The 10 for 10 Challenge

The 10 for 10 Challenge

This does two things. First, it builds inbound links to your site, boosting your SEO and ultimately getting more traffic from search engines. Second, there’s an immediate effect of having the site owner, other readers, and commenters become aware of you, which might lead them to check out your site, using the link in the comment.

This works for both other blogs and for forums. It also works on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not convinced that it works as effectively there. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that point. There are a lot of people who read this site that have Etsy shops. Their forums are a great place to post.

I want to help you out, my precious readers. I want you to have a direct benefit from reading this blog. So, here’s what I’m going to do.

The Challenge

I’m announcing the “10 for 10 Challenge”.

Post at least 10 comments on other people’s sites for 10 days in a row. That’s a total of at least 100 comments.

Document the number of visitors to your site on the day you start and at the end of the 10th day. That’s 10 full days of visitors.

The Prize

Whoever has the greatest increase in those 10 days will get a promotional article on my site, including an interview with you, a review of your site and your products, and a link in the sidebar on walton.com, (which is great for your SEO.)

The Rules

You need to have Google Analytics installed on your site, or another statistics program that can be verified.

The 10th and final day must be on or before July 12, which is 2 weeks from the day this article is published. That will give you a couple days to get the statistics program installed if you don’t have it already and you can do a little research for where you want to leave comments. If you want to start now and pick the best 10 days to get your maximum number, you can do that too.

Send me a screenshot of the statistics program, show the number of visits for each of 10 days in a row. The site with the greatest increase in the number of visits between the first day and the tenth day will win.

That’s not a percentage, it’s the number. It’s not the number of page views, it’s the number of visits. It’s not just the 10th day either. It’s the first day compared to any other day within 10 days. If you have a bump on the 7th day, then it declines, take the number on the 7th day. We’re looking for the greatest increase.

The actual comments that you leave are not verified. The only thing we’re counting to win is the increase in the number of visits.

Email me with your results. Show me a screenshot. The winner will be determined based solely on my judgement and my decision is final.

The Strategy

The way to make this work is to know your market. Research where they hang out. Search Google for your keyword and the term “forums” to find forums related to your product. Use your keyword and try searching for “best keyword blogs”. You can search for just your keyword, note the top 10 results, and see which are blogs or places that accept comments.

Once you have a good list of places to leave comments, hit them all, every day. See what people are talking about first. Don’t just jumps in with “Please visit my site”. No one cares about that. You need to be helpful. Answer questions. Be an authority. Give solid information. Ask great questions. Be that interesting person at the party that everyone wants to talk to.

The Benefits

If you are not using a stats application now, you should be, and this challenge might push you into doing that. Going through the process of looking for sites to leave comments, then actually leaving them, will get you into a great habit that will SEO your site for the long run.

If you leave 10 comments a day for 10 days, you WILL have more traffic, regardless of this challenge. You may not win this, but you will have more traffic. Everyone who attempts this challenge will have more traffic.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Posted in web traffic |

Free SEO Software Tool & Text Browser, Search Engine Optimization Tools – SEO Browser

This tool will show you what your web page looks like to a search engine. It removes all of the pretty formatting and shows you the text in relative sizes. Links and copy, that’s all that the search engine sees and all that this shows you. You can see which links are more important than others. Maybe you’re not even aware of what links are on your page or how much text you have.

The advanced option shows you some of the technical data that they consider. That info for walton.com is below.

Yeah, it’s a bit confusing, but look at the number of links, external and internal. More internal links is better than less.

The ratio of text to the entire amount of code on the page is interesting also. That’s 46.9% below. That means that only 46% of all of the code on the page is readable text. The other 54% is HTML markup and script and tags and stuff that makes the page work, but users never see. More readable text is better than less.

This might make interesting reading on a boring Spring day, but the really valuable way to use this information is to compare it to your competitor’s pages.

Can you add more links? More copy? Better use of keywords in your internal links? Look at your page with your keywords in mind. Do you use them? Where you can use them more?

Go look at your page with the tool and tell us what find.

Number of of Meta characters : 343
Number of of Meta Words : 50
Text to Page Weight Ratio: 46.9%
Number of of Meta Keywords Words : 25
Canonical Link: http://www.walton.com/
Page loaded: 1.685 seconds
Frame Info: No Frames
Page size: 122.5 KB
Noframe Info:
Number of of Words: 10269
Number of of Frames: 0
Number of of Body Words : 10139
Number of of Cookies: 2
Number of of Images All: 34; with Alt Text: 32; without Alt Text: 2
Number of of Links: All: 270 (External: 50, Internal: 220 );
No Follow: 0
Robots.txt yes
IP address : 76.246.231.1
favicon.ico file: yes, script: yes
Country: United States
Number of of External JavaScript: 31
Number of of Imagemaps: 0
Number of of Objects (Flash): 0
Clickstream Reporting: [Google Analytics]

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seo-browser.com/

Posted in SEO |

Ten With Tess – An Interview On SEO Success

Last week, I wrote an article, Do You Love To Talk? SEO for Comment Virgins, urging people to leave comments on other people’s blogs to increase their own SEO.

Among the 7 people who followed directions and commented on the post was this from Tess Richardson:

After months of procrastinating over the SEO thing, I downloaded your free guide and started getting busy. In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, sites related to one of my Etsy products, Google analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views. I can send you a screen shot if you would like it.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Conrad.

Click to see the whole chart.

This kind of feedback makes me crazy, so I had to follow up and find out more. Please visit her site. Here’s the interview she gave me. The book she refers to is The Simple Guide To SEO.

What prompted you to download the SEO book?

Tess Richardson

I was–until Dec. 31 of last year–a communications and marketing director for an employee benefits consultant. I am not new to some of these concepts, but I had never tried them before and did not have a comprehensive understanding of them until I read your free download. Before that my knowledge consisted of bits and pieces: use really good keywords, inbound links, converse on other’s sites/blogs in a meaningful way. I never had time to put this knowledge to work at my previous job. I really needed someone to put it all together in terms I understood.

When I saw the post in the Etsy forums, I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed.

How would you describe the book? Good points? Bad points?

I love the glossary. I love the light, readable style. I love that it’s free! (I kept wondering, “What’s the catch?”)

I LOVE the checklist toward the back, but it doesn’t seem to be in the same order that things are discussed in the book. That bothered me.

I would also like to see the checklist broken up into “Things to do RIGHT NOW,” “Things to do next week,” “Things to do next month,” or something like that. For newbies it’s a lot to digest in one sitting, even if it is all well-explained. I have gotten a start, but I did skip over some of the “sign up for this account and that account” things. I mean to get back to them, but I just picked a couple of tips at random and jumped in. Many people are not comfortable doing that, I suspect.

What did you learn from the book? What stood out?

One thing jumped out at me right from the moment I skimmed it, before I downloaded and printed for later digestion: You must have a blog. Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above. I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book. http://homespunlife.wordpress.com

Another thing was about using bold and italic. I had never read that elsewhere.

Tess Richardson at her Ashford Spinning Wheel (aka My Precious)

How did you find the sites to comment on?

A little background on my Etsy site…I started with rosaries, then added homespun yarn, then got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on a young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next BIG THING, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet. Even though I hope to really establish myself in the homespun yarn market (hence my blog focus), the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales since it was an untapped niche with an eager market.

I thought about where I could find my target (tweens and teens who loved the books) and started Googling for fan sites. That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them, getting a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some I had to join, like Facebook fan pages and Fanpop.com.

How many comments did you leave? How much time did you spend?

I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord. I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.

It was time consuming, though. I spent an entire morning on it earlier this week and maybe posted on 4-5 sites total.

What was the biggest obstacle in starting from nothing to getting 132 page views?

Having to register for some of the fan sites. I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!

What was the easiest part?

Actually, it was all pretty easy. I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites.

What surprised you the most?

The fact that my Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place, on the first page overnight!

What advice would you give someone else with an Etsy shop?

Some niches will be much harder than others to see results on. For example, my homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors. But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.

Any other comments?

Having spent time chatting up my Hunger Games bracelets on fan sites makes me look at my future product offering with new eyes. I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop. On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining Hunger Games fan sites by developing other products for HG fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.

Another thing I’m really excited about, having tasted just a bite of success, is that I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction. My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.

Thanks, Tess!

If you want more information about Tess, please visit her sites:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ColdHandsWarmArt
http://homespunlife.wordpress.com/

What did you learn from this story? Did you learn that if you leave interesting comments on other people’s sites that you might end up getting a lot of attention for your site? Would you like to leave a comment now, after reading the interview, and tell us all what you learned? I thought you might. Thanks!

If you haven’t read the book yet, you can download it here:
The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO

Posted in SEO, featured |

Beyond SEO – Who ARE These People?

The strategy behind SEO is that you optimize your web site and other’s web sites to that the search engines put your site at the top of the search engine results pages. Being at the top of the page means that more people will probably click through to your site.

That’s all well and good, but technically, you don’t really care about getting people to come to your web site. You really care about getting people to buy your stuff.

The Goodyear blimp in Los Angeles is based a few miles from where I live. We see it all the time. On today’s bike ride, it came out from over the city and turned South to cruise down the coast. It flew almost over my head before I could stop and get a camera out.

On sunny days, they fly airplanes over the water, parallel to the beach, with big banners flying behind them, advertising beer or some event. They fly up and down while surfers surf and sunbathers sunbathe, uninterested in them.

They blast out their message to everyone within sight. Does everyone run out and buy Goodyear tires? or buy Coors Lite? If they’re lucky, they get a small percentage of sales.

Is that what you are doing? Are you optimized for a keyword that brings a lot of people, but not the people that want to buy your products?

SEO traffic is great, but you should target people who love your products. Aim for the fans, not for the crowds. Work on relationships, not on quantity. It’s better to have people who are interested and stick around and read your stuff than the people who are clicking through and bouncing out within 8 seconds.

A practical step step to do that is to figure out who is coming to your site now. Where do they come from? What are they looking for? Who stays around? Who bounces quickly?

Google Analytics has a few ways to dig a little more information out of all that data. There’s a button named “Advanced Segments” above the chart on the main stats page. If you click on that, you can look at segments of the traffic, like new visitors or sources. In the right hand sidebar, there’s a link to “Custom Reports”.

Try to find out who these people are that come to your site and why they are coming there. Look at keywords. They might not be what you expect.

Those tools will give you hours of fun, sorting through data.

When you think you have a better idea of who all these people are, you can focus your site on giving them what they want. Then maybe, you can make a few more sales.

Posted in SEO |

Read Your Analytics Stats

I was walking a client through his Analytics stats yesterday, explaining what each page, each section meant. I asked him if he ever looked at these since we set them up. He looks at them as much as you do, which is never.

What traffic are you missing?

As we drilled into the content part of it, I saw that no one, as in not one person, was looking through his portfolio pages. I realized that these pages have a smaller menu over to the side that people could easily miss.

Also, when I redesigned his site by bringing it into WordPress (of course), the top, main menu now has a different look and action than the original small portfolio menu. I used to just put a glow around the highlighted menu item and now I was doing the whole colored div background, which is much more apparent.

Now we have a menu that looks and functions differently and no one who ever clicks on them. HHHmmmm. What to do?

Next step, I put in the same style menu as the top, so they highlight the same. That should improve the click on those. We’ll be watching his stats to see what happens.

Read your Analytics pages today. What traffic are you missing?

Posted in statistics |