Genius Blog Optimization

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 3 - An Equation for Success

2009-07-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….

Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased.

High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.

Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.

Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.

Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.

Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.

How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 2 - Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

2009-07-04T01:53:00.000-07:00

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.

If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.

Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.

Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).

It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.

The next posts in this series will expand upon these aspects of successful blogging with Adsense with our Adsense Equation.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

2009-07-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable.

So how do we make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that have helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

Earning a Six Figure Income from Blogging?

2009-07-04T01:43:00.000-07:00

There has been quite a bit of flow on interest from the Interview that I did a few days back with Susannah Gardner. Interestingly, despite the fact that I wrote thousands of words of wisdom (I like to think so) it was a line buried way down at the bottom of the first part of the interview that seems to have gotten everyone talking and emailing me. In response to the question of ‘how much do you earn’ I wrote:

‘This is the big question, isn’t it? Some of the systems I use don’t allow disclosure of actual figures so I won’t break it down or give specifics. It is actually difficult to put a figure on it because each month is different and overall my earnings are still on the rise from month to month. However based on how things are currently going I expect that this year my blogging (across all blogs and income streams) will generate a six figure income ($US).‘

To be honest I grappled with whether to include that detail in this interview. As I’ve said here before, I was brought up not to discuss money and to do so to me feels a little awkward - but i did it for a couple of reasons:

1. It is the question i get asked more than any other question. People are fascinated with a blogger earning money from their blogging. I thought I’d answer it once and for all so we could get past it and start talking about more important things.

2. I partly did it because people constantly write off the idea of Pro Blogging to me.They see what I and a growing list of other Pro Bloggers as a hobby and write it off as just a stage we’re going through. I want to legitimate what we do and show it is a significant earner and something worth putting some serious time into. Pro Blogging is here to stay.

3. I wanted to encourage my fellow Professional Bloggers(and those aspiring to be them) with a figure that would give them a bit of hope. If I can earn that kind of money then I know others can (and already are). Yes I’m working very hard on this (and have done so for a couple of years) but I’m just an ordinary guy following some hunches and dreams.

A couple of people have told me I shouldn’t have revealed how much I earn because it breaks confidentiality clauses with the ad programs that I use. Thanks for your concern but please don’t worry. In saying I earn a six figure income (in excess of $100,000 $US) I have not said how much over and I have made it clear that the figure is calculated on a number of income sources including private advertising deals, affiliate programs, impression based ad programs, Adsense, BlogAds, text ads and blog consulting revenues etc.

Lastly I’ve had a number of people write to me in the last 24 hours via email and I’m quite amazed by the diversity of responses that I’ve had. They range from utter rage and anger that I earn money from blogging through to people asking for lessons and consulting.

To those that are angry - I am sorry that you are offended by me earning money from blogging. A guy has to support his family somehow and I figure it might as well be by helping people on the net by providing them with the information that they are searching for.

To those that want help to do what I do- sure thing - I’d love to help. I’d suggest the first port of call is to take a few hours to wander through the archives of this site. Virtually everything I’ve learnt is here for free. Yes I am open to doing some consulting work to help people but I’d recommend you start with the free stuff that I offer here on this blog. If after you’ve had a read you would still like to engage me for some coaching or consultation I’d be more than happy to do that. I do charge for this service.

update: Since writing this post I’ve had many requests for help from people wanting to know more about how to blog for money. The requests are so many that I’m unable to respond to all individually or to give everyone the attention that they want. As a result I suggest two things for those wanting to know how to make money blogging.

Firstly I encourage you to read the archives of this blog. Everything I know about blogging professionally is on this blog. There are thousands of posts on the topic and I encourage you to put some time aside one day to have a read.

Secondly if you don’t have the time or patience to wade through my archives (there are a lot) I’ve developed a course in conjunction with Andy Wibbels to introduce people to the ways to make money from blogging. The course was inspired by this post and is called Six Figure Blogging. The course is made up of six one hour recordings of Andy and myself looking at different aspects of making money from blogs and includes over 200 pages of transcripts from the recordings. The course is not free but we believe it contains information that has the potential to earn bloggers money from blogging through hard work, putting in time and following some of the ideas we include in the course.

I hope that between the course and my archives you find the information you’re looking for on making money from blogging.

15 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

2009-07-04T01:33:00.000-07:00

Google Adsense publishers often commit common� mistakes that could ban their Adsense account. Google Adsense is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches – Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing – Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported – Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Update:
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page – With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral. Update: This feature is closing Aug 2008.

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. – Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images – It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. More.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

Warning: Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes?

2009-07-04T01:32:00.000-07:00

“What’s the most common mistake made by new bloggers? How can we avoid it?“ - asked on Twitter by @alisonkerr.

Here are a few quick mistakes that I see new bloggers making (some of which mistakes I made myself). They’re listed in no particular order and I’d love for you to continue the list in comments below:

Giving up too early - blogs take time to take off
Putting off starting a blog - waiting until everything is just right before launching can mean you never do it
Echoing what everyone else is talking about - say something unique and share your opinion
Not blogging on your own domain - I know some swear by using hosted blogs but if you want ultimate control of your blog it is best to do it on your own domain and hosting.
Irregular Posting - you don’t have to post every day but try to establish a regular rhythm of posting
Being too apologetic - ’sorry I haven’t written for a while’ can end up being the most common type of post on a blog - yes apologize if you’ve messed up but don’t be too hard on yourself - keep investing your time into building your blog up rather than highlighting it’s problems.
Focusing more upon Quick Traffic than Loyal Readers - there’s nothing wrong with a big rush of traffic from social media or another blog - but just as important as that is building reader loyalty. Sometimes growing one reader at a time is more fruitful than getting spikes of traffic that never returns.
Clutter - too many buttons, widgets, navigation elements
Great Posts but Terrible Titles - don’t short change yourself by investing hours into writing great content only to slap a mediocre headline/title onto it.
Not Defining a Topic - the most successful blogs have a well defined topic/niche (or they target a certain demographic)
Choosing a Topic you have no Interest in - for your blog to be successful you’ll need to blog regularly on your topic for years - if you want to sustain it choose something you have an interest in or love for or you’ll run out of steam.
Too many Ads - I don’t have a problem with ads on a blog from Day #1 but when they overpower the content and push it down the page too far they hurt your chances of building a loyal readership.
Being too Insular/Expecting Readers to come to You - many bloggers starting out fail to realize that the more you put yourself out there and interact with other bloggers the more chance you have of being read.
Blogging about Making Money Blogging (as a first blog) - I’ve lost count of how many bloggers I’ve seen start blogs on the topic of blogging for money when they’ve never made money blogging. Start with something you know.
Not Being Useful - blogs that meet needs and solve problems are blogs that people will keep coming back to and which they’ll spread news of to their network.
Writing for Search Engines Before Humans - you can always tell when a blogger discovers Search Engine Optimization for the first time. Suddenly titles don’t make sense, keywords appear in posts for no real reason, links to other pages on the blog that are irrelevant to the post keep being used. Learn SEO - but keep your readers as your #1 priority.
Becoming a Stats-a-holic - the lure of checking your stats is understandable and common to new (and older) bloggers - but it can become an unhealthy obsession that leads to distraction and depression.
Link Baiting with Personal Attack - taking pot shots at other bloggers might get you some quick traffic - but hate breeds hate and the type of readers you attract and the culture it’ll breed on your blog could come back to bite you. Plus you’ll get a reputation that you might not want to live with.
Not Knowing Why You’re Blogging - while most of us don’t really know what we’re doing at the start - the faster you can work out what the purpose of your blog is the sooner you’ll start moving toward achieving that purpose.
Not Selling Yourself - one thing I don’t think many bloggers get is the power of blogs to sell yourself as a blogger. There’s nothing wrong with monetizing a blog with ads - but maybe a better long term strategy is to use a blog to advertise who you are and what you can offer readers.
Thinking You Have to Know it All - one of the best things about blogs is that they’re a great medium for involving your readers in the process of learning. Leave space for others to interact, share what they know and contribute.

There’s A LOT more to be said on this topic - what mistakes do you see new (and older) bloggers making?

13 Tips for Marketing Your Business With Your Blog

2009-07-04T01:30:00.000-07:00

While much of the content here on ProBlogger is about the ‘Business of Blogging’ I’m regularly asked to speak at conferences and receive emails from readers with questions about how Businesses can use Blogs to grow themselves - particularly in their marketing efforts.

Below are a 13 tips that I usually try to share with Businesses wanting to use blogging in their marketing mix.

1. Listen First, Blog Later

Perhaps the most useful thing a company can do before they start blogging is to monitor the blogosphere. There are some wonderful tools around for listening to what bloggers are writing about your industry, your company and your products. Many of these tools are free (Google News Alerts for example). Plug in some keywords relevant to you and your industry and see what is being talked about.

You’ll also find that as you ‘listen’ that you’ll begin to learn the culture of blogging and how those in your industry are already using it. This will teach you a lot both about what is acceptable and what the etiquette is but it also could give you some clues on how to differentiate your blog from what others in your niche are doing with their blogs.

Lastly - watching and listening will help you identify key bloggers and influencers in your niche - these are people who can teach you a lot, introduce you to the niche blogging network and perhaps help you get started .

2. Know what you want to achieve

What objective of your business is your blog helping you to meet? Don’t just start a blog because it is the ‘thing to do’. Consider what channel/s of your business your blog is going to help strengthen, what goals you want to achieve with it and what it will and won’t aim to do.

You might find as you ponder this that you have quite a diverse set of goals for your blog. This can work - but you should also probably consider multiple blogs if your objectives are wide and varied. There’s nothing wrong with multiple blogs, each with their own focus and purpose.

3. Be Useful

Good blogs meet needs, solve problems and help those who read them in some way. This doesn’t mean your blog has to be full of ‘tips’ (although tips related to how to use your products could work) but you should consider who will be reading your blog and what sort of needs they’ll have.

Will they be looking for information about your company and products? Are they looking to find information on your staff members? Do they need news from your industry? Do they have specific problems that you might be able to help them solve?

While being ‘useful’ might not sound like something that will convert to sales directly it can have a profound impact upon those reading your blog and your business in the long term. Solve a problem for someone and when they next are looking to make a purchase they might just come knocking on your door. Meet a need for someone and they might just tell their network about you.

4. Be Personal and Professional

There’s no single way to build a blog and no one style to have to write them in. Ultimately it’s your blog and you can develop your own approach…. BUT…. blogs do lend themselves to a personal style of communication. Your company probably already has a more static site which conveys content in the third person - use your blog (or blogs) to do something different.

Give your company a face, voice and personal touch by writing in a more personal voice, using pictures (of the author and other staff members), by showing some of the behind the scenes of your company etc. Be Human!

Try using different mediums (video, image, audio) as well as text to show your company is not just a logo and mission statement but a place where real people are at its heart.

This doesn’t mean professionalism goes out the door - always keep in mind that everything that goes up on your blog either potentially adds value to your company or takes away from it - keep your standards high and remember that everything you publish is effectively on the web for ever (even when you delete it it’ll usually be indexed in an internet archive somewhere).

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Sell, but Don’t be too Salesy

It’s OK to use a blog to promote products or run sales oriented campaigns. I’ve seen some people argue that blogs shouldn’t be used to sell - but I think as long as you’re transparent and keep your posts useful ’sales’ related posts can work. The key is to make the post more useful than just going with a ’sell at all costs’ attitude.

Why not run a blog special where you offer those who read your blog a special discount that can’t be had anywhere else? Perhaps offer blog readers coupons or bonuses when they buy? If you are providing people with value they won’t mind a promotion from time to time. The key is to keep everything you do on your blog of a high value and usefulness and avoid getting into hyped spin sales talk.

6. Link, Link, Link

Many businesses are afraid to send people away from their blogs and end up being very insular. This ignores one of the key things that blogging has been built upon - the link. Blogging is a medium that has grown so quickly because traditionally people have been very generous with their links to other sites and blogs.

While this might seem a little counter-intuitive (sending people away from your blog) if you provide value to your readers by sending them to high quality and useful information they’ll thank you for it and be back for more. Helping people learn something, be entertained, make a great new connection, stay up to date with the latest news etc can grow your own profile and perceived expertise. It can also help you to make in-roads with others in your niche when you send them traffic and could lead to links coming back at you and fruitful partnerships.

7. Establish a Rhythm of Posting

A blog doesn’t need to have new content on it every day to be successful. What is just as important as lots of posts is regular posts. In my experience readers like to know that they’ll get a regular stream of content and not sudden bursts of lots of posts and then extended periods of silence.

My advice for a new blog is to aim for 2-3 posts a week when you’re starting out. In time you might be able to lift this rate to 3-4 and then move towards 4-5 in time. This way you’re not biting off more than you can chew too early and providing your readers with a steady stream of useful content.

8. Avoid Ads

If your main objective as a business starting a blog is to grow your own profile and add to your own Marketing messages then you should avoid running ads on your blog. I’ve seen a number of businesses fall for the temptation of making a few dollars by selling ads on their blog - but all this really does is distract your reader from the one company you should be advertising - yours.

At the worst end of things you could be highlighting your own competitors by running ads on your blog with a system like AdSense which allows any company to target ads on your own blog. Instead of making some loose change with advertising - develop internal banner ads for your products and services and put them at key points on your blog so drive readers to buy from you.

9. Determine your Comment Moderation Policy

One of the biggest fears of many companies getting into blogging is about what will happen in their comments section. What happens if a customer with a vendetta starts doing damage there? What if a competitor sees an opportunity to stir up trouble or promote themselves?

Different companies have different approaches to moderating comments on their blog and while some bloggers can get a little rigid with their views on this - there’s really no one single rule that should be applied to all blogs. Ultimately it’s your blog and you determine how people should interact there.

My personal preference on blogs is to keep them as easy as possible to comment upon and to allow all comments unless defamatory, spammy or containing obscene language - however your comments policy might be a little more closed than this. The key is to know what you will and won’t allow ahead of time and to make that policy available somewhere for your readers.

Also have in place a system for enforcing your policy and moderating comments. This will probably include giving a person (or a team of people) the task of regular monitoring of comments.

10. Be Interactive

Blogging is often at its best when it’s an interactive thing. Encourage comments by asking questions in post, run polls and surveys, encourage your readers with blogs to write their own posts that extend ideas in yours, run competitions, offer special discounts for readers etc.

11. Integrate Your Blog with your Website

In most cases you should think carefully about how to integrate your blog with your company’s existing website. Again there are no rules here and it’ll partly depend upon your objectives but it’d be normal to link to your blog from your main company website and link from your blog to your website. In most cases you’ll probably also want to make sure your blog is on your main company domain (yoursite.com/blog will work well in helping both areas of the site to build your SEO authority) and that design elements are consistent between areas.

12. Finding Readers by Leveraging Your Existing Profile and Network

One of the challenges facing new blogs whether they be tied to a business or not is how to get people reading them. One of the starting points in this is to think about what existing profile or network you already have developed. Most companies have customers, staff, industry associations etc that they can notify (without being spammy) of their new blog.

If your company has other places of online presence (your company site, social network profiles etc) you should also link to your blog from these. Other marketing materials such as letterhead, business cards, email signatures etc can all also help get the word out about your blog.

13. Mix it Up

If you decide just to go with one blog instead of multiple blogs for multiple channels of your company it can be worthwhile to mix up the type of content that appears on your blog. There are so many types of posts that a company could run depending upon their objectives including:

highlighting key staff members
message from the CEO
state of the industry posts
linking to breaking news in the industry
polls
announcements of new products
highlighting key clients/customers
tips on how to use products
FAQs
live blogging from industry events

The sky is the limit on both the topics of posts as well as the mediums you can use to deliver them. Keep your blog fresh by mixing them up.

What tips would you give businesses wanting to use blogs as part of their marketing mix or in some other aspect of their blogging?

How do you link to yourself? Anchor Text for Internal Links Matters

2009-07-04T01:23:00.000-07:00

One of the most basic principles of search engine optimization is that the words that other sites use within the text of their links to you (called the anchor text) have an impact upon how your site ranks for those words.

For example - if you want to rank well in Google for the words ‘pink widget’ then it’d be more helpful for another site to link to you with the words pink widget than any other words.

The principle extends to internal links on your blog. When you link to yourself (for example linking to a previous link that you’ve written) you should consider doing so with descriptive words of the post rather than generic words.

For example - if I wanted to link to my previous post titled ‘blogging for beginners’ in a post rather than linking like this:

‘you can read my post on blogging for beginners here‘

it would be more powerful in terms of the search engine ranking of the post to link to it as:

‘you can read my previous post on the topic, blogging for beginners‘

It doesn’t sound like much - but it’s these small adjustments in the way that a blogger blogs that can add up to having a bit impact upon the ranking of that blog in search engines.

One more thing - it’s not just the links from within your posts that this matters for. Internal links from your navigation and menus matter too. For example if you link to your categories - think about the words you use there too.

Blogging Tips for Beginners

2009-07-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blogging Tips for Beginners Guide.

On the page below you’ll find links to a series of blog tips that I’ve written with blogging for beginners (and ‘Pre’ Bloggers) in mind. It unpacks the basics of blogging and a lot of the decisions and strategies that you’ll want to consider when setting up and starting a blog.

My Ultimate Guide to Blogging for Beginners

Since developing this series I’ve produced a book specifically for beginner bloggers. You can learn more about it on our ProBlogger the Book page. The book is filled with up to date blogging tips for beginners - you can get it on Amazon here.

3 More Excellent Resources on Blogging for Beginners

Also - if you are looking for some more personalized help in starting and running a blog I highly recommend that you check out these resources by a blogger that I respect - Yaro Starak:

Blog Mastermind Blog Mentoring Program - one of the best coaching and training course going around on blogging.
Become a Blogger Videos - a free series of videos that talks new bloggers through how to set up a blog. Easy to understand and best of all, free.
Blog Profits Blueprint - a free report on how to build profitable blogs.

Lastly- if you enjoy these posts and want to keep in touch with ProBlogger - subscribe via our RSS feed.

Blogging Tips for Beginners

Introductory Posts

Blog Design Tips

Tips for Writing Content for Blogs

Tips on Making Money from Blogs

Blog Networks

Other Beginner Blogging Tips

98 Blog Tips for a Lazy Sunday

2009-07-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

The 31 Days to Building a Better Blog is over and it’s time to post the final reader tips. In today’s batch there are 98 tips in total which means that I’ve now posted links to 626 reader blog tips on the central 31 Day Project Page. Please note - submissions are now closed.

In this latest batch of blogging tips are some fantastic examples of blogging tips which I really hope you’ll enjoy.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the project. A special shout out to the team in the 31 Day Project who did the Chocolate Challenge - sounds like they had a sweet time of it.

Here are the last batch of blogging tips - make yourself comfortable and enjoy!

Make Your Template Unique by Michael Martin
Blog on the Air by Jerky Beef
A Blogger on Blogging - Chapter 4: Easy Way to Confuse Your Users by Vlad H
Notebook and Pencil by Martin
Valid XHTML: Ampersands in Links by Martin
WordPress Link Love - Follow On Plugins And Tweeks by Rob Malon
Making a Favicon for Your Blog or Website by Tallfreak
Why your “About” page is going to become more critical on your business blog by Krishna De
5 Blogging Tips to Maximize Pageviews Per Visit by Blain Reinkensmeyer
The Nine Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers by Etienne Teo
10 Popular Firefox Addons for Better Blogging by Etienne Teo
5 Ways your Blog can GainTraffic From Media Power by Etienne Teo
Get More RSS Feed Subscribers! by Matt Harzewski
Hooked on Phonics Works for Me: How Learning to Spell Can Make You a Better Blogger by Kev at Special Kind of Stupid
How To Find Hidden Links In Your Site by Courtney Tuttle
Top 7 Sign’s You Are an Obsessed Web Stats Whore by Sarah Pacopac
5 easy ways to get bookmarked on delicious and become hot by Mohsin Naqi
The First Months of Blogging May Break or Make You by Jan
5 Essential OSX Blogging Tools by Simon
Using Outbound Links to Improve Your Blog by Steven Snell
Wordpress Plugin of the week - Redirection by Blogmunch
Wrap Your Brain around Viral Marketing by Suzanne Atkinson
How To Get Your Blogger Blog’s Categories Indexed By Search Engines (Again) by Bloggeroo
Adsense Isn’t Enough To Make Money Online by Taylor
Rabbit and Turtle Race in Blogging by Ken Xu
Break Your Blog Out of the Box with Mailing Lists and Cliff-Hangers by Fred Black
Don’t Starve Your Readers or Give Them Indigestion by PabloPabla
Better Google ranking by DPeach
Fact errors, libel and blogs: How to cope by Glenn Abel
What you need to know about outgoing links? from SEO perspective by Vijay Shinde
7 Ways to Turn Your First Time Visitors into Returning Visitors by Kreah
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes by Snoskred
Blog Hints - Refer To Yourself In The Third Person? by Snoskred
Creating Content from Everyday Life by Pearl
10 Reasons Why Blogging is like Sex by kuanhoong
blog migration series - Choosing Wordpress plugins by blogmunch
Visualize Your Success by Pat B. Doyle
What do YOU think is the best time of the day to post articles on your blogs? by Mark
Golden Pencil’s Mission Statement by Anne Wayman
Are Your Blog Posts Actually Useful? by Matt Jones
How To Load WordPress From A Static PHP Script by Jeremy Steele
5 essential blogging tools by Shawn Wallace
How I Added a Sparklet to my Lists by Suzanne Atkinson
7 Ways To Give Writer’s Block A Severe Beating by Jason
7 Ways to Brand Your Blog by Jordan (MamaBlogga)
Easily Fix Broken Links & Prevent Your Visitors Getting Lost by Chris Lodge
5 Steps For Effective Uses of Lists In Your Blog Posts by Sly from Slyvisions.com
Group Elements of You Website by Dan Cole
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing by Sephyroth
Writing Dirty by Skellie
Raving Lunatics of the Twenty-First Century by Chris
The Social Network That Makes you Money with Google by Shawonne Womack
Avoid The FUD By Following These Three Simple SEO Tips by George Manty
50 Types of Links for Bloggers and How to Make Them. by Vin
Increase Traffic Create a Google Gadget by Vin
Hot Tips On Blogger Profiles. by Vin
Branding For Small Business And Bloggers by Steven Bradley
Analysing The Problogger Group Writing Project by Rhys
7 Ways to Lower the Buying Hurdle by Mason Hipp
Does Valid Code Help Your Blog? by Michael Martin
How Does Being Social Help Your Blog? by Pat B. Doyle
A Simple Way to Create a Re Direct Link by Ian Fernando
Wordpress Duplicate Content: You Control the Horizontal, You Control the Vertical by Widgett Walls
Learning about blogging on my bike by Christine Martell
blog migration series - cpanel orientation by blogmunch
SUPERCHARGE your blog! What guidelines do you follow to make your blog successful? by Mark
Affiliate Programs 101 - Blog And Make Money by Shine With Grace
How To Get Others To Listen To You by Mohsin Naqi
Social Media Marketing: The Secret Weapon of Small Business by Mason Hipp
Ten Writing Errors That Makes Your Blog Less Good by Simon
Text-link-ads: all-in-one blog advertiser / monetizer by Joe
1 Quick Tip to get 1850 Visitors to Your Blog by Jake
The Importance of Comment Policy by Ken Xu
5 Stupid Ways To Sink Your Blog! by Ted Demopoulos
Stop frustrating your Readers! by Bob Walsh
Reach out to your online friends by Bob Walshb
Do it on Fridays - cherry pick a mega list post by Bob Walsh
9 Essential Tools for Bloggers by Steven Snell
Another Money Making Blog or Blog About Blogging? by PabloPabla
Made A Mistake In A Post? Remember to Ping Feedburner by Matt Jones
Actively Changing Your Layout by Dan Cole
1 EZ Tip to Beat the Rush and Make some Bucks by Jake
Use 25 Expert Techniques to Have a Successful Blog by Yuri Filimonov
How to : Time based Adsense by Ben Gillbanks
How To Find Profitable Affiliate Programs And How To Display Them On Your Blog by Pat B. Doyle
Update Your Permalink Structure by http://wolftales.ath.cx/webmasters/update-your-permalink-structure/
Supporting Blogging through other Revenue Streams by Simon
How do you REWARD your COMMENTERS and those who have BACKLINKED to your blog? by Mark
What can Bloggers learn from Babies? by Simon
Blogging for Business: Understanding the Two Types of Audiences by Aaronontheweb
What you gotta ask yourself is, Do You Feel Lucky, Punk? by Mark
What Your Readers Don’t Need To Know About You by Mohsin Naqi
Why I Use the WordPress Default Permalinks by Pat B. Doyle
Don’t Fall in the Expert Trap - Strive for Genuine Authority by Jan
10 Tips for Good Commenting Practice by Tejvan Pettinger
Blog Tools and Services That Bloggers Need To Use by Sly from Slyvisions.com
31 Day Blogging Challenge — Day 27 - 31 by Sue Waters
And The Winners Are…..The MiniLegends! by Sue Waters

Perseverance Will Save Your Blog

2009-07-04T01:14:00.001-07:00

I was doing some research recently, wondering if my blog would ever take off and what it really depended on. I was a little bit discouraged about writing lots of content for two months on my blog, but having a significant amount of less traffic than on my friend’s blog which is only two months older than mine.

To see if my blog would ever receive any readers that would get interested, and hopefully raise my hopes, I went on ProBlogger. I looked through his much older posts and went through the comment list. I clicked on a bunch of commentators’ names that took me back to their blogs and recorded how many of them were still blogging today. Their comments were from 2006 and I noticed that most of the bloggers had either just abandoned their blog or quit paying for hosting completely.

Now the interesting stuff I learnt from my research was that the ones that actually held on to their blogs and kept posting through good and through bad on topics that they found dear to them, they in fact had a pretty decent following with many RSS Subscribers and were receiving quite a few comments on each post. I also ran their blogs through a Link Checker and saw that the older the blog, the more backlinks they had.

The great thing about perseverance when it comes to blogging is that the longer you push your blog, the more you get out of it. It doesn’t matter what topic you write about, because there are a lot of people out there that have the same interests as you no matter what they are.

Perseverance gives your blog backlinks, it gives your blog a higher rating on search engines, and it gives people time to learn more about you and spread your blog’s name through word of mouth. If you read this blog and a bunch of other “making money online” blogs, it opens your mind out to how to market your blog properly, and if you connect perseverance to marketing, there is no stopping you. All that’s left is time to allow someone big and famous to come along and mention your blog in a review or just mention a little bit about your post to really help you explode onto the Super Blogger level.

So all in all, in my opinion, there are really just two things every blogger should keep in mind when either starting a new blog or whenever they’re discouraged about their own blog:

Make sure you’re blogging about a topic you really love (I know this one has been said before by almost everyone, but it’s true. Shite I Like is my second blog for a reason.)
Whatever you do, don’t give up. Keep blogging and blogging, and reading, and blogging. The more time you put into it will really come back to help you 100 times more in the long-run. And you just might never know when your blog will turn huge.

Also, if you’ve got the time to blog on a topic on an almost daily basis, you more than likely have the time to do research of your own on how to market and make your blog popular without having to really spend much money on it.

Many people’s biggest flaw in life is entering into something thinking that easy money will just flow their way, and once the going gets even a little bit difficult, they abandon ship. For example, when I was going to University and Real Estate College at the same time, I thought I’d become a Real Estate Salesperson in no time and start selling houses in the summer time while everybody from University would be working some landscaping summer job. Becoming a Real Estate person was harder than I thought and took much more time than initially planned. At many points I thought about quitting that and just focusing on Univ, but perseverance got me through College to get into the field of Real Estate as a part-time job while still continuing with my Univ studies. I’m happy I pushed myself, because now I see that if I could keep a weekend job while going to University and College all at the same time, while also learning about blogging, then I can push myself to blog on a regular basis.

Keep those 2 points I outlined above in mind and make sure to always keep pushing yourself, because without perseverance you’ll never see any glory. I hope this post really gave you a motivation to keep blogging and reading and most importantly believing that all you need to reach your goal with blogging is constant determination, time, and a little bit of luck.

Show Popular Posts of Current Browsing Category

2009-07-04T01:02:00.000-07:00

Wordpress really is a remarkable tool but there is no way to show popular posts of current category you are browsing just by using WP template tags. For instance if your blog has category Sport, it would be nice to show of the most popular posts in that category for the last month or so -> automatically of course….Well, I was searching for plugins that would do the trick, code snippets and much more but haven’t found anything similar so I’ve decided to code this myself – directly from database.

And because I really love simplicity this code is also as simple as possible…Here is what you should do:

Download archive.php file found below
Open your theme theme file also called archive.php
Use my code at your own risk=) … just be careful and place it outside loop

archive.php theme file (5.0 KiB, 90 hits)

This code snippet is aimed at WP theme developers and those that know a thing or two about coding,…sorry for everybody else;)

First 2 Words Are All That Matters

2009-07-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Users typically see about first 2 words for most text items on the web; they’ll see a little more if the lead words are short, and only the first word if they’re long.

This rule applies especially for title links so be careful how you write titles for your posts if you want to attract readers attention. It’s also good for SEO as search engines give better relevance to first couple of words and read just 50 characters or so.

Good Links

Use plain language
Use specific terminology
Follow conventions for naming common features
Front-load user- and action-oriented terms
Examples:
- “Gift Cards & E-Gift Certificates “
- “New customers apply online now”
- “First 2 Words Are All That Matters”

Bad Links

Bland, generic words
Made-up words or terms
Starting with blah-blah and deferring the information-carrying text to the end
Examples:
- “Working while you study: paying tax”
- “Introducing Chase Exclusives”
- “Profit Accelerator Overview”

Guide Users to Correct Links

Allow users to confidently predict what they’ll get if they click.
Be clearly differentiated from the other links.
Not be misleading or promise too much.

Nanocontent (first bit of a link) just needs to be good enough that users will sniff the most promising links in full.

Perseverance Will Save Your Blog

2009-07-04T00:55:00.000-07:00

So all in all, in my opinion, there are really just two things every blogger should keep in mind when either starting a new blog or whenever they’re discouraged about their own blog:

Make sure you’re blogging about a topic you really love (I know this one has been said before by almost everyone, but it’s true. Shite I Like is my second blog for a reason.)
Whatever you do, don’t give up. Keep blogging and blogging, and reading, and blogging. The more time you put into it will really come back to help you 100 times more in the long-run. And you just might never know when your blog will turn huge.

Should I Quit Blogging?

2009-07-04T00:43:00.000-07:00

“Should I quit my blog and start Lifestreaming, Videocasting, Social Messaging/Networking etc?”

There’s been another round of ‘blogging is dead’ posts doing the rounds of late and as a result I’ve had a number of emails hitting my inbox over the last week from bloggers asking if they should stop blogging.

Here’s some of the advice I’ve been sharing:

Blogging is not dead - it’s evolving.
You should be evolving too (read Blogs are Out of Beta, But Bloggers Should always be in Beta)
Keep being useful, keep solving problems and keep meeting needs - whatever the medium this is key.
Keep producing content - people continue to search the web for content in huge numbers. It’s not all about networking and bookmarking - whether it be text, video or audio - keep producing content.
Experiment with different mediums - to the best of your ability keep abreast of the ‘new’ mediums that are emerging.
Build a ‘Home Base’ - many people flit from one medium to another and end up with nothing of their own (read more on the Home Bases and Outposts that I use).
Build a Brand - the mediums are tools. They’ll come and go in time - the key is to build something that lasts beyond them.
Don’t be Precious about your ‘Blog’ and be open to change - there’s no one ‘right’ way to blog. Blogs can have comments or not have comments, have full RSS feeds or partial ones, look like a traditional blog or act and look more like a lifestream or portal. The key is to know what you want to achieve and let that shape what you do with your blog.
Don’t abandon your blog too quickly - your primary efforts may move into a different medium but blogs can be an important part of the mix of what you do online. Don’t abandon your blog - build upon it, let it evolve, leverage what you’ve already built and use it where appropriate in the mix of what you do.

My last piece of advice is particularly for those with limited time or capacity to fully engage with all of the mediums and tools that are currently at our fingertips.

I get the sense from a lot of bloggers that they feel that they’re being left behind - that all this new stuff that is emerging is beyond them - that it’s hopeless to keep on blogging. My message to you if you’re feeling this way is to keep at it. Even as a full time blogger/web entrepreneur I don’t have time to fully engage with all of the new technologies that are currently emerging. I too feel some of those ‘overwhelming’ feelings.

I think the key is to engage with the new technologies to the point that you’re able but to know when to stop and focus upon what you already have in front of you.

The problem as I see it is that whether it be a blog, a Twitter presence, a podcast or some other kind of website or presence - it takes time to build these things up to successful levels. If you only give a medium a short time before moving to the next one you’ll just end up with a trail of abandoned accounts and sites behind you.

I see a lot of people running from one thing to the next and not really achieving anything. They live in a constant state of distraction and experimentation. There’s nothing wrong with new things and testing them out - but unless you’re fortunate enough to have a lot of spare time or an amazing capacity not to sleep there comes a time where you need to choose a handful of things to do (or even just one) and to do it to the best of your ability.

For me - this means focusing mainly upon building blogs. My blogs are evolving and looking less and less like blogs as I experiment with different ways of presenting the information on them and play with different technologies on them - but I try to keep my focus steady upon the long term goals that I have. As a result I’ve managed to build them into profitable properties.

Yes I’ll continue to experiment with other technologies but for me they are only about adding value to my primary web properties.

What do you think? How are you approaching what you do in this ever changing web?

8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers

2009-07-04T00:42:00.000-07:00

Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers - but let me give you a few basic first steps:

1. Content is King

The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog. I suspect others will argue differently but as I look at my own blogs success in the search engines I’d say that this has been the number one factor.

Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written - of course they do this by passing on the link to your post and often they’ll do it in a way that helps your search rankings (on their own blog for example).

2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For

Every time you write a post you should be automatically be considering what words people might be putting into search engines to find that type of information. Once you know what kinds of words they’re using you’re in a great position to position yourself for that search.

3. Titles Titles Titles

There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles - so make sure you get them right:

first make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog. This is really important.
if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing.
next - include the keywords that you identified in point #2 in your post title
also, keep in mind that the words you use at the start of a title tend to carry more weight than words you use later in your title

4. Keywords in other parts of your post

Use the keywords you identified in point #2 within your post also. If you want Google to rank you for a term or phrase you need to use that term or phrase. Use it in sub headings in your post (use h tags where you can), use it in the content itself, use the words in the alt tags of images etc. Don’t go over the topic but do use the words where you can naturally in the post.

5. Link to Your Own Posts

Don’t over do this one but while links from other sites are a great way to increase your blog’s rankings so are links from your blog. Interlink your posts to share where readers can find more information on your topic (where relevant) but also consider linking to key posts on your blog from other places on the blog (sidebar, front page etc).

6. Links from Outside Your Blog

Links from other sites to yours are key in SEO but they can be hard to get. Start to linking to your blog from other sites that you have or are active on. Some (like on Twitter) won’t count for anything much as they have no-follow tags but they are all potential ways for people to access your site and some will help with SEO.

Don’t become obsessed with getting links - rather become obsessed about writing great content and the links will generally come in time. However if you’ve written a great post that you think will be relevant to another blog don’t be afraid to let that blogger or website owner know about it - they could just link up.

Also - take note of the type of posts that you write that do well at getting other sites to link to you. You can learn a lot about generating linkable content by doing so and might just develop a technique that will work again and again.

7. Plugins

I don’t tend to do much to the back end of my blog to alter things like meta tags - but there are some good plugins around if you’re using WordPress that can help with some of this and that may give you a small edge. Check out 9 SEO plugins that every WordPress Blog Should have for some suggestions on this.

8. Readers Begat Readers

This isn’t an SEO technique as such but it plays a part. The more readers you have the more likely your blog is to be found by other readers. There’s a certain ’snowballing’ thing that happens on a site over time - as you get readers quite often momentum grows as those readers pass on your site to others in their network. They link to you, they bookmark you, they tweet about you, they email friends about you, they blog about you, they suggest your site in recommendation engines….

Not all of this counts with SEO but some does and the accumulation of it over time all certainly helps to grow both organic and search traffic. I guess what I’m saying is to get readers any way you can - don’t just focus upon ‘SEO’ as such. It all counts.

My Hunch with SEO

Before I share my hunch…. let me say that I’m not an SEO and this could be completely wrong…. but it’s a hunch that I’ve had for a while now.

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost 7 years now and from what I can see the tweaks that many bloggers do on their blogs to optimize it seem to be having less and less impact on the rankings of blogs. Don’t get me wrong - I stand by the above tips completely and would do them as a common sense bare minimum - but from where I sit Google seem to be in the business of finding the best information that they can for their users. They don’t always get it right but I think they do a pretty good job.

As a blogger your job should be to provide the best information that you can.

It strikes me that Google have an ever increasing way of working out if your information is good. It’s not just about what keywords you have or how many links that you get - but these days they own Feedburner (know how many people subscribe to your blog and what links people are clicking on), they own Google Reader (again giving them all kinds of great data), they own Gmail, Google Analytics, YouTube etc…..

Now they may or may not use all the data in their ranking of sites but they certainly could know a lot about your blog and the posts you write. There’s also been increasing talk over the last 6 months or so about how easy it’d be for search engines to start generating data on what content is being shared in social networks and bookmarking sites.

My hunch is that many traditional SEO methods are less important (NOT irrelevant though) and that other factors are increasingly going to come into play. I’m sure that some will work out ways to manipulate this (SEO 2.0?) but increasingly the way to get ranked high in Google will be that you just need to keep producing great content and making sure that it’s sneezed out to your network.

Help this process along by giving your readers way to share your content (and seed it to social networks) as well as to become subscribers.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO

2009-07-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization is something that makes many blogger’s heads spin - I know this because every time I write an SEO article I get comments from bloggers telling me that its too big a topic and that they’d rather just write ‘quality content’.

Whilst I’ll never argue that quality content should be anything but a first priority in blogging, the fact is that there are many millions of pages of great writing languishing around at the bottom of search engines results pages that deserve to be read by many but which rarely see the light of day because their authors have failed to understand that just a few simple tweaks in the writing process could see them ranking considerably higher.

So it’s time for another series - this time on Search Engine Optimization for Blogs!

People often ask me ‘how do I get ranked number one in (((insert favourite search engine here)))?

My answer usually starts with - ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about….but….’

You see whilst some of my blogs rank very highly on different search engines - I often don’t really know why. Much of what I do is educated guessing and experimentation. I do read a lot of other people’s advice on the topic, but the more I read the more I realize that I’m not alone in my guess work - virtually every article I read is a ‘best guess’ of some kind.

My main advice to people wanting to optimize their blogs for Search Engines is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around.

When I think about SEO for my blogs I tend to divide the things I focus upon into two parts - offsite and onsite search engine optimization techniques. Offsite techniques are more about what others do on their websites in linking to you, onsite techniques you have more control over as you write.

Off Site SEO Techniques

Off site SEO techniques are as the name suggests factors from outside the site itself (ie from other sites) that impact the blog’s ranking in search engines. Many of these factors are outside the blogger’s control - however they are useful to know. The most obvious and probably most powerful offsite factor are Inbound Links (something I’ve already referred to above).

It is generally agreed that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing Search Engines results pages (in fact many argue it is THE most important factor). - To put it most simply - every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site.

Ideally Speaking - The best inbound links have three main qualities to them:

they are from higher ranked sites than your own
they are relevant to the topic you are writing about
they link to you using relevant keywords to your page

Whilst you may not have complete control over who links to you these are the types of links that you should be dreaming of.

How to generate quality inbound Links?

Of course whilst most of us know this it doesn’t make getting such links any easier - its in the hands of others in many cases. So how do you get such links?

Quality Content - There are all kinds of link generating systems out there but in my opinion the best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. You can solicit links with others or sign up for different link building programs or even buy text links on other sites but the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others link to your quality content.
Notify Relevant Bloggers of your content - Whilst I don’t advocate spamming other bloggers and asking for links - I would recommend that if you write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger that it might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know of your post. Don’t be offended if they don’t link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines (more on letting other bloggers know of your posts here).
Directories - Another way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who swear by the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a new site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are loads of directories out there - many of which offer a free submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a list of blog directories that you might want to start with.
Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are linked to from multiple domains. It is worth noting that you should be careful with this approach - if all your sites are hosted on the one server many think that Search Engines will work out what you’re doing and the impact will be lessened.
Buy Links - Many professional web masters have a budget to purchase links from other highly ranked and and relevant sites. I won’t go into this too much here but you might like to read more about it in my recent post On Buying Text Links. update: I’d encourage anyone wanting to buy links to think very carefully about this. Google have been cracking down on sites that use this practice. They can’t catch everyone but some have been caught and seem to have been penalized for doing it.
Swap Links - Similarly many bloggers swap links with other bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie instead of site A and B doign a direct swap they involve other sites. So A links to C in exchange for D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by A) - makes your head hurt doesn’t it!?! There are also a variety of systems around that say they’ll take care of such interlinking for you - I know many who use Digital Point’s Free C0-Op Advertising system. Personally I tend to avoid such schemes and have a policy of linking to sites I think are valuable to my readers. If they link back then so be it.

If you’re looking for link exchange/buying/selling programs you might like to look at systems like:

- Link Adage
- Text Link Ads
- Link Worth

On Site SEO Techniques

Having looked at Off site Search Engine Optimization Techniques I’ll now turn my attention to examining some of the factors you might like to keep in mind as you build your blog - (or Onsite techniques - things you do on your blog that help build a higher ranking). As with all SEO techniques there are many of these and a lot of speculation around all of them so let me touch on as many as I can:

1. Keyword Rich Content - identify a few keywords for your article that you’re hoping will get indexed highly by Google. Don’t pick too many but consider the questions

How do I want people to find this post in Search Engines?
What will they type into Google if they want information on the topic you’re writing?
How would I find information on this topic in the Search Engines?
What results come up when I do plug these keywords into Google?
What other keywords are other sites using?

The answer to these questions will give you a hint as to what words you’ll want to see repeated throughout your article a number of times.

These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your article. Use them in some or all of the following ways:

Keywords in post and page titles (read my post on using keywords in titles)
Keywords in URL of page (blog herald wrote on this a while back)
Keywords in outbound links (read this article on the pros and cons of outbound links)
Keywords in bold tags (try do it at least once)
Keywords in heading tags (there is debate over exactly how to use them but it’s generally accepted that h1 tags are important and that h2, h3, h4 etc tags also have an impact. Having said that I’ve seen some pages rank very well in search engines without using heading tags. There are many tutorials online about heading tags - here’s one.)
Keywords in image alt tags (here’s how)
Keywords in the general throughout the text of your post - but especially early on in the first few sentences
Keywords in meta tags (they seem to be less valuable these days but many still believe they are useful with some search engines - here’s a Guide to meta tags)

Of course you can go over the top with keywords in posts and let it destroy your content - but if it fits with what you’ve written tweak it to include the words you are targeting a couple of extra times. Most SEO experts recommend getting your keyword density up to between 5-20% - I think 20% is probably bordering on massacring your content.

One last word of warning and disclaimer on keyword rich content (because I can just hear the comments on this post already) - don’t sacrifice your readers experience of your site just for the sake of SEO. Yes keyword density can be important in climbing the search engine rankings - but more important is that your content and design are user friendly and helpful to readers. There is nothing worse than a site that is stuffed with keywords - these sites come off as cheap, nasty and spammy - don’t fall for the temptation.

2. Themed sites - One of the growing theories of SEO is that you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. ie a niche topic blog will probably rank higher than a general one that covers many topics. Build a blog with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and you’ll increase your chances of ranking well as SEs will see you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to some kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog. It is also probably another argument for categories and tagging posts that relate together strongly.

3. Site Design - Search Engines like well laid out, well coded and easily to navigate sites. Make sure your pages validate (I need to work more on this) and that they are viewable on all major browsers. Search Engines don’t tend to like too much Flash, Frames or Java Script in your site - keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately. Also try to keep your blog free from dead links (a challenge for those of us with older blogs with big archives).

4. Interlink your Site - The way Search Engines index your blog is to send little robot crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Make it easier for them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. Most SEO experts recommend that you provide some sort of Site Map that means every page on your blog is just a link or two away from every other one. One way to do this for bloggers is to make sure that your category pages are in your sidebars as I do in this blog. Also make sure every page links back to your main page and any other important pages on your site. If you’re writing on a topic you’ve previously written about consider linking to what you’ve written before or use a ‘other relevant posts’ feature at the base of your article. You’ll see in my menus at the top of the page a number of my key categories and articles. One of the impacts of having them highlighted in this way is that they have become some of the most highly ranked pages on ProBlogger simply because they are linked to from every page of this blog.

5. Update regularly - The more you update your blog the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging - make the most of it!

6. Outbound Links - There is debate over how SEs treat outbound links from your blog. I’m in the camp who believe that relevant outbound links enhance your site’s ranking in search engines. I always link out to quality relevant sites that I think my readers will find useful and have a little anecdotal evidence that seems to support the theory that this is healthy for the way SEs index you (check out Waynes article on the topic for more info). Linking to sites outside your own blog does mean you end up sending traffic away from your blog so you need to count the cost of such a strategy. Note that you should always try to link to reputable and relevant sites to your own page. Also keep in mind that too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Like in most things in SEO - moderation is the key.

7. Choose your domain name wisely - there are numerous factors to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. For one you might like to include your keyword in it if possible. Secondly you should do a little research to see if someone else has previously used the domain. This could have both positive and negative impact. If it was a quality site with inbound links you might reap some benefits but if it was a banned spam site you could still be banned from Google for a long time. One service you might want to use to check expired domains is Way Back Machine at Archive.org.

8. Register your Domain for a Lengthy Period - a recent patent by Google indicates that it now looks at the length of your domain’s registration in ranking it. It does this because many spam sites have short registrations and a longer one indicates that you’re building a site with substance and are in it for the long haul.

9. One topic per post - the more tightly focused the theme of a page the better when Search Engines come to rank it. Sometimes you might find yourself writing long posts that end up covering a number of different topics. They might relate loosely but if search engine ranking is what you’re after it could be better to break up your post into smaller more focused pieces.

10. Write optimal length posts - there is some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages that are too short can get passed over for high rankings. I try to keep posts at least 250 words. Of course there are some posts on my blogs that are shorter, but if I’m writing a post that I want to rank well I try to give it some meatiness in terms of length. On the other hand don’t make it too long either - because in doing so you make it difficult to keep your keyword density up and could end up with a less tightly focused page. Research also shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the ‘fold’ or to the end of the first screen of article .

11. Avoid Duplicate content - Google warns publishers in its guidelines about having the same content on multiple pages. This goes for both multiple pages that you own but also pages that others own. This is because a tactic of spammers is often to reproduce content on many pages and/or to steel content from other sites. There is some debate over what duplicate content does and doesn’t include (for instance many bloggers use ‘free articles’ as content on their blogs - these articles often appear on hundreds and even thousands of other sites around the web and to me could be seen as duplicate content) - my advice is to be very careful about how many places your content appears. I do republish occasional posts (or parts of them) but try not to do this too much and attempt to add elements that are unique on each occasion that the posts are republished).

12. Ping - services like Pingomatic (there are numerous others too) will ping a variety of websites for you to notify them that you’ve updated. In doing so you’ll also be letting search engines know that you’ve updated which will trigger their robots to come visit your blog. I’d also suggest pinging Google’s blog search tool.

13. Submit your RSS to MyYahoo - submitting your RSS feed to MyYahoo seems to help with getting indexed on Yahoo. Read more about this at Getting Yahoo Traffic for your Blog. Some also think that doing the same thing to Google’s Personalised pages could have a similar impact.

14. Quantities of Content - I always get into trouble when I write about having lots of content - but I think its true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites - whilst it is possible to rank highly with a small site - it’s probably not the norm.. Search Engines will see your site as more comprehensive the more content you have. You also better your odds of being found in Search Engines if you have more pages. By no means am I saying just to put up random junk content - be careful about this - rather work at building a comprehensive and large site over time.

15. Submit to Search Engines - You can do all the best onsite SEO strategies in the world and still get no where because the Search Engines have not found you to start with. Each search engine has a way of letting it know about your site - submit your URL to be included in the index. Please note that this takes time and perhaps a quicker and more effective way is to get linked to by a site already indexed by the search engine. I’ve written a post about his previously at how to get indexed by Google.

You might also like to tryout some of the services around that offer to submit your sites to search engines for you - I’d be wary of paying for this sort of service though. I never have and seem to do ok.

Again I will reinforce - the above techniques come out of my own experience and from the things I’ve learnt from others. I am not an SEO expert but find that if you keep the above in mind you can do reasonably well. Don’t become obsessed by SEO - if you do you run the risk of forgetting about your reader, forgetting to write quality content and you could find yourself getting into some dodgy SEO tactics that could get you banned from the Search Engines You’re trying to get listed in.

I’ll finish here by adding that SEO can take time - so be patient. After 2.5 years of blogging I’ve managed to build my blogs page ranks and SERPs but it did not happen over night. Sometimes it seems that no matter what you do nothing works - it may be that the words you’re wanting to target are actually a heavily targeted segment of the internet (consider changing your approach) - or it may just be that there is some unknowable glitch with the SE you are targeting - its a fickle game and one that I’d recommend you don’t rely on alone. So yes work on your SEO but also consider the many other methods around to find readers for your blog. You might like to read my Finding Readers for your Blog Series as a starting point.

Feel free to have your say on the topic of SEO and blogging below - share your comments, experiences and questions for the ProBlogger community to interact with.

Reasons Why Corporate Blogging Fails

2009-07-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

The task of corporate blogging encapsulates a plethora of pitfalls. Recently, my consulting work and a number of colleagues have illustrated some of the worst problems plaguing companies who attempt to enter the world of blogging. WIth a little luck, pointing out some of these threats can help to alleviate issues for those who might attempt the endeavor in the future.

Blogs vs. Corporate Culture
In many cases, a blog is NOT right for your company. Some companies simply don't have the flexibility to tolerate a human voice - their rigidity is a closely guarded asset and one they're unwilling or unable to loosen. In these instances, it's not wise to pursue a corporate, rigidly structured, dispassionate, impersonal blog. Instead, concentrate on your existing formal website and use other tactics to communicate. A blog's unique characteristics don't match with every organization, and it's better to recognize this than to force voice, personality and tech-savviness where it doesn't exist.
Editorial Control Issues
A blog must have a unique, personal, compelling voice - one that evokes passion, incites connection with the readership and doesn't back down from tough issues or reek of political correctness. In this way, a blog can be thought of as a novel - when too many editors or layers of editing interfere, the qualities that made the writing worthy die out. If your company can't find someone it trusts to be both writer and content editor (the rules on editing don't necessarily apply to proofreading and fact checking), an ugly struggle between writer and editor (or, worse, editors) may severely hamper the blog's quality.
Unfamiliarity with a Blog's Structure
Blogs contain, at a minimum, several unique components that make them recognizable to web audiences as blogs. Though there's always some degree of flexibility, you should be creating easily digestable content on a semi-weekly basis that offers comments, permalinks, categories and clear information about the writer (or writers). Using blog software CMS' makes this process a bit easier, but blogs can certainly be built from the ground up and integrated into already existing platforms (SEOmoz is a perfect example). When companies mistake blogs for newsletters, bulletin-style announcements or simply a news feed, both the user and the publish suffer.
Misunderstanding Your Audience
Repeat after me - "the blog audience is not the same as your typical customer base." Blog readers are universally more tech-savvy, more passionate about your products or your organization. They're up-to-date on industry news, they almost always read other, related, blogs in your industry (which means you should be reading those, too). Blog readers are more often connectors and influencers (for those who enjoy Gladwell) and they're also likely to be highly critical of dishonesty or insincerity.
Crafting a Corporate Voice, Rather than a Personal One
I've mentioned this in several of the points above, but it's definitely worthy of its own bullet point. A blog's tone - the style in which content is crafted - can't be too impersonal or corporate-babble-y. The best blogs connect with people through their writing by creating a human bond - that's basically the entire purpose behind blogging, rather than just issuing daily press releases on a website. If you want to call it a blog, give it a voice that has the power to compel, connect and engage.
Attempting to "Sell" or "Market"
This might be the worst sin of all, simply for its popularity. I can't count the number of blogs I've seen, from companies large and small, that are basically three paragraph ads for one product or another - no voice, no humanity, no connection, and essentially a waste of time for writers and readers. Let's get this straight - blogs are NOT ad copy, and any blog written as such belongs in the same category as splogs. I'm forced to ask - why bother?
Domain & URL Issues
A great number of corporate blogs don't exist on the company's domain. Some clever SEOs think that by having a separate site, they can gain link popularity by linking to their normal domain - hint, hint, it's far better to get the value from all those external links pointing to your blog helping the credibility and global link popularity of your primary domain. Many marketing and public relations executives keep blogs on separate domains (and bury or obscure links to them on the main domain) because they're worried about the association of the blog and the corporate website. If that's a real concern for you - that your official bloggers can't be seen as part of your company's site, then you need to go back to my first rule and decide if blogging is really the right thing for your firm. Just as the link love to a blog on the proper domain will spread good things to the rest of the domain's pages, so too will the positive branding of a blog spread goodwill to an entire company (or, at the least, its website).

If you've got experience providing services or working on a corporate blog gone wrong, I'd love to hear about it - please do share.

Keyword – Testers and Checkers

2009-07-04T00:24:00.000-07:00

AHeadsmacking Tip #3: Run Your Blog Post Titles Through Keyword Research Before You Hit Publish

2009-07-04T00:19:00.000-07:00

I'm getting to like this series :-) (see #1 and #2). This week, I thought I'd talk about a tip that might cause mild concussions if you haven't been doing it. That's right, it's the ultra-simple "research before you post" technique for bloggers.

The basic tenet goes something like this - if your blog has any reasonable quantity of link equity and ranking ability, chances are that every blog post has the opportunity to earn you ongoing search traffic. This search traffic is, oftentimes, even more valuable than your loyal readers, because they've expressed a specific interest in what your post covers. Thus, by default, your content is exceptionally on-topic (way to go!). The problem arises when you don't take advantage of this fact by publishing before obeying the cardinal rule of SEO blogging - run keyword research on that post title!

Watch the process - it's shockingly simple:

STEP 1: Come up with clever blog content, write a title and the blog post, throw in some graphics, and choose a category (all the things you usually do when writing for a blog).

SEOmoz Blog Composition Screenshot

STEP 2: Visit your favorite keyword traffic estimator tool - Google, Wordtracker, KW Discovery (sadly, to access Yahoo! & MSN's keyword suggestion tools, you'll need to login to your paid search account - though these are free to set up).

Google Adwords Screenshot

STEP 3: Choose the keyword or phrase most central to your blog post's title and enter it into the keyword suggestion tool.

Google AdWords Tool

STEP 4: Take the results and modify your title intelligently. You might even consider adding the popular search terms that are returned to the post's body content (just once or twice is all it takes).

AdWords Keyword Volume

STEP 5: Don't go overboard or get carried away trying to insert keywords. Sometimes, there won't be any good ones to use. Other times, the terms will be so broad and competitive that they're not worth targeting (or you've already targeted 5 other posts to that same keyword - see cannibalization). But every time you hit a sweet spot, go for it.

Using this mind-numbingly simple and obvious tactic every time you publish requires a bit of discipline, but if you make it part of your blogging process, you'll see incredibly positive results over time. Not only do you earn more search traffic, but that traffic will send more links, resulting in higher rankings and a snowball effect that will make your blog the envy of its niche.

Who knew blog post titles could be so valuable for SEO? Oh wait. We all did. That's why this is such a "headsmacking" tip.

BTW - When I say it requires discipline, I'm serious. I probably do this on less than 10% of my posts, and regret it every time I think about it (kinda like when you forget to floss night after night - yikes).

p.s. For those of you on Wordpress, SEMvironment released a clever plug-in that lets you access the suggestions from the KW research tools I pointed to above right inside your editing panel. Thanks to James Zolman in the comments for the heads up!

Examining The Internet's Top Blogs: What We Can Learn From Their Success

2009-07-04T00:14:00.000-07:00

Every day a fiercely competitive battle takes place online over capturing the attention of millions of readers. As a result the blogosphere constantly changes shape and different players thrust forward as content kings for the day. Lately, I have been trying to find out what forces control this volatile scene. I have been looking for recurring themes and hoping to find useful correlations.

I took a snapshot of the Internet’s top blogs. This freeze frame identifies the blogs that have developed the skills necessary to compete. Unlike traditional top blog lists, I did not seek to place blogs in order of perceived importance. Instead, I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse), and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool. The result is a list of blogs that have proven to be powerful in all aspects of Internet success.

Download the Complete Spreadsheet Here:

CSV EXCEL PDF

My hope is that by analyzing what all of these blogs have in common, I can learn how to become a better internet citizen and participant. Simultaneously, I want to share my findings and gain additional insight by learning from all of your unique perspectives and experiences. I have already identified some common traits and trends below and I look forward to learning more from all of you.

Big Corporations Don't Dominate, Yet...

Of the 100 proven blogs in my sample, 66% were self owned. This leads me to believe that blogging is still dictated by ability rather than budget.

This shows the consolidation of ownership for the top 50 blogs compared to the top 50 websites. Although there is a remarkable amount of popular independently owned blogs, the ownership of popular blogs overall is heavily consolidated. (Top 50 Websites Source)

Branding That Works

76% of the top blogs titles contain only one or two words (not including 'The'). This reinforces the idea that when it comes to marketing it is best to keep it simple.

86% of the top blog TLDs were the traditional dot com. This doesn't mean that there are not notable exceptions, but it does allude to importance of sticking with conventions.

Think the Market is Over Saturated? Think Again

There are already many established paths to success. The interesting insights come from diving into the niches.

Every subject has many niches. Success can come from any one of them.

Its as Much About Who One Writes for as it is About Who is Doing the Writing

Can't do it all by yourself? Neither can the experts. 80% of the top blogs have more than one primary writer.

I interpret this as supply rather than demand. Blogs catering to women will likely find audiences much more easily than the over saturated male-oriented market.

95% of the Internet's top blogs are based in the United States. Yet, the potential audience abroad dwarfs the current American audience. Why?

It is my hope that others will be able to learn from my research. If I have learned only one thing about this industry, it is that online there is always more opportunity than one person could ever possibly need. By pooling resources and cooperating, I think we can beat the battle that takes place in the blogosphere and receive the mutual benefits that come with the victory.

Graphs created in Apple Numbers

Lessons Learned from 3 Years of Blogging

2009-07-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

The beginning of this month (May 2nd, to be exact) marked my 3 year anniversary as a blogger. My first post on SEOmoz was a paragraph long and consisted of asking our readers if they know of any Spanish-language SEO blogs. It attracted 18 comments. Huzzah! Since then, I've published 241 more posts, with this one being #243. I thought I'd reflect back on my three years of blogging and share the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the lessons I've learned along the way.

Phase I: Asking Questions
I wrote 4 posts in May of 2006, and each of them centered on a question posited to the community:

"Know of any Spanish SEO blogs?"
"Is there such a thing as too much website usability?"
"What do you think of the (then-new) 'I'm a Mac/I'm a PC' commercials?
"Is cyberspace a Googlocracy?"

At this point in my long and storied career at SEOmoz, I had been occupying a desk within the company for 4 short months (3 of which were as an intern), so I still had a lot to learn about SEO, Internet marketing, and, actually, about the Internet in general. I didn't feel confident enough to blog about something as an "expert" or provide my input/opinion on a topic, so I resorted to asking open-ended questions in order to get feedback from our blog audience and establish a connection with them.

Lesson Learned:
The biggest lesson I learned with my first few posts was that you don't have to be the expert when you blog, especially when you've got a good chunk of readers. It's important to ask for feedback and reach out to your community for their input. I think they respect you more when you admit that you have limits and appreciate them for their opinions and level of expertise.

Phase II: Editorializing Existing Articles
My blogging evolved into me finding an article or blog post and talking about it (and, of course, ending with a question for our readers). With these types of posts I was able to inject a bit of personal interpretation and my input into them. I still wasn't touting my knowledge level or expertise, but providing opinions about other people's blog posts allowed me to step forward a bit and let my voice be heard.

Lesson Learned:
If you can't think of anything to blog about or still aren't confident in your "expert" abilities, there's always an article or some news that you can highlight and add a personal spin to.

Phase III: Establishing a Voice
Once I got a handful of posts under my belt, I started to feel more comfortable sitting at a keyboard, Doogie Howser-style, and I was able to add my personality and voice more freely to my blog posts. I've always had a knack for writing, so I really enjoyed (and still do) injecting a little bit of myself into the posts I authored. I think that if someone were to remove the authors from a bunch of different posts and ask "Which one did Rebecca write?", you'd be able to identify mine pretty easily. :)

Lesson Learned:
At this point, even though I was still learning and considered myself to be a beginner SEO, I was comfortable enough with our readers and my coworkers that I could start being myself and letting my posts reflect who I was as a person. I think that's one of the most important lessons learned when it comes to blogging. The thing that separates the good bloggers from the bad is their voice. What makes you read one blog over another? Sure, a lot of factors come into play, such as the frequency of updates, the quality of information, the level of expertise, etc. But for me, the thing that makes one blogger stand out amongst the throngs of everyone else is his ability to inject his personality into what he's writing. I'm still no SEO expert, and I don't pretend to be. Nonetheless, people still enjoy what I've got to say because I say it differently than anyone else, and that uniqueness I bring to the table is what defines me and makes me interesting.

Now that I'm at Phase III (profit!!!), I thought I'd share some other blogging odds and ends that I noticed after perusing through old posts.

Recurring Blogging Traits

1. Using punny titles that usually work in a movie, music or pop culture reference

I Used to Care, But Things Have(n't) Changed
Sometimes Sites Don't Look Like They Should...They Make It...Hurt So Good
Marketing Sherpa States That SEM Clients Aren't Multiplying Like Wet Gremlins
London (and Worthing) Calling
An American in London
Overheard in (SES) New York
Wordze to Yo Mutha

Lesson Learned:
Constructing a fun and eye-catching title is a good way to attract attention to your posts. Since I'm a huge dork, I like working in some sort of pop culture reference--it's a good way to identify fellow nerds who march to the beat of the same drum as I do. :)

2. Feigning abuse at the hands of Rand

"...I thought I'd take my boss's 'Post blogs while I'm gone or you're fired!' threat seriously and attempt to bring something to the blog table."
"Rand has chained me to my desk and ordered me to summarize the next set of videos released by Matt Cutts."
"You don't know what Rand Fishkin is really like. He made it explicitly clear that if I don't keep summarizing your videos, I won't live past my birthday."
"Rand took a trip to both Houndstown and Badgersville to constantly bug me to finish this damn thing..."
"In order to please the masses, Rand once again chained me to my desk and ordered me to do a recap of SES London in an amusing comic book fashion."
"My 'Don't Fire Me Rand' Recap of SES New York"
"...okay, sometimes when I ask him non-work stuff ('Hey, how was your weekend buddy?') he barks "Go write a blog entry!" at me..."

Lesson Learned:
Sometimes it's good to take a lighthearted, joking tone: it makes the post more fun to read, and if you can find a way to identify with the audience (by, say, pretending the leader of the company you blog for is a sadist), they'll enjoy your blogging even more.

3. Writing completely useless blog posts that people somehow nonetheless seem to like

Lesson Learned:
A little humor goes a long way. Sure, the posts are off-topic and have little to no actual marketing tips, but it's nice to take a break from the usual blogging schedule and present something fun for your readers. Plus, they seem to like it--the latter two posts I listed are among the most popular ever on SEOmoz, and they're certainly two of the most popular posts I've authored.

4. Using personal interests as an analogy or direct example (with food, movies and training/exercise being my most frequent go-to subjects)

Lesson Learned:
I like using analogies and examples that I know/care about. Analogies and examples strengthen your point and make your post more understandable and relatable for your readers. If you use examples that have a close personal tie to you, you're more likely to be excited about blogging. Plus, your readers will get to know you and will establish a personal bond, which will bring them back to your blog again and again.

Random Stats:

Most popular blogging categories:

Roundups (53ish): you jerkwads sure do love your roundups!
Events and Conferences (around 42): I've blogged about SES Latino, SES San Jose, SES Chicago, SES London, SEMpdx's Searchfest, SES New York, SMX Advanced, SES Toronto, SES Travel, Shop.org events, SMX Social Media, SMX West, the eCommerce Summit, and some local Seattle meetups.
Miscellaneous (23): this category houses most of my off-topic/silly/useless posts. :)
SEOmoz news (15): we're a growing company, so it's only fitting that I announce the occasional company-related news to the masses.
Google (16): in comparison, I've blogged about Microsoft and Yahoo! two times each. Cue the sad trombone.
Social Media (13): one of my favorite topics.
Search Community (12): there's always something interesting to blog about with regards to our industry's community.
Web Design/Usability (11): I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess I'm more interested in usability than I thought.

Number of posts about Matt Cutts: 10, 7 of which are video transcription posts, and all of which make fun of him in some capacity.

Number of posts I published but didn't write: 6 (they were written by our six hiring candidates)

Posts with the most thumbs (since the thumbs system has been implemented):

The Best Spam Submission Ever (it's also the 4th most popular post ever on SEOmoz), currently sitting at 96 up, 4 down
Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes (81 up, 2 down)
10 Different Types of Clients (67 up, 0 down)
Apparently I Work for Google (49 up, 0 down)
Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click (41 up, 0 down)

Favorite Posts:

Apparently I Work for Google. Oftentimes, the best posts I write are the ones that just come to me and that I don't have to spend any time researching. I wrote this one up one day while I was bored visiting my family in Michigan, and it really pleased me to see how well received (and relatable) it was by our readers.
How NOT to Request a Link Via Email, Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes, Just When You Think Search Misconceptions Can't Get Any Worse, Your Users Aren't Intuitive, Which Is Why Your Forms Need to Be, and Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study. Sometimes a post falls directly into your lap based on a situation you encounter. The above posts were derived from conversations, a random email, a sign up process, and a customer service mishap. I was able to turn each experience into a lesson that I could share with the community.
Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from the Dark Knight, 10 Different Types of Clients and Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November. Unlike the previous posts, these three are examples of posts I had ideas for and spent a lot of time on. There's always a fear and some worry that you'll pour all this effort into a post (or project) and that it will blow up in your face or fall flat, and I'm always relieved and happy to have the opposite happen. It's nice seeing your hard work get well received and rewarded.
Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click, How Newsworthy Are Your Newsletters, Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends, and How a Good Title and Description Can Make or Break Your Social Media Submission. These are the ones I had a lot of fun putting together because I really enjoyed finding and analyzing various examples.

Lessons Learned:

Try to find value in everyday situations. Think of how you can shape an experience you've had into something interesting and useful for your audience.
Not every post has to be planned out ahead of time--sometimes a great idea can just come to you or you can be inspired by a random occurrence.
If you put a lot of time and effort into a post and worry it'll never pay off, don't worry, oftentimes it will and you're just being paranoid.
Use examples in your posts (websites, screenshots, movies, whatever)--they really help!

Least Favorite Posts:

The lazy posts (What Google Needs to Do with YouTube to Make Me Happy, Wikipedia vs. Britannica in a No-Holds-Barred Debate, Want to Make Up Stupid Words? Then Create a Social Media Site!). I think these posts had good potential, but I was lazy and essentially used them as a means to bitch about something without having much of a valid point to support my gripes.
The clueless posts (Wikipedia: Now Telling You What's What While You're IM'ing, Google Adwords is Giving Me a Headache, Digg Has Shout-Blocked Me). I fired off these posts without doing adequate research and subsequently got my ass handed to me in the comments by people who were quick to point out that either what I was doing wrong or that the feature had been around for quite some time.
The lame post (How to Get Banned from Digg). Yeah, this post sucks. (Hey, sometimes I can be painfully unfunny too!)

Lessons Learned:

There's a fine line between bitching with a point and just plain bitching. You don't want to come across as a whiner.
Also, if you're blogging about a topic, you should do a bit of research beforehand just so you don't make a fool out of yourself (unless that's your intent).
Oh, and don't try too hard to be witty, clever, smart, etc. It often falls flat and is embarrassingly obvious to your readers. Just be yourself!

Polarizing Posts:

All the Female Bloggers Say Heyyyy!...Hello? Ladies? This post inadvertantly turned into a bit of a gender war. Kim Krause Berg had blogged about the lack of recognition for female tech bloggers, and I said that it's because there aren't that many so there are very few to recognize. This post was pretty tame in terms of how much ire it raised, but nonetheless it was my first foray into taking a stance on a topic that had dissenting viewpoints.
Hey, I'm Blogging! Pay Attention to Me! This post has the dubious distinction of attracting my first ever thumb down. Apparently some of our readers/bloggers didn't care to hear me call them attention whores. Oh well. I still think that bloggers (including me) are attention whores. Deal with it. ;P
A-List vs. Blue Collar Blogging. This is one of my favorite posts in that it received 17 thumbs up and 13 thumbs down for a net gain of 4. That's pretty impressive. I still stand by my core message, which is that "A-List" bloggers do exist, and that not every blogger can become one in 90 days. I do feel a bit dumb for getting baited by Jason Calacanis, but then again, he was pretty good at getting attention (be it good or bad) back in the day (he seems to have quieted down more recently--maybe he's busy trying to de-suck Mahalo).
Ron Paul is the Snakes on a Plane of 2008. Never fails--you talk about politics and end up stirring the pot, especially when you compare a popular politician to a B-grade movie about deadly snakes aboard a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles.
Generation Google a General Disappointment. This one's a bit tricky. While I still maintain that the panel could have been much better than it was, looking back I realize that I was too harsh to Danny Sullivan, Rand and his brother, Evan. Belated apologies--I could have gotten my point across without pouring on quite as much Haterade as I did, so I'm sorry. (Hey, better late than never, right?)
No, Unfortunately Digg Doesn't Know Who You Are. I think this post got a lot of backlash partially because of the harshness of the original title and because some of the examples I highlighted were taken from actual user accounts, so they felt embarrassed to get called out. Again, I probably could have made my point without being quite so harsh, which is definitely an important takeaway. Nonetheless, I still like my post and stand behind it as an important thing to remember when doing social media marketing.

Lessons Learned:

Controversy attracts eyeballs, but you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. If you can dish it out but your skin is too thin to take what gets bounced back at you, you probably shouldn't take such a harsh stance on things. (Thankfully, for the most part I've got a pretty thick skin. That's what you get when you grow up with two teasing older brothers.)
Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself or defend your stance, but also know when to admit you're wrong. After looking back at some of these posts, I was able to identify moments where I crossed the line and should have checked myself before I riggity wrecked myself.
This has more to do with a business blog, but try to stay respectful even when disagreeing with someone. I've sloooooooowly learned that over the past few years, and now I'm a bit more tempered than a couple years ago. I don't get as worked up or dragged into ridiculous wars between bloggers/marketers, and as a result it's made me a better employee, blogger and human being.

Well, that about wraps up my retrospective on my three years of blogging here at SEOmoz. Blogging for this company has pretty much shaped my career and my image into what it is today, and it's opened countless doors for me professionally. I can definitively say for a fact that blogging can be an invaluable asset if you know how to approach it. I've learned a ton about blogging and about myself in the past few years, and I hope the lessons I've shared can be of some benefit to you too. In the meantime, here's to many more years of blogging about movies, marketing, and the wrath of Rand. ;)

21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post

2009-07-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've covered blogging strategies, and my recent panel with one of the world's foremost authorities got me thinking that given our success, both with the SEOmoz blog and with blogs for clients, it's time to share a bit more. Today, I'd like to cover how to make that single post you're composing more likely to earn the attention it deserves. Let's dive into the list:

#1 - Target Content at Those Who Can Help Spread It

Whether you call them "Sneezers" (Seth Godin), "Connectors" (Malcolm Gladwell) or "Linkerati" (yours truly), there is clearly a subset of individuals on the web who are responsible for helping to push content into the collective consciousness. Making your Mom happy is nice, but it won't bring the results you desire - if you want links and tweets, you need to go to the source.

Making this crowd appreciate your work requires research. You need to know what they like, what they talk about and what they spread. Having your finger on the pulse of sites like Reddit, Techmeme, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Tweetmeme can provide that insight, but it's not enough by itself. You'll want a good few weeks or months of paying careful attention before you can "get the feel" of what the Linkerati have on the brain.

#2 - Reward Those Who Share

People are, by nature, selfish, and the mindset of most bloggers, tweeters and social media junkies is to build up their own network - they want more followers, more attention, a higher ranking - give it to them. Content that makes those who tweet it and link to it seem smarter, funnier, more interesting and more plugged-in than their comrades will bring great success. As you create, think "Would I retweet/blog this if I saw it?" When the answer is an unequivocal "absolutely!", you're on the right track.

You can go one step further and directly reward your sharers with trackbacks, tweets to them or even a personal email followup. This can help set the stage for next time, so long as it's well intentioned & discreet. Twitter is especially good for this, as you might bring that re-tweeter a few extra followers if you tweet @ them.

#3 - Choose a Subject That Readers Can Relate To

If your subject matter is something that readers have experienced or felt, even if (and perhaps especially if) they've never put it into words, you've got a great opportunity to induce virality. As anyone who's ever tried linkbaiting before knows, It's far easier to reach out with content that discusses dating, sex, news, politics, or popular culture than it is to espouse the virtues of frequently replacing your hydraulic pumps for maximum performance.

This doesn't mean there's no hope for those in the "boring" fields of finance, real estate, human resources, even dentistry. You just need to find ways of making your blog post relatable and interesting. Finance and real estate are constantly in the news, and nearly everyone has some experience with them - check out the creativity of folks like Mint.com's Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis Bailout or HR World's 20 Jobs That Are Better/Worse Than You Thought.

The key is to find an angle that looks at the interesting parts of what might otherwise be considered boring - no small task, but certainly not insurmountable. Remember too that the smaller your niche, the less you need to do to stand out. A few dozen links and retweets can be huge if you're in a space that typically attracts nada.

#4 - Write Exceptionally Well

It's hard. I know. Even Ernest Hemingway once famously told F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Great writing, though elusive, boosts readership, compels thorough examination of your work and greatly increases virality. Just see what this survey from Vizu had to say on the subject:

When it comes to writing better blog posts, there are far more talented instructors than I - check out Brian Clark's Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide.

#5 - Author an Attention-Grabbing Title

The title of your post can make or break its success in the viral process. While a short, compelling title that raises eyebrows and sparks interest will bring troves of visitors to investigate, a boring, flaccid headline can sink a piece faster than Digg's bury brigade. Darren has four key elements every title must achieve:

Simplify
Communicate
Employ Keywords
Grab Attention

That's the perfect combination not just for everyday blogging, but for crafting your "pitch" to the social web, and make no mistake, your title will appear in tweets and feeds and bloated social news lists without context or character, so the headline needs to stand on its own. Another good resource to embrace is Brian Clark's "How to Write Headlines that Work."

#6 - Use Illustrations/Graphics Above the Fold

Graphics are fantastic opportunities to keep those busy, attention-deprived, glance-and-go visitors on your site just a few seconds longer, and that's often all it takes to hook them. A common mistake, however, is to place your eye-catching comic or cleverly laid out diagram a scroll or two away. Don't do it - get that first graphic top of page and top of mind. Just don't think that a stock photo or bland image is going to be enough - you want something that enhances the content, tells a story and entices visitors to read the rest of your piece.

#7 - Don't Just Present Information; Spark a Discussion

Active social web users browse a lot of content on a daily basis, and sometimes, even if your blog post is phenomenally interesting or useful, it will be passed up as a potential link target because you haven't created an incentive for other bloggers and tweeters. Interesting is great, but controversial content - that which demands a response and interaction - can often achieve even greater success.

This does not mean you need to make outlandish claims or be antagonistic, disparaging or even sensationalistic. It just means you need to tap into the basic human need to communicate and respond - from any number of emotional levels. See this post about the Emotions that Make Us Link for more.

#8 - Use Bullet Points & Short Paragraphs

This is a simple one - use formats that get parsed easily and quickly on the web. Leave the long paragraphs to your creative writing classes. Bullet points, numbered lists and short, punchy sentences are excellent for both usability & shareability. You're reading this, aren't you?

#9 - Don't Make the Post Too Long (Unless...)

Easy to read typically means short and digestible. However, it can sometimes pay to be exhaustive. Just look at the success of posts like Danny Sullivan's recent deep analysis of URL Shortening Services or Aaron Wall's 101 Link Building Tips. The rule here is be as short as you can be without omitting critical information that adds value for your readers.

#10 - Get Your Social Media Comrades to Seed the Story

Generally, it's unwise to submit your own posts to Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc. but there's nothing that says you shouldn't have a trusted friend do it for you. This is a wise practice because, particularly if you expect to have a blog post go "viral," you want to control how the submission is crafted. The right title and description can make or break your success. This is also true with Twitter - blow your own horn and you're a selfish bastard, but retweet someone else's kind mention and you're just spreading the word.

#11 - Publish at an Ideal Time

Dan Zarella did some excellent research into when to Tweet and request Retweets:

This corresponds quite nicely with when to go popular on social media networks for maximum traffic as well. Just be aware that sometimes, it can easier to get on Digg/Reddit/Delicious during off hours and off days. We like Thursday morning, Pacific time, as well as late on Sunday, Monday & Tuesday night. Later in the week is typically better odds, but earlier in the week gives you a longer stretch of relevance and opportunity to "pop."

#12 - Do Your Keyword Research

There's no reason not to use a simple keyword research tool like Google's to check if the title/description and keywords you're including could use a bit of tweaking. Not only is this good for future traffic from search engine referrals (and with the fresh content boost, it can bring instant visibility and even help spawn a viral campaign), it's also useful to find out how web users think about your subject matter.

#13 - Reference Blogs & Sites You Want to Link to You

If you're getting lots of traffic, you're almost certainly inspiring lots of clicks from your content out to the pages you've listed in your post. Employ strategically and recognize that if a fellow blogger or site owner starts seeing referral traffic spike, they're likely to at least read your reference about them, and oftentimes provide a link (or at least a tweet). The obsession with social recognition and reputation monitoring is real - use it to your advantage.

#14 - Keep Your URL Short

Short URLs are easier to:

copy & paste
link to
tweet
share via email

If you have to go long, do what smart bloggers targeting Twitter have started doing and provide a shortened version of the URL right in the post.

#15 - Be Non-Commercial

Social media addicts despise ads, overlays and obtrusive commercial messages. They also hate being manipulated into linking to a site/brand they don't support. You can fight this by removing your more obstructive advertising, refraining from using affiliate links and completely rejecting commercial messaging in the body of your post. Yes, you're building a business on your blog and you need the income, but now isn't the time - attract first, market to later.

#16 - Provide Easy, Embedded Ways to Share

If you're going to have an embedded sharing system, customize it, as Mashable does:

My personal preference is to refrain from having these on every page, and instead only add the embed links for Digg/Reddit/etc. when you know you've got some viral material on your hands. In this fashion, you'll also call out the attention of your regular readers, who aren't accustomed to seeing it and are more likely to take notice.

I do, however, like having an "email this to a friend" link on every post - it's just good form, and my experience has shown it's remarkably effective.

#17 - Leverage Your Personal Social Networks

Once you've published something great, there's no reason to sit on your hands. Facebook has a status update, StumbleUpon lets you share, via email or the toolbar, with your connections, and you probably even have a few emails in your address book. Your personal and professional network is a perfect tool to leverage for assistance in launching your blog post into the stratosphere. Just be sure not to abuse it, employ careful, respectful messaging and be quick to forgive those who don't assist. Also - if you're going to ask for help, reciprocate and help when your friends need it, too.

#18 - Display Credibility with Your Blog/Bio

Your blog's design, layout, title and navigation will all play a supporting role in your content's success. If you've got a polished, professional design that engenders trust OR an offbeat, quirky, personal but still high quality layout that connects with your visitors, you're set. If not, get to work - it will influence the success of everything you produce.

Equally important is your bio - this can be in the sidebar, in the about section, wherever, but it needs to be representative and authentic. This will not only bring your personal brand/blog brand greater respect, it will cement the authority of your writing based on your experience and expertise. You don't want to write a great post on "how to XYZ" then have your readers find out you're a first-timer yourself (unless that's your angle).

#19 - Embrace Tried-and-True Formats

There's a reason supermarket headlines are all the same. They work. Formats like:

Numbered lists
How-To Posts
X Reasons Why...

are incredibly effective. Just browse through the social media sites and you'll see it time and again. For more references and examples, check out 10 Surefire Headline Formulas that Work.

#20 - Don't Appropriate Cliches

In the blog world, there are certain things that have been done a million times - lists of top Wordpress template designs, quizzes about zombie apocalypses, posts enumerating the suckiness of PCs compared to Macs. Before you go and spend hours writing your masterpiece, perform some educated searches and make sure your topic has some freshness to it. I could probably write the best post in the world about rounded corners with CSS, and it would fall on deaf ears. Originality counts - invent something new or make a new twist on something old. Just don't re-hash what's been done to death.

#21 - Be Prepared to Fail

No matter how hard you try and how much effort you put in, not every post is destined to be a viral smash hit. I generally recommend only trying hard every 5-10 posts maximum (unless you're a very infrequent blogger or well known for linkbait-style writing). The hard truth is, even the experts find that only 1 out of every 4 "engineered-to-go-viral" posts will succeed on a large scale. Prepare for it, and don't get disheartened by a bit of failure - it happens to the best of us (and that great post can still earn residual traffic and respect in the months and years to come).

Your turn - I'd love to hear about the success and failures you've had/seen for blog posts and your recommendations on this front.

8 More SEO Topics that Have Me Stumped

2009-07-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, I posed some questions from the SEO world that I couldn't answer. Tonight, I'd like to repeat that process and throw up some dilemmas that, once again, have me in a quandry.

Does QDD Give an Inherent Boost to Negative Subject Matter?
Some rumors have been passing around the SEO world that QDD, Google's "diversity" algorithm that's intended to show more of a variety of different kinds of content in page one of the SERPs, gives a rankings boost to negative focused content, making it easier to rank for a company/brand/person's name if you "talk smack" about them. True or false?
The 302 Hijack is Back?
From 2005-2007, complaints were flying about Google showing pages that 302 re-directed to other URLs in place of the originals, allowing clever spammers to conditionally 302, then steal the traffic when actual visitors clicked the ranking search result. 2008 was pretty quiet on this topic, but recently, I've seen it flare up again. What happened? Did Google make a misstep? Or is there a new, more sinister version of this loose on the web that gets around the old protections somehow?
Are the Engines Following URL Shortening Services?
Some recent evidence has suggested that engines are using URLs from shortening services like TinyURL, Is.gd and others (even those that don't cleanly 301 as Zi.ma does) for discovery, and possibly flowing link juice through them as well. Has anyone experienced this, tested it or seen results that would prove the case one way or another?
What Was Up with The Hyves Subdomain PR Penalty Checker?
Marcus Tandler leaked the news that using the subdomain "hyves" attached to any root domain on the web would give you a PageRank number indicating whether the domain had suffered a PR penalty for buying/selling links. So many questions on this one - who leaked it? It had to be someone inside Google, right? No one could guess that randomly without at least hearing a whisper from the grapevine. Why would Google create it? Why would they leave it active? Why would they make it publicly accessible in the first place? Every search quality engineer has access to the console to pull up their internal stats on a domain, so they could easily mark it there... So weird.
The Engines All Regularly Follow Many More than 100 Links Per Page?
We work on a lot of pretty authoritative, powerful domains, so I'm wondering if this is just a fluke from being in a link-rich environment, but we see that Google, Yahoo! and Live/MSN are consistently going up above 300 links per page and following and indexing them all. Is this a limited behavior set, or do small sites, newer sites and those of you with test domains see this activity as well?
Is it Really Harder to Get Rankings with a .info, .cc, or .biz Extension?
We've heard from a few sources that these three extensions, along with several other International ccTLDs, might be lowering trust scores or increasing the probability that your site is flagged for exclusion/devaluation/penalties. I haven't done nearly enough testing on domains like this to know. Of course, I don't think they're good for branding, which is a big part of a long term web marketing strategy overall, but that's beside the point.
Does Google Employ Link Buying Moles?
I've now heard tales from 2 different companies, one very prominent in the industry, about all their clients being manually penalized by Google and their link networks and link buying sources identified with immense precision, as though there was an insider leaking the data. I generally have a tough time believing this, since Google usually likes to do things in a very scalable fashion, and hiring moles to spy on link buying activity seems to my mind a very low ROI and bandwidth intensive endeavor. Have you heard/seen anything that would sway you definitively one way or the other? Is Google really conducting corporate espionage with those who would violate its quality guidelines?
Will Anchor Text Value Pass Through Terribly Low Quality Links?
A friend of mine recently hypothesived that while link juice might be compromised or even discounted entirely from spammy, low quality domains and pages, anchor text value could still pass. This phenomenon supposedly is why more aggressive SEOs are buying/acquiring tons of super low quality links from crummy directories, old sites that have lost most of their PR and open comment spam areas. Is there any truth to this? Why would an engine discount query independent metrics like link juice but continue passing anchor text value through links?

Hopefully, you've got more answers (and evidence) than I.

Website Optimization

2009-07-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is based upon making your blog accessible to search engines to gather information to store in their database, and to help users search for information related to your blog. Remember, SEO means helping search engines and helping users find the information they need when using a search engine, thus encouraging them to visit your website when it appears in the search results.

You can put your do-it-yourself search engine optimization techniques to work on your entire website, but it helps to start with one web page to clean up the core optimization problems, so we’ll start there. When you find consistent and redundant errors, then you can fix them throughout your website or blog.

So, the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to:

1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.

2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.

3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.

4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.

5) Take advantage of pinging services.

What is not in this list is anything that has to do with advertising. I want to be clear on this. Search engine optimization is about making your website easily accessible by search engines, it is not about how to make money with your website. Yes, SEO practices can help you make money on your blog, but only because it is lovely underneath the hood to both search engines and users, not because your ads work better. That’s a different subject known as e-commerce, search marketing or website analytics. A lot of people think SEO is e-commerce but it isn’t. Related but not the same. We’ll be focusing on your blog’s relationship with search engines and how this helps you to have a better blog.

Let’s look at each of these points to help you understand the benefits and how to do-it-yourself.

No Road Blocks: A road block for a search engine crawler moving through a website is any element that confuses, distracts, or stops a search engine crawler or spider from moving through your site. Examples of road blocks include HTML/XHMTL errors, lack of connecting and navigational links, lack of text, a table-based design, 404 page not found errors or other dead or moved links, and bad Apache .htaccess or robots.txt files.

It is critical to ensure all such errors and road blocks are fixed. To put it simply, this means you need to test, test, test your web pages.

This is not as complicated as it appears. If you are using WordPress, put your WordPress Theme through a couple validation tests to make sure it works right. While Theme designers do test their designs, double check their work to make sure the Theme validates both with HTML/XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Standards. If you tweak your Theme, run it through the testers and validators again. Make sure that all the template files work right and meet web standards and then you are ready to go.

With a solidly functioning and error free Theme, the only place you can screw up your WordPress blog is in the content area. Most people only post text in the Write Post panel, leaving all the design elements outside of the content. But headings, bold, italic, and links are still tags that can have problems.

Hey, mistakes happen. Links are left open. A link, blockquote or other tag is messed up or not closed. Headings aren’t closed. Or an image is too big or small and pushing things around. A DIV or HTML tag might be closed when it wasn’t opened, which closes another tag early, causing all kinds of problems. There are a lot of things that will mess up your blog that can occur within your content area created with the Write Post panel, but these are human error things. Careless mistakes easily caught.

The solution is easy. Before you click the Publish button, preview your post.

The new WordPress 2.0 and WordPress.com offers instant previews of your post within your WordPress Theme, giving you a chance to really see what it looks like before you publish. If you are using an older version of WordPress, you can get the same live preview by typing in your blog URL with the post number in a new tab or window such as http://example.com/index.php?p=456. The post number appears in the Write Post Panel address bar after you have hit Save and Continue Editing. Using this method in all versions of WordPress, you can actually test your post with any web validator if you find you have problems and can’t track down the culprit easily.

A quick glance can usually catch most harmful errors. The sidebar is gone, pushed down, or borked. The whole text is a giant link. A graphic or photograph is too large or small. All are easily fixed from within the Write Post panel.

Those without WordPress’s features should check your design and layout template files thoroughly, and then frequently test your published pages with validators to make sure you continue to keep the template files in good shape.

Make these tests and checks of your blog a part of your regular maintenance schedule. It’s critical to do semi-annual website maintenance to keep your blog performing well and ready for search engines to visit.

For an extensive list of free website checkers, testers, and validators, check out my article on Validating the Code Behind the Page and Conquering Site Validation Errors. And take time to understand how search engines see, search, and visit your website so you can take the necessary steps to make that visit enjoyable.

The Crawlers Can Navigate Your Site Easily: In order to get all of your posts into a search engine’s database, the search engine crawler has to find them. As the crawler moves through your blog, it looks for links to the Pages, highlighted posts, next and previous posts, or other internal links within your layout and posts to move through to the next post. Ignored by search engines, orphan posts can happen when a post is disconnected from the other posts.

WordPress and SEO

Now, there is something you need to know about WordPress and using site search tags on your blog. Google follows all the links on your posts, and many WordPress Themes feature date, archive, and site search links which generate specific pages when clicked. Google “thinks” these are all individual web pages and follows them, adding them to their database. As of January 1, 2006, this blog has 360 posts but more than 18,000 pages are stored in Google’s database. I didn’t do anything special, that’s just WordPress doing awesome SEO right out the box. Thought you should know.

When possible, add links to your content that connects the phrase or topic to another post on your blog. I’ve included many such examples in this article. Link list features like most recent posts, related posts, or random posts adds more navigational links to connect one post to another. You can add your site map and important Pages and posts to your footer for increased navigation, helping both the user and search engine crawler. A site map, archive, or even posts with lists of other posts on your blog will help connect the links between all of your posts.

To find out which posts from your blog are currently in a search engine database, many search engines allow you to search only for web pages exclusive to a specific domain name. In Google, the search command would be:

site:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/

Go through the list, and if you find any posts missing, the odds are likely that it is an orphan, so add some links to that post, and double check your navigational links to make sure that you have adequate links to connect all your posts to each other. As a side benefit, visitors will enjoy your blog much better if they can easily find other posts you’ve written that might interest them.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: Keywords in your post content help search engines categorize your information in their database. They also help the user find your blog.

Think through your post for keywords people will use to search for your content. For this particular article, keywords would be seo, search engine, optimization, keywords, clean, checking, maintenance, site maintenance, cleaning, optimizing, search, crawler, search engine crawler, validation, web, and standards. If you were searching for an article on search engine optimization, the odds are that you would use one or more of these words or phrases, so it is critical to include these words or phrases in your writing, at least more than once, to make sure the search engine crawler understands that these are words important to the content of your post.

As you write your post content, adding titles, headings, links and images, write them right. Make sure that all titles and headings include one or more of your keywords, reinforcing the topic at hand. Make sure that all links and images have TITLE and ALT attributes, and again put some of your keywords in their titles and descriptions.

keywords

The better the spread of keywords in your article, without using them in between every other word like a search engine spammer, the more likely a search engine is to understand the topic you are writing about, and the more likely your audience is able to understand the topic.

There are also tools that will help you by suggesting, analyzing, and checking your keyword density to make sure you are using enough keywords and the right keywords to help categorize your content.

With so many learning about website development and design in a seat-of-the-pants educational method, the importance of words in your content is critical. I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten complaints from photographers and graphic artists that their sites or blogs are not getting into search engines or getting any decent page ranking. I ask, “Where are your words?”

“I have pictures. I don’t need words. They speak for themselves.”

Well, while modern search engines are trying, they really can’t read your pictures. They can only read your descriptions of your pictures, the ones you tend to leave out of your image links.

Without words, search engines can’t “read” anything. There is nothing to categorize or add to their database except code with links to graphics. The graphics will get picked up by Google Images or another search engine that catalogs images, but it won’t go easily into their main database. You have to have words, and you need to make sure the search engine understands the topic at hand, and that means paying attention to keywords.

Remember, content matters.

Keyword – Testers and Checkers

Keyword Articles and Resources

Tags and Categories: Categories are for users. Tags are for tagging services like Technorati. Is that clear? Now, let me confuse things.

Tagging arrived a little over a year ago and took the web by storm. Tagging is part of a movement towards “social bookmarks”, a method of creating mini-categories for post content which are similar but not quite the same as keywords, and using people’s opinion to promote interesting websites, blogs, and information to the top of a list created, in part, by tag services.

Categories help your visitor move through your blog finding related material. For instance, on this site, I have categories for WordPress News and WordPress Tips. If you are visiting this blog and are interested in tips related to WordPress, then you would visit the posts within that category. Pretty self-explanatory, right?

WordPress marks categories automatically as tags. This is great as it instantly adds tags to your post, but not all categories are worthy of being tagged. For instance, my category, Blog Babble is a lousy tag. Who is going to search for “blog babble”? No one. But you instantly understand that you will find posts within that category related to blogging. It’s a synonym for “talking about blogs and blogging”. Search engines and tagging services don’t deal well with synonyms. This is just one example of the many problems with tags. I like my few neat categories and so I manually add tags to the bottom of my posts.

Tags categorize your content with keywords into micro-categories used by tagging services. They can be chosen by you and posted on and within your posts on your blog, or by users who “tag” your post in their tagging service account, which then may help other users who are searching that tagging service for that particular tag.

Tags are similar but different from keywords. Keywords are what people will use in search engines to find your information, while tags are used by those using tag services to find your information. Search engines are slowly embracing tagging, so the line between these two is blurring.

The keywords on this post might be:

seo, search engine, optimization, keywords, clean, checking, maintenance, site maintenance, cleaning, optimizing, search, crawler, search engine crawler, validation, web, and standards

The tags could be one or more of the following:

seo, search+engine, optimization, keywords, validation, standards, webdev, web+development

Any link can be assigned a “relationship” as a tag.

Apple

The link can be to anything. It can be, as shown, to a search page that looks for posts with the word “Apple”. It can go to any tagging service like Technorati. It can also go to applesrus.com or any web page link.

Search engines and tagging service crawlers or spiders come through your blog after being pinged or upon invitation to find every mention of rel="tag" and add that to their database along with part or all of that page, connecting the tag with your content. Users will visit Technorati and type in a keyword, like “apple”, and all posts with tags for “apple” will appear in the search results. If you have a post that is all about apples, but you haven’t included a tag for “apple”, then the tagging services will not have that post listed under “apple”. This makes tagging services limiting since their database returns are based upon tags not overall content and keywords. Still, tagging services offer an alternative to searching from traditional search engines and tend to focus their search results on blogs rather than traditional websites.

Whether or not your categories serve solely as your tags or you add tagging elsewhere in your blog, it is up to you. Either way, many search engines, in addition to tagging services, are now using tags to collect information about the content on your blog and blog posts. Learn how to use them and when.

Get Pinged: Pinging has been around for a long time, but it is now being used in a new, and better, way. According to Wikipedia:

Ping is the name of a computer network tool used on TCP/IP networks (such as the Internet). It provides a basic test of whether a particular host is operating properly and is reachable on the network from the testing host. Ping provides estimates of the round-trip time and packet loss rate between hosts. It works by sending ICMP “echo request?? packets to the target host and listening for replies (ICMP “echo response?? packets).

Does that make sense? Basically, a ping is like a knock on the door. When used on websites and blogs, pinging services take your blog address (URL) and knock on the door of, say, Technorati, and says “Hey, I have a friend I want you to meet. You need to check them out. Here is their card.”

Pinging is built into WordPress right out of the box. Every time you publish a new post, a ping goes to Ping-o-matic, which then forwards a ping onto many different search engines and tagging services to let them know that you have new content and to send out their crawlers and spiders to take a look.

In a moment I will talk more about search engine submissions, but pinging has basically replaced site submissions. With WordPress and WordPressMU, pinging happens behind the scenes invisibly. You don’t even know that its happening, but your blog shows up on tagging services and search engines with no effort from you.

Pinging is critical to SEO techniques today, so if you aren’t using WordPress, consider learning to manually ping to knock on the doors of search engines and tagging services to let them know you are available.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

2009-07-03T22:30:00.001-07:00

A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).

Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.

Optimize Your WordPress Individual Blog Posts

2009-07-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

This is part three of a three-part follow-up series to my article Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines.

Part one, Optimize RSS and Atom Feeds for Wordpress, focused on Feed optimization. Part two, Optimize Your WordPress Blog as a Whole, focused on overall Blog optimization. This article focuses on WordPress platform-specific guidelines for optimizing Your Individual Blog Posts.

Note: These tips assume you are using WordPress as an installed application on your own dedicated or shared server, and not as a free hosted blog on wordpress.com. These tips do not take into account any WordPress upgrades in the recently released version 2.3.

1. Add Social Networking Links

Adding a few links to popular sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us makes it very easy for readers to share your posts with the rest of the world. Pick a few of your favorite sites, or sites that you think would be the most receptive to your content.

There is a plugin called Gregarious that can help automate this. I’ve heard good things about it, however we decided to go the custom route which involved a little hand coding.

If you want to follow suit, you will need to edit the single.php file for your current theme. This file resides here:

blog-root-directory/wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/single.php

It will depend on your theme, but you should see some code like:

You’ll want to insert the code for your networking links after this so they show up at the bottom of your post. Again, it will depend on your theme and design as to exactly how you do this, but here is the linking code for StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us:

StumbleUponhttp://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&title=

Digghttp://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=&title=

del.icio.ushttp://del.icio.us/post?url=&title=

If you are displaying your full posts on your blog’s home page, category pages, or any other pages that display more than one post, then you will need to make the same additions to the index.php file found in the same directory as the single.php file.

blog-root-directory/wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/index.php

(Yes, you could write a php method to alleviate having duplicate code.)

2. Add an ‘Email This’ Link

Add a link that will allow your users to easily email your post to a friend.

We use FeedBurner to facilitate this. Because our feed goes through FeedBurner, we can just use the proper linking code and FeedBurner handles the rest. There are a couple of options when using FeedBurner for this functionality, but we manually inserted the code in the same location as the Social Networking example above. Here is the linking code:

Email Link Code for FeedBurnerhttp://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=&uri=

3. Add tags

Your WordPress blog has built-in categories, but categories should be used as an organizational tool specific to your blog. Tags allow you to attach universal meta data to your posts, and can be used by sites like Technorati, which will increase your blog’s visibility. A great plugin for this is the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

This plugin works well in conjunction with the SEO Title Tag plugin. I talk about the SEO Title Tag plugin in my article Optimize Your WordPress Blog as a Whole.

Note: WordPress 2.3 has native support for tags, but my experimentation so far has shown that the new tag functionality is very limited. I recommend using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin even if you’re using WordPress 2.3.

4. Show Related Posts

Provide links to other posts on your blog that are related to the post the user is reading. This will make it very easy for them to find more information, and it will increase the chances they will pass your articles onto friends and colleagues.

A great plugin for this is the Related Posts plugin.

5. Consider Using Sticky Posts

A ’sticky’ post is one that always remains at the top of a page regardless of whether or not it is the most recent post. If you have a page that has ranked well because of a keyword rich post, you might want to consider making that post sticky so it remains at the top of the page. This could keep that page ranked well for a longer period of time. You also might want to utilize sticky posts if you have a particular article that represents a page very well.

The Adhesive plugin can create sticky posts. It doesn’t seem to be highly configurable, but you can make a post sticky for all pages, or just for Category pages.

That’s All Folks

There are other obvious optimization techniques for your blog posts like including targeted keywords in your titles and body copy, and using ‘alt’ attributes in your tags, but this article has focused on WordPress specific solutions. Check out Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines and Increase Your Blog Traffic - 8 Important Steps for more general optimization techniques.

This article concludes my series on WordPress specific optimization techniques. I hope you’ve found this information as useful as I have while trying to optimize your WordPress blog.

Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines

2009-07-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Don’t end up like the founder of that other “Gone Wild!” web site. If your blog is not fully optimized, you might find yourself in solitary confinement, too. (Cue bad-joke drumfill.)

In addition to our list of 8 important steps to increase your blog traffic, here are some simple, easy-to-implement blog optimization guidelines to help ensure your blog’s freedom and visibility.

There are three main areas to consider when optimizing your blog:

Feeds, Your Blog as a Whole, and Individual Blog Posts.

Optimize Your Feeds

(Read my post on optimizing your RSS and Atom feeds in Wordpress.)

1. Use full text rather than partial text. When your post is viewed in a reader, like Google Reader, make sure your feed is set to display the entire post. The click-through rate for full text vs. partial text in feeds is basically the same, and there are a variety of other arguments in favor of full text feeds. See what Scoble says about this.
2. Show 20 posts. If your blog software defaults to showing 5 or 10 posts in its feeds, then increase it to 20. It’s simply more content for new subscribers and more chances your posts will get passed around.
3. Add categories at the feed level. Normally each individual post includes categories, but it is possible to include categories at the feed level too. View the RSS2 spec.
4. Add an image or logo. Although this feature is not well supported in the different feed readers, it is simple to implement. Adding an image to your feed makes it stand out from the crowd. Adding a logo to your feed is an easy way to reinforce your brand. Here is a great tutorial on adding a logo to your feed.

Logo in feed - blog optimization
5. Enable autodiscovery. If you use just about any browser other than IE 6 or earlier, then a chicklet will show up in the browser URL bar if your feed is autodiscoverable. Add RSS autodiscovery. Add Atom autodiscovery.

Autodiscover chicklet - part of blog optimization strategies
6. Consider using FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers many free services like SmartFeed, FeedFlare, and MyBrand. You can also track subscription rate (while not exact, you can still monitor trends) and a variety of other statistics.
7. Validate your feeds. Once you’ve made changes to your feeds, be sure to validate them. Fixing any errors found during validation will help to ensure your feed is compatible will the variety of readers out there. Validate your feeds here. Chances are the results will contain a couple of warnings. Fix these if you can. The important thing is that your feed is valid.

Optimize Your Blog as a Whole

(Read my post Optimize Your Wordpress Blog as a Whole.)

1. Use custom page titles. If you could only make one change while optimizing your blog, this should be it. Customize every page title in your blog, especially your home page, by including important keywords.
2. Use keyword rich URLs. If your URLs (permalinks) contain search unfriendly query strings like “?p=180,” you need to change your blog’s permalink structure. Most blog software allows you to change the default permalinks to include post titles, categories and tags instead of the cryptic query strings. You can take this one step further by manually customizing each post’s title, i.e. if you want your URL to be different than your post title, you can manually change it to something more concise and/or search friendly. For example, the default URL for this post would be:

/blogs-gone-wild-optimization-strategies-to-ensure-yours-is-of-age/

but I changed it to:

/complete-blog-optimization-guidelines/.
3. Add news reader subscribe buttons. Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog. Adding buttons for the more popular feed readers gives your users a single click solution for subscribing to your blog. However, don’t go crazy and add 4 million buttons. It’s visually unappealing and confusing for your readers. If they have too many choices, chances are they won’t make one!

News reader buttons - increase your blog visibility
4. Add a Technorati button. Face it. Technorati is the authority on blogs. You definitely want your blog listed on Technorati, and you should make it easy for your readers to ‘Fave’ your blog (add it to their Technorati favorites).
5. Offer email-based subscriptions. This enables your audience to receive your content via email as opposed to using a feed reader. Many (if not the majority of) people are still unfamiliar or not comfortable with the concept of feeds. Of course it depends on your particular audience, but you should consider offering an email-based subscription.
6. List most recent blog posts. Make it easy for your readers to see what your latest post titles are. Show 3 - 5 titles.
7. Add a Google Sitemap. Make your blog readily visible to Google.
8. Ping other blogs when you are talking about them. If you mention another blog post in yours, link to it and make sure your software sends a ping. You can also accept pings so your readers can see who is talking about you.
9. Notify blog search engines each time you post. Blog software generally makes this easy. Make sure your blog is at least pinging ping-o-matic (send pings to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/). Ping-o-matic pings many of the major blog search engines. Also consider pinging these other services.

Optimize Your Individual Blog Posts

1. Add social networking links. Add a few links to popular sites like Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. This allows your readers to easily share your post with the rest of the world. You can add graphical buttons or icons, or simple text links, but as with the news reader subscribe buttons, don’t go overboard.

Social networking links - increase your blog visibility
2. Add an ‘Email This’ link. Add a link that allows your users to email the post to a friend. FeedBurner can provide this functionality. See ‘Simple Invitation with FeedBurner.’ (Once you’re on the page, look toward the bottom for the code example.)
3. Add tags. Add tags to your posts that are relevant (and hopefully) high-volume search terms. You’re probably utilizing your blog’s built-in categories, and that’s great. However, categories should be used as an organizational tool for your specific blog, and might be terms that a user searching on Technorati, or another site, would never use. For example, this blog has ‘Rants’ as a category, but it’s doubtful that somebody searching for ‘Rants’ on Technorati will really be looking for our blog’s subject matter. Utilizing tags in your posts increases their chance of being found in searches. Make sure your tags are acknowledged by Technorati.
4. Show related posts. Provide links to other posts in your blog that contain similar subject matter. As with recent posts, 3 - 5 should suffice.
5. Consider using sticky posts. A sticky post is one that always remains at the top of a category, archive, or tag page, regardless of newer posts. Using a sticky post allows you to keep a keyword rich post at the top of a specific page, such as a category page. This gives the page a better chance of ranking well in the search engines because you can more easily optimize it for targeted keywords, and it allows your readers to see your best post at the top of the page when they first visit.
6. Include targeted keywords. This is pretty obvious, but worth repeating. Include targeted keywords in header tags and in your body copy. Bold keywords where appropriate - this gives search engines (and readers) more indications about what keywords you’re targeting and what keywords are important.
7. Use ‘alt’ attributes in your tags. ‘Alt’ attributes should describe what the image is about in case it cannot be seen (by text-only browsers and vision impaired users), and because search engines can consider ‘alt’ text as body copy. Of course it goes without saying that attributes should include targeted keywords, but remember to only use them when they are relevant and appropriate. For example, the ‘alt’ attribute for the first picture in this post is alt=”The other ‘Gone Wild!’ web site founder” which does not contain any targeted keywords.

Though the title tag of this page is ‘Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines’, we both know there’s always more to be done. That being said, if you at least follow these guidelines you’ll definitely have a head start toward increasing your blog’s visibility.

Google Adsense Resources, Services, Replacements, Help, and Assistance

2009-07-03T04:28:00.001-07:00

How to get Started: The Basics of Using Adsense

Adsense placement on blogs was taboo at one time, you were almost an outsider of you used them. I think that over the last few years most have realized that it takes a lot of time (and sometimes money, depending on bandwidth) to author a quality blog or web site. While “information should be free” sprit of the Internet is still alive, placing text ads on a web site is more and more common every day.

What is Google Adsense?

Adsense is a contextual ad-serving resource provided by google. Signup for a free account, place the code they give you on your web pages, and when visitors come to your site the google ads will appear in and around your content. How ‘relevant’ the ads are to your web site visitors depends on where you placed the code in your pages, and what format(s) you used to create the ads during setup. If your visitors click on the links in the ads – you get paid for each click. Each time an ad is shown it’s called an impression, and each time someone clicks an ad it’s called a click-through. The number of times someone clicks an ad per 100 visitors to your site would be your click-through percentage. How much you get paid per click depends on many variables, including what advertisers are willing to pay per click on a site like yours – and what your search relevance or page rank is.

Can I Really Make Money with Adsense in My Web Site?

Yes, you can make money with ad-sense in your web site. In fact, this entire web site is full of information and tutorials to optimize your web site to make the most money it possibly can from adsense and affiliate programs. Of course – this is hard work, and you will only be successful if you learn the tools necessary and put them to work. Adsense dollars don’t fall from the sky, you have to create them. Google won’t even pay you until you’ve made more than $100 in revenue. Let’s hope you don’t get discouraged before you reach that landmark. Also – if you don’t have original quality content in your site to begin with to generate quality traffic in the first place, chances are you won’t be too successful with adsense. The more successful your web site, the more successful you’ll be with Adsense. In fact, some people are making from $100-$1,000 per day in adsense revenue – making it a potentially lucrative opportunity.

Maybe you’d like to read some real stories – directly from web site owners, about their success with adsense. You should read Blogging for Dollars and find out how a quality, well-written, passionate blog or web site can go from $5 a month to $100 a day revenue with adsense. Or, if you want to shoot for the moon, you might want to read $1 Million Dollars per year in Google Adsense. Probably the best real word account I’ve read of adsense success or failure is Is Google Adsense Making Me Rich? over at ProBlogger. Darren Rowse is right-on -the-money with that post. He also has a poll and post about the rise of six figure bloggers, that illustrates the growing number of people making a very good living from adsense.

Where Can I find the Best Adsense Resources?

We will be publishing many adsense articles, but in this post I will give you links to some of the best adsense resources to get you started:

Google itself publishes a lot of quality information about adsense. If you doubt for a second that people are doing well using adsense – go and read some of the adsense success stories and case studies that google makes available.
You will find that (as I already mentioned) quality content in your blog or web site will get you not only the best page rank and relevancy – but also that it will get you the highest ad relevancy and click-through, generating more revenue per capita. Eric Wolfram’s article on “How to Score Higher in Google Search Engine” is very much on a par with the best there is in regards to authoring a quality web site, with quality content.

For quick adsense help (from adsense subscribers), I recommend the google groups adsense forums. You could also visit the google adsense help center, or browse adsense topics.
Google also has it’s own adsense blog, called “Inside Adsense”. I would subscribe to this in your RSS reader, so you always hear the latest adsense announcements – directly from the source.

Subscribe to some other RSS feeds from Adsense-related blogs – like Jensense.

Is google perfect? Any huge service used en masse is prone to it’s share of problems, and reading some posts from disgruntled adsense users probably wouldn’t hurt in case you run into problems.

What’s the Best Way to Place Adsense in Your Web Site?

Well, the only one who can determine that is you, but I can point you in the right direction to get some expert advice. First, head over to google and look over the adsense ad formats to see which ones might fit your site the best. Once you choose a format, you might want to do some research to find out layouts and placement tend to give the most click-thru, earning you the most revenue. You should look at the AdSense Heat Map to see where google thinks the best placement of ads is.
For instance, some say that placing the adsense ads within the confines of your content or blog post is the best way to get the most relevant ads (and highest click-through). Others might say that it also offends more of your readers. I guess that would be a judegement call on your part, and depend on what kind of site and content you have. At very least, you should read this post on How to Place Google Adsense Ads Next to Your Text.

Are There Alernatives to Adsense?

Sure there are, and you should check them out to see if one might work better for you. Just be aware, that some of the ‘articles’ you find out there may be slanted towards using something other than google (for the benefit of that site owner getting credit for you signing up, and not based on the merit of the service). In that sprit, check out Don’t Settle for Google Adsense.

But that’s just one example. I’ll add more here, as I research which ones are the best adsense alternative. In the meantime, here’s a link to 130 Adsense Alernatives or “Online Advertising Network roundup”.

I use Wordpress (or Drupal, or Joomla, or PHPNuke, or Xoops, or Mambo, or Blogger, or Typepad…

How do you use Adsense? It should be pretty easy, if you search for the information. Most of these blog services, packages, or Content Management Systems (CMS) have the ability to set adsense up via plugin – so you don’t have to manually edit the PHP or HTML code yourself (which many people don’t know how to do). For example, here you can find the Wordpress plugin for Adsense Deluxe.

Is Adsense just for Web Pages?

Well, it was, but now google has opened up adsense for feeds beta. So, now you can add adsense to the rss feed of your web site, and when people read your feed in their favorite rss aggregator – you will have a chance to earn even more revenue!

As always – there will be more to come with this post and on this subject!

Building Backlinks with Dofollow Blogs

2009-07-03T04:24:00.000-07:00

Commenting on other blogs is one of the best sources of traffic you can find and even better way to build backlinks. But how do you know that your time is being rewarded? You certainly don’t want to spend hours and hours leaving comments that are link dust in the wind do you? Here’s an example – let’s say that you are promoting your own business by leaving business cards on bulletin boards and check out counters. Would you waste your time leaving them in places where nobody would see them? Would you leave them in business that get virtually no customers at all? Of course not. You would leave them in the places that would do you the most good, big stores with with lots of customers.

So, due the same due diligence when leaving comments. First of all know what links are all about. Know that there is the normal way to (html) code them, and then there is the “nofollow” way. The “nofollow” tag added to an HTML hyperlink means that you link to something and tell the search engines to “ignore it”. So if you comment on a blog using “nofollow” tags the search engines will ignore the link above you comment. There is a “dofollow” movement, and dofollow Wordpress plugins you can use to remove the nofollow tag blog-wide. All you have to do is search google for “dofollow blogs” to find seemingly endless lists of blogs that you can comment on that are more beneficial than others. The only thing I can think of better is to look for lists of dofollow blogs that have decent google pageranks. You could go a step beyond that and look for Alexa rankings under 100K too, but I think that a list of dofollow blogs with decent pagerank is a good start.

Blogging Mistake: Not Using 301 Redirects

2009-07-03T04:22:00.001-07:00

If you are not using 301 Redirects you are making a blogging mistake. 301 Redirects are easy to setup, save your google pagerank and link love, and save your visitors from a nasty “Error 404 – Not Found” page. What is a 301 redirect? It’s a single line you add to you “.htaccess” file (more on this later) that says ‘anyone that visits that URL – send them to that URL instead’. The redirect can happen witin your site, you can redirect to an external site – it’s basically from any URL to any URL.

Here are some scenarios where you would use a 301 redirect:

You’ve changed your permalink structure
You’ve accidentally deleted a post and need to recreate it
You wish to change the post slug (url) to make it more seo friendly
You have a bunch of 404’s for pages that don’t (and maybe never) existed
You recently moved from one blogging platform to another (drupal, blogger, movable type, etc., to wordpress)
You changed, recreated, or renamed your categories

If you’re using Wordpress, you can try and install a module to add redirects directly from your admin panel. I personally have not had luck with this plugin, but some have – you’re welcome to try the Objection Redirection Wordpress 301 Redirect Plugin and see if it works for you.

If it doesn’t (or if you’re not using Wordpress), you’ll need to edit your .htaccess file yourself. If using Wordpress, you should already have a file called “.htaccess” in the root of your web site. If not, you’ll need to create it. Open up any text editor (notepad) on your PC. You’ll need an FTP account and FTP access to your web site to do this. If using Wordpress, download your .htaccess file. It should already look something like this:



RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

If you’re not using Wordpress, download your .htaccess file and open it (or create a new one if you don’t have one already). Basically – you’re going to add one line for each redirect. It’s very simple:

Redirect 301 “/blog” http://www.yourwebsite.com
Redirect 301 “/page.html” http://www.yourwebsite.com/page.html
Redirect 301 “/subdir/oldpage.html” http://www.yourwebsite.com/subdir
Redirect 301 “/blog” http://www.anotherwebsite.com

I tried several ways to do this, and this is the one that works for me every time. I’m hosted on a Linux server running Apache. Every line starts with “Redirect 301 “. Then (always in quotes) is the path on your server to redirect. I always start it with a slash (that means from the root of your site). There is no need to write out your full domain name in the first part. You can redirect a directory, a page, a page in a sub-directory, etc. Then just write the full URL to the page you are redirecting to. You can redirect to a page in your site, a sub-directory, or a page in a sub-directory. You can even redirect from your site to another (external) web site.

That’s it! Save you file and FTP back to the root of your web site and you’re done!

The reason I had to setup some 301 Redirects is because I migrated one of my web sites from Drupal to Wordpress. With the date based permalink structure in Wordpress, the URL’s of all of my important pages with pagerank was screwed up. They say if you redirect a page that had google page rank (to a new page) the (old) page rank will be passed on to the new page. I can’t verify this myself, because my redirects haven’t been in place long enough to tell. I will update after they’ve been online awhile.

The Google Supplemental Index is No More

2009-07-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

Wow, I’m reading over at the Dfinitive Blog how google has removed the supplemental index tag, and that’s just amazing to me! The Google Webmaster Blog talks about it in the post “Supplemental Goes Mainstream. On the one hand you might think ‘wow this is good’. But as Dfinitive points out – this is really bad. Think about it. When you found your results in the Supplemental Index in Google -you KNEW something was wrong with those pages (duplicate content, too many links, bad links, spam). As a results – most of us (that didn’t want to seem them there) strived to FIX them and get them back in the regular index.

Matt Cutts said:

“I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO….”

While a really worthy statement – it is very telling, isn’t it? It’s almost a slap in the face in a way – like saying ‘hey, those pages were put there because they deserved to be…and we’re not going to point them out anymore. You should know better and do good seo anway…’. So what does this mean? Now, everything is in the main index and if you have bad pages they’ll just go to the ass end? Or, will the ’supplemental index’ still exist – but just not be publicly identified? As with most google changes, we’ll have to do some investigation and reading to figure the impact of this one…

Your thoughts? Comment now below!

WP-SEO is the Ultimate Wordpress SEO Plugin – Throw the Rest Away

2009-07-03T04:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

It allows you to change your html title tags
You have fine grained control of making the title tag
The title can be any combination of title, separator, blogname, label, or keywords
You can individually choose a different title format for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
Easily change the separator to anything you want (for instance, don’t use WP >> default, use | instead)
Give separate labels to home, article, page, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages for use in the title tag
Choose to display the pagenumber, author, or even display a title field in your ‘write’ page to override with your own when required
It allows you to convert your meta description tags
Set a default value
Choose either the default value, titles of all listed posts, or part of the first post as description tags
Choose to use description of the category for category pages
Individually assign different choices for meta description for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
Choose the value for the number of words to be displayed in the meta description tag
Enable a description field on the ‘write’ page to write your own description when required
You can even convert the meta keywords tags
Set a default value
Set a dynamic value (as in the title and description options)
Choose the number of words
Choose the minimum number of letters for keywords
Blacklist certain keywords
choices for autocompletion, using only nouns, relevance, and labeling
Enable a keywords field on the ‘write’ page to write your own when required
An option for highlighting content areas using the adsense google_ad_section code
Option to eliminate duplicate content indexing by automatically inserting robots nofollow tags on appropriate pages
Option to not index RSS feed
Rename uploaded files with title instead of filename
An option to download all plugin settings in an XML file, so you can ‘import’ it in other sites you want to have the same settings (BIG time saver)

The only other thing you should know about this plugin are that before you activate it, you need to comment out any other title or meta keyword or description tags listed in your header.php file (which you most likely will have). If you’re not sure whether you got them all or not, this plugin even has a ‘compatibility check’ on the WP SEO plugin settings page that will look for double tags and alert you if there are any before you turn it on.

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress – leave them now below!

SEO Digger digs out ranked keywords

2009-07-03T04:11:00.002-07:00

SEODigger.com is an SEO tool that helps you find out what keywords a domain ranks for in google top 20 listings. I ran my URL and came up for keyword phrases I didn’t even know I ranked for. They have both a premium and free services available once you signup for an account – but I’m just using the free service for now. Check it out! You can get a quick and dirty look at where your blog stands in SERP’s, and maybe find out some new keyword phrases to key in on for monetization!

The ABC of SEO: Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Price: $19.90

SEO – Search Engine Optimization Bible
Price: $39.99

Backlinks Watch for SEO Reporting

2009-07-03T04:11:00.001-07:00

Backlinks Watch is a great place to do SEO work, because it not only checks your backlinks, but it “digs” some info out about each and every one including anchor text, pagerank, and whether it’s ‘nofollow’ or ‘dofollow’. The site is free, and there are all kinds of software products on the market for several hundred dollars that basically do the same thing.

If you’re looking to find out who is linking your site, and what kind of quality those links are – this is a great way to Git ‘R Done!

Internal Links – Great for SEO

2009-07-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

I think that too many people forget how good internal inks are for SEO. If you want to increase your rankings in the search engines start linking your own posts on your blog! It will increase your listings in the Serps, but it will also be better for your blog because you will be highlighting and bringing up your old posts all the time.

When you write on a topic – link your previous posts about similar topics. In fact, think about installing a plugin like Aizatto’s Related Posts. You can create specific pages rounding up posts into a “series”. You can feature certain posts on your home page. All these are great ways to build internal links. There’s even a plugin called RB Internal Links that helps you browse for and find previous posts to link to using Wordpress short codes.

Build internal links and watch your search rankings increase!

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines

2009-07-03T03:40:00.000-07:00

Everyone and their dog (yes, there are a few dogs out there with their own blogs) have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While blogs can be business related (another blog about mesothelioma anyone?) they can also be personal where you talk about the great ham sandwich you had for lunch today or the crappy service you had at that trendy restaurant last night.

But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.

However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else’s domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings.

Let’s face it, when you commission a styling’ new blog template, most blog designers focus on making your blog look the way you want it to. But unfortunately for bloggers, not very many of those great blog designers are also SEOs by trade, meaning that the blog design you use could actually be hurting your search engine rankings. While you may have a great design that looks wonderful to readers, new readers might not find you if your blog isn’t ranking well organically in the search engines.

Also, when you optimize your blog for the user experience, you make it easy for users to return and engage in your blog without dealing with any of the hassles that can cause them to abandon other sites or blog entries. Repeat visitors are the cream of your blog, so by following these tips you have given them the tools they need to return as well as the user experience that makes them want to come back.

Fortunately, if you are on the case to make your blog rank well while not hindering your visitor’s experience on your site, there are definitely things you can check - and fix - to prevent any indexing issues from occurring, and ensuring your blog a happy and healthy existence in the search engines.

So here is advice on how you can optimize that blog of yours for both users and search engines without alienating one or the other.

1) Dump The Default Template - Looks Count!
I cringe when I see a blog using the “out of the box” Wordpress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog, or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.

2) Just Say No To Bad Color Schemes
While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men’s suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user experience and their expectations.

3) RSS Me!
Make sure you have RSS available. Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don’t tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate “About Us” page. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them. If you use Feedburner currently, have a look at their new MyBrand option which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.

4) Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons
Yes, when people want to subscribe to a blog, they will often look for that orange RSS logo as well as the logos of the standard aggregators such as Bloglines. So it is worth the time to add the most popular ones to your blog so visitors can easily do their one-click subscriptions to your feed without it require much effort on their part. If you make it hard to subscribe, most just won’t bother. FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.

5) Offer Posts Via Email
Some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.

6) Decide On Full Or Partial Feeds
Do you offer full feeds or partial feeds? This is a personal preference, and is often dependent on what market space you are blogging in. One option is to offer two feeds, one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed, where readers won’t see ads but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. But this will often come down to personal preference, and the preferences of your readers.

7) Write Compelling Snippets/Descriptions
If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.

8) Pay Attention to How You Write.
One of my favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing detailed long entriesâ€¦ without a single paragraph break and with the double whammy of also writing with a font size smaller than usual. If I look up for a moment, it is hard to find my place again in her 1000 word entries. As a result, I don’t read it as often as I would like to, simply because reading it is such a painful experience.

9) Spelling Counts
Spelling is also worth mentioning. Add one of the many spell checkers to your internet browser and run a quick spell check before you publish your entry. Every word doesn’t have to be perfect, and I am certainly guilty myself of letting on occasional typo slip through unnoticed. But I also get annoyed when I am reading typo after typo after typo in an entry. And yes, if it happens enough, I will unsubscribe out of sheer frustration.

10) Fontography Counts
Make the font easy to read. Some bloggers think it is cool to have their handwriting turned into a customized font, or use a trendy font that would be better suited to a scrapbook layout. But not everyone has those wild and weird fonts installed, which means that those people will see a standard font such as Times New Roman, and it can really kill the look of your blog. So instead design the text of your blog entries to use a standard font in a standard size.

11) Don’t Forget Navigation
Is this blog part of a larger site, such as a corporate blog on a site for a major company? Don’t just link to the main page of the blog. Syndicate your recent headlines in the sidebar to encourage visitors on the main site to check out the blog too.

12) How Fast is Your Host?
Another one of my favorite blogs has such a slow response time when I click from the snippet in my RSS to the full blog entry that I only actually end up waiting around for it to load about 10% of the time. Don’t lose readers because your hosting company thinks 30 seconds is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to load up a page.

13) Avoid Widget Overload!
Yes, there are definitely some cool widgets you can add to your blog, such as MyBlogLog or a Flickr photo box tied to your photo gallery. But be aware that having a large number of javascripts can slow down your site. So don’t sacrifice timely loading time for nice-but-not-all-that-necessary widgets.

14) Have Descriptive Titles
Some blog software actually makes your entry titles seem pretty repetitious in the search engine result pages, and can result in a lower click through than you might have had otherwise with highly optimized titles. If your title’s say something like “Jason’s Tech Industry Rants & Ramblings Blog >> New Xbox 360 title announced for April release” you should change it to “New Xbox 360 title announced for April release”. Unless you are well known as an authority blog in that market, the blog name is simply wasting crucial space at the beginning of the title tag and causing the rest of the entry title to end up getting truncated in the search results. And make sure your titles actually enhance the entry and don’t leave the reader wondering what on earth the blog entry could be about. Ensuring you have great titles when you have a small readership and are depending on search engines to send you readers is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your blog.

15) Look at your Cascading Style Sheets.
Most blogs use a tremendous amount of CSS to create that custom look. And while most of the “out of the box” designs that come standard with the installed template include all CSS in an external file, there definitely are some blog designers who will put their CSS on the individual template pages rather than placing it all in an external CSS file. And when you don’t place CSS in an external file, it can clutter up your pages and result in the most important part of the page - the entry text - being much further down in the HTML code when it has to go after the masses of CSS coding lines.

16) Post Often
The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a more regular basis. If you only post once in a blue moon, expect that it might take a while for Google to stop by and see that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.

17) Spread the Link Love
If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence (if they weren’t already) when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.

18) Be Aware of Your Anchor Text
When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game”.

19) Create Unique Stories
Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. When you write original blog entries, rather than just rehashing something someone else has already said, you increase the odds that someone will find yours interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said as well, meaning yet another link as well. And if you are fortunate, it will go viral, meaning suddenly it seems like every blogger in your market space is talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.

20) Use a Related Posts Plugin
Not only does this make sense to keep readers around for other articles on your site that are related to your current post, but it also allows you to deeplink from a current page on your blog to older entries. Often, older entries get buried several pages deep on an archive page, and this allows you to showcase entries written months or years previously and give those “oldies but goodies” an extra little kick in the search engines. There are several related post plugins available depending on which blog platform you use.

21) Ping Other Sites
When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com. Automatic pinging is an option in the control panel of most blog platforms including WordPress and MovableType. And Ping-o-Matic offers a service that allows you to quickly pick and chose what to ping.

22) Buy Your Own Domain Name
Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domainâ€¦ that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google’s Blogger & Wordpress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.

NOTE: See also our related story, Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain.

23) Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam
You don’t want Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.

24) Use a Good URL Structure
Don’t use “permalinks” such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. And just in case the blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.

25) Use Great Categories
When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, and article on the television show Grey’s Anatomy could go under “Grey’s Anatomy” and “ABC”. Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including “drama,” “hospital,” “interns” and “Seattle” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey’s Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey’s Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.

While some bloggers insist that search engine rankings will come naturally to those who wait, who really wants to wait for Google? A blogger can run into several unique challenges when it comes to optimizing for search engines, and it makes sense to get the jump on it now than simply hoping that if you write it, the bots will come. It is far easier to ensure you have a well optimized blog now than trying to figure out what the issue is 6 months down the road when only your blog’s index page is found in Google!

Does anyone else have tips they would have put in their own top 25 list of blog optimization tips? I had some that didn’t make the cut for the top list, but am interested to hear what others feel are the most important tips.

t=v1+v2 ,Cara meningkatkan traffic dan popularity dengan cepat dan alami

2009-06-16T23:43:00.001-07:00

Mohon baca baik-baik lalu terapkan dengan benar....

Sebuah filosofi mengatakan "Honesty is The Best Policy (Kejujuran adalah politik/strategi terbaik)" , inilah yang akan kita buktikan....apakah konsep kejujuran bisa kita olah menghasilkan traffic dan popularity yang lebih hebat dari konsep rumit para expert webmaster atau pakar SEO..?...
Saya yakin bisa asal konsep ini di jalankan dengan benar...,bila ini di terapkan pada web anda sesuai ketentuan maka:
-Web anda akan kebanjiran traffic pengunjung secara luar biasa hari demi hari, tanpa perlu repot-repot memikirkan SEO atau capek-capek promosi keberbagai tempat di dunia internet.
-Web anda akan kebanjiran backlink secara luarbiasa hari demi hari, tanpa perlu repot-repot berburu link keberbagai tempat di dunia internet.

Jika Albert Einstein memakai persamaan e=mc2 untuk menggabungkan potensi masa dan kecepatan cahaya untuk menghasilkan energi nuklir yang luar biasa itu ,maka kita akan memakai persamaan t=v1+v2 untuk mnggabungkan potensi web saya dan web anda untuk menghasilkan traffic dan popularity yang luar biasa pula.

Jika Einstein menggunakan atom plutonium dan uranium untuk membuat bom nuklir, maka kita menggunakan Kejujuran dan ketepatan untuk membuat bom traffic dan popularity ini.

Yang perlu anda lakukan adalah ikuti langkah-langkah berikut :

1.Buat posting artikel seperti posting saya ini, atau copy-paste posting ini dan juga diberi berjudul : t=v1+v2 ,Cara meningkatkan traffic dan popularity dengan cepat dan alami
2-Selanjutnya Copy atau buat KALIMAT SAKTI yang ada di bawah nomor 4 ini lalu pasang di web anda pada bagian yang paling mudah dilihat pengunjung, misalnya di bagian atas sidebar:
3-Pindahkan atau ganti link atau alamat url posting saya (disini-1) menggantikan alamat url rekan saya (disini-2).
-untuk mengetahui alamat url posting saya dan posting yang anda buat adalah bisa dengan meng-klik judul/title posting yang kita buat ini.
4-Lalu isi alamat url posting anda pada pada disini-1 tadi. Jadi anda melakukan publish (terbitkan) 2 kali, setelah posting ini selesai anda buat lalu di terbitkan, dan lalu anda klik pada title (judul) posting untuk mengambbil/meng-copy alamat url posting anda dari address bar browser anda, lalu anda edit lagi posting tadi dan masukan pada link disini-1 itu.

Berikut tulisan "KALIMAT SAKTI" yang perlu anda pasang di bagian web anda (setelah di ganti link url-nya sesuai ketentuan di atas)

"Ingin meningkatkan traffic pengunjung dan popularity web anda secara cepat dan tak terbatas...?...
Serahkan pada saya..., Saya akan melakukannya untuk anda GRATIS...!..Klik disini-1 dan disini-2"
-Jadi setelah KALIMAT SAKTI ini di letakan di web anda maka: jika pengunjung meng-klik link disini-1 akan menuju link posting anda, dan jika meng-klik disini-2 akan menuju link posting saya...dan seterusnya kan terus terjadi mata rantai yang tak terputus seperti itu...
5-Di bawah ini ada 2 link :link anda (link web saya sekarang) dan link saya (link web rekan saya sekarang) . Maka ganti (alamatnya) "link anda" dengan "link url web anda" dan "link saya dengan link url web saya" (link rekan saya di hapus).
link anda
link saya

5-Selesai, siapkan counter tracker dan pengecek link misalnya sitemeter dan technorati untuk melihat hasil banjir traffic dan linkback web anda.

Apa itu t=v1+t2...?
t : Jumlah traffic yang akan di peroleh web anda dalam suatu hari
v1 : Jumlah pengunjung web anda dalam suatu hari
v2: Jumlah pengunjung yang dimiliki v1 (pengunjung dari pengunjung web anda) dalam suatu hari.

Traffic:
Misalnya, web saya ini atau web anda dalam sehari memiliki rata-rata pengunjung 50 orang.., dan semuanya menerapkan konsep kita ini (KALIMAT SAKTI) dengan benar, dan dari 50 orang itu masing-masing memiliki 50 orang pula pengunjung dari blog-nya , maka web kita akan berpeluang di kunjungi 50 ditambah 50 x 50 orang pada hari itu = 2550 orang , dan akan berpeluang terus meningkat pula hari demi hari ,karena setiap hari selalu ada pengunjung baru di dunia internet, setiap hari juga ada blogger atau web baru di dunia internet...BUKTIKAN

Popularity:
Misalnya, web kita memiliki pengunjung 50 orang dalam suatu hari, dan semuannya menerapkan konsep ini , maka dalam hari itu web anda akan mendapatkan 100 linkback ke web anda, yaitu sebuah link pada KALIMAT SAKTI dan sebuah link pada link saya di kalikan 50. dan akan berpeluang meningkat terus hari demi hari....

Kenapa perlu di buat link link anda dan link saya pada posting...?
...hal ini untuk menjaga keabadian link kita, karena seperti kita tau link pada posting lebih kecil kemungkinannya terhapus....

Bisakah kita berbuat tidak fair atau tidak jujur menyabotase konsep ini, misalnya "menghilangkan semua link asal" lalu di isi dengan web/blog kita sendiri...? ....Bisa, dan konsep ini tidak akan menjadi maksimal untuk membuktikan Kejujuran adalah strategi/politik terbaik.....Tapi saya yakin bahwa kita semua tak ingin menjatuhkan kredibilitas diri sendiri dengan melakukan tindakan murahan seperti itu...

t=v1+v2 ,Accelerate Your Web Traffic Fast and Natural

2009-06-16T20:26:00.001-07:00

"THE SOONER YOU DO IT THE BIGGER RESULT YOU WILL GET"

I got this in Info from a friend in Indonesian Language, I try to find the English version but failed, so I try to translate it my self (and perfected [if I may say] the technique , hope you can read it well guys.

A philosophy said "Honesty is The Best Policy", now this is what we're gonna prove... can the concept of honesty generates traffic and popularity greater than the complicated concept of webmasters and SEO experts?...
I'm you can, as long as this concept is correctly done..., if it is then:
-Your Web will outstandingly crowded by visitor traffic each day, without thinking of SEO or promoting web all over the net.
-Your Web will flooded by outstanding backlink everyday, without bothering to hunt link all over the net.

If Albert Einstein used the Equation e=mc2 to combine the potency of mass and speed of light to generate the marvelous nuclear energy, then we shall make the equation of t=v1+v2 to combine the potency of my web and yours to accelerate marvelous traffic and popularity as well.

Interested?. . .

If yes then this what you are going to do

1. Make a posting exactly like mine (or simply Copy-paste it) and give the same title also : t=v1+v2 ,Accelerate Your Traffic Fast and Natural

2. Next, Copy the magic words :

want to increase traffic visitor and popularity of your web quickly and unlimited?
for free! click here and here

and paste it on your web, place it on most visited part of your web, I suggest you the upper sidebar. Link the first "click here" part of that MAGIC WORDS to your own t=v1+v2, Accelerate traffic posting that you've copy from me (on step 1) to your Web. So when people click it it will go to you web (on your t=v1+v2 web page ofcourse). And link the second "click here" to my web so anyone who clicks it will go to my web (fair enough isn't it). That's all you need to do, Good luck.

Go here to see more explanations...

"THE SOONER YOU DO IT THE BIGGER RESULT YOU WILL GET"

2009-06-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

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