Archive for Blogging Tips
Sunday Morning SEO: A Simple Way to Create Linkworthy Content
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Creating content that attracts links is one of the most efficient ways to build links. Link building is usually a time consuming task so anything that makes it easier is a welcome strategy.
If you read about linkworthy content, you’ll often find articles about the qualities the content should have. For example, some SEO experts talk about using humor or controversy. Others say you should be the first to scoop the latest news while there’s another camp that recommends giveaways and contests.
While these tips can definitely help, I favor a more pragmatic approach. I like to look at the content in my niche (including my own) that’s already getting links and then create similar content. I like this tactic because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation.
What’s Already Working?
First, check out your referral stats to see what types of content are already attracting links. Also, you can look at the trackbacks in your comment section.
A couple weeks ago, I did a quick scan of my stats and found that 90% of my natural links were pointing to a certain kind of resource post. With this information in mind, I started publishing more of these posts. As a result, my links and traffic have gone up significantly.
Second, when examining the links of competitors, look at the blogs with mid-level traffic instead of the super popular blogs. The A-listers tend to get links because of the sheer size of their audience even if their content is not particularly link worthy.
Once you’ve looked at a couple blogs, you should have a good idea of what attract links in your niche. Then, publish similar content and you’ll be on your way towards a strong link building foundation.
Sunday Morning SEO: 3 Golden Rules of Guest Posting
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From the early days of the blogosphere, savvy bloggers realized they could get traffic and links by offering free posts to other bloggers. The bloggers receiving the posts were happy to get free content. It was a classic win-win situation.
This strategy of guest posting is not only effective for SEO and referral traffic, but it also builds your reputation, brand, and credibility.
If you want to have a successful guest posting campaign, consider these 3 rules.
1. Relevance
Your post should fit the overall flow of the blog.
Read the last couple entries to get an idea of the style and tone of the blogger. Some blogs are very informal while others have a traditional writing style. Some blogs use many images while others don’t use them at all.
One of the best ways to be relevant is to read the previous guest posts on the blog. Look at what they have published before and create a post that is similar.
2. Quality
Create something so good that it can’t be ignored.
About a month ago, I found out that a PageRank7 blog with 1,800 subscribers and 80,000 monthly visitors was looking for guest posts. As you can guess, the blogger had pretty high standards for the content on his site. I started working on a guest post since PR7 links are hard to come by. I came up with a topic but after 3 hours, I realized the post was not going to be good enough so I scrapped it and started a new post. It took me 7 hours to complete. I did a lot of research and wrote four rough drafts to get the post just right.
I sent off the post and the blogger really like it. He published it within a week.
You might balk at the thought of spending hours creating one post, but oftentimes that’s what it will take to get popular bloggers to notice you. Now you may not have to spend 10 hours like I did but don’t underestimate the time and effort it takes to produce quality content.
3. Persistence
The old saying goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
If your post gets rejected or you don’t get a reply, don’t give up. Send it to another blogger. You worked hard at creating a top-notch post, so someone else will be willing to publish it.
About three weeks ago, I sent a guest post but the blogger said they already had similar content. I thought my content was unique but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I moved on. I did some research and found a blog with better stats. I sent them the guest post and they published it within a week.
Stat Geeks Take Note: 4 iPhone Apps To Analyze Blog Health
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Have you ever tried to cook a steak without checking the time, temperature and (most importantly) the steak itself?
As silly as that sounds, the same is true when it comes to analyzing your blogs traffic and stats, which can provide invaluable feedback on the health of your blog.
For those fortunate enough to have an iPhone, here are four apps you should consider owning.
Analytics App (price: $5.99)
If you are a Google Analytics freak (note: I say that in love) then you will enjoy this app.
Although Analytics App does not have the greatest user interface (when compared to rivals like BAM Analytics), it does offer one feature that you will not find elsewhere on the app store–the famous “Today” stats, allowing me to view stats that happened today, rather than glimpsing at yesterday’s traffic.
Analytics App supports multiple accounts and despite the steep price, is worth every penny.
iEarn ($1.99)
Believe or not this is NOT my favorite AdSense App (truth be told SenseEarn is).
However, with iPhone password cracking slowly gaining popularity, I have made it a general rule that all financial apps require an “in app” password for security reasons, a feature iEarn has (that it’s rivals do not).
Security aside, iEarn does contain a few interesting features, the main one being the ability to see your earnings in different currencies.
While basic compared to other apps, the developer is promising to add extra features (RSS, search and mobile earnings) which should make it more appealing for stat geeks (like me).
Stat Fever ($0.99)
Created by Paranoid Ferret Productions, Stat Fever is in my opinion one of the best apps for FeedBurner addicts.
Stat Fever allows you to analyze your subscribers via graphs and numbers (the former which I’m a huge fan of).
While not much has changed since I last reviewed this app (which is unfortunate), Stat Fever still retains its crown as one of the most elegant and powerful FeedBurner apps thus far.
Statistics for WordPress ($2.99)
For those of you sporting the WP brand (and fear Google “knowing” everything about your blog), Statistics for WordPress is a perfect alternative to Google Analytics, and perhaps has the best user interface as far as analytics apps go.
What I like about this app is that it supports multi-touch, allowing you to compare different data points (which is useful if you’re trying to spot a trend).
Any others?
To my sorrow I was unable to find apps supporting a few other analytical apps or ad networks (i.e. for Yahoo! Publisher, Pheedo, Sitemeter, Quantcast, etc.), although hopefully more will appear (unless they are all holding out for the upcoming iPad).
Sunday Morning SEO: Why Should You Evaluate Sites?
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In my last post, I talked about using an SEO tool to evaluate a site’s link authority. In this post, let’s look at why you should be evaluating sites and how to apply the information you get from your research.
Getting quality backlinks is the best competitive advantage you can get in SEO. Backlinks are a major part of the search engines’ algorithms and it’s much harder to copy someone’s backlinks than their keywords.
You can focus on keywords but keywords are easy to implement. Once a webmaster figures out that they are important, he can look at the free keyword tools, find relevant keywords, and then add on their website. Compare that process to building links on quality sites.
That’s why the search engines place a lot of value to backlinks on their algorithms. With the early search engines, you could just place keywords on your site and you would rank pretty quickly. Savvy SEOs realized this and created many low quality sites that dominated the search results. Google became the best search engine by focusing more on links instead of keywords on a site. This focus helped Google create search results filled with more quality sites than their competitors.
It’s not just the quantity of links that today’s modern search engines look at. Quality of links is much more important. In fact, if you get too many low quality links in proportion to your other links, you could get penalized and lose your rankings. That’s the main reason I often talk about quality sites.
Therefore, we need to figure out what quality means to the search engines. I gave the following metrics in the previous post:
- PageRank
- Number of backlinks
- Number of links from unique domains
- Age
- Traffic from popular keywords
These numbers aren’t perfect but they do give a good picture of the quality of a site from the search engine’s perspective. Once you’ve found some quality sites, you can apply that knowledge. Here are some common ways:
Guest posting: I’ve written that guest posting is the best SEO method for bloggers. You can maximize your guest posts by sending them to quality blogs.
Link requests: At the beginning of this month, I wrote that the key to successful link requests is researching sites, figuring out the type of content they link to, and then creating that content. Once you’ve done those steps, you can confidently ask for a link. You can increase the effectiveness of your link requests by sending them to quality sites.
Reciprocal links: Getting reciprocal links is not a powerful strategy by any means. Still, it can give you a small boost in the rankings. But the most important thing it can do is let the search engines associate you with quality sites. Of course, for this to happen, you need to know which sites are the quality ones.
Buying sites: This application is not as common as the others. But if you ever find yourself in the position to buy a site, it can be very profitable to buy a site with a lot of authority. Also, because not every webmaster focuses on keywords, there are many sites with good links but poor onpage keyword use. Ycan quickly improve the search traffic of these sites by doing keyword research and including those keywords in strategic locations like the title tags.
Sunday Morning SEO: Blogroll Reciprocal Links
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One of the easiest things you can do to improve your reputation on Google is exchange blogroll links with other blogs. This strategy is not the most powerful strategy in the world, but it can give you a small boost in rankings. And if you’re targeting different keywords than your competitors, you might even get big ranking improvements.
About two years ago, I started a blog on a popular TV show. I didn’t have time to do a comprehensive link building campaign, but I still wanted to get search traffic. I exchanged blogroll links with other blogs and my traffic increased by a couple thousand visitors per month.
Reciprocal links still have value despite what many SEO specialists say, but you do have to be smart about it. Here are two principles to keep in mind.
Quality
Getting links from quality sites sends signals to the search engines that your site is a worthy of good rankings. Even with the benefit of getting a reciprocal link, quality blogs are much less likely to link to spammy sites than low quality blogs. Therefore, search engines track the outbound links of quality sites as part of their algorithm.
By exchanging links with reputable blogs, you’ll place your blog in “good neighborhoods,” which will build its reputation with the search engines.
Relevance
If you get too many irrelevant links, you can raise a red flag with Google. For example, its not natural for a celebrity gossip blog to get a bunch of links from gardening blogs. Search engines are advanced enough to recognize the topic of a site is covering. They can easily set up spam filters that trigger whenever a site gets too many off-topic links.
As you exchange blogroll links, stick with your niche and closely related niches. Not only will this keep you from being penalized, but you’ll give Google a better idea of your blog’s topic. This can lead to better rankings for keywords in your industry.
Over to You
Have you ever exchanged blogroll links? If you have, did you see an increase in search traffic and rankings?