• Slow Site Performance can hurt Google Page Rankings

    General

    Google has just announced that the speed / performance of a website will not be factored into the search ranking position. While the relevancy score will still be the main ranking factor, attention should definitely be given to ensuring that your websites are performing well.

    You can verify how your site is performing via your Webmaster tools, under Labs, Site performance – with the key threshold being 1.5 seconds as the determining factor in establishing if your site is a fast or slow performing site.

    Google has made a tool available for establishing site performance and providing recommendations as to how to improve this. This tool hooks natively into Firefox (3.5 and above), and you can download this from their code.google.com site at; http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

    Here’s Google’s official video introducing this;

    How can I improve my Website Performance?

    While good coding practices will definitely help improve page load times, some additional steps webmasters can take to speed this up is to remove any references to non-local domain hosted code. As a common example of this, those people using the default Google analytics code which refers to the ga.js file on the google-analytics.com domain may wish to create a local copy of this and reference it there instead.

    Another quick-win is to enable gzip page compression on your site. The simplest way to do this is to add the following into your .htaccess file under your website’s root directory;

    php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

    Alternatively, add the following code to the header and footer of your site to do the same via PHP code;

    // In the head:
ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);
// At the bottom:
ob_end_flush();

    You can then check whether this is working successfully or not by entering the URL into the following site;

    http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

    It may also be worth reviewing WHERE you are hosting your website from. While hosting abroad (in the US for instance) will save you a lot of money in the short term, the page load response times will typically then also include up to a 2.5ms lag. This in turn will impact significantly to your site site performance and now also consequently on your page rank which will ultimately mean less traffic and less sales through your site.

    Performance aspects aside, it is also important to note that your site will also not rank for geographic specific “regional searches” (ie; pages within Australia) if your site is not hosted on a server recognised as having an IP address local to that region. To check where your website is being hosted, you can use free online services such as;

    http://network-tools.com/

    … simply enter in the domain name or IP, select Network Lookup, and hit GO!

    Good luck! :)

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  • Online Competitor Analysis

    Niche Internet Marketing

    First up, keep in mind that competition is your friend – it means there’s demand for a product! With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the KEY components of how to perform an Online Competitor Analysis.

    Check your Google Results; the number of listings returned by Google is an estimate only. Quantity of listings is one thing, however for most search terms you will find that many of the results will contain little to no SEO (low quality). Market Samurai provides an awesome insight into the top listings for terms and their associated onsite and offsite SEO – very handy for performing this sort of analysis. Poor SEO sites can easily be trumped with your own tuned sites to gain high credibility organic traffic!

    Use the google results figures as indicator only for competition in that term (ideally under 1 million results), then use Google Keyword Research tool to gauge market interest.

    Check for competitors who have your keyword phrase in their title by entering into Google “title:keyword“. Anything less than 5,000 results will give you a decent chance of ranking well for such a term. Keep in mind that Phrase matched terms will tend to rank higher than broad matched terms!

    allinanchor:”keyword” – This is a powerful reason for ensuring you use effective internal linking in your site designs! Anchor texts provide Google with insights into search term / key word candidates for sites (both internally and externally). Searching based on anchor text will ignore page titles in favour of returning sites which contain the anchor text you are looking for, when contained in a website link.

    Examine the Page Rank (PR) of top ranking site for your keyword. The google toolbar offers this information, or alternatively Market Samurai does an excellent job with this also. Focus specifically on non-optimised (on-site / offsite SEO) sites to see what elements can be improved upon in your own site. If your search results return a lot of PR 5+ sites with lots of backlinks, these will be very difficult to compete with. If you are considering competing with such sites, you will want to get lots of high credibility backlinks from othersuch high PR sites such as the following;

    Directory PR Alexa
    1 Knol.google.com 7 1
    2 Ezinearticles.com 6 197
    3 GoArticles.com 6 4337
    4 Isnare.com 6 14727
    5 Buzzle.com 5 1918
    6 ArticleDashBoard.com 5 6426
    7 ArticleAlley.com 5 6809
    8 ArticleCity.com 5 17015
    9 ArticleClick.com 5 18728
    10 Article-Buzz.com 5 24310
    11 Amazines.com 4 7727
    12 Free-Articles-Zone.com 4 20113
    13 ArticlesFactory.com 4 23857
    14 ArticleBlotter.com 4 27514
    15 ArticlePool.com 4 29013
    16 1888Articles.com 4 30829
    17 ArticleClub.com 4 45098
    18 Artcle99.com 4 45098
    19 Content-Articles.com 4 154100
    20 ArticleBiz.com 3 19106

    … you can do this either by providing comments on existing articles or submitting your own. You can also google top PR sites to see what ranks well atm. One site I discovered on this was; Top 1000 Google Page Rank Sites.

    Domain age; are the domains old? Older domains tend to rank better in search engines. Tools such as Market Samurai will give you this information fairly easily.

    Search Volumes; is anybody actually searching on that keyword? Some keywords have too much competition to justify the traffic. Use the Google Keyword Research Tool to find out approximate traffic vs competition volumes. A popular methodology on doing this is to use the following “Money Word Matrix” for assessing keyword candidates to use.

    When used in conjunction with a Google Search and Google’s Keyword Research tool, the matrix provides a good indicator for keyword “sweet spots”, where the ratio of competition to searches is more (or less) favourable for focusing your Search Engine Optimisation efforts. There’s an excellent video offered by Niche Profit Classroom which explains all this in more detail.

    The moral of this story being that instead of trying to compete head on for “big ticket” key terms, it is often easier to rank well for more peripheral terms or possibly even micro-niche phrases, which collectively may provide just as much traffic as those big-ticket search phrases. These long-tail key phrases may even be more profitable as they may more closely target your intended market. By example; “Learn to play guitar”, than just “play guitar”.

    Is there money in the market? Or rather, is this a keyword or keyword phrase which has commerciability? If there’s a keyword which seems to be good to be true (that there aren’t any paid advertisers for a particular term), then maybe it’s just not a term people will pay for as the traffic it offers isn’t the type to convert into sales. Once again, Market Samurai offers a very comprehensive insight into this information, allowing you to see how much people are willing to pay for certain terms. Here’s a video on how you can do this if you’re already own this;

    And finally, something else to keep in mind when performing online competitor analysis, is the regional variations when searching in Google. For instance, you will find that results from www.google.com.au vs www.google.com will vary in the results sets returned. Likewise when you specify “search pages within Australia”, the result set will vary again. You can force Google to use a non-geographic specific search by using www.google.com/ncr – which is handy when checking how you rank generically in the online market.

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  • Niche Internet Marketing

    Affiliate Marketing

    Let’s recap on lessons learnt over the past few months endeavours. In what I will only attribute to my “youthful exuberance”, I have come to learn two rather expensive and ultimately fatal (amateur) mistakes of niche internet marketing.

    Referring (in the below example) to the niche of Bonsai tree care – which I discovered using Google Products which provides insights into what products people are searching for right now; I did my competitor analysis to discover 393,000 competitors / pages were returned in Google, most of which not well Search Engine Optimised, with not many paid
    advertisers. Using Google trends, I also learnt which demographics were searching for information on this, from where, and when they were searching for this through the course of a year – overall, things looked fairly promising!

    And so then it began. I jumped immediately onto oDesk to log jobs for the creation of the ultimate ebook on Bonsai tree care, along with 7 unique articles which I could later use for article marketing. Total cost, $120USD.

    I purchased a domain name (approx $15USD) and set out on creating a high quality score website, templating the layout and content structure from established IM gurus’ sites such as Frank Kern’s Email Tricks site – for which I logged another job for this website design ($50USD). With the jobs logged, I set off to research what information my niche would want to know about – this later formed the outline to my ebook.

    So things were progressing very well, or so I had thought. As it turned out, my Internet Marketing friend who had also been pursuing a number of different niches at the same time (he was doing this full time whereas I was only doing this part-time around my full time job), discovered that of the 5 information products developed and launched using this same methodology, 4 of these had failed to commercialize – even though the initial online competitor analysis proved favourable!

    So we had to go back to the drawing board. Where did we go so wrong? Discovering niche markets was fairly easy. Assessing the number and quality of competitors was also fairly straight forward, especially when using such tools as Market Samurai which provides insights into not only competition on differing keyword terms but also adwords advertisers (I highly recommend this application to anyone interested in Internet Marketing)! So conditions appeared favourable, but then why weren’t we rich yet??

    This brings us to current day and a couple of very unfortunate realisations that ultimately led to us kulling 95% of our niche marketing ideas as potential (viable) candidates. We ended up developing a niche marketing checklist, or flowchart rather, including a fairly comprehensive test plan that we’re expecting will drastically reduce our strike out rate.

    Referring specifically to my Bonsai tree care niche specifically, this failed on 2 criteria;

    1. it doesn’t solve any immediate problems,
    2. alternatives were too readily available, and worse yet, FREE!

    … we had failed on two aspects of classical marketing which we had overlooked while we had our Internet Marketing blinkers on. The following isn’t a comprehensive listing, but for those who don’t want to sign up for the full checklist, I’d STRONGLY RECOMMEND asking yourself the following 3 questions before throwing yourself into a prospective niche market to attack;

    1. Is my prospect experiencing pain & urgency or irrational passion?
    2. Is my prospect proactively searching for a solution?
    3. Does my prospect have no or few perceived options?

    So in conclusion, my Online Marketing income is now officially in the red, but valuable lessons have been learnt along the way. It will be interesting to see how these new discoveries will translate into profitable niches for our future endevours.

    Those on my mailing list will receive the complete Niche Marketing Checklist / Flowchart shortly ;)

    As a final BONUS for my readers, I found the following two video posts very informative on the subject of Niche Marketing. The first is a post by Frank Kern on the subject of “Finding something to sell” – Frank Kern is definitely one of the industry’s experts in Niche Internet Marketing. He’s also got a lot of very informative other posts on his site which may also be of interest to you.

    The 2nd bonus video is by Steven Clayton and Mark Ling, who talk in depth about keyword research and competitor analysis. They go into a great deal of details, however the important things to note here is the information on the money word matrix – the video’s quite long, so it may take a little while to load. Enjoy!

    And so the quest continues! All the best till next time! :D







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