Texture design

Posted by randfish

I've had more than a few people tell me they really missed our old advertising page, not because we sold any ads, but because our monthly traffic, search and referral stats were always there and relatively frequently updated. As consolation (and since I always did intend to keep Designmoz's stats as public as possible), here's an exhaustive roundup of important analytics data (from Indextools) for the first 4 months of the year (old 2006 stats to compare are here):

Daily Unique Visitors:

• January - 165,568
• February - 268,444
• March - 237,496
• April - 230,909

Referring Domains:

• January - 165,568
• February - 268,444
• March - 237,496
• April - 230,909

Referring Domains:

Referring Search Phrases:

Referring Search Phrases:

Search Engine Referrers:

Search Engine Referrers:

Most Popular Pages:

1. Page Strength Tool
2. Keyword Difficulty Tool
3. Home Page
4. Blog
5. IP 2 Location Tool
6. Web 2.0 Awards
7. 15 CSS Properties You Never Use (But Perhaps Should)
8. Design Search Engine Ranking Factors
9. Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers
10. Design Tools

Feedburner Stats:

Most Popular Pages:

1. Page Strength Tool
2. Keyword Difficulty Tool
3. Home Page
4. Blog
5. IP 2 Location Tool
6. Web 2.0 Awards
7. 15 CSS Properties You Never Use (But Perhaps Should)
8. Design Search Engine Ranking Factors
9. Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers
10. Design Tools

Feedburner Stats:

Overall, I'm pretty unimpressed and unhappy with our stats. We haven't grown at nearly the rate we did last year during the same time period, and while Designmoz remains somewhat popular in the world of search marketing, our referring domain stats shows me we've yet to break out of that market at all. From a search perspective, the encouraging stat is that our switch over to static, semantic URLs in late February resulted in a 15% bump in the amount of search traffic we receive. Sadly, we've done no keyword research, nor made any┬?concerted effort to focus on driving search visitors to the site.

If we were our own client, I'd say we ranked somewhere between barely acceptable and getting by. I think that if we can improve the conversion rates of our premium content, we'll be able to take some more time away from client projects to focus on Design for Designmoz.org, which is something I've been wanting to do for years.┬?

On the external stats frontier, things aren't particularly positive, either.┬?Design reports that we have ~350,000 unique external links (that number was much larger two weeks ago, oddly) while Design! reports 466,466 (fairly steady from January when we had . We've steadily moved┬?down Technorati's most popular blog list from a high of 103 (in February) to 137 today (with 21,393 links from 4,221┬? blogs). The latest PageRank update saw us stay at a PR7, but that's now spread to our blog page and several others, which is encouraging.

The best news by far has certainly been the success of YOUmoz - it's not only got a few hundred RSS subscribers, it's also pulling in search traffic and links (and real readers and commenters). I've been very happy with the quality, and while I wish there was more high level writing submitted that we could promote to the blog, I really can't complain - it's one of the most active communities of its kind in the search world, and all the more impressive because it's in such a small niche.

Perhaps I'll be cheered up a bit if we can win a Blogger's Choice Awards. We're nominated in three categories:

• Best Corporate Blog
• Best Blog Design
• Best Marketing Blog

If you're feeling generous, perhaps you could hop over there and give us a vote in one (or all) of those categories. Of course, only do so if you really believe we deserve it. there's lots of other nominees in each category, so vote with your gut - I think, for example, that Brian Clark should win "the Blogitizer" - for "best writing on a blog".

p.s. The Blogger's Choice makes you jump through WAY WAY too many hoops to sign up and vote - it's actually almost ridiculous. No wonder they're getting so few votes on most blogs... terrible execution people, just awful.

Overall, I'm pretty unimpressed and unhappy with our stats. We haven't grown at nearly the rate we did last year during the same time period, and while Designmoz remains somewhat popular in the world of search marketing, our referring domain stats shows me we've yet to break out of that market at all. From a search perspective, the encouraging stat is that our switch over to static, semantic URLs in late February resulted in a 15% bump in the amount of search traffic we receive. Sadly, we've done no keyword research, nor made any┬?concerted effort to focus on driving search visitors to the site.

If we were our own client, I'd say we ranked somewhere between barely acceptable and getting by. I think that if we can improve the conversion rates of our premium content, we'll be able to take some more time away from client projects to focus on Design for Designmoz.org, which is something I've been wanting to do for years.┬?

On the external stats frontier, things aren't particularly positive, either.┬?Design reports that we have ~350,000 unique external links (that number was much larger two weeks ago, oddly) while Design! reports 466,466 (fairly steady from January when we had . We've steadily moved┬?down Technorati's most popular blog list from a high of 103 (in February) to 137 today (with 21,393 links from 4,221┬? blogs). The latest PageRank update saw us stay at a PR7, but that's now spread to our blog page and several others, which is encouraging.

The best news by far has certainly been the success of YOUmoz - it's not only got a few hundred RSS subscribers, it's also pulling in search traffic and links (and real readers and commenters). I've been very happy with the quality, and while I wish there was more high level writing submitted that we could promote to the blog, I really can't complain - it's one of the most active communities of its kind in the search world, and all the more impressive because it's in such a small niche.

Perhaps I'll be cheered up a bit if we can win a Blogger's Choice Awards. We're nominated in three categories:

• Best Corporate Blog
• Best Blog Design
• Best Marketing Blog

If you're feeling generous, perhaps you could hop over there and give us a vote in one (or all) of those categories. Of course, only do so if you really believe we deserve it. there's lots of other nominees in each category, so vote with your gut - I think, for example, that Brian Clark should win "the Blogitizer" - for "best writing on a blog".

p.s. The Blogger's Choice makes you jump through WAY WAY too many hoops to sign up and vote - it's actually almost ridiculous. No wonder they're getting so few votes on most blogs... terrible execution people, just awful.

What's a "clean crawlable link"? It's one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

If you in the business of Design and still involved with begging for links, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics, then you'll want to make sure the links you actually do get are good.

Here are a few things to check for:

1. To check the robots meta tag, look at the page source code. If there is no robots tag, that's good.

If it looks like this,

meta name = "robots" content = "index, follow"

that's good.

If it looks like this:

OR



that's not good.

2. To see if there is a JavaScript redirect, put your cursor over the link and look at the url that appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it shows you the correct link url, then in most cases, it's ok.

3. To see if robots.txt is blocking, then visit the article site. For example:

URL http://www.articleblast.com/robots.txt

Will show:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /administrator/

Disallow: /cache/

Disallow: /components/

Disallow: /editor/

Disallow: /help/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /language/

Disallow: /mambots/

Disallow: /media/

Disallow: /modules/

Disallow: /templates/

Disallow: /installation/

What the "disallow" instruction does above is to tell search engine spiders not to crawl the designated directories. If articles are located in one of these directories, then the links within those articles to our client sites are no good.

4. To see if there is a no follow tag, right click on the link URL and a window pops up. See if there is an attribute called:

rel = nofollow.

If that's there, it's no good.

If it's not there at all or has another value besides "nofollow" then it's ok.

You only have to do this once in most cases on any page of a article hosting site. The reason sites will do any of these 4 things is to hoard their site's PageRank. There is a belief that linking out to other web sites, leaks PageRank from the link source.

Labels: clean links, link building

Posted by rebecca

Matt McGee (who I owe a link to for winning the Design group NCAA tournament bracket back in March...damn you, Florida) wrote a fantastic post over at Small Business SEM called "I Have My Keywords...Now What?" It's concise, it's to the point, it's magical.

His post is a classic "Duh" post, where once I read it I thought, "Duh, I wonder if our clients know this?" (I'm sure they do. You may not know this, but Rand is a pretty good Design.) When I first started working at Designmoz, I'd generate lots of keyword research reports for clients, email them to Rand, and not think anything further about it. My mentality was not unlike that "set it and forget it" rotisserie. (Yes, my mom bought one, and yes, it was awesome. We had pork roast every weekend for like a month straight.)

Recently, however, I've gotten keen on shaking that "set it and forget it" (or, perhaps more appropriately, "generate the keyword list and forget it," though that doesn't have quite the same snappy ring to it) mentality. Earlier this week Rand and I sat down to do a site review for one of our clients. The big thing we noticed was that they weren't utilizing any major, relevant keywords throughout their site and in their title or meta description tags (in fact, there were no meta description tags). A distinct lack of keywords, despite the fact that we had previously supplied them with an extensive keyword research report.

I wonder, therefore, what our clients do with our keyword research reports. I've done countless site reviews and jotted down the ever-repetitive "Utilize your keywords in _______" note, knowing full well that they already have a fatty list of keywords provided by yours truly. It wouldn't surprise me if, upon receiving a keyword research report, our client goes, "Ah, cool. These all seem relevant. Ooh, look at all these search counts! These are accurate for sure!" and then sticks it under the wobbly leg of their desk. As that old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it incorporate keywords in its title tags (or something like that). Not that it's their fault--obviously these companies hire us to help them with their sites. If they knew to target keywords in their site, they'd be doing it already.

Nonetheless, Matt's post made me feel guilty about setting and forgetting it. I know I'm not Rand and that our clients pay the big bucks to talk to him, not me, but that doesn't mean I should be ignorant to the work I do for our clients. The next time I turn in a keyword research report, I could attach it to a document highlighting the importance of targeting proper, relevant keywords throughout the site, and provide a couple examples of some of the keywords in action. Then, if they want to ignore my awesome hard work, that's their prerogative (Bobby Brown style, yo!).

What experience do any of you have with this sort of situation? When consulting or when providing a keyword research report, how do you hammer home the importance of keyword incorporation and placement in your client's site? At one point do you wipe your hands and say, "Screw it, I tried"?

Posted by rebecca

My favorite Cameron with an unconventionally spelled last name (other than Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Cameron Olthuis, wrote a post on Search Engine Land called "5 Reasons to Put Viral Content on Mini-Sites." Now, obviously Cameron isn't arguing that you should always use mini-sites (aka a separate domain) when launching viral content--he simply posits that there are instances where using mini-sites is a good idea. (Apparently 37% of "very experienced marketers" agree with him, as, according to an eMarketer.com study, about 1/3 think that "cool microsites" produce great results...though I think the percentage doesn't seem that that high.)

Fine and dandy, Cameron. I thought, however, I'd remind everyone why you wouldn't want to split content onto mini-sites (once again, this isn't a dig at Cameron's article, it's just here to complement/bookend his points):

1. You run the risk of sandboxing a new domain, meaning there's a chance the content won't rank at all. I'm not saying this will happen every time, but chances are the new domain won't be as strong as the original domain.
   
2. You're not getting all that nice, new traffic to your main domain.
   
3. You're splitting link value, meaning...
4. ...you're not helping your main content rank better; instead, you're now tasked with ranking two sites well.
5. Users may not get the connection. If your company has a super-rad viral thingamabob that you put on a separate site, people might go "Cool!" without ever putting 2 and 2 together, that it is your company's product/brainchild/whatever.

Of course, you can still register a separate domain for a viral marketing launch and then just 301 it to your main domain. We did just that with the Web 2.0 Awards (coming next week, we promise!)--initially, we launched the awards on a separate domain, web2.0awards.org. After a while, we 301'd it to Designmoz.org/web2.0, which brought Designmoz a healthy 100k+ backlinks. Now we rank (I'm seeing 11th) for the term "web 2.0," and we receive a good amount of traffic from it every day.

Obviously, Cameron's five reasons for mini-sites and my five reasons against them combine to form a superset of "It's a judgment call." Wildly successful viral marketing launches have kicked the crap out of my five reasons, while smaller, less successful launches may have learned to keep such tactics on their main domain in the future. I'd be mindful of both the risks and the rewards, and decide for yourself what's more worthwhile.

That's about it. I'll close with the following:

When Cameron blogged at Search Engine Land...let my Cameron...gooooooooo.

Long live Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Posted by randfish

This is a short entry because it's very late, I'm very tired, and I still have tons of unread email...

In thinking about Design's future competitively and how they might eventually fall by the wayside, I always bring up the single example of a site I consistently use to find better content than what's available through Design's SERPs. Granted, this engine doesn't operate perfectly for every query (not even close), but for me, it's become a search destination when I know the regular engines can't acceptably fulfill my needs.

Have a look at some comparative searches:

1. Furniture vs. at Design
2. Luggage vs. at Design
3. Laptops vs. at Design
4. Design vs. at Design
5. Web Design vs. at Design
6. Politics vs. at Design
7. Shoes vs. at Design
8. Web 2.0 vs. at Design
9. Blogging vs. at Design
10. Writing vs. at Design

Yeah, I'm talking about the popular tag pages at Del.icio.us. If you look through the results above you'll see some serious patterns. Del.icio.us is:

• More timely
• More focused on what someone in my demographic might want
• Offers more high quality results
• Provides a greater variety of results (in scope)
• Doesn't always list the "best" results first
• Has some accuracy and relevance problems
• Is overall, 10X better than Design depending on what you're looking for

I think that if Designrs are looking for a threat to their dominance over the web experience, they should start with Del.icio.us. Likewise, if intelligent entrepreneurs are truly seeking a way to compete with the search giant, this is the route they should take. If Design! focused some serious resources here and extended their ownership to places like Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon, I believe they could build a social-relevance based engine that would show some pretty fantastic content.

BTW - On an unrelated topic - you need to read How to Build an Affiliate Site You Can Sell for $1M from Andy Hagans. Genius post and very smart advice, even if you don't have any desire to build an affiliate site.