Search Engine Optimization, Content Creation and Blog Development
Although just about every small business has a website, most small business owners choose to outsource the development and management of their Internet presence.
Even if you choose to outsource everything, there are two items that you must keep current:
Let’s discuss each. [Read more…] about Never Lose Access to Your Domain or Hosting Accounts
This Sunday’s (February 13, 2011) New York Times ran a front page story in the business section entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. The story discussed how J.C. Penney appeared as the number one result for hundreds of search phrases for its products. In some cases, the J.C. Penney result for a brand name appeared before the brand name company web site – the example given was the phrase “Samsonite carry on luggage.” J.C. Penney’s sales page for Samsonite appeared ahead of Samsonite.com.
J.C. Penney’s organic search results topped Google’s rankings for months, including the critical holiday season. The Times researches determined that J.C. Penney’s rankings were due in part to incoming links from thousands of pages, many of which had nothing to do with consumer retail goods. In other words, somebody created a huge network of bogus sites that existed primarily to generate “link juice” that benefited J.C. Penney. [Read more…] about Google Gamed by J.C. Penney?
While you may be thinking that you are tricking search engines like Google into noticing your website through tactics such as cramming your website with irrelevant keywords and content, you may actually get penalized or ignored. The only foolproof strategy to boost rankings is to figure out what kind of quality, relevant information your audience wants and provide it for them. And once you determine the content you are going to provide, choose keywords wisely (i.e. use relevant keywords). The internet is simply jam-packed with low-quality articles, scams, and useless information; it is important to not make the same mistakes made by so many employing these tactics if you truly want your site to succeed.
While search engines no longer care as much about keyword meta tags, it is still important to make yours are well-written and relevant – or your site could get penalized. Keyword meta tags are used to quickly and easily identify the relevance of your site. These days, Google’s algorithm, which is used to figure out where to rank pages on the search results, is much more complex due to years of dealing with people trying to cheat the system. Google’s algorithm will not respond to outdated tricks such as typing keywords multiple times or using “invisible” keywords (white text on a white background). If you attempt these tricks, your site will not only be frowned upon, but may get banned from Google altogether.
Another big mistake is including keywords that are irrelevant to your site to attract more traffic. By including a hot-topic article on your website that is irrelevant to your subject matter, you will loose your credibility and your audience. Once a visitor to your site realizes your trick; they’ll leave immediately. Why would anyone bother visiting your site if it is filled with incohesive, random content?
Since navigating the internet for quality information is already difficult, it’s important to stand out from the sites that are created for no other reason than to get better rankings. You can do this by providing useful content and keep from making typical mistakes such as trying to trick search engines via the methods mentioned above.
So you have determined what your site’s content will be about but now you are at a loss as to what keywords to choose and begin using. A good place to start is Google’s keyword tool. There, you can simply type in the keyword (or search term) that you think the people who you want to visit your site would theoretically be searching for. Then, this useful tool will tell you how many searches people make per month on that particular keyword, what the competition is for that keyword, and will even provide similar keywords which may be more effective and that you hadn’t thought of. For example, say you are trying to make a website all about old outlaw ballads. Well, according to the Google Keyword tool, people rarely search for the keyword “outlaw ballads.” However, it will tell you that the keywords “outlaw songs” and “outlaw music” are far more popular and will show roughly how many others are trying to use those same keywords to market their sites.
For more on how to use the Google keyword tool, I recommend checking out this handy video on how to use articles to build SEO found at IdeaMarketers.com. There is a section of this 20-minute video devoted to the topic of using Google’s keyword tool – I recommend you check it out for more tips on using it and finding the right keywords for your site.
Often, you will want to include your contact information – including your email – in articles or blog posts that you write. Many programs automatically convert email addresses in to clickable links that open your pre-set email client.
For example, if I am reading an article on a blog about a doctor or lawyer and that professional’s email address is hyperlinked, all I need to is click on the link to open my email program (in my case Gmail, but it could be Outlook or Yahoo Mail or any one of several).
By contrast, if the email address is not a link, I will have to manually open my email program, past the address and then send the email.
In my first web sites, I intentionally made my contact email addresses hyperlinks so colleagues and potential clients could easily contact me.
Big mistake.
Spammers use programs called “bots” to troll the web and harvest these clickable email addresses. Within a few months, my firm email address was (and is) essentially useless because of all the junk that arrives daily. I still keep it active because a lot of people over the years use that email address and I am reluctant to close it.
For years I have recommended to my clients that they use email forms (like the one on this site) rather than live, clickable email addresses. If you do not want to devote the real estate to a form on your site, you can put the form on a separate page, then use a link shortening service like tinyurl.com or cli.gs and post that address.
I recently learned about another solution called HideText.net. This free service takes any line of text, such as emails and converts it into a graphic. Here is an example:
This email address a graphic and thus not currently readable by spambots. A nice and elegant tool.
If you have a web site, there is a good chance that you will receive unsolicited emails from “link managers” working on behalf of other web sites looking to exchange links with you. Often the link manager will be from India or Pakistan and his/her English will be overly formal or contain spelling or grammatical errors.
Frequently, the email solicitation will state that your link has already been posted on the other web site, with a link that looks something like www.abcwebsite.com/links_2.html. If you should happen to visit that page, your link will be there along with a few dozen other links that may or may not be in your business category.
My advice is to ignore these requests for link exchanges.
Years ago, the major search engines gave some credit to links on “link directory” pages on a web site. Back in 2000 or 2001, a “reciprocal link exchange” might have some value to both parties. Unfortunately, those days are over. Search engines generally do not give any authority credit to a link that exists in a link directory – at least that has been my experience.
Link directories that exist solely to pass “page rank” or site authority defeat the purpose of a good search result – to indentify authority sites that provide topical and relevant information. This bias against link bartering is why some search engines are punishing links sold by link brokers. Take a look at an article by bodybuilder Mark McManus entitled “Google Slashes MuscleHack’s PageRank.” Mark earned $18.95 by selling space on his blog to a text link ad company, only to see his ranking in Google plummet. Mark happens to have a legitimate blog that contains fresh, original content that is frequently updated, yet he got slapped. Take heed.
If you are going to “exchange” links with another web site, ask the other site’s editor if he/she add an article that you have written to his/her web site. The article you write should be topical and relevant and it should contain a relevant link text phrase back to one or more pages on your site. You would never want to use “link here” as your link text.
At this point it does appear that the major search engines are still giving authority credit to “blogroll links” on blogs. In theory blogroll links don’t differ much from link directory pages on web sites, but obviously Google and Yahoo must see some reason to still consider blogroll links. Don’t be surprised if this linking tactics disappears at some point.
I’ll post about some of the link building tactics that I use in a future post. For now, however, don’t waste your time or your site’s credibility exchanging links with link builders who are using 10 year old tactics and putting links on link directory pages.
Earlier this week, I ran into an attorney friend of mine who owns a thriving personal injury practice in the Atlanta area. He told me that he was in negotiation with a “pay per click” (PPC) management firm and that he planned on testing PPC to attract personal injury cases. He would be testing this tool to the tune of $3,000 per month for a minimum of three months. What did I think of this?
I responded by asking him if he had tested his web site for conversion. It turns out that his web site is not yet live – it is in production and will be produced by a friend at no cost. I just took a look and, yes, the domain is registered, and the “in production” version of the site is there. The designer is using a template downloaded from Free Website Templates, and the site looks to be about 10% complete.
Now let me stop right here and say that I have nothing against a free website template. In my view money spent on expensive design is often money wasted as one can have a very effective web site with a free template that displays good content.
My point here is simply that before my friend even thinks of signing on for $3,000 per month of pay per click traffic, he needs to have a live web site up and running and he needs to test that site to verify that live visitors are responding appropriately. If live visitors don’t like your site, and if they don’t follow the path that you have set out for them, you are wasting your money with paid advertising.
I explained to my friend my concerns about marketing for personal injury online and that in my view his target ought to be the “researcher” type who will spend hours online looking for a vendor who will provide extensive information.
I also suggested to my friend that he should capture names and email and add a sequential autoresponder to his site to communicate with past, present and future clients.
Now, my friend is a very smart and successful lawyer. But this episode shows that even smart, savvy, trained minds can fall prey to the hype of a good salesman and the excitement of wanting to tap into the Internet gold rush. My friend needs to either educate himself about how the Internet might work for his practice or he needs to associate a consultant like me to advise him. Otherwise the $9,000 he plans on spending will do him no good at all.
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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.
Lorelle VanFossen publishes a very readable and useful blog about WordPress and blogging in general called Lorelle on WordPress. Lorelle recently attended a WordPress event in Israel and she has published a helpful post containing tips and suggestions about how to get the most out of WordPress. I recommend this post to all bloggers – new or experienced.
I was particularly interested in the section where Lorelle wrote about how to deal with the problem of content theft. Content theft happens when an unscrupulous blog owner "scapes" your content and puts it on his own (Google Adwords stuffed) blog. Often the scraped blog (called a "splog" within the blogging community) will contain scraped content from several legitimate blogs on a particular topic. The splogger then includes a trackback hoping to pick up page rank from the legitimate blog.
As Lorelle points out, these sploggers are content thieves. In the "How to Stop Content Theft" section of her post, she identifies several specific tactics to deal with these content thieves. There is a splogger who scrapes every post from my Atlanta bankruptcy blog and I am going to try some of these suggestions. I’ll report back to see how they work.
About a month ago, my house was hit by lightening. The lightening strike was a direct hit – we ended up with a hold in the roof and water damage in the ceiling. The strike also blew out most of my electronics – including televisions, stereo receivers, my garage door, my alarm system, the cable box and the DSL modem. I also lost my desktop computer – the one with all of my digital photos, videos and personal financial information.
About 85% of the digital photos were backed up – I burn my digital photos to DVD’s every year, but not much of the rest had been backed up. Fortunately, my IT consultant was able to salvage the hard drive – he put it into an external enclosure so all of my data is still there. Nevertheless, this experience served as a wakeup call to me. You cannot assume that your digital information will always be there.
In the old days, there were backup programs that compressed data for storage on floppy disks. Now, with hard drives holding 200 to 500 gigabytes of data, backup options are less obvious.
There are some software options but I have not found one that I like or completely trust. At this point, I am going to use the external hard drive route – I will have to remember to back up but I will have a complete copy of all of my data.
My friend, Atlanta mortgage broker Steve Epstein included the following suggestions in his weekly newsletter. You may have seen these tips before, but they bear repeating:
We all hear warnings about data loss and the need to backup. Fortunately, I have never experienced a catastrophic loss. However, noted affiliate marketer Chris Carpenter recently did experience a complete loss of both his laptop and both of his external backup drives. Chris used two external backup drives for redundancy in case one of them failed, but he did not plan for a fire.
The lesson – back up your data to DVD or to an external drive and keep your backup in a separate location!
