Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season
If you want more traffic to your web site, you need to write posts that last a long time, that people can point at and come back to, over and over again.
These kinds of posts should be about what your site is about. They should show your expertise on the subject. They should be the kinds of posts that are so valuable, so informative or entertaining or insightful, that people will want to read them for years to come.
If you could write THE definitive guide or explanation to the subject of your site, there will be links and tweets and traffic.
Think about what your subject is, what keyword you want to be know for, and write a really good post about it.
You’ll see the traffic.
The evergreens we admire for their longevity
The most obvious way is to write about a topic that never gets old. These are cornerstone reference posts, like ‘10 Ways to Build a Better Blog.’ These posts are evergreen simply because people always need that information.
The good news is that evergreen reference posts are pretty straightforward to write. Do a step-by-step summary of how to do something from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself an evergreen post.
They’re also good for defining something that’s often mis-defined. For example, I have posts bookmarked in my ‘Evergreens’ folder on “What Marketing Really Is.” And I refer back to them often, because marketing is a slippery subject.
There are downsides to these types of evergreen posts. You’re up against a lot of competition, for one. There are already thousands of evergreen posts on building a better blog or providing better customer service. There’s probably an evergreen post on 10 Ways to Do Absolutely Any Topic Imaginable.
If you want your evergreen post to be the one that gets bookmarked, you’d better make it really, really good.
Which brings us to the second downside: Evergreen posts often require much more work than your standard post. You’ll probably wind up putting in at least 5 hours — and probably more like 15 — making sure everything is well-written, entertaining, compelling, and that you didn’t make any mistakes.
You might also be putting some extra hours into in-depth research if your evergreen post is on a topic that’s difficult to understand.
Read the entire article at:
http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/0GUusIszMsk/
Posted in web traffic |
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Here’s a list of SEO terms that you should be aware of, if you aren’t already. There are more where these came from, so go check out the site.
Long tail
In SEO terms, the ‘long tail’ refers to the less obvious, more specific (and therefore less competitive) but still relevant keywords and phrases you can optimize your site for. So instead of trying to optimize for very general and competitive phrases such as “coffee”, a long tail phrase might be “buy Costa Rican coffee.” For a very competitive field such as coffee, you might have to think of even more specific and niche phrases than that in order to find the ones you can rank highly for.
Why You Should Care:
If you are a small business, or just starting out, the long tail will help you find free & targeted (there’s that phrase again!) traffic. You will be able to rank more quickly for long-tail phrases instead of wasting your time trying to compete for very general terms that have established competition.
SERPs
This simply stands for Search Engine Results Page – i.e. the list of results that comes up when you perform a web search.
Why You Should Care:
That’s where you want your site to be!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.webtrainingwheels.com/2009/11/online-marketing-terms-seo-edition/
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
You know that local search is important. This is a list of places that can help establish your local listing on the web.
Each of these listings will bring you traffic.
Each of these listings will bring you traffic. Each should be pretty easy to use. Some offer paid listings as well as free listings.
- local.botw.org
- www.dmoz.org
- advertise.local.com/
- listings.yellowpages.com/
- selfenroll.citysearch.com/
- www.google.com/local/add
- botw.org/top/Regional/United_States/
- www.localeze.com/manage/
- www.dexsearchmarketing.com/
- list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
- searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/business.php
- my.superpages.com/spweb/products/business-listing
- Friends, Family, Partnerships with websites. Ask if they would be willing to swap links with your website to help promote both of your businesses.
Posted in web site build |
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
This is a great article on some common SEO problems, but I want to point out two of them in particular. Write it and forget it is one that I wish I could solve easily. It seems that there’s a common idea that SEO is something that you can sprinkle on at the end and then it’s good to go, that you never have to touch the site again. Wrong. The site must be updated at least once a week and more often is better.
This is not a spatula. This is a ramp of people falling into a pit. Look again.
Only looking at ego phrases are also an easy pit to fall into. You know that THIS phrase is the one that everyone should be looking for, but in reality, everyone doesn’t know as much as you do and they search for what they think is the right phrase.
I’m constantly surprised when reading reports on traffic for related keywords. There are always phrases and keywords with what I think is way too much traffic. Don’t people understand the best way to search? Well, no they don’t. You have to look at what people ACTUALLY search for and optimize for that. It doesn’t matter what goodness and truth is. It doesn’t matter what you know is the right way to search. It only matters what THEY actually search for.
by Jolina
2. Write It & Forget It
Website content is not a ‘set and forget’ project. Rather, web content should be treated as a living organism which needs ongoing care and nourishment (read new content).
A ‘set and forget’ mentality when it comes to web content will only keep you successful for so long. Eventually, competitors catch onto to the benefits of SEO as well and if they are creating new content they are likely to trump you for target keyword phrases.
4. Focus on Ego Phrases
Some clients make the mistake of hanging success of the entire program on what we call ‘ego phrases’. i.e. wanting to rank for a particular phrase because they think it is important, not because data predicts it will drive traffic
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/09/seo-pitfalls/#comments
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
I did some research on my new client, his site, and his industry. He has, or had, a web site built by someone else. I did some checking around to see where we stand before we begin. Here’s what I did.
Using the “SEO For Firefox” plug in and the Google Toolbar in Firefox, I found out that it’s been around for about 6 months. That will help us get out of the Google sandbox.
by NeilsPhotography
Using the “links:” search term in Google, where you type in “links:www.domainname.com”, you can find out how many other sites out there are linking to you. These are your “incoming links”. This one has 10 at the moment. That’s a cool place to start from.
It’s got a page tank of 0. That means there’s opportunity to improvement here! It’s got a good solid base, with a little history and some links to it, so when we start to optimize it, it should really respond.
This is much better than starting from a brand new domain name and new site, with no incoming links. Google doesn’t like those newbies. They could be spammers or child abusers or some kind of perverts.
Just like in the real world, they want to get to know you a bit before they trust you. It’s all about the reputation. Now that this site has been at the party for a little while, it’s time to make sure our hair looks good, that we don’t have bad breath, and there’s no food spilled on our shirt. Then we can walk over and introduce ourself to the host of the party, Google.com.
Posted in SEO |
