Traphic

100 Domains in the Network

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:25:13 +0000

I now own and manage over 100 domain names, and the quality is not bad for a portfolio of that size.

I will be auctioning or selling a bunch of these domains so look out for posts on this soon.

I own domains based around different verticals, for example, I have over 20 voucher code and coupons related domains which are perfect for new voucher site projects.

Reason for selling? Not enough time to follow up all the ideas I have, and though I’m an active domainer, I don’t really like squatting on a name for too long if I do not use it, so I feel it’s better to free them up and let someone else have a go.

I will post them up here before I list them on site such as AcornDomains or Sedo.

Google Keyword Tool

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:08:18 +0000

Probably the most popular free keyword tool available, the Google Keyword Tool is used by thousands of SEO’s mainly for basic groundwork Keyword Research. It’s a great way to get your initial lists of keywords together and some basic info on competition and search traffic levels.

Here’s the link to the new interface Keyword Tool

I still prefer the old Keyword Tool (this link will force the old tool to display)

Content Management with Drupal

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:56:56 +0000

Drupal is by far my favourite CMS. Although the learning curve is quite steep, once you understand how it works it really does power you with it’s amazing potential to run the largest of scaleable website, and being Open Source with a massive development following it stays on the bleeding edge of web technology.

I have used it for some 4 years now and use it to power our Drum and Bass music site and have learnt a whole lot of neat tricks in the process, probably more important is learning how to fix the system when any issues arise. Running Drupal to power a large site didn’t come without any stress, we needed to upgrade the server to high spec kit to have the processing power and memory to run smoothly, and caching was a must do.

I’m really just introducing Drupal here and will post some useful notes on what I found when using it over the past 4 years.

You can download Drupal to power your site over at drupal.org, I suggest you grab the 6.17 version until the new version 7 is fully supporting all modules.

Find Traphic on Twitter

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:46:13 +0000

Connect with us on Twitter, our username is traphic_london.

Follow this link to see our profile and to follow our tweets:

traphic_london on Twitter

8 Ways to Speed up Your Site for Google

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:15:52 +0000

There is a great post over at seomoz which gives some neat tips on optimising your site for Google’s Site Speed Algorithm. Use these methods to make your site load and run quicker, making Googlebot a very happy bot.

Enable Gzip Compression
Minify Javascript/CSS files
Use Content Distribution Network
Optimise your images
Use External Javascript/CSS
Avoid Excessive Redirects
Use Fewer Files

and here’s my extra tip:

Enable Caching modules such as memcached (Apache)

Here’s the original post which contains more info on implementing these ideas.

Google’s Social Shopping and Seller Ratings

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:57:27 +0000

Google recently introduced seller ratings to PPC ads so product reviews can be tagged and shown in display ads on the Search Network. As well as price information, titles and images, searchers can now find a 1 to 5 scale indicative of previous customer satisfaction reviews.

This is great for existing comparison sites, as they often already incorporate product reviews into the mix, though other sites may have to develop further to make use of this new PPC feature.

Only one thing to complain about, seller rating only apply to merchants with a total average of 4 stars so only the best merchants will benefit.

google seller ratings

Search leading the way in online spend – growth of 10.8% over last year

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:41:17 +0000

The spend for online ads in the U.S. will reach an estimated $25.1 billion in 2010, representing a growth of 10.8% over the last year with search being the single biggest category and social media marketing overtaking display media, according to a recent eMarketer report.

Read the full report on eMarketer.com, priced at $695 or more on the subject at searchenginewatch.

The Traphic Blog

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:58:39 +0000

Though I’d really love to, I don’t get much time to blog due to current workload which I don;t see easing up anytime soon, so keeping on top of a blog at this time will be a difficult thing to do. I will pop in now and then to post Search Optimisation and Marketing articles and news. I’ll also blog about Web Design and Development, talking about my favourite scripts, Drupal and WordPress and hopefully getting some real nice tips for you to better optimise your WordPress or Drupal site.

Thanks for visiting the site, drop me a comment if you find anything interesting here.

Best regards

Barrie Adams

Google updates search keyword tool including match type timesaver

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:50:04 +0000

I had a lovely surprise when logging into Google today and saw that the Google Keyword Tool has had a major update with improved integration into Adwords. Not only is the Dashboard a whole lot easier to use, it is much easier to use.

One of my favourite upgrades, although very simple improvement, is to the keyword match type so you can now simply tick a box to set your match type to broad, exact or phrase, whereas before you needed to input special characters which was time consuming.

Looks like this along with the Google Webmaster Central update is a major step in the right direction for SEOs to get more information from Google about how their websites are seen.