Rent My Brain

Search Engine Optimization, Content Creation and Blog Development

Blogging

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Generate Backlinks by Commenting on “Do Follow” Blogs

blog comment strategyI recently read a blog post written by a marketing consultant who set out a strategy for getting backlinks pointing to your blog.  The strategy calls for posting thoughtful and relevant comments on authority blogs.   When done correctly, this strategy operates as a “win-win” – the blog publisher gets additional content in the form of your comments and you get a backlink to your blog or web site.

This all makes sense except for one glaring admission – you must find blogs with the “no follow” attribute turned off.  Otherwise your comments will not create any backlinks.  Ironically the marketing consultant who described the blog comment strategy had “no follow” enabled on his blog!

What is “no follow?”  No follow is an attribute that is now the default setting in WordPress.  It signals Google and some other search engines not to follow a hyperlink, in this case, your link text.   The blog publisher must turn off “no follow” in order to send his commenters a backlink.

In order to turn off “no follow” in WordPress, you need a plugin, which you can find by clicking on the link.  Install the plug-in and activate it and your blog comments will become “follow links.” [Read more…] about Generate Backlinks by Commenting on “Do Follow” Blogs

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How to Get Links to Your New Site

I publish several blogs about legal topics and have done so for several years.  My Atlanta bankruptcy blog, for example, has been around since 2005 and contains close to 300 posts.   It has a very solid search engine presence and links from this provide a significant amount of “link love” for the recipient.

Almost weekly, I get emails from blog or web site owners that go something like this:

I am in the process of developing a more substantial online presence.  I noticed your blog and that it receives a lot of traffic, and am wondering whether you would be interested in a reciprocal link arrangement whereby we link to your blog and website and, in return, you link to our website on your blog.  Our site is at _____.   We will be adding a “Resources” page that will include links and brief descriptions of useful sites for bankruptcy information, and would include a reference to your blog on that page.

Here is how I read this message:   “Hello, you do not know me but I see you have an established blog that has been around for 5 years, appears regularly in the organic search results and has a high Google PageRank.  I have a new website that has a few pages of content and has not yet been indexed by Google, Yahoo or Bing.  I want you to give me a site wide blogroll link from your site to help put my site on the map.  In exchange, I’ll put you on a “links” page on my site, when I get around to adding such a page.  I sincerely hope you don’t know that “links” pages are ignored by the search engines, meaning that a link from a “links” page is totally worthless.”

Not surprisingly, asking for a link from an established site when you have nothing to trade is a waste of your time and it is a waste of your potential link partners’ as well.

Similarly, if your site still contains a “links” or “resources” page, you are shouting to the world that you do not know what you are doing and/or that your linking tactics are vintage 1990.   With very few exceptions, “links” pages have no search engine value.  Next time you see one, look at the PageRank indicator on your Google Toolbar (or at PageRankLookup) you can check for yourself.

So what should you do if you have a new site?  Here are a few suggestions that would work for me:

  1. if you have another, more established site, offer a link from that site
  2. offer to write an article for your target site – but make sure that your article has some relevant, meaty content.  If you really want to impress your target’s editor, offer to write a second article that you will include on your site that contains a link back to your target’s site
  3. if you have friends or colleagues who have established blogs, ask if they will accept a post (written by you or by your target) that contains a link back to the target
  4. offer to write an article for the benefit of your target for EzineArticles.com or another major article directory.  Even better, offer to write several articles for multiple article directories
  5. offer to bookmark several of your target’s blog posts on one or more social bookmarking sites.
  6. offer to write reviews for Google local, Kudzu, Avvo if applicable
  7. offer to pay for the link back to your new site
  8. offer to distribute video content on behalf of your target on TubeMogul
  9. offer to record and produce a screen capture video for your target
  10. offer to translate (or have translated) one or more pages of your target’s site into Spanish or another language
  11. offer to write and set up an autoresponder series for your target on AWeber or Constant Contact
  12. offer to buy 50 stock photo credits at iStockPhoto or another stock photo site
  13. offer to locate 5 or 10 badges for your target’s blog – badges are seals that look like awards that may help a blog’s credibility
  14. offer to record an interview with your target and to provide target publisher with the audio file

Generally, put yourself in the shoes of a busy blogger – what can you do to help your target blog publisher save time?  Any other ideas about what a new site owner can offer an established site owner to justify a valuable link?

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Quick Tips: Using Your Blog to Attract Traffic to Your Website

How to Use a Blog to Attract Traffic to your Website

With a massive audience of blog readers and 175,000 new blogs launching every day on the internet, this new global phenomenon can be used as a great way to drive traffic to your site.

By design, blogs quickly and easily attract traffic. The instant you publish a blog on the internet, search engines automatically search for keywords and update the public for you. Here are some great ways that you can use your blogs to attract traffic.

Long Tail Keywords are specific words or phrases related to the topic of your blog post. It is important to keep from using generic or broad terms that will put you in direct competition with larger businesses. For example, if you are writing a post about wine tasting in Florence, Italy, using a keyword such as “travel” would bring up large travel sites such as Travelocity.com. Rather, use a whole phrase that is more specific to your topic – something like “wine tasting in Florence.” With long tail keywords, your post is more likely to show up in a search.

Onlywire is a service that lets you automatically bookmark your blog post on multiple sites that generate a lot of traffic. Once you subscribe to the free service, click a button on your browser, enter in some keywords, and submit. Your content and articles will be distributed to the web’s top social networking sites and available for millions of readers to view.

Leave Blog Comments with your link on other blogs in your niche that receive high traffic. To find these high traffic blogs in your niche, simply run a Google search on your topic. When you leave a comment, use an enticing name or keyword so that people are inclined to click. Make sure your comment is both useful and thoughtful, and not just “spam” so that you aren’t blocked from leaving comments in the future.

Press Releases made up of valuable content can be great for generating traffic. If you fill your press release with information that is actually of importance to people, then it can spread around the internet rapidly. The best way to find valuable content is to poll your readers on what they want to see and then compile the data.

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Is Your Blog Post Tweet-Worthy?

*The following is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh, an online marketer.

Whatever our reasons for blogging – whether it be for hobby, to give advice, or a way of earning an income – we all need one core thing in order for our blogs to succeed: readers. Without them, what’s the point? Twitter is a potential source of massive numbers of new readers, based on them seeing links to your blog from other members. But how can you get people to Tweet links to your blog? Quite simply, it all comes down to whether or not your readers feel that your content is worth passing on to people they know. Creating a Tweet-worthy post means you essentially have to give something to your readers, whether this is new information, a good old fashioned laugh, or a talking point. Here are a few hints on creating a blog post that’s worth Tweeting.

Give it a Good Title

The title is the first thing your regular readers will see. If your article is a witty one, make your title witty. If it’s going to tell your readers something new, make sure they know through the title that by reading it they’ll get some information. Include a word or two that gives a clear indication of what it’s all about. Take this post’s title, for example. The post is about writing blog posts that people will want to share on Twitter. The title gives an indication of this. However, an overly long title can be off-putting. Keep it snappy.

When Blogging the News, Have Something Special to Say

Plenty of us blog on the news or current events. Or we may blog on issues being covered on a good number of other blogs and sites. That in itself is fine, providing you add a new dimension to it. If you just post a link to another news article on some other site and say “Here, read this,” why would your readers then link to your site? Why would they not just link directly to the original site from which you sourced the story? You need to add a new spin to material like this. Add your own opinion or commentary. Make it more valuable to the reader. There should be something they can gain or find out from your site, whether it’s an opinion or analysis, that they could not gain just from reading the original story.

Unique Content

Whether you’re discussing a news article that’s doing the rounds on millions of sites or you’re writing your own piece completely from your own head, your content should be unique. Having word-for-word copies of something else online will do you no SEO favors and will do your readers no favors. It comes back down to the big, “Why would I share this?” question. Why, if ten sites are showing exactly the same piece, would people share yours? Keeping it unique means that your blog is the only place your regular readers can send new readers to to access that very article.

Be Human

Let your personality shine through in your blog posts. More personable posts are generally more reader friendly, and it’s the more reader friendly of your posts that will receive the most benefit from people passing on your link through Twitter. Being human in your blog lets your readers feel as though they know you to an extent. If they know you and like you, they are more likely to want to share your content with their own contacts. While business blogs obviously require a level of professionalism, you can easily maintain this without being almost sterile about your posts.

Keep to your Niche

It’s something of a pet peeve of mine to go onto blogs I follow almost religiously and find frequent off topic posts. We all wander from topic from time to time. But as an example, I used to follow a blog about personal finance. And then over the course of a week the blog author had made 4 separate posts about entirely unrelated items, such as gadget related posts. I wasn’t following his blog for gadget information, and so after the 4th post, I un-followed and was done with it. The people who are most likely to Tweet your posts are your regular readers. They’re regular readers because they’re interested in your subject matter. If you go off topic, you risk losing their interest altogether.

Read Before You Post

Once you’ve completed an article it, read it. And then reread it. Ask yourself, ‘what do my readers gain by reading this?’ Do you give them hints? Do you make them laugh? Do you cause them to stop and think? If you can’t identify anything your readers gain, consider rewriting before posting. There has to be a reason for someone to Tweet your blog post.

As I’ve mentioned already, Twitter is a phenomenal way in which you can reach out and attract new readers. While your own Twitter account is good means of publicizing your posts, you ideally want your readers to feel compelled to share it too, thus extending your network of readers. Taking a bit of time to perfect your posts can grant massive reward in this way.

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WordPress Users – Check Your Feedburner Links

If you use WordPress (like I do), you may direct your RSS feeds through Feedburner.  When you run your feeds through Feedburner, you gain access to a variety of free analytical tools that can help you better understand and count your audience.  In addition, Feedburner allows you to monetize your content by adding services like AdSense to your feeds.  Feedburner is now owned by Google, which means that you can expect even more capacity for analytics and statistics.

For whatever reason, Feedburner has decided to change the syntax of the feed link.  Until recently, a Feedburner feed looked like this:

feeds.feedburner.com/yourblogname

Now, the syntax includes the number “2” as follows:

feeds2.feedburner.com/yourblogname

When you install the Feedburner plug-in on your blog, you will see an entry screen at “Settings” to type in your Feedburner feed address.  If, like me, you set up your Feedburner plug-in several months ago without the “feeds2” syntax, your RSS link will go to a dead link.

You can fix this problem easily by logging in to your WordPress blog and changing the Feedburner address to show feeds2.feedburner.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com.

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Adverbs Often Mask Poor Writing

As a licensed attorney in the State of Georgia, I am required to attend continuing legal education classes yearly.  Several years ago, I attended a seminar taught by Steven Stark, a writer and consultant who taught a CLE seminar about how lawyers could improve their written communication skills.  Although I chose this seminar because I needed some credits for that year and it was already December, Mr. Stark’s seminar turned out to be one of the most useful and practical programs I have ever attended.

I was reminded of Steven Stark by an article in the October, 2008 issue of the Georgia Bar Journal.  Entitled “The Road to Heaven is Paved with Good Verbs,” authors Karen Sneddon and David Hricik echo many of Mr. Stark’s suggestions when it comes to using adverbs and adjectives.

Specifically, Ms. Sneddon and Mr. Hricik, as well as Mr. Stark, argue that adverbs should be used sparingly, and that strong verbs will produce significantly more impact.  Ms. Sneddon and Mr. Hricik note that less effective writers use adverbs as intensifiers – words like “really,” “clearly,” and “very,” and they give examples:

Less effective: “The police officers ran really fast across the lawn.”

More effective: “The police officers dashed across the lawn.”

Mr. Stark takes the same position with regard to adjectives.  He argues that strong noun and verb combination create a much more vivid mental picture in the reader’s mind.   Mr. Stark also advises writers to avoid using weak verbs like “is,” and “was.”

I think that if you sensitize yourself to how much adverbs and adjectives are overused, you will discover that sentences with strong nouns and verbs make for much more enjoyable reading.

As a marketing consultant I find myself writing a lot – blog posts, web pages, articles for republication, autoresponder series, and sales letters – and I make a conscious effort to think about my choice of verbs and nouns and to limit my use of qualifiers and intensifiers.  You will likely find discover that your writing will improve when you keep these suggestions in mind when for your writing projects.

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Blogs and Web Sites – How Many Should You Have?

During the course of my consulting work with lawyers and other small business service providers, an issue that often comes up has to do with how many web sites or blogs should the business owner maintain.  My response: as many as you can maintain.

In my view, the Internet functions as a research tool.  This is especially true if you are offering professional services.  People go to Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. to learn about a particular topic, not necessarily to choose a vendor or to buy that service right now.

Contrast this to the visitor dynamic in the yellow pages.  Yellow page browsers are not researchers.  They know that they will not find extensive information about a topic.  Yellow page buyers tend to be visual people who will respond to large, dramatic ads.  This is why in the lawyer market, yellow page ads work well for practice areas like personal injury, DUI, uncontested divorce and bankruptcy.  A significant percentage of buyers for these services are looking for any reason to make a buying decision – price, location, immediacy, social proof.

Internet browsers generally look for more detail.  I have had a great deal of success with my bankruptcy sites because I offer extensive information.  The people that respond to my bankruptcy web sites tend to be better educated, have more complex situations, and are less price conscious.   I have had much less success with personal injury web sites because most people involved in soft tissue auto accidents are looking for quick settlements and they do not perceive that there is much difference between Lawyer A and Lawyer B.

Therefore, before I will agree to work with a lawyer, I have a long discussion with him/her about his market – are his clients people who are looking to research?  If so, I will give those clients more information than any other competitor in the market, and my client will dominate this “researcher” part of his market.  I use blogs, podcasts, web sites, wikis, forums – whatever makes sense for the particular market.

Fortunately, the search engines also like extensive, relevant content.  So, in the ideal scenario, I can map out a multi-site approach that will please both the search engines and the client/researcher and, as a result, keep my client extremely busy with new business.

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Eliminating Comment Spam – Part Two

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Yesterday, I uploaded a screen capture video that demonstrated how you might get rid of comment spam by using the "mass edit" mode moderation function in WordPress.  Of course, not all comments that appear in the moderation queue are spam – how do you quickly identify which comments are spam and which are legitimate.

If at all possible, you should download and install the Akismet plug-in for WordPress.  Akismet is free for personal use and carries a nominal charge for commercial use, and it can block most spam using a sophisticated spam detection algorithm.

What happens, however, if you just learned about Akismet and you have hundreds or thousands of spam comments, or you inadvertantly changed a WordPress setting that let all this spam in.  Is there any hope?

The short answer is "yes" – there is hope.  In this video, I show you how to use the search function in the mass edit mode to identify likely spam by keyword as well as by IP address.  Hope you find it helpful

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How to Deal With 10,000 Unmoderated Spam Comments in WordPress

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Comment spam can take a lot of the enjoyment out of blogging.  Comment spammers operate in the same manner as email spammers – they use automated scripts to disperse their wares.  Comment spammers use the comment capability of most blogs to distribute links to their web sites.  If your blog has the "no_follow" attribute of comments disabled, then you may be unwittingly providing the comment spammers with some of your "link juice."

At a minimum, every blogger should enable the moderation feature for all blog comments.  If your comments are unmoderated, you will soon see hundreds, if not thousands of irrelevant, spammy, link-filled comments on your blog posts.

Most blog platforms have spam filtering either built in or available as a plug-in.  WordPress, which is my blogging platform, has a plug-in called Akismet, which is a very good spam filter.

Many of us learn about comment spam the hard way.  What happens if you did not previously enable spam blocking and now you have 10,000 spam comments in moderation, or worse, showing up as comments on your blog posts?   Fortunately there is an answer to this problem and the video demonstrates how to go about clearing spam posts in volume.  The blog I use for my example is the Bankruptcy Law Network blog.  This is a multi-contributor blog that accepts contributions from a select group of lawyers.  The blog has been very successful in educating consumers and those in the legal community about Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but, as a group, we did not plan very well to when it came to moderating and processing comments.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves with over 10,000 unmoderated comments, most of which were spam.  Worse, the size of the unmoderated comments table in the SEQL database that manages the WordPress blog made the manual, one-by-one processing of comments very slow and cumbersome.

After some looking around, I figured out how to deal with the spam comments in bulk and I show what I did in this screen capture video.

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Linking Techniques for Bloggers

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If you blog frequently, you will have many opportunities to link to other web sites and blogs.  I created the following video for my colleagues in the Bankruptcy Law Network.  The BLN consists of a group of bankruptcy lawyers who work in various cities throughout the country.  The BLN blog is a collaborative effort to provide consumers with multiple perspectives about the bankruptcy process and to allow member attorneys to showcase their knowledge.

Some of the BLN bloggers are experienced and comfortable with the "technical" side of blogging, while others have no technical experience at all.  In reviewing some of the BLN posts, I noted that some of the attorney authors were not maximizing the value of the network.  This video demonstrates how I approach linking and trackbacks.

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