Sundance Solutions

Twitter for SEO

Aug 31 2010

I have started using Twitter as part of my overall SEO strategy. Recently came across and interesting post on the SEO aspects of using WordPress. I have blogged using WordPress, Drupal, Blogger and to a lesser extent Joomla and I think that WordPress was the most SEO friendly straight from the box, with just a tweaks needed to get the urls to be both reader and search engine friendly.

So time to turn to off-site SEO. Well, that’s not quite true, the above mentioned post had several tips for on-site SEO that are worth reading, but I will leave that for another day.

Twitter, microblogging platform, either the coolest thing on the planet or an annoying toy for self-publicists. Well, as a blogger and a webmaster you probably fall into the self-publicist category! But what, if any, is Twitter’s value in SEO?

WordPress has some handy plugins (I am using Wordtwit, which does exactly what I want, but there are others) which allow WordPress to access your Twitter account whenever you create a new post and tweet a link and (very) brief teaser to the world. This is create, as because of the viral nature of Twitter you could get a great deal of traffic to your site.

My strategy was like this:

Create a special Twitter account for each site.
Install and Activate Wordtwit (2 mins).
Create a post or two.
Search on Twitter for keywords related to that post or the them of the site in general.
“Follow” (i.e. subscribe) to people tweeting on similar interests.
Often, with no prompting, they also choose to follow me.

I get new readers who are potentially interested in my site. I have not done any spamming or hard selling and anyone can stop following me at any time. Assuming that you’re not breaking any big stories you are probably not going to see huge visitor spikes, but visitors will come and they will be interested in your content. Hopefully they will retweet some of what they have seen and all their followers will get to see it too.

And that is the singular most valuable thing about Twitter for SEO, the people who use it don’t just like to see new information, they like to share it!

No responses yet

Links – are they still relevant?

Aug 30 2010

I was looking at my Google Analytics today and one of the many pie charts caught my attention. The Traffic Sources Overview showed me that 92% of my traffic came from search engines (of course mostly the big G). Roughly 6% from direct traffic, so some readers were nice enough to add me to their favourites or even remember my URL! A measly 1.6% came from referring sites. That made me wonder, what is the point of link building?

I know what you’re thinking…link building is good for SEO. But is it? Obviously in the early days of SEO link building and keyword stuffing were the order of the day, but Google (and Bing, Yahoo etc.) are much wiser and they know a fairly won link when they see one.

At the beginning of a project, it might well be worth adding links to directories just to get yourself on Google’s radar, but ultimately those links count for next to nothing in terms of SERPs position and traffic flow.

Of course links from relevant sites still count, and are very important. But the best kind are one way links and those are hard to get. Google knows all about webrings and pingbacks and doesn’t give artificial one-way links much credit. It especially hates anchor text that looks like it has been provided by the benefiting site.

One of the worst things you can do is send mountains of spam to webmasters. The kind of email that says

“Dear…, I am so excited about the content of your site that I wanted to share a link. Please link to my site about Dog Shampoo…”

That kind of thing gets you know where, most webmasters, like me, delete them in bulk from our inboxes and more than likely mark them as spam.

So all you can really do is use the safe, honest methods which are pretty boring with no pyrotechnics.

Create good content often
Visit other people’s blogs and participate in debates
Leave them relevant feedback
Only link to one of your own pages if it’s genuinely relevant
Use forums and post relevant links if allowed
Write articles to syndicate
Invite your readers to comment (interesting debates invite links)
Be patient
Use Twitter

In a nutshell, spend the time you would have spent creating spam emails for webmasters on producing content. If you are assiduous about your blogging and you have something to say that’s worth hearing, the reader’s will come!

No responses yet

Placing Adsense in WordPress Posts

Aug 26 2010

Lots of people that use WordPress to blog or for websites monetize with Google Adsense. There are various themes and plugins available that make this relatively easy but they tend to have one big problem: all they do is place ads above posts or below posts, or in the sidebar area.

As all good bloggers know, if you want a decent click through rate (CTR) on your ads, the first port of call is the adsense heat map. As you can see, the best place to put ads is likely to be somewhere within the post.

Lots of people unnecessarily fear editing the WordPress code. In fact it is very easy.

All you need to do is go to Themes > Editor. In the right hand side bar you will see a list of files. The two you need are single.php and index.php.

Index.php controls the homepage of your blog, single.php controls individual posts.

In Index.php find the line of code that says

Just slip your full adsense code directly underneath. That will give you an ad right above the title of the first post on your homepage, central to your readers viewpoint.

Now for the individual posts. How about having an ad indented next to the text, under the title (as in this blog)? Easy!

Open single.php and find the line of code

Underneath that, insert the following:

Obviously, insert your own ad code above so you get paid! Also, change “alignright” to “alignleft” if you would prefer your ad to appear on the left. Click “update” and you will see a nice ad, and so will your readers.

If you would like to show ads in some posts but not others (or want different themes for different posts) see this excellent link.

No responses yet

Blog Directories

Aug 22 2010

As any good webmaster knows, the key to a successful site is lots of traffic, decent traffic that might find what is on your site interesting. To those ends yesterday I dedicated some time to updating my blog directory listings.

Blog Directories are just one way of increasing links and traffic flow to a blog. There are many thousands of them out there and probably not worth your time and effort to submit your site to hundreds of them.

I believe in organic SEO and therefore I am pathologically against paying for site listings and links. Apart from anything else, it puts you on a very dodgey position with the big search engines, that shun paid for linking services.

It got me wondering what the point of these blog directories is. Does anyone atcually use them to find blogs? My guess is not. The directories that came top of Google SERPS were generally poorly laid out and hard to use. I go the distinct impression that the only visitors are bloggers who are looking for a listing and an inbound link.

So is that all these blog directories are? Glorified link farms? Well, I guess so. It’s a shame really but then if a blog is worth its salt then it will be listed in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. so who needs a blog directory anyway?

It would probably be better if the big search engines stopped putting any store in links from directories as they are not truly earned links and show nothing of value in the blog.

NB I should just add that Technorati does look as if it has value to internet users…but it was the only one!

What do you think?

isit them

No responses yet

Toshiba NB200 Problems

Aug 21 2010

Since the Netbook exploded onto the market a while back almost all manufacturers wanted in on the action. Those that didn’t, such as Apple, just stood on the sidelines throwing insults like “a netbook is just a cheap laptop”. Whatever.

For those of us who like full PC functionality on the move weighing around 1kg then netbooks are the way forward and so cheap.

But which one should you buy? Netbooks tend to have roughly the same spec for roughly the same price, so other factors that are perhaps more personal come into play. I took advice from Netbook Showdown and bought their top netbook of that time (Sept 09) – the Toshiba NB200.

It is a great netbook:

It has a great keyboard

It has a fantastic battery life, even compared to newer rivals

It has built in Hard-drive protection

A good screen

But my one had one problem. It stopped working, and it wasn’t going to be covered by the warranty. The fact of the matter is, a netbook is a laptop and that means you should be able to use it on your lap. But if you do then it gets hot.

Through perfectly normal and legitimate use I managed to fry my mainboard. Now, if I try and turn my Toshiba on, all i get is a few seconds of whir from the hard-drive and a green power light, no post and no boot.

I could buy a new main board but once I’ve had it fitted it will cost the same as a new netbook, so that is what I will buy next – haven’t decided which on yet. Any ideas or recommendations please leave me a comment!

No responses yet

Affiliate Marketing Tricks #1

Aug 21 2010

Over my five years in the business of making money online I have learnt a few tricks. After much anxiety and trial and error, it would seem that the best revenue sources are in the field of affiliate marketing – where you send a customer to a site and get paid a commission. This is somewhat more effective than pay per click (PPC) which tends to bring in a steady stream of small money.

With affiliate marketing you do tend to have panic moments, when time goes by and you haven’t made any sales even though you have been sending your readers through (readers whose clicks would have made you revenue on PPC).

But fear not, my affiliate anxiety-busting tip of the day is to think about how you attract potential customers. After all, assuming your product is good it’s just a numbers game: send the customers and the sales will come.

The important question is why should customers come to your site before they go to the main sales page? What is in it for them? And the answer is added value. The point is to pre-sell and to ad value probably by answering questions or allaying fears or anxiety they might have about buying the product.

The most common questions that potential customers want to know are “Is this a scam?” and “Does it work?”. If you can answer one of those questions then you are likely to attract readers and convert sales. Of course this only works if you can give positive answers because you feel genuinely enthusiastic about the product.

In a post on another blog recently there was an article entitled Panic Away Review. This post did some clever things:

It offered to review the product and therefore answer the two important questions (is it a scam? does it work?).

It offered impartial advice to the panic attack sufferer that might be interested in buying the product.

It gave negative as well as positive opinions, which increases customer confidence: people know that nothing is perfect and that if it seems to be too good to be true it probably is.

It offered an alternative product so sales could still be made from those potential customers who read the review and decided against Panic Away.

You might read it and think the post isn’t that good, but you don’t want it to be so good people spend too much time on it. You want people to absorb the information quickly and then click through on one of the affiliate links provided.

If you have nay further tips or comments to drop me a line below!

No responses yet

Blogging: Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress

Aug 20 2010

Well, I have spent the best part of the evening reminding myself why WordPress is still the best for blogging.

I had an old blog here which used Drupal. Problem was that is was Drupal 5.1 and sorely in need of an upgrade, but given that I had modified the code to make some rather pleasing aesthetic changes it was going to be hard to upgrade (time consuming anyway). Add to that the fact that there were lots of odd happenings on my Drupal site, with spammers managing to create their own blogs (but not post to them!). It was my fault for being lax on security, but it rather proved the point that if you use Drupal just for a blog you are making unnecessary work for yourself.

Drupal is marvelous and a coders paradise. But for a simple blog it is overkill to say the least. And how do you make a Drupal site look nice? Any ideas let me know!

I toyed with the idea of useing Joomla for this blog. I haven’t used it for ages. It makes a great shop in the form of VirtueMart as long as you have a secure host. I had lots of security issues with it when I used it on Streamline.net hosting and had to move that particular operation to Siteground.

Joomla looks great out of the box and there are plenty of really good and professional looking themes (although it can be a touch too corporate and bland). But ultimately blogging on Joomla is just more complex than wordpress, so why go to all the extra trouble.

So that leaves WordPress. Simple to use, simple to customise, love the fact that you can install plugins and themes without having to download from the main site and FTP to your webspace. For blogging, I don’t think there is anything out there better.

Aside, I learnt today that if you accidentally upload images in ASCII then they corrupt and make your sites look horrible! Lesson learnt!

No responses yet

I blog about my online life including SEO, my successful health website, ad revenue and affiliate marketing, and all things tech that I come across. Do drop me a line!
Blogroll

Blogroll