Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

I guess I am on Aaron Walls mailing list because I just got an email from him(Probably from buying his SEO book). He mentioned that he will be finished updating his famous SEO book in several days and in his email also included some goodies such as the following which I though I would share with you…

A video offering tips on how to install and use SEO for Firefox

8 other short SEO videos yesterday, and uploaded them to YouTube here

By the way, I got a chance to meet Aaron at a conference here in the Philippines. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, but he seems like a really nice guy.

I just finished taking SEOmoz’s SEO Quiz and got the following results…

SEO Dark Lord - 92%

Are you an SEO Expert?

The Quiz was pretty challenging and I learned a few new things from taking it such as the existence of the robots-nocontent tag and the most popular search engine in various countries. I’m sure even if you are an SEO expert you’ll have hard time answering some of the questions in this quiz. If you take the test please share your thoughts and results.

The Following is another post from Kreah, who blogs about Korean Dramas and Movies:

Your blog is the product of your passion and creative imagination. However, with the number of blogs being born everyday your hard work will be futile if only the search engine spiders will notice your new blog. Yeah, you can do seo and link building so you can drive search traffic to your blog, but what’s the use of this sudden flow of visitors if you can’t keep them on your site? Is there a reason that your first time visitors stay or keep returning to your blog? Will they value your blog just by seeing it for the first time? Whatever your response, your goal is the same as mine – to make your first time visitors return to your blog. So what shall we do then?

1. Be the first to blog something different in your niche

In my niche, two blogs just started in January 2007, and December 2006. I believe the bloggers are not even familiar with Search Engine Optimization but their blogs now having thousands of visitors everyday. Their secret? They are the first blogs to offer something new for the readers in our niche — a blog that specifically offers English episode summaries of dramas currently airing on Korean channels, and an updated Korean entertainment blog in English.

There are actually fans posting episode summaries in forums, and there are official Korean entertainment-news websites, but blogging these topics offers a different experience for the fans. Lately, I have seen a few blogs offering episode summaries like Dramabeans.com but they have a weak readership. Dramabeans is the first to blog on this topic.

So if you want to own a number of returning visitors in your blog, offer something new and different. Be the leader in your niche. Create a buzz. Being a leader will not be hard if you are really passionate about that something you want to blog about. Observe forums, and if you will find resources. Just remember the times when you were searching for a certain topic online and you got frustrated because you didn’t find the thing you wanted. Just be the first to blog about that topic, and you will surely get a community of returning readers.

2. If there is an existing blog on a subject create a new category or be the opposite

Don’t attempt to compete with existing bloggers in your niche by just trying to copy them and be “better” because readers will likely prefer the blogs they have loved first. Instead, be the opposite, the alternative, or be the first in a new category.

Since dramabeans.com is focused on summarizing dramas that are currently airing, a good category to be the first in could be making episode summaries of old dramas. For sure, there are fans out there who will be interested, especially if they can’t afford to buy old Korean drama DVD’s now, or just want to have ideas on what old drama to watch next.

Also there are existing sites and blogs that offer Romanized Original Soundtrack lyrics, just as mine blog, but I am the first to post lyrics with youtube videos. Visitors will stay longer on my site because they can sing while the music plays in the videos, or just watch the videos.

3. Use a catchy domain name, title and tagline

Why do you need a catchy domain name? If your first time visitors like your site, your domain name and blog title may be one of first things they look for, followed by your tagline. If your domain name and title are catchy, it can become a well known brand name in your niche. Try to make your domain name and title simple yet creative. The words in your tagline will be the back up if visitors can’t remember your domain name on their next visit. You will be surprise how many returning visitors start typing your domain name or blog title together with the topic they are looking for in the search engines in order to find your site again. Also, a tagline will make you and your visitors one because they can associate their selves to you. If it is a professional blog, sound professional, too. Just be sure that your domain name and tagline doesn’t sound the same as existing blogs. It happened to me, and I changed my tagline immediately. Good thing too, because as a result I have coined a word – the K-Addicts, referring to Korean Addicts.

Stand out in your niche!

4. Make effective and search engine friendly headlines for your posts

Well, what’s the use of being the first to blog something different, and having a catchy domain name, title and tagline if you are not visible in the search engines? You still need to exert more effort to get some search traffic. After submitting your url to directories and getting link through other methods, next thing is to make sure that the titles of your posts describe clearly what your posts is all about, put keywords in it – keywords that readers in your niche use. This is not a personal blog. Your blog is about your readers, your visitors.

5. Make sure your blog can be easily navigated

Personally, when I visit a site that does not offer me to view their previous posts, I often just leave the blog even though I like the post I first saw on the blog. Since I don’t want my visitors to have that same experience, I make sure my blog has a simple navigation.

Aside from putting the widgets for Top Posts, and Recent Posts, I created a tabed menu of categorized list pages of my posts. Each tab is a list of related posts. So, I have a tab for lyrics posts, for drama related posts, for movie related posts, etc. Doing this, I am sure that posts that are rarely viewed now have the chance to be noticed by visitors staying on my blog longer. Be sure to update the category pages once there is a new post for a certain list.

If you cannot simply categorized your posts or are lazy to update such list, then offer a search box in your blog.

6. Update your blog regularly

Update not just for the search engines but also for your visitors. Once first time visitors like your site, bookmark it, or subscribe to your feed, this means that they want to read more posts from you. I’m sure you’ll never run out of topics to blog about if what your blogging about is really your interest. If you cannot update your blog daily, twice or thrice a week will work. Just make sure you have new posts on a at least semi-regular basis.

There are some blogs that need to be updated almost daily, though. This is because they have to be committed to what their returning visitors expect from them.

Dramabeans.com really requires a daily update since the summary episodes are the current shows in Korea. It is like watching an episode everyday on TV. Popseoul.com, on the other hand is about the latest news about Korean celebrities.

So, also update according to what you offer in your blog, and be faithful to your tagline especially if you claim to be the latest.

7. Be visible! Stay connected.

Respond to comments and requests. Don’t be snobbish. Let your visitors feel they are important to you. If someone asks you a question, respond to it as soon as you can. If you can’t answer their requests, just say no, and tell them your reason.

Offer an e-mail where your readers can contact you aside from your blog, or add you in social networking sites. Visitors who are adding you in their friends list in Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Multiply, etc. can be your future contacts in your niche. You might need them someday.

I blogged a little over a month ago about moving from a wordpress.com hosted blog to your own hosting on your own domain. In that post I outlined a plan Kreah and I would follow to move the Kreah Craze Korean Dramas and Movies blog out of wordpress.com on onto its own domain and hosting over time. Although we are still working on improving the blog, we have now moved completely away from wordpress.com, so I asked Kreah to give us an update of her experience. I have also added my comments in blue. We will be going into more detail and giving further updates as time goes on to help you learn from our experience and hopefully avoid any mistakes we have made or apply anything we have learned.

In October of last year, I got hooked on watching Korean Dramas and Movies, and last April I decided to put up a blog dedicated to my obsession. I had managed a friendster blog for two years, but it was a personal blog, and I knew only a few of my friends would be interested reading my posts on my current obsession. So I decided to sign up for a blog in Wordpress.com and started blogging April 7th, 2007.

From a meager start of just 5 page views per day, KreahCraze.Wordpress.Com started having 50, 100, 1000, and eventually up to an average of 2500 page views a day. This was all before moving to my own paid web-hosting service. I even got around 3,500 page views a few days before I moved out of worpdress.com. This high traffic made me decide to monetize my blog. Wordpress.com has a policy of forbidding ads on their free hosted blogs, so in order to monetize my blog but also not lose a large amount of traffic, Chris and I came up with a plan last July to slowly migrate away from wordpress.com to my own hosting. I still have lost a lot of traffic(around 1,000 pageviews per day), but I am now making money with my blog, which I could have never done while still using wordpress’s free hosting.

I expected her traffic to drop a little, so there was no surprises there. I think this may have been minimized if we had done some more linkbuilding early on. From now on we are going to do link building to try to gain back any search engine ranking we have lost.

LINKS

Right now, it is almost two weeks after the switch, and I am trying to get back the traffic I have lost. Chris suggested link building. Well…the age of most of my visitors range from 12 to 30 years old, and I guess only a few of them would mind linking my site, so I really have to work on getting natural links or putting up the links on my own.

Good thing, though, I am still being redirected by wordpress because I haven’t deleted my blog, even though I changed my domain name to Kreah-Craze.com.

Wordpress.com maintaining our redirect from the old domain to the new one after we had started hosting the blog with another host was a pleasant surprise. I wouldn’t count on it lasting, but we are grateful as long as it is still up.

THEME and LAYOUT

I was bored with my old theme so when we made the switch I changed my theme. Aside from having only a few backlinks, I am thinking that the current theme and lay-out for my blog caused my visitors to move away, but Chris didn’t agree on this matter because my direct traffic is doing fine. Only the search engine traffic is declining. He also noticed that my bounce rate is doing well too. I guess I have to get my visitors’ opinion, or give them time to get used to the new theme. The new theme I chose works better with Firefox than with Internet Explorer.

ADSENSE

Monetizing my blog was the big reason I moved away from Wordpress.com. In the first week, it averaged around 3 dollars per day but now the revenue from the ads barely reaches a dollar per day. I am also disappointed that the Google ads appearing in the site seemed uninteresting to click on. I installed the Adsense for referrals but the products I chose are not appearing in the site after installing the code. Is this because there are ads that will not appear on a certain country? I chose any country on the options though.

So now, I am applying for Affiliate Programs to monetize my blog.

I think the drop in adsense earnings after the first week could be due to the fact that we added too many ad blocs and thus increased the amount of low paying ads that would show up. I could be wrong though. There is still a lot I think we could do to optimize adsense earnings, and I don’t think it would be too hard to start earning around $5 per day in a short period of time, by working on both earning more per visitor and increasing the amount of visitors to the site. There are also many things we can do to further monetize the site such as sell text link ads, blogger reviews, and even banner ads, in the future.

ERRORS

There were errors after moving out Wordpress.com

1. CDATA error – I really freaked out when the author’s name in comments does not appear, and the comments in Pages were totally gone. At the time of the switch, I had 877 comments. I asked Chris to work on it, after finding the solution to this problem. But Chris seemed to be busy so I ended up manually editing 877 CDATA entries.

Yes, I admit I am busy/lazy. Sorry.

2. Youtube Videos and Slideshows – I used youtube videos in most of my posts, like 100 out of 180 posts I had before the switch. And seeing the code instead of the video itself also freaked me out. Well, Chris easily solved this. I don’t know though what he did but good job. At least, now I know that the codes that I am using in Wordpress.com do not apply if another hosting provider is hosting your blog.

And now, I can easily embed javascripts in my posts. Yehey! (Well, this statement doesn’t have anything to do with the error.)

I just did a find and replace in notepad to replace the old code in every instance with the appropriate new code. It was a little time consuming since every instance of a youtube video had a ] which had to be replaced by some code, but not every ] was an instance of a video, but it was a lot more efficient that editing every instance by hand.

3. Korean / Hangul / Asian Fonts – Aside from posting lyrics that are Romanized (from Korean Characters to Roman Letters), I also put the original lyrics in the few posts I had. Sadly, Korean Characters or any language that doesn’t have Roman letters, do not appear correctly in the blog. These characters are replaced with question marks. According to my research, this has something to do with the ‘encoding for pages and feeds’, and specifically the wp-config.php file.

PLUG-INS

I don’t have to worry about Plug-ins in Wordpress.com but I want to install plug-ins though like Sociable and Top Commentator plug-ins.

At first, I thought installing the plug-ins was easy, like just putting some code in text widgets or widgets will be readily available after activation. But I realized it wasn’t. Some plug-in codes need to be installed using the theme editor. It is still a good thing because I am learning CSS slowly. All I have to do, I guess, is to apply logic. There are instructions I can follow, and I can do the “trial and error” method until I succeed. Right?

Kreah has done quit a bit of installing plugins and editing her theme without my help. I am proud of her.

I have a friend who has a highly trafficked blog hosted on Wordpress, kreahcraze.wordpress.com. Since my friend is getting quite a bit of traffic she would like to add ads to her site in order to make some money with her blog. However, wordpress doesn’t allow its users to have ads on their blogs. So, I have been helping her move her blog to her own domain and hosting, where she will have complete control of her blog. The tricky part about doing this is that she will likely lose a lot of traffic since many of her pages are listed in the search engines under her Wordpress.com domain and she likely also receives some traffic from Wordpresss.com itself. We have come up with a plan to minimize loss in traffic as much as possible while still giving her complete control of her blog on her own domain. I have not done this before so I have tried to do as much research on this subject as possible but haven’t found anyone explaining exactly what I think would be the best plan of action in her case, so I decided to share our plan in case someone else is considering doing the same. The plan is…

1. Buy a new domain (kreah-craze.com).

Cost: $8/yr.

Although Wordpress allows you to buy a domain through their site we decided to go with GoDaddy since we want to be eventually completely independent from wordpress.com.

2. Buy Domain Mapping from Within The Existing Wordpress Account

Cost: $10/yr.

This feature allows you to re-direct your existing traffic going to your wordpress.com blog to your own domain. So all traffic going to http://blog.wordpress.com/post/ will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/post/. At this point the blog is still technically hosted by Wordpress, but since the traffic is redirected using a 301 redirect to the new domain the search engines should recognize that the blog has moved permanently and will eventually update their index to list the new domain instead of the old one.

3. Build Links to and Promote the New Domain

Cost: It’s up to you. In our case very little.

By building links to the new domain we will help the search engines recognize and index the new domain and hopefully reclaim any loss in search engine ranking we may experience due to the switch. We will tell existing readers to update their bookmarks, and notify anyone linking to the old domain to update their links to point to the new domain. We want to get as much traffic as possible going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain.

4. Move the Blog to its Own Hosting Independent of Wordpress.com, Run on an Independent Installation of Wordpress (downloadable at wordpress.org), and Add Ads

Cost: In our case $0 since we are just adding the domain to my existing hosting account, which allows unlimited domains. However, costs for those starting with nothing can range from a couple dollars per month up. I use HostMonster for hosting.

Once the search engines have indexed the new domain, and a significant amount of the blog’s traffic is going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain we will cut all ties with the old domain and move the content of the blog to its own installation of wordpress on a separate hosting account. The reason this step is necessary is because up to this point the blog has still been hosted for free by wordpress.com, so the ban on ads still applied. To my knowledge you can only use the domain mapping feature as long as you are still hosting your blog on wordpress.com. When you move to your own hosting you are on your own and can no longer redirect the old domain to the new one. However, once we move to our own installation and hosting we can add ads and start monetizing the blog, which was the point to doing all this in the first place.

Additional Notes:

• When moving from an old domain to a new one using a 301 redirect you would usually keep the redirect in place permanently. However in this case that is not possible since we need to be independent of wordpress.com in order to add ads to the blog. If you were to do the switch also I would recommend waiting as long as possible before taking the last step and moving to your own wordpress installation so that more of your traffic is going directly to the new domain. Any traffic still going through the old domain when you make the switch to your own hosted installation will be lost.
• We will most likely lose some traffic no matter what when you finally do move to your own installation because there are existing links out there pointing to the old domain that will no longer be redirected, we will no longer receive traffic from wordpress.com, and we will likely experience a drop in search engine rankings. Hopefully we will build up enough traffic going directly to the new domain that this loss in traffic will be fairly insignificant.
• We are likely to lose some search engine rankings during this process because your old blog is hosted on wordpress.com which is already an established, trusted domain, and your new domain will initially be given less trust by the search engines. We can overcome this in time by promoting and building links to the new domain.
• If you were to do this switch and have an existing feedburner account it will be fairly easy to switch the feed to the new domain from within feedburner. However, if you are just using the default wordpress feed I would recommend start using a feedburner feed as soon as possible and encourage existing wordpress feed subscribers to switch to the new feedburner feed so you can take them with you to your new domain. Once you make the switch to your new domain all your previous wordpress subscribers will be lost.
• I have never actually done this before so I am not completely sure how it will all turn out. I will post an update when the entire process is complete and maybe a few updates in between. I hope for the best.

Update Aug. 27th, 2007: Kreah and I have written an update of this project at http://www.chrissandberg.com/an-update-on-switching-away-from-wordpresscoms-free-hosting/

Graywolf is offering to answer questions on his SEO blog, with the condition that you ask your question in a blog post. I trust his opinion so I wanted to take advantage his offer. This is what I would like answered:

Could you explain Latent Semantic Indexing and similar technologies and their implications to SEO? What strategies and tactics would be most effective given that search engines are using these technologies in their algorithms?

Anyone else who would also like to share their own response to these questions please feel free to do so in the comments below or in a blog post of your own. Thanks.

I just ran across a site called RankPulse, which tracks the top ten ranking of sites returned for 1,000 popular keyword searches on Google. I ran across the site because one of my domains, sandbergventures.com ranks in the top ten for the keyword “internet business“, which happens to be one of the 1,000 keywords that RankPulse tracks.

A few useful application of RankPulse:

• Monitor the RankPulse Index, which represents the number of positions websites moved within the top ten for a particular keyword among the 1000 keywords tracked. A noticeable increase in this index could be the result of a significant change in Google’s algorithm.
• Get a glimpse of the relative volatility in rankings for a given keyword by analyzing the ranking history of the sites listed for that keyword.
• Track the keywords for which any give site is ranking. Just going to http://www.rankpulse.com/www.anydomain.com, will give you a list of all the keywords for which the given domain has had a ranking for any of the keywords that RankPulse tracks.

This site would be a lot more useful if they tracked more keywords, but even with just 1,000 keywords the site provides a lot of valuable information and is very interesting to browse.

I just found out that Dave Bascom’s Web Targeted was sold to WashingtonVC who was able to acquire the domain name SEO.com for $5 Million. Dave seemed pretty excited about this news on his blog, and I am happy for him. He is a great guy and a very knowledgeable Search Engine Optimizer. They have gotten a bit of exposure (and will probably get more) from this news in the SEO blogosphere. I have found commentary on Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim, and Threadwatch, which are three very popular online destinations for SEOs. It is cool to hear this news happening in Utah (I am from Utah in case you haven’t figured that out).

I just barely changed all my blog post permalinks on this blog from the longer /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to the much simpler and shorter /%postname%/. I have been wanting to do this for quite some time, but was worried about the loss in traffic I may experience due to old links pointing to my old URLs.

It’s very easy to change the permalink structure in Wordpress. You just go to admin panel Options->Permalinks, change your permalink structure to your new desired structure, then click the Update Permalink Structure button. The problem with this, however, is that any old links poining to your old URL will become broken, which will cause a loss in direct traffic from those links and a loss in search engine rankings that old URLs may have occupied.

The solution is to do a 301 redirect from your old URLs to your new ones, that way any traffic directed to your old URLs will automatically be redirected to the new ones, and Google will recognize that your pages have permanently moved and will update their index accordingly. I used the Permalinks Migration Plugin for Wordpress that easily accomplishes all this. Now old posts such as my learn how to make money from blogging post can be accessed through either its old URL its new URL.

Here is a little step by step guide if you would like to change your permalink structure and not lose any traffic or search engine rankings.

1. Download and unzip the Permalinks Migration Plugin.

2. Upload the file deans_permalinks_migration.php into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.

3. In Wordpress go to admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration and enter in the old permanlink structure of your site.

4. Go to admin panel->options->Permalinks and change to the new permalink structure of your choice.

After completing these four steps all of you old URLs will automatically be forwarded to their appropriate new URL.

I am writing this post as part of Darren Rowse’s Group Writing Project. The following are my five favorite blogs related to doing business online. I would recommend them to all.

1. ProBlogger: Darren gives great advice on everything related to Pro blogging.
2. Pronet Advertising: I would say this is the best blog out there about social media from a marketers perspective. Neil and his gang have done a great job.
3. SEOmoz: Rand Fishkin and the folks at SEOmoz provide a steady flow of good advice and information related to Search Engine Optimization.
4. CopyBlogger: Brian gives great advice related to copywriting. I am constantly amazed at the quality of every post he publishes.

5. John Chow dot Com: Although his blog tends to go off topic quite frequently John offers great information on everything related to making money online.

While trying to come up with this list several other blogs came to mind which are also worth reading, so I’ve decided to list them below if you want to check them out.

SEO Book

Paul Allen (the lesser)

Newspapergrl

Macalua.com

Shoemoney

Seth Godin’s blog

Search Trends

The Carolynn Blog

and so many more…