How to set up your Blog for Higher Rankings
BlogKing June 15th, 2008
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SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Archive for the 'Blog Tip' Category
How Can You Help Clients Become an Authority?
BlogKing March 12th, 2008
Jeff Quipp of SearchEnginePeople had an interesting article on What is authority and how to build it. Thanks Jeff for a terrific explanation.
photo credit: Erica_Marshall
There are only 3 primary strategies:
1) Be an expert, of which there are 3 primary approaches that I’m aware of:
a) Be amongst the best at a particular niche (eg. Bill Slawski at understanding and interpreting complex search patents, Muhammad Saleem at social media). This is a difficult balancing act. You don’t want the niche to be too narrow that you limit people’s perceptions of your abilities (not unlike type casting to some actors), though too broad and its near impossible to establish yourself as an expert, and less and less likely over time. b) Simplify and explain complex industry issues (Dosh Dosh or Rand Fishkin)c) Break new ground with respect to a subject. (Eg Tim Nash with understanding the algorithm of Stumbleupon, Seth Godin with his purple cow concept, or Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro with their research)
What’s really interesting here is that communication is key here to each of the above techniques; if no one can understand your contributions or the extent of your knowledge, you will attract no respect or admiration.
My personal belief is that this is where SEOs can help clients a great deal. We can help guide clients to understand where their particular strengths lie within an industry (are they extra knowledgeable about a particular niche? have they done research or discovered something really interesting about a particular industry concept? Or do they just have an exceptional knack for simplifying and communicating?), and then to help focus the clients to leverage those strengths.
2) Be a uber networker and super friend. People using this approach must give openly, have no expectations of reciprocation, and be genuine. They understand that “the best way to have a good friend is to be a good friend”.
Superior interpersonal skills are a must too if you hope to become an Authority. If someone is a great friend to many industry peers, many will develop an affinity with the individual, and he/she will get a chance to showcase his/her knowledge and earn their respect. People are also much more forgiving of limitations and mistakes made by friends … and we all have limitations and make mistakes!!!!
3) Carefully craft perceptions: Associate yourself with authorities. The phrase ‘guilty by association’ works both ways; be seen with the wrong parties and perceptions of your skills, abilities, knowledge, and judgment plummet. Alternatively, be seen with the ‘right’ people/sites, and perceptions of your skills and abilities are strengthened. This is important for individuals as well as companies … see DoshDosh’s post to this effect at How Brand Associations Help To Promote Your Website or Business.
Equally important, is the concept of being in the right place at the right time. Many a fortunes have been made (think Bill Gates and the launch of Microsoft) by people lucky enough to have been holding the gauntlet when the powers that be were thirsty. Of course, being in the right place at the right time is of no benefit if you are not prepared. I’ll argue its next to possible to predict when and where its going to happen, so preparation for the eventual opportunity is key.
In the end, you’ll find most authorities use a combination of these approaches, and almost all target a specific niche. The more approaches used, the more likely someone is to become an authority.
What is RSS and Why You Want to Use It?
BlogKing October 23rd, 2007
Found this excellent video totrial explaining RSS; you know those orange little buttons you see on blog sites. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Think of it as real time updating of content from your favorite sites all in one convenient place. Save yourself time and aggravation in keeping up to date. I have been using Google Reader and can recommend it. Fast, flexible and web based so readily accessed from anywhere. I will be testing on my iPhone this week.
Thanks to Matt Dickman of Marketing Profs for putting this together.
Must see Word Press plug-in tutorial
BlogKing October 11th, 2007
I have been using a plugin called All In One SEO Pack for several months now. It is great for optimizing your titles for search engines and letting you tweak them further, generating META tags automatically and letting you define them. Best of all it helps to avoiding indexing of duplicate content.[a no, no for Google bot]
Here is a video tutorial that explains its use in better detail than I can write. Seeing it done makes learning easy. The Tubetorial series on Word Press tips is excellent. Note especially the section on per post customization; here you can make the title seen by the search engines more keyword focused than the one you might want for the title that humans read.
Social media marketing with StumbleUpon generates easy traffic boost
BlogKing September 16th, 2007
What is Social Media Marketing and how do I use it to promote my business?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others.[1] The SMM goals will be different for every business or organization, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.
Seomoz did a comparison of 30 Social Media sites ranked for business usefulness.
For this post I want to focus on my favorite StumbleUpon.
11. StumbleUpon
Their pitch:
“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,284,477 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”
Our take:
Anyone remember eTour? The site whose tagline was “Surf the Web Without Searching” didn’t survive 2001’s dotcom crash. StumbleUpon is Web 2.0’s eTour and it’s an absolutely fantastic way to wander through websites that potentially interest you. There’s no typing, there’s no “links” pages to seek out. There’s not much effort on a user’s behalf at all.
- To use StumbleUpon, you must download an add-on to your toolbar that lets you give sites a thumbs-up, thumbs-down and click “Stumble!”
- Submit your site to StumbleUpon by clicking the thumbs-up button when you’re viewing your homepage. If you are the first person to bookmark your site, you’ll be prompted to give it a title, briefly review it and fill out some other information about its content.
- If you’ve said your site is about technology, users who have specified technology as one of their interests will potentially be directed to your site when they click “Stumble!” You may only pick one topic.
- The tags you give your site will also influence traffic. Unlike topics, you may include multiple tags.
- There is also an automated system whereby StumbleUpon reads a page’s text and decided what it’s probably about.
- The system sometimes gets it wrong (pages containing mainly graphics are obviously hard for the categorizer). Users, however, can report mistakes if they feel a site has been categorized inaccurately.
- Getting noticed on StumbleUpon depends on whether users identify your page as one they enjoy by using the thumbs-up button. The more people who identify your page as thumbs-up-able, the more traffic StumbleUpon will send you.
- Also, if a user comes across your site and really doesn’t like it, they can click a little thumbs-down button on their tool bar before leaving, demoting your site’s status on the StumbleUpon network.
- Members can join StumbleUpon Groups and contact others on the site, although these social features aren’t nearly as interesting as StumbleUpon’s addictive ability to store and present websites that people like.
- Additionally, although it is a free service, members can upgrade their accounts to the status of “sponsor” by paying twenty U.S. dollars per year. Sponsors have access to extra features, such as the ability create new groups and to keep messages in their inboxes for longer.
- One could argue that there’s a psychological advantage to having your site discovered by a Stumbler. After all, they’ve told a program what they like, and the program has presented them with your site. Hence, people are somewhat programmed to believe that they’re going to like what they see.
- StumbleUpon is linkbait’s tool of choice. When stumbling, you’ll often find yourself arriving at pages well within a site. Rarely are you directed to a homepage.
When I have stumbled posts on my blog here I often get a traffic surge for three day with a peak of 3x normal. Imagine if you tell a few friends to give the same post a “thumbs up”.
I know we’ve said it before, but we’re continually amazed at Stumbleupon’s ability to drive traffic. If you have good, linkable content, it will send you a few visitors. But if you create truly great content, it will strike a cord with a lot of people and send you lots of traffic.
The Secret to Sustainable Blogging
BlogKing September 4th, 2007
Who does your blog serve?
That is the question Darren Rouse ponders in this video report. Who benefits the most: the readers or the writer. Darren says the key to sustainable blogging is a balance focus on both.
Avoid These Mistakes During Your First Year in Blogging
BlogKing September 3rd, 2007
There has been a lot of posts written about the optimal way to blog. One of the most important tips in my opinion is establishing your self in the greater blogosphere that already exists around your topic.
Kristie T at the Home Business Blog writes that her biggest first-year mistake was “not reaching out to other bloggers soon enough.” She adds that she has worked on this, and “Now I have a sense of community with other bloggers.” I would add that it might feel really weird at first to leave comments and write an email or two. But most bloggers are really cool and happy to help and almost always write back! (Guy Kawasaki probably won’t write back. Unless you’re Arianna Huffington.)
So it’s not all about your own blog. Get out there and contribute to the community. You might get some good link love in return (its good to make the Google algorithm happy). [When available use a trackback for instant reciprocal link goodness.]
The second most important tip is write often.[I am working on that one myself]
Maybe you don’t feel inspired. Liz Strauss has 10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day.
We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.
That is great motivation right there. Writing will clear you head and bring better understanding. If you are writing a business blog isn’t that the value added; the hard won insights that distinguish you from the average practitioner. Sometime those insights come in the act of putting your thought into words for public consumption. So write and become wiser.
My favorite from her list is #3
Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.
Have you any thoughts about developing your blogging voice? Trials, tribulations, false starts. You are not alone. Share your ideas here.
