If not search engine friendly and optimized, your pages will never rank in Google’s Top 10 to 30 search results for anything other than obscure search terms that get very little traffic.

The figure of 25,000,000,000 web pages on Google.com came from a search on Google for all web pages that contain the vowels a,e,i,o,u since any page should contain at least one vowel.

Of course 25 billion pages is not the total number of pages on Google, since it does not include all those pages in more than 25 other major country specific Google databases. Nor does it include pages in languages that do not use our character set i.e. Chinese, Arabic or Japanese.

So, the question we wanted answered is - just how good do the majority of business or ecommerce sites have to be to get enough traffic from Google in order to survive ?

From our estimates a business or ecommerce site
has to be in the top 10% of web sites to survive.

While Alexa rankings are notoriously inaccurate, from our experience of sites in Google.com in many different categories, web sites with an Alexa ranking as low as 20 million can still get enough traffic to operate successfully in a niche market.

But if we stay with sites that need main stream traffic, our estimates suggest a site needs to have an Alexa ranking above 10 million. Keep in mind, sites in some business categories would need an Alexa ranking above 1 million to survive and others have to be in the top 100,000 to sustain their business.

Therefore the majority of business or ecommerce web sites would need to be in the top 10 million of web sites to get enough visitor traffic to sustain their business.

Using our estimate of 100 million web sites on Google.com that means the majority of business and ecommerce web sites must be in the top 10% of sites just to get enough visitor traffic to stand any chance of surviving.

While the figures used are taken from our own experiences and estimates they provide a rough guide to how good an ecommerce or business website must be to Google.

Tony Simpson
Making web site optimization work for you

In a previous article, eight essential aspects of website design optimisation for search engine visitors were examined. Although we are examining website design optimisation as separate parts one part for search engines the other part for people, during the optimization process they must both be accounted for at the same time.

This is because website design optimisation for search engines, often opposes the website design optimisation considerations for people visitors. This conflict often requires us to strike a balance between the two.

In this article we take website design optimisation one stage further and look at how web page optimization can affect a person's behaviour.

But first, have you carried out any web site optimization for people ?

Also:
Do you know which web page optimization measures produced results ?

I suspect like the majority of web site owners your answer would probably be NO for one or both of these questions. Assuming you knew what to look for it would still be difficult to remain objective about your own web site, particularly if you were involved in the design.

What is of significant benefit is the trained eye of an independent person to uncover or confirm areas of the design that would benefit from improvements.

If you would like an assessment carried out on your website we provide a number of Free web page optimization evaluations, just complete one of the forms on our site.

Determining what and how effective web page optimisation is, can only really be done through visitor tracking and measuring definable visitor actions, combined with split-testing, or segmentation and targeting.

When carrying out an evaluation we suggest the emphasis be on eight factors that influence people the most when visiting a web site.

The key behavioural influencers of people are:

1. Visual Look
Complementary colors should be chosen for the site so as to match the theme of the site with text of a color and size that makes it easy to read for people of all ages. Backgrounds or images should not be distracting and should compliment the look and theme of the web page providing additional useful information and enhancing the visitor’s perception and understanding of the site. Do not use images unless they contribute to your message.


2. Impression
The page should impart a clear impression of what you want the visitor to have, within 3 seconds of them first viewing the page. Your web page must give people a quick clear summary of what you are offering. If people can’t work this out quickly most will generally become frustrated and move to another page, or another site.


3. Easy Flow
Avoid the use of multi-column page layouts. Studies show that multi-column layouts distract visitors and cause them to deviate from what should be an easy flowing path down the page. Many studies have also shown that in general, key information or impressions you want to impart to the visitor should be across the top of the page below the header, in the top left corner and page center. Using these guidelines a layout can be designed with minimal distractions and an easy to follow flowing path to the objective of the page.


4. Page Navigation
Navigation of the page should be easy to use, links in the page should look like links – blue underlined and it should be clear what they are leading to. Make use of image alt tags and link tags as an aid to the visitors understanding of where links are going. These are requirements for good site accessibility and compliance with W3C web design standards.


5. Clarity and Value of Proposition
Visitors must be able to clearly determine what your web site is offering. If the visitor can not clearly determine what is on offer they will go elsewhere. Any proposition or offer must also have "value" in the mind of the visitor. The page must answer questions in the mind of the visitor such as, how does this benefit them, in what way is the offer of value to them and what makes your offer so special that they should buy from you.


6. The Proposition Experience
If a site provides downloadable information, purchasable products or services, or sign-ups to obtain information, products or services, then the process by which these are obtained needs to be free of distractions, obstacles and barriers and as short as possible. The anxiety and friction caused by a site’s order and fulfilment process is a significant factor in lost sales and site abandonment.

Typical deficiencies are:

• Asking for too many unnecessary personal details
• Requesting information too early in the process
• Having too many steps or pages to the fulfilment process
• Unnecessary barriers – register / create account before ordering
• Lack of visitor reassurance at key stages in the process
• Assurance measures not within the customer’s eye path
• Insufficient or lack of trust boosters during the process
• Insufficient or lack of confidence boosting measures
• Failing to reaffirm the value of the proposition

If you have a fulfilment or order process with more than 3 steps you should look closely to see what can be done to shorten the process.


7. Site Navigation
This often creates a conflict for website design optimisation as the site navigation preferred for people is frequently not the best for the search engines, since the two requirements are usually not the same.

For common links to pages throughout the site we usually advise a top or side of page navigation menu that should have a consistent location and appearance throughout the site. The only exception to this is normally the home page. Large sites can benefit from a search box and all except sites with less than 10 pages, should have a site map as a further aid to visitor navigation.


8. Download Speed
The advent of high-speed Internet has caused many web site designers to abandon mainly text web page designs and replace them with web designs high in graphics, flash movies and videos. Modern web pages have become so bloated that even for visitors with a broadband connection they are slow to access with a normal browser.

The consequence of this is that for 30-40% of Internet users without high-speed broadband such web sites are completely inaccessible or are so slow they give up.

What makes the problem far worse is that many image laden web pages are not effectively optimized. By that we mean they do not use graphic images, flash and movies that have been optimized for the smallest file size while maintaining quality.

In our experience across 100’s of site, savings of 50% or more in the download size of images are common and achievable through better optimization.

Our web design and website design optimisation enables site owners to improve functionality and increase profitability of their web sites. We also specialize in web design and research and publish free reports on web page optimization.

We also provide FREE if No-Result services, guaranteed to increase site performance and/or revenue. Visit our site to view our full range of web site optimization services or to obtain a Free evaluation or consultation on your web site.

But have you done any web site optimization for either of them ?

For a web site to be successful it needs to effectively cater to both search engines and people and that’s not easy, as both are often looking for entirely different things.

The task of designing or redesigning a web site for search engines is referred to as SEO or search engine optimization and designing a web site for people is usually just referred to as web site design. Modifying or redesigning a web site to cater to both is generally known as web site optimization.

The task of web site optimization usually includes webpage optimisation although it is possible to do web site optimisation without much or any web page optimization.

The main factors that interest a search engine are:-

Keyword usage & placement
Use no more than two main keyword phrases on a web page placed so as to emphasize the relative importance of those phrases to the search engine. It is very difficult to effectively optimize a web page for more than two key phrases. Headlines and sub-headlines that make use of h tags and bold type are still important.

Page title and description
These should be unique and contain at least one main keyword phrase. Search engines generally use these for a listing in the search results. Google uses only the first 155 characters in the description and the first 65 characters in the title. Pages with duplicate titles on the same web site are often not indexed, especially with Google. This can be a problem for shopping catalogue sites whose pages may be generated with the same titles.

Meta tags & compatibility
The only meta tag of real importance to the search engines, in particular Google, is the title tag which to be compatible with Google should be less than 65 characters. Although Google does read and analyze titles containing more than 1,100 characters, it does not display them. Google and MSN have NO specific interest in keyword meta tags, so filling them full of keywords serves no purpose. Yahoo for the time being does still take account of keyword meta tags.

Site & page coding
Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can NOT read text in images and only Google has a limited capability to read text content in Flash movies. The page coding should be kept to a minimum and placed if possible below the main body text content. This makes the page coding more search engine friendly. Page compression that involves removing white space in the page code will also speed up access time for the search engine.

Internal linking structure & tags
The manner in which pages are linked and what pages are linked together is very important to a search engine. This generally tells a search engine how important different pages are on the site. Of prime importance is using plain text links instead of image links. This provides additional information to a search engine to enable it to determine what the topic of the page being linked to is about. Image alt tags and link title tags should also be used to convey more of the information you want to convey to the search engine.

External linking
The quality and quantity of incoming links has increased in importance, particularly with Google. Google places a high value on quality links from well established sites, particularly if those sites have human editors. Generally quality is also more important than quantity. The link text is also of high importance in ranking the page.

Page & site theme
The pages on a site have a theme determined by the page content and the links to the page. The themes of individual pages and the way they are linked together will determine the theme of the site as a whole. A consistent theme throughout a site enables a search engine to gain a clearer picture of what the site is about leading to better and more consistent rankings.

Age of domain
How long a site has existed and is currently registered for is important to Google, particularly for highly competitive search terms. Sites registered for only 1 year are generally not taken as seriously for rankings, being regarded by search engines as not likely to be around for long. Domain age is however less important to MSN or Yahoo.

Important things to avoid
The major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live DO NOT like cloaking, mini-nets of sites from the same owner excessively linked together, keyword stuffing, duplicate site content, text hidden on a web page or links from link farms.

Google especially does not like paid for links and encourages people to report sites that use them. It is therefore important to avoid all of these, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Search engines have penalties for infringements of their guidelines which can range from warnings, lowering of rankings, page de-indexing or in severe cases removing the entire site from the search index.

Of course there are more factors of interest to the major search engines than the ones discussed here. But, these represent the key influencers that have been established through my own years of experience and that of others in the worldwide SEO community.

In the continuing article to this one are the factors that are of most influence to people visiting a web site. These influencers include visual appearance, visitor impact, clarity and value of offer, speed and ease, page and site navigation, the offer experience and page access time. We also outline the most common failings of the offer fulfilment process.

For ‘people’ visitors to a web site the key factors of importance have a lot more to do with human psychology and perception. Hence website optimization for ‘people’ imposes a very different set of requirements on the design or redesign of a web site than those needed for a search engine.


For a Free evaluation of what search engines make of your web site
visit our web site optimization evaluation page.

We have many years of experience in webpage optimization and search engine optimization. We offer an extensive range of web site optimization services to site owners seeking to improve search engine rankings, or increases sales and profitability using existing levels of visitor traffic.


Visit our web site optimization services page for more details and Free evaluations of our services.

Tony Simpson
Making web site optimization work for you

Dr Williams software claims
Dr Williams content creator software is designed to enable a user to improve the themed content of a web page using Latent Symantec Indexing or LSI.

LSI or themeing, is a process used by Google and other search engines to look not just for main keyphrases in a page, but also other words it would expect to find associated with those words and phrases.

He claims by using his article content creator software, that he has shown top 10 ranking pages on Google rank well because they contain themed web page content, when compared to similar pages ranked outside the top 800.

He has produced two pdf case studies and a video that support his claim, with the objective to persuade the viewer to buy his article content creator course and / or his article content software.

"All I am showing is that there is a correlation between top pages, and well-themed content (which there is), and I am using my tool to do that."

When asked if he would like to open our discussion to the wider SEO community, to see if they would agree with his views, Dr Williams declined, but replied:

"I believe, with all other things being equal, a page of content that is well themed, will outperform one that isn't well-themed.”

In order to make things equal Dr Williams chose pages with a similar low page rank from the top 10 on Google to compare them with similarly low page rank pages outside the top 800. This was in an effort to compare like with like in so far as PR was concerned.

He also chose pages of low PR generally below 3 to avoid the influence of rank boosting effects of incoming page links which might give higher PR pages a boost in the rankings.

Dr Andy on pages that don't agree with his results
When presented with pages that didn’t fit with his own published results he replied:

"Keyword stuffing at its best. If this page is ever inspected by Google, I am sure it would be penalised."

In fact the page was last modified Aug 17, 2007 and Google had not seen fit to penalize its No.6 ranking even after almost 12 months.

For another page the quality theme score indicated by his content creator software dropped from 63.3% to 42.4% just on changing one word !

Dr Williams replied:

“The article has all the symptoms of keyword stuffing, especially since the content is so long.”

The article was actually less than 800 words, hardly long by any standards. It also had a keyword density less than 3% so not keyword stuffed either.

In his own video case study one page he chose had 6,304 words, but he didn’t consider that too long !

When presented with another page that did not fit his theory Dr Williams wrote:

"Comparing this page to a page of basically written content is just not right."

This page had over 200 words of content, excluding menu and link texts and had a Google ranking of 10 with a PR of 3, so it should have fitted his theory.

The Video
Dr Williams in his video “Does Google Really Rank Well-Themed Content Higher ?” uses his Content Creator software and the keyphrase "liver detox" to show how pages in the top 10 rankings of Google ranked better because of themeing - when compared to similar pages outside the top 800.

When I repeated his video example I also looked at pages in the top 10, but unlike Dr Williams I also looked at pages outside the top 30, 50, 100 and 200. I also did a statistical correlation analysis on the results.

There was NO strong or consistent correlation, between pages ranking on Google and themed content results produced by his software.

In fact there was a closer correlation between a page’s ranked position on Google and its Alexa ranking.

One page that ranked 106 was better themed according to Dr Williams content creator software than a page ranked on Google at position 8. Clearly this did not match his theory and they both had a PR 1.

His claims strongly imply that his software can help you achieve a better ranking with Google for your pages – Otherwise why else would you purchase it ?

Dr Williams chose to maintain his claim
So I chose to publish my findings

Tony Simpson
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

My version of Dr Williams Disclaimer:
This web page is not meant to provide definitive proof, that Dr Andy Williams is deliberately making false and misleading claims with his software it merely highlights some of the compelling research I have done on this topic.

Several months ago, I bought a wireless optical mouse in the US that is branded under the name Wenger. Wenger also happen to be the makers of the genuine Swiss Army knife known throughout the world for its good design, quality, precision and fine craftsmanship.

I mention design, quality and precision in particular, as these have some bearing on what happened after I started using this wireless mouse named "The Daytona."

Even the name “Daytona” suggests speed and endurance after the famous NASCAR Daytona 500 car race.

But this wireless computer mouse did not live up to it’s Daytona name for endurance, since after only 3 weeks when it was used very little, it required 2 new batteries.

OK, I thought, perhaps the batteries that came with the product were not at there best, so I popped in two more batteries, but this time wrote the date on them to be sure I was not imagining things.

Sure enough after about another 3 weeks the same problem, the mouse starts flashing a little red optical light telling me the batteries are low.

Ah ha I think to myself this wireless mouse must be faulty because no one would produce a computer mouse that eats batteries at the rate of almost one a week.

It was not as if the mouse was being asked to do much work, just for maybe two hours a day and the rest of the time it was allowed to sleep. By sleep I mean it switched itself off after not being in use for maybe 5 minutes or less.

Since I bought the wireless computer mouse during a trip to the US, taking it back to the shop for a replacement was out of the question.

Instead I contacted the company licensed to distribute the mouse under the Wenger name – AvenuesUSA.com.

The first gem of wisdom I was offered from their support desk was and I quote

“To preserve battery power, place the receiver into the cavity on the bottom of the mouse when it is not in use.”

So users of this wireless usb mouse are expected to fumble around at the back of their PC to unplug the usb receiver every time the mouse is not being used – does that sound like a user friendly design to you.

After further moronic replies from their technical support desk and a week of emails, they finally agreed to send me a replacement mouse. In fact they sent me two, a new Daytona wireless optical mouse and “The Diablo” an enhanced precision mouse.

Unfortunately the replacement Daytona mouse had no more endurance than the last one and the Diablo was far from being precise. In fact it was the worst example of a precision computer mouse I have ever seen. The mouse pointer jumped and jerked all over the screen like a thing possessed.

Not to be deterred, I decided to overcomes the mouse’s (or should I say mice) appetite for batteries my giving my mouse a tail.

The tail connects it to its very own power supply, so no longer would I have to change batteries every 3 weeks.

The only reason I bought this mouse was for my wife’s PC. She was using an old style roller ball mouse on a mouse mat that constantly needed degreasing.

The optical mouse solves this problem since it does not have a roller ball and does not need to have contact with a mouse mat.

I have to report that during the extensive and lengthy surgery performed on the mouse to connect a tail, one of them died and I was unable to revive it.

However the surviving mouse is doing well, as you can see in this post-op picture.

Perhaps I should no longer call it wireless optical usb mouse since it has a wire (tail).

Maybe I could call it a ‘Withwire Optical USB Mouse’ or a ‘Wiremore Computer Mouse,’ or perhaps a ‘Batteryless Optical Mouse.’

One thing I know for sure, I would strongly suggest you don’t buy one.

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

It may come as a shock to some people, but building a successful business online has very little to do with creating or putting up the actual web site, in fact in some cases you don’t even need a website.

It Doesn't Sell Well
There are very few people online who will actually tell you what’s really involved and how much work and resources it actually takes, because that’s not what most newcomers to the web want to hear – it does not sell well !

By the time a newcomer is set on the idea of putting up a business web site he or she has already read a ton of stuff on how easy it all is and all you need is to buy this ebook or that piece of software or find the holy grail – the Secret to Online Success.

What is more, so many people now believe they can do all this for free.

Let’s face it, if most newcomers to the web knew the real truth, most of them could save themselves a lot of time and money. That is by not downloading free stuff or buying products on the web that feed their dream to make riches and sit on the beach all day. Apart that is from the 1 or 2 hours they need to work to keep the money rolling in from their business web site or sites that run on auto-pilot.

In fact if you read the true life stories behind the big names on the web, in virtually every case you will find they spent years struggling to make ends meet and in many case they went 10’s and in some cases 100’s of thousands of dollars into debt to follow their dream.

Instant success did not happen for them and more than likely will not happen for you.

If you choose not to believe me, I won’t lose any sleep over it, but you may one day when you look back in a few years and say, gee I wish I’d paid more attention to some guy I read something about on a blog once, but I can’t remember where.

I also mention his link management script because it features in the story I am about to share with you regarding one of Duncan’s current projects. You see, Duncan is one of the very few people, in fact only the second one I know in the past five years, to offer to share how he goes about building a web business in real time.

The first person I know who tried this over the shoulder approach was David Vallieres, but he was charging a monthly fee and closed the project down after only a few months.

Now I don’t mean how Duncan creates or puts up a business web site, that’s easy, but how he markets and promotes it on the web, how he gets the site top rankings in the search engines, how he builds links, creates the product to sell, builds a mailing list, tests and tracks his marketing efforts to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you want to follow along and see what Duncan does on this project and how he does it then you should visit the blog he has set up for it, a link to which you will find at the end of this blog.

For my part I am following the reports on his progress with keen interest and I shall be offering my insight into what he is doing and how he is doing it in future posts on this blog.

What is clear to me so far is that Duncan is not trying to hide anything. For a time I thought he was not telling the entire story like so many other gurus on the web. It’s often not what they tell you, but what they don’t tell you that really matters.

You see I knew about Duncan’s secret weapon for getting thousands of links to any site he chooses so I suspected he was using it on this project to boost his site’s rankings, something most people don’t have the resources to do.

In fact I didn’t just suspect he was using his LMA script, I knew he was, but more of that in a later blog. The point is that eventually Duncan did say that’s what he was doing in one of his later project reports – so full marks to Duncan for telling the whole story.

So if you want to gain some first hand experience on how to build a business web site as it happens, but more importantly promote it then I recommend you follow this blog and the one Duncan has created for this project at: http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com/worm-farming/

This niche project began in late February 2007 so you have some catching up to do by reading Duncan's blog entries if you want to follow along.

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

The fact that your subscribers may not get your email because the SPAM filters ate it pails into being totally insignificant when you yourself can not access your web site through your browser, or by ftp or even recover email for days or even weeks at a time.

Don’t think it can’t happen to you, it has happened to me several times. The first time I experienced the problem it occurred at random lasting for periods up to a week and eventually caused me to move to another web host.

More recently I was unable to access one of my web sites for 12 hours, all because of the measures a web host was forced to take to combat a Distributed Denial of Service attack a.k.a. DDOS attack.

To prevent the Internet from becoming a hostage to Trojan Viruses installed on 100’s of thousands of Home PC’s around the world then clearly we all have a responsibility to ourselves and each other to stop it happening.

The solution is simple, install some good anti-virus software on your PC that includes a firewall and keep it regularly updated. Keeping the anti-virus software updated is crucial if you are to remain protected from the 100’s of new viruses and self replicating mutations that come onto the Internet every day.

Downloading free anti-virus software is a start, but it needs to be kept up to date every day. I know of only one way to keep anti-virus up to date and that’s to pay for a subscription that provides automatic daily updates.

Not all anti-virus software is up to the task. I have tried quite a few of them over the years, including the well known ones like McAfee and Norton – Symantec, Trend Micro and many others less known.

The one that I have used now for 2 years and in my opinion has no equal is from pandasoftware.com.

But what ever anti-virus software you decide upon, make the decision to install it today and keep the Internet free from those who would want to control it.

If you come back to this site at a later date and can't load the pages then the site could well be under attack from a Trojan Virus controller who didn't like what I wrote or who wants to prove a point - so be warned.

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

The Internet a.k.a. the World Wide Web is rapidly becoming the Wild Wild West whose access is controlled by a plague of viruses residing on the PC’s of Home Users.

Whilst most Home PC users have heard of computer viruses, the majority think that if their PC becomes infected by one, they will know about it, because the virus will start to play havoc with their computer.

Whilst that is certainly true of many viruses, an ever growing breed of viruses, more commonly known as Trojan viruses can reside quite happily on a PC without the user ever being aware it has installed and replicated itself.

An innocent question might arise, well if this sort of Trojan virus does not affect a Home PC users enjoyment of his/her PC should they care.

Let’s assume the Home PC user is not aware that the Trojan virus sits quietly mailing spam email to those people in his/her email address book. Well we have all come to live with receiving SPAM - it’s an irritation to many people and a major headache for some.

But what if the Home PC user has the sort of Trojan virus installed on their PC that sits quietly receiving commands whilst the user is connected to the Internet that instruct a virus to launch attacks on other users computers.

If you are reading this and think this is fiction, unfortunately it’s not and it’s an ever increasing problem on the Internet. The computers so frequently the subject of attack by Trojan viruses are those that host the very fabric of the Internet itself.

I am talking about the computers used by web hosts that provide the home for all the web sites we visit. These web hosts often have to devote significant resources to combat what they call DDOS attacks or Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

So what exactly is a DDOS attack and should the average Home PC user care about them anyway ?

After all it’s not the Home PC use’s machine that’s under attack by the virus.

Tony Simpson
Web Page Add Ons
Making Your Website Work for You

The product is being sold in various forms, with and without resale rights formats and re-branding rights. So, you might find it being marketed by different people under different names at anything from $7 to, well you name it.

I should however warn you, if you are expecting a script like an Adsense Tracker that runs on your web site you will be sadly disappointed. The "software," if you can describe it as that, is quite simple.

The software installs on your PC and you provide it with two sets of Google Adsense Code for the Ad formats you want to test. Let’s say you want to test one Ad with black text and another Ad with grey text.

You copy and paste the two different Adsense Code blocks into the "software" and it adds a simple javascript function to the page code. Once added to your web page the javascript rotates one block of Adsense code for the other each time the page is loaded.

I will save you buying Easy Adsense Splitter, here is the javascript code it adds to your normal Google Adsense code, it’s a simple random rotation function.

Here’s the javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">
var random_number = Math.random();
if (random_number < .5){
//your first ad unit code goes here
} else {
//your second ad unit code goes here
}</script>

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>

To track the results of this you also need to setup different "channels" within your Google Adsense control panel for each Ad.

Also with this product is a pdf document called "Three Little Tricks" that gives tips on boosting your Adsense income by using different Ad placement techniques.

To anyone well versed in Google Ad placement on web pages there are no new revelations – so I suggest you save your money.

So is Easy Ad Splitter - "software ?" – well you judge for yourself.

Tony Simpson
website design optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

The ebook niche member’s site is run by Robert Blackstone & Adam Maywald and requires a monthly membership fee.

During my membership I downloaded and evaluated 12 ebook packages, covering a wide range of topics from Boat Safety, to Modelling, Home Schooling, Anxiety, Dog Training and UK Debt.

Each package has one ebook in pdf and word format, 20 PLR articles, an email course with a sales letter and graphics, provided in case you want to try and sell the ebook.

In the ebook niche package you also get a short list of 3 or 4 niche product affiliates and the results of the keyword research that I assume went into choosing the ebook subject in the first place.
 

So, what can you do with this ebook niche package ?

Well, you could try and sell the ebook, or give it away, or use the content for your own ebook or web pages.

Ebook niches make the claim that these are quality ebooks. Well, they are better than some I have read, but are they of such quality that you could, or would want to sell them ?

Personally I would not try to sell them. Many of them are not particularly well written and come from the ghost writer factory. The only possible use for the material that I would recommend is content for your own web pages.

However, whilst you are free to use the ebook and articles as you please, I would caution you against using the material as provided.
 

Secondly, the content is not particularly good and I generally found I could get no more than 1 or 2 pages of quality web content from the ebook and articles.

Out of 20 articles I could usually only piece together one article that I would consider good enough to publish.

So, don't expect not to do any work.
 

eBook Niche Keyword Research
On the subject of work I would also suggest you don't rely upon the keyword research data that is provided with each ebook niche package. Firstly, I would seriously challenge whether many of these topics are actually in a niche at all.

As I have found from other product evaluations I have done on niche offerings - like Niche Monthly, Niche a Day and Article Underground, the keyword research that is the basis for these products is in many cases, extremely flawed.

It is clear to me from the keyword research provided with all these types of products that it can not be relied upon. For this reason I always do my own keyword research.

What I usually find is that the keyword phrases that have been chosen are either not in a niche, or if they are, not in one that you could get a high ranking for with a search engine any time soon.

The cost of membership to ebook niches was $47 per month, but quickly rose to $97 a month. Is it worth $47 or $97 per month, well not to me.

Tony
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

I recently returned from a 3 week absence to find I had received almost 4,000 emails from the 50 or more email accounts that I have. Of those emails 70% were SPAM which from what I have read seems fairly typical.

There would probably be more if not for the spam filter service I use on each web hosting account. This 2nd line of defense does its best to act as an email spam blocker before the mail reaches me.

My 3rd line of defense, which is the most effective, is Mailwasher an email spam blocker software that I run that whilst it doesn't stop spam email, at least stops me from having to download it before I find out that it's a SPAM email.

My 4th line of defense is my email client (browser) on which I have set up some basic filters.

In case you're wondering what my 1st line of defense is to stop spam email, it's trying not to let my email addresses be captured by spam bots and email brokers. I know in the latter case I need to do better.

Of course it would be nice to be able to stop spam email before it ever gets to my mail box. It would also help if the whole system of email we currently all endure were redesigned. The email system we have today was created at a time when SPAM emails were largely unheard of.

As such the email system we all use is easily abused. For example many web hosts operate capture all email accounts. This means it doesn't matter what someone uses to send you an email.

Say they use wyscz@yourdomain.com, the web hosts email server at yourdomain.com will deliver it to you even though you have no such email address as wyscz. What the web host has done is shift the problem from them to you.

Have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year

Tony
website design optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

One of the world’s largest Internet payment processors has over 100 million accounts in 103 countries recently caused a charity website’s payment pages to appear to its English customers in the German language.

It was not until someone from Ethiopia wanted to make a donation did the problem come to light. The person wanting to make the donation could not because they couldn’t understand the German payment page being presented to them.

The switch to presenting the sites payment pages in German had probably been like that for about 3 weeks. That was as far as I could tell from another website affected by the same problem.

The payment processors first response to the problem was to suggest that the fault was with the charity website using the wrong code on the sites webpage’s.

This ignored the fact that the pages reverted to being shown in German rather than English when no changes had been made to the sites payment pages. The pages were in English when they were first created.

The next response to the issue was to suggest that the problem was caused by the fact that the charity sites account is based in Switzerland and therefore any payment pages created will be shown in German.

If that were true, why did they choose German, since Switzerland has three main national languages, German, French and Italian and each is the main language in different parts of Switzerland. Millions of people in Switzerland don’t understand German because their language is either French or Italian.

According to the payment processors logic let’s suppose you were running a business in China and wanted to accept payments from English speaking countries. Because your account is based in China your customer’s initial payment page rather than being presented to them in English would be presented to them by default in Chinese.

The suggested solutions to the problem were many and varied, but the end result was that the charity site had no other choice but to replace all the payment code on every affected webpage.

The problem affected not just the charity website but other websites as well.

When the payment processor was asked if they would like to donate something to one of two children’s charities by way of compensation or to show good faith for the problems they caused their response was that they do not offer compensation for their errors.

Article Announcer Review - Testing Product Claims and Google's Duplicate Internet Content Filter in Action

Despite this many webmasters still believe it’s an effective way to add pages to their web sites by using other people’s article content. With the web growing at an ever increasing rate it seems clear that search engines needed to find ways to cut out duplicate content.

If you think about it, why would search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN want to keep spending money adding computer resources to index and store all this duplicate content.

If a search engine has a page indexed for an article, why would they want to index and store 400 more pages exactly like it ?

Of course, in reality they don’t and it’s one reason why Google in particular is so keen to remove as much duplicate content as they can, or at least get it down to a more manageable amount.

To try and side step the search engine’s duplicate content filters web content publishers have resorted to various methods to modify articles to make them slightly different from the 400 others using the same article.

It was being suggested one should aim to have at least 20% original or changed content in an article to avoid the duplicate content filters. The problem with all this is that it’s only a matter of time before the search engines learn how to detect even this sort of content.

If the changes following Google’s Big Daddy update are anything to go by it would seem Google has taken another step forward in detecting and removing this sort of content. Many webmasters have reported entire sites being dropped from Google’s index and Adsense revenue completely drying up as a result.

My own personal experience of some of these PLR articles is that they are of very poor quality, written by ghost writers, who it’s clear, frequently know very little about the subject they are writing about.

I don’t blame the ghost writers, after all, when they are being paid just a few dollars per article, what can you expect.

Webmasters just want pages to put on their websites that firstly get indexed and secondly ranked by the search engines. They then hope to get some traffic and make money from Adsense or other advertising.

One of the more enlightened sources of web publishing content using articles that I have been looking at over the past few months is Article Underground.

I should make it clear I don't use Article Underground and this blog entry is not in any way promoting it.

Mike Liebner who runs Article Underground has produced some excellent videos that walk you through the steps you need to take when publishing articles, not just his, but any article.

Of course, the videos are a promotional platform for Article Underground but that’s to be expected. In the video’s you see how he chooses article subjects to have his ghost writers create articles about using keyword research.

I have stressed the importance of Keyword Research many times on my site but it’s still a mystery to many newbie webmasters who simply just don’t understand it, or worse still think they do.

As someone who has been perfecting keyword research and discovery for many years I can say that Mike Liebner has a good system. I don’t fully agree with some of his assumptions and it’s clear he doesn’t fully understand some of the issues himself, but none the less it’s a good process.

Whilst he admits the results are modest ones, he is being realistic about the earnings from his example site and for that I give him credit. He does show some spreadsheet predictions of revenue, but for me there are some very big but’s and if’s in his forecasts.

The expectation of any webmaster joining Article Underground is clearly to be able to use some of the 400 articles per month they get and to publish them as web content. This they can do, using the processes that come with Article Underground membership.

The assumption in all this is that a member can achieve the same sort of results or better, than Mike shows in his video. However, I feel there is one big flaw in this argument and that is Mike is not using articles that the membership uses.

If you’re wondering why, not using the same articles as Article Underground members matters, I’ll explain.

As a member getting your copy of an article indexed and ranked by a search engine you are competing against other members using the same article.

Mike on the other hand is not competing against anyone since he uses articles that no one else is using. He makes it clear he does not use articles from the membership.

Mike Liebner does make it clear that there’s a lot more to publishing web content with articles than just putting up a web page and he’s right, there is a lot more to it.

So is it still effective to publish web content with PLR articles ?

Yes for the time being, but how long it will last very much depends on the search engines. How much you will earn from it with the likes of Adsense is a completely different topic.

Tony Simpson
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

I have written before about what is and what isn't a Niche and these daily examples from Niche A Day are yet more examples of what I consider not to be a niche.

The daily email comes courtesy of NicheADay.com run by Scott Standke, who also runs Keywordavalanche.com.

In the email Scot provides a keyword or phrase which by his definition represents a niche market based on the estimated monthly traffic from Overture and a PPC bid price which is the other piece of information supplied.

Here is a list of the Niche a day supplied in each daily email for the past 3 weeks.

They look really exciting with these high levels of traffic. But the real question is what chance is there of getting any of that traffic if you built a website around one of these “niches” ?

To answer that question you need to look at what information is not supplied by NicheADay and that’s the level of competition.

Or, put another way, how many other web pages are competing for this traffic by using the exact same keyword phrases ?

Todays NicheADay niche is: spyware
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 448,799

Todays NicheADay niche is: digital photography
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 52293

Todays NicheADay niche is: consulting
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 179117

Todays NicheADay niche is: bahamas
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 121890

Todays NicheADay niche is: bankruptcy
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 278932

Todays NicheADay niche is: diabetes
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 425020

Todays NicheADay niche is: landscaping
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 140988

Todays NicheADay niche is: adoption
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 190355

Todays NicheADay niche is: car insurance
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 1740644

Todays NicheADay niche is: hot tub
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 196195

Todays NicheADay niche is: office furniture
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 208618

Todays NicheADay niche is: tax attorney
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 180207

Todays NicheADay niche is: teeth whitening
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 78842

Todays NicheADay niche is: wedding
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 494127

Todays NicheADay niche is: airfare
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 804608

Todays NicheADay niche is: architect
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 110468

Todays NicheADay niche is: dating
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 3067977

Todays NicheADay niche is: gardening
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 224923

Todays NicheADay niche is: headphones
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 32553

Todays NicheADay niche is: home gym
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 101429

Todays NicheADay niche is: long distance
Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 219359

Here’s the same list again but I have added the number of other web pages being reported by Overture ( this information was not supplied by NicheADay )

Competing Web Pages
spyware 222,000,000
digital photography 74,800,000
consulting 695,000,000
bahamas 245,000,000
bankruptcy 141,000,000
diabetes 197,000,000
landscaping 55,200,000
adoption 316,000,000
car insurance 77,900,000
hot tub 21,400,000
office furniture 437,00,000
tax attorney 3,040,000
teeth whitening 4,380,000
wedding 304,000,000
airfare 60,500,000
architect 220,000,000
dating 437,000,000
gardening 122,000,000
headphones 68,400,000
home gym 4,260,000
long distance 109,000,000

With this level of other web pages using the exact same keywords, I would like to know how anyone would consider these to be in a Niche.

Perhaps Scot Standke could supply his definition of a niche ?

Then it would all make perfect sense how we can quickly get free traffic to a website built around one of these keywords.

As Scot says in his NicheADay email “Now it's up to you to take this information and actually do something with it.”

Here’s my suggestion, put it in the bin, what’s your suggestion ?

To determine whether a niche is worth targeting you need to do proper keyword research or keyword discovery as I prefer to call it. That means at least knowing not just the volume of monthly searches, but also the level of competition for those search terms.

If there is a lot of competiton in your niche you then need to determine what chance you stand of competing in that niche. That will depend a lot on your website, your know-how and what budget you intend to spend to dominate that niche. You can see what factors I use during my own keyword discovery at: web site optimization & keyword discovery

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

Since Niche Products Monthly is new, I decided to give them a fair chance and wait to see if the 2nd month’s product offerings were better Niche Products. The 3 products for February were on Bass Fishing, eBay Power Selling and an Insiders Guide to Real Estate.

As with the previous months niche products these three come with a ready made easy to upload website, 50 Private Label Articles, an ebook, Ready made PPC Ads for Google and Overture and Autoresponder course and around 1000 keyword phrases all related to each niche.

I was not alone in voicing my concerns about this, as was evident from other comments on the Niche Monthly Forum. However in the 2nd months batch of products the keywords still come with no competitive data.

Just as before I have to seriously question why this should be, since these keywords are supposed to be collected using the widely accepted Wordtracker service used by many for keyword research. Wordtracker does not supply keywords without competitive data, so why would Niche Products Monthly not supply this data ?

Could it be that if they did supply competitive data that it would be quickly obvious to everyone that these products being offered are not in a Niche.

So there's certainly a market for fishing products and it could be argued that Bass fishing is a Niche market within the larger market of fishing.

But if we relate marketing to fishing, there is no point in having a large pond of hungry prospects (fish) if you don't have the means to reach them.

Simply putting up a ready made web site does not mean it will ever be seen by your prospects (fish). The point about having a Niche Market and a Niche Product is that you need to fish in a small pond, that has enough hungry prospects (fish) willing and having the money to buy your product and they are in a pond you can reach.

However, here are some of the key results:

For the exact search phrase " bass fishing " there were over 22,000 searches/month on Overture. So there are lots of fish, even if Overture over estimates them, but that's another story. However there are over 4.2 million others trying to catch the same fish, as shown by the number of other web pages targeting this exact phrase.

If we dig deeper to a niche within a niche (sub niche) then we come up with " largemouth bass " which is in fact mentioned in the ebook that's part of this Niche Products Monthly offering. Whilst there are still over 4,400 searches for " large mouth bass " there are still too many other anglers looking to fish in the same pond, namely over 984,000.

Slightly better is " large mouth bass " with over 1,100 fish but still 147,000 other anglers.

" small mouth bass " doesn't fair any better with over 727,000 other anglers and 1,700 fish.

A niche pond that does look reachable is " bass fishing lure " 1,800 fish; 26,800 other anglers or " bass fishing tips " over 1,700 fish and only 80,600 other anglers.

The product ebook supplied is too general to appeal to someone looking for specifics about bass fishing lures so perhaps we are left with bass fishing tips. Yes the ebook does cover some tips but even I can tell (and I'm not into fishing) that it's very beginner's stuff in the ebook.

Let's face it these types of ebooks are written by ghost writers hired from elance.com or the like and the author probably knows nothing about fishing let alone bass fishing. So will anyone buy such a general ebook from an unknown author, or are they more likely to buy from an author who has actually done some fishing.

I mentioned that each niche product comes with ready made ads for Google and Overture so just in case you can't get the ready made web site high enough in the natural search engine listings you can start using PPC to get traffic to your web site.

I did a quick check to find how many sites existed were using last months niche products. Whilst the most I managed to find was 35, only 2 of those appeared in Google's search results and that clearly shows how effective Google now is in filtering out duplicate content.

Getting traffic through PPC for a $27 ebook is very much border line in being cost effective. If the site conversion rate is 1 in 100 (typical) you will only earn any money if the CPC is less than $0.27.

I won't waste my time or yours giving you a similar breakdown on the other two Niche Monthly Products for February but it seems clear at least to me that Niche Products Monthly - Still has no Niche or at least not one anyone can reach that is cost effective.

If anyone using these products would like to leave a comment on this blog that they have done well with them I would be happy to be able to report it.

Until then

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You