The Agile Micro ISV Blog

I’m learning.

Like a lot of micro ISV‘ers, copywriting is not my strong point, but, I stumbled across an interesting way to boost traffic to the Home Document Manager blog. When I issue an update, which can be as frequently as once a week, I found I was making a series of posts with repetetive, uninspired titles – “Update Released,” “Minor Update Released” etc. Then, for one of my updates, I wrote a small piece explaining some of the issues with TWAIN. The post was entitled “Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet,” an obvious reference to Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West.”

Suddenly, instead of a dull and uninteresting nuggat about an update, this small, boring post, became the most popular post on the blog. The main traffic sources were people searching for the quote, so it wasn’t highly targetted traffic, but since these kinds of posts would seldom attract traffic anyway, untargetted traffic has to trump no traffic. It can’t hurt my Google standings either, since the post makes a reference to Kipling, as well as the TWAIN specification. The double entendre is an interesting way to get a free traffic boost. Take this post for example, I wonder if it will start ranking for the “Tales of The Unexpected” TV series??

The second unexpected traffic source came from a review I wrote about my new shredder. This too became the hottest post on the blog, and is still pulling in 3 times more traffic than any other post or page. This is different because it is, of course, pretty highly targetted traffic. I’ve gone on to publish a review of one of the Scansnap scanners to see if I can replicate the earlier success. I guess this goes back to one of the first principles of micro ISV blogging – blog about things your customers are interested in.

This SEO thing just keeps me guessing. After smugly realising how well this blog ranks for key search terms, I switched on the SEO Book plugin for Firefox, and quickly realised that this site has a page rank of zero, zilch, nada. I backed this up with a quick parse on the Website Grader, and yeah, zero page rank.

The Website Grader did give me some pointers though.

• No permanent redirect from agilemicroisv.com to www.agilemicroisv.com. I’ll have to look at this. An initial parse of GoDaddy suggests everything is as it should be.
• Page Rank = 0. Fail.
• Alexa rank of 5,877,627
    which is in the top 48.98% of all web sites. This seems pretty lame. Fail.
• Inbound links = 590.
• No entries in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory or ZoomInfo.

Website Grade = 67

Must try harder. I’ll report back when I’ve made the changes suggested. I’m curious to see the results.

I’m
not too worried about the Home Document Manager site at the minute,
simply because the site isn’t finished, and the software isn’t
finished.

It’s only recently that I’ve really taken a deep interest in SEO. I
took an interest mainly because I was concerned about how to design the
Home Document Manager website, and how to boost the traffic on the Ergo web site. But like the title says, it’s a funny old game this SEO lark.

I was browsing the visitor stats on this site today, and noticed something; this site ranks really well
for key search terms, in fact, it ranks much better than it really
should. I’m not just being modest, but this blog isn’t a patch on Patrick’s or Bob’s for example.

Check out the ego inflating rankings:

On many locale specific google domains, I’m top for isv blog, micro
isv, isv blogs etc. Weird. Yahoo has a particular liking for me. On
“micro isv”, there’s only Microsoft above me. Now if only I can convert
my magical lucky SEO juice into rankings for Home Document Manager and Ergo…