Website Optimization Techniques

My first website optimization product will shortly be released. It is a mini-site creation tool. What it does is allow you to create a highly focused and keyword optimized content-based website.

The home page is a sales page or a squeeze page, with the content pages comprised of articles that act to draw in organic search engine traffic (visitors interested in your topic).

The articles are loosely linked from the home page footer with the intention of search engines (rather than people) following a link to an index of the articles.

Visitors landing on and reading articles are encouraged to write their own articles at the end of each one, so the site can actually grow in content pages via contributions from site visitors.

I have made it as easy as possible to add articles to the site and also added many countermeasures to combat spam submissions. There are also moderation options for how you want to handle article submissions.

There is an admin area where you can approve, edit and delete articles. With the least strict settings, you can have articles that pass through the spam traps automatically added to your mini site.

URLs are based on the title text and are made unique by adding a dash plus a number to the end of the URL should their be a conflict.

I have created a set of basic templates that can be chosen together with an outline of a sales letter to help you fill in the content in a structured way. I based this on possibly my favorite e-book called “Killer Mini Sites” which is years old now and I don’t recall where I obtained it.

I have been testing the script with live sites. The first one is a sales letter style site and the second is a new website designed to capture traffic and attract inbound links at FreePrivacyPolicy.org.

The first site uses an older version of the script with the link to the articles in a subdirectory and linked to mid-way down the sales page. With the second site, you can spot a link to the articles in the footer. But notice how the home pages have large “call to action” links at the end of the sales pitch. So the articles are designed to capture relevant visitor traffic and drive them to the home pages. The second site has the latest script running.

You may be thinking that a blog is another way to do the same thing, but they are not since the home page of a blog is usually a list of the current posts and people read these and bounce off the page to another blog.

However, a sales letter is designed to steer people towards a single goal. Blogs are cluttered with options and gizmos so most readers are blind to the offers on the page, so read and leave for the next blog on their list of favourites.

As a blogger myself, I have created several “dead blogs”, these are blogs that you started off enthusiastically writing articles (posts) for and then got fed up of posting to anonymous people that read your blog and leave without even a comment. So this tool allows you to turn a dead blog into a useful sales site by copying the posts to the article input form and erasing the old blog code. This removes all the pressure to blog everyday.

So when will I release this mini-site generator product? Well, I think I have all the code running smoothly now but I wanted to create instructional videos for using it and create a DVD containing the product and tutorials. Also, I need a sales page. So the full product is about a week away from launch.

Please post your thoughts in the comments…

In one of my first posts I promised to post details of any videos that I create. Here is the first one:

It’s about how to create a database in your web hosting control panel (cPanel).

Since most many of my scripts make use of databases, this was a natural first choice video to make. Also, the process is quite short at around 3 minutes.

I’m not very happy with the sound of my own voice and from what I gather by asking around, most other people are not happy with the sound of their own voice either, so I can’t do much about that. What I did do was work on how to get the background noise down.

After many experiments I ended up in my car with a battery-powered lap top computer. This helped cut out the sound from my home and a nearby road, and the lack of a mains power supply probably helped reduce the electrical noise from the switched mode power supply that is normally used.

I only used Camtasia Studio 3.1.2 which is currently free software to produce the AVI video file which I just uploaded to YouTube. So hopefully, by the time I finished this post, the video will be up.

So, if this works out ok, look forward to more videos and hopefully better ones as I get more experienced at producing them.

Getting things done is the secret to success for many successful people. But there is so little time I hear you cry!

It’s actually very easy to get many things done, the way to do it is to focus on the most important things and get them done first before you do anything else such as web browsing or checking email. Also, do these things when you have the most energy and alertness.

For me, this is mid morning. Even so, I get up from bed and the first thing I try and do is something highly beneficial to my business before I eat breakfast. This may only take 30 minutes but it is a great start to the day to get this thing, whatever it may be, done and achieved right at the start of the day. To get ideas for what to do, you could plan them at the end of the day before or think about what you will do immediately before springing out of bed, this is what I tend to do, after brewing my mug of tea (#1 priority).

After completing the productive task, I will shower and have breakfast. Then I am ready for my mid-morning session of productive time. Then, by lunch time I often have made great progress and relax by checking out blogs by inspirational people over lunch. I don’t need to check news since I have a rotating news RSS headline in my browser which will show me if there is anything majorly important going on that I need to check out.

In the afternoon I will often not work but go for a run, go 10-pin bowling or more work, but it is often less productive work than in the morning.

Now it is evening and I am writing this post since I can do my miscellaneous tasks such as blog posting. Even, this is work-related but fun and relaxing.

I like to watch downloads of mini-series of sci-fi or action dramas but these are treats so I limit these to when I feel that I deserve these treats. Today may be one of those days

Of course, I don’t have the time waste of a commute to work, meetings and a forced time frame to work to, so it is easy for me to make every day highly productive. But, like normal people, I do have my unproductive days where I stayed up too late the night before etc. But I hope I gave you some ideas for how to prioritize and get the important things banged out early in the day or whenever you are personally most energized.

When you have expertise in the area of Internet Marketing there is plenty of scope to leverage income out of clients for your services.

I have a danger here to reveal my tactics to current clients so I will only present a few ideas here and expand on them in future posts.

First off, you can mostly save them time: you can do your coding and web design very fast, so you can quickly debug and respond to requested changes by the client.

This makes them happy. Every day lost to them is revenue down the drain, also they need the expert to make sure their money-making site runs smoothly.

But you need to make sure that you get paid. The way to do this is to host their code on your site and only transfer it over once they paid you the money.

To ensure that you get future business from them, over-deliver on expectations. So you go the extra mile outside of your contract to complete the job.

There is more to this strategy, but I will leave it for later.

- Mr MultiVar … the man with the tips for maximizing your profits online

Here is a quick tip on how to optimize your landing page text link Ads for relevancy to the visitors search query.

When people search on Google, MSN or Yahoo! for something, they end up on a search results page that has a url including the search terms that they used.

If they see your site listed and click on the link, they visit your page and their browser will usually reveal the url that they came from unless they are a privacy nut that denies all data to you via browser settings. Then you could maybe serve them up some special free content instead?

No, don’t do that since they may have come from another page on your website. So if the referrer information is not available you can’t act on it.

But, normally, you can get hold of the referring url that contains the search terms in an environment variable called “HTTP_REFERER”. Make note of the way this is spelt!

Then, using some PHP or maybe Javascript code, you can filter out the search terms.

Now we can use this valuable information to make our Ads more relevant to improve all kinds of things like the user experience, the relevancy of the Ads to what the visitor searched for and possibly improve the quality score for PPC landing pages.

The idea now is to insert these search terms on your page. I suggest placing them right before an Adsense Ad unit to try and get the Ads in that unit to be most relevant to what the visitor is looking for. But this is hit and miss since only milliseconds are available for the poor old Ad bot to select the Ads.

But what works extremely well is to use an affiliate link that is a search link. The idea here is to get hold of an affiliate link that contains a search term and replace the keywords with the ones we grabbed from the referring url. Also, we can insert our keywords in the anchor text of the link.

So now the visitor gets to see a super-relevant link leading to your affiliate page and that page will be targeted to their original search terms.

To get hold of this kind of affiliate link you need to go into your affiliate member’s area and hunt around for any links that you can generate that contain some keywords. For example, a direct link to a search page on the merchant’s website.

So I hope that made sense and got you thinking about how best to optimize a page for search keyword relevancy.

Of course, you need code to put this strategy into action. So how do I go about handing you the code? Should I sell it, give it away for free or let you donate random amounts of dosh depending on how useful it was to you?

Best regards,

Mr MultiVar