SEO Ladder

Way back in the beginning of July I was tagged by Derek Semmler to participate in the 8 Oddities Meme. As you know, I’m not that big on Memes but I believe it is high time to expose a little bit of the personality behind SEO Ladder. I am going to start out by breaking the rules – I am not going to tag anyone this time (but feel free to jump if you wish).

Rules To Follow

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

8 Oddities About Myself

1. I haven’t paid for a haircut in over ten years. While I don’t own a Flowbee, I have been shaving my head with clippers ever since my sophomore year of college.
2. I went to grade school with two time Olympic figure skater Michael Weiss. I haven’t spoken to him since then but listen to him on the radio pretty regularly.
3. I was almost “stuffed” into a torpedo tube by a crew member of the USS West Virginia (never piss off a missile tech). Ah, life as contractor scum…can’t beat it.
4. I have played five instruments over the course of my life (trumpet, euphonium, guitar, bass, and drums)…but really only have time to play the guitar these days.
5. I am a computer nerd by day, audio engineer by night. I am a (hobbyist) “tweakhead” and am currently in the process of building a recording studio in my basement.
6. I love good beer and am a novice home brewer. While I am a novice by most standards, I have had a batch or two turn out to be pretty pleasing to the palate. I am planning on doing a Scotch Ale in October.
7. My band opened up for the pop/rock band OAR (back before they were rich and famous of course). Culos, where you at?
8. I am a Dunkin Donuts coffee fanatic. I must have at least two to three cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee per day or the world may come to an end. Oh yeah, just cream…save the sweet stuff for your batch of brownies.

Back in May, Wendy Piersall over at eMoms at Home orchestrated a group research project where she asked her readers to pull their resources and post answers to many of today’s blogging related conundrums. One of the topics that immediately caught my attention was “How to create a Google Toolbar icon to get gazillions of subscribers”. I mean, who doesn’t want “gazillions” of subscribers, right? Intrigued, I decided that I would create a custom RSS button for SEO Ladder in hopes of attracting new feed subscribers.

Background

A Google Toolbar Button is nothing more than a small button added to the Google Toolbar that provides a small piece of functionality targeted at a specific website. Google Toolbar Buttons can be used to display RSS feeds, run custom search terms, or even function as a simple bookmark. Toolbar buttons sit in the Google Toolbar and display an icon of your choice.

Google Toolbar Buttons are created using a simple XML file format that conforms to the Google Toolbar API. Toolbar Buttons are installed by clicking on specially crafted link pointing to this XML file (provided you already have the Google Toolbar installed on your system).

Creating a Google Toolbar Button alone does not guarantee the flood of traffic mentioned at the beginning of this article. You will also need to submit your completed (and tested) button to the Google Button Gallery to ensure your button reaches the masses.

How to create a Google Toolbar Button

Dennis Bjorn Petersen rose to Wendy’s challenge and created an awesome tutorial on how to create a Google Toolbar button. Instead of rehashing the steps that Dennis took in my article, I suggest giving his tutorial a good read. Dennis outlines two approaches (technical and non-technical) that you can take to create a custom RSS toolbar button. I opted to go with the non-technical approach and used an online tool to create my button. This tool automates the creation and formatting of the XML file as well as the encoding of the button image (icon). With a little tweaking of the input parameters, I had a finished button minutes.

You can download the SEO Ladder RSS button here.

Next Steps

After uploading my brand new RSS toolbar button to my blog, I performed a round of testing in both FireFox and IE to ensure everything was working. Once I was sure everything was working as expected, I uploaded my Toolbar Button to Google’s Button Gallery for approval. Approval came in about two weeks and my button was then available for all to download.

My Results

I was fortunate when I added my button to the Button Gallery in that my niche was not saturated…so there were only a handful of buttons under my search term. Within hours of my button being approved, I was seeing numerous hits from my Google Toolbar Button.

Over the last three months I have seen over 230 visits originating from my button alone. I have also noticed a significant increase in RSS subscriptions (up to about 250 subscribers from just a handful). While I cannot attribute the jump in RSS subscriptions to the Toolbar Button, I can speculate that it had some impact on my current numbers.

Overall I am extremely pleased that I decided to publish my Google Toolbar button and thank Dennis Bjorn Petersen for putting together such a great tutorial on the subject! I would recommend that other bloggers do the same if they are interested in a little boost in traffic. I would also love to hear other’s experience with Google Toolbar Buttons as well…