| LED Digest 1925: What It Is |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... January 27, 2005 Issue #1925 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Submission Software - News? ==-- ~ Jill Whalen "Submitting to spidering search engines is a thing of the past." --== Dream Affiliate Programs ==-- ~ Tom Aman "For some operations, providing a link back could be a real problem." ~ Ken Evoy "You can argue what you think, but I am simply stating what it IS." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Stats Terminology ==-- ~ Deke Hammel --== The Google Rankings Thread ==-- ~ Tracy Coyle ~ Paul Corsi ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Jill Whalen Subject: Submission software > ... as things things do have a tendency to change / improve > over time I was wondering if the new range of submission type > software programs had improved and if they now offered value? - Tom Connelly, LED 1924 Submission software, as well as submitting by hand, is a waste of time for spidering search engines. All of them find pages on their own as long as there are links to them from other pages in their index. Submitting to spidering search engines is a thing of the past. Don't waste another minute on it or thinking about it. DO submit to directories and DO obtain links on relevant sites that don't have their own spiders routinely crawling the Web. Best, Jill Whalen High Rankings http://www.highrankings.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Dream affiliate In LED 1922, Michael Martinez wrote > 13) Link back to my site on your sales page. It won't kill you > to offer to send your customers back to where they came from. In LED 1923 Ken Evoy responded > Yes, it will. And in LED 1924, Michael came back with > No, it won't. But then, that may also be an issue directly > related to market. My sites generate return traffic. ... I think Michael is forgetting one thing here. If the site has only a small number of affiliates (say <12), then the link back would be no real problem (other than cluttering up the page), but if the site has a lot of affiliates it would get pretty messy. Of course dynamically providing the link back is another approach so only a single link back would appear. In this regard, in LED 1924 Michael says > And it doesn't take "all sorts of code to provide dynamic links > back". I speak as a programmer with almost 30 years of coding > experience. A link back is a simple feature to provide. ... Michael, I am a programmer with well over 30 years of experience and I would suggest that the wording of that should be "A link back MAY BE a simple feature to provide." Whether it is simple or not would depend on many things such as how and where the site is hosted, what server software is being used and what features are available, whether or not the owner has access to a programmer with appropriate background to do the job, etc., etc. For some operations, providing a link back could be a real problem. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Ken Evoy Subject: Dream affiliate Hi Michael, Just a couple of quick points regarding your points. > Framing has become so common... The legal battles were > lost years ago... Each merchant just has to decide how much > they want to accept the reality of today's Internet. Yes, except for one point. It's not a question of legal battles being won or lost years ago. Nor is it a matter of the reality of today's Internet. But it is a question of not being aware of how much our content is being framed, how it's being framed, etc. For that reason, we break frames. Since we've not had more than a few complaints about this, I assume it's not a big issue for most. > Link back to my site on your sales page. It won't kill you > to offer to send your customers back to where they came from. [I said, "Yes it will"... You said, "No it won't...] Michael, we could go on with "yes it will" - "no it won't" forever. But I should have added that we do extensive usability testing (per Jakob Neilsen) AND have self-written visitor-flow software that tracks how visitors flow through our site AND we a-b split-test just about everything. So you can argue theory and philosophy, but I am categorically stating, beyond any doubt, based on watching hundreds of individual humans use our site specifically when testing link-backs, AND tens of millions of visitors flow through our family of sites AND based upon a-b split testing... What you want DOES indeed hurt. You can argue what you think, but I am simply stating what it IS. There is no argument here, unless you have statistically significant data that proves otherwise, BUT anecdotal / philosophica / theoretical arguments do not trump the hard reality of good data. The REALITY aside, our philosophy differs. You feel that a merchant "owes" you or the visitor a link back. In fact, the link back is not expected by ANY visitor, and can damage the visitor's mindset to see that. Rarely have I seen a "link back" to any site that I have visited, and if I did, I would wonder why the heck I did. As to whether the merchant "owes" it back to the affiliate, that's not part of MY basic concept of the affiliate-merchant deal... Merchants provide affiliate with all the tools and strategies so that affiliate can PREsell visitors into arriving at one of our sites with a positive, open-to-buy mindset. We complete the sale. We'll agree to disagree on philosophy, but the facts are that link-backs hurt our job... getting the sale. And, as the only company that has grown from scratch to a Top250 company, TOTALLY on the basis of our affiliate program, we must be doing something right. :-) All the best, Ken Evoy http://affiliates.sitesell.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Deke Hammel Subject: Stats > I look at my website stats every day BUT I'm > not really sure what some of the terms mean... - Philip Scriver, LED 1924 > Total sessions served: 11093 It could be that 11093 people visited your site once, or 1 person visited your site 11093 times, or something inbetween. > Total hits made on server: 191848 Every file served is a hit. > Total page view hits: 17408 > Total non page view hits: 174440 Those 11093 sessions viewed 17408 pages. You'd get that from 63% looking at your page and going away, and 37% looking at one additional page and going away. > Total bandwidth: 1328973.75 kilobytes Your pages average 76 KB in size. That could mean you've got a lot of graphics and sound, but generally, if you're much about 40KB, you're probably making your pages too big. "To emphasize everything is to emphasize nothing." If your pages are more focused, your users will find your site easier to use - and search engines will be more likely to send users your way. > Total search engine referred sessions: 80 (0.72%) > Total referred session: 2924 (26.36%) > Total blind (no referrer) sessions: 8089 (72.92%) That's an awful lot of blind sessions. Those are people who come to your site without clicking on a link on another web page. Could be links in email or usenet, or bookmarks, or people entering your URL having seen it printed someplace unclickable (like a magazine ad.) You really need to learn what users are doing, if you are to figure out what to do with your site and your site marketing. A little script that assigns a unique (cookie) ID to users without one, and logs page requests with cookie IDs would do the trick. If people are seeing one page of your site, and never returning, your advertising is offering something your site isn't delivering; one or the other needs to be adjusted. If you are getting lots of return visits from a few people, you need to advertise more aggressively, and perhaps figure out a new strategy to get those few people to part with their money. Deke Hammel AmishHosting.Com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tracy Coyle Subject: Google After reviewing dozens of sites 'competing' with us, and finding a movie theatre listing in the search results (the word bankruptcy was in the movie description) higher than our site (not found in the first 700 search results), I am ending any attempt to get any position in Google. We appear in several of the directories listed in the first page or two of results and we are getting visitors from a Google search, but I am not going to work the site with SE placement in mind. When I sent the previous post I seriously considered asking that it not be posted as too whiny. The results returned by Google will provide potential clients with options, unfortunately, not us - directly. I am sure those associated with SEO will suggest I am hurting our results, but there is no rational explanation for us not being in the first 700 listings. Tracy Coyle Cazel Family Law Offices ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Paul Corsi Subject: Google Dirk van der Werff in LED 1924 was wondering if there is a problem with Google UK because of an outdated site ranking higher than expected rather than more recent, relevant sites. It's been my experience that Google in general continues to have ridiculous search results for the majority of commercial type searches that I do. For reasons beyond me, Google results return old and outdated directories of information with lots of outbound links rather than sites that would provide direct services for the searchers. Most of the directories are outdated and irrelevant to the search. Yet these sites have been around for years and have lots of inbound links. I mean the folly of such thinking boggles my mind. I've stopped using Google when my search requires any kind of commercial interest. As a matter of fact, I think Yahoo has a more superior search product since there upgrade a few months ago. I can find what I'm looking for within the top 3 or 4 results provided by Yahoo. With Google, I sometimes have to go 3 and 4 pages deep to find anything relevant. Paul Corsi West Indies Web Design ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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