ISV Kaizen

How to stuff your software product website with content attractive for search engines? What to write about besides the product features, download and order pages, and contacts? Here is a brief list of ideas to get started.

1. Press release archive
2. Product news
3. Blog
4. FAQ & How-To
5. Knowledge base
6. On-line forum
7. Product live tour or demo
8. User testimonials
9. On-line manual
10. Trouble shooting articles
11. Product use cases
12. Sample project list
13. Freebie add-ons
14. Industry statistics and news overview
15. Periodical research reports
16. White papers
17. On-topic articles
18. Press kit
19. Specials and discounts
20. Awards and in-press reviews
21. Review of complementary products and services
22. Product comparison charts and tables
23. Your interview to somebody well known
24. Your bio or your company profile and history
25. Site map

Happy New Year to everyone!

It’s 2008! Have you updated copyrights?

Wikipedia is one of the most visited resources on the Web. It’s built by people and for people. Many people from all over the world are looking for specific information on Wikipedia. The information they are looking for may be related to your software product.

Why not to turn the Wikipedia’s readers into your web site visitors and then into new users of your software? Link your web site from Wikipedia and receive several dozens of targeted visitors per day for free. Bellow, there are some hints how to do this.

Do it for people, not for search engines
Google seems to ignore incoming links from Wikipedia when calculating Page Rank for your web site. So it’s useless to link from Wikipedia to increase your Google Page Rank. There is no SEO in it. The main goal is attracting real people, not SE robots.

Start little
If your software product is popular then somebody likely has always created an article about you on Wikipedia and put a link to your web site in it. If your product is quite young and there are no articles about your software then you may look for articles that are relevant to your niche and add your link into References or Extras sections of them.

Observe the rules
Lurk for a while before adding your links into every article. See what links are appropriate and what kind of web sites are linked from Wikipedia. Try to add your link into a single relevant article first and wait for a couple of days to see if moderators accept or remove your contribution.

Monitor your competitors
Search for your competitors mentioned in the Wikipedia and try to add your plug into the same articles.

Be extremely relevant
Don’t add link to ‘ABC Super Audio Player’ into an article about ‘Jazz Music’. Otherwise, moderators will remove your contribution and may even ban your IP to prevent from future irrelevant contributions.

Link to information, not to infomercial
You can hardly add a link that points to the main page of your commercial product web site. I’m sure it will be rejected. You must give people really valuable information, not pure advertisement, and you must give it for free.

The appropriate information types on your website to link from Wikipedia are:
- Troubleshooting articles and white papers
- Statistical reports and analytics
- Freeware or open source tools and utilities
- Knowledge bases and How-To
- Tutorials
- Free on topic e-books and pod-casts
- … etc.

Name the link properly
The link title must be also relevant to the article topic. Look how other links are titled and name your one accordingly. Try to avoid directly mentioning you product in the title. It should not look like an ad.

Keep these simple points in your mind and you will see that being on Wikipedia is an easy way to get additional free and targeted traffic for your web site and, therefore, to increase the popularity of your product.

If you decided to setup a forum on your company or product website then the most annoying question is likely: “Initially, my forum will be empty and will look silent. This will deter people from joining the community. What to do?” As a moderator of several forums, I’d like to share a tip regarding the question.

Initially, don’t create too many sections. While your forum isn’t very popular each section would contain just a few posts and overall the forum would look inactive.

Create just a couple of general sections and have all posts there. So, these sections will be active and, therefore, the whole forum will look alive. Later, you may create more focused sections and move the appropriate posts there from the general section. Thus, the newly created section will be immediately filled with many posts and will also look active.

This simple trick will help you quickly spin up your forum and build a community around your product with minimal efforts.

This post is written by our special guest, Sergey Petrov.
Sergey is a CEO of SoftLogica. The most known software titles by SoftLogica are Backup Platinum - a powerful backup program for Windows OS, and Handy Recovery - a data recovery software that restores deleted files or files from deleted and formatted partitions.

After many years in ISV business, Sergey knows many secrets of how to succeed in the market. Today he unveils 8 reasons for acquiring a separate domain for each software product.

Separate domain for each product or one general site? I think it’s fair to say that I’ve participated in discussions on this topic several dozens of times.
Now all my considerations should be brought together, so that they can be referred to easily.

Type-in Traffic: If your product becomes somewhat popular, sooner or later some clients (at least, out of mere curiosity) will type in the browser’s address bar www.product.com. So why loose such a “delicious” traffic?

SEO: Firstly, if a product name contains a keyword from its niche, the domain name derived from it will give some added advantage. Secondly, all website pages will targeted to a specific niche.

Design Freedom: Different products may require different market approaches, including differences in site structure, colour spectrum, layout etc. Is a “universal” design worth loosing efficiency?

Anamnesis: It is much easier to keep in mind one entity (a product name) than two (a product name and a company name). As for me, I could hardly recollect vendor names for the heaps of software that I use every so often. It may seem that a user doesn’t need to remember a URL consisting of two entities, that is, it’s enough to remember just a company name. But it is well known that every extra click results in loosing visitors.

Analytics: It is much easier to analyze a separate site than a part of a general one. Any superstructure makes visitors’ behaviour hardly predictable.

Link Building: Sometimes a website allows placing links only to a homepage, and doesn’t allow placing links to other pages. In most cases the problem can be solved, however, it will require additional efforts.

First impression: A man is an emotional being in many respects. Therefore, a good suit and a necktie produce an impression on people even before they get acquainted with you. Thus, imagine a reseller hearing with half an ear a product name and\or catching a glimpse of URL in a printed material: he’s already had the first impression about your product.

Scalability: Perhaps, some day you’ll decide to sell a product and the related stuff “in gross”. Will it be possible to deliver everything to a new owner without loosing some integral parts?

Thanks for sharing this, Sergey!
Here is another interesting article from SoftLogica.

Some time ago I heard the gossips that Google doesn’t “like” web sites with newly registered domain names. Google likes old domain names with long history.

But … the domain history is not the only important factor. The future of domain is also important for Google ranking. If your domain registration expires in a couple of months then Google may have doubts if you are serious about your domain name and may slightly lower your web site rank. If your domain’s expiration date is far enough then Google thinks that you have serious long run intentions regarding your business and your web site. So, it may slightly increase your rank.

Most likely it’s just another urban legend. But who knows … This time I’ve renewed my domain names for two years, not for just one year as previously

Tracking is a king in mISV business.

When somebody downloads a file from your website you must log the event. Therefore, you must invoke a script (e.g. download.php) on your server that will write the info about the event in a file or database and then will redirect the visitor to the actual binary file.

In the same time, using script as a download link is not practical because many software archives do not allow links to php/pl/cgi pages, only to the exe or zip.

To overcome this you may use .htaccess file for redirection.

If you use http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip as a public download link then the sample string for .htaccess can be:

Redirect /download/abcmaker.zip http://www.site.com/download/download.php?product=abcmaker

and the download.php must contain something like:

<?
...
//logging info to file or db
...
header("Location: /download/abcmaker_1421.zip"); //link to real file
?>

As you see this approach allows also to change the actual file name on the server while all incoming links may still point to http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip

Many novice (m)ISVs design websites for their products themselves. The home-made design allows the quick and low-cost getting started. However, if you have no experience in web design there are lots of non obvious peculiarities that you have to know to make your website attractive. One of the most important things is graphics. Look at your web site in different web browsers and check if your logos, screenshots and artwork are clear and glamour. The website images appearance depends on the image file formats. There are three standard formats for website images: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. You should use each format for different purposes.

Today I’d like to tell about the common mistake of freshmen designers - using inappropriate image format for their logo or screenshots. I met this situation many times. The simple demonstration bellow shows the specifics of using those three formats for logo picture.

Using JPEG format
Although JPEG offers good compression ratio and allows using high color palette, it affects the picture quality. The better compression means the lower quality. If your image consists of monochromatic areas with sharp bounds then using JPEG format will make your picture “dirty” and inaccurate. That’s why JPEG is often good for photos rather than for logos, screenshots and artwork.

If we’d use JPEG for the logo picture on our Dr.Explain website then it would look inaccurate.

Not good, right?

Using PNG format
PNG is a very useful format indeed. It offers high color palette support, good compression ratio, transparency and doesn’t affect the quality of the picture. PNG images look clean. The format is perfect for screenshots. Nevertheless there is an issue that sometimes makes PNG useless for web design. Web browsers may display PNG images in slightly altered gamma, especially if the picture uses transparent alpha channel. So, if you use PNG image in conjunction with other design elements its borders may be visible and the whole design will look like patchwork.

If we’d use PNG for our logo picture then its borders would be visible on the gradient background in some browsers.

This is not perfect also.

Using GIF format
Although GIF format supports only 256 color palette in most cases it’s enough to display your artwork without loosing the quality. Of course you must adjust the picture palette in image editor first to select the right colors. It’s better to use the same color table for all elements of your website design to make the it seamless and solid-drawn.

We do use GIF format for our logo to make the header graphics seamless.

It looks perfect, does it?

Conclusion … Please recall this post when you’re making a new design for your website. Choose appropriate image formats for different graphical elements… or hire a designer

I bet you want to improve your website position in the search results on major search engines, primly on Google. Being seen in the organic search results is the good way to receive the stable targeted traffic almost for free. That’s why you have to continuously improve the Page Rank (PR) of your pages. Everyone knows that good PR “comes” through incoming links from other websites with high PR. In the same time, not everyone knows that external links on our websites steal our PR and pass it to those third party website.

To keep your website PR you should minimize the number of outgoing links, especially if you’re linking to sites with poor PR (many SEO experts believe that outgoing links to relevant websites with high PR positively affect your own PR). How this can be done:

Remove weak links
If there are unnecessary outgoing links on your website then simply remove them. Period.

Use rel=”nofollow” attribute within anchor tag
If you cannot delete an external link by some reasons then you may use “nofollow” attribute within A tag. The “nofollow” attribute that can be associated with links was originated as an idea by Google and pitched past MSN and Yahoo, as well as major blogging vendors, gaining support. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.
The link that looks like

<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Cool Page</a>

won’t grab your PR and won’t improve PR of the linked page.

Convert external links into internal ones
Another approach is replacing direct links with redirects.
For instance, replace

<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Cool Page</a>

with

<a href=”/redirect.php?s=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.site.com%2Fpage.html”>Cool Page</a>

SEO gurus believe that search engine spiders can pass through 301 and 302 redirects. So, redirect.php script must be slightly tricky. Here is a simple example of redirect.php script:

<html><body>
<script language=”javascript”>
document.write(’<form id=”go” method=”get” action=”<?=$s?>” style=”display:none”></form>’);
function bl()
{ document.getElementById(’go’).submit(); }
bl();
</script>
</body></html>

This script will pass a real visitor through but will stop a crawler. Thus the search engine spider will count the link as internal one.

Revamp your website by using these simple techniques and don’t let other websites steal your PR.