Every once in a while, it’s important to step back and evaluate how you are doing when it comes to the fundamentals of your field or industry. Because my field is Internet marketing and websites, I came up with 10 questions you can ask yourself to determine how well your site and online strategy are working.

10 Website Questions

1. What kind of Web presence do I need?

   Don’t worry too much about what kind of web presence you have just yet. Think carefully about what kind of presence you really need. Do you need an informational site, an e-commerce platform, or a community or network site? Which suits your business best?

2. What does my website need to accomplish?

   Is your site primarily meant to distribute information? Sell a product? Get subscribers? What are the end results you need to achieve?

3. Who do I want to visit my site?

   Think about your ideal audience. Are they tech-lingo-speaking engineers? C-suite managers? Teenage girls with generous spending habits? Do you need to serve more than one audience? How will you serve multiple audiences? Some reading about personas might help at this point.

4. Who is visiting my site?

   Do you really know who is visiting your site? This can be tricky to determine, but there are clues to who it is that is viewing your site. A web analytics package will go a long way in helping you to determine what content and which calls to action are resonating with your current audience. You can also ask your visitors directly—a short, online survey can do a lot to help unveil your visitors’ feelings and background.

5. How will I drive traffic to my site?

   There are many methods for driving traffic, and you need to figure out which will be most appropriate for your site and which are the highest priority. Natural search engine results? Pay-per-click ads? Viral, word-of-mouth marketing? Links from related sites? Press releases?

6. What is it that I want my visitors to do or learn?

   These actions are the baby steps towards achieving your main purpose in #2 above. Do you want your visitors to read a certain page, download a whitepaper, and then contact sales? Do you want them to read product reviews, look at a photo gallery, add a product to their cart, and check out? What are the most important actions that lead to achieving your goals?

7. How can I engage my visitors?

   Often the problem with a site is not getting visitors to come to a site, but making them stay. How can you connect with your audience and encourage them to stick around? What (small) set of calls to action are going to be used to motivate your visitors to explore, learn, and enjoy your site?

8. How can I increase repeat visits?

   How do you make a website “sticky?” Is your site a one-trick pony? Does your site have more to offer visitors at a later date?

9. How will my website be built and managed? In-house or outsourced?

   Once you’ve determined what your site needs to be, you need to think about how it will be built and maintained. Remember, it’s often the case that whatever site and system you have now is a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t unduly influence your decision about what to do going forward.

10. What kind of website can I afford?

    Once you know what you need and want, you have to look at what you realistically can have, at least in the near term. You may have to prioritize your goals and simply try to accomplish as much as you can with your limited resources.

More Than 10 Answers

These 10 basic website questions don’t have perfect, unchanging answers, even for the same company at two different times. The best answer often changes with growth or challenges your company is facing. Each question is also open-ended, so there are multiple answers to each one. The main point is simply to think about what’s important regularly so that your company or site follows its optimal path on the web.

Some people have wondered: is Blog Rush against the Google AdSense terms of service?

Blog Rush, as I see it, is NOT against Google AdSense’s terms of service.

The Google AdSense blog says:

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

Google wants to make sure that site and blog owners aren’t providing people with an incentive (beyond normal interest and curiosity) to click on AdSense links.

Blog Rush Is in the Clear

If you examine each part of the quote above, you can see that Blog Rush does not violate any of the statements made.

No one is paid to click on AdSense ads after they land on a page they found through Blog Rush. Doing so does not result in a reward for visitors.

No one is being paid to surf or autosurf—in money or clicks. Even if you surf your own site for an extra 1000 pages, you’ve only earned impressions. If your article titles suck, no one is going to click them. This will be even more true as cheating is weeded out of the impression system. You can see this even now—the cheaters are generating thousands of extra impressions, but no extra clicks. Click-through rates are simply falling. If someone does click through, it’s because they are truly interested in what you have to say.

Blog Rush is not click exchange—no one is using the system to agree to click each other’s AdSense links.

There is no incentive to view other web sites’ pages.

Because Blog Rush in no way affects visitor behavior in relation to AdSense ads, it does not violate the terms of service. So go ahead and join Blog Rush and see if it increases your blog traffic.

I recently learned about a new traffic generating system called Blog Rush. I’m usually very skeptical of such systems, but this one had some very interesting unique ideas that kept me on the hook just long enough to try it. The system is in Beta, and there have been a few hiccups more than most Beta launches, but on the whole it is working as advertised.

The Idea Behind Blog Rush

The basic idea behind Blog Rush is to create a network of similar sites and facilitate the exchange and dynamic rotation of links between these sites. Each site in the network installs a widget that lists five links to blog posts in the network. Your blog’s widget will show the links from other blogs, and your blog will be linked to from other sites’ widgets.

Blog Rush Referrals

So how does the system decide which links to show? Through an impression tracking and exchange system. Each time your blog shows the widget (1 page impression, 5 link impressions), you earn the right to have your blog linked to for one impression on someone else’s site.

Because you are creating 5 link impressions for each page impression, but only receiving one, the system has 4 extra link impressions per page impression to hand out.

For now, Blog Rush has done two main things with these extra impressions:

1. They have reserved one link impression for themselves to use for advertising and handing out bonus impressions.
2. The other three are used for rewarding referrals to the system. If you refer someone, you get an impression for every impression they earn. The same thing happens for each level of referrals, all the way down to ten “generations.” You get less and less of an impression at each level (level 10 earns you 1/8 of an impression), and the fractions add up correctly to three total impressions.

Blog Rush Inequality

There was a person who left a comment on the Blog Rush blog who was concerned about unequal impressions. His example stated that if there was someone who had 1,000 impressions vs. someone who had 100, a growing deficit of available impressions would be created. This would be true, but only if you have too few sites. As you increase the number of sites, the deficits and surpluses will tend to average out almost perfectly, especially over time. Blog Rush has already served more than 40,000,000 blog headlines, so I’m not worried about the availability of page impressions to show the link impressions I’ve earned.

Cheating on Blog Rush

The biggest problem with Blog Rush so far has been some cheating. Many bloggers have created ways to game the system by creating bad pageviews—for example, using a script to auto-load pages to earn impressions, even though no human ever sees the pages. These cheaters have sucked up impressions earned by legitimate bloggers and have nearly killed click-through rates. However, Blog Rush has switched to a manual review system for new blogs and is purging existing blogs that aren’t meeting standards, so this problem should be fixed soon.

Click Through Rates on Blog Rush

My last concern about Blog Rush will be click through rates. How many impressions will it take before someone clicks and visits my site? The last time I checked, I had nearly 300 impressions without a click. It can take over a thousand impressions to generate a click, though, so no final verdict here… The headlines you write for your blog posts will also be extremely influential on your click through rates, so write headlines that will grab attention and will be short enough to fit in the widget (7 words, 40 characters or so).

It can’t hurt, so go try Blog Rush. I have visited some blog posts that sounded interesting, so it has value for discovering new information, even if no one clicks your links. And if I’m clicking links, there’s a chance I will visit your blog some time!

You’ve been working hard on your site, posting new content regularly, playing by the rules, being a good netizen and all that good stuff. One day you decide to check and see how you are doing in Google’s index. So you type in site:yoursite.com to see how many pages have been indexed.

Oh the horror!

A large portion of your pages are listed with the phrase “Supplemental Result” next to them.

Supplemental results are just that—supplemental. Provided when the primary variants aren’t good enough, or when someone who is starving consumes all the other results and still wants more. This means that your pages aren’t going to have the optimal traffic generating characteristics that you’d hoped for.

Two Possibilities with Supplemental Results

Take a deep breath—supplemental results aren’t the end of the world. There are two main situations where supplemental results come into play:

1. Your pages are new, and Google isn’t sure about them just yet. They are in supplemental results for a while until Google integrates them into the main search index. You just have to wait for a while (2 months should be enough). This happened to over 100 of DiamondLime’s pages after I moved my site and was first indexed at the new domain name.
2. Google doesn’t like your pages as much as the alternatives. This is tougher than simply having to wait like in case #1, but again, not the end of the world. There are things you can do to get your pages to move into the main index.

Page Rehab - Getting Pages out of Supplemental Results

There are things you can do to get your pages out of supplemental results. The central point is that you have to do things that will make your pages better (or at least seem better) than the alternatives. Here is a list of things you can do to get a page out of the supplemental results, starting with the most effective:

1. Get links from other sites to the page that needs to move out of supplemental results
2. Link to the page from other pages on your site
3. Add useful content
4. Improve your on-page SEO elements.

Get Links from Other Sites

The most powerful factor for moving your site’s pages out of supplemental results is to have other web sites link directly to your pages. This deep linking tells Google that someone values your content enough to link to it, and that immediately puts you up over all the resources that aren’t linked to from external sites.

Link to the Page from Your Site

If you link to your struggling page from many varied locations on your web site, you are telling Google (and other search engines) that out of the pages on your site, you deem this particular page to be important. This is almost as effective as getting an external link. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may shake the balance of your site’s SEO up too much.

Add Useful Content

Adding to and modifying the content on your struggling page indicates to search engines that you are trying to improve the page and that this particular resource is up to date.

Improve On-page SEO Factors

Improving your page’s SEO for on-page elements (headers, titles, etc.) is like waxing your car—it’s the same old car, but it looks like it’s worth more.

Once you’ve done what you can, wait. It can take quite a while. SEO requires patience. If, though, after 6 months and two passes at improving your page, you don’t have rankings, it may be time to focus on another page targeting that term.

Best of luck getting out of the supplemental results! It is possible, I did it—as of this writing, not one of the pages indexed on my site is a supplemental result.

I wrote a few months ago introducing Tag A Cloud as a possible method for generating free traffic to a site. At this point, I think the results are mixed.

Starting Off

I signed up with Tag A Cloud back in January. I put a link on my site in a blog post I wrote about Tag A Cloud, and then I simply clicked on my own link each time I visited my site. I usually browsed a few of the other links that were there, too, doing my part to help drive a little traffic. The day I put the link up, my site visitors started to click through as well.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many links, and many of them weren’t upgraded, so if you could make your link on the Tag A Cloud pages larger, you stood to gain a decent amount of traffic. I know I clicked on the larger links, especially to see why they were larger—was there something about the site that was driving clicks or traffic?

Leveling

Like role playing games, leveling up is addicting. My visitors and I drove about 190 clicks to Tag A Cloud, and my tag is now level 9, which means it’s now a larger version of the standard black text. No bolding, underlining, or colors yet. I wonder how far you have to go to get more than font-size upgrades.

Google Juice

In my last post about Tag A Cloud, I wondered what Tag A Cloud would do with the Google page rank it would surely get. Their rank is up to a 6. That question is still to be answered. They may not need to think about it, though, if enough people keep paying to have their tags upgraded.

Noise. Lots of Noise.

Tag A Cloud recently introduced their “Point Shop” which allows tag owners to pay to upgrade their tags in an effort to make their tag more visible and drive more traffic. Most of the sites that joined early on have had their tags upgraded through natural clicks to and from Tag A Cloud, too. Between all the upgraded tags and the paid highlighting that many have been doing, Tag A Cloud is starting to look rather noisy. It’s harder to make sense of the big pile of tags. Since they’re displayed randomly, it’s a little tricky to find a tag you know was there before from earlier. They need a save-a-tag feature that lets you save tags to your own personal tag page.

Free Traffic

Despite the noise, Tag A Cloud has delivered 27 clicks to my site. This may not seem like many, but it’s nearly as many as I have ever received from any other directory-type listing, and certainly in a shorter period of time. If you don’t need to pay attention to it, then your interested visitors will do the work of clicking through to Tag A Cloud and increasing the prominence of your tag. If you have to babysit your tag, however, the invested effort compared to the traffic you will get is an ROI that doesn’t make much sense. I think I may make one last push to get my tag to be more visible and drive traffic, and then I am probably going to let it go dormant and let the link on my site and the tag on Tag A Cloud do all the work.

Let’s imagine that you have a hot new web service. An AJAX-powered, Web 2.0, community-based Google killer. Let’s also assume that, like most new web services, you have limited time to reach critical mass and profitability before you run out of money.

How Do You Promote Your Service?

So what do you do to promote your service? What methods are available to those who are strapped for cash and time?

• Viral Campaign

  Create a video, contest, game, or activity that people want to pass on to their friends and that uses or mentions your service.

• Press Releases

  Put a press release out to every possible effective PR source. Accurately describe the benefits of using your service.

• Reviews

  Ask bloggers, magazine and newspaper columnists, technology pundits, futurists, educators, and other influential experts or members of the media to have a look at your service and share what they think.

• Word of Mouth

  Encourage, promote, and assist people to take the effort to share

• Pay-Per-Click

  You could pay to drive traffic to your site, but this would only work for a start-up under the above conditions if the cost per click was low and competition sparse.

In short, you should gratefully accept any interest or exposure for your product, especially if you are receiving qualified prospects.

Mum’s the Word

What would make you swear off one of these methods? Expense is a big one that might be involved in a few of the items listed above. What else? Not much.

But that’s precisely what one particular service is doing. ChaCha Live Search’s user agreement has a clause that limits its guides from asking people to become guides in public forums, blogs, or classifieds. Let’s think about this for a moment: ChaCha could potentially be receiving large numbers of interested, qualified guides, but is limiting itself to the people who fall into its guides’ close group of friends and family.

That seems silly to me. ChaCha is dramatically limiting the speed at which word of mouth can travel by limiting who its guides can invite. What’s wrong with the total strangers who express an interest in ChaCha and have the skill to do a good job? Nothing. And what would ChaCha have to lose if it accidentally let someone less skilled or interested through? Nothing. So why clam up its guides, its most effective advocates?

Breaking the Silence

Instead of clamping down on what people can say about you or your service (especially legally), you should try to help people to discuss and promote your service. Make it easy for them, and create incentives that will attract the right kind of people, rather than controlling the methods by which the word can be spread. Remember, your promotional methods will be vitally important to the success of your service, and you don’t want to punish or limit those who are helping you.

After the famous Million Dollar Home Page, lots of people have tried to come up with similar linking schemes to earn money and/or fame. Many of them are pathetic. Others are somewhat ingenious or even downright clever methods of free traffic generation.

One of the more creative linking ideas is from Tag A Cloud. No money changes hands—only links. Each visitor is allowed to sign up for one or more tags. These tags are short text descriptions that are added to the overall tag hierarchy. For each click your tag gets, you get a point. For each visitor that comes from your site to Tag a Cloud, you get two points. The more points you accumulate, the larger your tag becomes relative to the other tags on Tag A Cloud. You win by increasing traffic to your site. Tag a Cloud wins by getting more traffic and huge inbound link power. What Tag a Cloud plans to do with all this Google Juice is yet to be seen.

So head on over to Tag a Cloud and see if you can’t get some good free traffic generation going. I’d appreciate a little click love below:

An important part of evaluating a site is when (or if) a site was crawled (visited) by a search engine spider.

For example, if you are thinking of buying a site or taking a company on as a client, it’s important to know if the site has any chance of getting free, natural traffic from search engines. If the site has never been indexed or is so rarely visited that new content would take months to be indexed, then you may want to reconsider

Determine Last Spider Visit

To determine the most recent spider visit for a site, simply type “site:yoursitename.com” into the search box of the search engine you are testing. Most search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN, support this command. The search engine will display a list of all of the pages that it is aware of on that site. Each listed page will usually have a link that says “Cached” next to it. Click on “Cached”. There will be an information bar at the top of your browser that will say when the page was cached (unfortunately, Yahoo doesn’t display these dates).

Sometimes you will see the date each page was cached listed on the search engine results page, making your job much easier. The pages with dates displayed are usually the most recently crawled pages and were visited in the last 1-3 days.

By looking at the cache dates of each page, you will be able to see when the most recent spider visit was and the extent of the indexing it did. I usually check my home page, blog, and other high-page-rank pages first—they get indexed far more frequently than the rest of my site.

Check Crawling Reach and Frequency

One of your site evaluation criteria should be an evaluation of when a site was last visited by a search engine spider. Using the site command and cached dates, you can get an idea of how well and how frequently a site is crawled by the search engine spiders.

I have recently seen the influence of Google’s Jagger update at work on DiamondLime.com. There were three steps that occurred with my site:

The Jagger Sequence

1. Traffic Changes

   The first thing I noticed was a shift in traffic patterns for my site. I saw a sharp increase in traffic for most of the important keyword phrases relevant to my site (which makes sense, since I have been adding content regularly) and a slight decrease for a few terms (which I have left stagnant).

2. Only Supplemental Results

   It was scary when I typed in site:diamondlime.com one day to find that only 3 of my pages weren’t supplemental results or eliminated altogether—my home page, the Lime Blog, and my business page. I suspected it was only the site command that was inaccurate, though, because my traffic didn’t hiccup. My pages were still being served in Google’s results pages.

3. Updated Listing

   After a week or so of being in supplemental results limbo, my entire site was re-spidered and listed in Google again. My reported page rank has been updated, too.

Weathering the Storm

It looks like DiamondLime.com managed to weather the Jagger Storm intact. The important things, like traffic and being ranked for keyword phrases, survived or even improved. I attribute this success to the fact that I have done my best to build a reputable, white-hat, recommendation-abiding web site.

A curious thing that happened to DiamondLime that isn’t likely to happen to other sites is that the reindexing of my site happened during the 1 hour period it took for me to upgrade my site! Consequently, the titles of my pages were scrambled before I could adjust them after I upgraded Wordpress last weekend. I have missing spaces between post titles and the name of my blog (”» 2006 » JulyThe Lime Blog”). Hopefully it won’t take Google until another major update to reindex my site and correct these goofy page titles.

DMOZ is another name for the Open Directory Project, the largest, free, human-edited directory on the web. It is constructed and maintained by volunteers from all over the globe who make submissions and edits to the listings. As the largest directory, it provides listings and results as a help or starting point for many search engines, including Google, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape, and others. Go to BruceClay.com to see a graph of how central DMOZ is to search engine results.

Google Draws Results From DMOZ

Google, like other search engines, often uses the listings and descriptions from the ODP in its results. These results and descriptions can have a powerful effect on how effective your site’s search engine results are. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell DMOZ and Google what to say about your site? To write a description that accurately describes your site and entices visitors to come?

How to Submit a Site to DMOZ:

Luckily, you can tell Google and DMOZ how to portray your site. DMOZ is edited by humans, and so to get a listing in the ODP, you need to make the humans there aware of your site (which, if your site is new or small, may not be very likely). There is a link on most DMOZ category pages for suggesting sites and descriptions for those sites. Official guidelines for the DMOZ URL suggestion tool are here.

1. Go to the category that you feel fits your site best
2. If available, click the “suggest url” link
3. Enter the web address of your site
4. Give your “elevator pitch,” the concise, accurate summary of your site that you want DMOZ to display (Make sure your description is objective and doesn’t sound promotional)

Chances are, if you make it easy for them, the editors will simply use the information you gave them and give your site a good DMOZ listing.

What to Do About a Bad DMOZ Listing:

Sometimes the editors don’t understand your site and give you a poor or incorrect listing. Sometimes your site changes and your listing needs updating. You can do one of two things about these problems:

1. Update your listing. You can update your listing by going to the category where your site is listed and clicking the “update listing” link. Make sure to clearly show the error, short coming, or change that needs to be made in your DMOZ listing.
2. Use the NOODP meta tag on your site. The NOODP meta tag allows you to ask search engines to override or ignore the ODP listing that your site has in favor of content found on the pages of your site. Matt Cutts’ blog entry shows you how to use the NOODP meta tag.

DMOZ provides what is, for the most part, a valuable service. There are allegations that the directory is flawed, spammed, or worthless, but the editors are only human. Besides, flawed, spammy, or worthless, the ODP still has a strong influence on the web and you have the tools to influence what they say about you or to avoid ill effects from potential DMOZ problems. Use DMOZ submissions as one more edge in your effort to improve your rankings and marketing message on the Internet.