befuddled me? » Search Engines

Shop Codes top keywords

befuddle — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:23:08 +0000

Shop Codes is eighteen months old and below are the top search phrases that have attracted visitors to the site. This post was prompted as a search for “voucher codes” now returns Shop Codes in the middle of page one in Google. This is a promotion as the site has often been in eleventh place.

Shop Codes does not rely on advertising via Pay-Per-Click to generate traffic. Of the eighteen months, the site has been advertised on either Google or Yahoo for parts of nine of those months. The last PPC activity was two months ago on 5th June 2007.
Number one keyword

Feb-Mar 06 – discount codes

Apr-July 06 – tesco+voucher+codes

Aug-Oct 06 – discount codes

Nov-Dec 06 – merchant brand name X

Jan-Mar 07 – discount codes

Apr 07 – voucher codes

May 07- merchant brand name Z

June-Aug 07- voucher codes

Number one keyword discounting any PPC activity

Feb-Jul 06 tesco+voucher+codes

Aug 06 tesco voucher codes

Sep 06 microdirect voucher

Oct 06 tesco voucher codes

Nov-Dec 06 merchant brand name X

Jan 07 – merchant brand name Y

Feb 07 – voucher codes

Mar-May 07- merchant brand name Z

June-Aug 07- voucher codes

You’ll see that I’ve mentioned ‘Tesco’ and ‘MicroDirect’ but elsewhere I’ve listed “merchant brand name” “X,Y and Z”. I can’t really tell you what merchants they are, as they still feature very highly in the search results and are profitable to me.
I generated over £100,000 sales for ‘Merchant brand name X’ alone during the two Christmas months.

What can I tell from this picture?

Well, when I first launched the site I set out to rank highly for the term “voucher codes”. That has been achieved. It’s only been in more recent months that I’ve focussed on other related keywords and three word phrases.

Also, the four months where merchant X, Y and Z are listed were my most profitable. And this is one of the reasons why I suspended PPC activity. Rather than chasing visitors that typed in “voucher codes” into Google, I opted to be more direct and find those visitors who actually had a shop or product in mind too.

If you find that one of your sites merchant pages is the number one result in Google for a keyword or phrase, I recommend you avoid playing about with that content or page too much.

My “Merchant Brand Name Y” is highly featured as I put some original copy into my pages. If I remove that phrase now, then the page will no longer feature when it’s next indexed.

So, like me, keep a close eye on what keywords are being used to find your site. You may find some gems.

And if your top keyword phrase is “tesco voucher codes”. Well done. You can keep it

Shop Codes subscriber numbers reaches first milestone

befuddle — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:16:58 +0000

There are now over 100 subscribers to the Shop Codes newsletter, which is double the amount of traffic I received from Google organic search listings one day in June.
July was a record month for Shop Codes in terms of traffic and sales but June was a scare after the highs of May when my site was in the top three results for many profitable keyword searches.

Google only sent 52 unique visitors to my site on 21st June. This was a significant blow as the amount of traffic has an impact on the amount of profit.

I had a determination not to spend my May profits on Google Adwords, which does not represent value for money, so I looked at alternative methods of attracting visitors.

I first launched an RSS feed. I’ve opted for manually editing mine rather than just plugging it into a Word Press updated site. The result is that it includes a tailored paragraph that deliberately includes the discount code in the content. My traffic statistics show that this is published on other websites.

The RSS feed is powered by FeedBurner who have since been bought by Google.

I then chose to launch an email newsletter. This has been something I have been deliberating about for many months. I’d not launched one sooner as I wanted the design and content to be exactly right. However with traffic dipping to a low of 225 unique visitors a day I opted for the easiest solution. This was to have FeedBurner send an email based on my RSS content.

The result is each time I update my RSS that includes a new url, an email newsletter is sent out to subscribers. Potentially then an email could be sent daily but by monitoring what urls are included in the RSS I have a pretty good idea of when a newsletter will be published and what will be included.

Today I have 105 subscribers to my newsletter, which is double the amount of visitors Google sent me one day in June. That’s exactly what I set out to achieve two months ago.

“Please remove your site from Google, page one …”

befuddle — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:47:17 +0000

I was shocked to read this email today from a merchant, asking me to stop Google spidering my site. This blog includes posts of how I try to improve my rankings, so why when I get to the top of page one, after 39 days of using legitimate search engine optimisation, would I want anything else?

The email went as such:

“If you type {merchant X} in Google you get your site with the shop code on the first page and from checking my discount record it would appear that more people are using the code than the commission that I pay you. Can you install a robot txt to ensure that Google does not pick up your page for my site?”

If each merchant were to send me the same request and I did that, then I may as well stick to my nine-to-five.
Shop Codes is currently receiving record levels of traffic yet despite that, this particular merchant’s page is rarely visited.

It has only been viewed a total of 33 times by 25 unique visitors in the last 30 days, peaking with 5 views on 14th July 2007.

In the last 30 days, there have only been 15 visits from people searching with the keyword {merchant X}.

It appears the real issue is that people are using my site as a resource and I am not receiving commission for every person that goes on to purchase. I am fine with that as long as the majority of people still click the affiliate links. Many code sites have gone down the route of hiding the codes or framing the merchants sites. Going down this route just makes the code one further click away. Then, when the user clicks to reveal, the merchants site opens up in a new browser window. This may make me more money by having more cookies installed but I am satisfied with my current revenues, not to have to use this approach.

But to tell Google to ignore my site would be business suicide. Only last month all my pages were stuck in the Supplemental index or on page 37 and that was not a good place to be in.

39 days without Google love

befuddle — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:51:22 +0000

It’s just after midnight on 10th July 2007. I’ve another two hours before I go to bed as there’s something stopping me. It’s the new site visitors hungry for discount codes. I’ve not seen activity like this for 39 days.
I’d consider June a “quiet” month for Shop Codes. During May my traffic was climbing each day and daily sales were surpassing December figures consistently. Then this graph shows the sudden decline I experienced from 31st May 11:30pm.

So June dipped a lot but it was only a huge blow because I was used to better times. However, this happened to be a little wake up call. Now that the audience wasn’t there I knew I could “tinker” with the site and basically have nothing to lose.

Google didn’t stop delivering traffic to my site. It just didn’t link to many “shop” pages, instead it was just happy to send me people to my home page.

So the traffic is back (maybe another 30 days?) and one or more of these beliefs and actions helped it along the way …

FIX 1: Add a search box to the home page.

Before I could please the search engines I had to take care of the visitors. I previously didn’t have a search on my site as I want people to navigate past related items, click links and not go for the easy option. With a search they may not see related offers.

FIX 2: Change page titles.

I’d already gotten into the habit of producing dynamic page titles dependant on the content. If I didn’t have a code say for Argos, I wouldn’t say I had in the titles or other meta data. Each time I add a new offer to the page, the page title reflects the new offer. And if the search engine is saying that my site is offering a June offer but it’s now July’s offer. That’s a bad reflection on their part and not my site. They just need to come and spider a bit more frequently.

FIX 3. Re-write all urls.

I re-wrote all my urls so that they were consistent. I used to serve the same pages at different urls so the keywords within them would be highlighted in the search result pages. This resulted in duplicate content and unintentional spidering and lots of pages going straight into the supplemental index.

FIX 4. Remove distractions.

I had a Wordpress version of my site which was only a few months old. It was effectively a duplicate copy but without the heavy images and a better url structure. When my Shop Codes traffic dipped, it wasn’t a surprise to see that one of my major competitor sites, happened to be myself. So rather go with that one, I killed it, albeit not totally intentionally.

FIX 5. Grab that tail
Once my site was taking its shape it was time to look at the content on the pages. I’ve decided to target three keyword phrases for each merchant I promote. As an example for Petmeds, I am explicitly looking to tap the market of users searching for “Petmeds Coupon Code”.

FIX 6. Use the meta tools to be descriptive
My targeted keywords were moved to the front of the page titles and repeated in the description. I’m a firm believer that sites that stuff their descriptions with repeated keywords will soon fall from grace. Look again at the Petmeds example above. The page title and description say exactly what is on the page. OK, I may not receive visitors searching for “Petmeds voucher code” but don’t bet against it. Simplicity wins. On that note, one of my next tasks is to make sure all pages include no more than five keywords.

FIX 7. Diversify.

I’ve now got an RSS feed and a newsletter that goes out every other day with 50 subscribers. That’s approximately one new sign-up per day. In both cases the content is being pushed to different audiences. My codes are syndicated on other sites and with email, subscribers can browse at their leisure.

FIX 8. Add more distractions.

Knowing that my Wordpress blog was doing well for itself on another domain, I brought it ‘inside’. Some of these new pages were quickly indexed and started ranking higher than the ‘originals’ which were in the Supplemental.

FIX 9. Truly believe content is king.

With unique content or a unique spin on the same content, a site will stand out. So I continued to press for new exclusive codes and continued to update the regular offers long into the night, despite knowing not so many people would get to see the information. Once the content is not updated then the search engines have a right not to visit.

kerching – I’ve got a googlewhack

befuddle — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:44:26 +0000

People are searching for something this very minute but I can’t tell you what it is! And I can’t tell you because this has happened twice before and made me a lot of money.

If you type what they’re searching for into Google.com or co.uk, my site returns as the number one result. Not only that, it is the only result displayed!

Wikipedia: “A Googlewhack is “a search query consisting of two words, that returns a single result.” OK, it’s not two words. It’s one word or at least one phrase.

The last time this happened I made £750 selling £5,000 worth of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts.

The previous time I made £6,000 commission selling £38,000 worth of products for a catalogue company, which I won’t name as history may repeat itself.

Today’s item is a new one. It’s the most used keyword to access my site today. The only thing not in my favour is that the landing page is not necessarily the page I’d want them to visit. So I’ve just had to reshuffle a text link and a creative or two to make it perfectly clear where the user should be.

The first sales are coming in. Whilst I’m not expecting £6k for this one, I’m eager to see if it can get to “Charles Tyrwhitt” levels.

The latest fad: Tagclouds

befuddle — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:08:03 +0000

I like to play with the latest gimmicks and so from today I’ve introduced tag clouds to my site to display merchants top ten products.
So here’s what I’ve produced for the BBC Shop, as a visual alternative to displaying graphics and lots of text.

I actually think the above will draw some benefit to my pages. All it is, is a list of keywords presented in different sizes and presented in no particular order.

The important thing though is “keywords“. Before I introduced this cloud I had no mention of “doctor who series 3 dvd” on my site at all. I now do and those words will now be picked up by the search engines.

Yes, I could just list the same keywords and deeplink them directly into the product pages but where’s the fun in that?

Results 361 – 370 of about 132,000 for dixons discount code.

befuddle — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:49:14 +0000

My “Dixons discount code” page ranks on page 37 of Google for the search term “dixons discount code”. My link is surrounded by familiar affiliate sites. The site is at number 366. Now I’ve visited some of those 365 sites above. I own the domain ShopCodes.co.uk, so I just had to visit www.shopcodes.org who are listed on page 33. Now come on, that site is a joke.

I’m fed up with the deal the Google hand is playing me at the moment. May 2007 was a record month for Shop Codes and I was making hundreds of pounds of commission each and every day. Conversions were at 20% and it felt like Christmas.

Then at 11:30pm 31st May, I saw that my traffic had dipped. I’ve been here before and I knew June was going to be a tough month.

So this is where we’re at now. I’m receiving little Google traffic as my pages are stuck on page 37 of the results.

hold the Dixons page up as an example. I used a ‘SEO TESTER’ tool at InstantPosition to see what was wrong with the page. It scored an excellent 37 out of 40.

“Your server settings are excellent.”

“Your page title reflects high relevance to your keyword.”

“Your keyword density is good.”

There’s obviously something up – but whatever it is, Google didn’t mind last month!

Word de-Press-ed

befuddle — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 17:28:53 +0000

“Download the new version!” it shouted. And then one hour later my website was gone…

I lost one of my WordPress websites this morning when I upgraded it. My site www.1234codes.co.uk [now redirecting elsewhere] was beginning to appear on page one of some Google queries and as a result was receiving a share of new unique visitors each day. So I thought I’d update it for the first time since its February launch as most of the content was dated.

So after spending Saturday pruning the content and uploading a few new offers, my plan for Sunday was to find a new theme for it.

On my travels though, I saw that WordPress 2.2 (”The latest stable release”) was available to download. The upgrade pages couldn’t stress any more that you needed to backup the database. So I did. More than once.

Then I uploaded the software via my hosting company Servage. Clicking two little links “Autoinstaller” and “install” ruined everything. All the content had gone. No problem I thought, I’ve got backups.

However, when I tried to import them it was reporting MySQL errors at me. And that’s where the WordPress site left me. “Support is closed for the weekend.”

So I’ve 301 redirected the site to my main site and for the foreseeable future 1234codes is closed for business.

That website only ever was an experiment to see how the search engines would treat it. So I have learned something at least. Don’t ever upgrade, be happy with what you’ve got!

Behave yourself Google!

befuddle — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:37:51 +0000

Within half an hour of creating a new page, which includes an exclusive coupon code, Google indexed it and subsequently dropped it to its Supplemental index. Half an hour! Behave yourself Google!
Give me a break. At that speed, I don’t see why I should create any new content for you to spider.

The Truffle Shuffle page in question has a cached time stamp of “15th May 2007 09:08am” . I sent an email to Jess at affiliateprogramadvice.com only minutes earlier “May 15, 2007 8:42 AM”, saying the page was now live.

So, one good thing. Google indexed the page within minutes of it going live. But take a breath Google, let that twenty six minutes old page try and establish some history before you junk it.

I know my visitors appreciate the page as I made my first sale for Truffle Shuffle at 17/05/2007 14:30:53 according to Affiliate Window. I’d like more of your huge traffic to be offered the 10% discount. Now I’ll just have to keep that exclusive code, exclusive to my own visitors.

Google Checkout – a success a month on

befuddle — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:46:37 +0000

One month after the launch of Google Checkout, I am directly benefitting as an affiliate.

Four weeks ago I wrote a post on A4uforum saying how the new Google Checkout was not tracking affiliate sales. The post kicked off an interesting and animated discussion.

In the last couple of weeks though, I noticed a steady shift of consumer interest. My traffic analytics showed I had a healthy set of visitors looking for “Google checkout shops” via Google and landing on my site. So I thought I may as well push it far as I could.
Last week I’d gone as far as building a dedicated page showcasing these shops that had the £10 bonus and that also had an affiliate scheme.

In the last few days I’ve made some “Party Delights” sales and I wouldn’t have even signed up to that programme if it wasn’t for GC.

I’ve also made a few Findmeagift sales. Theirs is a particularly good offer as you save £20 if you use the discount code as well. Before GC, I made few sales despite promoting them prominently across the Shop Codes site.

Elsewhere, I managed to get the Bedworld page out of the Google supplemental index by including it on this page.

So, all in all I’ve made a handful of sales that I wouldn’t have made without promoting Google’s £10 bonus.

What a bonus!