Caydel’s SEO Blog

I am in the process of preparing to scale an SEO tool I have prototyped to make available to the public. However, I need to find a decent keyword tool to use in a script, something that:

• Returns a list of related keywords based upon the keyword I specify
• Can be banged on repeatedly by a script
• Preferably returns estimated search volumes as well

Cost is not a huge factor, although the cheaper, the better. Also, if it has a decent API, so much the better. If there isn’t one that you know of that gets the search volumes, what would you recommend to obtain those? Do any of the major search engines provide search volume data?

If worse comes to worse, I could code my own. However, I would much prefer to save time!

Share This

In the era of Web2.0, we are seeing the advent of AJAX technologies to drive web pages and applications. Which is good, for the most part - AJAX is a great tool. AJAX-powered pages and applications are often quicker and more responsive than their predecessors, since they don’t require full page loads for every possible operation, opting instead to reload and refresh only those parts of a page necessary.

On the flip side, AJAX can cause problems for search engines. Since the browser does not necessarily move to a new URL to display new data, much of the data and text content on an AJAX-powered site may not be accessible to search engines. Search engines will not submit forms or otherwise interact with the AJAX-powered sections of a site to cause page updates to be triggered, causing much of the content of an AJAX-powered site to be missed.

This is an issue for SEOs everywhere - as AJAX becomes more prevalent, client demand for this technology will continue to increase. So how do we deal with AJAX from an SEO perspective?

Rich McIver of SoftwareDeveloper.com emailed me yesterday to inform me of their latest feature article entitled, ‘‘. The article goes into some detail over techniques and best practices to help make your AJAX application search engine friendly. Some of the information is pretty standard (’submit a sitemap containing static copies of the fragments returned through AJAX’), while some of it deals with the problem at a more design / technical level, such as a presentation on ‘Hijax’ model of AJAX web design.

The article also goes into some common ways of handling AJAX for SEO purposes, and shows the shortcomings of these approaches.

How have you handled AJAX in your web pages / applications? Anything you would add beyond what the linked articles suggest?

Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

Share This

So, the holidays are over and we’re all back at work.

Fun, isn’t it?

My nose is back to the grindstone today again, which isn’t so bad, actually. Over the holidays, Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed. came in from Amazon, so I’ve spent the day so far reading through the book.

You know how sometimes you find a real gem of a book? I am amazed by how great this book is - things are laid out clearly, Dave Thomas has a great style and strategy for getting across what a Rails developer needs to know. Within a few hours of reading, I already had a few pages of notes written down concerning things I could have been doing better with my Rails coding.

I am not approaching this book as a complete beginner, of course. I have done quite a bit of work in Rails before. I had already worked through David Black’s , which is also an excellent book. The two books together complement eachother in style and approach.

So, in short, if you are a Rails programmer and you haven’t already purchased it, go out and get your hands on this book - it will definately give you a much better understanding of Rails. The new edition has been heavily updated for the coming release of Rails 1.2, so it will be a good reference for future releases of Rails!

BTW, if someone wants to get me Rails Recipes… *wink*

Share This

Last weekend, when I moved my blog to this new domain, after moving the files from their old location at http://www.infohatter.com/blog/ to their present location, I needed to set up a redirect to ensure that traffic following links pointing to the old location would still end up at the right posts.

Additionally, I knew that I wanted to use a 301 Redirect, since that is commonly held to be more Search Engine Friendly than a 302 Redirect. For those wondering why, a 301 redirect indicates to the visitor or bot that the page has moved permanently to it’s new location, as opposed to a 302 redirect, which indicates that the move is only temporary.

Now, I had never set up a redirect before, so the first thing I did was to Google it. I found a bunch of sites teaching about how to do redirects, but they all made either one or both of the following assumptions:

• I had access to the server httpd.conf
• I only wanted to redirect a single page

I am on shared hosting, thus do not have access to Apache’s httpd.conf. Instead I knew that I had to perform the move in my sites .htaccess file.

Since I wanted to move an entire site rather than a single page, using the instructons given for rewriting a single URL to point to a new location would have become extremely tedious given that I had nearly 500 active URLs at the new location.

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of instruction on the web, I finally turned to #apache on irc.freenode.net, where some helpful people got me finally set up.

How to 301 Redirect an Entire Site in .htacess

If you wish to have all the URL’s in an existing site redirect to your new site, include the following code in the .htaccess file in the root of the old site.

Redirect 301

So, in my case, I added the following line to the .htaccess file in the root of infohatter.com

Redirect 301 /blog https://caydel.com

Now, any URL which points to my old blog location is now forwarded to it’s corresponding URL in the new blog. For example, http://www.infohatter.com/blog/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/ now redirects all the visitors to https://caydel.com/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/

301 Redirect for a Single URL in .htaccess

If you have a specific set of pages you would like to move, while leaving the others intact, you can use the following 301 redirect in your .htaccces. Notice that the syntax is the same as we used above to send a whole subdirectory to a new url. This form will also keep any arguments passed along with the URL as a GET or POST request, so that they are available to the redirected page.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

301 Redirect to your www

I feel somewhat obligated to include this, since this is perhaps the most important redirect in existence, and EVERY SITE SHOULD USE IT.

Many webmasters do not realize that they likely have their entire site duplicated. Google considers www.example.com to be a different site than example.com. The ‘www’ is considered tp be a seperate subdomain,

This presents a problem because if you have links pointing to both versions, Google will split the attributed trust from these links between the two copies of your site. This will result in lower search engine rankings, and lower search traffic to your site. Now this can be eliminated by implementing this simple 301 redirect in your .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Good Luck - remember that you always want to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. Always make sure you 301 redirect your ‘non-www’ version of your website to the ‘www’ version for the best Google results.

Share This

Update: the mystery is finally solved

Setting

This yesterday, I mistyped the URL as I was visiting Google this morning; I accidentally typed http://www.google.cm. This redirected me to a page on the domain of http://www.agoga.com, which actually looked like a somewhat convincing, spartan page, very similar in style to what you would often see if your browser. Except that it also contained a search bar, and a few unobtrusive links to subject like ‘Travel’, ‘Cars’ etc., the kind of subjects you would see on a typical parked domain page.

I thought that was kind of interesting, a way of monetizing typos that looked to me at least like it would be somewhat effective way of squatting a typo. At the time, though, it didn’t seem noteworthy enough to me to give it further thought.

A little later, I was trying to get to Paypal, and again I accidentally typed http://www.paypal.cm. Once again I was at the same page. I was intrigued, and began experimenting by checking a variety of other domains with the .cm extension. Many big names in the industry had the .cm TLD pointed to the same page I had viewed earlier.

That also, is not that notable. A squatter could easily have registered a whole variety of company names in that TLD - it’s done all the time, and is considered a valid tactic for making some money off of parked domains.

What made it notable finally is when I started entering random domains, and sequences of characters in the .cm TLD. such as http://sdfjhksd.cm and http://www.oiyt.cm. These also are pointing to a landing page on agoga.com, albeit a different landing page from the ones used on major domain mispellings.

Agoga.com has every unregistered .cm TLD pointed to their landing pages!

While there are a bunch of legitimately registered .cm sites which resolve elsewhere, any other .cm domain, whether nonsense characters or misspellings of ‘real’ domain names resolves to the same IP address which is a cluster at agoga.com. The only way this could be accomplished is to change the default site settings of the master DNS serving the .cm TLD. Agoga must have either hacked the .cm registrar in Cameroon, or paid the registrar off for this. Either way, I suspect something illegal has occurred here; I doubt this type of redirecting is approved by IANA.

Opportunity

How much type-in traffic would you think would be generated by people misspelling .com as .cm? Agoga.com has an Alexa Rank of 6,915 which indicates thousands or tens of thousands of visitors per day by some estimates. Keep in mind that this site has not been running for even three months yet; today’s Alexa rank was 2,913.

Since Alexa ranking is biased towards a technical crowd, I think it is safe to assume that the true numbers are fairly large. Now, it is easily attainable that a proper landing page optimized for Pay-Per-Click advertisements will result in a 30%-40% click-through-rate. Especially if one was to put some effort into ensuring the advertisements were targeted around the domain name or keywords at the similar .com page.

It is obvious that with this type of traffic, Agoga.com could be pulling in some huge advertising revenue - as much a $1000-$2000 per day. They should have it made in the shade, for all intents and purposes. But, they have screwed up royally.

How did they screw up?

Agoga will return you to one of two landing pages, depending on what type of domain you enter. One version, which they seem to use when squatting the domain of a large company or popular website, can be seen at . The other, which they seem to use for the domains of smaller websites and nonsense or misspelled domains can be seen at http://www.oeiurt.cm (note the random domain name…) or http://www.caydel.cm (a typo of this domain) or at the Agoga main page at http://www.agoga.com.

The first type of landing page is broken - The first type of landing page is relatively well done - it is minimal, and could easily get the user to click onto their main site. The problem lies in that no ads are served if the user enters certain search queries. While an advertising page is shown if the user enters a query such as ‘digital cameras’, ‘dvd’, ‘knitting’, other queries such as ‘infohatter’, ‘caydel’ or whatever return nothing. Sure, probably nobody is bidding on that term; wouldn’t it be a better plan to grab the first result from a Google query for that term, scrape it for keywords, and return ads based on that? Potentially millions of long-tail opportunities are being missed here, thrown away for no good reason.

The second type of landing page broken - The script that Agoga used to generate the second style of landing page is broken. Any search query or link click redirects you to the same page you just left, with a nice photo of a mountain range, or other scenery visible in place of the advertisements that should be shown. They are making nothing from this type of landing page; in fact, they are losing money due to bandwidth costs.

Opportunity Missed

I would be willing to bet that the majority of the traffic that Agoga.com receives will end up at the second landing page, the broken one. While they probably have their highest traffic domains such as http://www.google.cm pointing to their ‘working’ script, they are missing out on the whole long-tail of domain misspellings. Think about it this way - any mistake made by anyone anywhere when he misspells .com as .cm will send him to the broken script. This could be anyone typing in one of a billion domains.

Additionally, a fair number of people who misspell the the domains of large sites such as Google will make multiple mistakes - they may mispell google.com as google.cm, but how many are prone to make multiple mistakes such as gogle.cm or googel.cm and be sent to the broken page?

What Are You Trying to Tell Us Here?

The point of what I am trying to say should have become clear by this point, but I will write it out nice and neat anyways: an neglect of details can lose you a lot of money. I do not know if this second landing page has ever actually worked for Agoga. Perhaps it has, and only stopped working 15 minutes before I stumbled upon it the first time. Perhaps it has never worked. The fact of the matter is, the person or persons who own Agoga.com (Whois data indicates Nameview, Inc, BTW) are losing thousands of dollars per day. It is probably safe to assume that they don’t even realize this; if they did, they would fix it in realtively short order.
The people responsible for this had an amazing idea, which they ran with 90% of the way to the perfect money-making opportunity. But they have missed a few small details which are costing them perhaps thousands of dollars per day. If they were to fix these small problems, they could probably nearly double their income.

I appreciate your comments and feedback!

Share This

It was just posted on the Wordpress development blog that Wordpress MU 1.0 and bbPress 0.72 have been released. This is some great news - I can attest to the smooth function of these two packages, as I have been using both of them extensively on a blogging community I built this summer. Both of these are quite simple to install and configure, if you are comfortable with the Linux command line.

The login integration is really grat, as it makes your community more cohesive…

Share This