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News and Views - August 2016
Driving Traffic to Your Website: 13 hints for getting real people to visit.
We'd appreciate your feedback and comments.
Rude comments, however, will be summarily deleted.Driving Traffic to Your Website: 13 hints for getting real people to visit.
We'd appreciate your feedback and comments.
09.01.16 Driving traffic to your website: Final Warning!
My other website gets roughly 1000 file transfers a day, and there's no reason you can't achieve similar results. That's the good news. Now for the bad news:- I write new, original content for the website at least 5 days per week, 52 weeks per year, and I've been doing it for 10 years. This amounts to roughly 700 typed, single-spaced paper pages of original content.
- I volunteer my time to write and post the content, and a friend volunteers his time to prepare each page for posting. This amounts to roughly 5 to 10 hours per page, although some pages have taken more time than that. Nobody has paid us for somewhere between two and four man-years of work!
- I post all new content daily to a Facebook page with the same name; the Facebook page has slightly more than 700 likes after about 5 years.
- The Facebook page and website are linked to each other.
- I've spent time trying to develop backlinks, and after 10 years, the website has a few high-quality backlinks and a dozen or so lesser-quality backlinks.
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Driving traffic to your website is hard work.
08.30.16 Meta Tags: Write good descriptions and first paragraphs.
When you're searching for something on the web, the search result contains a little bit of text below the headline and URL. This is called the "snippet." You want to make your snippet as interesting and informative as possible in order to get as many actual people as possible to click through to your site. I searched for "pc games free" and used the the Word Count tool in MS Word to determine the number of characters, including spaces, in the snippets. Just as Google says, the maximum is about 155 to 160. (I trust no one.) Our interesting description needs to be about that length.I also checked again (see 8.23.16) to see whether Google is getting the snippet from the description or the first paragraph. Yes, and once from the second paragraph. I noticed that several times the description and the first paragraph (or at least the first sentence) were identical, and Google used those words. I still haven't figured out what their algorithm is for choosing between the two if they differ. I have also noticed on my other website that when I write something short and pertinent above my page headline, Google tends to use that.
So my final advice on the description meta tag is this:
- Get straight to the point in the first paragraph on the page.
- Make your description and your first paragraph match.
- Limit the description and the first sentence of your first paragraph to about 155 characters.
- Hope for the best.
08.24.16 Meta Tags: Write Good Titles
As near as I can tell, keywords won't help you much and might hurt you in Google and Yahoo, although we need to remember that they aren't the only search engines. Some search engines apparently do use keywords, so we shouldn't abandon them altogether. Your description may or may not get used, depending, as near as I can tell, on the phase of the moon. Titles are our best friend, because they are used word for word as both the headline in search results and on the browser tab when the page is open.Let's think today about how to write a good title. First, keep it to about 55 to 65 characters, and then search for your site (using your site name in quotes, if necessary) to see whether all the words are coming up. Also open your page and see how much of the title is shown on the browser tab. The title should give real people something that's informative and interesting.
- Wrong: Homepage
- Right: Storm Dragon: Get the game or read the blog.
I actually wrote the "right" title just as an example, but it's better than my old one, "Storm Dragon Software: Home." It tells what's on this page, it's a little longer, and it replaces "Software" with "get the game" on the tab. So I'm going to use it for a while. You aren't married to your title or description; change them whenever you get a better idea. Note that the tab changes immediately, but you'll have to wait until your site is crawled for the search-result headline to appear.
Writing a good description is probably trickier, so I'm going to postpone that until tomorrow.
08.23.16 Meta Tag: Description
I Googled "game companies" and compared each headline of the search results with the words on the tab and the words in the title tag. Guess what: they match! Here is something that we webmasters apparently can actually control! I am so excited!The reason I'm so excited about the title tag is that I also compared the text description below the headline in the search results (the "snippet") with the "description" meta tag and with the page text. The results are out of control.
Wikipedia's snippet is clear but boring. There is no description meta tag, and the snippet is taken verbatim from the first paragraph on the page, which consists of one sentence and three links. For a random page of my other website (not about games), there is a description meta tag, but Google ignored it in favor of the links at the top. Does Google necessarily prefer links? No:
- New Zoo: Google ignores the description meta tag in favor of the first sentence of the first paragraph.
- Pocket Gamer: Google appears to use part of the title tag and part of the first paragraph.
- Insider Monkey: Google ignores the link at the top of the page, which is nearly identical to the title, and uses the first sentence of the first paragraph.
- Business Insider: Google ignores the headline, the title, and and link, and goes for the first sentence in the first paragraph.
- IGN has a fairly good snippet that comes verbatim from the third paragraph of the page.
So I am officially confused. Google says that they use the description meta tag 'in many cases', but I told you above what I discovered. Bottom line:
- Write a great title.
- Make sure that both the description meta tag and the first sentence of your first paragraph are brief, exciting descriptions of the page contents, and
- Hope for the best.
08.22.16 Meta Tag: Title
Okay, a title isn't a meta tag, but it's an important part of the top end of your page so I'm going to discuss it here anyway. The html looks like this:
<title>Your Title Here</title>
Each one of your pages should have a unique title. I think the current recommendation is about 55 to 65 characters in length, although people are probably not going to see the whole thing unless they hover over the title with the cursor. As you open more and more webpages, the title tab typically gets shorter and shorter. It's a good idea to put your brand in every title, but consider putting it at the end: "Downloads - Storm Dragon Software" instead of "Storm Dragon Software - Downloads." That way, instead of seeing Storm/Storm/Storm/Storm/Storm, the Visitor will see Storm/Product/Download/Polici/Contact, and so on, making it easier to navigate your site. So bottom line:
- Pay attention to your titles, because both people and search engines look at them.
- Put the most important word first to encourage your human visitors to look at the page and to make navigation easy.
- Put your brand on every page to remind the search engines who you are.
08.19.16 Commented HTML
Probably you know all about HTML comments already, but babies are born every minute, so I'm going to discuss them very briefly. Commented material is written like this:
<!--Your Comment Here-->
<!--
- Don't put anything into a comment that you want search engines to pay attention to.
- Don't put anything into a comment that you want people to pay attention to.
- Don't put anything into a comment that you want to keep a secret.
- You can look at source code to see how another web developer did such a cool thing on his page, and then you can do it on yours!
08.18.16 A Realistic View of SEO Offers
Yesterday I said, "Anybody who sends you an email guaranteeing to put your website on page one of the Google rankings using keywords is at best deluded and at worst lying." Today I am willing to broaden that: Anybody who guarantees to put your website on page one using any tool or combination of tools should be regarded with deep suspicion.Let's do the math. Wikipedia has an alphabetical list of active game developers, and I counted 100 before I got to "F." (Your count may differ.) Storm Dragon Software isn't on the list, and I suspect lots of others also aren't. If you search for "computer game" on Google, 10 results are on the first page, and only five of those sell computer games.
If, for $100, someone could absolutely guarantee to put a game company on page one for "computer game," how many developers would pay that? A hundred, maybe? We would. [SEO Optimizers: Don't call us; we'll call you!] So you've got 100 paying customers, and best case, you get 5 of them on the first page.
Now, if you search for "storm dragon software," we're right there on page one. Unfortunately, the person searching for games already has to know about us and know that we are a game company. "Computer games NM" - nope. "Game companies NM" - nope. "Game company Albuquerque": NO!
So yeah, I could easily get you on the first page under your own name, but what good does that do you? There's a word for this: "scam." If you desire to throw your money away, send the hundred bucks to me. I'll use it to buy chocolate, but at least I'm honest about it!
08.16.16 Meta tagsWhen you visit a website, you see a (more or less) pleasing arrangement of text and graphics on the screen. When a crawler visits that same website, it "sees" that information, but it also sees a ton of instructions meant primarily for computers, servers, browsers, and crawlers, and not for the human visitors. Most of these instructions are written in html (hypertext markup language) or php (hypertext preprocessor). The html and php written by the webmaster are handed to the server, which translates the whole package into html and passes it along to the browser so that the browser knows how to display the text and graphics on the visitor's screen.The html itself does not appear on the screen (unless the webmaster makes a mistake). A fair amount of the html isn't even trying to put something on the screen. Instead, it's talking to the crawlers, using html in functions called "metatags." What you want your metatags to say to the crawlers is, "Hey! Over here! Look at me! Ignore all those other billion websites and bring the eyeballs here!" For the next few days, I'm going to talk about metatags and how to make them work for you. |
08.10.16 Check before you invest.Yesterday I said I was going to update my manta.com information. Also yesterday, I got a call at 8:05 a.m. (from a live person, at least) offering to sell me a "cash-flow accelerating" tool, and I deleted about 30 spam emails without opening. When I looked at my current Manta listing, I discovered a couple of interesting things. First, the one link to my website is rel="nofollow," which as discussed below means that it doesn't affect the page rank of my site. On the other hand, my phone number and email address are in plain site. I'm not aware that manta.com has ever generated any sales for us, but it would be easy for spammers and phone marketers to use this page to get in touch with me. The site offers free listings, and it probably would be great if I had brick and mortar, but maybe when we're trying to generate business through website traffic, we need to be a bit discerning about what free offers we're going to invest our time in. |
08.05.16 Backlink Checkers.If you want to see how you're doing on generating backlinks to your site, Google "free backlink checkers." No, seriously, check out the most recent winning lottery combination and use that, because as near as I can tell, it would be about as accurate. Yesterday I checked for backlinks to my other website (which gets about 1000 downloads a day, remember) and the number ranged from 3 to 53. And I didn't even try all the checkers! Probably what I would do if I were serious is to make a table for myself that compiles the results from all the free backlink checkers. Then I'd actually follow all the links to see whether they were organic links, directories, or whatever. Then I'd break for hot chocolate. |
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08.02.16 Remember what you learned in kindergarten.One of the first words children learn is "Mine!" One of the first words mothers try to teach is "share." I post original material 5 days a week on my other Facebook page. It has 666 likes this morning, and the number typically goes up by half a dozen or so per week. The reach, on the other hand, is typically about 10 people per post; although it varies from 2 to 20 or so. The reach is the number of people who have seen a particular post. Occasionally a reader will like one or several posts, and I can't really see that "likes" affect the reach. For the July 21 post, the reach was 100! Why? Because one reader "shared." So if you are using a Facebook page for marketing, it is essential to train your readers to share every post. If you figure out how to get people to share, please let me - and mothers everywhere - know how you did it. |
| 07.21.16 Steam Greenlight. Speaking of marketing, if you had a product, wouldn't you rather get 50% of your sales price at WalMart than 100% at your own personal roadside stand? Clearly WalMart is a better option - they are open somewhere 24/7, and people have heard of them and go there all the time. The same is true in software marketing. Yesterday we put our game into the Steam Greenlight process, for two reasons. First, of course, we'd love to be on Steam. Steam is huge, and most gamers have heard of them. We are (currently) small, and almost no one has heard of us. Second, running a greenlight campaign is a marketing tool all by itself. Since yesterday at 12:30 p.m., 446 people have seen something about our game who probably would not have without this campaign. If you have a Steam account, please wander on over and give "A Picture Perfect Murder" a Yes vote. |
| 07.20.16 Social Media. Whenever you read anything about marketing these days, it consists of just six words: social media, social media, social media. How does that work, anyway? I have a public Facebook page that I have added original content to, five days a week without fail, for a few years. As of this morning, it has 647 "likes," and it gets several new likes a week. A typical daily "reach," on the other hand, is only about 10, because Facebook doesn't automatically send your stuff to everyone who likes your page. One day I had more new "likes" than I had "reach"! How can that even happen? So Point 1 is, the people who tell you to use social media don't tell you how to make it work. I mean, for the same time investment, I could walk down the block and hand out flyers to more than 10 people. The Facebook page arose out of a website that's been going for about five years. This site also consists entirely of original content (except for the artwork illustrations). I don't add stuff to it every day, but rather every few months I add several pages from the daily tips that I send out by email. The website usage runs to about 1,000 downloads a day, which isn't phenomenal by any means, but which is 100 times better than the Facebook page. So Point 2 is, don't neglect your website. |
| 07.19.16 Affiliate Programs. A long time ago when I worked in a consulting firm, both I and the boss were out one day. An Amway distributor dropped by and talked to the other two young employees, apparently trying to recruit them as lower-level distributors. As I got the story, he was explaining that they would make money by recruiting even lower-level distributors, and they kept asking, "But who sells the soap?!" Finally he said, "Nobody sells the soap!" and left in a huff. In an on-line affiliate program, one party, such as Storm Dragon Software, manufactures a product, and another party, called the affiliate, markets and sells it. The money goes to the manufacturer, who pays the affiliate a percentage of the total. Do you have a website? Would you like to be our affiliate? We've already got "soap" - a game - and we're looking for people to sell it. Contact us. |
