothing and our budget was tight. Members receive points for various actions they take, and the point values are weighted to reflect the value of the content to us. For example, reviews are worth 1 point, photos 2, and new listings are worth 3. With contribution points we can rank our users and the competition has proven successful at maximizing participation as members jockey for the top spot.

Along with the contribution points we introduced user badges to signify various point levels and the badges are visible alongside content posted by that user. Earning status badges give users a sense of pride in their contributions and as a side benefit, give new readers an easy way to identify the experience level of each content author. Most modern forum software includes a similar ranking system, mainly because it works!

Lists

With Review App you can create custom lists to allow your members to track and collect listings on their profile page. For example, on a BBQ restaurant review website you might want to allow members to create a list of places they have eaten. Now let’s say a new user starts adding restaurants to his list and notices his favorite BBQ joint doesn’t have a listing yet so he can’t add it to his list. He’ll now be motivated to add a listing for that restaurant to keep his list up to date, giving you the content you desire!

Contests

Generating new content for your website via a contest is perhaps the lowest-tech method you could employ (and the only one mentioned that costs anything) but it’s tough to avoid just because it’s so darn effective. We’ve hosted dozens of contests to see who can add the most new listings in a month, who can post the best photo, etc. and the results are always huge. Oftentimes the prize can be as simple as a t-shirt with your website logo but the bigger the prize, the more new users and new content you’ll attract.

Contribution points, lists, and contests are just a few ways you can motivate your members (and potential members) to give you the content you need - use them wisely and often!

SportsOneSource posted an article last week about how online reviews are helping to drive sales at REI. From the article:

Customers of Recreational Equipment Inc. who submit online reviews of gear they’ve bought at the retail co-op purchase at a 26% higher rate than non-review readers, according to the vendor who helped implement the online feature.

Now this is a little confusing since it sounds like the study compares purchase rates of folks who submit online reviews with folks who don’t read online reviews. There’s certainly a difference between submitting and reading reviews but based on the article title I’m going to assume they are actually comparing purchase rates of review submitters to non-review submitters.

Now, the finding is that review submitters are more likely to purchase than non-review submitters, but I’d argue that folks who purchase recreational equipment probably have experience with said gear and are interested in sharing their thoughts. Not only that but those who purchase ALOT of recreational gear are probably ENTHUSIASTS who enjoy discussing the merits of various products. If I own three sleeping bags I know enough to write a helpful, meaningful review, and I’m more likely to share my thoughts.

So does submitting a review make me more likely to purchase or does purchasing make me more likely to submit a review? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter but then again that probably won’t help me sell online review software

Update: I reread the article and had another thought. Maybe the finding is that folks who 1. bought an item in store and 2. later went online to post a review were 3. 26% more likely to make a purchase online than someone who didn’t read the online reviews. Again, still comparing apples to oranges (submitting to reading) but it seems like the argument is that by going online to submit a review 1 out of 4 folks are hanging around to make a purchase. Then again, it’s tough to make an online purchase if you don’t visit the website in the first place. Or maybe people went online to say how much their purchase sucked and then proceeded to purchase a competing product, later returning the first purchase in store

An important Review App feature is the ability to upload spreadsheet data to your website: listings, categories, and even input field choices. Yeah, we went a little nuts with the spreadsheet tools but they speed up the configuration process so much that we couldn’t resist.

Loading new listings via spreadsheet

On SeriousRunning.com we needed to transfer our ‘places to run’ data from an existing site into the Review App framework. Using a common spreadsheet format we simply exported the data from the old site, manipulated the columns in Excel, then loaded all 200+ listings into Review App. Total time to completion: less than 30 minutes.

SeriousRunning also uses data from Amazon.com’s affiliate program for running shoe listings and we were able to load a spreadsheet downloaded from the Amazon API into Review App as well. Sure beats typing hundreds of listings by hand

Editing Listings in Excel

Not only can you load new listings using the Review App spreadsheet tools but you can edit them as well. Just download your existing listings, make changes in Excel, then upload the file to Review App. Your changed listings will be updated and new listings will be added at the same time from the same file.

Loading/Editing Categories and Field Choices

Review App also makes it easy for you to quickly add or update categories and field choices using spreadsheet data. Import categories from your old website, create new categories using data you found online, or edit all your category names at once to make them more consistent - spreadsheet uploads make it simple! Field choices (the choices in your input forms’ drop down menus) work exactly the same way - simple. All our spreadsheet forms include simple step by step instructions: download the spreadsheet template, edit your data, upload to Review App. Done.

Some web software packages include spreadsheet data support as an ‘add-on’ (read: extra charge) but with Review App you get it all standard. It’s your data - upload and download it however you want!