Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓
June 3rd, 2007 — SEO, blogs
In this post I looked at reasons why a good title is essential. These are some suggestions for turning a bland title into one that captures the imagination of the reader.
For example, suppose you write an article about “Getting links to your blog” On its own this is particularly boring, especially because this topic has been done many times. These ideas can make it more attractive. Which do you think is most interesting? which would you want to read?
1. How To:
“How to create more inbound links to your blog”
- We read articles if they are informative, how to, suggests we will be told something useful.
2. Secrets:
“Secrets of Gaining inbound links”
This suggests there are actually some new ideas for getting links that haven’t been covered on the other 10,000 + SEO blogs.
3. Myths:
4. Question:
5. Top 10:
June 3rd, 2007 — SEO
1. The title determines whether the post will be read.
I use Mozilla bookmarks for my RSS feeds. I look through all the titles and choose to read the ones with good titles. Boring or ambiguous titles can mean your visitors only take a momentary glance at your blog and then move on.
2. Titles determine Success in Search Engines.
Choosing keyword rich titles is an essential factor for determining traffic from search engines. If you choose a very short title like “Links” or “SEO advice” don’t expect any traffic from Google. You need to choose titles with less competition, but with keywords people still search.
3. A good title sets up the rest of the post.
Don’t choose an ambiguous title. If the title is clear it can give your writing focus. As a general rule, don’t try to cover too many things in the same post. It is better to split it up.
Continue reading →
May 25th, 2007 — SEO
If you would like to ask a question about blogging, SEO or writing, feel free to leave a comment on this entry.
I will try to answer your question as a new blog post.
May 25th, 2007 — SEO
For each blog entry. I prefer to use just one category. The reason is I don’t want duplication of content. If I chose 5 different categories. The blog post would be repeated in 8 different places on the blog.
- on home page
- as individual entry
- within 5 different categories.
- Monthly Archives
Maybe Google have a way of dealing with this, that doesn’t penalise the duplicate content. However, for the moment I am sticking to one or possibly 2 categories.
It is also a good reason to use the MORE function - it enables less duplication of content.
There is a good post here on avoiding duplicate content issues with wordpress; many ideas are useful for other blogging platforms.
Continue reading →
May 14th, 2007 — SEO
This is a tricky question, there are advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.
Advantages of having date in Blog URL.
1. It’s good for readers, they like to know when an article was published. I like seeing the date on blog post, so I can choose the most recent. If it’s useful for your readers it should be a good thing to do.
2. It gives a certain structure to your site. It’s a logical approach for a blog to take.
3. Numerical URls are suitable for international understanding
Disadvantages of Having Date in Blog URL.
Continue reading →
May 8th, 2007 — SEO
When I first started working on websites, like many people, I was fascinated with Google’s Page Rank. PR seemed to be the holy grail, if only you could get a link from a PR 8 site, all your problems would be solved.
The first website I worked on was Poetseers.org. At the time I started work on the site it had low traffic and a PR of 5. I was determined to move the PR to PR6. I worked very hard in creating links and content. In particular, I was always looking to get a link from PR 6 and PR 7 sites. Two things happened as a consequence.
- No matter how hard I tried the PR stayed exactly the same.
- Creating content and getting links helped increase traffic.
After 2 years I felt PR was of little importance, and now no longer even bother to have it installed on my google bar.
- PR and Recipricol Linking PR is often tied up with reciprocal linking. However, the benefit of reciprocal linking is uncertain. Reciprocal links can be very beneficial if they are from related sites. If they are from unrelated sites and / or on a long links page they will not be helpful, even if it is from a high PR site.
- Don’t Bother to buy PR. Some high PR sites started to sell links. However, Google is to clever to be fooled by links from sites, which are nothing other than expensive link farms. At best you waste your money. Rather than the PR of a site, consider these factors:
- Does it get good traffic?
- Is it an authority in its area?
- Does it rank well in the search engines for related keywords?
- Is the site focused on creating good content, or does it waste its time in SEO tricks like reciprocal linking?
- Promote Articles rather than promote site. Rather than worrying about the PR of your site. Consider the importance of promoting your articles and blogs. If people like your articles and blog posts, they will link naturally, without all the bother of recipricol linking.
- Don’t worry if sites have low PR. Sites with low PR will grow. All sites will start with PR 0
- What determines Usefulness of Links. The benefit of links depends upon factors other than PR
- Are they natural.?
- Does the anchor text include the keywords of your site?
- Is the site related?
This is not to say PR is completely irrelevant. Generally good sites accumulate a good PR. However, I once heard Google say PR, is for “Entertainment value only” - I think this is quite close to the truth. Don’t worry about PR, concentrate on creating good content and developing your blog in a natural way.
Related Posts
May 3rd, 2007 — SEO, design
In a recent post, I talked about the importance of getting inbound links.
I discovered on my Economics Blog that somebody wanted to link to a post but couldn’t find the Permanent link, therefore, they linked to the category, even though it wasn’t the best choice.
This made me realise that on the standard blogger design, the permanent link is hard to find. It is actually the small time, - not obvious to the average reader. for example see: poetseers.org blogspot (a blog that got retired)
It is unsuprising that people can’t find the permanent link. But, it means that if they can’t find it, then you will be losing out on potential links.
See: Economics Blog for a more obivous design. - The re-design uses principles of “Don’t Make me think”. This is a design concept I will go into more detail later.
May 2nd, 2007 — Increasing Traffic, SEO, blogs
There are 2 Main ways of getting higher traffic levels:
1. Increase traffic from Search Engines.
2. Generate a loyal readership.
In many ways they are interconnected. Good content generates a loyal readership, if people like your blog in the long term this will help search engine results. However, this post will concentrate on the first part.
Increasing traffic From Search Engines.
1. Create a big Site.
It may seem like stating the obvious but small sites generally get low traffic volumes; large Sites have much more scope for attracting traffic. Be patient, but try to commit to a regular publishing schedule to build up your archives. As a general rule, I aim to create 10 new Internet pages every day; that’s an average of 4,000 pages a year. Some of these pages will be time consuming articles, others will be shorter and quick to generate. The more pages you have, the more chance people having coming to your archives via a search engine.
2. Choose carefully the titles of blog posts.
The title of a post is very significant for determining traffic levels.
1. You need to include keywords that people search for.
2. You need to choose a title that does not have too much competition.
“economics” is a very popular search phrase, but a new blog will have no chance of getting listed in search results. However, if you specialise and choose, for example, “UK economy 2007” you have a good chance of getting traffic.
There is of course a balance between getting traffic and your readers. If you always come up with titles like:
“Free Online Tips for Increasing Traffic to your Blog” you may lose a little authority. But, it may be looking at titles of old pages and seeing whether you could tweak the title to make it keyword rich. Generally speaking longer titles are better than 1 or 2 word titles.
To help find best keywords, you can use programmes like Wordtracker and 103 Bees - (103 Bees is free)
3. Check Statistics to see which Keywords work.
Statistics pages are very useful for finding out the most popular ways people come to your site. For example, on my mortgage site, I found the most popular keyword was “Housing Market”. Therefore, I created blog entries related to these keywords; like for example “prospects for UK Housing Market” “Is UK housing Market heading for Fall” e.t.c.
As you can imagine this Mortgage blog makes for pretty interesting reading…
4. Increase Links to Your Site.
This is worth a post of its own “How to Get More links to your site”. Basically, the more relevant links you have, the more the search engines will trust your site. However, be careful some links are much more valuable than others. The main rule is that incoming links should be relatively natural. – Links from a range of websites, increasing over time e.t.c.
Continue reading →
April 30th, 2007 — SEO, link building
1. Very Good Content.
If your content stands out as being particularly useful, then over time this will attract webmasters to link spontaneously. Ask yourself, “Is this content I would want to link to?”
2. High Traffic.
If your site is getting 1000s of visitors, you automatically increase the chance of gaining natural, organic links. Most really successful sites have a combination of high traffic and good content.
- The problem is to get high traffic, you need links, without links you can’t get high traffic. Therefore other strategies are also needed to get links.
3. Blog / Web Directories.
A good place to start off for one way inbound links. Some directories are selective, so make sure your blog is worth linking to. If a blog isn’t selective, I doubt the link will have much weight.
- Dmoz is less important, but it worth trying to get listed (don’t get mad if it takes 3 years though)
Continue reading →
April 28th, 2007 — SEO
Since starting some new sites on UK servers, I have been surprised at the % of traffic from google.co.uk, rather than google.com.
In the UK, like other countries, there are 3 ways of searching google.
- www.google.com
- www.google.co.uk
- www.google.co.uk - pages in UK
Quite often, google.co.uk is different to google.com. Searching only pages in UK, can give very different results.
The % of people searching pages in UK is quite low, as a % of total search traffic. However, it rises for UK specific searches. For example, if you are searching mortgages in the UK, there are many advantages to limiting your search to just UK web pages.
The implications of this are that:
- There are advantages of having a site hosted either, in your country, or having a suffix like co.uk
- It is easier to rank for country specific sites, because you have less competition. This is important if you are trying to enter a very competitive keyword market. For example, my site Mortgage Guide UK is getting most of its traffic from co.uk. It is very hard to enter the .com mortgage search results
- If you have a .com site and host it in America, you will lose the chance to get country specific traffic.
The same theory applies for co.nz .de, .com.au e.t.c
The good news is that having a co.uk suffix will be liked by google.com
For a big site, it is advisable to set up domain mapping and redirects. For example, bbc.com redirects to bbc.co.uk
