Get Your Blog Google-Ranked in 30 Days or Less (Part 2)

By Frederick Townes (c) 2008


If you haven't read Get Your Blog Google-Ranked in 30 Days Or Less, Part 1, you aren't going to want to miss it. But, here are even more useful suggestions to put your blog on steroids without any blog-roid rage. Please read on.

25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site's content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.


24. Only purchase ad links on relevant niche sites. This, by default, limits competitive links and delivers more qualified (knowledgeable and ready-to-purchase) visitors to your site.

23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there's always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.

22. Publish new content on weekdays. Even search engines need a break. Actually, more people are online Monday through Friday so your latest blog post is still the latest when posted on Monday rather than Sunday. A little thing, for sure, but little things mean a lot online.

21. Write content for various experience levels. For many spaces DIYs are the largest sector. Some readers are just starting out. Others have been at it for years and probably know more than you do, so post blogs to appeal to a broad range of skill sets – from green rookie to wizened old vet.

20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.

19. Focus on contextual relevancy before quantity of links. Connectivity within a market or topic segment has more value than SEO anchor text, at least in the short term.

18. Poll your readers. Everybody's got an opinion. Provide a platform to let posters and readers vote on a topic related to your site. It doesn't do any good if you run a retail outlet and poll visitors on who they'd like to see in the White House. Stay on topic.
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17. Create surveys. Surveys are more in depth than a poll. One survey you might want to try is one in which buyers rate the services and products you sell. Great marketing information. Consider placing a satisfaction survey somewhere on your site.

16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn't matter if you're blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.

15. Find free stuff to give away. Free still works on the web. There's lots of open source software (OSS), mortgäge calculators, real-time stock feeds and other digital goodies that visitors can download free. Free is nice.

14. Answer questions on Google groups and Yahoo Answers. People write in with all sorts of questions, some sure to fall within your area of expertise. By signing on as an authority in a field (your arena) you build credibility. Plus, it's fun helping others from the comfort of your own work station.

13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don't take up a lot of room. If you aren't an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Don't use clip art.

12. Use QA sessions in your blog. You're the expert. Also, invite guest bloggers to handle questions beyond your skill set. Helpful, simple advice keeps visitors coming back and makes you a guru.

11. Syndicate content outside of your blog. Every site owner needs content. Fortunately, there's plenty of it free for the taking. Sites like www.helium.com, www.ezine.com and www.goarticles.com are content supermarkets. Post your piece and pick up non-reciprocal, in-bound links for your effort. Content syndication increases link popularity.


10. Direct (future) page rank efforts to well-optimized content on your home site. Don't direct visitors and bots to the garbage bin of out-dated content stored in the site's archives. Point them to the new news.

9. Update or create a Wikipedia page and link to your site. Another means of establishing yourself as an authority. Just make sure the Wiki piece is accurate, well written and typo-free.

8. Submit industry or topical news to general news sites. Not just industry related sites. If a small oil and gas company brings in a gusher, it's of broader interest than to just industry insiders. Also adds credibility and another link.

7. Deep links or links to sub-pages are vital. There's a tendency to link from a remote site to your home page. Not necessarily the best strategy. Consider linking to pages deeper in the site – pages related directly to your blog post. This way, visitors are in your site and less likely to bounce.

6. Respond to comments in your blog. This accomplishes three important objectives: (1) it shows that there's a human behind the blog; (2) it gives you a chance to show your expertise; and (3) you can lead the thread in a new direction or keep the discussion going. Oh, it's also the polite thing to do, as well.

5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you're optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.

4. Get linked alongside related blogs on other sites. You can contact the blog administrator to swap links, you can become a regular guest blogger if your writing is good enough or your knowledge extensive. Niche sites are great for building blog links networks.

3. Bait your blog. Post unconventional and controversial articles to create lengthy threads that, in turn, create site stickiness.

2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.

1. Network offline. Helpful networking tools include www.linkedin.com, www.meetup.com and www.mybloglog.com. These sites provide real world contacts to simplify and streamline the process of networking. They're also useful in building beneficial online relationships - not to be overlooked. Also reach out using conferences that are available in your area and abroad.

The keys to building a successful, well-tended blog run the gamut from good content to good contacts, and from credibility to controversy. There are lots of ways to expand your blog community and develop quality rankings at the same time.

Once you've got all of this down your next steps are to begin monetizing your site.

So, blog.
About The Author
Frederick Townes in the owner of W3 EDGE Web Design. W3 EDGE is a Boston web design company that specializes in search engine friendly design, Internet marketing and conversion optimization. Contact them today for a free quotatíon and more information on how to make the most of your online presence.

3 Top Tips for Great Web Page Design

Great web page design is very important to making sure that your customers see your company in the way that you want them to. Just as you put a great deal of effort, time and resources in ensuring that your bricks and mortar storefront is bright, clean, and attractive, your website needs the same kind of attention. This article will explain the top three ways to make your website work for you!
When I started Future Access in 1995, St. Catharines website design guru's thought that good web page design was no more than putting up a few pictures, a page of text, and that was it. Little to no thought was given to how things made you feel, the logical path you would expect someone to take through the site, or where you wanted them to end up. It was much more about being trendy and cool by being one of the first companies in your industry to have a website at all!
Today, now that bandwidth limitations have been greatly reduced and multimedia content is everywhere, great web page design has become a way for small companies to level the playing field and compete on par with much larger rivals. In my experience, as we have developed better and better websites over the years, our customers' customers continually give positive feedback (and their business!) to companies that have made effective use of their design.


People have enough stressors in their life as it is today, and they don't need their experience on your website to add to them. Everywhere you look, busy, highly pressured individuals are seeking after a Zen-like experience, feng-shui, or just simplicity in general. So should it be on your website. Do away with the unnecessary extras, flashy gimmicks, and fancy doo-dads. Resist the temptation to say everything you want, or put a list of every single product you offer all on one page.
I have come to realize that less is more, and that users really appreciate the simplicity of a clean, uncluttered look on websites. The success of Google's web page design is a prime example. Look how clean Google's homepage is compared to its major competitors like Yahoo and MSN. They have so much white space, they even offered a black background for the 2008 Earth Day in order to reduce power consumption on the monitors of their millions of users.
The simplicity and ease of use have allowed a single company to capture half of the market share of the entire search engine industry, and catapult them to market leaders and innovators in many other areas as well. Remember this, give the user what they want (not what you want), and less is more.
Part of keeping your site clean and easy to use is simple, intuitive navigation. Many times in my online browsing experience I have come across websites that have a beautiful homepage, and then completely change the design on their inside pages. Menu items that were clearly outlined across the top have now moved to the left hand side, or have disappeared altogether. I have no idea how I am supposed to progress through the site, and in fact I can get lost altogether on some pages.
I have found that a much better approach is to use clear, consistent navigation. This means that the links to your various pages should appear in the same place and in the same order on every page on your site. If you have many pages for your users to navigate, a drop-down menu can be a very effective tool. Everyone is used to clicking or rolling over a menu at the top of a program like Microsoft Word and have a menu drop down from there. If your website allows them to navigate in the same way, you keep the experience consistent and help users to get around your site with ease.


So now that we have established that your website should be clean, simple, and easy to navigate, how do we make it beautiful? What is going to create that emotional response that you create when people walk through your doors into your bricks-and-mortar storefront?
After years of St. Catharines website design at Future Access, creating hundreds of websites for our customers, I have come to realize that the use of high-quality photography really separates a great site from an average one. The key is to use the right photograph, and not to overdo it. A collage of 9 or 10 images a blurred together on your homepage, many of them indistinguishable because they are wide shots reduced greatly in size will not be effective. Instead, a single large, high-quality close-up photograph that showcases your product or service can work best.
If you want to use more than one image, a moderately paced Flash animation can create extra emotion by having them fade into one another, or by panning across the picture very slowly. A photographic technique called "depth-of-field", where the foreground of an image is in sharp focus but the distant background is completely blurred really draws attention to the image. Don't believe me? Check it out next time you are browsing the web and see for yourself!
Now you have all the essential advice you need to create fantastic website. Great web page design includes a clean uncluttered look that eliminates unnecessary information. You need an intuitive navigation system to help people get around easily. And finally, you should use great, high-impact photography to create an emotional response. That's it! Now, go and check your website to see if it meets these criteria. If not, go to it!



About the Author: Bill Janzen has been doing web page design since 1995, and owns Future Access, a St. Catharines website design company

Social Media Advertising Will Succeed

Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Despite the fact that social media advertising has yet to hit its stride and is taking some lumps for low click rates when compared to high pageviews, it will succeed. Social media is a different type of advertising platform from information-oriented websites and the two should not be compared.

The reality is that social media delivers the holy grail for advertisers on the Internet: a mass-concentrated U.S. audience reach similar to television. Tell us your thoughts...

The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70 percent coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in YouTube and Flickr and you get another 60 million totaling an estimated 215 million humans viewing social media monthly.

Compare that to television where an average 24-hour period delivers around 50 million unique viewers. The highest viewership day of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, has an estimated 110 million unique U.S. residents viewing television. Even over an entire month there is arguably less than 200 million total unique television viewers.

The Internet has become a powerful platform for advertisers to reach mass audiences via user generated video too. According to comScore Video Metrix, U.S. Internet users viewed over 10 billion videos online in the month of December alone. Imagine a 15 to 30 second commercial with each video view and the Internet seems ready today to compete with broadcast TV in delivering commercial views.



Advertising on social media is not about clicks or click rate any more than TV commercials are; it's about quickly reaching reaching a huge U.S audience. Sooner rather than later, advertisers will see social media as a great way to reach mass audiences. After all, in terms of audience size there are several Super Bowls every day on Facebook, MySpace and YouTube!

It simply doesn't matter what the click rate is for Facebook, MySpace and YouTube because they reach huge audiences that major advertisers like Ford, Pepsi and McDonald's can't help but see the value in. Predictably, Adwords buyers will see the value too.

Click rates are a reflection of pageviews and social media sites similar to TV have a large overlapping audience that hang around them all day, every day. Television would have a low click rate too if an ad campaign were measured over the course of a months worth of programs on the same network, assuming you could click the screen.

People also tune in and out of TV just like they do with social media. According to Compete's figures for every unique visitor to YouTube there are 54 pageviews. With Facebook, a unique visitor creates an amazing 564 pageviews in a month and on MySpace each person generates a staggering 1,110 pageviews.

The social media audience is loyal, large and habit-oriented just like broadcast TV. They also hit the prime youth-tilting demographic who are big spenders online and are considered a high value audience by ad agencies and advertisers. Ultimately, what advertisers value is the audience, not just the clicks.

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About the Author:
Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which includes WebProNews and numerous other vertical and community sites.