Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

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Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby Karlis » Tue Jun 30, 2009 7:55 pm

I need ideas (or call them battle plans) for increasing the Google PR for Rapid PHP editor (and WeBuilder for that matter, though Rapid PHP is more importent right now because of the php editor keyword). Any ideas from the community? Basically what I need is more incomming links.

I have these banners, they work but not good enough (not enough of them placed by users).
http://www.blumentals.net/company/help_editors.php
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby syrupcore » Thu Jul 02, 2009 10:25 pm

in my search for "php editor" you came up as the second link on page 2. Pretty amazing really!

Some stuff that might help (besides more inbound links...)
1. http://www.blumentals.net/rapidphp/ you really want 'editor' in your url and the google likes words separated by dashes. /rapid-php-editor maybe ? rapidphp/editor.html ?
2. It's great that you have your keywords in the h1 but the h1 is really far down in the source (ln # 109). Might be too much trouble at this point but you can use different positioning techniques to move the nav and all that other stuff below the content in the source but then position it up top. Switching the "leftmenu" and "content" divs should be pretty easy.

Code: Select all
html:
<div id="middle">
    <div id="content" />
    <div id="leftmenu" />
</div>
<div id="footer />
<div id="menu" />

css:
#leftmenu {
background-color:#EAF2F8;
float:left;
margin-left:-860px;  /*changed*/
width:204px;
}
#content {
background-color:white;
float:left;
margin-left:204px; /* changed*/
min-height:450px;
width:656px;
}
#head {
background-color:white;
clear:both;
float:left;
height:63px;
margin-bottom:35px; /*make room for the absolutely positioned nav */
width:100%;
}
#menu {
background-color:#0C85D5;
background-image:url(images/menubg.gif);
clear:both;
height:35px;
position:absolute; /*added */
text-align:center;
top:63px; /*added*/
width:100%; /*need a width*/
}
/* the above is only tested in firebug... :) */


you could do the similar absolute positioning on the utility nav up top and the <!-- Title image bar --> in the content. basically, the higher up in the source the bot finds your keywords (particularly in the H1), the better.

You could also generate some content that links back to your own site without being spammy. Screencasts for certain rapidphp features, more active twitter feed...
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby Karlis » Sat Jul 04, 2009 3:00 pm

syrupcore wrote:1. http://www.blumentals.net/rapidphp/ you really want 'editor' in your url and the google likes words separated by dashes. /rapid-php-editor maybe ? rapidphp/editor.html ?


I have thought about this but wouldn't changing the url now crush the already earned ratings?

I will try the code repositioning, although I remember I have tried this when I originally wrote the code and it caused for the site not to work in older browsers. But I'll try your way! Edit: I did try and as I predicted, IE6 ruins everything.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby EvilBMP » Wed Jul 08, 2009 12:50 am

Karlis wrote:I have thought about this but wouldn't changing the url now crush the already earned ratings?


You can use apache mod-rewrite or just the simple redirect functionality and provide a 301 code. Then search engine bots would recognize, that the site just has a new name...

Karlis wrote:I will try the code repositioning, although I remember I have tried this when I originally wrote the code and it caused for the site not to work in older browsers. But I'll try your way! Edit: I did try and as I predicted, IE6 ruins everything.


Imho, that doesn't make sense ... Google or whatever search engine really should be aware of filtering out navigation code snippets while indexing websites! It is more important that the ratio of interesting keywords to the whole text length (word count) does not exceed a certain percentage value. Content is the most important factor, if you want to do SEO!

Greets, Evil
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby syrupcore » Wed Jul 08, 2009 9:49 pm

Karlis wrote:I will try the code repositioning, although I remember I have tried this when I originally wrote the code and it caused for the site not to work in older browsers. But I'll try your way! Edit: I did try and as I predicted, IE6 ruins everything.


IE6 is the best! :)

What does "ruins everything" mean? screenshot? you may need to add 'display: inline' to #leftmenu and/or #content
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby Karlis » Sun Aug 02, 2009 4:51 pm

The layout with the code you provided is broken inside IE6 whatever I try.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby syrupcore » Mon Aug 03, 2009 11:19 pm

Karlis wrote:The layout with the code you provided is broken inside IE6 whatever I try.


if you want to send me a zip or svn user/pass I can sort it out for you.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby MaxD » Wed Aug 05, 2009 7:35 pm

I would add a link to my current small development site, but it has come to a halt :( I wanted to use panorama images and export to Flash, but I'm getting a rendering problem and currently no fix in sight. It is though looking promising using some php, easy button menus and (hopefully Flash). If its solved I will add a button.

My other site due for launch later this year is mostly the work of my colleague. This site will be awesome and so technical its scary, which is why my now delayed site is much more fun :wink:
Amateur web design now dabbling with php and jquery
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby Karlis » Sat Aug 15, 2009 12:24 am

I am re-building our website, getting rid of some last tables and enjoying pure CSS since it is now so much better supported than 2 years ago. Probably this will help in some way.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby STUCKSHUTTER » Sat Aug 22, 2009 4:31 pm

Hi Karlis,
Rapid PHP is a nice package and I use it often. You have great suggestions for the continued upgrade of the product so I'll let that one go. For promoting the product (and others) here are some suggestions that I think would help you quite a bit. First is invest in a product for SEO like IBP's, I use it and while a lot of work to optimize a web site, it has moved me up to #3 in organic search in my market. You just can't tinker with an odd thing or other and make it to the top of the organic search lists, you need help.

Ask for your users to link back to your site with a banner so you improve your backlinks in Google et al but I definitely would not recommend you buy into any junk like "we'll guarantee top 10 placement etc" no one can guarantee placement in Google. Also, no link farms, it needs to be relevant.

Next, you may want to offer a bounty on new users, figure out what your lifetime value of a customer is and then offer perhaps 20% for a lead. You could give that as cash or as a credit against upgrades or other products you provide.

Take a look at a service like Commission Junction as a way for you to quickly set up a huge community of people who will promote your product using a royalty model. You can't get clients unless you are getting a lot of people to look and these are among the best ways you can do that today.

Best of luck
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby mrlami » Tue Aug 25, 2009 3:21 pm

Talk to people running online communities like nettuts, css tricks, david walsh, and webappers.

You don't have to try to advertise on their site as you'll just be there for the time you pay for, but you can offer them 3 copies of variations of the softwares you provide to give to their users free in a contest.

You should remain permanently on their site (if they don't put a no follow with your URL) and thousands of people might get to know about your software. Heck they might love it and start using it for their screencasts and hopefully things will take off from there.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby syrupcore » Sun Aug 30, 2009 7:08 am

good short code tutorials on your site and youtube/vimeo that use webuilder as the editor. On small specific how tos. "How to connect to a database in php" sort of videos not "how to program php part one". Tie that into a dev blog on your site so you have fresher text-based content for indexing.

You can do some research via keyword research (google adwords stuff) to figure out what people are looking to learn and create videos based on those searches. That's what a lot of the tutorial sites do anyway.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby EvilBMP » Thu Sep 10, 2009 11:06 am

syrupcore wrote:good short code tutorials on your site and youtube/vimeo that use webuilder as the editor.


Another great approach ... many other websites of code editors are already promoting the features via screen casts. You should do this too.

Nevertheless, this falls under the same topic as already mentioned. You need content, content, content ... but it must be seo-optimzed - see posts above (especially STUCKSHUTTER ... although you could do allot with google analytics first, those payed solutions for content seo-checks are also not the holy grail, because nobody really knows how googles algorithms are working in detail - so save that money first ... trust me, we have students at our company who write their master thesis about automated seo-optimizing ;-) - because we make our money with online marketing and it is a mess to approximate the right settings manually for all clients).

Greets
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby syrupcore » Wed Sep 16, 2009 1:15 am

Karlis wrote:
syrupcore wrote:1. http://www.blumentals.net/rapidphp/ you really want 'editor' in your url and the google likes words separated by dashes. /rapid-php-editor maybe ? rapidphp/editor.html ?


I have thought about this but wouldn't changing the url now crush the already earned ratings?

I will try the code repositioning, although I remember I have tried this when I originally wrote the code and it caused for the site not to work in older browsers. But I'll try your way! Edit: I did try and as I predicted, IE6 ruins everything.


I missed your first question. I'm not sure but I'm believe you will not be penalized for using an apache redirect for your old url to your new one.

Still willing to help out with the IE6 issue if you want to send me the code. do you have a lot of visitors to your site using ie6? usually dev oriented sites see a much higher than normal modern browser base.
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Re: Help needed with promoting Rapid PHP

Postby Karlis » Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:51 pm

Thanks for your suggestions. Many of them are what I had on my mind too, but there is always lack of time (a struggle between improving product and taking time for marketing).

As for the question by syrupcore - we still get very many IE6 users, I am not talking about 1% or even 5%, it is more than that - we distribute beginner-home-user products too, so the visitor base is mixed.

I have decreased amount of HTML code in the latest version of the site, in fact even factoring in the increase of CSS, it is still smaller. I haven't tried with the new code, probably I can move the menu in code after the text, but shouldn't this decrease spidering?
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