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Minor SEO Updates

Posted on August 26, 2006 by in search, SEO, Uncategorized

Long time readers of this blog will probably remember me describing MSN as a very cheap date in terms of SEO.  Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so dismissive: she’s now my #3 source of hits (after Google AdWords and, er, this blog oddly enough) and my #1 source of sales for last week.  Apparently she’s rather popular with non-technical audiences, just judging from the search queries I’m getting.  I’m flabbergasted that I get the rank I do for some of these: you would think “bingo cards” would be a fairly competitive search (cough gambling cough) term but somehow I’m still on the first page.

In other news, I think the Google Dance has begun.  I got a sudden spike of traffic from them yesterday, far higher than my previous peak, and its mostly for people *not* searching for “bingo card creator” so it can’t be a warez release or something.  Maybe I got moved up in the PageRank or something for all these minor searches.  Ironically, my conversion for Google organic searches is terrible (10%) because most people are looking for Dolch sight word lists and get them and leave without trying my software.  Sigh.

Speaking of search engine results: for the 5 people who found this blog looking for “Bingo Card Creator registration key”: you’ll find it in the mail you got after you purchased the software.  If you didn’t get that mail and expected to, send me a quick email (my first name @bingocardcreator.com) and we’ll get you squared away in a jiffy.  Oh, and if you didn’t know where you can get a registration key, that would be here.  Try the big red button on the right side of the page, you can’t miss it.

On-page SEO for Small Companies

Posted on July 29, 2006 by in popular, search, SEO

(Note: If you were looking for software to create printable bingo cards, Dolch sight word bingo, or Dolch sight word lists, you should check those three links. The rest of this post is about how search engines work, and is probably not that interesting to you. However, because it repeats your search query frequently, the search engine you were using thinks its a perfect match for your interests. If you’re running a small business and wondering how to make it look better on the search engines, you’re in the right place:)

Some things which I’ve found useful, and which can be done fairly easily without compromising your ethics or your user experience:

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Legitimate Organic Searches Eclipse PPC

Posted on July 29, 2006 by in search, SEO

Every day I get roughly 10-15 PPC visits from Google and 6-8 from Yahoo (I actually get slightly more clicks than this, but some people apparently abandon the page view before the Javascript at the end loads).  Today was the first day I got more organic hits than this, and they appear to be legitimate (i.e. not from pirates for a change).  I think I can largely blame my blog for this, since after I discovered that it ranks higher than my site for key search terms (as a result of a post similar to this one, ironically) I made about 10 links for those terms from the blog to the appropriate content pages.

And, bam, 48 hours later I got crawled and my site went from the 3rd page of search results for, say, “d01ch w0rd b1ng0″ to the 1st page (I’m obfuscating that to not ruin my good luck — mea maxima culpa).  Its not in the top 5 yet but I’ve got high hopes of reaching there eventually.  I know from my PPC search impressions that some of these words get traffic in the hundreds per day, which if I could capture 10% of would be excellent.

The Long Tail of Search

Posted on July 14, 2006 by in search, SEO

(Edit: Were you searching for sight words?: You’re probably looking for a Dolch sight word list or maybe Dolch sight word bingo cards . You can find them at those two links, and yep, they’re free.  Sorry you got directed to this page by accident — the explanation as to why is long and boring, but you can click here if you really care:

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Getting Organic Search Traffic

Posted on July 11, 2006 by in search, SEO

I got my first few hits from organic searches today (real ones, not people searching for “bingocardcreator.com” or “bingo card creator”). One was from MSN for “free Dolch sight word lists”, which I do offer (previously you had to extract them from my trial, but I decided to put the actual list up for search engine bait and hope some people convert while they’re reading). That page must have gotten an inbound from somebody other than me, yay. Its actually doing its job.