Bookmarklet to Quickly Check If A Site Has Been Hacked

Occasionally I hear of sites being penalised by Google and quickly dropping out of the SERPs. This can often be the result of spammy links being injected into the site’s template.

Often the links are hidden from everyone apart from the search engine spiders, so a quick normal visual check won’t reveal the problem.

In those cases a site search at Google for the domain name + a spammy term can show the infected articles.

The following bookmarklet will take the domain you are currently visiting and search Google for site:domain and add four common spam terms. Each Google search is opened in a new window giving you the original site plus four new tabs for each of the searches.

javascript:(function(){ window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' viagra'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' payday+loans'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' cialis'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' ringtones'); })();

To install the bookmarklet, just drag the button below to the bookmarks bar in your browser. To use, click it when you are visiting a domain you want to check for spam. It’s that easy!

Site Spam Hack Test



When I shared this bookmarklet on the SEO Book community forum, Aaron Wall mentioned the Blogstorm post, “How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked” as an alternative for constantly checking your own sites.

16 Web Design Tips for Higher Sales

Improving Conversions With Informed Design Choices

The following sixteen pointers provide an overview to improving the conversion rate and general customer satisfaction with your businesses website and landing pages.

  1. Focus on what’s in it for THEM using clear benefits and your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
    1. USP must be unique and specific
    2. Example of weak USPs: using lowest or best price (no longer credible)
    3. Example of great USPs:
      1. Fed Ex: “Get it there overnight” (was unique when they first used it)
      2. Domino’s “30-minutes-or-free guarantee”
      3. Strongest reasons why buying from you is best FOR THEM
  2. Headline packed with specific, measurable benefits (not features)
    1. The more specific the more believable
    2. Improved headlines can increase sales by 400-1000% or more
  3. Up to two sub-headlines with the second and third strongest benefits
  4. One-click navigation
    1. No more than three clicks to order – two is better
    2. Navigation in the same place on every page – left side or top only
    3. Buttons must be clear on what they do
  5. Use all your strongest benefits above the fold
  6. Have a clear “Call to Action” clearly telling visitors what you want them to do
  7. Establish Credibility
    1. Use Testimonials that include:
      1. Specific, measurable results
      2. Use first and last name
      3. Web site address
      4. At least the state and ideally city and state
      5. Photo of person
      6. Use 1 minute video clips for the ultimate testimonial
    2. Explain why you’re qualified to help them or solve their problems
    3. Show that you’re “just like them”
    4. Make it interesting – tell a story
  8. Place Your List Opt-in offer above the fold on every page.
    1. Writing Your Offer
      1. Make it compelling
      2. Emphasize the benefits of joining
      3. Use a clear Call to Action
      4. Link to your privacy policy
      5. Request first name, last name, and email address (other sources recommend first name and email address only)
    2. Following Up
      1. Use your list to build relationships over time.
      2. Send a free monthly newsletter
        1. Information with a strong benefit
        2. Entertaining or informative
        3. Highlight the contents in bullet points at the top
        4. Generate back-end sales with member only discounts and special offers
        5. Include link to privacy policy
        6. Include unsubscribe information
  9. The Sales Copy on Your Site IS Your Sales Person
    1. Long copy is best if:
      1. You sell only one product
      2. You sell a service
      3. You have one type of product with limited variations
      4. Use separate sales letters/pages for multiple products
    2. Short copy is best for sites with many products
  10. Transfer Ownership by writing your site as though they already have the products/services offered
  11. Remove the risk
    1. Compelling, powerful “no risk, 100% money back” guarantee
    2. Do not limit the guarantee to 30 days – 60, 90 or one year is best
  12. Create added value for buyers with free bonus items such as e-books
  13. Create Urgency and encourage immediate sales with:
    1. Limited time discounts and offers
    2. By rotating free bonus items regularly
  14. Make it easy for customers to contact you in multiple ways
  15. Use effective formatting techniques
    1. Scannable
    2. White space
    3. Limited number of fonts and colors
  16. Consider using Hover Ad technology for:
    1. Opt-in mailing list
    2. Contests
    3. Surveys
    4. Last minute offers
    5. New product announcements
    6. Coupons
    7. Time limited offers

Written by PPC Think and reposted with permission.

Analytics Adds Accounts Overview Giving At A Glance Data

Amongst other recent Google Analytics changes such as the new data segmentation features, the accounts overview may appear as a fairly small addition, but this lets you quickly and easily see changes to your sites and accounts for day, week, month and year periods without having to drill down into individual sites. This feature can therefore can alert you to any problems or unexpected successes far earlier than your regular analytics schedules might allow.

Here we’ve displayed the “all accounts” overview, from here you could then get an overview for individual domains within the account. This overview can be so useful that it might be wise when building new sites to theme the analytics accounts to contain sites with similar content or revenue schemes into groups.

Within each account, you are now presented with a similar overview but for each of the individual websites. Again you can display the data in day, week, month & year views. Data is displayed for visits, average time on site, bounce rate and completed goals which can be selected as the percentage change.

Benefits of the Accounts Overview

  • Theme similar domains into content, geographical or revenue groups
  • Save time keeping an “eye on things”
  • Use the daily figures to spot domains with problems
  • Quickly spot emerging trends with weekly view
  • Get a deeper feel for the traffic levels throughout your portfolio
  • Spot low traffic domains with potential that otherwise get ignored.

Using this data you can quickly see the changes to individual sites without having to visit all the separate domains specifically, any emerging traffic trends you spot can be developed or countered quickly.

Are there other uses for this presentation of the data that you’ve discovered? Please do comment and share.

Using Google Analytics Segmentation To See Value of Existing Customers

Recent changes Google Analytics added include segmentation amongst other features and further increase the benefits for SME e-commerce sites to implement it as an information source.

To select the segmentation click the drop down in the top right of the dashboard, “Beta Advanced Segments” which is initially defaulting to “All Visits”. Here we’ve selected both “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors” which combined still provide the “All Visits” data so that too remains selected.

The dashboard updates and includes the three visitor types in the traffic seen. Here you can see “all visits” in blue, the “new visitors” in orange and “returning visitors” in green.

With the overview of the visitor types we can quickly see, for instance, that returning visitors visit, for this site, half as many again pages as new visitors.

Selecting the Ecommerce panel from the left hand menu will display conversion rate data for the three segments, All Visits, New Visitors and Returning Visitors. This is both graphed for the selected period and various aspects of the data is displayed below.

You can instantly see that returning visitors convert at a much higher rate than new visitors, and from the segmented data below you should notice from the Average Order Value and other sales data that they not only convert at a higher rate but also spend more money and purchase more products.

This data gives an incredible insight into the value of your exiting customers. If you maintain the customer lifetime value then you will already be aware of the hidden value of your existing client base. With these graphs we can instantly see that the returning visitors provide 50% of the revenue from 28% percent of the site’s hits.

From this analysis, you might decide to concentrate more on retaining customers and increasing communications with them, as their interactions with the website are more valuable than a new visitors. However, knowing the value of your existing client base should help your PPC campaign bidding as you gain a further insight into a clients lifetime value to your business. You may therefore decide to bid for more than just the initial ROI on the opening visit and sale. Afterall, extending your customer base will increase the number of clients who can become repeat customers for you.

Have you found any other uses for the new segmented data from Google Analytics? Please feel to comment below.

SEO & SERPs Bookmarklet

UPDATE 2016-06-16
I’ve developed a new version of the bookmarklet, which is now over here. The new version uses the Bootstrap theme for a contemporary look and feel. It also has a useful textarea box so you can quickly copy and paste the on-page seo elements into another document.

You’ll also get a preview of the site’s new theme!


Install the SEO bookmarklet tool following the instructions on that page – you just have to drag the big link there to your bookmarks toolbar.

To use it just click the bookmarklet when you are visiting a page.

  • It will open a new page with a “quick and simple” overview of the on page SEO.
  • An example of the Google SERPs and
  • An overview of the important content on your page.

This is the first in a few of SEO and bookmarklet tools, this version works entirely from javascript, your complete privacy is assured as no information is sent to our server other than the delivery from the server of the CSS & images to appropriately format the results and mimic a Google SERPs result.

Here you can see an example of what the page’s Google serps would be and following that a breakdown on several of the on page factors for SEO and conversion.

The SERPs Result

Consider the expected result from Google

  • Does the SERP grab the users attention?
  • Does it provide enough appropriate information about the landing page to encourage the user to click through?
  • Once they’ve clicked do you actually keep the promise made in the SERP and satisfy their need?

Use the tool to test various title and description options to tailor the result to best reflect your page to a potential visitor whilst still maintaining the appropriate keywords in the title for ranking benefits. The SERP should encourage clickthrough, whilst the landing page will be tailored to getting the necessary conversion.

On Page Elements

Look at the list of heading tags knowing that visitors often skim the text on the page and only see the headings:

  • Do they supply enough information to your prospective visitor?
  • Do they work independently of the body text?
  • Do the headings alone encourage them to take action?

Following the work on headlines do the same with any emboldened words, do they provide enough key information on the pages content for readers skimming through your page?

If you can, please take a few minutes to leave your comments or ideas on the SEO Bookmarklet below so we can continue to improve this tool.

Bookmarklet Example

Selecting The Best Performing Ad Variations

This should be used alongside Selecting the winning ad variation.

Enter up to four Ad Variations here to calculate the version with the best return either for a fixed budget or per day.

With a fixed budget you may find that the advert that provides the best return per dollar may in fact be beaten if you remove budget limitations and spend to maximise gross income.

The opportunity costs / values are an indicator of what the best performing ad CTR and Conversion Rate would produce and also what the best advert from the fixed budget would be if the restrictions were removed.

  Ad Variation 1 Ad Variation 2 Ad Variation 3 Ad Variation 4
Clicks
Impressions
Cost
Conversions
Searches Per Day
(Leave Blank to add the impressions from all ad variations)
Average Sale
Click Through Rate
Conversion Rate
Cost Per Click
Cost Per Conversion
Fixed Spend – Calculate the best return for a set budget
Spend
Clicks for Given Spend
Conversions for Given Spend
Gross for Given Spend
Net for Given Spend
Impressions Required for Given Spend
Days for Spend/Impressions
Opportunity Costs – With a set budget best variation may not provide the best return if the budget limitation was removed.
Opportunity Value
Per Day
Clicks Per Day
Conversions
Gross
Cost
Net Daily Return On Investment

Search Engine Marketing, Optimisation & Conversion Optimisation Glossary

Creative Commons License
Conversion Rate Optimisation & Search Glossary by Online Sales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

200

Status Code OK – The file request was successful. For example, a document or file was successfully found by a spider or browser

301

The 301 is a status code meaning Moved Permanently. 301 is often used as a term by SEOs such as “301 the page”, meaning to add a code such as to an Apache web servers htaccess file to redirect a URI to another location.

302

Found however the requested resource has temporarily moved to a different URI. Due to the mechanism in which search engines index the Internet, it was possible to hijack another sites’ search engine results for a page though providing a redirect to the proper source.

304

Not Modified

404

Not found.

AIDA

  • A – Attention attract the customer.
  • I – Interest: Does the product meet the customers needs
  • D – Desire: Focus on advantages and benefits (rather than features) and let customers imagine that the product or service will satisfy their needs.
  • A – Action: Encourage customers to take action.

AIDAS

In addition to Attention, Interest, Desire and Action, Satisfy has been added to the traditional acronym meaning that the action perform must satisfy, the click must work, error messages shouldn’t blame the user, searches produce relevant results and products match the promises.

Apache

Apache is the server software that runs the majority of web sites. Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996.

Browsers

A browser is typically the software that the visitor uses to interact with your website though it can also refer to the visitor themselves.

Popular web browsers are:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Opera
  • Google Chrome

Contextual Advertising

Usually PPC adverts that appear on websites and search engines closely related to either the search performed or the content of the page.

CPC

The Cost Per Click of PPC advert.

CPM

Cost Per Thousand Impressions is an advertising pricing model that pays the publisher for the amount of impressions received. It’s commonly used on high volume sites that may receive a lot of traffic from social bookmarking sites whose users commonly don’t click on PPC adverts.

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimisation is a comparatively recent discipline that analyses user behaviour and through testing and result measurement will raise the number of visitors that reach the goal of the website owner. This goal is normally a sale on an e-commerce site, but some pages the goal may be to get more visitors to interact in certain ways, such as to click a particular link or make a comment.

CTR

Click Through Rate is normally expressed as a percentage of the clicks on an advert compared to impressions. It can be expressed for the individual adverts or keywords.
CTR % = (Clicks / Impressions) X 100

Indented Result

When two pages for the same site would be listed on the same page of results Google indent the lower ranking page beneath the higher one.

The indented listing will appear just below the old higher position. If you had a listing at position three and twelve, if you displayed twenty results at once you’d see the twelfth result move up to fourth.

Similarly if you improved the second listing up to tenth, then it would display at three and four even when displaying just the standard ten results.

UGC

User Generated Content is elements of content that is input by users of the site, this can be from blog comments, annotations on photograph such as on Flickr.com through to entire sites being built on UCG such as wikipedia and 43things. In a wider sense the entire content of blog networks like blogspot, video upload sites or social book are also User Generated Content.

Opportunity Cost

Opportunity Cost is the value that can be placed on the next best decision for a business. If decision A would reap X amount and decision B would reap Y, then the opportunity cost of making decision B is the difference between X and Y.

During conversion optimisation the opportunity cost is the difference to the value attributed prior to the test to the current versions. In testing you may create versions of pages or advertisements that perform worse and it can be said that the cost of testing is the difference, however as as we continue to test hypothesis and produce better performing pages and advertisements then the opportunity cost is a benefit to the company. We often prefer to refer to this as the opportunity value.

Off Page SEO

Generally refers to link building techniques to improve the popularity of the target site.

On Page SEO

A set of modifications made to the page to improve its performance in the search engines. This will include focusing the title, headings and body copy to a small set of keywords.

Page Rank (PR)

Page Rank is a logarithmic value given by Google broadly indicating a site’s / page’s value based on incoming links. The page rank as reported by the tool bar lags behind the “real” internal Google value. Many PR values are either hand or algorithmically changed by Google, especially if the site sells links.

PPC

Pay Per Click – a/k/a CPC. Pay Per Click is a common term for contextual advertising for example Google’s AdWords system where the advertiser is only charged when the advert is clicked and and not for the advert’s display.

Robots Txt

The robots.txt file provides instructions to spiders about the website and which pages or folders they may not visit. This is called the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The directive is to disallow pages rather than allow. “Badbots” tend to ignore the robots.txt.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation – is the term given to a variety of tasks and procedures undertaken with the goal of increasing a site or pages ranking in search engines. It’s closely related to Search Marketing which may include advertising elements, and Social Media Marketing.

SERP

The Search Engine Result Page. Can also be used to refer to the positioning of a result within a search engines results.

SMM

Social Media Marketing is the process of marketing a site through various social bookmarking and social networking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.Icio.Is, Reddit etc.

Spider

A spider is both the process of the indexing pages from sites & discovering new sites via links as well as the program that retreives this information. Ex. Googlebot is a spider.

Spidering or crawling the web is the action of indexing it.

These “Bots” should follow the robots.txt instructions.

Status Code

Each request to your website such as visiting a page or downloading an image returns a HTTP status code. These are typically 200 (ok), 304 (not modified) or an error status such as 404 (not found).

TBPR

Tool Bar Page Rank – refers to the page rank of a given page or web site as reported by the Google Tool Bar.

Web Browsers

See browsers.