Today’s site snapshot is on Quality Traffic Supply. If you’re interested in getting your site reviewed, please contact me. QTS is a bulk traffic purchasing business - pay $90, get 20k visitors. Are these visitors quality, or even real? I’m having some difficulty telling, since there are no examples of sites that are part of this network, nor is there any way to join it. At 200 visitors per dollar, their contextual network prices decimate adSense.
But really, how much value can such cheap visitors have? If even a small percentage of those visitors convert, you might have a fantastic deal on your hands, but you know the old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
May 17th, 2007
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Today’s Site Snapshot is BroadbandSuppliers.co.uk. The first major problem is that there’s a whole lot of text on the page and very little organization. ISP’s are shown multiple times, and AOL is the number one offer shown. Now, I may be more into affiliate marketing then the target audience, but most people know AOL has a bad reputation, so why not put that as a secondary or tertiary offer and gain more credibility, or throw in a few ISPs that aren’t as well known and don’t obviously have referral prizes?
They do have some good articles, such as “How to Get Cheap Broadband” and “What is broadband?“, which is a good step to gaining the trust of a visitor, as well as decent link-bait to attract more links. As for their link profile, Yahoo! and Google show drastically different numbers - 30,300 to 200, meaning they have a lot low-value links, but this still puts them #4 for “cheap broadband” on the Google.co.uk search, which is pretty damn good. This site proves that a large quantity of low-value links are still useful in gaining good rankings.
April 30th, 2007
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Today, we’re starting a new feature: Site Snapshots. Basically, we’ll be looking at a site and critiquing it from an overall marketing and monetizing perspective, including general site design, linkage and SEO, navigation, as well as pointing out any unique assets this site may have or major flaws that may have been developed.
The first site in this set of features will be a language learning website. At first look, they seem to have adopted a friendly blue, slightly 2.0-ish theme. They miss the idea of 2.0 cleanliness though, and their front page is a little busy with a lot of extraneous information (recent clients, 6 step program that doesn’t immediately take you to it). Their menu has 12Â items on it, with 6 of them dropping down into an ~80 item submenu that goes past the bottom of the page, and is essentially replicated for each of the items. This could be condensed into a single search rather than 400+ menu items. Then they also have 4 additional menu options below this, giving the user literally hundreds of options to go through (475 internal links from this page alone - talk about spread out link love).
That’s a big mistake - you want to guide your visitors, especially if you’re selling a product. The less work they have to do, the better. The .co.uk version and .com version target appropriate audiences, but this separation of sites could be replaced by simple geo-targetting and they could then be melded together, creating for a consolidation of link value and content (each of these home pages has a PR of 5). An internal organization of pages would also be beneficial, as Google, Yahoo! and MSN (who index between 500 and 4000 of this sites pages), show mainly very specific pages as the highest ranking ones, and most have significant amounts of duplicate content.
Google only shows 73 backlinks, whereas Yahoo! shows 1190. This suggests that a lot of these links are low value - for higher organic search position, this site should focus on getting more prominent, high value links. This will also help their traffic as well.
The focus on the business market could be taken advantage of through linkbait to get large amounts of free advertising. Perhaps an article on “The 21 Biggest Language Snafus” would grab a lot of attention - such as when President Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner!” Rather than showing solidarity, he had just claimed he was jelly donut.
So the overall recommendations are: a reorganization of the navigation to make it easier for the user as well as consolidate multinational sites, an increase in marketing targeting high value links, and a humorous contentbait campaign to draw out the business crowd.
April 23rd, 2007
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