Posts Tagged ‘seo’
“The ‘Like’ button has worked wonders for my film publication. We had respectable numbers before we implemented the button but since we’ve added it to our articles our traffic has doubled in only a month!” – Eric, on mashable.com
In the war between Facebook and Twitter, Facebook managed to come up with a trump card: The ‘like’ button that can be integrated on blog posts. This immediately made it a favorite for many webmasters. For the uninitiated, the hype about the ‘like’ button is baffling. Why is everyone so in love with this little button all of a sudden?
Typepad Research
“…referral traffic from Facebook has increased by 200%” – Typepad
Typepad, a blogging platform, allowed its users to integrate the ‘like’ button below every post. 2400 bloggers used it. Their demographic and their blogs aren’t mentioned. Yet, a 200% increase in traffic cannot be overlooked for any reasons. Yes, 200%. That is the amount by which traffic to blogs increased once users started integrating the Facebook ‘like’ button.
Threat to Google?
“…reports have Facebook driving even more traffic than Google to some big-name sites.” – Chris Crum on webpronews.com
The amount of traffic that Facebook has been driving to websites is staggering. So much so, that webmasters are now beginning to look at Facebook as a traffic source just as seriously as Google. What site owners love about Facebook is that, apart from being free, they don’t need to hire any SEO specialists to rank higher in a search engine. Users are voluntarily spreading their link. Some feel it is time Google began to look upon Facebook as a threat, since it might divert advertisers’ money.
But it isn’t for everyone
“I have found that for my demographic and style of content, personal development, it is not ideal to have a like button.” – Joshua Noerr on problogger.net
There is one small problem with this traffic, however. Most users are visiting your site purely to satiate their curiosity. They saw a friend sharing something and wanted to see what it was. If you are selling something, or expecting users to sign up for something, it won’t work. Users will come, take a look and leave. That is a waste of precious bandwidth.
The ‘Like’ button is most useful for entertainment websites or daily news sites that might get users hooked on their first visit. Your method of monetization, then, will have to be advertisements on your site. Again, don’t expect users to click on their first visit.
Why you should implement it
Integrating the Facebook ‘like’ button is a simple job, for the most part. It doesn’t hurt you to see how much it affects the traffic to your site, does it? It is possible that you might see a huge surge in traffic. It is recommended that you track the traffic well, to find out how much is coming from Facebook. Also track the users to see how well the traffic is converting. If, after a month, you find that the button simply wastes bandwidth without resulting in any additional profits for you, you can always remove it.
‘Like’ it or hate it, there’s simply no ignoring this button.
Most LInkedIn users will know that the summary is possibly one of the most important parts in their LinkedIn profiles. Some people sign up for LinkedIn, quickly assign a profile picture, slap on their website URLs and add a couple of lines about what they do for a living. However, these people are missing the point here, and are not doing enough to ‘sell’ themselves. Having a LinkedIn profile is all about expanding your business network, and your summary is a vital catalyst for you to achieve your goals using this popular social networking.
Here are the best 5 tips on how to write an engaging summary for your LinkedIn profile.
1. Think of your summary as a game expansion
To properly ‘sell’ myself, I always think of my headline as a best-selling game, and the body of the summary its expansion pack! What you do is attract people with your best points in your headline, basically put your best foot forward – and then WHAM! Pile on all your unique selling points (USPs) in your summary and get people hooked on to you as a talented professional.
Why do you think people keep getting one expansion pack after the other, especially for those The Sims games that sell like hot cakes all the time? :-)
Then there is the fact vs. fancy debate – Whether you want your summary to contain boring but true facts, OR inspirational quotes that tell people about what sort of person you are but not the talents you may possess?
2. Be interesting. Be very, very interesting
According to Shoestring Branding the summary space in your LinkedIn profile should be treated like your elevator pitch but you should ALWAYS refrain from writing in a boring manner. And that means NO big words, NO jargon, and absolutely NO phrases that sounds like an automatic mission statement generator.
You can also try your hand at writing a light-hearted summary that will make people sit up and pay attention. Humor is appreciated but only when it is tasteful!
3. Sprinkle powerful and attention-grabbing words in your summary
Gil Carlson from Freelance-Copy-writing.com has a list of uplifting words for your perusal. Normally copywriters would craftily dangle these words in front of potential customers when strewn across the sales page, but I think there’s no harm in using them sparingly when it comes to ‘selling’ yourself on your LinkedIn profile. Here are some of the better words you can use:
- Challenge i.e. “I love challenges and will rise to the occasion to make my endeavors a success.”
- Creativity i.e. “I’ve been told that creativity is one of my best traits.”
- Inspiration i.e. “I find inspiration in simple everyday things found around us.”
- Vitality i.e. “I have the vitality of ten hares when it comes to completing important tasks at hand.”
- And the most popular yet powerful word – Love, i.e. “I love life – and it loves me back.”
4. Do some keywords analysis on the jobs you want
There are many reasons why people create LinkedIn profiles, but one of the major reasons is due to career advancement. You should ideally have an idea what jobs you would like to apply for, and then create your profile to match the job’s requirements.
A smart move would be to apply a little SEO technique and make it so that your profile is keyword-rich. Do a brief search and see what your dream companies’ are after. Jot down these keywords and spread them naturally throughout your profile.
5. Write your summary in first person
Josue Sierra hit the nail right on its head when he recommended people to write their LinkedIn summary in the first person rather than third because doing so in the latter can make you sound arrogant and pompous. You’re writing a summary, NOT a biography!
When it comes to generating valuable inbound links, very rarely do people refute the benefits of writing a press release. A press release is a cost effective method to grab targeted traffic as well as generate publicity about your new website or the launch of a new product or service. However, do note that a press release should never be treated like a piece of advertisement. Sound too pushy or “sales-y” and you will quickly realize that your efforts will be for naught.
The task of writing a good press release is not as daunting as you think. Here are some vital tips to help you get started.
Put up a catchy headline – That said, it is better to be clear than overly clever. Some of your readers may not be able to get what you mean, even if it IS incredibly witty, so it is more preferable for you to write a clear headline that sticks to what you want to say. You should also just ditch the hype and go straight to the point without “tricking” people into reading your press release.
Make your story believable – Remember, this is a press release, not the latest Harry Potter book. Concrete facts should support your claims so that your press release would appear convincing. Strictly no fluff! Again, you are not writing fiction so don’t overly embellish your PR if you don’t want to lose your credibility.
Set your objective and stick to it – Ask yourself what are your reasons for writing a press release. If you want to tell everyone about the launch of a new service, do insert relevant information about the features and benefits your readers can enjoy.
Industry jargon? A definite no-no! – Your press release should be as simple as possible. Make it a point to avoid sprinkling your PR with unnecessary jargon.
Keep it short and sweet – A good press release should typically consist of 300 – 400 words. Anything more than that and your readers may start to bail out. Remember, this is a press release, not a thesis.
All in all it takes several attempts, but with a bit of luck you can get a nice amount of visitors to your site and benefit from natural link building.
We on DuoBlogger are using different kinds of SEO techniques to increase our rating in the search engines. Today I’m going to talk about Targetting Long Tail Keywords, what it is, and what to do with it.
A good point between long and short tail keywords is that long tail keywords often get alot less search results in Google and that way you would have alot less competetion, and thus more likely to get more visits. I’ll give an example: Search for “Blogging Tips” and see how many results it gives (near 2 million). Compare that to “Blogging Tips for Beginners” which results in merely 600.000 results. Ofcourse this is still a huge amount, but much easier to rank higher if you focus most of your related post on those keywords, this also results into higher conversions.
Plugin
Using the All-In-One SEO plugin for WordPress, is making it rather easy to manage the keywords, descriptions, titles of each post, making them more Search Engine friendly.
Statistics
I made a graph which explains the correlation (connection) between the monthly searches (Y) for specific keywords and the amount (X) of them. As you can see the amount of keywords as they increase, will also decrease the monthly searches for those keywords. Many SEO Experts will tell you to focus on 3 to 4+ keywords since competing with established websites whom are using 2 keywords will be hard.
What should you do?
So what we did on DuoBlogger lately is looking into Google Analytics and find the keywords which people are using to reach our blog. We searched through some of the recent days and it looked like we had some visits on these keywords:
All the other days looked fairly the same for those keywords. Typing that keyword in Google gave me the result which lead to: Must Have PC Software For Bloggers. So to make this more SEO friendly, we would have to rename the title, description and keywords for the post. As you can see we now named it: Top Blogger Apps. Which should, after reindexing by Google rank up in page 1 in the SERP’s. (If the keywords don’t have much competition you don’t even need that many backlinks to that sub-page, you simply do your on-page optimization like changing the page title then get it indexed then it will start to rank.)
Short Vs. Long Tail Keywords
So you should question yourself if you should focus on short tail or long tail keywords. It all depends on the niche you are in.
You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds of keywords which bring only small traffic. Well the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic (note: only a handfull, not that much, but it’s targetted traffic). Not everybody is capable of ranking high for highly competitive keywords but anybody can rank for long tail keywords.
Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Priced Computers’ whatever, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them, and thus generating sales.
See what other Twitterers focus on
I asked around on Twitter to my followers if they were targetting long tail or short tailed keywords. Here is the result:
@Rajupp from TechPP said: I use long tail keywords as well as short ones, just to give you an example, I use “Watch online TV Free” and “Online TV” & …
@Hendricius from DuoBlogger said: I focus on short ones and then try to include long term ones in the post. I try using alternatives to the short title.
@PassTheBoll from PassTheBoll said: I try to use relevant keywords. Usually they are single words, but sometimes phrases.
So what do you focus on, long – short – mulitple? Problems ranking high for some keywords? Share it with us.
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Hendrik
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Mark
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Top commentators blog
As you might have noticed I have now installed a top-commentators plugin on my wordpress blog. The plugin shows the people that commented most as a widget. What might sound like a SEO-horror for old time SEO experts is a nice way of getting visitors on your blog.
The top commentator plugin rocks – if there is anyone telling you the opposite – take out a fish and slap him twice. But why do people find your blog just because of this plugin?
It’s very easy, the key to all SEO these days is getting links to your blog. Bloggers are always searching for dofollow blogs where they can comment (dofollow means there is no nofollow attribute on hyperlinks). Nofollow is a SEO killer – your backlinks do not get credited if it they have the nofollow attribute. Consequently you will be in the need of dofollow links. The top commentator plugin provides such links.
So, to sum it up – Bloggers are searching for dofollow blogs where they can comment to get more links to their website. But, you are not mainly targeting those (you will need a nofollow-free plugin for wordpress to do so) you are targeting the ones that are searching for “top commentators” + blog (not sure about the exact code, if you know it, please let me know, thanks). Those people will find your blog there and are eager to write comments. The reason for that is simple – the top commentators are hyperlinked without a nofollow attribute. That means, if your blog is relatively popular they are getting an authority link! That’s exactly what people are looking for – free dofollow high page rank links. Nonetheless, don’t search for high page rank links – page rank does not matter. It only indicates the time that is required for your site to get indexed by google.
So, using this addon will attract new people to your blog. Make sure you reset the statistics every month, because that way they are forced to comment every month. They will come back and every page impression means money for you.
So, let’s get started – download the top commentators plugin. Unzip it, open your FTP application and place the content of the .zip in your /wp-content/plugins folder. Go into your “WordPress settings”, go to “plugins” and enable the top commentator extension. Next step is to go into the “Design”, “Widgets” and then drag the plugin onto your sidebar. Voila, you got it installed and working.
My top commentator settings
The next step is the correct configuration of the plugin. Use the settings I used. You can find them in the picture on the left, and yes,I think they are best. Reading my article you should by now agree on that.
You could perhaps set the time until the counter gets reseted a little longer, but that depends on you. I like my visitors to return every month, nonetheless it might be a little unfair for your old fan-readers who are subscribed and commented for months. Decide yourself which value you want to place there. Make sure to make the links nofollow-free. Again, the bloggers are searching for your blog to get top dofollow links – no nofollow links.
Some of you are probably rolling their eyes and say: “OMG NOES – MY PR WILL GET LOWER!!11!”. Yes, the Page Rank of your forum posts will not be as high anymore. Nonetheless – Page Rank does not matter, so don’t even bother about it. Quality back links do and you will get more of them with more people reading your blog. I will tell you something: Google is known to check the incoming links to webpages, whenever they do so they also occasionally send Robots to those sites. That means, linking to other pages will get all of your pages indexed better and faster. Outgoing links do as well matter for SEO, that’s for sure. Google loves blogs and user generated content, that’s why they also love the top commentators. Trust me – it is a good strategy. See this blog and you will notice that high-pr sites have the plugin installed as well. If you have some time I can only recommend you to do some commenting on those blogs. Most of them are old, valuable blogs – especially valuable in terms of link juice.
I found out about the next method on Hugo Santos blog. At the end of the month he is writing a post which contains the names of the users who commented most in the last month. It as well contains a link to their websites. That’s very fair – the users are getting a permanent one way link from your blog and also get a well-deserved thanks.
In a nutshell, I don’t see anything bad in the top commentators plugin for your blog. I only see benefits, it is a very good way of getting organic traffic and readers to your blog.