David <seodave@search-engine-optimization-services.co.uk> wrote:

> On 29 Aug 2006 18:36:10 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:


> Drop me an email via david at seo-gold.com and I'll tell you what I'd
> do with your site to increase traffic significantly.

I'll do later, thanks!

>>Yeah, I am aiming for 20K, but I also try to be modest. To be honest,
>>I was expecting to have 15K around this time, but somehow things have
>>slowed down with Google, or in ASCII art:
>
> Your site is what I consider a quick ranker. Because of it's age,
> quality of links, PR etc... anything you put on your site will rank
> relatively quickly and much higher than most sites. It's like when a
> popular news site like CNN adds an article sometimes it ranks really
> high for semi competitive SERPs.

Yup, I had already that feeling when I talked about sweet dreams several
months ago. It's sometimes too easy, I often can predict where I am going
to end up :-) I mean, perl support was a piece of cake to get. No idea if
it's actually going to bring me traffic, but it took me 5 minutes to write
that page :-)

> So if I put content on the home page of say seo-gold.com (which isn't
> a quick ranker) and you put the same content on your home page, yours
> would almost certainly beat mine.
>
> Same is true for internal pages, I have a few sites like this and they
> are brilliant for making high traffic, though I'm pretty sure yours
> would beat my sites content vs content.

:-D Sounds good.

>> - add a description to each page (just a short summary)
>
> It might with click thrus, but not SERPs increases.
>
>> - add keywords to each page (just 10 or so, kind of summary of the
>> summary)
>
> For Google a waste of time.
>
> I'm assuming you are talking meta tags here, not a spammy list of
> keywords on every page :-)

Yup meta. Both are to see if it has any effect for smaller SEs. But
moreover to me to manage my content. I have plans for a decicated
very simple editor to maintain my content (I already moved to an XML
editor since TextPad was not that good with XML) and keywords +
description are going to me to find back my own pages :-)

>>Do you recommend adsense? I am thinking about:
>
> Unless you have an alternative source of ad revenue or service/product
> you can sell to your visitors (do you sell scorpions etc... :-)). The
> great thing about AdSense is it can convert almost any traffic.

Not selling scorpions. And even if it was legal to sell them, I wouldn't
do it for several reasons :-) But yeah, with enough scorpion and tarantula
related traffic I might be able to contact pet shops directly and make an
arrangement with them. Since I can offer very targetted traffic it might
make more money compared to adsense. OTOH, it's a lot of extra work and
only works good if I let them pay in advance a fixed price for 6 months or
so :-)

>>[ short introduction of article (what is it, etc ]
>>
>>[ Ads by Goooooooooooooooooggggggle ]
>
> The best sort of layout I've found is like this-
>
> http://www.morearnings.com/2006/08/1...nections-with-
> google-adsense/
>
> The best performer by far is the square ad at the top of the content.
>
> I started an article about placement etc... here
> http://www.morearnings.com/2006/05/08/adsense-revenue/ must finish it.

Will read it. I have seen several articles on positioning, and blending it
into the content seems to work best.

OTOH, I have quite a large number of people who visit my site regularly
via bookmarks, and I don't want to scare those away with too much adsense
:-)

> You can see the heat map
> http://www.morearnings.com/wp-conten...sense-heat-map.
> gif that first square ad in the main content is in the orange/red zone
> so will get a lot of clicks.

Yup, as will a short intro in the orange part, and under it a wide adsense
rectangle (which will cover the red part). The bottom ad I have in mind
will be in the bottom orange part.

> With the traffic you have you could add just one ad unit like that and
> see significant revenue. Other ad units won't perform as well, but if
> you are looking for max revenue another ad unit at the bottom of the
> content is a good idea, I like to use a large rectangle like on the
> home page of http://www.morearnings.com/ but it doesn't fit in with
> the article pages of those sites because of the comments box, so I've
> added a banner type ad unit (low click thru, but it all counts).

I would make it horizontal on my page.

> Basically you add an ad at the bottom for visitors who finish the
> article and are probably going to leave your site. The one at the top
> is for when a visitor comes to your site, but doesn't find what they
> hoped for.

Yup, hence I want to put a short summary on top, 3-5 sentences, enough to
make them decide if they want to continue reading, or leave.

> If it works a long 160 by 600 unit on the menu will be clicked, but
> keep it in the orange/yellow zone (see heat map) as the white is
> almost pointless.
>
> BTW I use the search ads that open a Google search window like you see
> at the top of http://www.morearnings.com/ (that's a 468 by 15 unit),
> but they tend to not perform very well in my experience.

Ah, ok the one that looks like navigation. Yeah, I have seen those, and I
can imagine that they do very well.

> I've played around with the colours of ads and I find the contrasting
> ads to the design of the site like here
> http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/...century/franci
> s-bacon/ (refresh the page, there are four versions of the ad colours)
> result in higher click thru compared to blended ads (morearnings has
> blended), but they do come at the cost of the design. for a site like
> yours I'd use blended ads (make them look part of the site) as the
> user experience is important (I'm assuming you have a lot of repeat
> visitors and you like it that way).

Yes :-) And yeah, I agree with you, I think blended works the best for my
site, and not overdoing it.

> http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ would work well with a WordPress blog and
> would add relevant content to pages like
> http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/16/ rather than just the links.

Yes, I know what you mean, but this can be blamed on me. Normally I add a
small handwritten summary to pages like these (and pick better titles),
e.g.:

http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/02/

When I started my blog the idea was to have a short day summary, and links
to each "item" of the day. But some days have just one item, so I got
lazy, and put that item on the day itself. I probably should fix that one
day :-)


Another reason for the description tag is that I might going to use them
on month overview pages like: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/

I also have been thinking of writing each month a short summary about how
the month was :-) BTW: I do get hits for things like "All days of June".
Some people do need a calendar, or knuckles.

> There's a great plugin http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/PostTeaser that
> takes a snippet of your posts and adds them to the archive pages like
> you see here http://www.morearnings.com/category/adsense/ I have it
> set to around 125 characters from each post.

Yes, I want to do something like that one day with the index page of my
site (making it more blog like). I do something like that with my comment
pages though, and it's funny that some of them do get hits because of the
first paragraph + comments on that page.

> Normally Wordpress adds
> the whole article to the archived pages which can be a bit over kill
> content wise!

Yes :-) And thanks for that tip, I have been playing a little with
wordpress, and it certainly has a lot of potential.

Thanks,

--
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