My Top Keyword

September 20th, 2007 1 Comment »

Sorry for being so late on schedule in posting about my Top Keyword. I was busy studying for my exams and my mom banned me from the computer. The keyword is…. See for yourself :

Traffic Source

It is Taj Mahal. If you go a Google Image Search for that word, you’ll find GotChance.com listed first. (Uh oh ! It has changed now). Anyway that was unusual. But this is a nice piece of example of Seasonal traffic. I wrote the original post just in time when the New 7 Wonders were being announced. It hit the first page and i received good traffic. Thats it !

My Top Keyword Turns Out to be UnExpected

September 14th, 2007 4 Comments »

For the past few months, i have seen this particular keyword top my list of “Top search keywords”. And, also it tops the list of “Traffic Sources” in my FeedBurner stats. But, i didn’t bother to check it out as the keyword was unrelated to this blog. Today, determined to check where it comes from i did a Google search first and then a Google Image Search. To my surprise, its from the Google Image Search. Here’s a screenshot from my FeedBurner stats :

Sources of Traffic

I’ll let you readers have a guess at the keyword. I’ll give you some clues. The traffic comes from Google Image Search. A specific post from GotChance is displayed as the number on result for the keyword. I’m sure that there are lots and lots of websites out there which provide better “pictures/photos” of the same. The image was taken from WikiPedia and the WikiPedia page is nowhere to be seen in the results page. Maybe because, i directly displayed the image, whereas WikiPedia shows a Thumbnail link.

More clues, the major part of the keyword Search traffic comes from images.google.co.in showing that it is an India-related keyword. Any Guesses ? I’ll disclose the answer in 24 hours or after the correct answer is guessed (whichever occurs sooner).

WWW or No WWW in Domain Names

September 14th, 2007 29 Comments »

This is something simple that all blogs can do and all blogs should do, but not all blogs do. Do you know that http://www.gotchance.com and http://gotchance.com are treated by search engines as two different websites. So, the search engine results may split up and even worse the Google PageRank will split too. So, it is generally a good practice to do a Search-Engine-Friendly redirect from on to the other.

Here i have chosen to redirect www.gotchance.com to gotchance.com. But that doesn’t make any difference. Here’s how to do it. Just add the following code to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain :

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]</code>
If you want to do it otherwise (i.e) from Non-WWW to WWW, here's the code :
<code>Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Now, go ahead and start concentrating your SE Optimization on one domain.

UPDATE : When i checked the FeedBurner stats (while making this post), i noticed something that is very much related to this post. Here is a screenshot. I use gotchance.com/feed for my FeedBurner feed and www.gotchance.com shows as one of the top referrers. This is before i started redirecting www to non-www :

Referrer

J Chow’s Affiliate URL Strategy Pays off

August 24th, 2007 21 Comments »

The affiliate link strategy that John Chow has been using on his blog has paid off nicely. John Chow uses PHP files to cloak his affiliate links. He has all those PHP files in a folder called “go” and links to them this way :

  • Text Link Ads : http://www.johnchow.com/go/tla.php
  • ReviewMe : http://www.johnchow.com/go/reviewme.php

This has now become useful, for Text Link Ads changed their affiliate link URL today. Today morning, i received the following email from TLA :

Shrihari,

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

As far as i know John Chow was the first to start this method of Affiliate linking. So, if you are not already following it, start doing it now. John Chow has written a detailed post on how to do this and how useful it is over here.

Which kind of URLs are the best ?

August 19th, 2007 13 Comments »

Many times people get confused between what URLs are Search-Engine-Friendly(SEF) and what aren’t. The complex URL involving a lot of query strings etc.. appear mostly in user-generated-content scripts like Blogs and Forums. Take a look at the following URLs :

  • WordPress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/?p=176
  • vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/showthread.php?t=42918
  • IPB : http://www.youripb.com/index.php?showtopic=236497
  • SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/index.php?topic=189291.0

Of course, these are very complex and looks pretty ugly. Further many of the URLs used in forums contain a lot of other query strings also like Session IDs, Post IDs in addition to Topic IDs etc… These kind of URLs are disliked by Search Engines. This gave rise to the SEF URLs.

With suitable plugins or settings, you can convert the above URLs as something like below :

  • WordPress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/p/176.html
  • vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/t42918.html
  • IPB : http://www.youripb.com/topic/236497.html
  • SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/topic/189291.0.html

Thats it. These are better and are Search-Engine-Friendly URLs. But, are they easy to remember ? Would you be remembering Post IDs for the URLs. Of course, not. So, we need to modify these further to make them Human-Friendly as well.

So, you have to convert it into something like below :

  • WordPress: http://gotchance.com/2007/08/17/4-reasons-to-avoid-paid-reviews/
  • vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/your-topic-title/42918.html
  • IPB : http://www.youripb.com/your-topic-title/236497.html
  • SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/your-topic-title/189291.0.html

Those are sexy and this kind of URLs are being used by most Blogs and Forums. Thats a very nice practice. WordPress has it as an inbuilt feature. vBulletin has a plugin called vB SEO to do this. IPB has IPB Seo. SMF doesn’t have anything as advanced as vB SEO, but SEO 4 SMF pretty much serves the purpose.

If you don’t use any of these ready-made scripts, you can customize your URLs using .htaccess. We’ll see about it in the next post.

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