Building traffic through free organic channels, such as major search engines, should be the goal of every WordPress blogger. So, how do you stand out and use the built-in features of WordPress to help promote your site? Here are ten easy to implement, great ways to get your blog noticed for free.
1. Unique Content
Your website is your voice to the world! Use it to speak to your audience but use your own words. It’ll help your SEO as well as building an audience.
2. Hyperlink Keywords
This drives search engines wild, it helps readers find great content and it helps search engines dive deep into your website. See my article on deep linking with WordPress to learn about it.
3. Focus your Titles with Keywords
Titles are the most important SEO element on a page. They appear in search engine results and are vital to being found. Use keywords in your titles, but never force it, stay natural.
4. Tag your Posts in WordPress
Use the Tags option to build a directory of interlinking articles and, while you’re at it, drive the point home with powerful WordPress meta tags. You can build them without a plugin.
5. Use WordPress Excerpts
Every time you post a new article, include an excerpt as a short summary and include it as your post description using meta tags.
6. Make the Most of Comments
Search engines love comments. They keep content fresh and help your site stay relevant. Sometimes I find the comments on a post as important (or even more relevant) to my search than the original article.
7. Keep Your Website Simple
We all want a great looking website, but don’t get caught in a design trap. Install the default WordPress theme while you’re starting out and focus on the content.
8. Make the Most of JetPack
The great team behind WordPress have released a monster plugin called JetPack and it’s jam-packed with goodies. There are share buttons, URL shorteners and more short codes than you can shake a stick at! These are all tuned to work perfectly on WordPress websites and are easy to install.
9. Use Social Networks
Share your posts on social networks, offer retweet and repost buttons. Make sharing easy. These links will drive both people and search engines back to your website.
10. Include Photos, Maps and More
Drive traffic to your website using photo search engines. Remember that people find your content through more than just the main search tools of Google. Add your images to Google Images, get listed in Google News and include yourself on Google Maps.
If improving your online marketing is your goal, then this article is for you. We’re going to not only talk about what deep linking is (and why it’s so valuable), but also how to do it using WordPress, the easiest online editing tool around.
What is Deep Linking?
First of all, let’s establish what deep linking is so that there is no mystery to it. You’ll see why it’s such a vital step in both online marketing and search engine optimization.
Deep linking, while it sounds complicated, is simply the process of linking from one page on your website to another page throughout the text. For example, in this article I’ve mentioned the phrase search engine optimization and since I know that some readers won’t know what search engine optimization is, I’ve linked those words to another article that focuses on search engine optimization. That’s all deep linking is – helping your visitors to move from one page to another to find related content.
Why is Deep Linking Valuable?
Linking content from one page to another is valuable for two key reasons:
It helps search engines find content on your website and, as a result, index those pages;
It helps readers find content on your website and therefore read more of what you post.
Both of those are tremendously important for online marketing. Using deep linking, you’re not only helping your visitors, but also helping search engines to better understand your content.
How to Deep Link in WordPress
The first step to deep linking in WordPress is to remember that it’s all about helping people find similar content. Scan through your post and find a keyword or phrase that you feel a reader might want more information about.
Next, save the post as a Draft copy (located in the Publish box of your post editor).
To make editing easier, open a new browser window and navigate to Posts > All Posts in WordPress.
Using the Search Posts field at the top right-hand of your posts list, search for articles that feature the keyword or phrase you’d like to link to and call up a list of related posts by clicking Search Posts.
You can grab the URL of the post you’d like to link to by right clicking the View option while hovering over the article name, or click the View link to open the post into a new window.
Now that you have the URL of your target article copied to your clipboard, let’s go back to the original article and insert it as a link.
Select the words that you would like to be hyperlinked;
Click the small link icon located in the editor toolbar for WordPress ();
Paste the link into the available URL field and add a title to your link.
Once you click Add Link you have successfully created a link between the new article and the older article, stored deep in your website.
Quick Tips for Deep Linking
Only link to content that is relevant and helpful;
Limit the number of links in an article to a reasonable amount, based on content;
Avoid linking entire paragraphs or large sentences;
Avoid hyperlinking words such as “Click here” or “Read More”, instead link phrases.
Remember, the purpose of deep linking is to help your readers find similar, expansive content and as a side benefit, you’ll also help search engines dig deep into your website!
Over the past few years, blogs have become a staple of the Internet. This is due, in a large part, to the ease of publishing content with tools such as WordPress and the need for small publishers to fill unique niches. In fact, blogs are now used for business in a way that traditional newsletters, emails and speciality magazines have been used for decades.
Despite the simplicity of installing a blog (Bluehost for example offers a one click solution), running a successful blog still has a lot more to do with mastering the world of publishing, rather than the technical aspects of setting up a website address and WordPress. This is especially true if you’re looking to build a regular readership and a successful advertising campaign.
The key to blog success is to convince readers to visit your blog and continue to return. This is the most important aspect of your website. Remember, readers don’t differentiate between a blog and a magazine, so your content should attract and retain an audience just like print publications.
Remember that blogging isn’t about technology, it’s about writing for your subject in a way that readers will enjoy and want to come back. You’ll need to education yourself on what works and doesn’t in the online world and the best ways to do that is to look at other, successful blogs to see what they’re doing right (and wrong).
How do you know who’s successful? Tools like Alexa and Complete allow you to review the traffic patterns of other websites for free.
Find a Niche that Works
What to write about becomes an even more difficult question when faced with the concern of making a blog profitable, but using popular technology, it’s easier than you think. Google offers a tool as part of their Google AdWords suite to help identify popular, profitable and competitive keywords for bloggers.
Using the AdWords tool, a blogger can review their subjects to see which ideas could have an audience as well as which are profitable. In the example to the right, you’ll see that the subject apple cider has 1 million searches monthly with low completion for the subject.
Understand Your Goals and Measure
What is the goal of your blog? Are you building a mailing list, generating interest in a business or publishing an online magazine with your blog? Understanding your goals is vital to building a successful blog.
Some measurements of success, such as personal happiness, are hard to quantify, but others are easy using online tools such as the JetPack and Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. These two plugins will allow you to measure the number of visitors to your website and gain a better understanding of which articles they’re reading regularly.
Write Strong and Write Well
Many bloggers are not professional writers and grammar is a complex subject, but it’s vital for a successful blog to be well written with proper spelling and a respect for proper grammar. JetPack, a free plugin for WordPress, includes a built in grammar checker that helps authors catch common errors and typos.
Before you even begin to setup your WordPress blog, start writing. Content is the most important aspect of a blog and it’s also the most time consuming. Writing great content is key to launching your blog.
Write Consistently
Blogging is a way for you to share ideas, information and content with a community. Once you establish a readership it’s important that your audience receive a consistent quality of post, on a regular schedule and subject matter. Some bloggers prefer to write daily or weekly, others once a month or even at once a quarter. The schedule you post at will impact your audience size, as well as how you’re ranked in the search engines.
Establish Your Credibility
Assuming you’ve now selected a blog subject and tested to see that it has a reasonable market size, you’re ready to start blogging (sort of). Remember that blogging is about building an audience and that your expertise is being shared with other people. Write content people will benefit from and share knowledge to increase your credibility.
Build an Audience
So far, I’ve talked about how to write quality content for your blog, but to encourage people to read it is the next, vital step to running a successful blog. When you encourage visitors to come to your blog, you need to remember the goals you’ve set and what you consider a successful blog visit. If you’re writing about a subject for personal pleasure, this may not seen as important, but building an audience is at the heart of blogging for business.
You can use Google Blog Search to find similar blogs by searching for a subject under the more tab of Google to help build a network of similar blogs. Look for articles that interest you and contribute by leaving a comment, this will encourage the blog owner (as well as other readers) to visit your blog and also participate in discussions.
Become Socially Active
Linking your blog to popular social media applications is just the first step in becoming a social blogger. It should go without saying that your blog should link to Twitter and Facebook, but being a social blogger is about more than just linking to social network. Here are a few suggestions to help you along the way:
Participate in networking events such as WordCamp and other real world activities;
Attend local TweetUps and other events or host one in your community;
Link to similar and source articles;
Reply to comments and thank the community for contributing to your blog;
Guest write for other blogs, and encourage writers to write for your blog.
Optimize for People, not Search Engines
You’ll discover a lot of content on my blog about optimizing your website for search engines. What I hope you’ll take away from the articles is that SEO isn’t really about optimizing your site for Google, it’s about helping Google read content that you’ve written well for people.
It’s important that you learn to write great titles, format your pages correctly, build deep linking structures and include keywords, however, poor articles with great SEO won’t build an audience so instead focus on writing for people, not computers.
Maintain your Blog
Remember that your blog is always growing, always changing and always needs attention. Put a couple of hours a week aside to reply to comments and update old content. Feel free to edit old posts with more updated information, add new photos or share old links that you feel are timely again.
Building a successful blog isn’t likely to happen if you simple write content and push it out to the community. You need to write content and revisit it regularly. Add links between articles to help readers find similar content, fix your mistakes when you find them and keep your blog updated with fresh, strong content regularly.
Disclosure
In accordance with the FTC Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, please note that this post includes reviews
or links to affiliate programs. The reviews provided in this post are unbiased and presented a fair manner. This post does
not include misleading or paid reviews.
A long time reader and friend, Daniel, sent me a question this weekend by email. I thought it was an interesting one to share on my website, as it involved Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
“Chris, my website’s been running for six months but hasn’t secured a PageRank yet. Could you let me know what I’m doing wrong?”
That’s a great question and one that I’ve been asked before, so I did an analysis of his website. I found that like many self-published websites, the mistakes he made are each relatively small but, when combined, will affect how search engines see his website.
Let’s take a quick look at the five things I found on his site and how they can be improved with easy SEO tricks for beginners.
Meta Keywords and Descriptions
There is debate still among SEO marketers as to the value of meta tags for modern search engines. Some believe they have no impact at all, while others seem them as valuable. My personal belief (although I have only anecdotal evidence to support it) is that poor tags can hurt your blog, while good tags will only impact you slightly.
Daniel’s problem was that using Adobe Dreamweaver, he didn’t see his meta tags, and as a result used the same keywords and description for all 10 pages on his website. This is poor SEO and worse, inaccurate. Search engine software will read the ten pages and know that the description isn’t accurate for all 10 pages. As a result, it will choose to ignore the keywords and other meta data for the whole site.
A better solution would be to create a handful of custom keywords for each page and write a short description for each page based on the actual content of the page, not the website.
Poor Title Tags
Similar to his meta tag issue, Daniel had used his HTML editor to generate the same title tag for all the pages on his website. Titles are important in HTML. They tell users (as well as search engines) what your webpage is about in a short, content-focused phrase.
Each page on your website should have its own title, unique to each document. The title should start with the most important idea on your page, and end with the least important, to help search engines rapidly identify the content nature of your document. Removing less relevant words will help concentrate your SEO value.
For example, if your document title is How to Build SEO Value into Your Website, you can set the title to be the same or something similar such as Build SEO on Your Website. Adding your domain or business name to the end will help with branding, while giving your article powerful SEO value. Build SEO on Your website by Christopher Ross is a strong, powerful SEO title that looks great in search engine results.
Inconsistent Links
Links are the lifeblood of search engine optimization yet, my friend seems to have done everything possible to interfere with search engines rewarding him for proper linking by confusing what links he valued.
Let’s look at my own website as an example. The homepage of my website is located at http://thisismyurl.com/ and when I link to my own homepage from other pages or sites, I always link to http://thisismyurl.com/. Take note of the trailing slash because http://thisismyurl.com/ and http://thisismyurl.com are different pages in the eyes of a search engine. In fact, http://www.thisismyurl.com/ and http://thisismyurl.com/ are also different pages. As are http://thisismyurl.com/index.php and http://thisismyurl.com/. Theme inconsistent domain name links are common on websites.
To maximize the value of your links, pick one and stick to it throughout your website marketing campaign.
The Takeaway
Improving your search engine optimization is about helping search engines understand and index your content the way their automated robots work most effectively. By labelling content properly, linking to pages consistently and writing better titles you’ll help improve your ranking by helping the robots label your content more effectively.
When it comes to running a successful website, failure is most likely not your intention. Still, no matter how hard you try or how smart you are, it may be the end result. Now, don’t get too depressed about that, you’re in good company. I read a blog by James Altucher everyday and what I get out of reading his blog is that he understands failure is part of being successful. Remember that in web based business, failure is the most likely result of trying.
Does that fact mean you shouldn’t try? No, of course not, but it does mean you need to appreciate that you’re not alone when your website doesn’t work, and you’re not alone for missing more often that you hit. The trick (if you like my baseball analogy) is to get up to the plate and swing. It might surprise you to learn that Reggie Jackson holds the National Baseball League’s honour of having the most strikeouts in his career. Reggie Jackson was a failure as a batter. He had 2,597 strikeouts. That’s even worse than #95 on the list, Babe Ruth (1,330 strike-outs). What does that fact tell you? You can strikeout more often than any other player in baseball and still make it to the Hall of Fame.
Failure is not the end
When it comes to the web, failure is not the end. In fact, with a 14% rate of success, you have to consider that being successful is actually the exception to the rule on the Internet, and treat your business as such from the very beginning. From personal experience over the past decade, I can tell you that I’ve built hundreds of websites for clients and the vast majority failed to reach critical mass.
My five rules to succeeding with a website
To help you out, I’ve put together five simple rules that I think will help anybody launch a successful website. They come from the experience of working with brilliant startup wizards like Phil Pearlman and Ben Weiss, as well as working hard for myself and often failing. Here are my five simple rules for Internet success:
Know a bad idea from a good idea and when you’ve got a lemon, walk away.
Start your website as quickly and cheaply as possible and build a user base through social tools. If it doesn’t build organically, walk away.
Treat your website like a beta tool, be willing to rewrite it to meet your customer needs and if nobody needs it, walk away.
Worry less about design and more about value; don’t get caught up in the choosing the colours while ignoring functionality.
Be willing to walk away at any time and restart. The beauty of the Internet is that you can always try again.
I’m off to build websites for the afternoon, but I’d love to hear what rules you’ve followed to build your own successful web businesses.
In the world of online marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is king. It offers website owners low cost marketing through search engine results, with little or no cost. Before you hire a company to provide SEO services, it’s important to know which services are good and which will get you banned from top search engines.
Black Hat SEO Tactics
As the term Black Hat implies, there are good ways to build your website traffic and bad ways to get Google’s attention, and these tactics make use of tricks to generate visitors to your website. Here are some common methods used by SEO firms that are considered sneaky and will get you banned from Google:
Keyword Stuffing is used commonly to try to drive traffic up by placing the same keywords over and over on a page, often in small text or in hidden layers.
Hidden Text on a page is used for keyword stuffing and to bury links so they appear for Google but not for the average visitor. This is a great way to get banned from Google and it’s how BMW was removed.
Cloaking is used to present different information to the search engines than a human visitor and usually involves scripts that are designed to detect various search engine bots which will show content based on the type of client connecting.
Doorway pages are used to try to build traffic for specific keywords on a website and are often generated in bulk to stuff keywords through the methods above.
Redirection pages can be used for legitimate purposes (such as when I remove a piece of content and redirect to a new page), or they can be used to push visitors to spam pages.
Duplicate websites are designed to push the same or similar content with the intention of overpowering search engine results. This is also known as content scraping which involves picking up content from one website (often via RSS feeds) to display on other websites automatically.
Link farms are often used by SEO companies to generate links to websites in an attempt to affect the Google algorithm.
Does working with a Black Hat SEO firm or using their method really hurt your business? Matt Cutts, the guru of Google (actually he works for Google and lectures extensively on SEO techniques), thinks so. In fact, in the video below he talks about major newspapers and international automakers that have been stripped from the Google database for breaking the rules.
Does working with a Black Hat SEO firm or using their method really hurt your business? Matt Cutts, the guru of Google (actually he works for Google and lectures extensively on SEO techniques), thinks so. In fact, in the video below he talks about major newspapers and international automakers that have been stripped from the Google database for breaking the rules.
White Hat SEO Tactics
In a single word, White Hat SEO is about content. It’s what Google is designed to index and it’s how they determine who should be on top of the list. Essentially, White Hat SEO (the good guys) is about developing the content of your website in such a way that Google is able to read it, discover the proper content and index that content from your website. In order to do this, your website needs to have a few things:
Properly formatted pages using HTML standards as developed by and approved by the W3C. This is because Google is a robot; it reads data in a common format and indexes based on that format.
Properly tagged pages using the correct HTML such as title tags, headers, paragraphs and markup tags including the strong and em options to highlight certain words or phrases.
Optimized filenames help Google understand content by reading the URL to a page. This page, for example, is white-hat-black-hat-seo-tactics. That helps Google know what the content is about. Do the same for images, downloads etc.
Accessibility matters because robots can’t see images and Google is nothing more than an exceptionally gifted computer program. Help Google index your images and improve page content by including ALT tags in your images and naming them properly.
Are you ready to improve your marketing, connect with new prospective customers and build a loyal following? Of course you are. The real question is how to do it economically. Sit up and pay attention class, as we explore Social Media Marketing 101.
First of all, don’t get rattled by the various types of social media. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have one thing in common: they’re all about helping you connect to people. Forget that you’re a company or that you sell anything. Social marketing is about one thing and one thing only: building relationships.
Now, most likely you’re already familiar with these services on a personal level, but when it comes to business applications, something is holding you back. Maybe you’ve been reluctant to jump in to use them as promotional tools because you find them just a little intimidating and confusing. That’s where I come in. Here’s how each of these tools can be used to get solid results.
Tweeting Your Success
Twitter is a great for quit hits. It’s the medium for broadcasting short messages to a broad range of people. It’s limited to 140 characters and the audience for a small business is generally a mix of both personal and professional connections. The system of hashtags allows for quick sharing of common ideas and builds a social experience into almost any subject.
What Twitter is great for: Business messages such as new hires, promoting short-term sales (such as menu items at a restaurant or one day sales) and responding to customer service issues.
There are lots of Twitter mistakes but they’re easy to avoid with a little common sense.
Build Your Fan base and Your Business
If you want something a little more interactive, Facebook is the way to go. For some businesses, it might actually serve as the entire web presence. In Facebook, you create custom pages tailored to your specific needs. Another benefit? Your clients and customers become Fans (what Facebook calls a subscriber) and will share their love of your product or service with all of their own Facebook friends.
With a simple mouse click the terrific business page feature allows visitors to your site to sign-up for your newsletter, without the fear of giving your company too much access to personal information. Customers receive updates on products and services, while you get to promote yourself to both the first customer and his or her circle of friends.
What Facebook is great for: Facebook is far more people focused than Twitter, so it’s a great way to announce personal connections and interact with customers in a public one-on-one environment. If you’re a business that runs contests, giveaways or special regional promotions, Facebook will help you target your message to specific market groups.
Let People Linkin With Your Business
LinkedIn is sometimes described as a professional version of Facebook and it’s growing strong with a recent IPO that doubled its value in a short stretch. Where Facebook connects consumers to your brands, LinkedIn connects your lateral markets to your business personality. It’s about connecting sales managers with purchasing department heads, building a network of CEOs and getting to know the people side of your market.
I like to think of LinkedIn as an online resumé. It helps me see the careers and specialties of my connections. That way, when I need to hire a consultant I can look at the people I already know before looking elsewhere.
What LinkedIn is great for: Building a comprehensive understanding of your stakeholders and developing professional relationships with your business contacts.
Blogging is Social
Building an online blog (short for weblog) is another common form of social marketing albeit often forgotten when talked about as a form of social marketing. A web blog is about communicating from a fixed domain name such as thisismyurl.com using WordPress or a similar blogging package. It’s about writing content for your readers, sharing knowledge and helping people solve problems through articles.
When I think about what a blog is, I like to describe it as an old-fashioned newsletter or a magazine just for your business. It easily connects to the other social platforms but brings people together from the other social websites to read longer pieces in a central location.
What blogging is great for: Blogging is about building your website as a brand and giving people a place to read about your product or service as a central repository. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, search engines index blog posts as regular website content and drive organic traffic to your website via search results.
(still, why is it worth the extra time it will take to write the blog? Does it allow for the flavour of my business personality to come through? And if so, why is this important?
Take Away
I hope this has helped you learn about the four key tools in social media. Each has a strength, which will help build your business as well as your personal brand. Remember, building your online presence is about interacting with your clients, building a web of contacts and helping them realize how your services can help them. Class dismissed!
It’s official this morning: my AdSense logo disappeared from my ads (displayed on the right of my blog pages) and a new ad for AdChoices appeared instead. The logo change was known for some time but it doesn’t change the shock of seeing a new logo appear on my sidebar this morning.
More importantly, I don’t like it.
The choice to change from AdSense to AdChoice is irrelevant to me (you can read about it here) but the change from a small i to a larger branding in the ads, adds to the clutter and makes them less attractive in general. For a blog like mine, on which I try to minimize distractions, it’s a bit shocking. You can see the difference here.
On the other hand, they’re just ads and I put them out of the way on purpose. So, the change has little affect on my blog, but I’d like to know what you think of the change. Is it noticeable or immaterial?
Using the Search Posts field at the top right-hand of your posts list, search for articles that feature the keyword or phrase you’d like to link to and call up a list of related posts by clicking Search Posts.
