The Feedjit Blog

The Daily Feed Issue #26: Cross-browser testing part 1

September 14th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #26 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).

At Feedjit we have a strong focus on QA or Quality Assurance. My co-founder created the BBC’s digital television testing lab, so we have some great in-house QA experience. This week I’m going to give you some tips on how to ensure the quality of your own blog or website. Today we’re going to start by covering which platforms you should be testing your site in.

Whenever you change something on your blog or website, you should test your site across all the major browsers and operating systems. If you don’t have access to all browsers and operating systems, then you should test it in as many as you can.

At a minimum you should test your site in:

Firefox (on any operating system)
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer version 8
Internet Explorer version 8 in compatibility mode.

Here’s a great tip if you don’t have Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) but want to make sure your site looks great in IE7: Load up Internet Explorer 8. See that little icon on the location bar that looks like a broken page? Click it to put the browser in compatibility mode. It will now load the page as if it was Internet Explorer version 7. Make sure your page looks great in regular IE8 and compatibility mode. This page on Microsoft’s site has a guide to switch to compatibility mode.

If you would like to do a fuller test to make sure your site looks great in 95% of browsers, you should test your site in:

Firefox on Windows Vista, XP or Windows 7
Firefox on OS X (Mac)
Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista, XP or Windows 7
Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, XP or Windows 7
Chrome on Windows Vista, XP or Windows 7
Chrome on OS X (Chrome on Windows behaves differently to Chrome on OS X)
Safari on OS X
Opera on Windows or OS X

Note: The above list refers to the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

At Feedjit we go a little further. We test the current and previous versions of all major browsers on WIndows, OS X and on Linux. We also test several minor browsers like Opera, Flock and Konqueror. We also test major releases with even older browsers like IE6 and Firefox 2. This kind of testing is very intensive and time consuming, so I’d recommend starting off with the smaller list above and that will catch most issues and give you a reasonable level of confidence in your site quality.

Tomorrow I’m going to explain how to build a mini test lab on your PC or Mac.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #25: Tracking early stage SEO

September 13th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #25 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it’s free).

We’re tracking our early SEO performance since we launched 503me.com on Thursday and I thought I’d share a few of the ways we measure SEO performance of an early stage website and how you can begin to measure your performance too.

Firstly we’re looking at how many pages have been indexed. Doing a Google search for site:example.com will show you how many pages have been indexed for your site. So far we have 56 pages indexed as you can see from this search. Not a spectacular amount of content, but it’s all high quality so it should start sending us a few visitors in the near future.

Next we are checking our server logs to see how frequently Googlebot is visiting our site. Right now we’re getting a few pages crawled every 3 to 5 hours. Unfortunately you can’t use Google Analytics or Feedjit Pro to get this information. You’re going to have to look at your server logs. Javascript based tracking or analytics services can’t give you this data.

Next I want to find a page that we have on our site and see where it’s ranking in the results for a particular search. That will be our benchmark search. Someone posted a question asking “Is the meta keywords tag still important?“. If I do a Google search for that phrase without using quotes, I find that we’re appearing on page 3 of the results. We are currently ranking at about 230. Not too good, but the site is only 4 days old, so that’s OK for now.

This benchmark search is now my measure of how we’re doing in terms of pagerank with Google. As more sites link to 503me.com, we’ll see that search results rising from 230 to 150, 100 and eventually, with a bit more work, page one of the search results for that search.

PS: On Saturday we added the ability to comment answers that are posted and it’s great to see a number of comment threads kicking off as original posters strike up a conversation with someone who answered their question.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #24: How fast Google indexes and post launch report

September 10th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #24 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com.

It’s day 1 after our launch of 503me.com yesterday. Last week I wrote about how fast Google indexes your site. We have a great live example with 503me. In less than 24 hours of the website going live Google has already indexed us and we’re appearing in search results.

We’ve had a bunch of great questions posted today and they’ve all been answered. Today we added a Top Users Page with a list of the most helpful members (ranked by Karma) on the site. Thanks to all the members that are listed here – you guys really helped out today asking great questions and posting great answers.

We also added a Newest Answers page. You can help us by keeping an eye on this page and flagging any spam that comes in and voting up great answers that are posted.

503me is turning into an incredible community resource for learning about ways to get more traffic – and we’re only 24 hours old. We haven’t started marketing the site yet. Later today we’re going to be turning on the traffic cannons by linking to the site from Feedjit.com, so I really need your help to make sure we’re voting the best questions to the top and flagging spam to keep the site clean.

If you are helping out and earning Karma, please make sure you’ve added your website address to your profile so that when you appear in our Top Users list, people can find out who you are and go to your site. The link from us will also help boost your site’s search ranking.

I’ll be using 503me as a kind of marketing case study in The Daily Feed going forward and I’ll be chatting about the site growth and our thinking behind the design and strategy. If you do have any questions, please post them to 503me.com rather than emailing them to me. That way you’ll get more than just my answer and the best answers will be voted to the top.

Yesterday I mentioned I was going to chat about how to migrate domains. I’m going to hold off on that for now – if you’d like details, please post the question on 503me and I’ll cover it there.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #23: Launching 503me.com today to help you get more traffic

September 9th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #23 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Today we are launching a completely free, community powered question and answer site called 503me.com. On 503me you can ask any question about getting traffic. We cover subjects like search engine optimization, search marketing and viral marketing – anything related to getting more visitors on your blog or website.

Beginners and Gurus are both welcome. Go there now, post a question, and you should get a few great answers from our team and from other experts on the site. If you’re a Guru, help us help the community by answering a few of the questions posted.

503me is inspired by the hundreds of questions I’ve received via email and haven’t been able to answer yet. I realized that it would be great to have a way for the many smart people on this list and on the Web to answer your questions too. We designed the site to be lightweight, super fast and as user-friendly as possible.

The name 503me comes from the code that a web server gives when it’s getting too much traffic: HTTP code 503. It’s every webmaster’s dream to have the happy problem of too many site visitors.

The site works on a voting system. The best questions and answers will rise to the top as they receive more votes. The home page uses an algorithm that shows you questions that are both new and popular.

We also use a “karma” system that rewards members who’s questions or answers get votes. We will be introducing features for members with higher karma.

I hope you enjoy 503me as much as we enjoyed creating it. Please send your feedback directly to me at mark@feedjit.com. Tomorrow I will chat about how to safely migrate from one domain to another as I promised yesterday.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #22: Should you change your domain name

September 8th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #22 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

We have a huge announcement in tomorrow’s edition. For the last few weeks we’ve been working on something that will help you get more visitors from search engines. It’s completely free and completely awesome. Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s edition for the big announcement.

I have gotten a few questions from our readers saying they have domain XYZ.com and it was registered a long time ago when they weren’t thinking clearly. Should they change it?

First a quick recap of the most important things to consider when choosing a domain name:

In the 90′s and early 2000′s search engines would put a significant amount of weight on the keywords in your domain. Domains like car-auto-insurance.com that stuffed as many relevant keywords into the name were common. Then around 2003 things started changing and keywords were deemphasized in search algorithms. They realized that sites like amazon.com and eBay.com have arbitrary names but should rank highly for certain categories.

Modern domain names take human factors into account rather than search ranking. In issue #9 I listed these things to consider when choosing a name:

It must be easy to remember
It doesn’t have to be short. HuffingtonPost is the most popular blog in the world.
It should have words that are related to what it does. e.g. RescueTime.com sells time management software. MediaPiston.com is a copywriting service.
It must be easy to spell
It must be easy to pronounce
It should not contain dashes – when someone remembers your domain, they won’t remember if it included dashes or not.
It should be a dot-com. .org’ers argue with me if you like, but dot-com’s are still the most memorable domains.

Now back to the question of whether you should change your name. Don’t make this decision lightly. You have a significant amount of search engine equity and brand equity in your domain name. Unless your name is harming you in some way or a new name would deliver strong benefits, I would recommend against changing your name.

A valid reason to change your name would be that you have strong evidence you’re being confused with another company. Assuming you don’t want to get involved in a trademark dispute, changing your name may solve this. Another good reason is if you have an obscene word or suggestive word in the name that is harming your brand.

If you do have to change your site or blog domain, there is a way to ensure that all the page-rank you have accumulated gets passed on to the new site. I’ll discuss how to change your name successfully tomorrow – along with the big announcement we’re making.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #21: Attracting targeted visitors

September 7th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #21 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Today’s edition answers a question I got from Saira last week asking: “How important is it to be specific on your blog? Being specific may define and facilitate getting hits from your target market, but sometimes it restricts you from sharing on your blog what you want to.”

You’ve hit the nail on the head Saira. The more specific you are, the more likely you’re going to attract the niche that you’re targeting. The best case scenario is that you write about something that lots of people Google every day but that no one (or few people) have written about before. Once Google indexes your blog, you’re going to get visits from a huge percentage of the people searching for that subject even if your blog doesn’t have a lot of pagerank.

If your blog or website is purely for your business, then logic dictates you should do what makes you the most money. But there is another force at work here. If you don’t love what you do, it’s very hard to be good at it. There’s a great t-shirt I’ve seen around Seattle that says “Do what you love, love what you do.”. Great advice!

As a general approach I would suggest the following: Blog about something you love and that can also make you money in some way. It could improve your career prospects, earn ad revenue or helps you sell stuff. Clearly define who your target market is and keep them in mind while writing. If you want to wander off topic for a while, do that but always be aware that you’re doing it, how far you’re wandering away and know that you risk losing the interest of your readers. That way you can take measured risks.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. You may think that blogging about something personal is wandering off topic, but there is a reason reality shows and human interest stories are extremely popular and you may find that it helps you connect on a deeper level with your readers and engage them even more.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #20: Attracting targeted visitors

September 3rd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #20 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Danette, one of my readers, sent me a question asking: “I make a living from my online business. How can I attract the right kind of people to my blog who are interested in buying from my online stores. It is a fairly exact niche of people and I don’t want to hire anyone.”

There are three ways to get people to visit your site:

Via search engines
When they click a link on another website that brings them to your site.
When they see an ad for your site offline or hear about it from a friend and type in the URL.

Remembering URL’s in the offline world is very hard for most people and that kind of brand marketing doesn’t work very well for small businesses so I would strongly recommend that you focus your efforts on the online world.

Lets pretend you sell booties online for Huskies so that their feet don’t get cold in the snow. You only ship to the USA and Canada. That’s a fairly niche market. Start by defining who it is you’re trying to attract:

People who own Huskies
People who live in the USA and Canada.
People who live in areas that get snow each winter.
People who spoil their dogs enough to buy something as specific as booties.
People who buy online.

These bullets are criteria that define your target market. If any one of them is missing, it disqualifies the person as a buyer. If it doesn’t snow where they live, they won’t buy. If they’re outside the USA and Canada, they won’t buy. If they don’t buy online, they’re not your target market.

Print out the bullets that define your target market and as you go about your marketing efforts, test what you’re doing against each one of them. Before approaching a blog to do a guest post or a website to get a link, test that site’s audience against your bullets to see if the site’s visitors are your target market.

Now that you’ve defined your target market, here are a few ideas to help you get your website link in front of them:

Get links from websites where your target market hangs out. You’ll benefit directly from a few clicks and indirectly via SEO. Google’s blog search is a great way to find blogs that your target market reads.
Do guest posts on blogs that your target market reads and be sure to include several links to your site.
Write a feature article for an online magazine that your target market reads. Don’t bother with offline magazines because few people will remember your website name.
Find people on Twitter who have a lot of followers who are your target market and get them to tweet about your site. Use Twitter’s own search engine to help.
Network your way to people on Facebook who have friends who are your target market and get them to post a link on Facebook. Trade shows and other industry events are great places to make friends that might be able to help you later.

If you have a niche website, your marketing efforts will be similar to most website’s with the difference that your efforts need to be laser focused. Defining your target market gives you a way to constantly evaluate if your efforts are focused correctly.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

Tags: daily feed, SEO, targeted visitors
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The Daily Feed Issue #19: How long does SEO take? (part 2)

September 2nd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #19 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. Send suggestions for future editions to my personal address at mark@feedjit.com.

As always this edition is brought to you by the team at Feedjit.com. Know when your friends and clients visit you with Feedjit!

Today I’m concluding my series on how long SEO takes to kick in with a few examples.

The most effective thing you can do to get your site listed in Google fast and to get a good ranking is to get very high quality back-links. In my experience the best strategy to get back-links is to get main-stream press coverage and by publishing link-bait. See issue #11 for more on link bait.

If you have a site that’s been around for a while, you have an advantage. If an established site suddenly gets a few high quality back-links it will generally ramp up it’s search traffic faster than a new site.

Lets look at a hypothetical example. This is based on anecdotal evidence that I’ve seen. There is no scientific basis behind this and your mileage my vary wildly from these numbers. It’s simply what I’d expect to see.

Example: You have a new domain name and a new website. 1000 pages of new, unique and useful content that generally is searched for by many people in a not-too-competitive category. As you launch you get covered in The New York Times. A few hundred bloggers and B-level news outlets pick up your story and either republish it verbatim or add their own 2 cents – all with back-links to you. Here’s what I’d expect to see:

Within a few days you have a few hundred visitors from search engines arriving via keywords that are on-target within your category. In other words, if you have a jewelry store your visitors will arrive by Googleing things related to jewelry. Within a few weeks you’re getting 1,000 to 3,000 unique visitors per day from Google and the other SE’s.

Now lets look at a few variables:

If your site’s domain is already established and has already been getting some search traffic when you get your big NYTimes coverage, then I’d expect to see your traffic ramp up faster and peak at a higher number.

If your established links are “deep links”, meaning that they link not just to your home page but to pages deep in your site then you’ll also see a better result. If the links you get after your launch from bloggers and websites are also deep links, then you should also expect to see an ongoing boost in ranking and indexing.

If your site continues to get medium to high quality links over time, then you’ll see a much better result over the first few months and ongoing.

If you have a history of adding a page or three of new content per day before your big launch and you continue to add new content each day after your big launch, then you’ll also get better results. Google loves new content.

It’s rare to get good coverage in a main stream news publication. But this should give you a good idea of the kinds of things that accelerate getting indexed and that boost your ranking. Links from a second or third tier publication are also great and have a similar, if less pronounced effect on getting indexed and your ranking.

The best advice I can give you on getting indexed fast is to pretend you’re a search engine. If you see a site that’s new, has lots of unique content and is newly popular with high ranking websites, you’re going to want to tell your searchers about it fast!

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

Tags: daily feed, SEO
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The Daily Feed Issue #18: How long does SEO take? (and your feedback)

September 1st, 2010

Welcome to Issue #18 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

I’ve been getting great suggestions all day for upcoming editions of The Daily Feed. Special thanks to Kevin, Diana, Saira, Danette, Jenny and Donna for your feedback and ideas. Please keep sending your suggestions to mark@feedjit.com.

These are questions we’ve chosen from today’s feedback that I’ll be answering in upcoming editions:

K.S. After you’ve done the SEO magic you need to do, how long does it take for your site to start climbing in rankings?

K.S. Why has Google ranked some plain-jane commercial and non-information websites higher than others?

K.S. If your blog is a niche blog that focuses on something very specific, how can you turn it into a great resource where experts want to go and also attract thousands of hits?

K.S. What if you started your blog way back with a not-so-strategic name – like I did – but now when someone plugs in a search term I come up first or so on Google – so I am afraid to change the blogs name now. What should I do?

K.S. Do you seriously think I’ll ever get up to hundred hits or so a day with a topic like …?

S.F. How important is it to be specific on your blog? Being specific may define and facilitate getting hits from your target market, but sometimes it restricts you from sharing on your blog what you want to.

D.D. I make a living from my online business. How can I attract the right kind of people to my blog who are interested in buying from my online stores. It is a fairly exact niche of people and I don’t want to hire anyone.

D.T. asked me to include a few war stories on the struggles I’ve encountered doing business online, things that inspired me and helped me overcome them.

Today’s edition covers a question from Kevin S on how long SEO takes to give you a return on your time investment.

Between 2004 and 2005 it took us 10 months to grow a site from zero to 3,000 unique visitors per day from the search engines. In month 10 the traffic went from almost zero to 3000 visitors overnight and then up to 10,000 visits per day 3 months later.

Back in 2004 and 2005 Google would only update their search index every 1 to 3 months. We (and other SEO’s) would call this the “Google Dance”. For a few days search results would bounce around wildly as Google pushed out their new index to their data centers all over the world, and then things would stabilize for another few months.

Today Google updates almost in real-time. They will do a major index update once every month or two, but they are constantly adding new sites and new pages. Your newest blog entry will usually appear in the search results a few hours after you post it. A popular website can have reasonable SEO traffic a few days after launch if they have the right content and the right kind of launch.

Tomorrow I’ll chat about strategies that will get you indexed fast and what “the right kind of launch” means.

Just an FYI: I’m still working on the eBook. It will be ready asap and will be announced here first. The Daily Feed subscriber discount still applies!

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

Tags: daily feed, SEO
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The Daily Feed Issue #17: Curing writer’s block

August 31st, 2010

Welcome to Issue #17 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog.

Today I have writer’s block so what better subject to write about than finding the cure. In previous editions of The Daily Feed I’ve written about the importance of creating new, unique and useful content to get traffic from search engines. It’s tough to come up with an on-topic page of great content every day for your blog or website, so here are a few tips to overcome writer’s block.

CopyBlogger says the best way to overcome writer’s block is to start digging through famous quotes and draw inspiration from them. Many quotes can be the seed for an entire blog entry. Wikiquote is a great resource for finding quotes. In fact the quote on the home page today would make a fine blog entry: ”The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.” ~ Eldridge Cleaver ~

Hemingway, one of my favorite authors, wrote a lot about his own life experiences. If you’re run out of things to write about, one approach is to go and have some fun or go out and have an adventure. Clamber down into a canyon you’ve never been in to go fishing. Or walk up to 3 random strangers in the mall and ask them a question. That should quickly fill your literary fuel tank.

There are the usual cliche’s of “Carry a notebook with you” or “go and get some excercise – the blood flow to your brain will increase creativity”. Well what if you weren’t carrying the darn notebook with you and now you’re working to a deadline? Or it’s 2am and the neighbors might call the cops if they see you out running right now. That’s the situation I find myself in on this Tuesday morning at 2:22am pacific standard time.

The very best advice I’ve ever read on overcoming writer’s block is the following from Gary Bencivenga, a former Madison Avenue ad exec:

“I discovered that “writer’s block” is just a symptom of a rather easily cured malady—”LRS,” or Lazy Research Syndrome. It took me a while to realize that the best copywriters are the most tenacious researchers. Like miners, they dig, drill, dynamite, and chip until they have carloads of valuable ore. John Caples advised me once to gather seven times more interesting information than I could possibly use.”

That’s all for today’s edition. Click here to send an email to my personal email address and tell me what you would like to read about in upcoming editions of The Daily Feed.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

Tags: daily feed, SEO, writer's block
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