Yahoo and Google – Brands you can Trust?

June 29, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Marketing, Online Business

While I was browsing the web yesterday, I came across an interesting study on the effect of brand awareness on the evaluation of search engine results (PDF). Basically, the entire study boiled down to a series of tests in which search engine users were provided identical results for a query, but those results were branded as coming from one of 4 different search engines, namely Google, MSN, Yahoo, and an in house search called AI2RS.

In the study the researchers found that given identical results, users are overwhelmingly more likely to trust those coming from Yahoo and Google over those coming from a different engine. In fact, users generally claimed Google and Yahoo results were superior to other engine results despite the actual results returned being identical. While you might say this was a foreseeable conclusion, it’s still interesting to note just how much branding effects a user’s trust when it comes to working with the Web. This is very similar to a study performed last year in Germany that looked at MRI brain scans of people reacting emotionally to different brands.

So, what exactly does this mean for your online business?

I think clearly it shows that users on the web are no different than consumers walking into your average brick and mortar based business. They identify with brands and they establish a trust with those brands. This trust results in several things, but most notably is their willingness to do repeat business with the brand and also to implicitly trust their recommendations and enhancements.

It’s these traits that you need to take into consideration when deciding many aspects of your web presence such as advertising your products and services or even simply where to focus your search ranking efforts. For example, what converts better sales, being number 1 on Ask.com or number 15 on Yahoo? While you may get more clicks at Ask, you may not get as many converting customers simply due to the trust issue.

Food for thought, and definitely something every one of us needs to think about when running an online business. One thing I would be interested to try is all three companies have respective advertising networks, and I wonder if promoting Google products converts much better than converting the others? I’d wager on yes, simple because of the brand name associated with it…What do you think?

Does Domain Expiry Date Really Matter?

June 28, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Domain Names, SEO

While I was scanning through my list of blogs today, I came across a really interesting article from over at DailyBlogTips entitled, Renew Your Domain for Longer Periods. I found this article to be really interesting because frankly, it was not an aspect of SEO I really considered. Basically, the idea is that it’s possible that when considering where to rank your site in the search engine result pages (SERPs), Google may use the expiry date of your domain as one of the metrics of legitimacy for your site.

From a Google patent filed several years ago:

Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

Earlier this month, I posted a look at the inner workings of Google. In the source article, a top Google engineer mentions that they have more than 200 individual tests that are applied to a site to determine ranking in results. That fact alone would clearly argue that they probably cover most bases, so the fact that they might toss some weight behind domain expiry is not all that far fetched.

SEO is an ever changing field, and no one knows for sure if Google checks expiration dates. However, this is one of those things that it really doesn’t hurt you to fix. If you’re planning to keep a good domain forever anyway, why not renew it for multiple years? Many good domain registrars offer multiple year discounts, so in the long run you’ll actually save yourself a few bucks as well.

I know a few of my own domains are expiring later this year and I think I’ll definitely renew the ones I plan to keep for a long while for multiple years. What do you think of this idea? Have any of you ever noticed a bonus in ranking when renewing a domain for 5-10 years instead of just 1?

Bookmark Bliss – Old School Wordpress Version No More

June 23, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: General

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I finally got around to upgrading Bookmark Bliss to the newest version of Wordpress, 2.2.1. I never actually upgraded to 2.2.0, so I guess it’s not so bad now that a new version came out so soon afterward. If you’ve already upgrade to 2.2.0, this patch is mostly just a bug release but is very HIGHLY recommended to patch some security holes found in the last version.

Here are some of the bug updates provided by this new version:

Widget compatibility issue fixes
Atom feed fixes
Improvements to Page and Text Widgets
XML-RPC fixes Widget layout fixes for IE7

Here are some of the major security problems that were fixed:

Remote shell security issues with PHPMailer
Attribute issues in Default Theme
Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC

Upgrading for me was really smooth and simple, but always remember to backup your site and your database before updating just in case. Nothing is a bigger kick to the head than having an update fail and completely toast your previous install.

Bookmark Bliss: The Massive List of Web Development Resources

June 20, 2007 | Comments (1) | Filed under: Programming

Last month, we continued the Bookmark Bliss series with the biggest list of bookmarks yet. Our Massive List of Web Design Resources covered everything a web designer may need from inspiration to fonts to color palette selection.

While some of us may need help on the design side of things, others need a hand when it comes to development. To continue both the massive list and bookmark bliss series, we’ve scoured the globe, dug into every crevice, and unearthed every stone to bring you our newest massive list of links. So, without further ado, behold, The Massive List of Web Development Resources!

Community Forums

Content Management Systems

Alfresco
Drupal
Jahia
Joomla
Lenya
PHP Nuke
Plone
TikiWiki
Twiki
Wordpress

Database References

Firefox Plugins

Javascript Libraries

Programming Language References

Web Development References

Have you found this list useful? If so, show your support by subscribing to our news feed. We’ve posted several other entries in our Bookmark Bliss series that you might find interesting as wellâ€¦

Link Roundup – June 18, 2007

June 18, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: General

One again with the link Roundup, here are some great articles from around the web posted by members of the Bookmark Bliss Community:

Over at BloggingTips, Kevin discusses his ‘No Follow’ Dilemma and his reasoning behind the eventual return of NoFollow to his blog. It’s an interesting take on the whole I Follow issue, and one I don’t think I’ve read anywhere else.
At Seldom Static, they’ve compiled an excellent list of top landing page tips from the pros. A great read for anyone just starting to dip their toes into landing page design.
John Chow is running a contest for a brand new 24″ Wide Screen LCD Monitor. If you’re interested, just head over the contest page and follow the very easy steps. To enter you simply need to link to the contest, link to John’s make money page, and link to hosting Canada.
Randa from Randa Clay design has released her second wordpress theme entitled Bluebird. I really like Randa’s designs they are clean and professional, and look a lot different than most of your standard stuff. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for a new layout.
Over at Blue Hat SEO, Eli discusses in depth what it takes to build your own suite of tools to automate promotion and indexing of your sites.
SEO Blackhat shows two interesting ideas for requesting links to your site from other sites.

Well, that’s it for this roundup. Hopefully you’ve found something interesting. If you’ve stopped by for a visit at Bookmark Bliss and like what you see, take a second and join our community or subscribe to our news feed. It’s the best way to let us know you’re out there so I can return the favor.

Site Review: Blue Hat SEO – Advanced SEO Tactics

June 15, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: SEO

I’ve been meaning to mention this site for a while now, but never did have the chance to get to it. Blue Hat SEO is by far my favorite blog on the web, and the one I try not to ever miss an article from. If you’re not familiar with the term SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization and can be very loosely defined as the process of optimizing your site for better placement in search engine rankings. That definitely doesn’t do it justice, however, as the field is very broad and talking to two different “experts” in SEO can result in nothing but contradictory opinions.

At first glance, Blue Hat SEO – Advanced SEO Tactics looks like every other SEO site that seems to be a dime a dozen these days. Once you crack the surface, however, you’ll find one of the best archives of really great tactics and techniques that you can IMMEDIATELY apply to your own efforts. Eli, the author of the site, offers one of the most candid resources for online business and discusses literally hundreds of advanced techniques on everything from how to dominate SERPS to how to make $100 per day.

This site is a great resource for anyone trying to make a living online, but many of the techniques require at least a basic understanding of the technical side of things. For anyone who understands the fundamentals of SEO and is looking for a way to catapult their site to the next level, this site is a great resource that can help you take the steps you need in the right direction.

Here are just a few of the great articles you should definitely pay a visit to:

Anyway, I really can’t recommend Blue Hat SEO highly enough. It has personally helped me with dozens of ideas that I’m still using in my online business projects. I can’t really do it justice in my review, so I hope you’ll take the time and stop by for a visit on your own. I guarantee, you’ll find at least a few articles that will interest you, no matter what your level of expertise.

Five Ways to Use MyBlogLog to Generate Traffic

June 14, 2007 | Comments (18) | Filed under: Traffic

For those of you who might not be familiar with MyBlogLog, it’s a great little tool for visualizing your blogs visitors. You can see it in action here on the site in the area labeled “Recent Readers” on the black toolbar. I really like it as a blog addon because it lets me get a feel for who’s visiting my site and also lets me visually see when new readers are stopping by.

In a recent post, I talked about some of the new changes that MyBlogLog had made to their system. In one of the comments, regular Bookmark Bliss reader Skarld from Wpthemez posted a request for a post about how best to use MyBlogLog. I’m not sure I’m able to list the “best” way to use it, but I’ve definitely done a lot of experimentation. Most of my focus, however, has been on how to use it as a way to generate traffic.

So, I figured if I can’t help Skarld with the best way to utilize MyBlogLog, maybe I can list some tips on how you might use it to generate traffic. Here are 5 great ways that many users, including myself, generate traffic from the MyBlogLog community.

Visit other sites with a unique icon

I think one of my favorite ways to generate traffic and also one of the most underestimated, is to choose a unique and standout icon, and visit sites displaying the widget. I think you’d be surprised at just how many people will click on an interesting looking icon. I personally click on all of the ones that visit here with an icon that catches my eye.

Here is a quick set of some eye catching avatars I found just browsing around. Of course, the list is very subjective

As you can see, I didn’t choose a single icon that contained an actual profile picture of a real person. Why? Because that’s what everyone else does, and the face images get lost in the blur. If you want to stand out, pick an original icon or make one of your own.

Build out your community

MyBlogLog, at its core, is a social networking site. One of the best ways to bring traffic to your own site, is to let other members of the community know you exist. With MyBlogLog, you simply navigate to someone’s community profile and click the “Join Community” button to add yourself to their list.

You can join as many communities as you want to, but there is a limitation of 15 per day. Once you join, your profile image will appear on their profile which in turn allows their visitors to visit your site as well. To make things even easier, MyBlogLog can optionally track sites you visit often, and if you reach a specific number of visits, automatically join you to the community.

To get the most traffic bang for your buck, you should try to visit and join 15 new communities every day. There is no reason not to and every community you join is another opportunity for someone to see your avatar and pay your site a visit.

Expand your friends list

Similar to building out your community, MyBlogLog also gives you the option to add individual members as contacts. The benefit of doing this is that it is a much more personal gesture and allows you to show interest without having to individually visit every single blog they run.

The largest benefit, however, is that by adding yourself as a contact, you appear on the FIRST page that people see when checking out a profile. That means that your eye catching avatar from our first point is now front and center on a large number of profiles.

You’d have to be blind to not realize the type of impact that kind of placement can have on your traffic. By expanding your friends list, you manually place your link in a wide variety of sites and at the same time establish a slightly more personal relationship with members of the community.

It’s win win!

Post messages in other communities

Another social networking option available with MyBlogLog is the ability to leave messages to others in a community message block on their profile page.

This option allows you to exchange messages either publicly or privately with members of your community. The biggest benefit of this, in terms of generating traffic, is it gives you a chance to make a more personal introduction and also to establish yourself as an active member of the community. By promoting those aspects, you will generate more visits to your site and are also more likely to find visitors who will consistently return to your blog for further posts.

If you’re so inclined, the community messages also appear to be a fairly decent way to pass around unsolicited URL’s and sort of spam your site around to unsuspecting members. I haven’t tried this myself, but I have received several myself and it seems to be a pretty common practice.

Tag your Site

Last, but not least, another new but great way to get traffic from MyBlogLog is to take advantage of their newly added profile tagging options.

You can tag both your own profiles and communities as well as tag any other members you want. This can help you improve traffic in two ways. First, by tagging your own site with relevant tags, you ensure that your site shows up in appropriate tag categories, helping anyone searching MyBlogLog to find you as easily as possible. This has the added bonus of also introducing readers to your profile with a quick and convenient glimpse at what your site is all about.

Secondly, by helping to tag other members, you also help yourself. Each tag you add is mapped directly back to you and can be looked up at any time. For every tag I’ve added to a community profile, the member has taken the time to visit my profile and some have checked out my site and also added tags to my blog as well. It’s a powerful option and one you can take full advantage of while it’s still brand new.

Basically, the take home of this entire post is that by being an active member of the MyBlogLog community you can really gain a lot by giving very little. By being an interesting personality, you can improve your own sites traffic substantially which can only result in one thing….MORE TRAFFIC!

And we could all use that…

Recap Roundup

June 11, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: General

I had a little time today, so I figured I would quickly touch on a few items I haven’t had to opportunity to recap, and let you know where things currently stand.

The Alexa Widget

Previously, I started an experiment here to see if incorporating the Alexa widget into the site actually improved ranking. I followed that initial posting with a 1 week update claiming some success. In the comments though, the consensus was that the Alexa ranking improvements I’d been having couldn’t be directly linked to the Alexa widget. After more than a month of using the widget, I think I can safely say that the Alexa widget has very little effect on your ranking, if any. All of my increases in rank directly correspond to reaching Alexa month milestones and there were no really big increases corresponding with the addition of the widget. I will, however, keep the widget live for at least 3 full months to see how it performs overall.

The Digg Plugin

Back in April, I talked about some of the experimentation I’ve been doing with the Digg API and the possibility of building a “smart” Digg button for Bookmark Bliss. Since that time, I’ve changed the way I think about Digg a bit and decided to go a different direction. In fact, I’ve actually removed the Digg button entirely from the site. The reason for this is that during May, we had several articles here submitted by random members of our community, and all of them were subsequently buried. As a result, our site was banned from Digg. I removed the Digg button from the site just to make it a little more difficult to submit our content.

Recently I did discuss methods for using the Digg API to Prepare your site for the Digg Effect which was split into part 1 and part 2. These techniques, I feel, are a better use of the Digg button and the Digg API and can benefit your site rather than hinder it.

Bookmark Bliss Redesign

At the beginning of last month, I mentioned briefly that I was considering redesigning the site here at Bookmark Bliss. While this is very high on my list of interesting projects, I’ve yet to find the time to really jump into it. My hope is to have a chance to work on a new theme before the end of next month, and possibly put it live shortly afterward. Currently though, this hasn’t really even gotten off the ground.

iFollow Movement

Finally, in early April Bookmark Bliss joined the iFollow movement by removing “nofollow” attributes from links on our site. In addition, we also participated in the iFollow D-List, which has been a great success so far, and continues to pop up on new sites at fairly regular intervals. Overall, joining the iFollow movement has been a great success on our site. Commenting increased, trackbacks and linking increased, and best of all, spamming did not increase. I highly recommend that all sites fully embrace the movement…

Using the Digg API to Prepare your Site for the Digg Effect – Part 2

June 7, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Tools

Last week I started to discuss some of the recent efforts I’ve been making to try and use the new Digg API to prepare a site to survey the Digg Effect. In part 1, I described the idea behind the project and my plans to use the API to detect a rising Digg article, and take the appropriate steps to prepare. Now that I’ve had the chance to experiment a bit, I’m actually quite impressed with the API and some of the amazing things you can do with it.

Here is a really basic idea of how it works (if you want a really comprehensive idea, there is a large set of documentation at the official site):

You query the Digg server by building a customized query string and passing in any one of a wide range of identifiers to let them know which article is yours. Some examples are your permalink, the title of the article, your URL, etc. Basically, whatever you have at hand that can uniquely identify your content will work. In our case, I’m using the URL/Permalink to the video being digg’d.
Depending on a number of variables you can customize, Digg returns a response for your query in the form of XML, JSON, JavaScript, or PHP. The choice is yours, so whichever is most compatible with your site is probably the best to go with. In this document, I’ll be using the PHP response type.
The response from Digg really depends on what you queried with and what you’re looking for. You can search very broad through topics and users or very narrow at individual stories or even just the comments and Diggs of a story. You can see a full list of all the supported Digg endpoints on their API site.

So, to continue with the idea, my plan was to automatically query Digg using the API and determine how many Diggs an article has currently received. If the number is low or even zero, leave the site operation alone because there is no fear of reaching the main page of Digg.

In the case that our Digg count does start to climb, and eventually reaches our specified cutoff, we automatically invoke steps to prepare the site for the incoming Digg Effect. The best way to accomplish this is to remove all dynamic aspects of the site including database lookups and JavaScript tools (such as MyBlogLog or Text-Link-Ads) to completely minimize the server load for your page. We also export the entire page into a plain static HTML file, and through the duration of the Digg Effect, this file is used for incoming requests in place of the original dynamic page.

For example:

function queryDigg( $link ) {

     ini_set( ‘user_agent’, ‘Digg-a-ling/0.0.1′ );
     $diggURI = “http://services.digg.com/stories”
     $appKey = $SITE_URL;
     $sort = “submit_date-desc”
     $count = “1″
     $type = “php”

     $queryURI = $diggURI . “?link=” .
            urlencode( $link ) . “&appkey=” . urlencode( $appKey ) .
            “&type=” . $type . “&sort=” . $sort . “&count=” . $count;

    $response = file_get_contents( $queryURI );

    return $response;

}

The above query looks up specific stories containing the permalink of our page. Once you get your response, you can then go ahead and implement any code you need to prepare your site for the Digg Effect. You can add something like this to the top of your diggable pages:

if( $diggInfo['DIGGS'] > $diggThreshold ) {
        if( file_exists( $CACHE_FILE ) ) {
             print( file_get_contents( $CACHE_FILE ) );
             return;
       }
}

This is assuming you’ve taken the time to create $CACHE_FILE if your page started to build in Diggs.

if( $diggInfo['DIGGS'] == $diggThreshold ) {

        $CACHE_FILE = $CACHE_PATH . “/” . $PAGE_TITLE . “.html”;
        $fileHandler = fopen( $CACHE_FILE, ‘w’ );
        fwrite( $fileHandler, $THIS_PAGE->getDocument( ) );
        fclose( $fileHandler );

}

Where $THIS_PAGE->getDocument( ) is whatever your template system uses to generate the markup that is printed to the screen. You can also use this technique to decide when to show your Digg button on your site. If, for instance, you don’t want to show a digg rating of zero, you can simply setup a check and only display when it grows to a certain value. You can get a full list of the available digg buttons for your site by visiting the Digg buttons webpage.

function show_digg( $diggs ) {

      $diggURL = “http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js”;

      if( $diggs > 0 ) {
          return ‘<script src=”‘ . $diggURL . ‘” type=”text/javascript”></script>’;
      }

      return “”;

}

As I hope you can see from this very small and minor example, the Digg API opens many avenues for much more robust integration between your site and Digg. The skies the limit on what you can accomplish, which is more than you can say for many of the other major social news sites. Say what you want about Digg, but this API is a great step forward in terms of making the users drive the ingenuity of the Digg engine, and I can’t wait to see what new tools come out in the months and years ahead.

A Glimpse at the Inner Workings of the Google Machine

June 5, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: SEO

While I was reading one of my favorite blogs, SEOMoz, I came across a great article they recently posted entitled Remarkable Openness from Google’s Black Box. The article goes through a recent New York Times story entitled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine and discusses many of the aspects from a web business and SEO perspective.

What I really enjoyed about the New York Times article was the candidness of the answers. Google’s search result inner workings is one of their most guarded secrets, so while you often read a lot of speculation, you very rarely get confirmation straight from the source.

The SEOMoz article is an excellent accompaniment as it steps you through many of the interesting points from the NYTimes, and takes a look at them from an online business standpoint and from an SEO standpoint. For anyone who is working at making a living online, every little tidbit of information can really help shape your entire approach when it comes to running your business.

This was the point I found the most interesting is:

Some complaints involve simple flaws that need to be fixed right away. Recently, a search for “French Revolution” returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign â€” in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions â€” rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like “French Revolution” rather than pages that simply had both words.

This shows you that no matter what you do to optimize your site and setup your keyword campaigns, there is still a human element behind the Google ranking system that you may inevitably butt heads with.

There are many other great tidbits of information such as how Google decides which content to show based on the connotation of a search and just how many metrics they use to determine a sites rank. I highly recommend checking out both articles if you’re at all interested in how Google search really works…

Weekly Business Bookmarks for Internet Entrepreneurs

Bookmark Bliss

Previous Articles

Archive for June, 2007