My Blog is collected story of Blog SEO and Blog Optimization from veiw of my point
Monday, July 28, 2008
How to make your web site more effective…(3)
PART 4: Make your Web site easy to navigate and guide Web surfers through your pages
Last week, we’ve told you how to write good sales copy to convince Web surfers. This week, we’re telling you how to direct your visitors to the right (order) pages.
1. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)
Your navigation must be easy to understand. People must be able to find your links and they must know how to use them.
To achieve this goal, your navigation (and your whole Web page design) must be consistent from page to page. It’s a good idea not to reinvent the wheel. Blue underlined text links work best as everybody knows how to use them.
Even if you have an image map (a picture with links) or navigation icons (see below), you should always have text links on every page. Some users turn off the display of images in their Web browser. They need text links, as well as the search engines which cannot index text on images.
Don’t use Flash/Shockwave to design the navigation of your Web site since many users cannot access them.
2. Design navigation icons wisely (if you must use them)
Many people use little graphics or photos that link users to their pages as navigation elements. These navigation icons are offten unnecessary.
If your icons don’t denote by themselves what the page stands for, don’t use them. For example, don’t use a meaningless icon like a smiley for a link to your contact page.
3. Use descriptive text links
Your visitors want to know what they can expect on the other end of the link before they click on it. Use descriptive link texts so that your visitors know what they get when they click on a link.
For example, the link text to your contact page should be called “Contact us” or “Contact information”. This is what users expect and what they know. Don’t experiment with texts like “Our address” or “Tell us”.
4. Guide your visitors through your site
It’s important that you guide people through your site. Don’t give them too many choices. That will only confuse them.
Make sure that your visitors don’t have to search for your important “download” or “order” links. Make it easy for your customers. If you have several support pages on your site, you don’t have to list them all on your index page. A single link to your main support page is enough.
You can link to all other support pages on your main support page.
Don’t link to other Web sites on your index page. People have finally managed to come to your Web site. Don’t send them away by placing outgoing links on your index page.
Links to other Web sites are an important way to make your Web site more valuable for customers and for getting reciprocal links from other sites. However, use an extra “links” or “resources” page for outgoing links and open outgoing links in a new window.
Be sure that you customers can find what they’re looking for on your site and that they don’t have to search for it.
Make a test with a relative or a friend who is a bit unsure surfing the Web. Tell him or her to find out the price of your product or service. Look over his/her shoulder and find out how people can find ways you’ve never dreamt of.
Your Web site navigation should be easy to understand and it should be consistent throughout your whole Web page. If people cannot find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they will leave your Web site.
Check if your potential customers can easily order the products or services on your Web site:
My order page is easy to find. I link from the home page and from all product and service pages to the order page.
My order page link is called “Order”, “Buy”, “Store”, “Checkout” or anything else that my customers easily recognize.
I don’t hide the price for my products or services. I know that people will not buy if they don’t know what they have to pay.
I tell my visitors about shipping costs and state taxes.
My visitors know the final price before entering the credit card number.
My potential customers can trust me. They know who I am and they can easily find my complete company address.
My visitors don’t hesitate to purchase because I offer a no-questions asked money back guarantee.
I tell my visitors upfront about my refund policy.
I tell my visitors upfront about my privacy policy.
My order pages are secure. They use at least 40 bit encryption so that my customers can safely enter their contact and purchase information.
My order pages are easy to understand. I’ve tested it with my friends or relatives that don’t connect to the Internet very often.
I regularly test my order pages if they work.
If my server goes down, I’ll get notified.
My order page displays a meaningful message if the customer forgets to enter the street name.
My order pages even work with international customers, for example German customers don’t know what to enter in the “State” field and usually leave it empty. Some countries don’t even have postal numbers. My order pages do work for them.
If you agree to all points, then your order pages won’t stay in the way when your visitors decide to purchase from you.
Last week, we told you how to keep visitors on your site. This week, we’re telling you how to convince your visitors with a good sales copy.
As soon as people are on your Web site, you must convince them with a good sales copy. Always remember: People aren’t necessarily interested in your product or in your company. You have to fulfill their needs if you want to sell them something.
1. Know your product
Before starting to write sales copy, be sure that you know your product and that you’re passionate about it. You have to fully believe in your product. If you don’t, you shouldn’t sell it. You cannot write convincing sales copy if you don’t stand behind your product. You must be sure that you’re doing your customers a favor by offering them your product.
2. What’s in for your customers?
Your customers want benefits. What can your product do for them? What can it do for them now?
The benefits of your product should be the first words on your site. Make them bold and make them big. If your visitors don’t know what’s in it for them after the first few seconds, they’ll leave your site.
People don’t read everything on your page. They scan it for interesting information. Grab their attention with benefits.
3. Don’t mix up features and benefits
You must differentiate between features and benefits. Features are the attributes of your product, benefits are what your product promises. For example, if you sell a solar-powered clock, then the feature is “runs without batteries”. The benefit to the buyer is “you save money because you don’t need to buy batteries anymore”.
Don’t bore your potential customers with technical details. Tell them what your product will do for them. How they will feel when they tried your product. Maybe your product or service will make them more money, maybe it will save them time. Tell them and don’t be shy.
4. Be nice and trustworthy
Your customers must trust you. They won’t buy from you if they don’t. On the World Wide Web, you cannot speak face to face with your customer so you have to establish credibility in other ways.
The most common things to establish trustworthiness is to offer a free trial and a money back guarantee. Use testimonials. You must literally speak with them in your sales copy. Write with a natural style. Don’t try to be over friendly. Just write it the way you’d say it to a potential customer face to face.
Make sure that customers know that a real person is sitting behind this Web page. Include your full contact information on your Web site and make it easy to find. If your visitors don’t know from whom they will purchase and how to contact you, they won’t buy anything. Show your privacy policy.
5. Killer headlines will grab your visitors attention
Nobody will read your entire page. Make it easier for your customers by dividing your page into paragraphs where each paragraph has a headline. Your headlines should make clear what to expect in the next sentences and they should grab your visitors’ attention.
Use words like “free, proven, benefit, first, discover, complete, exclusive” and avoid words like “should, could” and “but”.
Be sure that you use “you” more than “I” or “we”. Remember: Your customers don’t really care about you and your business. They only want to know what’s in for them.
6. This site will be gone tomorrow!
Not really. However, urgency sometimes helps to improve the performance of your sales copy. Make a special offer for the first 200 subscribers, add a special bonus if people purchase this month or until midnight.
7. End your sales copy by telling the reader what to do
At the end of your copy text, you must tell your visitors what to do next, e.g. “Download a sample chapter” or “Click here to order now for immediate delivery”.
Use the tips above to write as persuasively as you can, but remember not to deceive your customers in any way. You’d risk poor word of mouth, legal action, no repeat business and refund requests.
You know that a high ranking is very important to get high quality targeted traffic to your Web site. The more targeted your visitors are, the more you’ll sell on your site.
However, a high ranking alone is not enough. Many webmasters have the problem that their visitors don’t buy something on their site even if the way the visitors reached the site indicates that they’re interested in the products.
For that reason, we’re going to tell you in this article what you can do to improve the effectiveness of your Web site .
PART 1: The first 3 critical points - Make a good first impression, or your visitors will leave immediately
When Web surfers come to your site, it’s very important that you make a good first impression. Before a Web surfer starts reading the copy text on your Web page, your page must pass these three critical points:
Your Web page must load quickly
Web surfers won’t wait for slow loading Web pages. If your Web pages don’t load as fast as is possible, a lot of Web surfers will go away before they have had a chance to take a look at your Web pages.
Don’t forget that still the majority of Web surfers use a 28K/56K modem to surf the Internet. If your Web page is 120 KB big (including the images), then it takes 17 seconds to load the page. Would you wait so long?
Your Web site must look good
Make sure that your Web site has a professional layout. People don’t want to purchase from a shady backyard business. It’s very important that your Web pages look perfect. Hire a professional Web designer if necessary.
The same is valid for your link pages. If you want to exchange links with other sites, make sure that your link pages look attractive. A link on your link pages should be something other people want to have.
Make your link pages accessible from your other Web pages and use a great layout for your link pages.
Don’t use automatically generated doorway pages
Automatically created doorway pages might bring some visitors to your site. However, they’ll land on a Web page that was designed with search engines spiders in mind.
Automatically created doorway pages usually look ugly to human Web surfers. Often, they consist of nothing more than a list of buzz-words. You won’t get good results with this method because human Web surfers will quickly close such a Web page.
If your Web site fails under one of these categories, Web surfers will leave your site before you even have the chance to tell them your marketing message.
PART 2: How to keep Web surfers on your site
Last week, we told you which three critical points your Web site must pass before Web surfers even consider taking a look at your Web page. This week, we’re telling you what you can do to keep these visitors on your site.
1. Come straight to the point
what you do
why people should stay on your site
what’s in for your visitors
Your home page is the most important page on your site. It’s the very first page of your site and the page that people see first when they come to your site. Therefore, it’s important that your home page is interesting for your visitors.
Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question “what’s in it for me?”. On the first paragraph of your home page, you should tell your visitors the following:
If you don’t answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away.
Of course, every home page owner is convinced that they have the best product on earth and that everybody should buy it. Unfortunately, visitors don’t know that.
If you don’t tell them the major benefits of your product, no one will take the time to dig into your site. Web surfers are a very impatient group.
2. Don’t annoy your visitors with animations they cannot see
Some people use Flash animations or big pictures with a meaningless text such as “Welcome to the world of tomorrow” as their index page that redirects to their actual first page. Don’t do that if you don’t want to lose a big part of your visitors.
Flash intros take minutes to load on a slow modem connection so most Web surfers will go away before they even had a chance to see your actual home page.
In addition, Web pages containing only a Flash animation cannot be indexed by most search engines. If you use a Flash intro as your index page, chances are that your site will never show up on search engines.
3. Respect people’s time
Until high-speed Internet access becomes widespread, don’t use large bandwidth-clogging graphics.
As a rule of thumb, no single graphic should be larger than 30 KB to 50 KB, and no single page should have more than 200 KB of graphics.
If you must include a large, detailed image, provide your visitors a smaller, thumbnail version so they know if seeing the larger image is worth their time.
4. Test with different Web browsers
Not all Web surfers use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in version 6. It’s important to test your Web site with different Web browsers.
Try to test your Web site with Internet Explorer version 5.0, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera.
5. Be consistent
Professional Web sites always have their navigational bar at the same side. They use a consistent style for headlines, headers and text. Don’t use more than three different fonts in different sizes.
Try to avoid colored or textured backgrounds. They make text difficult to read. Of course, dancing buttons and blinking text don’t belong to a professional Web site, either.
Once Web surfers have decided not to go away on their first impulse, you have to keep them with a good sales copy.
Link popularity has become an important factor in the ranking algorithms of most search engines. If many quality Web sites link to your site, you’ll have a good position in the search engines.
There are a number of ways to improve the link popularity of your Web site. Here’s the first half of our top 10 list on how to improve your link popularity:
10. Cross-link your sites
An easy way to improve your link popularity is to add a link from your own popular Web site to a less popular site of your own.
However, it’s very important that one site is not only a duplicate of the other and that both sites are related to each other. For example, CheckYourLinkPopularity.com links to Axandra.com and vice versa. Both sites are different but they offer related content.
9. Give testimonials
Everyone has some favorite software tools and utilities. Contact the publishers or developers and explain why you like their software programs. Some of them will request a permission to display your testimonial on their Web site, along with a link to your site.
You can also contact Web sites that don’t offer software programs but interesting articles. Just make sure that you really stand behind what you say as it can backfire to you if you recommend bad products.
8. Awards for you and other sites
You can submit your Web site to sites who offer awards. If they reward you their award, then they’ll probably link to your site. Just search Google for “awards directory your-keyword” (replace “your-keyword” with a keyword that is important to your business).
You can also offer an award for other Web sites. Submit your awards page to the above-mentioned awards directories to make it popular. The Web sites who receive your award will link back to your site.
7. Participate in newsgroups and discussion forums
When you post to newsgroups and discussion forums, add a signature file with a link to your Web site.
An easy way to post messages in newsgroups is to create a Google account and to post via their Web interface: http://groups.google.com
To find good discussion forums, just search Google for “forums directory your-keyword”. For example, if you want to participate in a marketing forum, search Google for “forums directory marketing”.
6. Provide a link directory
Offer a link directory on your Web site which links to quality Web sites with a similar topic. Your visitors will appreciate such a resource and you’ll provide incentive for other sites to link to your site.
You can add a “link to us” page to your Web site on which you promise to add other complementary sites to your link directory if they link back to you first.
ARELIS, the professional reciprocal links management software, can help you to create and maintain a link directory (among many other useful things). It also checks if other Web sites remove their link to you.
4. List your Web site with Open Directory Project (ODP)
If your Web site is listed in the popular directory ODP, then your Web site will have a good base for the link popularity.
Rumor has it that Google starts crawling Web sites with the Web sites listed in the ODP directory. Best of all, you can add your Web site to ODP without paying a fee.
3. List your Web site in regional and industry-specific directories.
Write articles about the topics that your Web site visitors are interested in. After a while, other Web sites will link back to your articles.
You can also send your articles to syndicate Web sites. They’ll offer your articles to other Web sites. Just make sure that your article contains a link to your Web site so that other sites who publish your article will automatically link to you.
Search the major search engines for your keywords. They will return many Web sites that don’t compete with your site, or which offer complementary things.
Visit their site and then write them an email message to request a link to your site. If you link back to them first, they’ll be more likely to link to you.
A high percentage of #1 ranked Web pages on Google don’t contain the queried search term in the body text or in the META tags. How can that be? The answer is: These top ranked Web pages have high link popularity and a good PageRank(tm).
In our new series we’re going to tell you how to obtain high link popularity and a good PageRank so that your Web pages get a high ranking on Google and other popular search engines.
Link Popularity is becoming the determining factor for successful Web sites.
Part 1: What exactly is link popularity?
Link popularity refers to the total number of links that a search engine has found for your Web page. The more Web sites link to your Web page, the higher the link popularity of your page. High link popularity contributes to a high search engine ranking.
Note that link popularity is measured only for single Web pages, not for the whole Web site. Your Web site can have several Web pages with different PageRank numbers.
The idea behind the link popularity concept is simple. The more other Web sites link to your Web site, the more important your site must be. Other sites wouldn’t link to your site if there wasn’t something interesting on your site or if your Web site didn’t contain any special content.
It’s nearly impossible to manipulate link popularity. Previous ranking algorithms that took META keywords or similar factors into account have been quickly abused to mislead the search engines. On the other side, it’s very difficult to manipulate the number of links that point to a site.
That’s why link popularity is now one of the most important factors for search engines when they rank a Web page.
However, you cannot get high link popularity by submitting your Web site to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Not all links are considered equal by the search engines. It does matter who links to you and how they link to you.
You can find more information on this important fact in the next issue of our newsletter.
ARELIS (commercial)
Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.
Part 2: Not all links are considered equal
As mentioned in the last issue of our newsletter, the more Web sites link to your Web site, the higher your link popularity.
However, not all links are equal. Some links count more than others. Links from important Web sites have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.
A link from www.Yahoo.com to your Web site has more weight than a link from a small private Web page. A link from a Web site with high link popularity is better than a link from an unknown Web site.
It’s also important that the Web site that’s linking to you has a similar topic as your Web site. Imagine that you sell shoes on your Web site. A link from another Web site that is all about shoes will count much more than a link from a Web site that links to all kind of Web sites.
Finally, it’s important how the link to your site looks like. For example, one of your important keywords might be “brown leather shoes”.
By the way, many people think that they can increase their link popularity by submitting their Web site address to FFA (free for all) link pages and link farms (Web sites that link to all kind of Web sites). This doesn’t work.
More and more search engines recognize FFA pages and link farms and choose to ignore these pages. Usually, submissions to FFA pages are a waste of time that only results in many spam email messages.
In addition, you should avoid services that promise you 2000 links to your site within a week or so. If they link to you at all, these 2000 links must be of poor quality or they don’t have a similar topic as your Web site.
Use common sense. Offers that sound too good to be true probably aren’t true.
Summary:
try to get links from important Web sites
try to get link texts that contain your important keywords
don’t use FFA or link farm pages
don’t use services that promise lots of links within days
focus on quality links, not on quantity
Next week, we’re going to tell you how to find good potential link partners quickly and easily.
ARELIS (commercial)
Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.
Part 3: How to find good potential link partners
As explained in the last issues of our newsletter, it’s important _who_ links to your site. Web sites that have a similar topic as your site are more important than Web sites with different topics.
In addition, if you can convince Web sites with a similar topic to link to your site, you’ll also get targeted traffic from these sites.
People who visit your topic partner sites are usually interested in what you have to offer. They are more likely to come to your site and to buy something. It’s the quality of the traffic that counts, not the quantity.
But how do you find good potential links partners? There are several ways:
Search the most important search engines for your most important keywords.
Among the search results, you’ll usually find Web sites that don’t compete directly with your site. These Web sites are very good potential link partners.
They have a good listing on search engines under your important keywords. This means that they get a good amount of traffic from people who are interested in what you have to offer.
If such a site links to you, you’ll get high quality targeted traffic from them. In addition, their link to your site also increases your link popularity and your search engine rankings.
Find out who links to your competitors.
Web sites that link to your competitors are probably Web sites that should link to you. If a Web site links to one of your competitor sites, it’s a strong hint that it could be a very good link partner to you.
First, the webmaster of that site has shown that s/he is willing to link to other sites. Second, those Web sites are often related to what you have to offer. You’ll get targeted traffic from them while increasing your search engine ranking.
Unfortunately, both ways are very time-consuming and it’s hard to do it for many sites.
Instead of manually searching for good potential link partners, you could also use a software tool like ARELIS to save time .
ARELIS is a commercial tool that quickly finds sites that link to your competitors as well as other potential link partners. It presents the found sites in a clearly arranged list that can be sorted by different criteria. It even helps you to build link pages and to check for broken links.
In the next issue we’ll explain how to contact potential link partners so that you’ll get a positive reply.
In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool ” Link Popularity Check “. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.
Part 4: How to contact potential link partners
In part 3, we told you how to find good potential link partners. When you’ve found such high quality sites, it’s important that you use the right words to contact the webmasters of these sites.
If you want them to link to your Web site, you have to be personal and politely. Emails like the following usually do NOT work:
—snip—
Subject: Let’s trade links
Hi!
I’ve found your site and I think we could link to each
other. That will increase your search engine ranking and
mine, too.
Best,
Paul
—snip—
Many webmasters consider sending such messages as spamming. It’s much more effective to use personalized email messages. They’ll improve the chances of your link request message being read and acted upon favorably.
If you want positive feedback, you must convince the webmaster that you’ve really visited the Web site and that you know what the site is about.
Try to convince them that your Web site is related to their site and make it easy for potential link partners to link back to your site.
Here’s an example:
—snip—
Subject: Axandra.com and CheckYourLinkPopularity.com
Dear Peter,
I found your CheckYourLinkPopularity.com site recently and
like it very much. I think the straight-to-the-point web
site design is perfect for the freeware tool you’re
offering.
I’ve placed a link to your site at
http://www.Axandra.com/recommended-sites
I’ve noticed that you link to other Web sites that are
related to your freeware tool. We offer a Web site promotion
tool that also focuses on link popularity
(http://www.Axandra.com/arelis/index.htm).
It’d be great if you also placed a link to our Web site. If
you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me
by email or phone at 123-456-7890.
Best regards,
Johannes Selbach, CEO
http://www.Axandra.com
PS. Visit “http://www.Axandra.com/link-to-us.htm” for ready
made HTML code.
—snip—
As you can see, we’ve already linked to the other site before asking them for a reciprocal link. If you’ve already linked to a site, the webmaster is much more likely to answer your request.
This sounds like a very time consuming task. Fortunately, there are tools that help you with that. If you use ARELIS, a software program to manage reciprocal links, you can quickly visit and contact potential link partners.
ARELIS lets you preview a Web site and offers a built-in email client that helps you to contact potential link partners quickly and easily. You can use email templates that use variables so that you can create email messages
very quickly. For example, ARELIS can automatically insert the name and the URL of potential link partners as well as many other variables.
However, ARELIS is not a spamming tool because it only lists relevant Web sites and you must visit every Web site before contacting it. Just how a serious webmaster would do it and what brings the best results.
In addition, ARELIS automatically creates and manages your link pages for you so that you can quickly add, edit and remove link partners from your Web pages.
Next week, we’ll discuss what you can do to increase the success of your linking campaign.
In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool ” Link Popularity Check“. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.
Part 5: How to increase the success of your campaign
Until now, you’ve learned how to locate good potential link partners. In addition, you know which Web sites and services you should avoid if you want to obtain a good and long lasting link popularity.
You’ve also learned how to contact potential link partner sites and that a personal approach gets much better results than mass emailing sites.
Here are a few other important tips to increase the success of your linking campaign:
Link to potential link partners first before you ask them to link to you.
Tell potential link partners that you’ve linked to their site and tell them where they can find the link on your site. If you link to other Web sites first, more webmasters are willing to add a link back to your site.
If you think that this is too much work, consider using a tool like ARELIS to manage your link pages.
With ARELIS, you can quickly add new link partners to your site and you can also quickly remove them if they don’t want to link back to your site. Building link pages in the design of your Web site requires only a single mouse click in ARELIS.
ARELIS also checks if your link partners still link back to you and automatically removes them from your link pages if they don’t link back to you anymore.
Offer a “Link to us” page on your Web site.
Make it easy for other people to link to your site. Offer a “Link to us” page on your site that contains sample HTML code that your link partners can copy and paste into their own Web sites. The easier it is for your link partners to link to your site, the more likely they’re going to link to you.
On this Web page, there are three ready made HTML snippets at the end of the page that link partners can insert on their own link pages.
With the snippets at hand, your link partners don’t have to think about how to link to your site. A “Link to us” page also indicates that you’re willing to exchange links. That means that other webmasters will approach you through that page.
Make your link pages easy to find.
Don’t be surprised that no one wants to link to you if your link back to their site is hidden somewhere in your site and cannot be found by the average Web surfer.
Make it easy for your visitors to find your links page. If you’re afraid of losing visitors, you can open the links to other Web sites in a new window.
Conclusion
Building a good link popularity requires some work but the results will pay for it. Link popularity is already the most important factor for search engines to rank Web sites.
The sooner you start with your linking campaign, the better the results for your business.
19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines…(3)
Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn’t show up on search engines.
Reason #13: Your Web pages require a full-fledged browser.
When search engines crawl the Web to find new Web pages, they use special software for it, called “spiders”, “robots” or “crawlers”.
These crawler programs don’t have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read text descriptions.
This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site.
Therefore, it might be a good idea to test your Web pages with very old versions of Web browser applications or with the software program “Lynx”, a text-only browser.
Lynx is available for download here . Here’s an online version of Lynx that allows you test your Web pages with a text-only browser quickly and easily: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html .
Reason #14: Search engines could not resolve your DNS name.
There’s a mistake that novice users often do. They register a domain name (for example, www.my-great-site.com), and they immediately submit the Web site URL to the search engines.
Then they wonder why the search engines didn’t index their site. The answer is, they weren’t able to do it.
It takes approximately 2-4 days until a domain name becomes active. All Internet access providers must update their records (DNS tables) to reflect new site locations. The process of updating DNS tables is called propagation.
Search engines must also update their DNS tables and until then, the new domain name www.my-great-site.com doesn’t work.
So when you register a new domain name, you must wait about 48-72 hours until you can submit the domain name to the search engines.
If you’re interested in other factors that might prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines, visit our newsletter archive:
Reason #15: Your Web site has a low link popularity.
Link popularity is becoming _the_ determining factor for a top search engine ranking.
Link popularity means the number of Web sites linking to your site. However, the quality of links is more important than the quantity of links. For instance, if the New York Times links to your site, their single link might count a lot more than 30 links from your friends’ personal homepage.
By now, all top search engines use link popularity in their ranking formulas: AltaVista, Inktomi, MSN Search, HotBot. For Google, it’s even the most important factor in ranking sites.
The idea behind link popularity is that other Web sites will link to your site only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So if many Web sites link to your site, search engines come to the conclusion that your site must be very popular and deserves a high ranking.
As Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview: “…a page that is pointed to by many other sites is important. In other words, external approval raises a page’s ranking.”
Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will the most important search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you.
In addition, as more sites link to you, the odds increase that search engine spider programs will encounter your site more regularly so that it’s less likely that they drop your site from their index.
What’s the link popularity of your site?
The freeware Windows program Link Popularity Check tells you the link popularity of your Web site is and compares it with competitor sites.
Link Popularity Check is a classic freeware application: it has no nag screens, it doesn’t change the system registry, it makes no unauthorized connections to the Internet and it comes with a hands-free uninstaller.
How to improve the link popularity of your Web site:
You can search the search engines for Web sites that are related to your business, find the webmaster’s contact information and then solicit a reciprocal link. Do this every day and your link popularity will climb steadily but slowly. And it’s very time-consuming.
Reason #16: Your Web page URL contains special characters.
Most search engines have problems indexing Web pages when their URLs contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be “search-engine-spider-stoppers”:
ampersand (&)
dollar sign ($)
equals sign (=)
percent sign (%)
question mark (?)
These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That’s why they ignore Web page URLs with the above characters.
AltaVista and Lycos explain on their help pages why they cannot index such Web pages:
HotBot recommends that you submit your dynamic Web pages with all parameters added onto the URL (for example, “www.site.com/articles/query.asp?article=83″).
Google and Inktomi utilize crawler programs that are able to index dynamically generated Web pages, even those that use question marks.
So what can you do if you have dynamically generated Web pages with special characters? If you use the Apache Server, ASP, CGI/Perl or ColdFusion, the following Web page provides some solutions: http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization-b.html
Reason #17: Your Web site has a slow host server.
Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don’t have much time. There are approximately 2-4 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them.
So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all.
AltaVista and Google specifically mention the problem on their Web sites.
AltaVista: “If a site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex, it might time out before the crawler can index all the text.”
Google: “Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index.”
You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It’d also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration.
Reason #18: Do you use the right keywords? It’s important that you use the keywords on which you want to be found in the right places on your Web pages.
Imagine your Web site sells garden flowers. Your HTML source might look like this:
—
—
Some search engines (AltaVista, Inktomi) index the META Keywords tag, some (Google, AllTheWeb/FAST) don’t.
For the search engines that index the META Keywords tag, it’s important that you actually use the keywords of your META Keywords tag on your Web pages.
Some search engines nowadays consider it spam if the keywords of your META Keywords tag don’t appear in the body text on your page.
Of course, you know that the most important thing for a good search engine listing is content on your Web site. Search engines need text, text and even more text to index your Web site.
For example, if you sell cars, have articles about cars on your Web site. If you offer package holidays, provide some tourist information about your destinations. Build this content and optimize the text for your target search terms.
In other words, make sure that the content on your Web pages contains the keywords that are important for your site.
And don’t forget to use only those words in your META Keywords tag that appear on your Web page.
Now make the test with your homepage:
Go to “http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com”.
Enter three of your META keywords in the three keyword fields.
Leave the ratio fields empty.
Copy and paste the body text of your homepage into the big edit field.
Click the “Update” button.
Now look at the ratio fields. If a keyword has a ratio of 0%, consider adding contents about that keyword on your Web page.
Reason #19: Have you waited long enough?
The Internet is growing rapidly. According to a study of the NEC Research Institute, most search engines need about 6 months to index a Web site.
The data was collected when there were by far fewer Web sites than today. With todays number of Web sites, it might take even longer (although many search engines have also improved their equipment).
That means that your Web site submissions may need up to half a year until they appear in search engine listings.
The result of the study shows that it’s important that you submit your Web pages the right way, right from the start. When search engines need six months to index your Web site, you should make sure that they’ll index your pages correctly.
No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking. However, if you don’t make the mistakes which we outlined in our 19-part series, a good ranking is much more likely.
19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines…(2)
Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn’t show up on search engines.
Reason #7: Your Web pages are created dynamically.
Databases and dynamically generated Web pages are great tools to manage the contents of big Web sites. Imagine you’d have to manage the Web site contents of the New York Times without databases…
Unfortunately, dynamically generated Web pages can be a nightmare for search engine spiders because the pages don’t actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page.
The exceptions are the spider programs from Google and Inktomi. They are able to index Web pages that are dynamically generated, even those that use question marks and query strings.
On the other side, AltaVista isn’t able to index dynamically generated Web pages, and here’s why:
If you create dynamic Web pages with the help of Active
Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, CGI, Perl or the Apache
Server, then the following Web page offers good avice:
Reason #8: You have moved your site to a new server.
Every time you move a Web site to a Web hosting company, or when you change the domain name, the IP/DNS address of your domain name changes. While people see URLs (www.yourdomain.com), search engines often only see IP addresses.
This means that you need to re-submit your Web site to all search engines and directories when you move your Web site to a new Web hosting company or when you change your domain name. In time, search engines will realize that your IP/DNS address has changed and will remove the old IP address from their index.
It’s important that you re-submit only when the move is completely finished. A good way to know when the IP address change has been updated is to upload a slightly different version of the index page to the new server. When you enter www.yourdomain.com in your Web browser and see the different version you’ll know that DNS servers of your ISP (Internet Service Provider) have been updated.
If you have changed your server, resubmit your Web site URL to search engines. If you have changed your domain name, you should also change your Yahoo and Open Directory Project listings.
Reason #9: Your Web page does not have unique IP address.
Does your Web site has a unique IP address? If not, your Web site is running the risk of getting banned from the search engines.
Human beings use domain names like yahoo.com, but network computers use IP addresses, which are numeric addresses written as four numbers, separated by periods.
Every domain name translates to a so-called IP address. For example, yahoo.com is translated to “64.58.76.225″. Just enter “http://64.58.76.225/” in your Web browser and you’ll go to www.yahoo.com.
Many Web hosting services don’t give out unique IP addresses to their customers to save money. They assign the same IP address to multiple domain names. This means that several hundred Web sites could all be using the same IP address as your site does.
There are 3 reasons why you need a unique IP address:
If you’re sharing an IP address with 50 other sites, you’re trusting them not to over-submit or spam the search engines. When a search engine blocks an IP address, all the sites that are sharing that IP address are blocked. You could wind up being banned from the search engine.
If the server or the search engine spider software is misconfigured, the search engine spider may end up obtaining a Web page from another domain with the same IP address. This may mean that the other Web site gets indexed instead of yours, or your Web site will be found for the keywords which are applicable to the other site.
Rumor has it that having your own unique IP address may help your search engine ranking.
So when you select a Web hosting service, make sure that your domain name has a unique IP address, even if it means that you have to pay a bit more for your hosting.
Are you sharing an IP address with people you don’t even know? Here’s a way to test it yourself:
The result page shows you what IP address your site resolves to (for example, 64.58.76.225)
Copy the IP address to the clipboard.
Open a new window in your Web browser, enter the IP address (for example, http://64.58.76.225 ) and hit Return.
If your Web site appears, you have your own IP address. If another Web site or an error message appears, you probably share the IP address with others.
If you are unsure, ask your Web hosting service company if your Web site has its own IP address.
Reason #10: You are hosting your Web site at a free Web space provider.
Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista) limit the number of pages they will index from a single domain. For example, if your Web page is hosted at Geocities.com or Tripod.com, it might happen that your Web site is not listed just because the maximum page limit for that special domain name is reached.
Some search engines no longer even index pages residing on common free Web hosting services. Their complaint is that they get too many spam or low-quality submissions from free Web site domains.
However, Google is the exception. Google does index Web pages on Geocities.com and Tripod.com. Those pages also seem to have a Google PageRank of at least 3/10 because they are linked from a popular domain.
In summary, if you are serious about doing business on the Web, it helps tremendously to have your own domain name. Put yourself in the customer shoes: Would you buy from a Web site that is called “sub.free-web-space- provider.com/~category/162742/ my_business/home.htm”?
A domain name is easier to remember for your customers and it helps to build trust.
And while we’re at it: A recent survey by Consumers Union found that only 29 percent of Americans trust Internet sites that sell products.
Reason #11: Your host server was non-operational during spidering.
It can happen that your Web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it.
If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Even worse, if your Web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you’ll often be removed from the search engine database.
It’s essential to have Web space on servers that are very seldom down. Choosing a reliable Web space provider is very important for a successful online business.
At first it sounds impressive when your Web space provider promises 99% server reliability. But take a moment to calculate it. It means that 1% of the time, your potential customers cannot reach your Web site. One percent of a year means that your Web site will be down for nearly 4 days per year. That equals 4 days without sales.
As you can see, 99% reliability is not enough. You must constantly monitor your server so that you can act immediately if your server is down (e.g. call the service provider to restart the server).
Reason #12: You don’t allow robots to index your Web site.
Imagine you’re a Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get a top ranking in the search engines for your customer.
Even after several weeks, the customer’s Web site hasn’t been listed in any search engine. Then you start to realize that the search engine spiders and robot programs cannot access the Web site because your customer blocks them (by mistake).
There are two ways to block search engine robots: a) with a simple text file in the root directory of the host server, or b) with a certain META tag in the Web pages.
a) Robots.txt
The host server might have a plain text file named “robots.txt” in the root directory. It contains rules for the search engine spiders. The rules in the robots.txt file follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a document designed to help Web administrators and authors of Web spiders agree on a way to navigate and catalog Web sites.
The content of the robots.txt file consists of two main commands: “User-agent” and “Disallow”.
The User-agent command specifies the name of the robot for which the following commands should be applied to. You can set this to “*” to have the spidering commands applied to any robot.
The second command, “Disallow”, specifies a partial URL that should not be indexed by the Web robot.
The text
—
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
—
tells all search engine spider programs to go away. If you find a text file called “robots.txt” in the root directory of the host server with the above content, you should delete it immediately. The text file says that no search engine is allowed to index your Web site.
Even if your robots.txt file don’t contain the above commands, you should make sure that its syntax is correct. A robots.txt file with a faulty syntax also prevents search engine spiders to index your Web site.
To check the syntax of your robots.txt file, you can use this free tool (just enter your domain name www.domain.com): http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html
b) The META ROBOTS tag
There’s a second way to stop search engine robot programs to index your Web site: the META ROBOTS tag. If you find the following HTML tag in your Web pages:
—
—
you should replace it immediately with
—
—
If you want all search engine spiders to index all Web pages, you can also remove the META ROBOTS tag from your Web pages.
Further information about both ways to stop search engines to index your Web site can be found at:
19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines…(1)
Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn’t show up on search engines.
Reason #1: You are using frames.
Many search engines have problems with frames. They often only index the frameset page and not the individual frames that contain the actual content. Unfortunately, the frameset page usually doesn’t have META tags, title and enough content (text) to obtain a listing on a search engine.
The best solution to this problem would be to avoid frames. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen counts frames as one of the top ten mistakes in Web design:
If you really must use frames, consider the following points:
1. Add a description of your Web site in the
<noframes> area so that search engines can index that text. There you should also add a link to the homepage.
2. When a search engine indexes a frame page outside of the frameset, the visitor can be left stranded and unable to link into your site. So your individual frame pages should always contain a link back into your site.
3. Add some JavaScript to force frame pages into the frameset. This prevents visitors from inadvertently accessing an orphaned Web page. You can use the following JavaScript snippet:
—
if (top.location.href == self.location) {
top.location.href = “URL of your frame file”;
}
—-
Webreference.com offers a very good introduction to frames:
Reason #2: You are using a lot of pictures on your Web site but very little text
Search engines need text to index your Web site. They cannot know what’s written on your GIF or JPEG images. If you use a lot of images on your Web site, you should also create some Web pages that have a lot of text.
Some Web site promotion consultants will tell you to create so-called doorway pages. A doorway page is a Web page that contains plain text and a link to your main Web page. On that doorway page, you should describe the content of your Web site in many sentences that contain many keywords that are important for your Web site.
However, some search engines only lists Web pages if at least one remote Web page is linking to it. In that case, a doorway page will not work. Don’t use doorway pages for search engine spamming! Only use doorways that have something to do with the content of your Web pages.
Note that many search engines already ignore doorway pages. For that reason, try to give your real Web site as much content (text) as possible. Fresh, continuously updated content is one of the best ways to ensure that your visitors will return again and again.
Here are 3 tips for building and distributing your content:
1. Build one page of quality content per day. Write timely, topical articles with about 250-500 words. If you aren’t sure what you can write about, look in your log files which search phrases have been used to come to your site. Or use Overture’s keyword suggestion tool at
and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.
2. Stay abreast of developments in your sector. If the big site “ABC” is coming out with product “XYZ” in autumn, then write about the product or the product sector in general and have it ready in June so that search engines can index it early. For example, all the Nintendo GameCube sites you can find in Google today - those have been submitted 3-4 months ago.
3. Syndicate your content (along with your name and Web site URL)! Other webmasters will gladly incorporate your articles into their Web sites. Just search for “syndicate your articles”, “syndicate your content” and “submit your article” on Google.
Reason #3: The submitted Web page is only a redirection.
If the Web page you submit contains a redirection to another Web site, most search engines will skip your Web site completely. Do not submit a redirection Web page.
Many webmasters tried to cheat search engines with redirection pages in the past. The search engines companies discovered that and they decided to totally skip Web pages with redirections.
Submit a real Web page that contains the product description visible to the reader.
Sometimes, you have old Web pages listed on search engines and you want them to redirect to the new Web site. There are several ways to do it:
1. You can implement a server side redirect on the old Web page, using the 301 Moved Permanently error message. This will redirect users to the new Web site, but also tells the search engines that this page has moved permanently. Some search engines will drop the page from their index, and some will eventually replace the old page with the new one without hurting your rankings.
2. You can use the META Refresh tag on the old Web page, for example <META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT=”5; URL=http://www.axandra.com”> tells the browser to load www.axandra.com 5 seconds after the current document has finished loading. However, some old Web browsers don’t support that tag, and some search engines penalize pages that use a refresh of a few seconds or less (more about this in our search engine ranking report, see http://www.axandra.com/search-engine-studies/index.htm ).
3. Instead of the META Refresh tag, you can also use JavaScript to load a new document:
Note that some search engines also don’t like that kind of redirection.
4. You can also delete the old Web page and create a custom 404 error page. This ensures that visitors will be redirected to the new site if they click on a broken link or enter an incorrect URL. The 404 error page should contain a link to your home page and to the primary sections of your Web site.
To move to a new Web site and to keep your old search engine rankings, I recommend using method 1.
Reason #4: You have submitted your Web site too often.
If you submit your Web site more often than once a month, most search engines will consider that spamming and they will skip your site.
Spamming does not work with search engines. Most likely, it will backfire to you. More and more search engines are able to detect spam attempts and penalize or ban your page from their listings.
Sites that spam search engines degrade the value of search engine listings. As the problem grows, these sites may face the same backlash that spam mail generates. The content of most Web pages ought to be enough for search engines to determine relevancy without webmasters having to resort to repeating keywords for no reason other than to try and “beat” other Web pages. The stakes will simply keep rising, and users will also begin to hate sites that undertake these measures.
Submit your Web site to search engines and wait for 4 weeks. Then search for the URL of your site. If the search engine cannot find your site, submit your URL again.
Many search engines fear to be spammed if you overuse keywords on your Web site. Do not repeat your keywords too often in your meta tags or in the body of your Web pages.
Nobody knows the magic number for the search engines but a paragraph such as the one below is not a good idea:
“Ebooks are great. I love ebooks. I’ve read hundreds of ebooks. You can learn much from ebooks. On my Web site you can find tons of free ebooks. When you subscribe to my newsletter on ebooks, you get two additional free ebooks.”
Some years ago, you may have obtained a top ranking for the keyword “ebooks”, but today the search engines will quickly ignore such nonsense and probably write it off as “spamming”. It could even cause the engine spider to skip your Web site completely.
Unfortunately, search engines do not indicate on their help pages the maximum allowed number of repetitions. Some webmasters suspect this to be three, some say six. There’s no way of knowing until you are penalised.
Reason #6: Text in the background color of the web
“Color can kill your ranking!” Some Web designers, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their Web pages as keyword-rich as possible. They try to spam search engines by repeating keywords in the same color as the background color to make the text invisible to browsers and search engine spiders.
However, almost all search engines already know that trick. They will penalize or even blacklist your Web page if they determine that your page is trying to unfairly misrepresent its actual content. This tactic is commonly referred to as “spamming the search engines” or “spamdexing”.
Unfortunately, the problem is that the search engines may end up penalizing Web sites which did not intend to use the hidden text trick. For example, suppose you have a Web page with a black background and a table in that page with a white background. Now suppose that you’ve added some black text in that table. This text will be visible to your human visitors, so in fact, the text isn’t hidden. However, the
search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they overlook the table background color.
I recommend going through all your Web pages and make sure that you haven’t inadvertently made any such mistake.
And, by the way, search engines also catch on using a slightly different color than the background color to hide words, so don’t use that trick.
Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Good news, there are creative ways to bring people in without doing a lot of work.
1) Social Bookmarking. It’s been around long enough that some people know all about it and have a tendency to just search del.icio.us or Furl for what they want. Social sites are basically like a user defined search engine. Are you listed? Make sure to bookmark yourself every now and then and add social bookmark links to your blog posts and/or web pages so others can bookmark you too.
2) Use Flickr! Yes, it’s true, the social photo sharing site can drive traffic to your site. I now post all my pictures that I’m going to use in my post to Flickr first, with good tags of course, then I write my blog post. Once I’ve published my post, I copy the post URL and add a note to my Flickr image. I paste in the URL, hit save and it turns into a clickable URL. Now, if people find my stats screenshot on Flickr they’ll see my note and may click on the link back to my site for more information.
3) Read and comment on blogs. TUAW is one of my favorite blogs. Since I’m a Mac geek, it’s a perfect match. Whenever I feel so inclined, I comment on stories. Since I’m able to add a URL when I comment, it gives me a live link. On some stories, I may have something on my site that is related, so I’ll drop in a link to my blog post about the same topic in the comments box. This usually draws decent traffic. Keep in mind, the post you are commenting on and your post must be very related or else it may be seen as spam and deleted.
4) Forums. Use forum signatures to promote your site with a live link. Also reply to topics with good information and maybe a link back to your site for more info and people will visit. Again, you must be sure to give valuable information or people will perceive it as spam.
5) Widgets, Themes and Extensions. It’s true, everyone has Widgets anymore. Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and the list goes on. And then there are themes and extensions for Firefox. All can be simple to create and quite effective in driving traffic.
6) Friends! Yes, get some friends who feel that you know what you are talking about. Maybe they’ll talk about you on their blog, talk to their friends about you or even interview you. Interviews are all the rage right now.
7) Industry specific sites. As noted above, I’m a Mac geek so I know lots of Mac sites. One in particular is MacBytes. I know that if I write up a review, opinion, some cool scripts or something related to Apple, I can submit my story to them and, if approved, they’ll post a prominent link to my site for all their visitors to click on. I’m sure there are other sites like it out there for cars or baseball or whatever you are interested in.
Guest Poster. As blogs get bigger and more popular, some sites ask for guest posters. If you sign on, they may just let you link to your own site every now and again.
9) Podcasts. Reach those that don’t like to read by giving them an audio or video podcast. If they find your podcast interesting, they may just decide to look you up.
10) Submit your feed. If you have a blog it should be pinging everywhere it can and be submitted to the many blog directories out there. A feed can drive traffic from a site that won’t allow regular websites to be added. And, quite a few of them, don’t come looking for you, you have to submit to them.
In the end, it’s not all about traffic, it’s about giving the user something they think is of value. You could drive thousands of new people to your site, but if you don’t give them a reason to stay, was it really worth it?
My ideas above may not generate tons of traffic, but they are creative ways to drive traffic. Do you have some other ideas?
While we wrote a 300+ page book about SEO, only a dozen pages are needed to cover how to do SEO for a blog. Why? As search improves, Google and other search engines collect more data, which allows them to recommend and rank blogs based on how well people trust those blogs.
What Google Knows About Your Blog
What Google Owns
Search engines have a wide array of trust measurements for blogs. Google knows a lot more about your blog than you think. Consider that Google owns…
Google collects data from millions of Google accounts every day
Extrapolating Trust from User Data
If a Google user subscribes to your blog how much can Google trust that person’s attention and subscription as a sign of trust? How long have they subscribed for? How often do users interact with your site? What other sites do they subscribe to? What other sites do they interact with? How regular are their search and email habits?
If another blog links to you, how much should Google trust that link as a vote to help your site rank better? Do any popular and trustworthy blogs link to that site? How many people subscribe to their RSS feed?
In addition to the above data, Google knows how old your site is, how steady you have produced content, and how steady your link profile has grown.
Why Blogs Are Different Than Static Websites
SEO for a blog is different than SEO for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology. SEO for blogs is less about buying links or tricking inadequate search technology. SEO for blogs is more focused on giving people something to talk about and creating something worthy of attention.
The Social Nature of Blogs
RSS and feed readers make it easy for readers to subscribe to every post you write, and be notified the moment you publish it.
Many people who read blogs also write them, and many of them have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. If a few reputable bloggers syndicate your story it can have a cascading effect where many of their readers share your story.
Popular blogs that solicit reader feedback may have dozens or hundreds of comments on each post, adding unique content which the page can rank for.
Optimizing a blog is more about capturing attention and getting credit for spreading ideas than it is about optimizing page copy to match search relevancy algorithms.
Domain Name Registration & Blog Hosting
Services such as TypePad, Blogger, and Wordpress.com allow you to host your site as a subdomain off of their sites. Do NOT do that! Some of those services offer a limited set of features and/or prohibit placing ads on your site. It can take months or years to build an audience. Rather than eventually moving your site away from one of these services, you are better off starting with your own domain name and hosting it with a reliable web host.
You can register your own domain name for less than $10 at GoDaddy.com. Dreamhost is an affordable web host, and they offer one click install of the Wordpress blogging platform.
Keyword Research
Traditional Keyword Tools
A wide array of free and paid keyword research tools exist. Many of these tools, such as Wordtracker, have traditionally return keywords that people recently searched for.
Trend Related Keyword Tools
As a blogger, you are not only looking for what is historically popular, but also what is fresh. You can gain insights into what is going on right now by performing searches on Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Google News. Services like Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz Index show you what searches were popular in the last day.
Where to Use Keywords in Your Page Content
It is crucial to use your keywords in your page title, preferably near the start of your page title. You may want to use your keywords, related phrases, and popular keyword modifiers in your page content a couple times, but with an emphasis on writing natural. Make sure that your content reads well to humans, as that matters much more than what a robot thinks of your content. If people like your content and link at it that is more valuable than getting on page optimization down perfect but sounding robotic in the process.
Regular keyword research tools show you popular modifiers, and some graphical tools like Quintura make it easy to visualize related words in top ranking documents.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
Meme Trackers
What ideas are spreading today? Who is at the center of the conversation in the blogging world? TechMeme and TailRank highlight recent popular blog posts. Spin off topically oriented meme trackers are also available. The World Bank launched their BuzzMonitor as a free open source software program allowing anyone to create a meme tracker.
You don’t have to track everything to be successful. You only have to compete in your market. If you read a dozen or two dozen blogs in your market, track who is getting linked to, and why people are talking about them, that makes it easy for you to identify and create ideas and content worthy of being mentioned.
Use the above mentioned popular lists to find out why ideas are spreading in related markets and past ideas that worked. From doing that research, it should be easy to tie those ideas to your own market to create remarkable ideas. Every piece of content you come across (online reading, books, pictures, magazines, conferences, personal experience, etc.) is a source of inspiration. Carry a camera and a notepad everywhere you go.
You can keep up with general blogging trends by reading Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger and Performancing.
Writing Clear & Compelling Headlines
Cory Doctorow, popular science fiction author and blogger at Boing Boing, had this to say about writing headlines in the following interview:
“Write headlines as though you are a wire service writer.
Descriptive headlines help put your story in context, and make people more likely to click on your site when it appears in search results.
You can also aim to be emotionally captivating with your headlines by using your headline to ask a question or to promise solving a problem. Brian Clark offers many successful page title formulas in his Magnetic Headlines series.
Optimizing Site Structure
Highlight Your Best Content
Until September of 2007 my homepage was the most recent posts from my blog. While that helps to promote new posts on the blog, it is off-putting to people new to my field. If you create a popular blog, make sure that your homepage is appealing to people new to your field. Guide them through the learning process, show them where to start, and highlight your best content. If your site grows into a business re-invest to create tools, add forums, and other interactive features that keep people coming back to your site.
Many blogging systems allow you to highlight your most popular posts. Featuring your greatest hits puts site visitors one click away from your best content, and places more link equity on the best posts, which makes people more likely to find your site by reading one of your best posts.
Many of your readers are new to your site. Referencing some of your older articles allows them to understand your frame of reference without requiring you to write the same thing over and over again. If you syndicate content to other sites or if any spammy sites steal your content, referencing old posts increases the chances that you get free links, which will help you rank better.
Block Duplicate Content
Michael Gray offers these Wordpress optimization tips in the following video:
Place any piece of content in only one category.
Use the Wordpress more feature to only show a small portion of your post on category pages.
Use robots.txt to block date based archives and other noisy/duplicate sections of your site.
Joost de Valk offers more Wordpress optimization tips in his Wordpress SEO guide.
Warning: If you are new to using robots.txt make sure you do not disallow all articles with dates in the URL if your individual post pages use dates in the URLs. Assuming you enable post slug URLs and you use categories, a robots.txt file for a Wordpress blog might look something like:
Create categories that are well aligned with industry related keywords. Doing this will create a site structure that helps those category pages rank well for the keywords in them. If your site is focused on weight loss, then creating categories about exercise, diet programs, diet pills, and weight loss supplements make sense.
If you use both category and tag pages try to not let them overlap. For example, you would not want to create a category page named link building and then tag many of your pages with link building as a tag. It also helps to limit your use of categories to a dozen or two dozen categories at the most, instead of having hundreds of categories and tags with only a few posts in each.
Neighboring & Related Posts
Many blogs link to the previous and next posts on each page. These links are convenient from a usability standpoint, and they help search engines crawl deeply through your website. Some Wordpress plugins list related posts under the current post, which helps readers find related material in case they land on the wrong page.
Fix Page Titles
Many blog content management systems place the site name ahead of the post name in the page title of individual blog posts. It is best if your page titles start with the most relevant information first. There are numerous Wordpress plugins that make it easy to change the structure of your page titles. A couple popular ones are all in one SEO pack and SEO Title Tag.
Analytics: Replicate Early Success
A web analytics program can show you:
who links at your site
what posts they are linking at
what people searched for to find your site
If you know the types of people who reference you AND why they are referencing your site, it is easy to create additional linkworthy content they will like. If you know what your site ranks well for, then you know what topics your site is trusted for, and what related topics you should easily rank for. Some bloggers tweak high traffic pages to add keyword modifiers to the page content, which helps them get a bit more traffic by ranking for additional keyword phrases.
Google Analytics is free. I also like Mint, which costs a one time $30 registration fee per site. Performancing and MyBlogLog offer analytics programs geared toward bloggers.
Controversy
Many people let fears control their actions, but most successful people are guided by intuition and instinct more than fear.
Nobody likes a bully. Some bloggers are worried about getting sued or offending somebody. When I got sued my name, exposure, and profits grew overnight. That is not to say you should be reckless, but illegitimate lawsuits garner media exposure and organic trust.
Creative destruction is part of business. In a few years people will pay to give away information that I sell today. Business people are worried about defending their copyright, but as the web gets more competitive we are fortunate to even garner enough attention to get copied.
Some self-proclaimed ethical bloggers play good cop bad cop in their marketing. In this viral video tips blog post, Michael Arrington commented about how he was disgusted by it. He could not have been too disgusted by it, given that he published it on his own site, and those pageviews made him a lot of money.
Use Push Marketing After Launching Your Site
Being Remarkable
If you are new to internet marketing, read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow to understand how to create remarkable ideas. Links are nothing but a citation. If you are remarkable the links will come, but not without a little push marketing first!
Being Credible
Most new information is spam and/or regurgitated drivel. As more spam is created using increasingly sophisticated tools, readers get better and faster at discerning information quality at a glance.
Using a default Wordpress design might turn off readers. If you use a good looking template or buy a professional custom design that shows that you care, and you are willing to invest into building your site. Formatting and design improve credibility.
Being easy to contact, listing your business address, and publishing a unique well thought out about page listing your credentials makes it easier to trust your website.
Link Out to Other Blogs
We are more receptive toward marketing messages that match our biases and interests. You can’t get any more relevant than talking specifically about a person. Many bloggers track who links to them and read those posts.
Linking out to other useful related websites is one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Don’t just link to another blog and blockquote it, but make sure you add value by explaining why you think they are right or wrong. Perhaps consider asking for feedback from a person you respect or ask them if they are willing to do an interview.
Link Building
Search engines view links as a sign of trust. If you can afford it, I recommend listing new blogs in authoritative general directories, niche directories, and blog directories. Here is some background information on submitting to general directories, and Loren Baker recently posted about the best blog directories.
Advertise Your Website
Exposure leads to more exposure. Spending a few dollars on advertising today might mean that your blog gets popular a few months earlier.
Pay per click ads enable you to buy relevant traffic from search engines.
AdWords has a large publishing partner network called AdSense. Buying site targeted AdSense ads and Blog Ads allow you to target your ads to specific related content sites.
Review networks like ReviewMe let you to buy reviews on popular related blogs.
StumbleUpon ads bring visitors to your featured articles for a nickel a click.
Understanding Network Effects
Cumulative Advantage
On April 15, 2007, social scientist Duncan J. Watts published an article in the New York Times titled Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? In the article Duncan highlighted the social nature of our decisions:
People almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.
Due to this group-think nature of decision making, many things remain popular only because they are already popular.
Sharing Social Proof
Comments: If your site gets many comments people will be more likely to participate in the discussion. You can bold your “leave a comment” line or feature recent comments in your sidebar to encourage more comments. Replying to comments makes people more likely to leave additional comments. Some bloggers partner up, commenting on each other’s stories to help make their blogs look more active.
Subscriber stats: If you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers you may want to publicly display those stats.
Borrow Authority: Ask authoritative people in your industry for feedback or input on a project prior to launching it. If they feel ownership in the idea they not only lend credibility to it, but they may also help you market it for free.
Publicize Your Publicity: If you or your blog were featured in the mainstream media displaying a “as seen in” section on your site helps build your authority.
Add Interactivity
People read blogs because they would rather read them than read a whole book at a time. Including pictures and video in your blog posts, and breaking up big chunks using bulleted lists makes it easier to consume (and share) your site.
Holding interactive contests and giving out awards are some of the easiest ways to get others to talk about your website, and conversation is a key to future profits. Cory Doctorow on the future of media:
Today there’s the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else’s, somewhere, and if you’re to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.
You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience. JMS kept Babylon 5 alive by hanging out on fan newsgroups. Neil Gaiman’s blog is built almost entirely on conversing simultaneously with thousands of readers. All the indie bands who’ve found success on the Internet through their message-boards and mailing lists, all the independent documentarians like Jason Scott, comics authors like Warren Ellis with his LiveJournal, blog, mailing list, etc.
Participate on Popular Channels to Build Trust & Exposure
Community forums tend to have large traffic streams. Participating in popular discussion forums can help get your name out there. Community forums are a great place to look for content ideas. If people frequently ask a question in forums then similar questions get asked in search boxes.
Writing guest articles for popular websites allows you to tap their brand equity, user trust, and traffic stream for free.
Some bloggers host blog carnivals to build exposure and link equity.
Leaving relevant useful comments on related blogs might lead to that blogger subscribing to your blog, and other people clicking through to your site.
Show Your Bias
Having a consistent original bias and voice makes it easy for others who share your biases and worldview to trust you and spread your message. Most (perhaps all?) popular political blogs are heavily biased.
Wait to Profit
If your site immediately places AdSense ads above the content it is going to be nearly impossible to build momentum and take marketshare from trusted leaders in your marketplace.
Setting Up a Safety Net
If many people read and trust your website, then Google is more reliant on you than you are on them, which makes it harder for Google to penalize your site for fear of the negative publicity they would earn for doing so.
Aaron’s Recent Blogworld Presentation on SEO
This presentation highlights why gaining attention is so crucial for blog growth in a competitive marketplace.
Guest Poster. As blogs get bigger and more popular, some sites ask for guest posters. If you sign on, they may just let you link to your own site every now and again.
