I was very excited to find out, however, that Google actually started to pass along this information in their referral URL parameters a little over a year ago. The URL format they said they would start using in their post announcing the change looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

so each of the URL parameters are:

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The “cd” parameter is the one that shows the rank position of the link the visitor used to get to your site.

This information is very useful not only because it saves time in having to check rankings yourself, but it actually tells you the exact position that the given visitor saw. One drawback to rank checkers or just manually checking a rank is that you can never be completely sure if the rank you get reported back is what actual visitors to your site experienced because different data centers could be presenting different results and with Google personalized search any given searcher’s SERPs could look different as well. So not only is the process simplified by getting this piece of information from the refferer URL, but the data you are getting is much more accurate than from scraping or manually checking.

Alas, it appears that Google doesn’t provide this information for every visitor. Shortly after Google’s post on the subject Omniture reported that this data was only shown for US searches and was currently impacting only about 10% of all searches. I think now, a year later, Google may be showing it more often but from my experience it is still a minority of searches.

Once I start to look closer to the data I’m receiving I’ll be posting more exact numbers on this along with other interesting data I’ve been collecting.

A common mistake I see among internet marketers is that they think that since they got two different results for two different campaigns, then in the long run those result will hold true, and they assume that the “winner” at that moment will be the true “winner” in the long run. I don’t blame marketers who make that mistake though, I have found that in general most people are clueless when it comes to Statistics. I am amazed at how often I see statistical fallacies used in the media from what are supposedly reputable sources. For an interesting read on this topic and a good introduction to statistics I recommend the book How to Lie with Statistics.

A video offering tips on how to install and use SEO for Firefox

8 other short SEO videos yesterday, and uploaded them to YouTube here

By the way, I got a chance to meet Aaron at a conference here in the Philippines. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, but he seems like a really nice guy.

SEO Dark Lord – 92%

Are you an SEO Expert?

The Quiz was pretty challenging and I learned a few new things from taking it such as the existence of the robots-nocontent tag and the most popular search engine in various countries. I’m sure even if you are an SEO expert you’ll have hard time answering some of the questions in this quiz. If you take the test please share your thoughts and results.

Your blog is the product of your passion and creative imagination. However, with the number of blogs being born everyday your hard work will be futile if only the search engine spiders will notice your new blog. Yeah, you can do seo and link building so you can drive search traffic to your blog, but what’s the use of this sudden flow of visitors if you can’t keep them on your site? Is there a reason that your first time visitors stay or keep returning to your blog? Will they value your blog just by seeing it for the first time? Whatever your response, your goal is the same as mine – to make your first time visitors return to your blog. So what shall we do then?

1. Be the first to blog something different in your niche

In my niche, two blogs just started in January 2007, and December 2006. I believe the bloggers are not even familiar with Search Engine Optimization but their blogs now having thousands of visitors everyday. Their secret? They are the first blogs to offer something new for the readers in our niche — a blog that specifically offers English episode summaries of dramas currently airing on Korean channels, and an updated Korean entertainment blog in English.

There are actually fans posting episode summaries in forums, and there are official Korean entertainment-news websites, but blogging these topics offers a different experience for the fans. Lately, I have seen a few blogs offering episode summaries like Dramabeans.com but they have a weak readership. Dramabeans is the first to blog on this topic.

So if you want to own a number of returning visitors in your blog, offer something new and different. Be the leader in your niche. Create a buzz. Being a leader will not be hard if you are really passionate about that something you want to blog about. Observe forums, and if you will find resources. Just remember the times when you were searching for a certain topic online and you got frustrated because you didn’t find the thing you wanted. Just be the first to blog about that topic, and you will surely get a community of returning readers.

2. If there is an existing blog on a subject create a new category or be the opposite

Don’t attempt to compete with existing bloggers in your niche by just trying to copy them and be “better” because readers will likely prefer the blogs they have loved first. Instead, be the opposite, the alternative, or be the first in a new category.

Since dramabeans.com is focused on summarizing dramas that are currently airing, a good category to be the first in could be making episode summaries of old dramas. For sure, there are fans out there who will be interested, especially if they can’t afford to buy old Korean drama DVD’s now, or just want to have ideas on what old drama to watch next.

Also there are existing sites and blogs that offer Romanized Original Soundtrack lyrics, just as mine blog, but I am the first to post lyrics with youtube videos. Visitors will stay longer on my site because they can sing while the music plays in the videos, or just watch the videos.

3. Use a catchy domain name, title and tagline

Why do you need a catchy domain name? If your first time visitors like your site, your domain name and blog title may be one of first things they look for, followed by your tagline. If your domain name and title are catchy, it can become a well known brand name in your niche. Try to make your domain name and title simple yet creative. The words in your tagline will be the back up if visitors can’t remember your domain name on their next visit. You will be surprise how many returning visitors start typing your domain name or blog title together with the topic they are looking for in the search engines in order to find your site again. Also, a tagline will make you and your visitors one because they can associate their selves to you. If it is a professional blog, sound professional, too. Just be sure that your domain name and tagline doesn’t sound the same as existing blogs. It happened to me, and I changed my tagline immediately. Good thing too, because as a result I have coined a word – the K-Addicts, referring to Korean Addicts.

Stand out in your niche!

4. Make effective and search engine friendly headlines for your posts

Well, what’s the use of being the first to blog something different, and having a catchy domain name, title and tagline if you are not visible in the search engines? You still need to exert more effort to get some search traffic. After submitting your url to directories and getting link through other methods, next thing is to make sure that the titles of your posts describe clearly what your posts is all about, put keywords in it – keywords that readers in your niche use. This is not a personal blog. Your blog is about your readers, your visitors.

5. Make sure your blog can be easily navigated

Personally, when I visit a site that does not offer me to view their previous posts, I often just leave the blog even though I like the post I first saw on the blog. Since I don’t want my visitors to have that same experience, I make sure my blog has a simple navigation.

Aside from putting the widgets for Top Posts, and Recent Posts, I created a tabed menu of categorized list pages of my posts. Each tab is a list of related posts. So, I have a tab for lyrics posts, for drama related posts, for movie related posts, etc. Doing this, I am sure that posts that are rarely viewed now have the chance to be noticed by visitors staying on my blog longer. Be sure to update the category pages once there is a new post for a certain list.

If you cannot simply categorized your posts or are lazy to update such list, then offer a search box in your blog.

6. Update your blog regularly

Update not just for the search engines but also for your visitors. Once first time visitors like your site, bookmark it, or subscribe to your feed, this means that they want to read more posts from you. I’m sure you’ll never run out of topics to blog about if what your blogging about is really your interest. If you cannot update your blog daily, twice or thrice a week will work. Just make sure you have new posts on a at least semi-regular basis.

There are some blogs that need to be updated almost daily, though. This is because they have to be committed to what their returning visitors expect from them.

Dramabeans.com really requires a daily update since the summary episodes are the current shows in Korea. It is like watching an episode everyday on TV. Popseoul.com, on the other hand is about the latest news about Korean celebrities.

So, also update according to what you offer in your blog, and be faithful to your tagline especially if you claim to be the latest.

7. Be visible! Stay connected.

Respond to comments and requests. Don’t be snobbish. Let your visitors feel they are important to you. If someone asks you a question, respond to it as soon as you can. If you can’t answer their requests, just say no, and tell them your reason.

Offer an e-mail where your readers can contact you aside from your blog, or add you in social networking sites. Visitors who are adding you in their friends list in Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Multiply, etc. can be your future contacts in your niche. You might need them someday.

In October of last year, I got hooked on watching Korean Dramas and Movies, and last April I decided to put up a blog dedicated to my obsession. I had managed a friendster blog for two years, but it was a personal blog, and I knew only a few of my friends would be interested reading my posts on my current obsession. So I decided to sign up for a blog in Wordpress.com and started blogging April 7th, 2007.

From a meager start of just 5 page views per day, KreahCraze.Wordpress.Com started having 50, 100, 1000, and eventually up to an average of 2500 page views a day. This was all before moving to my own paid web-hosting service. I even got around 3,500 page views a few days before I moved out of worpdress.com. This high traffic made me decide to monetize my blog. Wordpress.com has a policy of forbidding ads on their free hosted blogs, so in order to monetize my blog but also not lose a large amount of traffic, Chris and I came up with a plan last July to slowly migrate away from wordpress.com to my own hosting. I still have lost a lot of traffic(around 1,000 pageviews per day), but I am now making money with my blog, which I could have never done while still using wordpress’s free hosting.

I expected her traffic to drop a little, so there was no surprises there. I think this may have been minimized if we had done some more linkbuilding early on. From now on we are going to do link building to try to gain back any search engine ranking we have lost.

LINKS

Right now, it is almost two weeks after the switch, and I am trying to get back the traffic I have lost. Chris suggested link building. Well…the age of most of my visitors range from 12 to 30 years old, and I guess only a few of them would mind linking my site, so I really have to work on getting natural links or putting up the links on my own.

Good thing, though, I am still being redirected by wordpress because I haven’t deleted my blog, even though I changed my domain name to Kreah-Craze.com.

Wordpress.com maintaining our redirect from the old domain to the new one after we had started hosting the blog with another host was a pleasant surprise. I wouldn’t count on it lasting, but we are grateful as long as it is still up.

THEME and LAYOUT

I was bored with my old theme so when we made the switch I changed my theme. Aside from having only a few backlinks, I am thinking that the current theme and lay-out for my blog caused my visitors to move away, but Chris didn’t agree on this matter because my direct traffic is doing fine. Only the search engine traffic is declining. He also noticed that my bounce rate is doing well too. I guess I have to get my visitors’ opinion, or give them time to get used to the new theme. The new theme I chose works better with Firefox than with Internet Explorer.

ADSENSE

Monetizing my blog was the big reason I moved away from Wordpress.com. In the first week, it averaged around 3 dollars per day but now the revenue from the ads barely reaches a dollar per day. I am also disappointed that the Google ads appearing in the site seemed uninteresting to click on. I installed the Adsense for referrals but the products I chose are not appearing in the site after installing the code. Is this because there are ads that will not appear on a certain country? I chose any country on the options though.

So now, I am applying for Affiliate Programs to monetize my blog.

I think the drop in adsense earnings after the first week could be due to the fact that we added too many ad blocs and thus increased the amount of low paying ads that would show up. I could be wrong though. There is still a lot I think we could do to optimize adsense earnings, and I don’t think it would be too hard to start earning around $5 per day in a short period of time, by working on both earning more per visitor and increasing the amount of visitors to the site. There are also many things we can do to further monetize the site such as sell text link ads, blogger reviews, and even banner ads, in the future.

ERRORS

There were errors after moving out Wordpress.com

1. CDATA error – I really freaked out when the author’s name in comments does not appear, and the comments in Pages were totally gone. At the time of the switch, I had 877 comments. I asked Chris to work on it, after finding the solution to this problem. But Chris seemed to be busy so I ended up manually editing 877 CDATA entries.

Yes, I admit I am busy/lazy. Sorry.

2. Youtube Videos and Slideshows – I used youtube videos in most of my posts, like 100 out of 180 posts I had before the switch. And seeing the code instead of the video itself also freaked me out. Well, Chris easily solved this. I don’t know though what he did but good job. At least, now I know that the codes that I am using in Wordpress.com do not apply if another hosting provider is hosting your blog.

And now, I can easily embed javascripts in my posts. Yehey! (Well, this statement doesn’t have anything to do with the error.)

I just did a find and replace in notepad to replace the old code in every instance with the appropriate new code. It was a little time consuming since every instance of a youtube video had a ] which had to be replaced by some code, but not every ] was an instance of a video, but it was a lot more efficient that editing every instance by hand.

3. Korean / Hangul / Asian Fonts – Aside from posting lyrics that are Romanized (from Korean Characters to Roman Letters), I also put the original lyrics in the few posts I had. Sadly, Korean Characters or any language that doesn’t have Roman letters, do not appear correctly in the blog. These characters are replaced with question marks. According to my research, this has something to do with the ‘encoding for pages and feeds’, and specifically the wp-config.php file.

PLUG-INS

I don’t have to worry about Plug-ins in Wordpress.com but I want to install plug-ins though like Sociable and Top Commentator plug-ins.

At first, I thought installing the plug-ins was easy, like just putting some code in text widgets or widgets will be readily available after activation. But I realized it wasn’t. Some plug-in codes need to be installed using the theme editor. It is still a good thing because I am learning CSS slowly. All I have to do, I guess, is to apply logic. There are instructions I can follow, and I can do the “trial and error” method until I succeed. Right?

Kreah has done quit a bit of installing plugins and editing her theme without my help. I am proud of her.

1. Buy a new domain (kreah-craze.com).

Cost: $8/yr.

Although Wordpress allows you to buy a domain through their site we decided to go with GoDaddy since we want to be eventually completely independent from wordpress.com.

2. Buy Domain Mapping from Within The Existing Wordpress Account

Cost: $10/yr.

This feature allows you to re-direct your existing traffic going to your wordpress.com blog to your own domain. So all traffic going to http://blog.wordpress.com/post/ will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/post/. At this point the blog is still technically hosted by Wordpress, but since the traffic is redirected using a 301 redirect to the new domain the search engines should recognize that the blog has moved permanently and will eventually update their index to list the new domain instead of the old one.

3. Build Links to and Promote the New Domain

Cost: It’s up to you. In our case very little.

By building links to the new domain we will help the search engines recognize and index the new domain and hopefully reclaim any loss in search engine ranking we may experience due to the switch. We will tell existing readers to update their bookmarks, and notify anyone linking to the old domain to update their links to point to the new domain. We want to get as much traffic as possible going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain.

4. Move the Blog to its Own Hosting Independent of Wordpress.com, Run on an Independent Installation of Wordpress (downloadable at wordpress.org), and Add Ads

Cost: In our case $0 since we are just adding the domain to my existing hosting account, which allows unlimited domains. However, costs for those starting with nothing can range from a couple dollars per month up. I use HostMonster for hosting.

Once the search engines have indexed the new domain, and a significant amount of the blog’s traffic is going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain we will cut all ties with the old domain and move the content of the blog to its own installation of wordpress on a separate hosting account. The reason this step is necessary is because up to this point the blog has still been hosted for free by wordpress.com, so the ban on ads still applied. To my knowledge you can only use the domain mapping feature as long as you are still hosting your blog on wordpress.com. When you move to your own hosting you are on your own and can no longer redirect the old domain to the new one. However, once we move to our own installation and hosting we can add ads and start monetizing the blog, which was the point to doing all this in the first place.

Additional Notes:

• When moving from an old domain to a new one using a 301 redirect you would usually keep the redirect in place permanently. However in this case that is not possible since we need to be independent of wordpress.com in order to add ads to the blog. If you were to do the switch also I would recommend waiting as long as possible before taking the last step and moving to your own wordpress installation so that more of your traffic is going directly to the new domain. Any traffic still going through the old domain when you make the switch to your own hosted installation will be lost.
• We will most likely lose some traffic no matter what when you finally do move to your own installation because there are existing links out there pointing to the old domain that will no longer be redirected, we will no longer receive traffic from wordpress.com, and we will likely experience a drop in search engine rankings. Hopefully we will build up enough traffic going directly to the new domain that this loss in traffic will be fairly insignificant.
• We are likely to lose some search engine rankings during this process because your old blog is hosted on wordpress.com which is already an established, trusted domain, and your new domain will initially be given less trust by the search engines. We can overcome this in time by promoting and building links to the new domain.
• If you were to do this switch and have an existing feedburner account it will be fairly easy to switch the feed to the new domain from within feedburner. However, if you are just using the default wordpress feed I would recommend start using a feedburner feed as soon as possible and encourage existing wordpress feed subscribers to switch to the new feedburner feed so you can take them with you to your new domain. Once you make the switch to your new domain all your previous wordpress subscribers will be lost.
• I have never actually done this before so I am not completely sure how it will all turn out. I will post an update when the entire process is complete and maybe a few updates in between. I hope for the best.

Update Aug. 27th, 2007: Kreah and I have written an update of this project at http://www.chrissandberg.com/an-update-on-switching-away-from-wordpresscoms-free-hosting/

Could you explain Latent Semantic Indexing and similar technologies and their implications to SEO? What strategies and tactics would be most effective given that search engines are using these technologies in their algorithms?

Anyone else who would also like to share their own response to these questions please feel free to do so in the comments below or in a blog post of your own. Thanks.

A few useful application of RankPulse:

• Monitor the RankPulse Index, which represents the number of positions websites moved within the top ten for a particular keyword among the 1000 keywords tracked. A noticeable increase in this index could be the result of a significant change in Google’s algorithm.
• Get a glimpse of the relative volatility in rankings for a given keyword by analyzing the ranking history of the sites listed for that keyword.
• Track the keywords for which any give site is ranking. Just going to http://www.rankpulse.com/www.anydomain.com, will give you a list of all the keywords for which the given domain has had a ranking for any of the keywords that RankPulse tracks.

This site would be a lot more useful if they tracked more keywords, but even with just 1,000 keywords the site provides a lot of valuable information and is very interesting to browse.