Business 
Comments Off I just wasted 45 minutes finding this link. I have no idea why it does not show up (well) in Google. The documentation for Google Analytics eCommerce Conversion Tracking is here. It didn’t used to be this hard to find. And I swear you used to be able to find it on the Analytics settings page, somewhere.
Business No Comments I’ve found a handful of reasons, when developing new websites, to want to acquire existing websites or domains. I do not mean parked domains, I mean websites that are active, but not successful, and are in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In this post I’m going to discuss why you should be researching domains and websites that show up in SERPs for your website’s targeted keywords.
Things are always changing in the Google algorithm, but it’s been known for some time that Google tends to limit the exposure of brand new websites. Unless you can burst onto the scene and get tons of links quickly, you won’t show up on the first page for the keywords you are targeting for quite a while. It used to be a rule of thumb that you wouldn’t see your website in the top 10-20 pages in Google for 6-12 months after its release. Google has become much more dynamic, but mostly with content on existing, well ranking, websites. But one thing you can bank on is if you purchase an existing domain that is 2+ years old you can skip any type of sandboxing of your website in the SERPs. So sometimes acquiring an existing domain is better than coming up with a brand new domain name. Do some searches for websites that rank decently for your keywords. Getting your website in the top 5 pages right out of the gate is a great start. You will hopefully be building backlinks after the release so your site should move up in the SERPs. Any website that has the keywords in the domain will be easier to optimize for search engines, but this doesn’t mean it will be the most marketable domain available. Most of the big internet websites don’t include their purpose, or keywords, in their domain.
Let’s say you start a new website about Poker. Let’s say that the #5 website in Google when you search for “poker” is something like “pokerpoker123.com”. Your website has a more marketable name like “Donkfest.com” (a humorous poker term). If you can negotiate a purchase of “pokerpoker123.com” you can set up a 301 (moved permanently) redirect to “Donkfest.com” and once Google picks up on this, suddenly “Donkfest.com” replaces “pokerpoker123.com” in the SERPs. Now you’ve jumped from nowhere in Google to the #5 spot. Most of your keyword competitors will ignore this failing website and you can just snatch it up and jump right into the competition.
The main reason that SERP Jumping works is that when you 301 the domain to your website you suddenly acquire all of its backlinks. So if that website had 500 backlinks and you had 20, now you have 520 backlinks. This obviously creates an increase in your Google PR. This will also help you with Bing/Yahoo and other search engines. But aside from the SERP jump you will now start getting referral traffic from these websites that linked to the other website. You could see a significant amount of traffic from visitors trying to visit this older website via links.
Sometimes you’ll have a competitor that has been around so long, and has so many backlinks, that they stick at the #1 spot in Google for your keyword despite getting half the traffic you do. Their site is not as successful as yours, they aren’t updating it, but they maintain that #1 spot with no effort. You might convince yourself that since you can see more activity on your website than on theirs that #2 in Google is just as good as #1. The concern here is, what happens if someone with some drive and vision decides to purchase that #1 website and totally revamp it? Now you have a driven competitor who already has the upper hand with the #1 spot in the SERPs. This could cost you thousands in advertising if you suddenly feel that you have to convince searchers that your site is actually better/bigger/more important than that #1 site that used to be so lackluster. Don’t risk this happening. If you can acquire that #1 site for the cost of a few months of revenue, you can save yourself tons in advertising expenses should someone decide to buy the site and revamp it (or 301 redirect it to their existing website). So, with purchasing that #1 site you can SERP Jump and remove a potential thorn in your side at the same time.
If you get an individual to agree to sell their domain to you your going to want to have them sign a contract that includes a few specifics before you even consider how to physically pay for and transfer the domain.
Your best option for safely acquiring the domain is Escrow.com. Escrow.com allows a buyer and seller to make the transaction online without any chance of one party being cheated. The purchaser will pay Escrow the money for the domain, an amount that was agreed upon by both registered Escrow.com users. Escrow.com will then instruct the seller to transfer the domain to the buyer. Escrow allows the buyer to register their WHOIS information and only releases the funds to the seller once the domain’s WHOIS information has changed to the buyer’s information. This way everyone is safe and the sale and transfer goes without a hitch.
Once you acquire the domain you’ll want to 301 redirect the main domain to your new site. Research any page on the old site that might be in line with current pages on your site and 301 those pages directly to the pages on your site that relate. Be sure that you have a custom 404 page set up so that users get your website navigation if they visit a page that does not exist. You don’t want them to get a web server 404 page with no navigation.
Business, Development Comments Off With the major search engines supporting the Sitemap Protocol many developers have switched to using these XML versions of sitemaps for telling search engine crawlers about the pages on their sites. I recently found that this was a big mistake. I personally had switched to using these XML sitemaps 100% on my sites. I no longer had links to old-school sitemaps where we listed every page on our website. For many sites every page can be found through the standard crawling of links. For example, Fido Finder has thousands of Lost and Found dog listings, but the crawler can get to all of these by simply going to the Lost Dogs page and crawling the “Next Page” link, over and over. There are truly no hidden pages that I want Google to index. Tagomatic, being a search engine, is a different story. And there’s actually a story to go with this lesson.
One day I noticed that Tagomatic’s traffic dropped off by about 75%. I was in a panic. Had Google suddenly decided that Tagomatic was no longer important? It took me days to finally realize that for whatever reason Google had de-index any Mod-Rewritten URLs. 3-4 months prior to this I had changed the website listings on Tagomatic to include the domain name (which is unique) in the URL instead of having a standard querystring identifier (so /domain.com/ instead of page.php?id=12345). The only website listings showing up in Google were listings where the “domain name” (mostly older entries that contained sub-folders, so forward slashes) contained characters that did not allow me (with the rewrite code I found) to rewrite them. So ONLY standard querysting URL’s were index in Google for the websites section of Tagmatic. This makes absolutely no sense, and technically Google shouldn’t “know” that these URL’s are rewritten, but the only listings on Tagomatic that were still showing up where standard querystring, non-rewritten, URLs. The new, pretty, URL’s had already been indexed in Google for months. They were correct being redirected if you entered the old URL, but for whatever reason Google decided these URL’s were not worth indexing any more. So I rolled the code back and after some time, and submitting a re-inclusion request via the Google Sitemaps dashboard, the URL’s slowly started to show up again. After 4 months only about 50% of the original URL’s had returned. By 8 months about 70% of the URL’s that were previously index had returned, but the growth had definitely stopped. In the Google Sitemaps dashboard I could see that one of my sitemaps had 25K of its 50K links (max 50K per sitemap) indexed and the other had 23K of 25K indexed. I wanted that ~25K back.
As a test I created an old school sitemap, where any search engine could crawl “next page” after “next page” and see all of the pages on Tagomatic. Within a week 7K more pages showed up as “indexed.” Hopefully we can get back to having 90% of the pages in our sitemaps indexed, but it won’t be thanks to the new sitemap protocol. For whatever reason Google needed an old school sitemap to get all of the pages in the index. Sometimes you have to just experiment and you’ll find something that doesn’t make sense that works anyhow.
Business, Development Comments Off 
On many occasions I have noticed an increase in activity on one of my websites and had not know what was causing the new traffic. It could be a TV news report, a blog post, a forum post, or any number of events. I always thought that Google Analytics should tell me What Has Changed. But, it never did…until now! Google has a new feature in beta called “Intelligence”. The Intelligence report shows different variables that have increased or decreased significantly over the selected date range. It’s an easy way to find out What Has Changed in regards to traffic, goals, and commerce on your website. It’s a great feature and it should help many website owners to not just identify traffic trends but to help find bugs and other changes on their website. I’m glad they finally realized how valuable this information can be to us.
Development Comments Off If you’re going to own and operate a successful website you need to become familiar with the acronym SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of designing and/or tweaking your website so that the search engines know what your website content is about. The idea is to specifically tell engines like Google what content is on your site so that your website shows up when users query search engines for your targeted keywords. Some might also say that you are quietly suggesting to the search engines what keywords your website should show up for. Unlike the early years of the Internet, search engines no longer rely on META tag data for indexing websites. It’s the structure and makeup of your content that tells Google what your website is about. If you follow a few tips you can help to suggest to Google, and other engines, what keywords it should rank your website highly for. This will result in your website showing up higher in the results for your targeted keywords. These tips were gathered from months of reading both SEO forums and SEO articles online. We will use FidoFinder.com as an example in some of the suggestions to help explain the tips.
The HTML title of each individual web page needs to contain your keywords. Many websites simply include the name of their website in their HTML title tags across the website. You need to also include your targeted keywords, in a natural manner, in your title tags. Be sure to modify every web page’s title tag to represent the content of that page. A good example is Fido Finder’s web page titles including the keyword “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in their titles. The individual dog profile pages include the dog’s breed and location in the title.
The actual text that makes up your URL needs to contain your keywords. If your domain name itself does not contain your keywords make sure you name your pages in a manner that keywords are included in them. On Fido Finder the “lost dogs” search page is named “lost-dogs.php” instead of “search.php.” It is widely believed that dashes are the best way to break up words in a URL as Google will consider lost-dogs to equal “lost dogs” but lost_dogs to equal “lost_dogs”.
Links within your own website should contain your keywords. Instead of using links with anchor text like “click here” be sure to actually use your keywords in the anchor text. On Fido Finder links within a paragraph urging a visitor to register their lost dog use “register your lost dog” as the anchor text instead of linking text like “click here to register.” Use your keywords as links throughout the site, it is good to have 2-3 of the same keywords in links on the same page. Text links are better than image links. If you use images for your site navigation be sure to include ALT text for the images so that search engines can tell what the image links represent.
If you have control, it is best to have links to your website from external domains that include your keywords. On Fido Finder we employ the use of a tagline (Where Lost Dogs are Found) in our website identity that includes our keywords to help to encourage webmasters to link to our site using our keywords. So webmasters tend to create links that use “Fido Finder – Where Lost Dogs are Found” as the anchor text – which helps to tell Google that Fido Finder is about “lost dogs.” Most developers believe that the number of inbound links with your keyword is the number one most important factor in your position in Google’s search engine results.
Be sure to actually use H1/H2/H3 tags for headings of your page and include your keywords in these tags. You can use CSS to style the headings tags so that they don’t act quite as ridiculous (padding, etc) as the HTML specifications dictate. It is believed that Google looks for these tags and gives them weight when indexing a website.
Use the HTML bold tag around keywords within the text of your website. Again, it’s believed that Google looks for bold text to help determine important parts of a website.
Be sure to use your keywords multiple times on your web pages. Don’t overdo it, but be sure to repeat your keywords on your site. On Fido Finder we continue to use the terms “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in places where we would more naturally just use the term “dogs.” But we want Google to be 100% sure that our site is not just about dogs, but lost and found dogs.