Java search engine - Update to SEO for Firefox
While I was off on vacation apparently there was a childnodes error on Yahoo! SERPs with SEO for Firefox. An SEO Book reader nicknamed nastyw fixed the error and a programmer friend of mind recently updated the code. We also added phrase and exact match to the broad match values for the Google traffic estimator link at the top of the SERPs.
SEO for Firefox Updated to Include Compete.com Data
I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.
I Only Have 5 YouTube Channel Subscribers!
Yesterday I created 9 SEO videos and posted them to YouTube, but so far I only have about 5 YouTube subscribers, including my wife, mom, dog, and self. Can you give a few videos a look, and subscribe if you like them to help me increase that number? If you think they could use some improvements please offer those tips too. 
Should I make individual post pages for each video on SEO Book and offer texual background like I did on some of my past videos?
I think I am getting a bit better at doing the speaking part of creating videos, and am getting better at keeping them succinct, but could greatly improve at the visual formatting part. For some reason the end format looks ok on my monitor, but the stills are fuzzy. Many people made video suggestions here, but I still have to get to doing about 100 more of these real quick…hopefully after I figure out how to make the still look cleaner.
Should I Launch My Website With an Affiliate Program?
Question: I am new to the market and have a product I am going to launch soon at a similar price-point to SEO Book. I am wondering if I should launch with an affiliate program, and if it will provide a substantial return prior to
Answer: I would say off the start don’t enable an affiliate program until you have a better feel for the amount of effort required per purchaser and have brand awareness. I like launching without an affiliate program because it makes citations appear more natural. If you are launching a MLM hype program then a multi tiered affiliate program is a must, but if not the best option is to wait until you better learn your market and are well integrated into your market.
Why it is Best to Launch Without an Affiliate Program
- If you test your marketing first you are going to be able to achieve a higher customer value and attract better affiliates.
- If you are uncertain as to how to best sell your product and you have a new brand then it is going to be pretty tough for affiliates to sell it for you.
- The best marketing looks organic. With a new product it is best to get reviewed by top editorial channels and earn a few organic citations to help others see your product as more than just hype. If a product is primarily or only hyped by affiliates off the start that can undermine your brand.
- Some of my customers who did not sign up as affiliates have read my book and misquoted me to make me sound dumber than I am, and have misquoted to make me sound much smarter than I am. If others have profit incentive behind describing who you are or what you offer many will take the low road and use empty hype. Repositioning a brand after others have positioned it incorrectly is tougher than positioning it correctly off the start.
- Another advantage of waiting on establishing an affiliate program is that by the time you launch it you have built enough trust that people will be willing to sign up with you directly.
The Dangers of a Loose Affiliate Program
If you start off with an affiliate program I think your best best is to make the affiliate program invite only off the start to ensure your brand is not dragged through the mud before you were able to build brand equity. Some of my affiliates have done things like
- stealing content from my friends and wrapping it in banners for my site
- mass email spamming (while signing my name to it)
- a list of other dirty things I will not mention
Because affiliates are hard to control, it is best to have a direct affiliate program rather than going through a third party website. This takes more time to manage, but enables you to
- immediately warn affiliates and/or remove the profit incentive if they are doing things that are illegal and/or undermine your brand value
- altert affiliates in advance of price changes, special promotions, or other changes to your offerings
- keep in contact with your affiliates, protecting you from drastic cost increases seen at third party affiliate management firms like MyAffiliateProgram
- more easily track historical trends
- create your own dirty affiliate sites without risking your main brand
Some affiliate software also tracks referrals, which enables you to learn the difference between what sorts of traffic streams and marketing sell and which do not.
Corporations have sued other corporations based on ad targeting. Even if the lawsuits are bogus they still eat up time and valuable resources. Affiliate control is useful for mitigating some such conflicts.
A few years back a well known SEO said that I was deplorable for bidding on a broad basket of keywords including their name. One of their affiliates was bidding on my name, amongst others. Once questioned about the hypocrisy, this person eventually admitted that they were too lazy to police their own affiliates, which showed their complaint had no validity. If their complaint had validity they would have better been able to claim it by hosting their own affiliate program and holding their own affiliates to the same expectations they try to hold others to.
Affiliate Software Options
- Some of the larger affiliate networks (like CJ) have a wide array of affiliates, but typically the best affiliates will hunt out the best affiliate programs wherever they are (instead of staying inside third party networks), so it might be just as easy to attract the best affiliates by ranking well for your keywords + affiliate program.
- Google offers cost per action based referral ads, but they don’t have much inventory, and most of the best affiliates do not like using Javascript or sharing their business model with Google.
- Some of the smaller affiliate networks (like shareasale.com, as an example) have pitched me as a merchant for rates far below their published rates, but after seeing what happened with MyAffiliateProgram it does not make sense for me to pay a third party to place a roadblock between me and my affiliates.
- ClickBank does not cost much to set up, but I have found that I get an extraordinary return rate there when compared with Paypal. Paypal does not have affiliate features baked into it, but does work with many affiliate software programs.
- I use Idevaffiliate on Seo Book. Fully featured it costs $300.
- As ShoeMoney recently highlighted, BOTW has a custom affiliate program which even tracks direct links to any page on their site. Creating such a program would probably only cost about $1,000 at most. And that link for BOTW may have been an affiliate link, and Google has no way of knowing.
How to Make Better User Profile Pages
I am not sure if many readers here know about it, but this site has profile pages. Here is my profile, for example.
A few updates worth making:
- allow you to insert your RSS feed of your blog on the page
- track all comments from a user
- allow adding additional widgets / gadgets to profile pages
- layout improvements, but I am not sure how as of yet
What updates would you like to see made? Should any of the fields be expanded? Should any of them be killed?
You can edit your profile page under the my account section of the right sidebar.
Yahoo! Search Now Supports Bogus Webmaster Stats
I was sad to see Barry’s post about Yahoo! showing garbage stats to unauthenticated users.
Not that they asked for it, but here is my advice for Yahoo! Search:
- Following Google’s moves from last year is no way to catch them.
- How about marketing yourself on your key properties.
- Invest in Wikia search and share technology with them to attack Google from multiple fronts. Google engineers have openly admitted to frequently hand editing the search results. Now that search is back to being about people tell the USER that it is their web and THEY own it.
- What if you assumed you already lost the search battle and decided to counter Google by being open about search, and being actively involved with the webmaster community? What is the worse that can happen? People start talking about you, trying your product, giving you feedback to improve your product, talk about you, and you gain marketshare. Oh no!
Google Corrects Domain Name Spelling Errors (Sometimes, Anyway)
SEL highlighted that Google is correcting domain spelling errors. Which works to block some typos, but in some instances is pushing traffic away from smaller domains toward more authoritative websites.
Good Job Google
Here is an example of the spell correction working right…
Lets say you want to go to my blog located at search for www.seobook.com/nodd they offer the correct URL as a suggestion.
Bad Job Google
Now lets say that I misspell a filename. What if I typed www.seibook.com/bok (If you add a second o to the word book in the filename this URL exists). What does Google do? Even when I am not signed in, Google STILL recommends people go to SeoBook.com, to the URL seobook.com/images/spellcheck.png”>
In that last case correcting the URL and keeping the people on the same site only took changing 1 letter, but Google decided instead to change a letter in the domain name, and change 3 in the filename!
Why Not Fix This?
What about errors in the domain extension? If you type in ASP.nt (leaving out the e in net) Google does not correct that spelling error. If you type in ebay.cm (ebay.com leaving out the o) Google does not correct that error. Why launch a feature such as this without correcting the most common errors?
[Video] Domain Names & Search Engine Marketing
How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM
- Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.
- In addition to the defensibility issue, there is a large synergy between great domain names and SEO. Domain names containing your keywords as part of the name make it easier to get your keywords in the anchor text when people reference your company by its official name. This is true even if the domain has hyphens and/or additional words. But domains with hyphens in them are harder to market than domains without hyphens.
- Exact match domains make people more likely to give you targeted anchor text when they mention your website. In some cases a strong domain name also makes a site appear more trustworthy and linkworthy.
- Exact match domains are given an algorithmic relevancy boost in Google, even if a domain name shows little other criteria that prove it trustworthy.
- Exact match domains make it easier to get Google Sitelinks to expand your listing and block out competing sites.
- Exact match domains are easier to profit from search engine arbitrage.
Warning: New Google Webmaster’s Guidelines
I just found another Google webmaster guideline worth sharing…
According to Matt Cutts, the FTC thinks you should clearly mark paid links. If you do clearly mark paid links Google editors will penalize you for buying / selling links, then they will pay an AdSense spammer to steal all your content. Don’t worry though, as Google doesn’t clearly mark their own ads.
Look at how closely timed the above posts were. Why would any webmaster mark their own sites to be penalized and stolen? Clear language is a wonderful thing.
Some of my domain names were registered as a joke (haggisdiet.com was a bet against Andy Hagans), and it wouldn’t be hard to register domains in the name of another person. Having said that, I doubt few people put my name on their domain names, and now you can look up a list of domains owned by a person by using Registrant Search. If you have thin affiliate sites that rank well in Google and are not using fake whois data then now might be a little late to start.
Via Domain Name News I recently discovered Sold Names, which aggregates publicly available price data for domain sales. You can also view last week’s sales at DN Journal. If you find someone underselling a domain name browse through their inventory and see if they have any others worth buying.
