How to Add Social Bookmark Buttons to Your Blog or Website

Web 2.0 social book marking is massive, and makes sharing your content for your visitors extremely easy. Those little colored buttons that started appearing on blogs and sites a few years ago have now turned into a whole page. AddThis have made the incorporation of these buttons onto your site fantastically easy. They have created a sharing button widget…


…that incorporates all this…

Sign-up at their site, get the javascript code, insert it on your page, Voila! It does not get much easier than this;-)

The free service even includes analytics that enable you to track how people are sharing your content. http://www.addthis.com/

Pow! Penny DVDs hits #1 at Google

Almost exactly 1 month since my first post Penny DVDs is today #1 on both Google.com and Google.co.uk

No, it is not a competitive term and does not have a lot of searches per month, but it IS the name of one of my websites;-) I will try to maintain the ranking for this keyword and now try to rank for “Penny DVD” (minus the “s”) – currently PennyDVDs.com does not appear in the first 100 results for a Google search for “Penny DVD”. I'll let you know how I get on...

24 January 2009
Well nearly 2 months later and “Penny DVD” has hit number 9 on the first page of Google. It has been bouncing around quite a lot but has now started to settle down. I can’t say it was really that hard, but I thought it might have popped in there a little sooner. Have set my targets on “action adventure move” and “DVD for Kids”.

Santa is Evil

Way, way, way back in the very distant past I registered a couple of domains by the names of santa-is-evil.com and santaisevil.com

I created some graphics and set up a little cafepress store, pointed the domains at the store and waited for something to happen, waited some more and then, when nothing happened (sales I mean) and Christmas had past, I forgot all about it.

That was then. This is now;-)

There is maybe 50 “shopping” days left to Christmas. When you type in the phrase “santa is evil” in Google, neither of my domains appear, neither does the cafepress store I created – so let’s see if we can do something about it…

The first place was the paragraph above which includes the phrase I want to rank for, plus, a link to the cafepress store. I also changed the forwarding status of the domains to the store from temporary to permanent – I don’t know if that makes any difference but at the moment I can’t imagine it will hurt. I’ll be off now and let you know how I get on.

Penny DVDs moves up 1 place to number 4

OK, so it moved up one place on Google.com. The only changes I know of since it was at number five was that this blog was indexed by Google for the first time. Let’s see if we can get it into the top 3.

I created a blog at Clearblogs.com which includes a movie trailer and short plot outline. At the end of the text is a link to, you guessed it, Penny DVDs.

Keywords and commercial intent

If you read my last post you will know that I was pretty keyed-up about “Penny DVDs” getting a 1st page ranking in less than a week. I’m still excited, this is, after all, the name of the site – I would love to see it at the top of Google every day!

Let’s dig a little deeper though…

… “Penny DVDs” as well having a low monthly search volume of 260, does not have a high score when it comes to commercial intent. What am I talking about?

According to the Microsoft Commercial Intent Tool this phrase scores 28% in terms of “transactional intent” i.e. how interested someone is in making a purchase – this kind of information is extremely important if you are trying to sell something from your site.

Lets walk over to Google’s Keyword Tool and see what other keywords it suggests…

As well as alternative keywords, Google is kind enough to give us search volume data and an idea of how strong the competition is for a particular keyword or phrase.

From the suggestions, I felt the following had a good match with pages on the site (average search volume in brackets):

tv dvds (1,500,00)
comedy dvds (40,500)
series dvds (33,100)
dvds movies (18,100)
dvds tv series (2,900)
television dvds (2,400)
sitcom dvds (1,300)
tv show dvds (170)

…and here they are again with their score for commercial intent:

tv dvds (73%)
comedy dvds (86%)
series dvds (51%)
dvds movies (98%)
dvds tv series (55%)
television dvds (81%)
sitcom dvds (59%)
tv show dvds (84%)

As we can see “tv dvds” has by far the greatest search volume, a high commercial intent and a relatively high level of competition. Interestingly, the competition for “comedy dvds” is completely saturated, so compared to “comedy dvds”, “tv dvds” is still a better choice.

As you go down the list competition tends to drop off but commercial intent jumps around. Although relatively low search volumes: “television dvds” and “tv show dvds” have very high commercial intent.

This is really only scraping the surface, the big takeaway is to check the commercial intent of your keyword before trying to rank for it – no point ranking for a keyword if the people that type it in and arrive at your site are simply window shopping or searching for information – unless that of course is what you are delivering.

Just for the record PennyDVDs.com didn’t rank in the Top 100 for any of these keywords on Google.com or Goolge.co.uk I’ll let you know if that changes;-)

Penny DVDs goes live...

Towards the end of September 2008 Penny DVDs went live without much of a fanfare. Although I had built database driven sites before at college this was a first for me in terms of hosting a db driven site in the “real world”, and I have to say I was quite amazed it worked at all – although I shouldn’t have been as it worked fine on my Apache web server at home.

There were a few bugs on the live site that didn’t surface at home but after a few days I had these mostly ironed out.

As soon as the site was running I set up some “Google Alerts” to search for blogs with keywords such as “Penny DVDs”, “Cheap DVDs”, “Cheap Movies” etc. this would give me a good chance to post comments or articles on relevant blogs and get some back links to the site.

The first blog I posted on was a site called http://www.getrichslowly.org/ in response to a post titled “The $22 Movie”, here’s my post:

Noel Says:
September 26th, 2008 at 6:57 am
$22.00 dollars!! I feel bad for you, I can beat it though, my wife and I paid £12.50 each to see Charlie Wilson’s War at Leicester Square London, when it came out.

That’s pounds, so about $25.00 each, just for the movie!

When the guy said £25.00 I nearly passed out, no snacks for us so you were lucky in that respect, needless to say since then we have only gone to the local cinema and mostly use LoveFilm.com (similar to your netflix, I think). If you want to see movies and keep them I would recommend http://www.PennyDVDs.com they have a USA site coming in November.

Now bear in mind I had not submitted the domain to anything, least of all a search engine… within three days the site was listed in Google and every page had been indexed! All on account of this one post. If that wasn't amazing enough a week later (after a few more posts, not many though, just a handful) I typed in “Penny DVDs” into Google.com to find my site on the first page in 5th position and on Google.co.uk on the first page in 2nd position! I kid you not.

...yes I still have that Google alert running and am still posting. On the strength of that I don’t see any reason not to rank 1st on both pages, I'll let you know...

A domain is born...

I suppose it’s only fair to give a little background on the website I’m going to talk about…

On 14th May 2007 I registered http://www.penny-dvds.com/ knowing that the http://www.pennydvds.com/ domain was currently registered and may never actually become available. I went ahead anyway thinking it was worth a try as I had some fairly concrete ideas for the domain after completing a 12 week php course – (my first bite at programming).

After registering the domain, it sat there for a long time and went through one automatic renewal without me even noticing.

Until…

… on 20th May 2008 (a year later) I received an unsolicited offer from someone claiming to have acquired the http://www.pennydvds.com/ domain at auction and offering to sell it to me. The email looked genuine as did a search of the whois database. I click through to the offer link to find a sales page offering the domain for US$557.- I have to tell you I was tempted.

The next day a follow-up email arrived restating the offer with some more psychological arm-twisting about how great a domain it actually was … and if I was the owner … and various compelling reasons why I should order it immediate and how this was all time-limited etc.

After surviving these two emails without actually buying the domain a third email arrived three days later offering the domain at US$300.- with a time limit of 24 hours to buy, man, I was sweating, with my AmEx card burning a hole right through my wallet.

After about 10 minutes I talked myself out of it, with the rationale that with many other domains in my account and not even off the ground buying this particular domain (although good in my mind) was evidence of me starting to loose the plot.

… I blew it off and (tried to) put it out of my mind.

About a month latter without any prompting I got an impulse to type the domain name into my registrars website, the computer said:

“Noel, WWW.PENNYDVDS.COM is available!”

I totally flipped and nearly had an accident running for my wallet, which was in the bedroom, so both names were registered and I was jumping up-and-down in the living room. Penny DVDs, not everyone’s cup of tea but like I said I had big plans and started developing the site almost immediately (well the graphics at least).