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Last week on my Photography Tips site we published a guest post titled Three Lenses Every Photographer Should Own.
The author of the guest post emailed me a few days later amazed at amazing amount of comments left on the post. While the average post on dPS gets a reasonable amount of comments this post is climbing up towards 200.
Why did it do so well in engaging readers?
There are a few reasons. The guest poster didn’t really set out to do any of them – but stumbled upon one of the best ways to get readers interacting on a blog post:
- He Expressed an Opinion – the post shares one persons opinion on which lenses each photographer should own. While the post itself did indicate that it was his own personal preference and that others would find other options more suited to their situations – whenever you express an opinion you’re going to get other people reacting with their own.
- He Made a Claim – the title was key in generating this discussion. It made a claim that every photographer should own 3 lenses. I’m not sure how intentional this was but make this type of claim and you’ll almost always get a reaction because you’ll almost always have someone who doesn’t quite fit into what you’ve proposed – and they’ll want to tell you why. Write a post about ‘essentials’, or ‘the best’ or something ‘everyone’ should do – and you’ll generally get this type of response.
- He Invited a Response – the post finished by asking others what they’d include in their ‘must own’ category of lenses. This is the perfect invitation for an ongoing discussion.
- He Chose a Topic People Had Invested Heavily Into – the last thing I’d say about this topic is that he stumbled onto a topic for the post that readers had strong opinions about because they’d invested into the topic. Camera owners carefully research their lens purchases and put up considerable dollars to buy them. As a result they tend to feel quite strongly about their lenses and often feel the need to defend/explain their decisions.
Keep in mind that while when you write these types of posts you will almost always get a reaction from people that you need to be willing and ready to hear some strong opinions back – something that are not always easy to hear.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
The BEST Way to Generate Lots of Comments on a Your Next Blog Post
| | A few days back I asked readers a question:
What Have You Been Putting Off and What’s Holding You Back?
Some of the responses to the question in comments (and via email and Twitter) revealed a lot of bloggers really wanting to step things up and get what they’ve been putting off done.
So – lets set some goals – what do you want to achieve by the end of February?
I’m not going to be calling you up to check up to see if you’re meeting your goals – but hopefully in putting them down publicly you’ll find yourself a little more spurred on to reach what you want to achieve.
My Goal for February: I want to get a new E-Book out the door by the end of the month.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
What Is Your Blogging Goal for February?
As a quick update to my post over the weekend about Aweber’s system being compromised and spam emails being sent out to those that subscribe to Aweber lists – Aweber have today released a statement acknowledging the problem and talking about what they have done as a result of it.
A quick summary:
- They’re putting it down to vulnerabilities in two third party software systems that they use.
- They’re saying that the hack was limited to areas where subscriber email addresses were stored.
- They believe that the attack was done but an ‘overseas organised group’.
- They state that no other information was taken including information about customers accounts or affiliates accounts.
- They say that Aweber’s system was not used in the spamming and as a result deliverability rates have not been impacted
- They’ve closed the vulnerabilities.
Of course the reality is that while Aweber customers own details and information have not been compromised (this is a relief) – our lists have. While there’s nothing that Aweber can do about this now – the reality is that we as their customers do have to live with the knowledge that our readers, those who trust us with their details, are now getting spammed and that this spam could continue indefinitely.
While I understand Aweber’s statement, feel sorry that they went through this, am happy that it’s not as bad as it could have been and know this stuff happens – I do have some mixed feelings on this:
- Firstly I’ve got over 333,000 subscribers who have potentially been receiving spam in the last few days. This makes me feel ill and embarrassed. I’ve fielded many many emails in the last few days from angry and confused readers. While not all will realize why they’re being spammed now some who have set up specific addresses for my newsletters have – and they’re now angry and have a damaged view of my brand (and some have unsubscribed*). If you’re one of these subscribers – I’m truly sorry – I wish there were something that I could do except suggest you mark the spam as spam and/or resubscribe with a new email address.
- Secondly I’ve been actively recommending Aweber for a year or two here on ProBlogger. I personally want to apologise to my readers who have acted on that recommendation who have been impacted by this. While by no means is it my fault that there was this flaw in Aweber’s system I acknowledge that my genuine recommendation has led to these implications.
I think Aweber has an amazing service. They’ve become an integral part of my own business, have always given me amazing service and I will continue to use them. However I guess I wanted to also acknowledge to others hurt by this that I’m sorry for my part in it (indirect or not).
While Aweber does not apologise in their statement (I guess the lawyers might have had a part in that) I certainly want to express my sorrow for this event to those of you impacted by it.
There is no perfect system. Over the years my own sites have been hacked (as have many many successful businesses). It is just a pity that this particular instance has impacted so many people.
* as I’m about to hit publish on this I thought I’d check out how many of my subscribers have in fact unsubscribed over the last few days. What I found in the reports section was very odd – for the last 3 days Aweber is reporting that not a single person has unsubscribed from my lists. The blue part of the chart is the unsubscribers – you’ll see in the last three days it is not there at all).
This is bizarre – in the last month of the stats there has never been a day that I’ve not had someone unsubscribe (it’s just a natural part of having a list of the size that I do) – to have 3 days in a row with no unsubscribers is very very odd.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Aweber Makes a Statement About Their Data Being Compromised
ProBlogger Readable on Mobiles
12/19/09
One of the most requested featured by readers here at ProBlogger has been for the option to view this site more easily on a mobile device (at least some).
In the last few days we’ve added the WPtouch plugin to both ProBlogger and DPS.
I hope that this will enable a faster and easier to navigate user experience for readers on their iPhones and other mobile devices.
Of course if you’d prefer to view the site as normal you just need to scroll to the bottom of the page and flip the switch there back to the normal view.
Do let me know how the experience is viewing ProBlogger this way on your mobile.
Also – have you optimized your blog for mobile viewing? If so how did you do it?
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
ProBlogger Readable on Mobiles
Two weeks ago I re-launched the ProBlogger weekly newsletter. The first email I sent out to subscribers was a story of how I’ve been changing my approach to blogging over the last year. The reaction to the email was huge – literally hundreds of readers responded with emails telling their own stories, asking questions and simply reacting to what I’d written.
I’ve never had that kind of response from a newsletter before – I’m not sure why it happened this time, perhaps it was that it was a story (of sorts), perhaps it was because I shared how about how little I know and that I’m still learning….. or perhaps it was just a day that people felt like reacting.
Whatever it was – it reminded me of the fact that email newsletters can be interactive.
Bloggers with newsletter lists sometimes get trapped into thinking that their blogs are the interactive component in what they do (they have the ability to collect comments after all) and that a newsletter is more of a ‘broadcasting’ tool.
Perhaps there’s some truth in that – email is useful for broadcasting and at their best blogs are great for conversation – but my first email illustrated that email can be interactive too.
Building on the Interaction – with a Survey
I decided to build on the interaction of the first email with a second one that was ALL about interaction. A few days later I sent out an email to my subscribers that simply invited them to participate in a 4 minute survey.
The idea came as I read the reactions to my first email. As I read I realised how little I knew about those who were subscribing to my newsletter and why they subscribed.
I decided to put together a survey to help me do 2 things:
- Tell me about my subscribers and their blogs – including some basic demographics (age, gender) as well as some about their blogs (how many they have, platforms that they use, topics that they blog on etc
- Inform me of what people want out of my newsletter – including questions asking subscribers to identify the challenges/problems that they face as well as inviting them to write about what they’d like me to cover in future newsletters.
The survey contained 16 questions which were mainly multiple choice questions that could be completed in 3-4 minutes. There were also options on some questions to write more and two optional open ended questions inviting people to write as much as they wanted.
I created the survey using Survey Monkey (I went for the paid option as it lets you download results and do more than 100 responses).
I sent out the newsletter (unfortunately my timing was terrible as it went out just as Aweber were doing an upgrade so those who got the email in the next few hours were unable to open the survey link – which meant I had to send out an other email…. it was a real mess up) and in the 3-4 days that followed have had 1989 responses from subscribers.
The email went out to about 20,000 people so the response rate has been around 10% – more than I expected considering the mess up with the email and the fact that my list has gone a little cold as I’ve not sent much to my list in a while.
Within an hour or so of people starting to complete the survey I realised it was one of the smartest things I’ve done for a long time. It was producing incredibly useful data in each of the areas identified above.
I’m still working through the responses (the open ended questions are rich with powerful feedback but will take me some time to crunch through) but am already feeling as though I have a much better understanding of:
- who my subscribers are
- why they’re subscribing
- what their needs are
- how I might be able to help them.
I will share some of the results from the survey with subscribers in an upcoming newsletter but one of the bonuses that also came out of the survey is that from the 1000 people who took the extra time to respond to the open ended questions I have literally hundreds of questions and ideas for blog posts. Any time I’m stuck for something to write about in the next year I can just dip into those questions and I’m certain to come up with something to write about.
Take Home Tips
- Whether your blog is big or small – a survey can help you improve your blog on numerous fronts. Even in the first hour after I got results in and only had a handful of responses I was already learning valuable lessons about my readers that would improve my blog. Having lots of responses is great – but even a small number would be useful.
- A survey is a great way to ‘warm up’ your cold newsletter list – I’ve not really sent out too many ProBlogger newsletters for over a year – as a result my list wasn’t overly responsive or feeling connected to me. This survey has really ‘warmed things up’ and already I’ve had a few readers responding with feedback that they feel valued and more connected.
- Ask mainly closed ended questions – think carefully about what you want to find out and try to make the bulk of your questions as easy to answer as checking a box in a multiple answer question. This makes doing your survey quick (respecting the time of those who do it) but it also makes collating your data easier.
- Ask a couple of open ended questions – the multi-choice questions have produced some interesting data for me, but its the open ended ones that have produced the real Gold. I asked one that asked readers for questions or suggestions on what they wanted me to cover and another that simply asked for feedback on any aspect of my site. Both questions have been fantastic and both seem to also have given respondents a chance to feel as though they’ve been heard (and they have been).
- Survey Your Readers and/or Subscribers – in this case I’ve chosen simply to survey those who subscribe to the newsletter of my blog and not all readers and RSS subscribers. I partly did this because I wanted to be informed about how to improve the newsletter but also to help me manage the amount of responses – however valuable information could also be gleaned by surveying everyone or by targeting other specific sub groups within my network. Perhaps for you it makes more sense to survey your readers, your Twitter followers, your facebook fans, those who’ve bought your products etc – really it comes down to your objectives of your survey and how big your network is.
Have you ever run a survey with your blog readers (or some other subset of your readers)? What did you learn? What tips would you add?
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Survey Your Readers and Discover Who They Are and How You can Be More Useful to Them
Best of 2009 – Favorite Articles
12/03/09
Posted by jennita
Disclaimer: This article consists of our favorite articles of the past year and does not have actionable SEO techniques. Please read on if you’re interested in knowing more about us, and what we like!
This week I’ve been personally invested in Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge aka #best09. The idea is that each day in December you reflect on the past year and write about a different topic each day. Obviously you can write every day, or pick and choose which topics you want to cover. It’s only been a few days but I’ve enjoyed reading through some of the blogs and tweets from people participating. Today the topic is:
December 3 Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.
Since the topic is right up our alley, the SEOmoz crew decided to put together a list of our favorite articles from 2009. Some of these are search related, but many of them are not. Take a peek into our minds and I think you’ll find it interesting the types of articles we love.
Scott
Not sure if it "qualifies" since it’s from last year, but I shared this article, about what it really means to be a billionaire, with a ton of people. It’s absolutely fascinating, especially if you’re someone (like me) who fantasizes about how you would potentially spend great sums of cash 
On the flip-side of the equation is this excellent article from the Washington Post illuminating the incredibly high cost of being poor. Fascinating and eye-opening.
Together they pack a one-two punch that sheds a ton of light on just how drastic wealth and class disparity can be, even in the U.S.
Pete
I’m a big fan of this GapingVoid post from October: The moment
From an SEO standpoint, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from Eric Enge’s interview with Google Image search engineer Peter Linsley. It’s a topic that doesn’t get covered often, and the information in the article is incredibly useful.
This Smashing Mag post is Usability-oriented, but great stuff for any web person. Unlike many of these kinds of articles, almost every point in this one is directly actionable:
Of course, I also think this post was pretty good – the author is clearly a genius 
Danny
Life lesson: There is no speed limit – talks about how education is designed to get everyone through and how many people take this slow pace with them throughout their life.
We Have Been De-googled! – One blog talks about the impact of being kicked out of Google for seemingly no reason.
Jen
The article that made the biggest impact on my life this year was this one from SEOmoz. It is Lindsay’s first post and it was an announcement of the job opening I ended up getting.
Personally this short post helped me get my personal goals organized.
Rand
Rand’s favorites from the past few months:
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/youre-just-getting-started/
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/11/24/on-self-promotion/
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/
http://www.everywhereist.com/borough-market-a-place-for-love-but-not-vegetarians/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?hp
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
http://cdixon.org/?p=1391
I’ll continue to add to this list if any of the other team members decide to add theirs as well. 2009 has been a wonderful year for us and we look forward to many great articles in 2010. Please tell us about your favorite posts and articles from 2009. And we encourage you to be a part of the blog challenge!
Posted by randfish
First off, I hope everyone among our US (and expat) readers had a great holiday weekend, filled with tryptophan and football (I know mine was). Second, I’m very excited to announce that SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK). We’ve heard from a number of our members that they’d like to do some live reviewing of strategies and recommendations and get questions tackled in this format. I’ll be running the webinar personally, but I haven’t quite decided on a topic, and that’s one thing I need your help with.
Below is an embedded Google form (they’re pretty spiffy) with three short questions. We’ll use your feedback to help determine the content and format for the webinar, as well as gauge interest level.
We’ll have another blog post in the next few days announcing details (based on your requests + votes), as well as an email to all PRO members with a registration link.
Of course, if you have anything to add in the comments or any recommendations, we’d love to hear from you there, too. If this webinar goes well, we’re certainly planning to make it a monthly event for PRO members, and possibly offer some free webinars to the entire community. A future subject that folks have been asking about is training on the SEOmoz toolset – that’s something we want to do, but we have some changes + additions coming in January, so we’ll get those released first, then follow up.
Thanks for your feedback and happy holiday season!
As a quick followup to my post a few days ago regarding how to make more money with the Amazon Affiliate Program this Christmas – today is a key day to be linking to Amazon as their Black Friday sale has just started.
This is on of the biggest days (if not THE biggest day) of shopping all year on Amazon so many of your readers will be heading into the store today anyway – you might as well as earn a commission for what they spend.
The cool thing about linking to the Black Friday Sale today is that next Monday when Amazon’s Cyber Monday sale starts the links you create today will automatically be forwarded to that sale also.
Good luck with the promotion!
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Amazon’s Black Friday Sale Starts – If You’re an Affiliate Today’s the Day to Promote
A number of people have been asking how ProBlogger.com (the new community section of ProBlogger) has been going since we launched a month ago – so today I thought I’d give a bit of an update – including giving some news on the new price which will go live 1 week from today..
Some stats:
- As things currently stand we have 2080 paying members.
- In the first month the forum has had 1,400+ threads of conversation started and 15,000+ actual posts.
- Less than 1% of those who registered for the first month decided not to renew their subscription.
- The section with the most new threads in the first month was the ‘Critique’ section where members post a link to their blog or something that they’ve done and ask for others to review it.
- The section with the most posts/responses (apart from the ‘general chit chat’ area) is the ‘blog promotion/finding readers’ section.
Here’s a quick screen grab of the different areas (taken a few days back pretty late at night US time so not a lot of people in the forum at the time).
As you can see the topics being discussed are far reaching and in most areas there is a fair bit of discussion. The new(ish) Tutorials area is an area I’d like to see a bit more action in and I’m going to recruit a few experts in different fields of blogging to contribute some tutorials here in the coming months.
We’ve passed the point where most members have had the chance to stop their subscription if they choose to. As mentioned above we’ve had just under 1% of people decide to leave. While I’d love everyone to stay it’s not feasible to expect that the site will suit every need.
We did have a few issues with the subscription renewals at the end of the month which caused some confusion but along with a few other growing pains the first month of ProBlogger.com has been well worthwhile and I’m getting a lot of really great feedback from members.
As with all membership sites it is those who are throwing themselves into it most who seem to be getting the most out of it.
The Price Rises in One Week from Today
Now that we’ve achieved the 2000 member mark and retained that amount of members we’re moving towards ending the introductory price of $1.95 a month. Anyone who has signed up at this price already (and who signs up in the next week) and stays a member is locked in at this level.
However in a week’s time we’ll be putting the price up to $5.95 a month for new members. This gives everyone a chance to get in at the introductory price – so if you’re thinking of joining – now’s the time to get locked in at $1.95.
$5.95 is a price that we still feel is accessible to many but will enable us to make the site sustainable.
You have one week to get in at this price before we raise it – your time starts….. now.
New Feature – Social Groups
Now that we’re at 2000 members we’re starting to see enough bloggers in different niches to make the collaboration area of the blog more and more useful as there are now little ‘clusters’ of bloggers in different topics.
To help with this collaboration we’ll be adding the ’social groups’ feature in the coming week. This will enable bloggers to group themselves a little more and set up areas to discuss common interests.
I foresee this ’social groups’ feature to be used in a number of ways:
- Niche Based Groups – for example the gadget bloggers might find it useful to set up an area where they can all come together to work together, discuss their niche, ask for and offer help to each other. Groups for Mommy Bloggers, Photography Bloggers, Sports Bloggers…. etc
- Location Based Groups – for bloggers from a particular city, region, state, country who are interested in talking about issues of their part of the world.
- Platform Based Groups – for bloggers who want to talk about a particular blogging platform or tool. I could foresee a group for WordPress bloggers, for Joomla bloggers, for Blogger.com bloggers….
Really the way that these groups can be used is only going to be limited to the imagination of members. I hope that they provide bloggers with the ability to find others like them but also discuss some of the more obscure topics that might not be relevant to everyone.
At first we’ll be choosing the topics for these groups but would like to soon open it up for anyone to start one.
New Feature – Weekly Chats
We will also be adding a weekly chat session for members in the coming couple of weeks. This will not go live until after the price rise but will give members the opportunity to interact live with one another on a weekly basis in a chat room – the hope is that we’ll nominate a topic each week to focus the chat around, do a little quick teaching at the start and then open it up for discussion.
Other Benefits
Discounts – The 50% off the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog offer has been used by many of our members. Getting $9.98 off the workbook effectively gives those members 5 months free membership.
I’ll be extending this offer indefinitely for ProBlogger.com members and also offering discounts on future ProBlogger resources (expect to see another one released in the next 2-3 months with more to follow).
I’m also talking to a number of blogging related companies about them coming into the forums to offer special discounts on their products to members. More on this in the coming weeks.
Guest Experts – as mentioned above – I want to beef up the ‘tutorials’ area of the forum by bringing in some special guests to provide some teaching around different topics. This will not be a formal curriculum or syllabus but rather regular input from people with experience in different areas of blogging and the opportunity to pick their brains a little.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
ProBlogger.com Price Rise Coming in 1 Week – Lock in the Intro Price Today
Posted by chenry
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
What really makes a blog post worth linking to? In my last post, What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1, I took a look at the 3,800 blog posts on SEOmoz and did some analysis on a few different aspects of the posts and their affect on the number of in linking domains (ILDs). Some of the results were very interesting to me and it made me want to push it further.
I created a list of 40 SEO/SEM blogs that I read and feel are important to people in the industry and set those as my sample population. I first crawled each website and collected a list of over 72,330 different blog posts from the 40 different websites. Then over the course of the next few days, I crawled each post and collected the following information in my database:
- Blog Post Title
- Original URL
- # of Links from Root Domains (Via Linkscape API)
- # of ILDs (Via Linkscape API)
- If The Post Had Images, Lists, Or Videos
- Content of Post (No Comments or Other Text on Site)
- # of Words in Post
POSTS TITLE EFFECT ON ILDs
Does the length of the post’s title affect how many domains will link to it? The data suggests that posts with a title length between 10 and 18 words are on average more linked to than those with less or more. The data also suggests there may be a “sweet” spot around 14 to 16 words in length. The chart below was created without removing stop words.
This data proves to me that a descriptive title is what the linkerati is looking for. Going overboard on the length of the title can prove to be a bad move also.
EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS WITH TITLE LENGTH IN THE “SWEET SPOT”
- Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
- Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
- What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones
POSTS LENGTH EFFECT ON ILDs
Post length is a long debated thing out there in the blogosphere. Most bloggers will tell you that you should keep your posts around 500 to 900 words, and that might be stretching it. When it comes to SEO/SEM blogs, longer more content filled posts are more linked to than those with limited amount of content.
From the chart below you can see there is a word range that seems to collect more ILDs than other word ranges. Based on the data, the ideal length of your posts should be around 2328 to 2618 words. In my previous post, the ideal length for only SEOmoz’s post was between 1800 and 3000 words.
The chart above shows posts only up to 2812 words, but accounts for over 99.55% of all the posts. Posts that were greater than 2812 words really had a low number of ILDs. For this reason and for the display of the chart, they were removed.
EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS (BETWEEN 2328 AND 2618 WORDS)
- 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
- SMX East: Give It Up
- Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview
DEPTH OF POSTS EFFECT ON ILDs
Seos know that you want to keep your key content in as few subfolders as possible but does this affect the number of ILDs you receive? The data suggests that the depth of your post doesn’t affect the number ILDs. The graph below shows that just about half of the blogs out there place their content two subfolders deep, such as seomoz.org/blog/POST-TITLE.
MEDIA’S EFFECT ON ILDs
What role does placing list, images, and/or videos in a post play on the number of ILDs? The data shows that putting any one of the media’s in your post will increase the number of ILDs you receive. Putting a list on your plain text post could double the number of ILDs you receive. The results are even more outstanding when all three types of media are used.
Do I really believe that you can take any post, slap a picture in it and you will automatically receive more links? No, but if you have decent content and media to support your post, it will appeal to more users and in turn increase the number of potential links. I find it amazing that just by adding images and lists to your post could increase the number of ILDs by a large percent. Images and lists are one of the easiest things to create and anyone can do it, so why aren’t they? See the chart below for the full specs on adding media to your post.
TOP MEDIA POST EXAMPLES
So I’m sure you are all wondering what some good examples are of the different type of post along with the media. Below are some links to some great posts that contain different types of media and have been successful. Some of these posts should be your guide when creating new content for your site.
ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES
ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS & IMAGES
- Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
- Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS
ONLY VIDEOS
ONLY IMAGES
NONE
TOP DOMAINS FOR MEDIA TYPE
The data shows that there were certain domains that tended to use certain types of media in their posts. Below I’ve put together two sites for each category so if you enjoy posts of a certain type you can visit their blog.
ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES
ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS & IMAGES
ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS
ONLY LISTS
ONLY VIDEOS
ONLY IMAGES
NONE
AUTHORITIES EFFECT ON ILDs
What role does a blog authority play in the number of ILDs? Seems like a simple question and the data seems to show that if your an authority in your niche, you will generate many more ILDs than someone who is not. Look at the chart below and you can see that Matt Cutt’s blog generates almost twice as many as its closest competitor, sugarrae.com!
TOP TOPIC THAT ATTRACT LINKS
Unlike SEOmoz not every blog places their post into nice categories and if they do, those categories will not match across all the sites. So how do we determine what topics are attracting the most links and are good topics to create posts about? We crawl 72,300 posts, determine the ILDs, and then extract the most used words from those posts to create a “super” group of keywords that result in link worthy blog posts.
The first thing I wanted to do was extract all the text and find the words that are most used in all blog posts, I was curious, aren’t you? After pulling out 27,658,728 million words and sorting them, five words came out on top: Search, Google, Yahoo, Site, and SEO. Was I surprised, no but it’s interesting to know and a good starting point.
Taking a look at the top 1% of all 72,330 posts, it was found that the words did change a little bit. Some of the top words used were: Search, Google, Site, Links, SEO, Content, People, and Social. This data seems very similar to what was found in part one of this study, with the SEOmoz data. Posts that are about link building are very popular but now we can conclude that they are attracting links. When we look at a much smaller percentage say only the top 50 posts, you find that you are getting very similar words such as: Google, Search, Blog, Link, Pagerank, and Site.
So what can you really take away from the content of the top 50 blog posts? Stick with the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and maybe even Bing, on a good day. The linkerati likes topics including Link Building, Pagerank, and Social Media. As my disclaimer stated above, these are not the rules but just observations from a small sampling of the blogosphere. If I knew the exact topic that the linkerati loves, I wouldn’t be writing here, I would be out making millions writing all day.
BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS
- The data suggests that posts with title between 14 and 16 words attract more ILDs than those with longer or shorter titles.
- Contrary to belief, the data suggests that posts with more than 900 words are attracting more links than those with 900 words. Shoot for post between 2328 and 2618 words.
- The data suggest the location/depth of your blog post doesn’t seem to have an effect on the number of ILDs you will receive but may affect your SEO work, so be cautious.
- If you’re interested in the top post with a certain type of media, check above. Also if you’re interested in the blogs that tailor to a certain type of media, check above.
- Authority plays a major role in the number of ILDs that you will receive on your post. Matt Cutt’s blog receives twice as many ILDs as the next closest blog.
- Hot topics that attract links include: Google, Search, Blogs, Link Building, Pagerank, SEO, and Social Media.
SUMMARY
In summary, the takeaways above are generalization about a small group of post from the blogosphere and should not be taken as rules but merely as a guide to help you create content that will have the possibility to generate links. Work on the authority in your niche and become that place people come to receive great advise. While you’re waiting for authority to grow, make sure that your posts included visual aids to help readers get the takeaways quickly.
SPECIAL THANKS
Special thanks to the SEOmoz team for the access to the Linkscape API. Without the use of the API this post would have never been possible.
