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June 16, 2008

Blogging Achievements & Goals

You know how you get some people who just take to blogging? I was not one of them people. I started blogging for all of the wrong reasons. It was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my competitors were getting blogs and I thought that I should have one.

If you look at the 1st few posts on this blog you will see that I blatantly did not know what I was doing. I would say that I started to enjoy it and get the hang of it around Christmas time. IMO the Mixx review getting linked to by TechCrunch was a complete fluke.

Over the last couple of weeks a lot of the hard work that I have put in seems to have really started to pay off.

About two weeks ago, Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog added this blog to his big list of search marketing blogs and yesterday Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog.com made me an official SOB.

Other blogging achievements include:

  • Around 150 RSS subscribers
  • Linked to by most of the major search blogs
  • Technorati top 25K
  • Over 100 unique visitors per day (without the main site)
  • Good SE authority – most of the posts rank well

Over the next 6 months I would like to achieve the following:

  • 400 RSS subscribers
  • Technorati top 10k
  • 200+ unique visitors per day

I would also like to start making some money doing this. If I can get this blog (including the rest of the site) making over £1,000 per month off advertising I can cut down on doing SEO a bit and focus on doing more blogs. I will start looking at monetization strategies this week.

June 10, 2008

Funny Link Request

I have just started to put in place a directory of UK web designers and yesterday I got my 1st request for a listing:

“Hi there,

Please can you put my design company into your Directory for Yorkshire. We are a newly established business but have a successful record so far! Our website is being built at the moment (funny how you can design everyone else’s website and never find time for your own!).

Our address:

Unit 4 Amber Business Centre, Rawmarsh road, Rotherham, S60 1RU.

Kind Regards,

Candice Link

Managing Director

JEWEL Cre@tive Ltd”

Her last name is link, how awesome is that for link requests? I was so impressed with her last name, I told her she could have a listing immediately, even though I have not properly launched the dir yet.

Candice’s website, Jewel Creative will be online soon.

June 7, 2008

Is The Googlebot Neglecting Regular Pages?

Googlebot

Image Credit: google bot

So it’s been nearly two weeks since I re-launched this site and Google has still yet to pick the two new services pages. About a year or so ago the Googlebot would have picked those pages up in a couple of days easily.

The blog is getting crawled fine and I am sure that this post will be indexed within a couple of hours of me posting. It just seems to be regular web-pages that are getting neglected by Google. This could possibly be because the Googlebot is paying too much attention to blogs etc.

It is not just this site’s regular web-pages that do not get crawled as fast any more. I work on many websites and generally Google does not seem to be picking stuff up as fast.

June 5, 2008

Advanced SMO: How to Build a Social Media Storm

Social Media Storm
Image Credit: energy transfer
If you have really good content that you want to get thousands of visitors to, then this guide should come in useful.

With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:

Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.

Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.

Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.

Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.

Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:

  • Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily
  • Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments
  • If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content

With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.

June 4, 2008

How Much For a Link?

A month or so ago, one of the sites that I am working on got mentioned in this big fashion magazine. The magazine had wrote an entire article about the client.

I am not going to say which magazine it was, but if they had linked to the client, it would have been an awesome link. There was however no link to the client. The really annoying part is: they had actually placed the client URL in the article, but without linking it through.

I conferred with the client and we came up with a plan to get the hyperlink: this involved us doing our best to get the person who wrote the article on the telephone.

After a couple of days, we did and she said that she may be able to help us out.

To our surprise she sent us the following offering:

  • £833 per month

And there was a 3 month minimum contract, that is £2,499 (about $5k) to hyperlink a URL that is already on a page for 3 months.

Needless to say, we did not take them up on their offer – We just thought that asking nicely would be enough.

June 2, 2008

Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google

A little while ago I read the following thread over at SEOmoz:

Results of Google Experimentation – Only the First Anchor Text Counts

This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank. I think someone mentioned in the discussion that even if the 1st link was nofollowed, it would still be the only one that counted. This would have meant that I was supposed to be completely shafting myself.

I got rid of the 1st links to the homepage altogether hoping to see a rise in Google for my main phrase, but I did not. I did however rise over 60 places, within less then a week or so on MSN/Live search.

I wanted to know for sure with Google, so when I 1st changed over my design less then a week ago, I made it so that every post in this blog linked to the about us page, with my name as the anchor text. I have just checked today and it is ranking 4th on Google UK, just behind my Yahoo! post.

  • The 1st anchor text always says about
  • There is very little on-page for it, other then the links in these posts
  • There are other pages with far more David Eaves links (external ones)
  • There are no external links to that page using that anchor text

My conclusion: Google does not only look at the 1st link to a page for anchor text, MSN/Live search does and I am not too sure about Yahoo!

Good advice and practice from SEOmoz anyway though, if only for MSN. Why take a chance on it? Make sure that you have your good anchor text in the 1st links to your pages.

Update: Seeing how VanDeMar seems to be the one who started this whole thing off, here is a link to his original post:

You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers

June 1, 2008

New Logo and XHTML Template Design

I have been working hard over the last week or so, on the new design for this site. I have still got a long way to go, but I certainly feel like things are starting to fall into place.

I have changed a lot of the URLs on the main site and as you would expect everything is going fine with Google. Yahoo! seems to be very slowly getting there and I have no doubt sent a kiss goodbye to many of my MSN/Live search rankings for quite sometime.

The new logo is what I like best about this new design, if you look carefully at the blue design, that is actually a little SEO, with an arrow pointing upwards at the top. When the designer James was showing it to me, he was like;

“the abstract design contains the letters S,E and O and the arrow pointing upwards represents your clients rankings going to the top.”

I just loved it instantly and I was like:

“you had me at S”

I am not too sure about this font and one or two people have commented that it is a little small, I will probably be changing it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to get this hacked up, broken thing looking like a blog as well.

May 15, 2008

Yahoo! Gets With The IP Delivery

yahoo_logo.jpg I am pleased to report that this morning when I attempted to go to http://www.yahoo.com I was redirected to the UK version http://uk.yahoo.com.

It was just the other week when I was complaining about this not working properly and I think Brian mentioned it in his Yahoo! rant somewhere.

I have got a couple of clients who rank fairly well on the UK Yahoo! for some pretty decent phrases who up until now have only been getting a couple of hundred uniques a week from it. It will be interesting to see if this improves things. I know for a fact that Yahoo.com can send some good traffic, it is just the UK version that up until now has never really sent any.

I do not know if this is working in other countries or not yet, it could just be UK IP addresses that are getting redirected.

Update: Flyerguy over at Webmaster World has confirmed that German IP addresses that visit Yahoo.com are now being redirected to http://de.yahoo.com. It looks like the changes could have been made worldwide.

May 10, 2008

Has Sphinn Traffic Increased?

Just been looking at my statistics tonight and I am pleased to report that according to Google Analytics Sphinn has sent 286 unique visitors to my last article Linking To The BBC Will Boost Your Google Ranking.

When I wrote the traffic estimate article on the 19th of February I said that on average it would send between 50-200 unique visitors to a popular story, but to be honest with you I had never seen anything above 120 or so, someone else persuaded me to raise it to 200.

Is this a normal amount of frontpage traffic for Sphinn now? Or was I just lucky? Should I update the traffic estimate article? Or not?

May 6, 2008

The Times: Linking To The BBC Will Boost Your Google Ranking

The Times LogoO.K. I am going to pick on The Times because it is funny. On Sunday they published an article entitled Searching to get to the top of Google.

Most of the article is O.K. and it is nice to see SEO getting mentioned in a major newspaper, however some of their facts are a little off.

On the 3rd page of the article it says the following:

“As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.”

There is a common miss-conception that linking to authoritative websites can boost a website’s rankings in the search engines and I have spoken to many people who have thought this before. This is of course not true, linking to a website can improve it’s rankings, linking out from one cannot.

This has got to be great linkbait for the BBC and the all of the National newspapers, I can just see all the Sunday Times readers going out and linking them now.