Posted by RobOusbey

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics has been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ – I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work – both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved – they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  – a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples – and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions – but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly – even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (‘cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (‘internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (‘currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research – a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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A Guest Post by David Cleland from TotalApps.

In 2006 I proudly started my first blog, DigMo! It was technology, it was creativity, it was music and it was education. Despite it being a bit of blog soup I was pleased at how quick the site grew but within a few years it reached a critical point beyond which I really couldn’t get the traffic to grow. The site was frankly far too general to appeal to a specific community.

The site had a massive 80% bounce rate and taking advice from reading the great advice on this site I decided to take stock and critically re-evaluate the future of DigMo!

As a result I decided to split the site and create two separate niche blogs, DigMo! To focus on educational technology and I launched a new site, TotalApps, to focus on Mac and iPhone App reviews. The thought of starting from zero scared me and I looked at ways to get the site up and running quickly.

I decided the best way to draw attention to the blog was to offer regular site competitions. Finding companies willing to sponsor prizes was actually much easier than I initially expected. I tend to target companies whose product I have reviewed and especially if the review has been popular with readers.

With blog authors being urged to declare any products they are able to keep once a review is published what better way to retain your creditability but by passing the review samples on to your readers as a competition prize ? It seems to me like a logical benefit that will add value to your site and grow the community.

The Mistakes

I think it is best to share my mistakes with the Problogger readers and the initial competitions I ran simply required visitors to leave a comment on a post. This didn’t grow the site and managed to result in a massive 70% bounce rate i.e. the users came, entered, and left knowing we would email them if they had won.

The Successes

I decided if I was going to make competitions really work they needed to be of benefit not only to the visitor but also the site and thus I needed to limit entry to RSS subscribers (both email and reader)

The solution was simple and surprisingly successful and will basically work for anyone running a Wordpress blog even with a custom theme.

Setting the competition up takes a tiny bit of code adjusting but nothing too difficult.

The Concept

The competition works by placing a code at the bottom of blog posts that will only appear when the entry is read in an RSS reader, i.e. it does not appear on site.

To do this I used a known solution that was pointed out to me by fellow blogger Thaya Kareeson.

There are a few versions of this idea around but this solution works brilliantly on TotalApps. As I haven’t come across any plug-ins that can run competitions this bit of code fiddling is the ideal solution for now.

Getting Started

Open the functions.php file in your current theme folder (I would back this up before adding the code just to be on the safe side).

Paste the following code into the text :

function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'TotalApps Competition Code (Please note it is case sensitive) : a12221s';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('a12221s', '[code hidden]', $comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');

There are two lines you need to change - 1. the line that says TotalApps Competition Code and 5 lines down the code is repeated (a1221s).

I recently ran a competition where visitors could win a copy of Screenflow 2.0. The following screenshot shows the bottom of the post as it appeared in the browser.

……. and this is how it looked in the RSS reader. You should note your RSS Feed must be the full article view (i.e. not just the abstract) for the code to appear.

When the competition closes as I generally ask the sponsor to select a number between 1 and the number of comments and then contact the lucky winners using the email address in the comment.

When a competition closes you can either comment out the code in functions.php by adding /* before the code and */ after or alternatively is simply change the text to "No competition at present"

Offering a reason to sign up to the RSS feed resulted in the number of TotalApps RSS subscribers growing in one month to double the number of readers DigMo! had after 3 years.

Tips :

• Know what your readers want and try and target prizes appropriately.
• Make sure you link to your RSS and RSS by Email Feeds in the post to make it as easy for visitors to subscribe as possible.
• Make sure you make the rules clear and post the winner's name publicly on site.
• Where possible have the competition sponsors look after the postage. This not only saves you time and hassle but it is also assures the sponsor the competition is above board.
• Don't run competitions for more than a week as most of the comments tend to happen in the first week after that it dries up quickly.

I have to say I am certainly no expert in coding or blogging but am really excited to find a solution that really works for managing the competitions and I am equally as excited to see the number of subscribers grow.

There may even be better solutions out there and if you know of any I would be keen to hear them.

David Cleland is a teacher based in Ireland who runs three successful blogs (TotalApps, FlixelPix and Digmo.co.uk)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Run Subscriber-Only Competitions on Your Blog

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In this post David Wright and Sean Platt from direct response copywriters share some suggestions on indicators of when your blog might be on the road to success.

Starting a blog was one of the most exciting things we have ever done. Building a loyal audience, gathering intelligent subscribers with insightful comments, and making plans for the future were all part of a wonderful first year blogging. The problem for us was that reading about blogging and actually blogging are two entirely different things.

Blogging is hard work. Much like becoming a parent, all the warnings in the world do little to prepare you for the reality.

No blog becomes famous overnight unless its author happened to be famous a couple nights before. Blogging requires hard work and diligent effort for a sustained period of time. Many bloggers give up in the first few months and the majority never see their sixth. I can sympathize. With all the blogs screaming for attention, how are you supposed to know if your work is going to pay off or if you‘re wasting your time?

Outside of tons of visitors, or lots of ad revenue, success is defined differently by different people. Some bloggers are seeking a path to money while others are more interested in simply connecting or sharing their voice. The list below is simply a way of gauging whether or not people are connecting to your blog.

Five ways to tell if your blog has what it takes:

1) Comments

Comments can be both an empty measurement and a solid indicator that things are going well. If your blog is receiving a lot of comments, that’s probably a terrific sign. However, if the majority of those comments ring to the tune of “great post!” then even 100 are rather meaningless. A couple of valuable comments that provoke discussion are far better than double digit comments that are only there for the benefit of a link. It means that people are finding value in your content and interested in engaging you and other readers regarding that content.

Darren previously wrote on 11 ways to get your comments noticed on a popular blog. Use this information to help you determine the value of the comments you’re receiving, while helping you to learn to make your best comments.

2) Subscribers

All growth is progress. If your subscriber count is growing, then you can consider yourself on the right track. Slow and steady wins the race and it can take months blogging to break into the triple digits. Many people, ourselves included, set unrealistic goals for their subscriber counts. This only leads to disappointment and frustration. Be realistic and remember, blogging is a process, not an event. If your numbers show steady growth, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you need to reevaluate your content, posting frequency or perhaps your social media strategy.

Darren has written many times on getting more RSS subscribers. This post has 9 tips to help you find more with a nice video and link roundup.

3) Links

Links are the currency of the net and help to pay for whatever it is your blog needs: traffic, social proof and search engine rankings; all are the direct result of high quality links. And one of the best ways to generate quality links is to produce quality content (and make sure that content is seen). The more recognized you are, the more links you will receive. The beauty of incoming links is that they carry a cumulative effect. After a while, people will start linking to you simply because others are.

Getting links is important. Here are 11 ways to increase your chances of being linked to by a blogger, as previously written by Darren.

4) Friends

With blogging, an ever expanding web of friends and blogging buddies is essential to long term success. You could even make the case that who you know is sometimes more important than what you create, though I do believe the quality of your work must always stand on its own. Strive to meet new people and widen your network as best you can. I’m not saying to strike up phony friendships with people you’d otherwise have no interest in. Rather, find people you are genuinely interested in and can learn from. You will have created a network of mentors that can teach you a lot more than a dozen courses. If there is a natural complimenting of each other‘s strengths and weaknesses, all the better.

As part of Darren’s excellent 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series, he ran a post on Day 15 about finding a blogging buddy.

5) Niche

Many bloggers make the mistake of not clearly defining their niche. I know I’ve made the same mistake several times myself. If you are blogging as a hobby, it is unnecessary to build a fence around your ideas. If you are looking to turn your blogging into profit, or a full-time living, it is essential that you understand the audience you are targeting and how best to market to them.

In this previous ProBlogger post, Glen Allsop talks about how to find your passion and know what you should be blogging about.

Remember, we all define success differently. However, paying attention to the above list and the advice linked within can help ensure your blog lives up to its fullest potential.

Question: How do you define blogging success? How have your opinions of success changed since you first started blogging?

David Wright and Sean Platt are the team of direct response copywriters behind GhostwriterDad.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

5 Ways to Know if Your Blog is on the Right Track

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Have you ever been in a blogging rut?

You start out blogging with loads of fresh ideas and inspiration but after months of creating unique content you hit a wall!

You feel like you’re saying the same stuff over and over and instead of sitting down to blog each day with excitement you stare at that blinking cursor on a blank page and slip into a zombie like trance.

Of course your readers might be in a similar trance-like state – because while the things you say are all valid and make good points your posts have begun to merge into one and have lost some of their freshness…..

If I’m describing your experience of blogging I’ve got two things to say to you:

1. You’re not alone – most bloggers go through this.
2. IT’S TIME TO SHAKE THINGS UP!

In our last post in our series on Creating Compelling Content on a blog I talked about experimenting with different voices in your blogging because it helped you to find your ‘blogging mojo’ or voice as a blogger. The other benefit of trying new voices on a blog is that I find it ‘wakes up’ readers and provides them with something fresh and different. It can also ‘wake up’ you as a blogger as it presents you with a new challenge and way of approaching your topic.

In a sense when you experiment with a new ‘voice’ or style of writing you are doing something a little ’surprising’ with your readers that can grab their attention – particularly those who’ve been reading your blog for a while and who become a little zombie like in their reading.

Surprise Your Readers

Track with most successful blogs for a few weeks and you’ll find that from time to time many of them throw curve balls or surprises at their readers in one way or another. They often have a habit of presenting content that is a little left of center that is attention grabbing and/or refreshing.

Blogging is a medium that has always been a playful medium where creativity is valued so why not go with this and do something a little different in the next day or two with your blogging.

How to Be Surprising?

This might be a bit of a hard question to answer because being surprising is by nature doing something unexpected – but there are many ways to do something that can snap your readers out of a trance. Here’s a few that come to mind:

1. Write something controversial – if your blog is usually fairly middle of the rode and doesn’t express too many opinions throwing in a strongly worded opinion piece can definitely stir things up a little.
2. Argue Against Your Normal Opinion – sometimes throwing a post into the mix of your blog that plays devils advocate or that explores a very different point of view can be refreshing. Example: in my post What’s Wrong with Blogging? I asked readers to tell me what they don’t like about blogging. While it’s kind of an odd post to have on a blog that argues the case FOR blogging it was well received by readers.
3. Use an Eye Catching Image – just adding a striking image to a post can really lift it from ‘blah blah blah’ to ‘compelling’
4. Using Humor/Satire – I still get readers telling me how my post ‘ProBlogger launches PayPerTweet‘ grabbed their attention back on April fools day in 2008.
5. Use a Metaphor – Use an unexpected illustration from life to explore a topic on your blog – Examples: Lessons from an Umbrella Salesman – Blogging in Formation (Lessons from a Goose) – What McDonalds Taught me about Blogging – Lessons from Tower Defense on How to Reinvent Your Blog.
6. Use a Different Medium – throw in a video, a screen cast, a podcast, some pictures – mixing up your mediums can grab attention, connect with readers in a new way and show a different side of you as a blogger
7. Design – changing your design or even just adding a new logo can give your blog a new ‘look’.
8. Expanding Topics to Related Areas – most blogs have a fairly well defined niche that they stick to but in most cases there are topics that surround that niche that can be good to dip into at times. For example here at ProBlogger I tend to focus mostly upon techniques to improve a blog – but occasionally dip into the topic of health issues for bloggers like in this week’s post on ‘Nimble Fingers‘. While still on topic it’s a little ‘different’ to normal (as observed by quite a few comments and emails I had in response to the post).

Extra Tip – Coming up with fresh and surprising content on a blog takes work but also is about listening to the crazy little ideas that pop into your head from time to time. For me they usually start as bizarre ideas that come while I’m halfway through doing something else – the key for me is to capture the ideas as they come and then put aside time to make them a reality.

While it takes intentionality and work the benefit of such surprises is that sometimes loyal and long term readers fall into a bit of a trance with a blog – throw something a little out of the blue and surprising once in a while and you can reignite the reader relationship and give them a bit of renewed energy for your blog.

An added bonus of these kinds of ’surprising moments’ on a blog is that it’s also often these blue things that generate the most buzz on other sites and create incoming links as other bloggers or Twitter users link up to show you what you’re experimenting with on your blog.

Your Homework for Today

Your homework today is to set aside 15 minutes to ‘play’. Grab a pen and paper or a market and a whiteboard and spend some time mind mapping. I’ve outlined how to create a mind map previously – but write a word that has something to do with your blog in the middle of your page and then begin to brainstorm other words, topics, ideas that relate to that word.

Nothing is too crazy or left field while you’re doing this exercise. Just let your mind wonder and be creative as you ‘play’ with your topic. You might not come up with any concrete ideas but even in doing this exercise you’re giving your brain a chance to explore your topic in a different way and you might just unlock something that sparks into an idea you can use down the track.

I try to set aside short periods of time for this type of activity each week – sometimes I get lots of ideas, sometimes I get none – but over time it’s injected a lot of creativity and surprises into what I do.

What You Said on the Topic

Before I began this series of posts on compelling content I asked readers to submit their own ideas on what makes content compelling. Here’s what some of them said on related topics to this post:

• “Content is compelling when it is new. New information, a new perspective, a new way of dealing with something.” – Cathy
• “Unusual perspectives. I like to read about things that are weird and interesting.” – Elizabeth
• “Something that takes a new, fresh look at an issue.” – Alisa
• “A different perspective on a popular topic is compelling.” – hollywoodlvwork
• “Sometimes compelling content for me is the kind of article that leaves me reeling a little – it leaves me shaking my head and realizing how little I knew about the topic because the author has explored it in a way that I hadn’t considered before. In this way it is ’shocking’ – not because it’s controversial or bad – but because it’s given me a completely new perspective on a topic I thought I had little more to learn about.” – Grant
• “To me, “Compelling content” doesn’t need to be new information. Rather, I’d like to gain new perspective on existing ideas and be reminded that I’ve always known those principles.” – Takuya

What do you have to add on the topic? I’d love to hear the ideas that come out of your mind mapping homework above. I’m also keen to hear of your previous experiences with ’surprising’ things you’ve done on your blog?

This post continues my series of posts on Creating Compelling Content on your Blog. So far we’ve covered being in tune with your readers, creating reader interaction and experimenting with different voices.

A special thanks to Kate from Soy Sauce Carnival for the cartoon at the top of this post!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

SURPRISE! How to Create Compelling Content by Being Playful

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Posted by randfish

Many years ago, when I first started in the search marketing industry, several instances of the debate around "themed links" flared up, cooled off and reared their head again. Nowadays, it makes infrequent, though periodic appearances in the thinking, recommendations and forums of the SEO world, and I thought it would be wise to revist the issue, lay out the discussion points and get folks talking about their experiences, tests and intuition.

The basic tenant of the themed links debate revolves around the theory that search engines run calculations to identify "neighborhoods" of topically-related content, and then consider links from sites/pages on these topics to be more important or valuable than those from unrelated neighborhoods. Here’s a visual take:

While personally, I’ve seen little evidence that an algorithm like this exists at Google, Yahoo! or MSN/Live (haven’t honestly done enough Bing investigation to feel confident making statements around their practices), I’m very curious to hear your thoughts.

_

Let’s open this up in the comments – do you think themed links matter? Can you do well without them? Is there reverse-theming (where links from outside your neighborhood or from diverse neighboorhoods provide more benefit)?

p.s. For more on the origins of this theory, see Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon Kleinberg (warning PDF) and notes on the HITS algorithm lecture from the Math Explorer’s Club at Cornell University.

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Posted by randfish

The blog post – PageRank Sculpting – from the head Google’s Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

It’s valuable to recall the illustration I put up on Google’s initial announcement of this change:

This change in Google’s treatment of nofollow links comes with some very interesting additional advice/clarification:

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Many in the SEO field have long suspected that linking out to good places can provide a positive benefit, but I’m afraid that’s going to be very hard to quantify and therefore difficult to justify. In all honesty, I believe we’re going to see SEOs and websites revert to what I’ll call "old-school" PageRank sculpting – the kind prevalent prior to the existence of nofollow.

From now on, if you wish to sculpt PageRank, you’ll want to use one of the following classic PR sculpting methodologies:

• Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don’t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)
• Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)
• Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links
• Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

Tragically, while this action won’t hurt spammers or those seeking to manipulate Google, it will seriously harm many thousands of sites that have employed nofollow internally as it was long considered a best practice (and messaged as such to the SEO community by the same source as this reversal). I suspect it will be several years and many re-designs before a lot of sites are able to clean up this solution-turned-problem.

I’m saddened to say that given this change, we, as SEOs, are going to have to also recommend the best practice that comments (in all forms of UGC) no longer accept links. While Google has said that linking out to "good places" provides some value, that merely suggests that webmasters and site owners should select good resources editorially and link to them with live, followed links. Comments that contain links, unfortunately, will actively detract from a site’s ability to get pages indexed (as they’ll pull away link juice from the places that need it). It’s likely that a plug-in for Wordpress that sends comment links out through uncrawlable Javascript or uses iFrames will emerge in the very near future.

This is a disappointing move from Google on many fronts:

• It allows malicious operators to actively hurt a site by adding nofollowed links in comments, forums and other open submission arenas.
• It removes the protection webmasters thought was afforded by nofollowing links (you may not get hurt for linking to spam or paid links directly, but you’re now indirectly hurting your site’s PageRank flow)
• It casts doubt on Google’s credibility with future messaging to webmasters (Danny Sullivan covered this when he wrote about the loss of backwards compatibility)

While I’m personally frustrated, I’m also thankful to Google for publicly messaging this in an honest, open way. I hope that in the future, we’ll get this notification in a more timely fashion. SEO consultants and in-house analysts are going to have their work cut out for them over the next few months.

BTW – Although Google has almost certainly messaged this honestly, we’ve got some tests running to make sure this is the case (with both the nofollow and the iframe/javascript solutions). Results will be posted here once our tests have been confirmed. We’re also going to be making changes to how Linkscape’s mozRank scoring system, modeled around similar intuition as PageRank, will treat nofollowed links in future indices.

p.s. Danny Sullivan’s comment on Matt’s blog post is also an essential read (and re-iterates many of the points above). A few valuable excerpts:

With this change, I can still get the $4 if I simply don’t allow comments. Or I show comments, but I use an iframe, so that the comment actually reside on a different page. In either case, I’m encouraged to reduce the number of links rather than let them be on the page period, nofollow regardless. If I’m worried my page won’t seem “natural” enough to Google without them, maybe I allow 5 comments through and lock them down after that.

Rather than clarify things, I feel like this is what your post is going to do — cause people to consciously reduce the number of links they allow on their pages. We’re going to see an increase in iframe usage or other techniques to reduce links and flow more PageRank to the remaining links, for those who really worry/believe in such things.

It’s been a long time since we had such a fundamental shift in SEO best practices (maybe the canonical URL tag, though it’s effectiveness has been questioned and this PR sculpting reversal isn’t likely to inspire confidence).

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Posted by Danny Dover

Learning SEO can be a daunting experience. To make this process a little easier, I have broken down my method for learning SEO into bite-sized chunks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. I have also tried to create a mechanism to make it easier to get help and expand personal networks.

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Twitter Participation:
I think the best benefit of learning SEO is getting to know the SEO community. As an experiment to facilitate this, I propose the following. While you complete the tasks below, feel free to share your progress on Twitter with the Hash Tag #30MinuteSEO. This will make it easier to find people who are doing the same thing and willing to help you.

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Learn the Basics:
Your first group of tasks will teach you the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization. You get to start slow by reading some helpful articles.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Read the new Beginner’s Guide to SEO (30 mins) – This is the table of contents for the upcoming revision to the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. (Note the ‘Parts’ are links to full articles.) I recommend this version over its predecessor because its material is more focused on today’s SEO landscape.

Example Tweet on Twitter: Finished reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO http://bit.ly/19cBGq #30MinuteSEO

• Read Google’s Starter Guide to SEO (30 mins) – Isn’t reading two beginner guides to SEO redundant? The information might be, but this will teach you to recognize and appreciate Google’s perspective on SEO. (As a side note, notice the juxtaposition between the message Google is saying and the SEO unfriendly URL structure of this page. This is your first chance to study the difference between what Google says and how Google acts. Oh snap!)

Example Tweet: Finished reading Google’s SEO Starter Guide http://bit.ly/Lv4GU #30MinuteSEO

• Build a Basic Website (4 sets of 30 mins) – The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO will guide you through the process of building a basic website and teach you the basic SEO skills you need. (I apologize for linking to my own work. I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t believe it was worthy.)

Example Tweet: Does anyone have any SEO advice for my new website at www.example.com #30MinuteSEO

Start Using Your Skills:
Your second group of tasks requires applying the theories you just learned. These tasks are presented as SEO challenges that will utilize everything you learned in the previous section and depend on your own creativity. Note: The work for these will take about 30 minutes. The time it takes for the content to actually get indexed may be much longer.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Rank for a long tail phrase (30 mins) – Choose a long tail keyword phrase and figure out how to rank for it. When I did this exercise nearly two years ago, I chose “fat people falling”. Please be aware that the subject manner and the language of the ranking page may be NSFW. It was written for a very specific audience and may be offensive to others. Hint: See if you can figure out how I got this page to rank with only one inbound link.

Example Tweet: Look what I rank #1 for: “Orange Jean Jacket” #30MinuteSEO

• Rank in the top 10 in a local search (2 sets of 30 mins) – Find an actual small business that you appreciate and volunteer to do SEO at no cost. When I did this two years ago, I chose the preschool I originally attended and helped them rank in their area. Hint: Read David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: If you are in the Seattle area, be sure to check out Example Pastry #30MinuteSEO

• Rank an image (30 mins) – The image vertical is one of the most confusing search realms to work in. Dive in and see if you can get a relevant image to rank for a phrase of your choice. Hint: Read Google Image Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: Look at the third image result on bing.com for “example”. Awesome! #30MinuteSEO

• Rank in the top 10 for a popular term on YouTube (30 mins) – Compared to the search engines, ranking in YouTube is a piece of cake. Try to rank for a semi-competitive term with a worthwhile video. When I originally did this, I ranked for a popular culture phrase and my relevant video made me $10,000 theoretical dollars. Hint: Read YouTube Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: I now rank #4 on YouTube for “Example” #30MinuteSEO

• Outrank Google (3 sets of 30 mins) – This is an exercise with the domain-related metrics. Find a REALLY long tail phrase that Google ranks #1 for and see if you can create a page that can outweigh the domain strength of the big G. I have been experimenting with Google’s spam filters and I am seeing if I can outrank Google Webmaster Central forums with my awesome website What Is The Best Thing To Do With a Colt with Five Hooves.com

Example Tweet: You think SEO is difficult? I outrank Google for “Example Toe Jam” #30MinuteSEO

• Pitch SEO to a real client (2 sets of 30 mins) – This is the hardest but possibly most important task on this list. Go out and find a small business and sell them on your ability to do SEO. You will likely learn a lot about SEO and yourself in this process.

Continue Learning:

After completing the tasks above, it is a good idea to spend 30 minutes a day reading SEO blogs – I recommend the following:

1. Search Engine Land – Authoritative up to minute search engine coverage.
2. Search Engine Roundtable – High quality coverage of SEO as it evolves.
3. SEOmoz Blog – SEO blog with a focus on teaching SEO. (Disclaimer – SEOmoz pays my bills and may have been the bearer of my first child. The jury is out.)
4. Sphinn – A fair amount of fluff, but generally the first source to break inner-industry news.

Example Tweet on Twitter: Enjoying this post at searchengineland.com/post/example/ #30MinuteSEO

Study Advanced SEO:
This group of tasks has less direct return on investment but can lead to big wins. I try to complete these at least once a month.

30 Minute Tasks:

• Review ultra competitive Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) (30 mins) – Watch the progress of SERPs like “Buy Viagra”, “Real Estate” and “Payday Loans”. Most of the techniques used to rank for these are Black Hat but it is important to know what you might be up against.

• Find a site that outranks Wikipedia and try to figure out why (2 sets of 30 mins) – This will likely help you with later work. Wikipedia’s domain strength is incredible. Find and study the sites that outrank it because they generally use the best SEO tactics.

• Attend search conference parties (4 sets of 30 mins) – Don’t get distracted by the people exchanging short term tricks and tips. Instead, mingle and start to talk to some of the most interesting people you will ever meet.

Extra Tasks:
These tasks are more difficult and only indirectly apply to SEO

• Write up an SEO-oriented resume (2 sets of 30 mins) – From what I have seen, when businesses are facing hard economic times they look inward to see what current assets they can maximize. This means that SEO is a great skill set to have when companies are looking to attract free search engine traffic. Hint: You can add your resume to the SEOmoz Marketplace

Example Tweet: Check out my resume at the SEOmoz Marketpace http://bit.ly/APg9j #30MinuteSEO

• Review HTML Tags (30 mins) – In the same way that the typewriter dictated the course of keyboards, (the QWERTY layout was originally designed to prevent collisions on typewriters) HTML dictates the course of the internet. Become an HTML expert and your skills will apply for the rest of your life.

• Sign up for Social Media (30 mins) – If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter, Facebook and any other social media sites that you find interesting. Start building your personal brand and make it work for you.

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If you have any other tasks that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that’s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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This post is task #32 (a bonus one) in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge.

Your task today is to rework the title of the next post that you write

OK – so you need to have a post written before you can do this one but assuming you have a post ready to go – here are a few reflections on getting the titles of blog posts right.

Why the Title is One of the Most Important Elements of Your Next Post

The title of your next post is the main factor that people use to determine whether they’ll read your next post. This is true in most places that people are going to stumble upon your post whether it be on a search engine, in an RSS feed, on a social media site, in a link from another blog etc.

A great title will draw people into the post and give them reason to read it.

A bad title will more often than not be ignored, glossed over and mean a post goes unread.

As a result – bloggers need to spend at least a few minutes thinking specifically about the post title before publishing. Without it all the effort that you put into your actual post could be wasted.

8 Tips for Writing Compelling Blog Post Titles

Much has been written on the topic of writing great blog post titles and I’ll link to some great resources below – but here are a few strategies and tips that I’ve found useful (note: to get a full explanation on each of these read my post How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers Into Your Blog):

1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post.
2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post.
3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers.
4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post.
5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well.
6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging.
7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention.
8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.

Again – you can get a fuller description of each of these 8 strategies here.

7 More Tips on Writing Titles

1. Run it by Your Blog Buddy – on day 15 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog you were encouraged to find a blog buddy. The activity of writing titles is one thing that having a blog buddy is best for. I have a couple of fellow bloggers that I regularly ping with an instant message to bounce ideas off when it comes to titles. More often than not the quick conversation that follows improves the title considerably.

2. Consider Title Updates – I know that this will annoy some bloggers who don’t believe in updating posts after publishing them but I personally don’t have a problem with updating post titles after they’re published if it is clear that they are just not working. The only thing to remember is that some blog platforms derive their URLs from the title so you’ll only want to make updates if you can keep your old URLs in tact.

3. Write for Readers First and Search Engines Second – some bloggers try to write titles that are so optimized for search engine optimization that they forget their actual readers. It’s possible to have a post that ranks really well in Google but that is so poorly worded that even though it ranks #1 nobody will click on it – keep readers as your #1 priority.

4. Keep it Simple – I find that it is often the most simple and straight to the point titles that simply say what the post is about that work the best. There are times to be a little ‘clever’ but more often than not it is a title that clearly gives the topic and communicates a benefit of reading the post that will get clicked on most.

5. Learn what Works and Repeat it – Don’t feel you have the reinvent the wheel with every title that you write. The more posts you write on your blog the more you’ll begin to learn about what works and what doesn’t work. When you find a format that works well with your readers don’t be afraid to use it again. Of course you won’t want to use exactly the same title more than once but you’ll begin to see some formulas that work (see my link to a great series by Brian Clark below – it contains some title formulas to try).

6. Don’t Oversell Your Post – the temptation with blog posts is to make them so compelling and have such a big promise that they go beyond what the post itself can deliver. In doing this you create an expectation in your reader that you just can’t fulfill. Don’t oversell yourself or you’ll have disappointed readers on your hands.

7. Numbers and Lists – Tried and True – one of the most successful types of posts (and therefore titles of posts) are the good old ‘list post’. The title that tells readers how many points you’ve made has something about it that just seems to connect and compel people to click them.

Let me finish with the advice I started with – take your time with your blog post titles. You invest considerable time and effort into your actual posts – don’t short change yourself by slapping the first title that comes to mind on them.

Further Reading

For a little extra inspiration and instruction on how to craft great blog post titles check out these resources:

• A great book that I’ve found helpful is Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich: Create Winning Ads, Web Pages, Sales Letters and More – it contains a lot of proven headlines that the author David Garfinkel has used in his own copy writing. While it’s mainly about headlines in advertising that have worked much of it applies to blogging (and other places you need compelling headlines) also.
• Andy Beal wrote a thought provoking post – How to Optimize Blog Post Titles – in which he explores two audiences of blog posts and how he suggests you optimize titles for each at different life stages of a post.
• Aaron Wall shares How to Craft Kick-Ass Title Tags and Headlines – the post has some good SEO tips but also considers the ‘human’ aspect I mention above.
• Brian Clark has written some fantastics posts on Blog Post Titles in his series Magnetic Headlines. It includes some title templates that are worth experimenting with.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

15 Ways to Rework Your Next Blog Post Title

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Today your task in the 31 Days to Build a Better blog is to Make a Reader Famous.

The Task – Choose one (or more than one) of your current readers and do something out of the blue that acknowledges them, shows them that you see them as valuable and highlights them to your other readers.

Why This is Important

While many blog tips going around focus upon techniques to help make bloggers and their blogs more famous and well known one of the paradoxical keys to blogging success is that many bloggers who build great blogs actually go out of their way to make their readers more famous and well known.

When you create space on your blog to highlight readers in some way the impact can be quite profound (particularly when you do it regularly). Two groups of people tend to be impacted:

1. Those you make famous benefit - the first and most obvious people to benefit from your efforts are those who you highlight. Having someone go out of their way to talk about you on their blog certainly makes an impression on them. It gives them a feeling of being valuable, gives a sense of belonging to and participation in the blog and can help them to achieve their own goals if you send other readers to learn more about them on their own site/blog etc.

2. Other Readers are Impacted – one of the lessons I learned early in blogging is that when you publicly value one reader others often feel valued also. It shows you have an interest in and that you value all of your readers even when you just highlight a few.

How to Make Readers Famous

There are many ways to highlight your readers on your blog. Let me share a few that I’ve done over the years.

• Promote a comment to a Post - sometimes readers make insightful and wise observations and tips in the comments of your blog. While they will be read by a handful of people in the comment thread – why not pull it out and use it as the basis for one of your post – highlighting the wisdom in it and the person who made the comment.
• Write a Post about their Blog – visit the blogs of those leaving comments on your blog and pick one that you resonate with to post about. Write an ‘unpaid review’ of the blog – highlighting the best posts and what you like about it.
• Send Your Readers to Comment on Someone Else’s Blog – write a post that links to someone else’s great blog post and instead of asking your readers what they think about it on your own blog ask them to head over and comment on it on the other person’s blog. Shutting down the comments in your own post and saying that you’ve left a comment on their blog already can help make this more effective.
• Give Readers an Opportunity to Promote Themselves – run a project or write a post that gives readers an opportunity to promote themselves in some way. For example – one of the things I’ve done on DPS is give readers a chance to show off their photography. One time I did this was asking them ‘do you have a photoblog?‘ where I asked readers to share a link to their photoblog. Hundreds of readers left links to their blogs and many emailed me later to thank me for sending them traffic (another similar example was when i asked readers to share their best ever shot).
• Reader of the Week – I’ve seen a few blogs do this over the years – they simply choose one reader each week to highlight in a post.
• Projects/Memes/Competitions – long term readers of ProBlogger will be familiar with the ‘group writing projects’ that I run here every 6 months or so where I invite readers to all write posts on their blogs and then share the link with each other. These projects always generate a lot of traffic to other blogs. Similarly you can run competitions, Blog Carnivals, memes etc which give readers an opportunity to highlight their own online presence/blog/twitter account etc. (another example of this is my social media love-in that I ran last year inviting readers to tell us what social media accounts they had). Hundreds of people participated and those that did got a lot of followers on twitter and new contacts on other networks.
• Run a Reader Poll and Highlight Answers in a followup post – have a post one weekend where you pose a question to your readers. Then in the week that follows do a followup post where you add some of your own thoughts on the question and pull out some of the best comments left by readers. Alternatively you could survey your twitter followers on a topic relevant to your blog and then highlight their responses as a blog post.
• Invite Guest Posts – often ‘guest posting’ is talked about solely as a way to get free content for your blog. While this is nice – one of the things I love about it most is that it puts the microphone in the hand of someone else and lets someone who would normally be constrained by the comments section have a little more power and influence on the direction of your community for a moment in time. This can have a real impact upon the person doing the post – but also upon your readership as they see someone like themselves featured on your blog.

Don’t Have Readers to Make Famous?

Of course this exercise is easier for blogs that have been around for a while and that have developed a readership – those just starting out will find it tougher (there is only so many times you can make your mother, wife or best friend famous on your blog without looking a little desperate).

If you’re a new blogger or don’t have readers leaving comments yet to help you know who they are – try making another blogger famous today by writing a post that links up to them and highlights them to your readers.

Make Someone Famous

The blogosphere was built on principles of promoting others, conversation, celebrating diversity, open source knowledge etc. One of the things that first attracted me to blogging was the way that bloggers celebrated their readers and other bloggers – today attempt to recapture some of that ethos by making others famous today on your blog.

Share How You Do it

In the spirit of this post – I invite you to share how you make your readers famous in comments below. Share a link to the place you’re doing it so we can learn from you! Also stop by the forums thread for today to share your progress.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Pay Special Attention to a Reader [Day 22: 31DBBB]

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In this post >Alyssa Gregory from avertua, LLC shares some tips for business bloggers wanting to become more engaging with readers.

People are busy, and in order to gain and keep readership as a blogger, you need to provide your readers with information that makes their lives better, easier, and less stressful. Business blogs are a unique case because the general subject matter tends to be a bit dry. It’s up to you as the blogger to overcome that obstacle and provide the business information you are offering in a quick and easily digestible way.

How do you do that? Here are seven ways you can engage readers of your business blog and keep them coming back.

1. Offer Advice

You’re likely blogging about business because you have business experience. One way to gain loyal readers is by sharing your knowledge and giving them practical information they can use in their own businesses. You can give your readers an instant benefit by avoiding abstract ideas and providing specific tips, advice and tools they can use right away.

2. Talk to the Audience

You’re already ahead of the game with this one, because the readers of your blog have interests that are common to yours, otherwise they wouldn’t be reading your blog. Get to know them by keeping an eye on comments, watching for trackbacks and listening to feedback in other forums. All of this input can be material you can use to make your posts resonate with your individual readers.

3. Share a Personal Story

Business is business and personal is personal, right? Not anymore. Today there is an increasing amount of overlap between the two, and people want to know a little more about the person behind the blog, beyond that they are an expert in business. So give a little of yourself to create a stronger relationship with your readers.

4. Go Off-Topic

Throw in an occasional post that’s not exactly business-related. If it bombs, it bombs and you know to go a different route next time. But if it is successful, you can insert some comic relief, mindless banter and maybe even a personal story as listed above to give your readers a brief change of pace.

5. Keep It Short and Sweet

You could probably write some very long posts when you’re discussing your latest business endeavor or what it took to have your website redesigned. If that much information is necessary, split it up into a multi-part series. Use lists, subheads and images to break up heavy content whenever possible.

6. Give Up the Wheel

Ask directed and specific questions at the end of your posts to encourage reader commentary. For every few posts where you provide advice, throw in a post that asks for the answer. Involving your readers will give them an opportunity to take an active role in your blog.

7. Give readers what they want

Carefully read the comments provided by your readers. They are invaluable because they allow you to tailor your posts to the information your readers are asking you to provide. Acknowledge the comments, answer the questions, and address the requests and you’re on your way to building great relationships with your readers.

What are some other ways you engage your readers when you’re blogging about subject matter that may not be the most exciting subject matter?

Alyssa Gregory is the owner of avertua, LLC, a full-service virtual assistant firm. She has been designing websites since 1995, and has a passion for supporting small businesses. Alyssa provides business tips, advice and news through her Small Business Idea Generator blog. Alyssa is also a regular contributor on SitePoint.

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