This questions is asked all the time. How do I get traffic to my blog? How do I get publicity for my blog? The best answers are not always the ones people like to hear, but are still quite accurate… there is no real quick and easy way to get a million people to go to your blog (other than being on the news), it takes a lot of work. Since this question comes up quite frequently I thought I would share a few items that are on the top of my list for helping out your blog traffic. This is by no means a complete list, but a good start for a new blog.
How to Get Good Publicity for Your Blog
The best way to get publicity for your blog is a have a really good blog. That sounds obvious but I have found that in an overall general sense, that is the best way. Just from the very start if your blog is not appealing, or is not what the reader or visitor visually likes, they won’t stick around long. The items below start with the premise that your blog is generally designed well, has easy to read fonts and colors, does NOT have music playing as soon as your open the index page and does NOT resign the users browser window. Those two things, music and resizing the browser window automatically are the two fastest ways to have someone exit FAST, and never come back.
There are several blogs that I really enjoy reading the content because the topics interest me, but I will never, on purpose, go visit the actual site because of those two reasons, and many other people will choose the same, but will probably not add you to their feed reader. Photography and musician’s blogs are generally the worst at those two things. Photography blogs for some reason find it appealing to resize your browser window and musician’s find it a necessity to automatically play music when the person arrives. Both are bad for your blog traffic.
- Content is still king, and I believe that is still true. Know who your readers are and write to them. If it is a business content blog don’t post articles about your vacation.
- Comments. The next best thing is to comment on other blogs. Don’t spam other blogs, but start reading related articles and post thoughtful comments on their blog. Get your rss reader full of feeds from other blogs, read them, comment on them, and as you do people will visit your blog as well.
- Interact with your readers. You can do this in many different ways, for example, if someone comments on your blog with a question, answer it.
- Tip Jars. Don’t overpower your readers with ads or tip jars. A blog overloaded with ads and flashing banners is a turn off to most readers and even if you have very well written content they will probably not stay long. Ads are fine, just have them integrated as part of the website design and try not to overpower the reader.
- SEO. Get your blog setup in an seo friendly manner so the search engines will pick up your posts. This can be somewhat of a myth, but there are many good ways to make your blog seo friendly where Google and Yahoo will more likely pickup your posts.
- Post. Post well written articles, and often. If you can’t post as often as you think your readers will expect, hire a content writer familiar with your genre that can competently express your views.
- Advertise. Advertise on other blogs that have a lot of traffic in your same genre. Many times this can be an inexpensive way to gain traffic. What you are really going for here are subscribers, and visibility on other blogs is a good thing. You don’t always have to use a paid advertising company either. MyBlogLog and Technorati are great ways to showcase your blog to others.
- Be professional. This should probably be on the top of the list. You want a professional looking blog, clean design, easy to navigate, but speak, respond, write, and act like a professional.
- Ping other articles. When you write an article, back it up with credit to work cited, and make sure you link to the blog you are citing. When you do this, it will automatically “ping” the other blog, or notify the other blog you have mentioned them. You are going for eventually getting other blogs to quote your articles. This is GREAT for the search engines. Google and Yahoo will bring your rankings up as more people talk about your blog/article, so start talking about others and you will see the same in return.
- Run a contest. This is one of the more controversial manners in which to gain traffic but also one of the most effective. You need to research this and be careful with it, but it is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Don’t do some cheesy contest where you give away a free one month of something worth $5.00, it isn’t worth anyone’s time. Give away an iPod or something. You can get a Nano now for about $200. Call it an advertising expense and do a post saying you are giving away an iPod on this date. In order to enter the contest you have to write a post on your (the readers) blog about your blog or the contest or something. Even just having your readers write a post that has a link to your blog is fantastic for traffic. Any time any blog posts a link to your blog its gold. This is probably the best method to gain traffic although some wouldn’t use this tactic.
As I said, this is by no means a complete list but some of the items on the top of my list. Coming up, I have several articles that will explain in greater details the points above, and how to implement those points in an efficient manner. What are your favorite ways to increase your blog traffic?
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There are several good steps you can and should take to improve the seo for your ChannelAdvisor store pages and categories. This is part two of a two part article where I first outlined some steps you can’t take from within the store administration pages that are items you probably would like to implement in good seo practice, but really can’t for one reason or another, What SEO Steps You Can’t Take With ChannelAdvisor. I will now take a look at what you can do to keep your store’s SERP as high up as possible (titled: SEO Steps For a Better ChannelAdvisor Stores).
I realized that some may not be that familiar with using a ChannelAdvisor Store itself, even when using the products that put in place for eBay. Most of ChannelAdvisor’s business is in the auction management software area, so if you haven’t tried their store services as well it might be worth a look. It is another channel opportunity for those who don’t want to be so dependent on eBay for all their sales. For many online retailers, this is the key, finding alternative channels to selling on eBay so if an eBay crash comes your business isn’t dead. Infopia is another company looking at these types of alternative channels to eBay, embracing multi channel – cross channel selling companies (I will review their services in full in a later article) to go beyond eBay.
For many PowerSellers, eBay is just the beginning. With Infopia’s Marketplace Manager, you can drastically increase your sales by pushing your products out to more online marketplaces and create a multi-channel, online selling strategy.
ChannelAdvisor also has several other very useful products but this is in specific reference to the storefront. So, assuming you have opened a ChannelAdvisor Store, there are some needed steps to get the most out of your eCommerce storefront.
Customize Store Name and Logo
This would be the first stop. Log into your administration panel and click on the menu at the top for “store”, then go to “store name & logo” and you will see several fields explained below. This is usually completed during the setup of the store, but double check, you may have only put in your url store name. You will see several different boxes, store name and url, logo, and html page information. Make sure all these fields are filled in, this is where all the meta data is taken from when your index page is shown.
Store Name
If you are choosing your the store name, keep is short. Use your company name but don’t use something like “my store and all my products where you will love to shop store”. It will be used in many different places on your store, so think about it like a good domain name. If you have a company name just place it here. Think about dashes or underlines ahead of time, changing this after the fact is not going to be an easy move, especially when your customers have bookmarked where to find you.
Store URL and Domain Forward
Store url is what domain name you are going to have, so follow the above rules and all that you know about good domain names, keep it short, easy on dashes, try not to use mis-spelled words if possible, in general, use your company name or a version thereof. If you have an existing domain name you can use the same thing here since it will render the url from within the servers from ChannelAdvisor.
There is also a link where you can make any existing domain name url’s forward to the ChannelAdvisor url you just created. You will have to change the name servers on your hosting company so proceed with a little caution. It is not difficult but it does require a little more than just filling out a keyword. Using their forward will render your own domain name on the storefront and is certainly a good option if you can do that.
Store Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
This is probably the most important set of fields, and probably the most commonly left blank. These fields will be visible to customers, show in the search engine results, and help in your rankings. Your competition is probably using these fields and if you are not they will have an unneeded advantage over your store.
Store Title
This is what shows on the top of each page viewed by your customers. Not only that, it is what will show as the first line in the search engine results when someone does a search on Google or Yahoo. It should usually include your store name and a few details about the products you sell or your slogan or tag line. Make it descriptive but not too long. When someone clicks through to a category page it will show all the information on the categories and also the store title. Using ChannelAdvisor as an example their title reads: ChannelAdvisor – The Leader in Online Channel Management Solutions and Services.
Meta Description and Meta Keywords
The meta description is the most important field on this screen to complete in my opinion. The meta description is what will show as the first line or two of the search engine results and are often given more search engine relevance then the keywords themselves. Keeping with the ChannelAdvisor example, look at the screen shot below. The first few lines are the description of their services. Use full short sentences with good keywords, but don’t use just keywords only. Notice the quote below, it has some good keywords but is not just keywords separated by commas.
ChannelAdvisor combines best practices, innovative software and integrated technology to help retailers maximize their profits across multiple e-commerce…
The keywords are just what they say, a set of keywords that best describes your store products or services. Pick these carefully and do not use the same word more than once. Use 10 keywords at the most, more and it starts to make the other words a little less relevant.
Manage Categories
This would be the next big thing to complete in the store administration pages. This will be a little more time consuming if it has not be completed before and if you have already established categories. Go to your admin console and click on the menu for “store” then “manage categories” and it will take you to the category pages.
Category Names
If you have already created your categories (and sub-categories) you will see a list of the categories on this page. If you haven’t created them yet, use short one or two word category names, these will be used in the url in your store and should be something keyword friendly. Keep the caps in mind too. Either will work but what ever you use will be a permalink from that point on. If you create a category with a blank space in the name it will render on the url in ChannelAdvisor as “%20″ which is not something all that great for the search engine bots.
A category name called Non Fiction will show up on the url address line as /mystorename/Non%20Fiction/ and the category name called Non-Fiction will show as /mystorename/Non-Fiction/ and it works the same for all the sub-categories down the line. Use three or four letter words with spaces all the way down the line and it will not look so great. A screen shot example from ChannelAdvisor’s case studies on their website shows a url with categories that have spaces used in the names along with the subcategories. You can see the results below.
Images, Keywords, and Descriptions
Next will be a short description and long description, basically meta keywords and meta description, sort of. Use the same rules as listed above for these two items, keeping in mind the self imposed 10 keyword limit and perhaps show a few less on the categories. When you enter this information it will show up on the title page just after the main page title, so if you use a big list of keywords the title will look a little strange.
It may take a little time to put all this information into each category but it will improve the quality of each category listing and should improve search engine results.
The steps listed here are some very basic seo steps for your ChannelAdvisor store, but they are needed. If your competition is not using them you will have a little ahead, but they probably are and you don’t want to be a little behind. These steps can also be applied across several different sales channels, including eBay and Amazon. eBay in particular allows their store users to adjust the keywords of each category, but not quite to the extent that ChannelAdvisor allows.
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If you operate a ChannelAdvisor store as part of your service with them, there are some good basic SEO steps that you can take to improve your traffic results that do not require a high technical skill level and will not take to long to implement. If you are not familiar with ChannelAdvisor, their service is mainly an integration software between multiple sales channels like eBay, Amazon, and even in to some of the online feed channels like Shopping.com. Their tag line reads:
ChannelAdvisor combines best practices, innovative software and integrated technology to help retailers maximize their profits across multiple e-commerce channels – including marketplaces like eBay, Amazon.com and Overstock.com; comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, Shopzilla and Pricegrabber.com; and across all the major search engines
and for the most part they do a good job integrating different channels into their software. They also just purchased Marketworks (see ChannelAdvisor to Acquire Marketworks), one of their main competitors, so the company is a large force in the online eCommerce marketplace, but there are always those wondering if and when eBay will swallow up this auction management software company. One would not think so any time soon with press like, ChannelAdvisor Adds Over Ninety New Customers to Rapidly Growing Retail Base, but who knows. eBay has deep pockets and some price has to be right, and eBay actually owns a smaller share of the company already. You always have some bloggers speculating about the prospect as well, (see 10 Reasons Why eBay Will Eventually Acquire ChannelAdvisor and eBay Buys AfterBuy! Is ChannelAdvisor Next?), but that is for another subject.
One thing that has been lacking in the past is their ability to automatically render store functions in a SEO friendly manner, and there are still some of those issues existing today, but there are steps you can take to improve what they have put in place. This will be a two part article, I will first outline some steps you can’t take from within the store administration pages that are items you probably would like to implement in good seo practice, but really can’t here for one reason or another (titled: SEO Steps You Can’t Take With ChannelAdvisor). I will then take a look at what you can and should do to keep your store’s SERP as high up as possible (titled: SEO Steps For a Better ChannelAdvisor Store).
Many of these steps listed below are going to be short comings for just about any server hosted store site, these are just specific to ChannelAdvisor as I have tested them specifically on the ChannelAdvisor platform for this article.
What SEO Steps You Can’t Take With ChannelAdvisor
Some changes just have to be made on the corporate level and aren’t an option at this time for their end users. [On a side note, I do have to say that ChannelAdvisor has always been quite open to making changes and improvements. You can actually get a hold of this company, offer a suggestion or improvement, and I have found that many times that they will add it to their service. A recent example of this would be the integration with Amazon Stores (not the Amazon Marketplace sellers but Webstore by Amazon two totally different selling platforms) and their store systems. Scot Wingo (President, CEO, Board Member and Co-Founder) has often led the charge to fight against correct some of the short comings of the eBay system, making eBay sellers more successful, and he has now taken this into other aspects of Internet eCommerce channels.]
There are some things that are not so SEO friendly on the ChannelAdvisor stores platform and we can’t do anything about those, but it is a good idea to know what they are so we can adjust for them where we can.
No Access to Adjust a Robots.txt File
This is really no surprise, but you can’t access or add any robots.txt file to tell Google or Yahoo what to disallow on your store. I only mention this because it is pretty standard to address this on a root level domain that might give you access. ChannelAdvisor stores are run from within directories of their servers so this just isn’t possible (i.e. the url will be http://stores.channeladvisor.com/your-store-name). Robots.txt files really only work on the root level anyway, so to implement something like this ChannelAdvisor would have to make some global changes.
It does HAVE a robots.txt file that it reads on the store html code, but as far as I know it can not be modified and it reads all=index,follow which just tells the bots to follow everything. It isn’t as big of an issue with a ChannelAdvisor store as it would be with something like a wordpress blog that generates a ton of duplicate content, but I would still like to be able to make changes to it accordingly. With that said, I don’t think the core ChannelAdvisor store generates a ton of duplicate content.
No Way to Render URL’s in a Permalink Structure
It isn’t really called a permalink structure, a better way to say it might be that you can’t make seo friendly url’s for the end product sku’s. ChannelAdvisor does do this on the category level, but not on the sku level. In this case, eBay has them beat in their Prostores setup. Prostores isn’t perfect either, but it is better that the dreaded “?” question mark at the end of the address (or anywhere in there for that matter). In the same accord, they don’t use the category structure to create the url, all sku’s are listed in the “items” list like: http://stores.channeladvisor/your-store-name/Items/12345?
Instead what is should do is render the category and item name in a keyword type format like /category/sports/baseball/gloves or something of the sort, but it doesn’t, so just be aware of it. I have two screen shots below that show the difference between eBay’s Prostores way of doing it and ChannelAdvisor, neither are perfect but I would rather have the keyword structure.
Another quick observation from the screen shots is that the url taken from prostores url is a dot com name and the ChannelAdvisor url is a server hosted name. Now ChannelAdvisor does support your own url by listed a forward (you have to change the name servers on your domain account), but not in the same way, it is much different, almost something you can’t compare because Prostores is a platform that uses your own domain account, ChannelAdvisor is not. They do have a structure in place for forwards, but it isn’t like using your own name. Like I mentioned, neither are perfect. All those “,” and “-” marks render a % when clicked through, which isn’t great either.
No Good Way to Customize with .css Stylesheets
One standard of good SEO is to use proper and up to date html / xhtml code on your site, like no font tags, center, bolds, and all those things that belong in a stylesheet file. To make these stylesheet type changes to customize your store you just have to put the stylesheet itself in the header code on the main store page (which isn’t all that easy to figure out how to do in itself). This does work but it isn’t a great seo practice and it puts a bunch of non Web 2.0, non-valid xhtml code on your store page.
Doesn’t Make Good Use of Headings and Sub-Headings
This is just a personal preference I guess but I would like to see a good use of heading tags on the front store page. There are several featured items that could use the <h3> or <h4> heading tags and it would show very nicely in the search engines.
Skewed Traffic Results and Information
This is something that you really just deal with on any server hosted store pages where you are under the url address of another company name. When you try to look at your rankings for Technorati, Alexa, or Google’s indexed pages you get the results of the root domain, depending on how you look at it. I looked up a few stores and it gave me an Alexa rank of stores.channeladvisor.com not the actual store page, no surprise there.
This is also the case when you go to put a good traffic rating process in place like Google Analytics. You can get it done and working, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do and if you are using forwards from your own domain names it can be a little more complicated and confusing as to what results you actually want to look at.
Don’t despair, coming in the next article I will show you those all important steps you can take within your ChannelAdvisor store site. They do make go use of the meta tags and other good seo practices.
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Now I know I am not the most seasoned engineer, programmer, or any type of SEO professional (as I am none of those), but I can read.
I have spent quite a bit of time reading and re-reading the information on the issue regarding rel=nofollow and paid links, so follow me through this logic if you can. After all this reading I came to only one conclusion. I don’t have a clue as to what is considered to be good standard practice all the way down to what is considered black hat operations done by well meaning individuals that didn’t even know there was such a term, or knew about the whole payola issue, or that this guys great link contest had screwed up his rankings royally (or his royal rankings). Didn’t blogging use to be about saying what you think? Not when it comes to making a living I guess, and I understand that.
From an outsider thought, it is bordering on paranoia, but I know it has its merits. At this point I am not sure if I should even link to the posts I am going to refer to, but I will anyway as my traffic rankings are unimpressive right now anyway. My background and work is not in SEO but in small online businesses, so SEO is important for many reasons of course, but the companies I work with want to see a steady increases in their sales from day to day, but they could care less about some href relationship code, if they can even get that far.
What is important to them is sales. I know that SEO can have a direct impact on sales, but it is of less importance to the small business owners, the ones I know anyway, than seeing an actual product move off the shelves. I do think it is important to know all I can know about current issues, so as I said in the beginning, I started reading. There is the Forbes article, Google Purges the Payola, where they talk about the downfall of linking and selling links:
Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google’s Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask (nasdaq: IACI – news – people ), MSN, and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ), which mimic Google’s link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.
Among many other points the article made, it went on to talk about how much money some of these questionable sites are making, some charging more than $600,000 a year for link farms. At those fees it would be hard to keep people who don’t care about what color the hat is, away.
Then you have the Matt Cutts blog on How to Report Paid Links. Matt seems to be the authoritative view on the subject since his job at Google has to do with making sure the search listings yield relevant results. His post is very interesting and does shed some light on the issue but I still walk away confused, and I guess some others do as well as he states some Q&A’s:
Q: Now when you say “paid links,†what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links†it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.â€
From that, it tells me that Google is really more trying to get rid of those attempting to game Google (a verb I guess). Those of use who are just trying to make back a few dollars (or more like pennies) to off-set the cost of running the site, hosting, and so on, shouldn’t be penalized for that, but I don’t guess those this low on the totem pole really are?
After-all, Google’s main revenue source is ad-revenue, right? Shouldn’t we be allowed the same benefit, or is it only through Adsense that it is acceptable? Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and all it does, so I guess what I should be asking is what is taking them so long to just buy Text-Link Ads (TLA) already.
Then I came across David Airey’s blog and read his great post on How I Reversed My Google Rank Penalty and left glad he fixed it and confused as to how a seemingly well meaning person ended up on the Google hit list (better than being on eBay’s hit list). He did have some great points, and Matt seemed to be able to help him out, so all is well that ends well I guess. A few pointers from that post:
Why I actually got penalised by Google
First, however, and according to Matt Cutts himself (head of the Google spam team), my Google penalty was imposed for two main reasons:
- Having paid links to bad neighbourhoods
- Trying to game my search engine rankings with black hat SEO
steps to avoid a Google penalty
- Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO
- Add the rel=â€nofollow†tag to any paid links on your website
- Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods
Did I forget to mention the bad neighborhoods? Sorry, you can check that out too, it is worth a look. I live out in the boon docks now thank goodness, perhaps I don’t have to worry about the neighbors too much.
So, after all this, I was wondering about my own site’s future and those I work with. I did setup another blog with a Text-Link Ad widget that sold two links. Uhhh ohh. The death blow for my $6.28 earned last month. 
Our traffic is still climbing nicely for now, but what’s the old saying, “something from nothing is something”.
Well, why not take a more direct approach. I decided to just contact TLA directly and ask them how and where I could add the appropriate nofollow links into the widget code I was using. I really didn’t expect much of a response anyway, but you can see from the email screen shot above, it was brief and to the point.
You may not add nofollow to the links
Well, that clears it all up. I suddenly realized what their stand on the issue was, no surprise, they want to sell more links, which means Google and the paid link companies have decided to put a bullseye on… us… either way you go it seems you are in the wrong. If I was a better programmer I could just add them in the widget somewhere, but there is only time for so much.
So, I emailed them back again and asked them for a further explanation. The very prompt and kind response was a link to a blog post for further reading. Oh great I thought, like I haven’t read enough. It was a SEOmoz post, The “Google Payola” Issue Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon, which I actually hadn’t read, probably because it was published about 30 minutes before I emailed TLA.
Although the article did get some flack from SEO Refuge on their post, Rand & SEOmoz: Unprofessional and Irresponsible Actions, it did have some good points, but it wasn’t really all that pro-TLA, never-the-less, they sent me the link? Well, I think I hit everything (oh, I forgot to mention something about John Chow, oh well, sorry), and I probably broke and kept every rule of blog posting all at the same time. Where does one go from here. I am sure from all the SEO errors in this post it will never be seen, so, I think I will go back and look at one of my own posts, Simple Steps to Increase Blog Traffic and Pagerank, and read step number 10.
Have fun and be positive – if you get as far as a top ten list, number ten for me is always have fun. No one likes to read or hear negatives all the time, it gets tiring, so try something new, have a contest, give something away, do something fun.
I didn’t make it as far as number 10 in a list of anything here, but I think it is needed at this point. Is there a Google penalty for going to sleep? Maybe that is why the Yankee’s can’t seem to beat the Indians, oh, and I still don’t think that kid from Michigan hasn’t made that field goal yet but no one at The Big House cares about that now. I am sure Google had something to do with it.
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That is the big question for most of us of course, but notice I said immediate future traffic, these are not quick and easy steps, but simple ones I think will make a difference for future traffic. One thing I have learned over the years is that nothing comes overnight, and it is generally the methodical approach that works the best in the long run.
Although I have been writing on websites and blogs now for several years, starting over on a newer topic, for me, got me thinking about some of the basic steps for increasing your blog traffic, and eventually your pagerank.
I have a few blogs and sites I started that have a PR4 (Google Pagerank 4), and several that have a PR3. Not super high I know, but these were very niche market sites and blogs so I didn’t really expect them to go much over a PR4, and I really felt anything around a PR3 or PR4 was still good for the subject matter.
Of course this topic has been blogged to death on so much I am sure you might be thinking there isn’t really anything new that can be said on the subject, and that may be true, but sometimes it just helps to write it down again to keep it fresh in our minds. What I am posting on here are simple steps that I can take when I create a new blog or site, nothing complicated.
I do find that as we become comfortable in a specific area, I can become complacent and I know when that happens I just forget about the little things. So… in no particular order:
- Write like you have an audience – when anything is new, you are basically talking to yourself and a few others you can con to view your site, but as soon as you think, no one is ever going to see this, you start writing that way. Funny thing about the Internet is success on one particular post or subject can go boom overnight if something weird happens, and you certainly don’t want to look at something you wrote and go, opps, didn’t think anyone would ever read that. So, write like your RSS feed subscription has 10,000 members and when it does you will be ready.
- Be professional – if you want people to treat your blog, business, products, customer service, employees, or you, like a professional you have to act like one yourself. You may operate out of your garage (nothing wrong with that) and you can earn the respect of your customers very quickly when you talk, write, and act like a professional. In the same way, you can work in an expensive office and have the opposite effect. When you are writing or corresponding with someone on your website or blog, be a professional.
- Be courteous
- Use good grammar
- If you are a terrible speller like me, use spell check (2 or 3 times)
- Don’t use offensive language of any kind
- If you use images, use good looking images
- Know your target market – When you don’t have any traffic, knowing your target audience might be more difficult, but you know who you are intending on reaching at some point, so write what will interest your target market. Stay on topic, unless you specifically state otherwise, and don’t insult the market you are trying to reach.
- Don’t worry about your competition – at least not yet. If you are just getting started you should already have a good idea about how your topic, subject, products, etc., fare in the marketplace. Focus on what you do best to get things moving, there will be plenty of time to try to get that number one spot later. To start, be your own best competition. One of my most favorite single quotes is from Nehemiah who said “I consulted with myself and contended”. Consult with yourself, don’t worry about what everyone else is doing.
- Read and comment on other blogs – this is important. If you want to know what others are interested in within your topic, you need to read, a lot. This is good for several reasons. You don’t want to just post the same thing everyone else is posting, and you also want to be current and educated in your field. When commenting on others blogs or sites, be sure to do step number 2, be professional, don’t just post a comment for the sake of posting the comment, make it sincere and meaningful.
- Post – and often. I think I read only 20% of content sites have fresh, current content. Be one of the them if you want to increase your traffic.
- Interact with others on your blog – this includes responding to comments posted on your blog. Others want to know a real live person is over there behind the keyboard.
- Know your topic or subject matter – Be accurate. You don’t want to talk over the head of your readers, but you certainly don’t want to look like an idiot either. Know what you are talking about. If you don’t, people will know, and especially on the internet, you will be called on it. If you aren’t sure about a subject there is plenty of information on the Internet, just take the time to do your research. This isn’t always easy, and it isn’t an exact science. There will always be someone who knows more about a subject than you, and hopefully someone who knows less, but you don’t have to make it obvious. There are many many more people who know more about SEO and marketing than I do, but I always try to be as accurate as possible.
- Quote your sources – do not just paste text and show your readers where you got your information. You don’t have to disclose everything, just make sure you give credit where credit is due, it gives credit to you (kind of catchy too).
- Have fun and be positive – if you get as far as a top ten list, number ten for me is always have fun. No one likes to read or hear negatives all the time, it gets tiring, so try something new, have a contest, give something away, do something fun.
You may be thinking, we these aren’t really “blog” things and what do they have to do with increasing my traffic. Well, your traffic will come eventually, but taking some simple steps now will probably help more later than you think. The better your traffic, the higher your pagerank, alexa ranking, compete rank will be, the higher your ad rates will become. There are certainly other things that will help, steps that are not so simple, good SEO, design, and all that, but that is for another post, because one of them is also, be brief, which I can rarely seem to follow.
If you have read this far, you can see by now that you can also take off the part of the title that says Blog Traffic and Pagerank and replace it with business or customers and it should work the same. Good business sometimes starts with simple steps.
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Or did they? Well, not really, and it sounds a little stupid like theDonald, but a news type site (the Onion) reported yesterday that Google was launching a new site, called TheGoogle.com saying “Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults”. The article goes on to say how it is a more secure search engine and it has a more dumbed down version of the search, i.e. you can do a search or a url like http.google.com and it will render the correct address.
Just take a look at the article information below. Of course, the Onion does say that this is a satire site (or article) so it can be read with a grain of salt, but the site is still real, and it is still bringing in thousands of hits. So if it satire who cares. Well, perhaps those people using the site that doesn’t know it is a faux site, or that the article is just a joke. I am sure there are some out there that don’t know the history of everything on the internet (me being one for sure), afterall it is Google’s Birthday.
The Google will have all the same information currently found on regular Google, but with the added features of not stealing your credit-card numbers or giving your computer all kinds of viruses,” said Rick Tillich, The Google project director. “All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type ‘thegoogle.com,’ and press ‘return’—although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and ‘THEGOOGLE’ typed into a Word document.
Tillich added that he hopes the site will soon replace Yahoo Internet Website.com as the most popular search engine for users over 55.
If you take a closer look at theGoogle.com, it is nothing more than a 100% ad site. Every time you search, every single result is that of an ad. Why would The Onion publish a report to such an obvious hoax? Just take a guess. I don’t know, but I could guess. Is it just a joke? Are they the owners of the hoax site? Well a quick WhoIs search shows probably not, but it is NOT Google. I love the disclaimer at the bottom of all their pages.
Disclaimer: The registrant of this domain maintains no relationship with third party advertisers that may appear on this website. Reference to or the appearance of any particular service or trade mark is not controlled by registrant and does not constitute or imply its association, endorsement or recommendation.
I don’t recall google ever saying that themselves. There are a few obvious signs this is not something Google owns, and certainly not something they made an announcement for as the article says.
- There is no announcement on Google’s actual website, or in their blog
- All the results are ads (Sponsored Results shows at the top of all their results)
- The WhoIs information is NOT who they say they are (this isn’t always important but you can still learn from it)
- Look at the code from the site. Just right click and “view source”, nothing that is genuine Google
- Look at the results it does return.
- They ask for money! That should be a no brainer right there.
- Links that don’t work (see “donation” form below)
Look at the screen shot when you go to “inquire about this domain” and see what results it shows. I filled out the form and offered $5,000, perhaps I should have made it $100,000 but I thought I would make it something realistic. What happens when I click on the link after submitting an inquiry? Nothing. The link doesn’t work.
Why would a satire news site report on something like this, well hopefully they just thought it would be a good joke, but it could be more than just a harmless search engine ad site that is probably right now raking in tons of ad click through’s and donations from the article publicity, it could be a phishing site or something worse, but I guess the Onion looked into this far before they published an article about the site. At the least, you would think Google would not care for this and do something about it, but perhaps it really don’t matter, or perhaps I just don’t know what the heck I am talking about (probably the case as well) and everyone thinks sites like this are just fine.
One comment put it like this:
I’m pretty surprised Google hasn’t WIPO UDRP’d for the domain.
I do my share of online marketing, I use click through ads (don’t get paid anything but that is for a different post), and marketing is a big part of the Internet now, so I understand using advertising, but to what extent?
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For those who use Firefox, you can get some great plugins that add functionality to the browser. One that is pretty neat is the SearchStatus plugin. If you are interested in SEO or traffic utilization at all, this handy plugin puts the most popular rankings of a website, PageRank and Alexa (along with Compete) on the bottom of the browser where you can see the status in a quick glance.
In the screen shot here you can see it places an icon in the lower right corner of your browser and it will display the rankings of any page you are currently looking at. The other one shown there is called the SEO plugin which is also helpful but it takes a little more time to look at and shows only when on a google search page.
SearchStatus 1.21
Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.
There are of course many many other plugins for Firefox, and several that are specifically great for SEO type research. For others, checkout the add-ons page on Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox and click on plugins.
