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Posts in category Internet & SEO

Web Marketing Basics – How to be Successful

May03
2009 3 Comments Written by Clayton Wignall





Succeed OnlineHow to add a custom "vanity url" to your facebook Pages page. Here is how Facebook describes Page usernames: “Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL. This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards.” If you pick the username “AHFXnet,” then your Page’s URL becomes “facebook.com/ahfxnet.” It is important to note that you need at least 25 fans before you can create a custom URL for your Facebook page. You must also be an admin of the Page in order to secure its custom URL. Facebook also says, “Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (".").” We recommend picking a short and memorable username that reflects your company name or brand. You cannot change your username, so think wisely and ask for a second opinion when deciding on your page’s permanent username. For branding purposes we would suggest you use the same name as your twitter account. Here are the steps to create your custom Facebook URL. Login to Facebook, with the account that administers your Facebook Page Go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ You will see in a yellow box, the username for your PERSONAL profile. This is not related to your Page username. Below, you will see a link that says, “Set a username for you Pages” Click on that link A box will appear, and if you have more than one Facebook Page which you administer, you will see a drop down menu with all of your Pages displayed. Pick the desired Page from the list. If you are eligible for a username, meaning you have at least 25 fans and have not yet set your username, you will see a box that says “Enter Desired Username” If you select a page that does not have 25 fans, Facebook will tell you that you are not eligible. If you pick a page with already has a username, Facebook will display the current username, which cannot be changed. Once you enter a username, you can click “Check Availability.” If your desired username is available, you will see a box reminding you that you cannot change your username once it has been set.   If you are ready to set your username, click “Confirm.” Now you have a custom Facebook URL! Share it on your other social networks, and you can even have it printed on your business cards. Test your custom facebook pages url by going to www.facebook.com/ahfxnet (replace ahfxnet with your new custom url). This page also lets you claim your own cus...



Succeed Online  Eliminating questions allows you to achieve better web usability and quicker navigation making your site much more effective. Today you can do almost anything in a minute or less, more specifically when it comes to the web, it is important to create web sites so that they can be quickly navigated. A user comes to a site for a specific purpose. They want to find what they're looking for and get out with as little thinking as possible. Making the elements of your site self-evident creates better usability as you start to eliminate questions such as, "Where is the navigation?" "Can I click on that?" or "How do I search?" Another way to eliminate questions and create fast navigation is to be concise. Users won't read everything on your site. Instead they will scan until they find what they are looking for. By eliminating needless words you are creating a cleaner page and allowing the user to find the elements that they want quickly, making for an effective visit. Constructing page elements that look like what they are creates better usability. If you are creating a button make it look like a button; if you are making a search bar make it look like a search bar and so on. This is another way to reduce questions. When the user can find the submit button because it looks like a button then you are allowing them to quickly use your site, without any deep thought. Creating better web usability with self-evident elements will make your site much more effective. Usability is very important to think about when designing a website. Being conscious about the user and the questions they will have will help you to create a more effective site that is easier to navigate.  This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/184


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Add Auto Updating Content to your Website – RSS

Mar29
2009 2 Comments Written by Clayton Wignall



I have been doing a fair bit of research lately into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to brush up on my knowledge before I jump into posts.  During my travels I have become aware of the amazing possibilities of RSS feeds and what they can do for your site.

An RSS feed (an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated Internet material, such as a blog, news headlines and even audio and video.  People who subscribe to RSS feeds are automatically aware as soon as something changes on the site that they have subscribed to.

For example if you subscribe to my blog (which runs an RSS feed, click the icon to subscribe to my RSS feed mini_rss1 ) you will know as soon as one of my cracking articles is published online, you can even read it without having to go to the site, by using an RSS reader.  I have placed a FREE RSS reader on my FREE Stuff Page. <—–Click There

The benefit of an RSS feed is that it is always changing.  So how can you use this ever changing RSS content, to benefit your website and make you money?  Why would you want to have someone elses content on your website anyway?

It all comes back to the search engines, and offering your readers fresh new content.  Search engine prefer those websites with constant changing content.  If your site is changing all the time, Google for example has to keep sending their spiders to your site.  This is good for you and promotes you site ranking significantly.

So what would you have to do to get a RSS feed displayed on your blog for example.  Well first of all you would have to go through the process of converting the RSS feed into HTML (very difficult coding issues to over come here) so it could be displayed on your site.  It would then need to be formatted, and re formatted each time the feed changed.  Sounds difficult and time consuming yes?

Well, it is, believe me to convert and RSS feed being a .XML  file type to correctly formatted HTML is very difficult.  However, there is a little program out there that does all this for you, simply and effectively…it is really quite an amazing achievement on the programmers part.

If you can get an ever changing RSS feed displayed on your site, the search engines will love you.  I have struggled about whether I should do a post about this program because it gives a website such an advantage over others or if I should keep it all for my self.  However, as you can read I decided to spill the beans and tell all…..

rss

Have a look at an entire website I have created using only RSS feeds – its called Dawi News and focuses on World Business News and Finance.  I never have to change this site because it is updated automatically as soon as a feed is updated.  Fresh new content is placed on the site all the time.  It is a very popular site and works very well indeed.

dawi_news_homepage

Adding your own RSS feed (duly converted into HTML) on your own site is also a very beneficial trick.  Not only will it display different parts of my blog to you the reader, but doubles up on my content and keywords, and tells the search engines my site is changing again and again…….

If your interested in doing the same I would strongly recommend you download the below guide all about RSS feeds and how to turn RSS in money;  it is a great read, easy to follow (even if your not a wizard with HTML etc).   I simply love this product and hope you will too!!!  Any questions on it then post a comment.

Got go get my plane now…..UK here I come…..thanks for reading

Download the RSS Guide here – Downlad Here

Posted in eBay Tips & Help, Miscellenous Topics - Tagged , , , ,

Road to Website SEO Bliss Part 2- Keyword Density

Mar28
2009 1 Comment Written by Clayton Wignall



This is part two of my series on SEO bliss.  Part one can be found here, and talks about using eBay pulse as a keyword generator.

Continuing on from that post…..

Following my few weeks of trying out different keywords on my website from eBay pulse, I ventured over to Google Trends and went through the same sort of process.  As I have said previously, Google Trends is a bloogers ultimate tool because it tells you what is current and what people want to know about, right now!! So if you want traffic and want to make an impact, whether you use your own blog, digg, facebook, Yahoo 360, Blogger.com or whatever, Google Trends can help you get your two cents out there.

There isn’t really one thing that you can do to improve your traffic. The search engine algorithms are far to complex for that;  its not about just doing as much optimizing as you can and hope you get noticed.  The scatter gun approach wont yield you enough results for the effort you will have to put in.  What is important is doing a few things well !!!

We all know about keywords, and as a novice website owner I thought that if I just used the hottest keywords, as lots and lots of then I would get more traffic.  Well is just doesn’t work like that – not anymore (if it ever did).  You cant simply go to Google Trends, see what the world is buzzing about, enter the top 10 or 20 keyword searches from Google Trends into your site and wait for your traffic to spike.

If your going to use keywords, just use a few, and use keyword phrases……like “Internet Marketing” or “Website Optimization” or “eBay Powerseller” (if that’s your area), what I mean is use keyword phrases 2 or 3 words.

Once you have picked your keywords use them throughout your website.  I can’t stress enough how absolutely important this is.  If you run a website on selling pet food, and think if you enter some of the top searched keywords like  “Paris Hilton”, “Kylie”, “Google”, (as these are usually pretty popular keywords) your will get better search results, well I’m sorry to say you are wrong and your certainly not tricking the search engines.

It’s all about the density, page relevance and inward and outward links.  Google Trends is great for telling you what the world is searching for, its also great for telling you what the world is searching for in your particular niche.

For example if we stick to the “Pet Food” example, the main worldwide searches as specified by Google Trends for the last 90 days (these were my search parameters) were as follows: -

trends_pet11

As you can see from the above results, people are searching for the keyword phrase “dog food” and “cat food“, pretty much as one would expect as they are the most popular domestic animals worldwide.  You can also see that in these phrases the word “food” is more prominent in the search than the word “pet“.

trends_pet2

This search details those keyword phrases over the past 90 days (again part of my search parameters) that have showed significant prominence.  This does not necessarily mean they are the top keywords, more that there has been a spike in there use.  This may be from a recent advertising campaign, news event (which is really just advertising at a set time) or discovery.

Google defines a “Rising Search” as: -

Rising searches highlight searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. So if you’re comparing data for a search term during 2006, the time period serving as the basis of comparison is 2005. Similarly, if you’re comparing searches for that term during May of 2006, the basis of comparison is April of 2006. (Click here for the full definition by Google)

trends_pet31

Last of all is the geographical regions;  as we can see most searches for “pet food” important and products are coming from the United States.  I can further tell you from going further into the search results that the bulk of searches for the keyword phrase “Pet Food” in the US and UK are coming from:

  1. Poplar, England in he UK; and
  2. Madison, Wisconsin in the United States

There must be a lot of pets in these areas, or someone is really interested in Pet Food.  You can have an field day with Google Trends data!!! The amount of information available to the general public is just amazing.  Imagine what information isn’t available to the public.  Ahh the conspiracy theorist in me…that’s another series of posts (perhaps)!

Ok, so I’ll get back on topic.  The above Google Trend search has told us that people in the US are searching for Pet Food more than anyone else in the world and the most popular keyword phrase used is “dog food“, followed by “cat food” and “natural pet supplies“.

If you were to use these keyword phrases as you keywords, and did nothing else with them, your chances of increasing traffic to your site would be next to zero (this is assuming you didn’t have these words throughout your page content – see below on this point).

Search engines like keyword density, they calculate the density of the keywords you have used in your site/ page and this translates to the page relevance.  Search engines don’t want there customer finding websites that have no relevance to the search that was performed.

So to give you ever chance of getting your site up the ranks, you would want to get the word “Pet Food“, “dog food“, and “cat food” in your title, as your keywords, as well as mentioning them as many times as you can throughout your site/ content.  I say site or page as Word Press for example lets you set keywords for each blog post, and so do many other web programs.

Search engines want accurate page relevance, and sparing use of keywords (that is the old habit of keyword stuffing is dead).  Pre 1998 you would usually enter a keyword meta tag on every web page, and webmaster got in the habit of entering the same keyword over and over again – hence the phrase “keyword stuffing”.  Back then this seemed to work, however now all search engines have dropped support for the meta keyword tag, so using this technique will do nothing for you.  If you have a keyword meta tag, this part of your page will still be indexed by the search engines, yet they don’t do anything with it.

Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page by storing all the HTML content it finds.

I would recommend you try not to use more than 8 keywords or keyword phrases per page, I know its hard but your page relevance will be all the better for it.  Also, try and mention you keyword phrases at least 5 times minimum on the page, and use at least one of your keyword phrases in your title.  This promotes your page relevance with the search engines and will get you moving up the ranks to SEO bliss.  Also underline words and bold them, this shows the search engine spiders that, that particular word has emphasis, further “quotation marks” also promote keyword relavance.  Hence bolding a few of your keywords is a very handly little tip.  This again doesnt mean that you get your keyword such as “dog food and bold, underline and put it in quotations: “dog food“  Again it needs to be relevant, even gramatically relevant to assist your rankings.

The next part of this series on SEO I will be taking about some excellent FREE SEO tools on the net to seek out top keywords, submit your site to Search Engines and optimize each page of your site.  But for now remember:

  1. Use your keywords as many times as you can within your page content
  2. Try and get your keyword phrases into your titles
  3. Use bold, underline, and quotation marks to promote keywords, but do it relevantly
  4. Keep your pages on topic and or cover only a few topics per page, this helps you stay focused on your keywords.

That’s it for now thanks for reading……I know it was long.  If you liked this post, why not subscribe and get loads of free advice and ebooks or follow me on Twitter.

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Free e-book on managing websites

Mar12
2009 1 Comment Written by Clayton Wignall



Subscriptions to Clayton Wignall.com – Free website resource.

Getting information out takes time, and I have a lot of information I would like to share about all things internet and SEO etc;   so I thought I would offer all new and existing subscribers to the ClaytonWignall.com blog a free 130 page ebook to help.

The e-book is all about organizing, building and maintaining websites;  it also contains loads of tips, tricks and ideas to help you get results.

This e-book will be offered for a limited time only and will be emailed to you once you have subscribed.  Please note that I am a firm believer in personal privacy, and hence will not disclose any of your subscription information (name & email address is all you need to subscribe) to any third parties whatsoever.  This information is used for my purposes only to identify my audience spread etc.  Subscription to this blog is free.

All existing subscribers will be emailed this e-book over the next few days.  Hope you find it as much use as I did.  Enjoy……

the-internet-in-2005-croppe

The above image is a wicked representation of the internet in 2003, pretty amazing stuff, courtesy of The OPTE Project who have been mapping the internet for years.  Excellent work guys.

High resolution images available below.

Internet in 2003 – 700×700 resolution

Internet in 2005 – 1024×1024 resolution

Posted in eBay Tips & Help - Tagged , , ,

Driving Massive Traffic to your Site – Search the Searchers

Mar12
2009 1 Comment Written by Clayton Wignall



For those of you that blog about current affairs or perhaps sell the latest gizmo’s, computers, or need a comprehensive Internet research tool, there is no better way to stay on the cutting edge than utilizing the advanced features offered by Google Trends.

Google Trends is a simple concept.  It tells the users what people throughout the world are searching for.  Google Insights is Google trends’ big brother that has advanced filters that allow you to identify search trends by time, geographical location, keyword, and even compare interest in a particular keyword or phrase based on two different years.

Image if you could find out what each individual city in the world is interested in, and could then go off and write about what people in that particular city want to read about or you could perhaps sell those products that people wanted.

Maybe you want to beat your competition and find out when people start searching for Christmas decorations, presents etc.   If you knew this information you could start selling your products when the consumer is ready to buy it.  Google Trends gives you just this ability.

Today for example to top ten highest searched phases on Google for the USA: -

 

It’s interesting that the topic of 10 people being gunned down in German didn’t get a mention in the top 10 highest searches phrases in USA.  It didn’t even get a mention in the top 100.  However the terrible shooting in the US did get a mention (No 6).

Google trends can also give you search trends on the most popular websites.  In the US the 10 ten websites by traffic today are: -

 

1. eatability.com.au
2. truelocal.com.au
3. bom.gov.au
4. jbhifi.com.au
5. coles.com.au
6. australiannewsweekly.com
7. metlinkmelbourne.com.au
8. jbhifionline.com.au
9. officeworks.com.au
10. bigw.com.au


You can filter these searches by any country, and it will even give you a graph of recent activity.  In UK the most popular websites are: -

 

1. yelp.co.uk
2. amazon.co.uk
3. tfl.gov.uk
4. nhs.uk
5. tvguide.co.uk
6. nationaltrust.org.uk
7. thisismoney.co.uk
8. rspb.org.uk
9. allinlondon.co.uk
10. nationalrail.co.uk


Based on the above information, the National Health Service is working over time as usual.

Say your in London and you want to open a new store.  Google trends would be able to show you what the top searched phrases/ products or keywords people in Sydney are searching for, whether there is a seasonal habit to this search, and if there is a dip in interested over time (such as January) and even how 2008′s interest compared to 2005.

Google trends gives you an insight into what people want and can really assist in increasing traffic for your blog, product or service.  If you use iGoogle as you homepage, add the Google Trends gadget to your iGoogle page and stay informed on the hot topics every day – click here to get the gadget.  If you don’t have an iGoogle homepage yet, I would highly recommend getting one.  Click here for more information on iGoogle and how to open a new iGoogle account.

There is an alternative to the Google trends site, and it is called OneRiot.com.  One Riot is similar to Google Trends, it is nowhere near as advanced as google trends yet is more graphically pleasing than Google Trends.  OneRiot is really more of a search engine than a research tool like Google Trends;  OneRiot indexes there website differently to other search engines by basing the hierarchical index in popularity, this popularity it calls the “pulse”.  By basing indexing on interest/ popularity OneRiot is more up to date that other search engines because it focuses more on what is current and give less attention to the achieved websites that sit and fester with no love.  Have a look at OneRiot.com by clicking here.

We are all aware of the credit crunch and the problems with mortgages, so I thought it would be interesting to see what the trends were in the search phrase “home loans”.

The results showed that towards the end of 2008 when things were really getting bad, people started searching less and less for this phrase (which is understandable), in fact October, November represented the worst months for the last two years for the search phrase “home loans”.

However, wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that the searching for this phrase would go up in these last months of 2008, as home loans became more difficult to secure due to a lack of credit available from banks.  Maybe, the public were sick of hearing about how bad things are going to get and just switched off, or maybe we all just thought there was no point searching for a home loans in these awful economic times.  Interestingly, it appears that Australian’s were the most concerned about home loans, despite Australia being in a better than average economic position.

The below graph shows the search trends in the phrase “home loans”.   As you can see interest in home loans is starting to rise, which must be a good sign……..

google-trends

Do research on Google recently I came across this site which talks about how to get hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of Google ads for free,  a very interesting concept indeed.  I thought it worth a read – click here.

Have a look at this great video on Google Trends and how to interpret and use the data……great stuff.





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How to back up your Blogger.com blog

Mar10
2009 1 Comment Written by Clayton Wignall



Backing up your Blogger.com blog is very easy and should really be done once a month, or if you are going to add Google Analytics, or any major gadgets, customizations etc.

To backup your Blogger.com blog do the following: -

  • Login into your Blogger.com page
  • Click Dashboard, then Layout
  • At the top of this page you will see various header titles one being Edit HTML
  • Click Edit HTML
  • Once in this page you will see “Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it. Download Full Template“
  • Click Download Full Template
  • Blogger will now download the full blog in an xml format.
  • To restore a blog in the event of failure etc do the same yet click the Upload button.
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Adding Google Analytics to your Blogger.com blog

Mar10
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Clayton Wignall




Blogger.com is Google’s free online community blog and the features it offers are rather good indeed. It is very easy to setup and use, and offers a host of extra gadgets (plugins) one can add to your blog, such as Nasa’s picture of the day, finance news, a blogroll, AdSense adds, pretty much anything you can think of.

The selection of themes you can pick is a little dull and the layout and settings aren’t as customizable as having your own say WordPress blog; yet you don’t have to worry about hosting, or domain renewal, you can still incorporate your Clickbank ads, AdSense, custom header etc, and you get to sign up using your existing Google account, so it’s not all that bad.   I have started to mirror this blog at my blogger.com page claytonwignall.blogspot.com

As with any blog, Google analytics has a place behind the scenes.  If you want to add google AdSense to your blogger.com page (which you really should) then this is how to do it: -

  • Sign up for Blogger.com and configure as required;
  • Sign up for Google analytics (for more information on Google Analytics configuration and sign see my previous post – click here)
  • Once you have sign up for Google Analytics you will be presented with the Google Analytics code (under the New Code Tab);
  • Copy this code (all of it);
  • Log in to your Blogger.com blog;
  • From the Dashboard click Layout;
  • Online the top of the Layout page there are several headers: * Page Elements * Fonts and Colors * Edit HTML * Pick New Template
    * Monetize;
  • Click Edit HTML;
  • In the Edit Template window you will see a bunch of code
  • Scroll down to the bottom to where you see the close body tag </body>
  • Immediately before the </body> tag paste your Google Analytics code in;
  • Click Save Template
  • Google Analytics will shortly send you an email advising you that Blogger.com has requested access to your Google Analytics.  Once you click the verification link within that email your done.
  • Wait approximately 24 hours and data shall flow.

If you have a large Blogger.com site it is probably best that your backup your site before doing the above.  For more information on how to do this – click here.

blogger

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Guide to adding Google Analytics to your Blog

Mar09
2009 4 Comments Written by Clayton Wignall

Traffic is everything, traffic is what makes your site successful and what gives you incentive to carry on, traffic is rewarding and hence data on traffic is of paramount importance to the success of a website.

Google Analytics lets you know where in the world your visitors come from, what they do whilst on your site, how long they spent on a particular page and what keywords they used to find your site and a host of other great features.  If you run an e-commerce shop Google Analytic is as important as your choice of shopping cart.   From a bloggers point of view Google Analytics can tell you if a particular post or category of posts will generate more traffic than any other, and whether there is any pattern to this increase in traffic.  Data is everything……and so I have Google Analytics running on all my websites.

For example, in this blog ClaytonWignall.com I have done a post on how one can convert a DVD of 4.6 odd Gb into a nice high quality 800 or 900mb Divx file to play on your computer, media player etc.   It was quite an effort and took the beter part of a day.   I have also done an article on eBay selling tips (one of many to come) which talks about increases in email spam, the terrible eBay messenging system and a few recommendations to optimize and automate your eBay selling experience.   Behind these posts sits my little friend Google Analytics.

Now there is no shortage of sites out there that will tell you how to make a million dollars on eBay within the time it takes me to make this cup of coffee, so I thought that this one article wouldn’t really get noticed, at least until I had an arsenal of posts about eBay to increase my search engine worthiness. Nevertheless, this little article has been very popular indeed.  The Divx post gets its share of traffic but nothing like the eBay post.

According to Google Analytics people are finding my eBay post:

  • organically (that is not through links, ads, referrals etc),
  • using the Google search engine,
  • with spikes of interest on Monday’s and Tuesday’s (probably as the mind starts to drift off at around 3-4pm),
  • and have found the site using the keywords phrases: ebay selling tips, selling your stuff in 2011 and eBay home business.

I enjoy trolling through all the data Google Analytics gives me and analyzing it to better my websites, it does hurt my back though!.

In addition, Google Analytics tells me that 77% of people are using Firefox, 87% have DSL connections and most are viewing my blog from the US and they spend an average on 9.23 mins on the site.

So if you are writing a blog and one or two of your blog posts are getting way more hits that the others, Google Analytics has just told you what you should write about.   Don’t write about cutting the grass with a ride on mower, if you find your readers are more interested in your Friday night ballroom classes.   In my case it looks like I will have to write about eBay and SEO if I want to get my two cents out there…..

It would be quite easy to write a book just about Google Analytics, and I’m sure there are probably a few out there already,  I’m not going to write a book, yet I will try and share as much as I can about the Google Website Optimization Toolbox (G-WOT) as often as I can and try not to get too excited about it.   For now however, if you run a WordPress blog and would like to know how to incorporate Google Analytics into the back end of your Word Press blog then read on.

Getting Google Analytics on your site is very easy due to the excellent programming skills of Ronald Heft Jr of CaveMonkey50.com.  Ron has created the Google Analyticator plugin which is Word Press 2.70 and below compatible.

Getting your Google Analytics setup

First you need to download the plug-in to your desktop.  To do this click here.  Once you have downloaded the plug-in, you should see it on your desktop (assuming that was where you saved it);  now you have to extract it as it is a compressed file.

To extract the file – right click on it and pull down to Extract All.  Follow the on screen instructions.  It should only take a few seconds as the plug-in is very small.  You should now have a folder on your desktop called google-analyticator.2.40. Inside this folder there is another folder called Google Analyticator.

extracted_file

Once you have extracted the file you need to upload it to your blog.  Use FileZilla to do this, if you don’t have it get it from our Free Stuff Download Page (click here to go there).

Run FileZilla (once installed) enter your Host name, Username and Password.  Once logged in you will see all the domain files (file tree) on the right.  Word Press is usually located in the WWW folder or Public.html folder.   For the purpose of this post we will use the WWW folder.

filezilla

You need to navigate to the WP-Content/ Plug-in Folder.  To do this double click: WWW folder, WP-CONTENT, PLUGINS

Inside the plug-in folder will be all the plug-ins currently installed on your site.  Drag the Google Analyticator folder into the Plug-ins folder.  Filezilla will automatically upload the full folder contents (should take about 1 mins depending on your connection) to the plug-ins folder.

filezilla_upload1

Once that has finished you need to sign up for Google Analytics.   Go to www.google.com/analytics and click sign up.   Follow the on screen instructions.  You will get sent an email verification from Google, which will have a link in it.   Click that link and you are now verified;  now you will be prompted to add your domain information.

google_analytics

Once you have added your domain, you will be funneled through a few more pages until you get to the Analytics Tracking Instructions page.   This is the important part.

new-analytics-domain

Click the Legacy Tracking Code tab.   Halfway down the page, within the legacy tracking code there is a UID number.   We need this code for your newly installed Google Analyticator plug-in to work. It is very important that you write this code down correctly.  I would suggest the easiest way is to simply copy the code and paste it into the Google Analyticator plug-in (see instructions below).

analytics-uid-code

Once you have either copied or written down your Google UID login to your WordPress admin page, and go to the Plugin tab, find Google Analyticator and click “Activate” .

Then click Settings tab and find Google Analyticator and click it.  At the top of the page there is a blank box where you Paste your UID code.  YOUR MUST ENTER THIS CORRECTLY OR GOOGLE ANALYTIC WILL NOT WORK.

The number will start with a U and end in a number.  Don’t enter UID, just the UA-xxxxx-x number you got from the Google Analytics tracking page.  Once you have entered the code, scroll down to the bottom and click save changes.

analytics_config

Now all that is left is to activate the plugin.  Still within the Word Press admin page click Installed (under the Plugin header).  Towards the bottom of that page under the heading Inactive Plugins you will see Google Analyticator. Towards the right click Activate.

google_plugin

Google and the Analyticator will now have a conversation and within 12-24 hours you should start getting some excellent useful data that will help you prompt and target your blogs.  If you have any troubles please feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to assist you.

Phew……………………….





Posted in eBay Tips & Help - Tagged , , , ,

The Road to Optimizing Website SEO Bliss – Part 1

Mar05
2009 5 Comments Written by Clayton Wignall




Recently I have found myself very interested in the many different ways one can optimize a website.  There are so many tools and special offer packages out there it is difficult to know where to start and who to trust.  I started where most people would by researching keywords, and where did I turn to first?  eBay Pulse believe it or not.  As I have said in other posts, eBay pulse is an excellent place to see what the millions of registered eBay users are searching for.  This information is very useful if you run or own an online shop, or would like to find a product niche.  The favoured products really do go in waves.  For example leading up to Christmas, there was a spike in people searching for GPS Navigators, Sat-Navs and portable DVD players.  I happened to be selling these items in my eBay store and online shop desktopshopper.com.au so I optimized my product listings to reflect the keywords being used in eBay pulse.

These items are still very popular, but interest in them has levelled off as new products come onto the market.  The top search item on eBay today March 5, 2009 is….wait for it……Wii.  After that its iPod xBox 360 and the iPhone.  Apple must be so proud!!!  The poor Newton.  If you go to most of the eBay pulse pages around the world you can guarantee the iPod or iPhone will show its face in the top 5 of eBay Pulse.  So the moral is sell nothing but ipod gear….well not necessarily, yet people still want ipod related merchandise, so discussing iPods etc in your website will help certain aid their optimization.

After eBay pulse and getting a little confused with all the other products out there to optimize my site, I went to Godaddy.com and signed up for a product called Traffic Blazer.  Traffic Blazer is very reasonably priced, costing about $29.95 USD for a year for the basic package which I signed up for.  There are more advanced packages such as the Traffic Blazer Deluxe and the Traffic Blazer Premium.  But for me I was just starting out and didn’t want to drive in with a premium package.

Traffic Blazer has a simple interface and facilitates the submission of your site to hundred and hundreds of search engines and directories.  About 40% of your submissions are done with the click of a button, the rest mainly directories and some of the larger search engines require a manually entered site submission and some also require you to register (such as Yahoo).  It is a good idea to set up a new email account called submission@domain.com etc because you will get a lot of email asking you to confirm your website submission.

Overall I was very happy with Godaddy.com Traffic Blazer and I did get a increase in traffic after about 4 weeks.  Traffic Blazer also helps you create properly coded meta tags, analyses keywords and your site generally, create robots.txt and sitemap.  Once a month you will get a report on the submissions, page rankings etc.   I found it to be very useful as a newbie.

One thing I have since discovered is that you can only really submit your site to search engines etc once every 6 months or you have a chance of being over looked/ banned.  So the 12 month subscription to Traffic Blazer will only give me two SEO submissions to the hundreds of search engines, and directories out there.  I know I paid for it, but being new to optimizing back then, Traffic Blazer gave me an easy way of submitting my site without fuss.  It is the ease of use I feel was worth the money.  Nevertheless, I have now found a way of getting the same results and tools for free.  Which I will discuss in a later post.

I will be putting up more information on my website optimization SEO roller coaster shortly.  Please subscribe to my blog and you will be the first to know when I post.

Posted in eBay Tips & Help - Tagged , , ,

Twitter and the viral spread of information.

Mar03
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Clayton Wignall

I am now a member of the world wide phenomena that is Twitter.  Starting this blog, as well as running an online store called DesktopShopper.com.au, having to now maintain my Twitter page, trying to get 3 further sites up and running within the next 4 weeks and doing the John Thornhill Internet Marketing Master Course;  as you can imaging I am starting to feel a little flustered…..

I have found the John Thornhill course so far to be very good (although I’m running a week behind because I got carried away with this blog)’, he certainly explains things clearly;  yet the beginning of the course is somewhat basic.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, it is kind of refreshing to go back to basics and be shown how to do things within the Internet from a new perspective;  and John’s course is most definitely catering for people with all levels of Internet skill.  More on John’s internet marketing course in later posts.

A friend of mine recommended that I join Twitter and incorporate it into this blog with a great little plug-in for WordPress called Twitter Tools version 1.6 from Alex King.   I must say it was very easy to use and configure, and so far I’m quite impressed with its ability to work without issue.  When I make a post on my blog or Twitter each updates the other.  The blurb on the plug-in is as follows:-  A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter.    Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. You can download the plug-in or find out more about it at the website alexking.org.

As for Twitters features, in my flustered state I haven’t really had the time to investigate what Twitter can do for me.  From what I can tell so far Twitter is a little like a smaller version of FaceBook but without all the extra annoying fluff of Facebook.  We’ll see how it goes with the coming few weeks.

Nevertheless, Twitter’s viral spread of information is certainly fast.  Within 2 minutes of writing on Twitter that I was doing my Internet marketing course,  I had 5 followers already.  Who knows how many I will have when finish this post.  Perhaps “Internet marketing” is a major keyword phrase on Twitter.   The viral spread of information across the internet is truely amazing.

I have noticed that in Australia and the UK where I spend a lot of my time, many of my product wholesalers have started to use Twitter to advertise their specials and new release products.  This seems like a very nice way of keeping your reseller updated without having to do a mass email mail-out.

If your into Twitter please visit my page and help me spread the world wide Twitterings……I may even learn something if I get the time.

 





Posted in Miscellenous Topics - Tagged , , , , ,

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