Using your 404 Page

If you’ve some time on the internet, you may have seen silly, blank or just stupid 404 error pages. This is not about these types of 404's; this is about creating a 404 page that will be helpful to your users and solve issues problems you have not been aware of.

In your webserver, a 404 is an invisible resultcode sent to the user computer or search engine. It tells them the page they were looking for isn’t there, without giving more details. And of course there are lots of reasons why they could run into a 404, like when a page is moved, or maybe someone has made a mistake when creating a link.  Some people will know what a “404 error” is but others won’t, so it is recommend to inform both. Tell them it’s a "404 error" and include information telling them what happened and that the page they were trying to get to isn’t there. But that's only the beginning. Wouldn't you agree its nice to be told the way when you are lost?

If you leave a customer at a 404-dead end, they will leave. So give them a bit of info to pull them back on track. You will have a better chance of keeping them on the website. Every website is different but here are some ideas of what you could do with your 404 page:

• General service related info
• Contact information
• Popular content
• Popular products
• Links for technical support
• Search page
• Sitemap

SEO Software: Is It Worth the Money?

When searching for “SEO software,” Google says there are 42,000,000 results. So where do you begin? Even if only small amount of these results are really product pages, that leaves you with way too many SEO software programs to make a selection. Some half year ago, I was close to buying some SEO software package (forgot which), but as always when you need to make the actual purchase common sense kicks in (sorry guys). I just can't justify the cost. You need to do better to convince me.

Most of the tools will run a link audit or ranking report and/or do competitive analysis. Just add the URLs you need data on and let the program come out with a report. The data will help making the right decisions for the SEO campaign. 

Now if you run a small company, you'll most likely not be pulling in new clients every day. And would you really need to do a run every week? If you were running a SEO company with lots of clients however, you would be more than happy to use a tool to do your reports, so you can use your time to focus on building links, developing the right content etc. Then it will be worth the price.

But that's simply not my business.

But still, you need to keep some SEO knowledgde in-house.  A tool can be chaeper compared to hiring an employee or agency, but it is still a tool, not actual SEO knowledge. The SEO software will come up with a list recommendations, but you don’t have the knowledge to effectively implement these in the specific case you're at, what then?
Next, initially and with every new version you need to make yourself comfortable with your tool. Will you have the time to do so? Analytics data you need for your meta keywords, adsense ads and campaigns is presented by Google will be interpreted and presented in it's own format. This makes you dependent on their interpretation. And what happens if your beatiful tool misses out on the next thing Google does and loses it's edge? What will that do to your company and customers?

Why rank checking is overrated

1. Google personalizes search results.
It is not uncommon for different users to see different websites ranking #1.  Google displays search rankings based on previous user activity, searchesand many other factors.  It is common rankings favor local sites.  With all of this personalization, it is hard to figure out accurate rankings for your website.

 

2. Time. 
   Depending on the time of day, Google will show a different ranking. When checking rankings at 8am, while Google throttles rankings between 9am and 5pm, then the data I gathered at 8am is not accurate.

 

3. Google’s makes ranking data inaccurate. 
   Google integrated local listings, news headlines, videos and much more.  These will appear as integrated boxes above all rankings, sometimes in the middle.  So you may rank #1 with a Google local onebox appearing below you or you may rank #1 with 10 local listings appearing before you.  Quite a big difference.

 

4. Automated rank checkers have issues.
   Google does not like rank checkers. There are some smart people that make rank checkers do an their job. But unfortunately, Google gives them a hard time and they encounter a constant flow of issues that make it difficult to measure rankings properly. Meanwhile, be aware of people advertising their SEDO skills when they're promising 100% like accuracy.

 

5. Checking the ranks for wrong keywords. 
   Not all keywords are equal.  Some keywords generate lots of traffic, others have potential to drive sales.  On rare occasions, you can find a keyword that drives high traffic & sales.  Look at these keyword examples:
   • “buy Joomla theme” – high traffic & high conversions
   • “buy Joomla cocos layout” – high traffic & poor conversions
   • "free Windows" - high traffic& no sales
   • “generated boredom” – no traffic & no sales

    

6. What it doesn't tell you / my advice
   Your Google rank does not tell you anything really about the number of visitors or bounce-rate. What do to do then? Monitor by using Google analytics.  If you monitor traffic, you can see if  search engine referrals decrease.  If so, you can drill down to see which keywords are sending less traffic.

Optimizing Keywords (get keywords that pay more)

Once have an idea of what your site's capabilities and limitations, try and explore new keywords. Find out those keywords and combinations that will raise your CPC income.

1. Go to the Google Keyword Tool

2. Pass the security code check to get access

3. Enter a keyword or keyword phrase into the textbox

4. Click the button to get the keyword list

6. Select the maximum number of rows from the dropdown box

7. Select the CPC column (button columns) and recalculate

8. Click the CPC column to sort from highest to lowest amounts

You can now see the keyword phrases, ordered by highest CPC. Now you can edit your site and change your articles to contain some of these higher paying keyword phrases. Make sure to use these phrases for future writing. Also make sure to check regularly. Of course, you could also use this method to find profitable topics.

Get your Highest Paying Keywords

To get the most out of your current site, you need to know what value Google places on related keywords.

Google has thought up keywords for your website and they all have a value, to be paid by the Adwords customer. So you need to find out what these are. Then use this to tweak your current metadata and content to display higher-paying keyword ads.

1. Go to the Keyword Tool

2. Pass the security code check to get access

3. Enter your website’s main URL (or enter a specific web page) in the search field called “Website”

4. Press enter or click the button to search

5. Depending on where your visitors come from (check that using Google Analytics) you can use the advanced options to select geographical location and language.

6. Make sure Group keywords by common terms is checked

7. Now you need to make sure CPC (Cost Per Click) is shown. If not by default, select the Columns button and add it and use it to sort.

8. If needed search again, or click recalculate

10. Now the columns below will display the estimated cost per click (CPC) for each keyword!

11. Click the column title Estimated Avg. CPC to sort by price. Click it one more time to sort from highest to lowest.

13. If you have all the time in the world, go through this process for each and every URL, then rewrite your content to match the highest paying keywords for each page.

Be sure to take a look at the higher paying keywords before you write your next article and go for First Time Right

Understanding Google PageRank - SEO

If you want to turn your online efforts into money or want to increase revenue, you must know about Google’s PageRank (or PR). It is the method (according to Google named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page) Google uses PageRank to determine how important our site is. And it’s of course a ranking system, ranging from 0 to 10, meaning something like:

PageRank meaning

0 not registered
1 very weak
2 weak
3 average
4 above average
5 good
6 very good
7 very good internationally
8 major site
9 top-competitors
10 the top

The higher the PageRank, the higher your site’s listed in search results. The higher in search results, the more traffic, the more traffic, the more clicks on your ads and this more revenue.
But back to Google: As they say themselves: Google interprets a link as a vote for the page. The higher the number of votes, the more important it is. Next, the link from an important page is considered of higher value, so your page’s importance rises and falls with the importance of the pages that link to you. Still following me?
If your online success is related to your position in Google’s search results, you’d better know the something about the logic behind it.

PageRank algorithm

The idea is, your site‘s (or maybe better: page‘s) importance is measured by the possibility it is clicked.  With a bit of humor you’d say that is 50%: either the user does, or doesn’t. But to Google it is dead-serious. The exact algorithm is believed to be the companies closest guarded secret.
Before Google was founded in 1998, its founders were doing research at Stanford University and they published “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Now other people have read it, so you don’t have to.
Simply put, if a page links to another, its PageRank is partly added to the linked page, depending on the number of pages it links to. BTW, this is called an outbound link. From the perspective of the linked page, it’s an inbound link. Both internal (within the site’s domain) and external links are a part of the calculation.
There is a possibility that a link is clicked, but the user will at some time stop clicking links on the page, but starts on another “random” page. This is known as the damping factor. 

In a small quote from the document:

We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

Checking PageRank

You can access the PageRank easily if you use the Google Toolbar (toolbar link) which you can integrate into your browser. There’s also this site where you can look it up.

If your site isn’t yet where you want it, be aware your PageRank may not be re-calculated every day.  The higher a web page's PageRank, the more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed in the Google index. If you add new content, it may take a while before anyone notices. But adding new content will add to the number of links, increasing visibility.

Putting it to practice – internal structure and links

In order to maximize external exposure, you could for a start make sure the internal links to your site’s important pages are there. You can do this with a menu with links to the homepage and most important sections, displayed on every page. Likely, some pages are visited more often than others. Links to “most popular” pages will help. A third tool is a sitemap, used to presents all content in a structured way. You can upload your sitemap to Google, so they can easily index the pages you have on your site. If a page is not indexed, it can’t be found.

Putting it to practice – external links

External linking is more important for your PageRank, but you have less control over the links. You have no way to enforce another site links to yours. But that doesn’t mean you should do nothing! It will likely take more effort though. You’ll need to be asking for links to your site, preferably links from a higher ranked page. But take care which content is linked. If your site’s homepage is linked, all the internal page’s pagerank is improved, but you may do better if the “lower-level” pages are linked to. As these will likely be more specific on a certain topic, the traffic will be more targeted. This way your site will become more important on specific topics or niches. This way, your site is built up bottom-up instead of top-down. It may take more time before you see your revenue increases, but it will have a broader base.