The Softnik Blog

Some Simple Tweaks Using Web Page Explorer

Are there moments when you just want to take a break from whatever you have been doing?

Here is a simple web page tweaking exercise you should try when you want to take a break but still want to use the time productively!

Start Web Page Explorer (part of IM Toolpad). Run any of your web sites through it to analyze the pages.

Do you find multiple but identical anchor texts? Replace these with more relevant keyword rich text (but not spammy looking)

Here is a sample screen shot that shows multiple anchor texts that simply say "download now!" In some cases this may be relevant (for example, as a call to action). But you may want to find such identical texts and replace them with good keywords.

You can find identical texts by sorting the anchor text column (click on the header).

You can also use the software to check the heading structure of your web pages.  Always make sure that you have a good h1, h2, h3.. structure and that your headings are meaningful. The software can also help with your web page titles and decsriptions.

Create Monthly Snapshot Views Of All Your Websites

A previous post, from a month ago, discussed creating a target market snapshot view and how having it in front of you while doing strategic keyword research or creating the sales copy is extremely important.

In addition to keeping the target market snapshot, you should also have quick access to how your sites are doing. This will help you quickly identify problems with your sites and take actions to improve the performance.

So go ahead and create a website snapshot view of all your important websites!

You need to be using a good web analytics service or software for this. Make sure that you collect new data every month.

Here are some suggestions about what your website snapshot might contain...

1. The list of top 10 entry pages as reported by your website analytics.
2. The list of your top 10 exit pages as reported by your website analytics.
3. The top 10 performing web pages on your site (web pages that get real results). We will call this the star pages.
4. The overall bounce rate for your site.
5. The individual bounce rates for each of your star pages.
6. Visitors per day and per month to the website.
7. The top keywords that brought traffic to your site and the top landing pages for those keywords.
8. The list of long-tail keywords that brought traffic to star pages or that got you good results.
9. Your sales / expenses / income / profit data.
10. Any other parameter you think is relevant.

Open a folder and start filing this information every month. If possible, take hard-copy prints and file it physically. Use it to analyze how your sites are growing and to fix any negative trends.

There will be More on this in upcoming posts... and the upcoming Internet Strategy Studio Software.

Some More Keyword Strategy Studio Tips

"I have large keyword lists containing thousands of keywords. Your software allows me to find and pull out keywords containing the terms I type in. But how do I extract keywords that do not contain the words I type in?"

That was a question we recently received.

Actually it is quite easy...

Use the "Filter" option to highlight the keywords that contain one or more words. Now use the "Invert Selection" option under the "Filter" menu to invert the selection. Then use the "delete selected" option to delete the current selection. You will be left with all the keyword phrases that do not contain the terms you specified in the first step.

"The software lists a lot of sites in the "Competitions" tab. How do I verify if the sites I specify are listed? Actually I wanted to check if my own sites are present and found it very difficult to scroll through and look"

You can use the "Find" ribbon bar button to quickly check if a site is in the list. Just type in the site URL, even a partial text will do, and click OK. If the site / URL is present in the list it will be highlighted and scrolled into view.

You can also copy the full URL / site list into one of the "My Keyword Lists" and then use the features available in Keyword Builder to locate the sites that interest you.

Are you not yet using Keyword Strategy Studio or any of the other insider tools in the IM Toolpad software suite? You can download a fully functioning trial copy... click here.

Improve Your Pay Per Click Campaign Performance With This Quick Action Plan

Here is a quick tip to improve the performance of some of your Pay Per Click / Google Adword Campaigns.

Pick all the long tail keywords that have actually brought visitors to your site and are relevant to any of your ad-groups. Now group them based on the purpose behind the search and pick the group that has most number of keywords.

Now study each of these keywords. Can you find the intent behind the search? Start thinking like the person who made that search, Go to the web page on your site where the visitor would have landed after clicking on your advertisement text.

• Does your web page answer the question posed by the search query?
• Is there any thing that might distract him or her?
• Is the call to action present and relevant to her probable thought process?

Make a copy of your landing page. Modify the content  to make it fully relevant to the person who did the search for that long-tail keyword phrase. Simply answer his or her questions and make the call to action. Avoid other distractions.

Save the modified page as a new landing page. Use the keywords in the group along with the new landing page in a new ad-group in Google. Use phrase matching for the keywords if required.

Monitor the performance and tweak over the next few weeks.

Take the next keyword set and do the same!

Please note that this method is mostly suitable for groups of long-tail keywords because the actual purpose behind the searches are obvious.

Filtering Large Keyword Lists Using Keyword Strategy Studio

While studying our own log files I often extract the search terms used by visitors to our sites. These lists normally contain a large number of keywords. I then use Keyword Strategy Studio to categorize these keywords based on the terms present in each phrase.

Here is a small example - a sample list extracted from this blog's log, that contain the terms "PHP" and "redirect". Notice that some are misspellings!

multiple domain names php
multiple domain redirection php
multiple redirect url in contact form script
php multiple redirect
php multiple redirect how
php multiple url redirection
php redirect
php redirect multiple domains
php redirect script domain name
rederict php script
redirect multiple sites php
redirect script php based on keyword
redirect.txt
redirecting multible domains php
redirecting to multiple domains
simple blog php script
simple php redirect

(I used this just as an example. We don't really have any PHP related products. The above is the consequence of a blog post that offered a simple PHP script for redirecting to multiple domains)

Keyword Strategy Studio is very handy when it comes to peeling away the required keyword phrases from large lists.

Simply add your full list to one of the "My keyword Lists" in Keyword Builder. Then use the "Filter" button and select "Containing Terms Anywhere". Type in all the terms into the box that pops up (one entry per line) and click OK. For the above, I typed in

PHP
redirect

This will highlight all the keywords that contain the words PHP or redirect. Now use one of the options under "Export" to transfer the highlighted keywords to a file or to another list. You can use the "Filter" to do other things like finding keywords that contain terms only at the start or end, phrases that contain more than a specified number of words etc.

The main advantage here is that you can pull out all keyword phrases that contain "any" of the terms you specify. You could be trying to find all phrases that contain any of 50 different terms. All you have to do is paste all the 50 terms into the box and click OK. The entire thing gets done in just one step!

The main keyword list can come from anywhere and not really from your own logs. Keyword Strategy Studio can handle very large lists containing tens of thousands of keyword phrases and the filtering is extremely fast.

If you are familiar with Google Adwords you will quickly see that the Filter option is very useful for creating precisely targeted Ad-groups.

How to capture full length screen shots of the web pages you monitor

Did you know that you can use Web Page Monitor (part of IM Toolpad) to capture full length screen shots of the web pages you monitor?

The software displays the thumbnail views of the monitored web pages in one of the docked panels. You can then right click on the URL list and select Export Screen Shot to save the full sized screen shot (actual size, not thumb-nailed) to your hard disk.

An Easy and Practical Solution For Securely Backing Up Your Daily Work!

Whatever be the type of Internet business you run there is one thing you simply can't ignore. Your data backup plan!

Mozy offers the perfect backup solution for both personal and business use. In most cases the cost of backing up the data on one computer is less than the cost of a simple low cost web hosting account. You simply download a client software and specify the directories and files you wish to be backed up. Mozy will encrypt and backup these files to remote servers.

The first backup will take some time because all files need to be uploaded. Once this is done subsequent backups will be done quickly because Mozy only needs to record the differences between the current version of the file and the previous versions. This is called incremental backup. The main advantage of this is that you can retrieve any of the earlier versions of the file!

The backups are done automatically. So once you set it up properly, you can forget about it!

If you have employees working from their homes, you can assign MozyPro licenses for them and have them do regular backups of their work computer or notebook. You can use the web interface to access the data yourself. This will ensure that you always have access to the work related data created by your employees!

Check it out today!

A simple method to find the Internet keywords you want to optimize for!

Here is a simple but very effective method to know the keywords your prospective customers will use to search...

Ask them!

Yes, not very original and certainly not innovative... But still a very powerful idea!

If you have any kind of offline dealing with your customers, simply add a new question into any form they might fill in. You can also make a simple on-line or printed  survey form for this.

If you are in the travel business, you can probably ask the following question...

If you are looking to travel to [name the city or country here] what would you type in to search on-line for finding hotels there?

Make sure that you ask only the one question above. Most people will gladly answer a simple, precise question like that without any objection.

Here is what you should do...

For each of your product or service create a question similar to the above. Spend some time polishing the way the question is framed.

Add this question to your offline and on-line forms. If you already do surveys, add this question to your survey. Ask the question to friends and existing customers,  preferably after purchase, or send them to the survey form in your "thank you" email.

Collect as many answers as you can...  Then combine the data from your survey with the data from your own log files.

Within a few weeks or months you will be sitting on a keyword gold mine!

Collect the keyword phrases and use Keyword Strategy Studio to find the top sites ranked for those keyword phrases. Are you listed? Study the competitors who are listed. Are those websites offering what the customers are really looking for? Can you improve your sites so that your solution is superior?

The New Google Adwords URL Policy

Google will be enforcing their updated URL policy from April 1, 2008. Probably not an April Fools Joke because it was posted at the Inside Adwords Blog long ago!

The rule is very simple...

Your display URL and the Adwords landing page URL should have the same domain name!

You can continue to use an intermediate tracking URL before redirecting to the final landing page. However the final landing page should use the same domain as your display URL.

If your final Adwords landing page is

http://www.softnik.com/whatever/....

The Display URL should use softnik.com

Sub-domains are allowed. So you can use...

http://help.softnik.com/whatever/.... as the landing page and support.softnik.com as the display URL.

The key thing to remember is the main domain name. As long as both match, you are fine.

How To Make Your Web Page or Blog Post Titles Unique and Interesting

Here is a simple tip to make your web page titles unique, interesting and search engine friendly!

Use Keyword strategy studio and do a keyword analysis on the topic you are interested in. Click the Top Titles tab and look through the web page titles of your top competition. You will see all the titles listed along with their strengths (The strength is based on the ranking in top three search engines).

Can you create a better title? You can use the ideas from the previous post on creating good headlines while keeping an eye on the existing titles. Make sure that your title is unique and better.

Looking through these titles will also give you more ideas about keyword phrases and also ideas about topics you may want to discuss in the future.