Heatmaps are an absolutely critical tool for understanding how users interact with your site. Small changes to a site can make a big difference and heatmaps are one of the tools that can provide useful visual data to understand how effective your design really is. Last week we were analyzing the new design of Kayaking.org that we launched later in 2011 to understand how well it was working. We’ve seen some incredible results from this design but still some areas that definitely need improvement.

So let’s take a look at the heatmap and go through the good, the bad, and the ugly:

(Click image to see full size)

So first, let’s start with what was working. Based on data from the previous version of Kayaking.org we found that the most popular portion of our site was information about choosing a kayak. To maximize our impact based on this information we reached-out to a professional kayaker to put-together a really solid article about choosing a kayak and we put it at the very top of the sidebar. As you can see from the Heatmap it’s definitely getting a lot of attention and it has made a nice impact on the average time a user spends on our site.

Our new booking engine is also seeing some good traction and the heatmap show the attention this gets. Looking at the sidebar and the top navigation you can also see which categories are the most important and we’ve worked hard to get our most popular topics above-the-fold, but we’re always tuning!

Okay, that’s the good, now for the bad. With the relaunch we really wanted to highlight a new central slider that we hoped would feature some of the most popular things visitors were looking for. Unfortunately, looking at the data behind the heatmap, the slider only receives 5% of the clicks. The “How To Choose A Kayak” article is actually getting more than double the slider with 11% of the total clicks. When we see something like this, we tune!

So last week we made several changes to the central slider. A lot of the tuning we do is based on some of the great insight provided in Tim Ash’s book – Landing Page Optimization, as well as some great blogs, and things I’ve learned at conferences like Affiliate Summit. There were a few things wrong with this slider so in tuning we made a few key changes:

1. Add bright, distinct buttons that grab the users attention – before the tiny red button at the top didn’t really capture your eye and it blended in a bit too much with the image. We replaced this button with electric blue buttons accented by a feathered white background so they really pop.
2. Change The Slides Based On Current User Behavior – we know choosing a kayak is big, but we also wanted to add more shopping-related options as this area has been a growing revenue source for our site. One of the most popular products we’ve ever sold through the site is the Go Pro HD Hero 2 which is an awesome waterproof HD cam that is very popular in the kayaking community. Finally, we have over 1,600 fans on Facebook and the interactivity we get is phenomenal, so it felt important to feature this as one of the main slides.
3. Provide Special Offers When Possible – people like deals and exclusive offers, by adding coupon codes and discounts on the slides we are able to give people more of a reason to click and find-out more.

The new slider has been up for about a week and I’m excited to say that this central slider now receives 14.6% of the clicks, almost a 3x increase from before. Of course this process doesn’t end, it continues all year long. The more you can optimize your sites to deliver what your user is looking for, the better brand loyalty you will get, and the more conversions and revenue you will generate. We sold a $219 piece of kayaking gear from the first slide just two days after making the change so along with more interactivity we’re already seeing it generate some money.

In 2012 Kayaking.org hit the first page of Google for the insanely high search-volume term “kayak” which has driven over 1.8 million impressions on Google just this year driving thousands of new visitors to the site to start-out the year. The more visitors, the more data we get and the quicker we can tune the site and optimize the flow. So for any of the Domain Investors out there that have developed their domains and want to take it to the next level, give heapmaps a try, you’ll be surprised what our visitors can teach you about your site!

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Oh and if you want to know what software I use for heatmaps it’s called CrazyEgg and it is easy to setup and very affordable. This isn’t an affiliate link, it’s the software I use myself and highly recommend for anyone that wants to dive-into the world of heatmaps.

It’s always exciting when good SEO makes great things happen. When you’re building a brand, especially in a competitive niche, SEO can sometimes seem like a never-ending process. However, if you’re patient enough to take the time to do it right, it is absolutely possible to rank well for very competitive terms. Of course, it’s not free and it’s often a combination of the time and money that scare most people away from targeting higher-volume terms.

Most of the brands that we build focus on niches with relatively low search volume and competition. This is the low-hanging fruit I’ve been going after since 2008 and makes up the bread-and-butter of our business. Still, we have some major sites in niches with a lot of competition, one of which is our kayaking brand – Kayaking.org. We spent a lot of time and money getting the site ranked for “Kayaking” which was instrumental for driving traffic to the site in 2011. Now, I’m excited to say that we’ve recently hit the first page of Google for the term – “Kayak” which has been bringing-in north of 100,000 impressions on Google every day.

Before you get too overly excited please understand that these are impressions on Google, which means the number of times on Google that somebody sees our site within the results. Clicks are always significantly lower than impressions but at this level we are seeing a nice increase in visitors thanks to our new ranking for this term. It’s always fun to look at the Google Webmaster Tools Data to see how your impressions changed the day you start ranking well for a specific term (according to Google’s TOS I cannot publicly show clicks so this data has been removed from the chart):

As you can see, from 1/4 – 1/6 the number of impressions coming from Google Skyrocketed. While it might look like a flat line before, this flat line was representing between 1,000 – 1,500 impressions daily, but the jump makes the old numbers look like nothing in comparison! This year we are targeting four total terms in the niche and as we rank well for each term we will bring in a whole new stream of visitors to our site.

In my upcoming newsletter I will share with all my readers exactly what I did to rank well for this term, so if you haven’t subscribed, make sure to sign-up now! Of course I’ll continue to keep all of my blog readers updated as the year goes on, but all the really good stuff goes in the newsletter, so don’t miss out!

Well 2012 is now in full swing which means it’s time to start making deals and putting-together partnerships for the year. One of my absolute favorite conferences to kick-off a new year is Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. This will be my third year attending the conference and if you’re interested in Domain Development and Monetization – this is the go-to conference of the year.

Since I know that many of my readers might not be familiar with this conference I wanted to provide a brief introduction to the show and what value it has provided to me. First and foremost, Affiliate Summit is the largest Affiliate show out there which means you get just about every single Affiliate Marketing company on the planet. This means that really no matter what niche your site(s)/domain(s) are in, there are probably one, two, or ten affiliate programs out there with products to sell.

So how could you possibly meet all of these companies? Affiliate Summit has figured that out as well with the Meet Market. This is my favorite part of the show and happens on the opening day. Affiliate Marketing Companies setup tables in a large ballroom where attendees can then go from table to table meeting each company and understanding what they do.

I find the Meet Market is also a great place to get a better feeling for what’s hot in the Affiliate space. After spending an hour walking around the room there’s a good chance you will have met over 50 companies and have some excellent options for monetizing your sites. The great thing about having the Meet Market the first day of the show is that then for the next two days you know a lot more people and you can easily schedule meetings with some of the best companies you met with.

Affiliate Summit has seminars on topics that are incredibly relevant to Domain Developers. Heck – the first talk of the show is called “The Future of Content Monetization and Publishing” and going on simultaneously is a talk on “25 ways you can improve your website.” It doesn’t get much better than that and with three days of seminars you can learn what takes most people a year or two, in a matter of days.

Every year I leave Affiliate Summit with some great new contacts and all my monetization partners set for the year. It’s a great way to start-off 2012 and as always I’ll be bringing all of you along for the ride. Stay-tuned, I leave for Vegas tomorrow night! If you’d like to learn more about Affiliate Summit and why you should be there you can take a look at the video below:

This is probably one of the most common SEO questions I get asked being that I do SEO and I’m in the Domain Industry. A lot of confusion has come-up recently as companies like Network Solutions have mounted PR campaigns claiming that if customers register a domain for multiple years, they’ll rank better in search engines.

Well I’ve been telling people this is a bunch of hooey for a while now so thought it would be a good topic to cover on my blog in my SEO 101 series. So let’s settle this one and put your mind at rest, the number of years a domain name is registered for does not impact how well it will rank. So you don’t have to rush-out and renew your domains for ten years, renewing every year or renewing for multiple years won’t make much of a difference.

Of course if I just write this and don’t provide any data to back this up it doesn’t really mean much. If you’d like to hear it from Google’s own Matt Cutts you can watch the video below:

There’s a daily deals site that I discovered this year that has quickly become a favorite of mine. It’s called AppSumo and while the tagline for the site is, “Daily Deals for Web Geeks” many of the deals they offered are absolutely incredible for Startups. While just about every web geek (like myself) on the planet will love the deals AppSumo offers, many of them are incredibly useful for Startups containing training and tutorials from some very successful people in the Startup world.

What I really like about AppSumo is that their deals span just about every department within a startup. Recently they’ve had deals covering topics such as: hiring secrets, link-building tips and tricks, HTML5 tutorials, startup stories and lessons learned, and much more. AppSumo is run by Noah Kagan a successful entrepreneur who has worked for Microsoft, Intel, and Facebook where he came-up with the idea for real-time updates.

After Facebook Noah started creating events for young technology entrepreneurs to socialize and learn. He then worked for Mint as the Director of Marketing for a little under a year before founding Gambit, a payment engine for virtual games. AppSumo is Noah’s most recent project and as you can see from his resume, Noah is a real innovator!

So if you’re running a startup and looking for great tutorials, interviews, and software to inspire your team and learn from other startups AppSumo should be high on your list. I’m not being paid to say this, I’ve never met Noah before, and I don’t have an affiliate link hidden anywhere in this post. I’m writing about AppSumo because I know how valuable it is for startups and this is Startup Monday, so enjoy!

Last week I wrote a post about how exact match domains dominated the first page of Google for Black Friday. Well with Cyber Monday just a day away I thought it would be interesting to see who made it to the coveted Google page one – and once again exact-match domains win again!

Cyber Monday is the Black Friday of the online world. It is one of the top online shopping days of the year with companies like Amazon.com making a small fortune in just one day. Of course, just about every site that sells products or services is offering a discount on Cyber Monday and like Black Friday, being on the first page of Google can mean a very nice spike in traffic.

After CyberMonday.com is the one and only Wikipedia followed by another exact-match domain, CyberMonday2011.biz. Like we saw with Black Friday domains TLD is not much of an issue and this is another great example. In fact, .BIZ has some great placement for Cyber Monday as the next listing is Amazon themselves, followed by CyberMonday.biz.

CyberMonday2011.biz and CyberMonday.biz outrank both Overstock and Target with CyberMonday2011.biz and CyberMonday.com defeating even Amazon.com for excellent first-page placement. For anyone that thinks Google only gives preferential placement to big brands, think again.

Tomorrow is a big day and for anyone looking to save money online throw on your pajamas, grab a cup of joe, and start shopping! Oh, and when you’re looking to get a summary of all the great deals available, head on over to the exact match domain of your choice!

Yesterday I wrote a post about how the first page of Google for searches related to Black Friday is dominated by exact-match domains. One of my readers commenting on the post asked a great question, what kind of SEO did the top sites do to claim their golden spot in Google? While BlackFriday.com is definitely the category-killer domain, BFAds.net and TheBlackFriday.com have stolen the Black Friday traffic! If you don’t think so just take a look at the latest data from Compete:

As you can see BFAds.net is in the lead with 543,690 unique visitors followed by TheBlackFriday.com at 393,340 visitors, heck even black-friday.net gets 252,270. Then we get down to #4 and the traffic falls off a cliff, BlackFriday.com only has 73,220 visitors. So how did these three very mediocre domains steal BlackFriday.com’s traffic? SEO, and let me now take you a step further to show you how they did, allowing these sites to capture some incredibly valuable traffic.

Let’s start with BFAds.net, take a look at their link profile:

As you can see the site has a total of 7,991 links coming in from 755 different link domains. These include mega-links like one from USA Today and Technorati. This is a heavy amount of links as they are well targeted around their keywords giving them the best backlink profile in the space, and that’s why they are #1. While an exact-match domain could have probably helped them get to #1 without having to get so many links, they have well-secured this spot.

Now let’s take a look at TheBlackFriday.com, take a look at their link profile:

As you can see they don’t have nearly the number of backlinks with less than 1,000 links compared to BFAds.net massive 7,991. The same thing happens when you look at root domains with 193 compared to BFAds.net’s 755. There are some nice choice links though from very respected sources like Wired Magazine and Mashable. Remember, it’s not just the number of links but also the quality of links, still with 7,991 total links and 755 root domains linking in BFAds.net takes the cake for putting the most time into backlink building.

Now let’s take a look at BlackFriday.com certainly the best domain in the group, but it’s missing-out on a vast majority of the traffic.

As you can see BlackFriday.com has only 582 total links with less than 100 root domains linking in. This is a critical miss and while there are some good links coming in, their competitors beat them in the SEO game plain and simple.

Now for the very important disclaimer here, Complete.com isn’t necessarily providing perfectly accurate data, these are only estimates, but they can help determine relative scale. Given where BFAds.net and TheBlackFriday.com are located within the search results in Google vs. BlackFriday.com this data also makes sense. Google has always used the number and quality of links as a key determinant of relevance. As a domain investor I love domain names and especially category-killers like BlackFriday.com but this just goes to show how powerful SEO can be at driving traffic.

I am reaching-out to the owners of BFAds.net and TheBlackFriday.com to see if they are willing to comment or share any sales figures next week. Then again, they might be busy racing their Ferrari’s after 24-hours of printing money!

Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year and a major day for online sales. Traffic for the search term “black Friday” has grown like crazy over the last week, just take a look at Google’s search data below:

Position #1: bfads.net (major SEO done to rank well for “Black Friday” but it worked!)

Position #2: TheBlackFriday.com

Position #3: Wikipedia

Position #4: BlackFriday.info

Position #5: 2011BlackFridayAds.com

Position #6: BlackFriday.us (yes that’s right a .US name is in there!)

Position #7: BlackFriday.name

Do you see what I see? A lot of really nice exact-match domains enjoying some excellent rankings in Google. It should be noted that every one of these sites did some nice SEO here but there are plenty of other sites trying hard to rank well for this term too, they just don’t have the advantage of an exact-match domain.

Now I don’t want you to think that all you need to do is buy an exact-match domain and poof you’ll take-over Google page one. This is a competitive term and ranking well takes a lot more than an exact match domain and often requires a sizable investment in SEO. That being said, the exact-match domain makes it easier and gives you a nice edge against your competition.

You’ll notice .info, .us, and .name in here along with a .net taking the top spot so for anyone who thinks TLD has anything to do with ranking…think again!

Today Google announced a change to it’s algorithm that is said to impact 35% of searches, and what’s it all about? Freshness. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s all about fresh unique content and Google has made this abundantly clear in their changes today. Of course, as with most Google algorithm updates there is lots of confusion around what really happened. While you could read a long 12 paragraph SEO blog post about the changes, I’ll try to net this down to something more digestible.

It all started with Caffeine, a web indexing system that Google released last year which allows them to crawl fresh content, really freakin’ fast. Like the use of freakin’ there, I felt it was needed to keep this exciting! This means that Google now will be placing fresher, more recently written content, higher up in their search results. This change impacts 35% of searches compared to a mere 12% of searches that were impacted by the infamous Panda update.

So that’s the basics. Google changed their algorithm to reward fresh content. Now here’s one thing you might not realize. This isn’t the first time Google is including freshness in their algorithm. In fact they already impacted 17.5% of queries with their first freshness algorithm improvement, this just doubles the impact, i.e. fresh content is more important than ever.

“Google says the change is providing “fresh” content for twice as many queries as before. In other words, the old “freshness” algorithm had an impact on about 17.5% of queries. Now it impacts double that figure, 35%.” (Source: Search Engine Land)

As a web searcher this has been a long time coming. I can’t tell you how many times I search for something and find a site from 2004 when there are much more relevant sites about the topic. As someone who builds brands this is another huge victory making this year 2/2 for those of us that have been focusing on fresh content! Hat’s off to Google for another great move, as a searcher and online business owner I see this as a very positive move.

How can you know if your site(s) have been impacted by Google’s recent algorithm change?

I highly recommend that anyone that wants to understand how their site rank’s in Google use the free Google Webmaster Tools. By placing a tiny bit of code in the header of your site you can track how your site ranks in the search engines, and which terms are bringing you the most traffic. You can also see how your rankings change over time so you can understand how the latest change impacted your sites.

I was pretty excited when I first heard about Domains On Fire, an innovative new tool that can help you identify available names with prior PR and Google rankings. Then I had the chance to use the tool myself, and it blew my mind. My first thought was – “was couldn’t this tool have been built three years ago? It would have save me a lot of time!”

Domains On Fire massively expedites and automates a process that I’ve been doing manually for some time. As a Domain Developer I’m very interested in domain names that recently ranked well in Google. I’ve discovered (as have countless other SEO geeks) that building a site on a domain name that used to rank well in a particular niche can allow you to re-build that ranking, as long as you build a site that is relevant to that niche.

While I’ve only been doing this for a few years there are people who have been using this technique for much longer, and with great success. Well, some of the most successful people in the space decided to make a tool making it easier than ever to identify domains with previous PR and Rank. Even thought I’ve only been using the tool for about a week now I’ve already identified some stellar domains that would normally take me months to find.

Of course it’s one thing to talk about it and another to see it in person. So if you’d like to see Domains On Fire in action just watch my video below and prepare to be impressed!