Archive for February, 2008
You found your niche and words are beginning to coagulate into sentences and, hopefully, sentences into paragraphs. But crossing your fingers and wishing really, really, really hard won’t bring people to your blog. You have to be willing to put forth an extra effort to cultivate a following. Doing otherwise is like fishing without bait or being the world’s second fastest man—neither guarantee that anyone will take notice.
In this two-part installment, I provide a nightcap to earlier discussion on finding and maintaining blog content; the second confronts the uphill battle of summoning an audience.
No one expects you to be a constant wealth of creativity, but your audience is going to thrive on its consistency. To combat and prevent blogger-burnout, you’ll want to troll for ideas when your mind is most ripe.
Develop a writing schedule.
Allot specific times throughout your week to write. Adhere to them. Convince yourself that you must meet the deadlines you’ve made. This will give your blog consistency and condition readers to expect your latest creative outpours on a schedule.
Wake early.
This meshes into the above. You’re rejuvenated in the morning. Ideas are stifling and ready to overflow from your pen and onto a pad of paper, so try and make the effort to wake up a little earlier than usual; which segues into my final tip that is more of a personal preference, but has helped me with my own writing.
Write everything down.
Word processors are convenient, maybe even too convenient. They allow you to second-guess word choices and sentence structure. Every grammatical error is painfully underlined with red squiggles, so you feel the need to constantly edit yourself. Editing, mind you, is a completely separate process from writing.
What I find is that by scribbling everything down first, I am able to transcribe concrete ideas without being reminded of where I mess up; this, in turn, makes for output that is pure, and prime for editing.
With all the cogs churning and creative juices flowing, getting the spotlight cast over your blog extends a bit farther than what the infamous “content is king” saying implies; off-site interaction becomes the new focus.
Exchange links with other similar blogs.
This is helpful for when Google indexes your site and will elevate your exposure to an audience outside, but within close proximity, of your niche.
Guest blog.
Guest blogging lends you a voice of authority; because you would have never been invited if you weren’t one, right? See where I’m getting at? It makes you look good, the blog you’re writing for look good, and is forum for shameless self-promotion.
Provide a message board for your blog, and participate on other boards.
It’s all about creating interaction. A message board on your blog builds a community and communities interact—cause and effect.
Participating on other boards is a cheap form of advertising and if you’re an active member, you establish yourself as a reliable source of information, which does miracles for traffic.
Tags: blogging
In my last blog, I proposed a manifesto. They were a set of values that I felt every writer should conscientiously exercise, as to produce effective content. But what good is content without direction? In this blog, I slip on my kids’ gloves and guide you to authority-status of a niche.
In hindsight, I suppose I went about this series all wrong. To the neophyte blogger, I apologize; I took you under my direction and just sort of dropped you in the middle of a forest without your compass.
So to gain some grounding, we must first define who you are writing for and, more importantly, what you are writing.
Find a subject that interests you and don’t write about it.
If vegetables are your thing, writing about the whole lot of them will be exhausting and lacks consistency. Instead, focus your blog on something more specific; like butternut squash, for example, the “bulbous and misunderstood vegetable.”
Taking this approach may not be part of your original plan, but it will make you exact and relevant and elevate your search engine ranking; in turn, commanding a larger following.
Stalk your competition.
Now that you identified your niche, find out who your competition is and where they are slacking. This will help you establish a fresh angle to your content and make you unique—a commodity, even.
Write about what you know.
I can’t even begin to count the number of times teachers accosted me with this vital nugget of guidance. It may seem that “what you know” is boring and could never interest another person, but that is only because “what you know” has become so familiar and absent of that initial zeal.
By writing beyond your grasp on a subject, you run the risk of botching your message and sounding stupid.
Find your voice.
You don’t want to come across as a technical writer authoring a manual for ‘Efficient Energy Amplification in Subcritical Reactor Applications’, but shooting for Gonzo journalism could be perceived as pretentious; or wont’ be perceived at all.
A voice unique to you is going to determine how engaging your content is and whether any of it will stick.
Tags: blogging
There’s this scene from a movie, and I can’t bring myself to remember the title, but the plot had reached its climax and one of the actors turns to the other and begins to mouth something snarky, and almost immediately, that other actor interjects, “You better choose those next words carefully,” he says, “because they just might be your last.”
I’m pretty sure the scene fleshes out with the wrong words being said and a gunshot or two. The issue I’m stressing is that exact words—words that precisely relate a message, no filler, no fluff—separate books that are read from books that go unread; blogs that succeed from blogs that decay to inactivity. The right words are paramount to developing a readership and effective SEO.
The picking and choosing of words extends beyond strategizing for search engine ranking, they allow you to understand who you’re writing for, what’s going to grab their attention and ignite their curiosity until it becomes so paralyzing that the only means of extinguishing it is by clicking on your headline and soaking in your words.
I’ve composed a brief manifesto of sorts for the effective copywriter; a set of guidelines that you should actively practice until it becomes routine.
An effective copywriter…
• Knows how and when to use the results of keyword research to be perceived as an authority.
• Creates headlines that are unavoidable and seemingly the only clickable link on the page.
• Uses vibrant language in place of the bland, the overused, and the cliché.
• Filters out every tired metaphor and expression; they lost the power to their meaning a long time ago and fail to satisfy a reader’s appetite for hearty, satisfying content.
An example I’d like to use is a bit extreme and wouldn’t necessarily make for good copy, but it exercises a few of the above concepts, stripping a description of unnecessary language and keeping only what is necessary to convey meaning.
Among the rain/ and lights/ I saw the figure 5/ in gold/ on a red/ fire truck/ moving/ with weight and urgency/ tense/ unheeded/ to gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling/ through the dark city.
A lot of colorful imagery, right? This is a poem by William Carlos Williams titled ‘The Great Figure’. He could have just said…
I saw a fire engine the other night. It was red and had the number ‘5′ painted in gold on its side. It was going really fast and was really noisy, so I can only assume that there was a fire or some other emergency that demanded their presence.
But then the raw visuals of the original become diluted by all the unnecessary language of the latter. Instead of assembling content and headlines that force the reader to wade through thick, entangling filler, just to extract something of substance, cut out the fat and you will warrant an audience.
Keyword researching allows you to better understand who you are writing for and hone in to a niche. This, in turn, will increase your relevance, and decrease the likelihood of someone escaping the hypnotizing allure of your words.
Tags: blogging
Posted on Feb 23, 2008 by Damien to Projects
MeliaPuertoVallarta.travel now has a fresh new online persona that truly encapsulates the hotels grandeur. Located in beautiful Puerto Vallarta Mexico, Melia Puerto Vallarta is a gorgeous resort set in a Mexican paradise.
THAT Agency successfully set out to capture this resort and make sure the site has a true to life online presence. A clean calming layout of quiet sophistication the site does just that. Easy to navigation and a joy to view the site both functional as well as beautiful allowing any visitor to quickly book a resort reservation from any page. A custom booking engine handles all reservation requests, built using Ruby on Rails it’s a solid and trustworthy system.
The site itself is constructed on a PHP base utilizing a table-less CSS layout structure allowing for quick loads and expert search-ability from search engines. The site boasts a set of interactive photo galleries as well as a custom virtual tour allowing the user to truly experience the hotel before ever stepping foot in Mexico.
Available in both English and Spanish Melia Puerto Vallarta caters to a broad spectrum of visitors with ease.
Tags: hotel website design, resort website development, site design
I usually enjoy the SEOptimize blog a great deal, but I was sifting through my RSS reader today and noticed a post from Patrick Altoft that I couldn’t agree with less, ‘Link Exchange in 2008′.
I am not sure if I disagree with the blog as much as I disagree with what was left out of the blog.
I agree that exchanging links with similar sites is a great way to kick off the link building process for a new site, but I think if you do so in the traditional reciprocal fashion your labor will be fruitless.
The issue goes beyond the buzz word, link juice.
The real issue here has to do with what used to be called supplemental results. Links coming from these pages are worthless, even if they only have a few outbound links, because they are not likely to get continually indexed. Your link is worthless on a supplemental page, and that is the true problem with exchanging links. In fact, link exchanging is the reason the supplemental index was created.
Perhaps you believe that the supplemental index went mainstream, perhaps you believe it never did. Either way one thing is clear, if the page isn’t getting hit by the spiders your link is worth less than nothing.
It is a loss, due to your time and effort.
So, onto the possitve.
How do you go about making sure your exchanged link is worth something?
• Find a page on the site you are getting the link from that has been cached recently (use SEO for Firefox) and ask for the link placement within the content of that page.
• Create a custom piece of content, with your link embedded, for the site to attach directly to a page that has quality link equity and few outbound links. Make sure the page with the link equity has also been cached recently and is not a part of the supplemental index.
• Guest blog.
These are only a few ideas, and obviously each will need to be reciprocated for the exchange to be complete.
This takes me on to my initiative for 2008, social link building.
No, this has nothing to do with social media, but it has everything to do with human interaction.
For 2008, I plan on creating human to human connection with as many people in my perspective markets as possible. Publishers, bloggers, marketers, and property owners of all kinds. By creating these connections, I feel I will be able to guide my links to quality locations on sites and not have to deal with my coveted content and link lying on a page with the URL www.yoursite.com/links.php; which is nothing more than a kick me sign on the back of a web site.
By creating these connections, keeping links embedded in content, and creating other quality inbound links in a well balanced portfolio, link exchanging can be a good tool. However, going about it blindly could be a waste of hours upon hours of link building labor.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m already working 25 hours a day.
Tags: link building
Posted on Feb 19, 2008 by Damien to Projects
SportsNutrition.com a source of wellness and fitness on the web was successfully launched by THAT Agency, a leading web design firm located in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. The site features a complete online store allowing users to easily purchase supplements, vitamins and all manners of sports nutrition.
Custom built CMS and cart solution, SportsNutrition.com is much more than just an online e-commerce solution but the sole online persona of Sports Nutrition. The site allows the use of gift certificates, coupons and a viral marketing campaign to notify friends of new and exciting products available online.
SportsNutrition.com also has the ability to track it’s own inventory online, manage drop ship orders and track product shipping making the custom cart a perfect solution for online success.
THAT Agency also set up real-time tracking and stats reporting to better help SportNutrition.com understand what kind of traffic is visiting the site, it’s return on investment and most popular products. Utilizing Google Analytics THAT Agency increasingly delivers results and information necessary to keep Sports Nutrition on top of an already very competitive field.
Tags: custom ecommerce solution, web design, Web Development
Anyone can blog—and they do. Too many people share an undeserved confidence in their opinions and expertise; that it’s their voice that carries the most weight and is justified in its gusto. As a result, the blogosphere has become saturated to a discouraging level for many anxious and baby-faced newcomers.
To prove my point—that anyone and everyone blogs—I conducted a simple test. It was to see how fast I could register an account with WordPress and make my first post—a base set of goals, but by definition, a blog…
Palms resting on my desk, I stared into a blank screen cleared of any windows. When the little clock on my computer reached 9:31, I was off. I lunged for the mouse, super-anxious to start my new blog; a blog about dog-sweater knitting because, surely, it is a harbored affinity of many. I started up Firefox and made my way to the signup page, filled in 3 or 4 fields of required information and prayed that they would accept me as a member. What luck, for as soon as I checked my Gmail, I had an email from WordPress informing me of my acceptance and inviting me to make a post—and I did. I titled it ‘Why Dog Sweaters are The Best. Ever.’
“Because dressing up an animal like a human is hilarious.”
A quality post for the world to reflect over. Total Time: 1 minute 30 seconds.
But how do we veer from the mundane and monotony of, what is essentially, most blogs on the web? It’s a matter of persistence, to keep pumping out quality content on a regular basis. But it’s that kind of advice has been tired out, profusely. It’s understood that the thoughts and opinions you spill into your keyboard should be ones of merit and benefit to your audience. To establish and maintain presence, there are a number of rules that you should consider living your life by while taking residence in the blogosphere.
Your reason for blogging is not for money.
However difficult this may be, making a profit should not be a part of your immediate agenda. It comes as a result of time invested into the cultivation of your blog and developing it into an authority that accrues a following.
Be prepared to invest time.
This segues in from the first rule. Chances are, blogging is not your full-time job. Many of the most prolific writers had jobs to support their habit. They wrote on the side, which meant the finished product was not one of an evening’s work. The single most taxing phase of blogging is the development of the blog.
Upgrade and upkeep the visual components of your blog.
The default theme for WordPress, like most blogging tools, is drab and reflects something cold and sterile. To me, the descriptions are comparative to a hospital; a depressing hospital. Do you want visitors to relate visiting your blog to visiting an uncle with a terminal illness? Unless your blog is about Hospice care, then probably not. Spend the time or money into differentiating your blog from the million others.
Try not to only niche blog.
Niches are fine. They are why there is such overwhelming diversity to the blogosphere. But the ones that stand out do so by dabbling in other subjects. I wouldn’t post a review of a toaster-oven on my dog-sweater example-blog, but I might discuss other topics of pertinence.
Don’t be discouraged by slow or inconsistent traffic.
If you are just starting out, this is normal. In fact, it’s expected. The traffic should resemble a rollercoaster, spiking one day, dipping the next, maybe even riding along a plateau for a few. You are new and people are just finding out about you and deciding whether reading your words is worth their time. It may be like this for a few months, but if you follow the above advice, it should pick up. It is only when this inconsistence becomes something terminal that you will need to either address where you’ve been slacking or decide to just call it quits and find something new to blog about.
Tags: blogging
Google won’t index your website. It’s nothing personal. Shame, really, you invested a lot of time and creativity putting that thing together. Does this sound familiar? Sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself, not doing anything about it. It’s tee-ball all over again.
Well cheer up, mopey. Let’s do something about it.
First, a little research. Trudge on over to Google so we can find out just how big it thinks you are, using the site: query. This is going to return every page of yours that Googlebot has indexed.
We came out looking pretty good, how about you?
That bad? Well here are a few reasons why Google might be rejecting you. By addressing these common oversights and mistakes, you can finally make the team… I mean make the list, the Google list.
• You’ve disallowed the spiders in your robot.txt: If you’ve set your robots.txt to disallow spiders, then there should be no mystery as to why Googlebot is skipping over you. The logical solution would be to correct the file. In no way should it resemble the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
• Your server is too slow: Google won’t skip over you for having slow response time, but it will, however, grow impatient and index only a fraction of your pages.
• Google thinks you’re a spammer: If Google even thinks that you’re trying to deceive them in someway or cheat your ranking, they will not index your page. Once you feel as though everything is legit, you can submit a re-inclusion request.
• Bad navigation: If your navigation is all Flash or your site is just a bunch of broken links, then you’re probably not getting indexed.
• Spider traps: Anything that hinders a spider sifting through your site to index pages is probably a case of a poor code-to-text ratio. If your page has to redirect twenty times or the majority of your code is oozing in JavaScript, Googlebot is going to struggle through an index.
• Site is down/500-errors: If you are plagued with hosting issues and your site is constantly down when a spider tries to index, it will eventually give up.
Tags: website indexing
Much like the late Rodney Dangerfield, internal links get no respect.
Every time I hear an “expert SEO” rail on about the importance of inbound links above all else, I cringe. Not because it is an inherently wrong viewpoint, but because it takes the complexity of search engine optimization and boils it down to one factor. The success of Google has been hinged on its ability or failure to lower the strength of a single factor from being too influential, and although IBLs are still the single most important factor in most search algorithms, to make a link building plan for your website and not evaluate your internal linking structure is a mistake.
The first thing you must do is separate yourself from the ingrained concept that the web is a system of domains and sites. In search we must see the web as the search engines see it, as a series of interlinking pages. Granted factors such as domain age, and even where the site is hosted have weight, but in reality link equity rolls from page to page.
This means your website, has now become a much more powerful being, with x pages to disseminate link equity and relevance.
When I begin to work on a site I look at it in tiers. The first tier is your homepage. For almost every site on the web, their homepage is going to be the page on the site with the most equity. From there the pages in your homepage navigation (or any page linked from your homepage) becomes your second tier. The third tier is comprised of pages linked from the second tier, and so on. This is the way that link equity will be spread through your site, and it is the way that you should attack your internal link building efforts.
The first thing I do after figuring out my tiers is figure out which pages I do not need to get ranked in the search engines, and cap them off. What I mean by “cap them off” is use a “no-follow” tag to keep link equity from spilling into these pages, and thus wasting equity that can go to more relevant pages. Pages such as your “Privacy Policy” are a good example. Even Matt Cutt’s has offered his blessing on this tactic of controlling PageRank.
From here you should work with your keyword research to see what words are most important to your traffic strategy. If you have a great page written, with a great term that generates a ton of traffic, you will want to get an internal link to it on your homepage. This will promise this piece of content the most link weight possible from internal sources. This strategy becomes increasingly effective with low competition, long tail terms, that may need very little in terms of relevance in PageRank to climb to the top of the rankings.
You should work through your site from tier 1 to your last, linking to pages in descending value, using your keywords and matching content in the same manner. This will create a well structured use of your link equity from page to page. This is vital, because without it all of your link building efforts might be wasted as the link equity may not reach your powerful long-tails and deep pages.
Time and again I see sites with this issue. It is often the last thing that people think about in terms of making their site search engine friendly and highly marketable. However, a well structured internal linking strategy can make a large difference in your results from page to page, and an SEO strategy is usually won or lost in the small details.
Tags: internal linking
A guaranteed method to boosting your visibility on the web is by link building. When I say link building, I’m talking about quality link building. Anyone can chuck a handful of links at sites like del.icio.us or Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia, but those are typically sources of constant updating and offer only temporary traffic. To stand against time, you’ll need to invest time, and as the saying goes, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”
In ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link’, Debra Mastaler lists off a short set of guidelines by which she follows to build rank-influenced links:
- Place links on indexed pages.
- Look for web sites with strong established inbound link patterns.
- Use multiple variations of anchor text and point to optimized pages.
- Hyperlink whole sentences using associated text and keyword anchors when you can.
- Use online advertising venues with offline counterparts for keyword association and branding.
Not too much of a hassle, right? Well, you can’t go around peddling a link unless you have content to sell. It’s a topic that brilliantly segues into the key to offering an appealing link—good content. If that’s a sparse and malnourished side to your site, then the only sources that are going to want to link you are the ones you won’t benefit from.
Do Your Research
Where you need to be directing your link-building campaign toward are Authority sites; those that rank well for a set of keywords, are influential and high-profile, and your competitor’s websites. Make contacts with those “Authorities”; do your research and find out who is linking them and make even more contacts. It will feel a little like the first day at a new school, but if you’re serious about it, you’ll do it and it will prove beneficial in the whole scheme of things.
How to Get Linked
It is safe to assume that many high-profile sites receive a slew of link requests, so to stand out you should have an incentive prepared; something along the lines of a discount for a product, an offer to reciprocate links, or even blog you’ve written about the contact, prior to your request. It’s all about attention, and webmasters love nothing more than seeing their names hyperlinked.
Summary
Link building, procuring links that will actually mean something and drive attention to your site, is a process. There is no getting around it. It requires a proportionate combination of content and the available resources to invest into researching your competition and making that first contact.
Tags: link building
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