mincus code » web design

How to Stand Out in a Sea of Fives

mincus — Sat, 12 May 2007 02:23:04 +0000

Darren Rowse of problogger.net just finished up another of his whiz-bang Group Writing projects.

The topic of the project was “Top 5″

I got the feeling that many of the entrants were students from the school of Brian

It was really interesting to see the different techniques that people used to stand out – after the jump I’ve listed all of the posts without using 5 or five in the title. Out of the almost 900 entries, only 77 people didn’t use “5″ in their titles.

Also for those that missed it, Darren let in on his amazing Chitika earnings – almost $250K!

The Secret to the Search Engine Long Tail

mincus — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:07:23 +0000

What is your single biggest source of traffic?

Whomever said “Content is King” forgot to tell you that your king content amounts to about three people a month per post.

On my sites, almost half of my traffic comes from search engines, but the top 10 referring key phrases account for less than 15% of the search engine traffic.

The majority of the keywords that drive traffic to my sites number in the thousands, but only get 1 or 2 searches each. To top it all off, most of these keywords are for things that are said in passing in an article, or that were never intended the article to be about. You say “Pink Donut Safety Measures” and 3 weirdos out there search for it every month and you are the top site.

Just like this search engine traffic is the long tail, the articles they are hitting are all part of the long tail of the content on my sites. They are the everyday posts that most people look over once and then without any additional opportunities would probably leave only to never come back again.

So what can you do knowing all of this?

1. Create Anchor Content

First, your sites all need that special something that sets you apart – You need that killer

– what ever is the most popular thing on your site that you can use to convert that long tail traffic to someone who’s going to come back to read you again.

2. Add Lots of Additional Content

This is the daily grind. You add content everyday to your sites, you get a few comments here and there and a little link love. Most of what’s written gets archived away almost never to be seen again except from those one off, odd search engine referals. All of that said, it still needs to be focused quality content. Don’t think for a second that your hard earned readers won’t dump you if you start filling their RSS feed readers with rubbish.

3. Convert!

Now you take those long tail referrals and make sure they know about the #1 most important thing on your site. You throw the giant RSS feed icon at them and tell them that you’re not just a flash in the pan. But, this is the curse of running ads on your sites – By converting well with ads, you are potentially losing a lifetime visitor.

If you haven’t already looked at Aaron Wall’s Book on SEO(Aff), I highly recommend you take a look at it. If you’re making any money from your sites, the book is filled with 300+ pages of solid tips for increasing your profit.

How to Remove the Posts per page limit in WordPress

mincus — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:00:34 +0000

I love WordPress, it’s made web publishing and blogging incredibly easy and available for so many people.

But, Depending on your theme or setup, it’s also easy to make hundreds of pages of duplicate content within your own domain. For instance under the categories pages, by default your content is duplicated and paginated based on your posts_per_page setting. So some of your older posts can be incredibly difficult for users and search engines to get to.

My goal was to fix this using these two changes:

Make the category pages into lists of links so that it doesn’t show up as duplicate content.
Have each category page show every article in that category, overriding the “Show at most” setting, so that from any page on the site, you are never more than 2 clicks away from any other page.

Read on for how I did it…

Removing the posts per page limit

WordPress uses the first Template file it finds in your current Theme’s directory from the following list (assuming this is for category 6).

category-6.php
category.php
archive.php
index.php

So, the easiest way to change the amount of posts per page shown for categories, is to do the following:

Either edit your category.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, copy your index.php file to category.php.
look for this line:
< ?php get_header(); ?>
and change it to the following:
< ?php get_header(); query_posts( 'posts_per_page=-1&cat=' . $cat ) ?>
That’s all, your finished. The -1 in posts_per_page lets WordPress know you want all posts to be shown and it overrides the setting in your options.

Changing the duplicate content into lists of links

This was also a simple quick change – I again edited my category.php file and looked for the following line:
< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
Deleted everything between that if statement and its endif and put in the following:

`< ?php single_cat_title() ?>`



    

    < ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        

            < ?php the_title(); ?>


        


    < ?php endwhile; ?>

With these two easy changes, I now show all posts within my categories regardless of my options settings, and have removed the duplicate content from the category pages by making every category article a link.

If you aren’t already using it, I also recommend the Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin to help keep your URL schema straight and to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.

Let me know how this works out for you, hopefully you find these changes useful.

Why your successful site is leaving money on the table

mincus — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:26:09 +0000

Right now, your sites are making less money than they should be. What should you be doing about it?

Never give up. Never surrender.

Below I list some simple things that you can change on your site right now to increase your income and traffic. Changes that I have made in the past have quadrupled the traffic to one of my sites and increased my income almost 10-fold.

3 Simple changes that can drastically improve your ranking

Like Shoemoney and many other people that already make tons of money from their sites – these 3 changes are second nature to them and they don’t even count them as “SEO.” Yet, I come across site after site that doesn’t have even these tips on their site and are basically throwing away better rankings.

Keywords in the page Title

Your page title should have the keywords for that specific page in the title. Thats it.

Keywords in URL

Same as the title, every URL should include the keywords for the page and should “look” static. mod_rewrite is your friend. The only blog software that matters supports this, but doesn’t default to it. Make the change from query looking URLs (ex. ?q=3) to static URLs.

Content at the top of your HTML

This is the one that many people miss and end up in supplemental hell. If you have so many sidebars, headers, javascript, additional CSS, and formating code that your actual content is waaaaay down in the bottom of your HTML file, the search engines seem to get bored at some point and stop looking down in the file for your unique data. So the top part of your HTML looks the same on all of your pages and Google just slaps a dupe content penalty on the majority of your pages. Cut down on the crap in your HTML or use CSS to allow you to move the actual content as one of the first things in your HTML.

Japanese Kaizen and A/B Testing

Always keep trying new things

Your site can always be doing better. Don’t stop trying new ads, new content, new linking ideas. Use A/B Testing to find out what moving an Ad does – if it gets you a better CTR make the change on your site and start a new test.

Accumulate small changes

Kaizen is basically the concept of continuously improving through tiny changes. Adding new content on a consistent basis, and trying the A/B testing above. Looking to places where people talk about new ideas and giving them a spin. Little by little these add up. .5% better click-through, a few hundred more unique readers a day. It all seems like its too little to matter until months later you’ve doubled or quadrupled what your site makes.

Diversify Your Income Sources

Google Adsense has really given so many people the opportunity to make a living, or at least have some extra cash on their passions and hobbies. Its a great start, but eventually you must start diversifying your income, not only to protect yourself from a “single point of failure,” but to really start growing your income levels. Look into things like Text Link Ads(Aff), Azoogle Ads(Aff), Chitika, Amazon, or start filling ad space with house ads.

I once saw a demonstration at a conference where the presenter held up a a ten dollar bill and said he was selling it for one dollar for the next 10 seconds. The whole audience just stared at him for the first 8 seconds, until one person caught on and ran up and bought a $10 bill for only $1. Next, he held up a $20 and again, sold it for a $1 for the next 10 seconds. It still took almost the full 10 seconds before someone took the initiative to get out of their seat and take the free money. The rest of the audience just sat there. For some reason, most people are OK being the ones who sit around and watch everyone else actually do things. Who are you going to be today? The masses that sit in their seats, or the guy who simply walks up and takes whats waiting for you?

Updated (2007/3/30): Added Azoogle Link + fixed a formatting error with the amazon link.

WordPress Permalink Redirects

mincus — Wed, 31 May 2006 13:57:36 +0000

The default WordPress URLs aren’t very search engine unfriendly – http://code.mincus.com/?p=3

Under the WordPress options, it is easy to change this to something much nicer looking, for example: http://code.mincus.com/3/adsense-notifier – But that could lead to losing the PR that you’ve built up from the old links if you make the change after your blog is established or duplicate content issues.

For people using Apache, it should be relatively easy to add 301 permanent redirects using rewrite maps to fix both of these issues.

Three changes are needed to implement this:

Add a rewrite map program
Tell Apache to use the rewrite map
Update your .htaccess to use the rewrite map

Put this file somewhere where apache has access to execute it and name it something like mod_rewrite_map.pl. Update the three variables with your own settings for the DB name, username, and password. Make sure you give it execute permissions. This program will run in the background and give the pretty URL name when passed an article ID. Test it by running it then typing in an article ID and hitting enter. If a friendly URL name comes back, you’ve got it working right.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use DBI;

$|=1;

my $db_user = "database username";
my $db_pass = "database password";
my $db_name = "database name";

{
    my $DBH;
    my $STH;

    sub startdb {
        if ( !$DBH ) {
            $DBH = DBI->connect( 'DBI:mysql:' . $db_name, $db_user, $db_pass );
            my $query = 'select post_name from wp_posts where ID=?;';
            $STH = $DBH->prepare( $query );
        }
    }

    sub stopdb {
        if ( $DBH ) {
            $DBH->disconnect;
        }
        undef( $DBH );
    }

    sub execute_db {
        my $post_num = shift;
        my $post_name = '';

        startdb();

        $STH->execute( $post_num );
        $STH->bind_columns( \$post_name );
        $STH->fetch;
        return( $post_name );
    }
}

while() {
    chomp;
    print execute_db( $_ ) . "\n";
}

stopdb();

Next, add the following lines to your httpd.conf. They tell apache to load the rewrite map program into memory and when to use it. While you can place these in a virtualhost, they are not virtualhost specific. I just put them there in my httpd.conf because it makes it easier for me to remember my logic in setting it up.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap name_recmap prg:/path/to/mod_rewrite_map.pl

Last, add the following lines to your WordPress .htaccess – They tell apache to use your rewrite map and when. In this setup it does the following:
^p=([0-9]+)$ – If the query string is requesting a page, and is only digits
rewrite the URL to be ID/Pretty-URL-Name/

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=([0-9]+)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ %1/${name_recmap:%1}/? [R=301,NC,L]

That’s how I have it setup here on code.mincus right now. But I recently found this Redirect WordPress plug-in that seems like it will do all of this and more only easier. If anyone gives it a try let me know how it works out.

UPDATE(10/19/2006): I have been using Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect WordPress plug-in for a few months now and love it. It’s a must have plug-in if you are using WordPress and have even a passing interest in SEO and rankings.

URL schema change / Effect on unique hits

mincus — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:58:30 +0000

Earlier this month I made many changes to the structure of one of my websites as a test.

The result has been that my daily unique hits have increased 125-150%. Now, it could just be a fluke and maybe it will all drop back down again, but the site had been pretty steady at that number for about a year now without much fluctuation. It could also have just coincided with a change in a search engine algorithm. That said, below is the list of changes that I made.

Changed URLS from ‘index.cgi?[0-9]+’ to ‘/[0-9]+/Full-Title-With-Spaces-Replaced-With-Dashes/
Used mod_rewrite to redirect old URL schema to new with 301 redirects
Put unique title words in meta keywords for each page
Started adding relevant unique images with the same name as the title, linked to the full version of the image with the same title. Format: ‘/image/[0-9]+/Page-Title-[0-9]+.jpg’
User posted comments with links are automatically ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ now
Switched from a table based layout to full CSS (cut the average page size by one half without counting caching the css file)
Validated all pages with the w3c validator
Started asking one site a day to cross-link

Stats below:

The line marked in red is the day that I made the change over. Notice that the bandwidth initially went down from cutting the size of the pages, but then passed the old baseline when the new hits started coming in.

There was a _slight_ drop in my hits for the first few days after, but after about two weeks it really started taking off. My guess is that it really upped my ranking for periphery keywords. Also, the majority of my search engine traffic used to come from only Google (around 80%). But now Yahoo, MSN and the rest have been spidering the site like crazy (Yahoo alone has about 1/2 a gig of transferred data since the change) and the visitors sent by them is really starting to increase. I guess that those search engines really didnt like the old URL schema.

One last note is that the site has thousands of pages of unique real data. It has always been a solid site, but I just didnt put much thought into the design and layout of the URL schema before. Now it seems that it is getting the recognition from the search engines that it could have had all along. Hope this helps someone else; feel free to add more suggestions!