Category Archives: seo

Social networking sites to which you should belong

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I’m a member of about 11 social networking sites, most of which work in the same way. They also help you get more traffic to your web site or blog if you are a member of them. You might meet some people too.

I’m going to send you to my profile of each of the sites. From there you will be able to jin up as well as see what I’ve done with them. Unabashed self-promotion. What else?

Bloglines is important because you can read other blogs there and put a widget on your blog. Make comments on blogs you read.

Twitter is a simple application mainly for phone contact.

Facebook is a bit different in that you can use many applications there to build up a detailed view of what you have been up to! I’m a bit sick of Facebook and don’t want any more apps!

Flickr is mainly for photos

Squidoo is a place where you can create a web site.

A swicki is a site where you can create as many lens as you like and place the tags on your web site. These lens are on any issue. You can then tag you own web site so it is the first one that the searcher will find for that topic. I get a lot of traffic from these.

Linkedin is more for the professional trying to find old professional colleagues.

Stumbleupon is where you submit sites or blog posts you like so that it is user moderated rather than spidered by a bot. I think we should all use this one a lot more unselfishly unless we want to rely on Google and Yahoo. You should not stumble your own posts

Now ning is my new baby. Here you can add many things: a blog, photos, videos. You can create a group and join groups.

Everyone knows MySpace, but I haven’t bothered developing that one.

Digg is where people submit newsy type stories and like Stumbleupon you should not Digg yourself. I find non-USA sites very difficult to find here. The Australian market is so small that our cyclones are not of interest to the rest of the world.

I haven’t joined the next 2

Workbench is more for the business person.

Mixx is one I don’t know much about. I find I get social networking burn out pretty quickly.

If you join all these and work at them, you should get more traffic to your blog and/or web site. Join me there!

Entrecard reviewed

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When you sign up to entrecard, you agree to make a comment as well as drop your card onto the card on another blogger’s site.

I try to make a comment on each site I go to and I don’t do it often. I’m not addicted to entrecard. However, sometimes you just don’t have anything to say about the posts on that particular blog.

A little community builds up which is nice. It’s kind of better than blog catalog for example, because you know they will eventually come back to you, usually.

However, most of my traffic is now coming from entrecard and without comments.  This is not so healthy. I don’t want to rid myself of entrecard but I have deleted blog catalog and Blog Rush for the moment.

How is entrecard for you?

List of blog submission sites

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Here is a site which has hundreds of resources related to blogs and feeds

Having so much fun with entrecard

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When I learned about Entrecard, I immediately dropped Blog Rush and Blog catalog

entrecard.png transp.gifI’ve been having so much fun with it and seeing lots of blogs as well.

So what is it? It’s like a business card. You sign up and make a graphic with print on it representing your own site or blog. You then get the code and insert into your blog as a widget. People can click on it which gives you bonus points and you can click on other sites with entrecard (preferably after reading some of the posts and perhaps leaving a comment) and you get points for that.

Then other entrecard users find you and ask to be an advertiser on your site. If you are reading this you should see another site’s ad on the right. They don’t pay for this. It depends on how many points they have.

Then when you have enough points you can ask a site to advertise your site on their blog. Most of the cards are really attractive.

People can also recommend your site.

I like it because it forces me to check other blogs. However, once you have quite a few ads lined up, which I have now, people have to wait quite a few days to be able to ask if they can advertise on your site. New sites with entrecard often have a one hour wait to be able to advertise on it. The servers seem to need more space. It is only 3 months old and has exploded.

No money involved, just traffic.

Ways to increase traffic and market your web site or blog

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1) Write articles: Well-written, relevant articles can net quite a bit of activity to your web site. Don’t forget to add your URL in your byline. Articles should be 500 to 2,000 words in length.
You can send articles to sites like: Article City, GoArticles, Submit Your Articles and Ezine Articles.


2) Social bookmark *everything* – and I do mean everything – you can bookmark each page of your site and each blog entry you post. While this might seem tedious, it’s worth it. You’ll see a strong increase in traffic if you social bookmark each page on your site and each of your blog entries
3) Get yourself listed at: DMOZ dot org – it’s not easy to get listed there, but worth the effort. I have never been able to do this, but I wonder really how often people go to DMOZ

4) Review: if you can review hot new products or books within your market, head on over to Amazon and start positioning yourself as an expert. In order to do this effectively you’ll want to create an Amazon profile and make sure and sign each review with a reference to your URL (your web site). You can also go to Epinions and Revoo to review products as well.

5) Offer a freebie on Craig’s List: you’ll be amazed at how much traffic you get from a single Craig’s List ad. The key here is to send people to a page on your site and make sure
they have to sign up for something (like your email newsletter) before they can grab their freebie. That way you’re not just getting traffic, you’re also building your list.

6) Create a “recommended by” list on your Delicious . You can add a link to this page in your email signature line or on your web site.

7) Create an email signature
8) Lend a helping hand: you can be an answer person at Yahoo Answers – you don’t have to spend hours on there, but maybe a few minutes a week. Make sure and include a link back to your site following your answers.

9) Set up a social networking site using Facebook, LinkedIn, or Squidoo. There are heaps of others to join. It’s free and easy to do, just don’t forget the all-important link back to your site!

10) Make sure your blog has an RSS feed so if you capture a reader you don’t lose them if they forget to bookmark your site or blog. Use RSS submit to add more feeds to more sites

11) Add social networking widgets so your visitors can add them to these sites. My blog has a bookmark widget at the end of each post.

12) Join relevant groups at Yahoo groups.
13) Podcasting is another great way to drive traffic. Start a podcast by going to Audio Acrobat. There are other programs you can use, but I love Audio Acrobat. You can record the podcast over the phone quickly and easily and then hit the “send” button on your computer once it’s recorded and the system will syndicate it to 27 podcast directories including iTunes. It’s a great way to let people know about you and your web site! I also use My Podcast


14) Start a blog and then once you do, start commenting on other people’s blogs, linking to them from your site or adding them to your blogroll.

15) Inbound links: don’t squander your time (or a perfectly good link) on smaller low-traffic sites. Instead spend your time going after high traffic, high quality sites. Good sites should have a PR (page ranking) of 4-6 depending on the market. You can find out what a site’s page ranking is by downloading the Google toolbar which comes with a PR feature built in.

16) Start an email newsletter

17) And speaking of offline efforts: if you’re ever quoted in a magazine or other publication, make sure and mention your URL as it’s appropriate to the topic. Don’t be too pushy about this, but do not forget to tell folks you have a web site that may be a great resource for the topic of your interview.

18) If you have products to sell, why not get a store on eBay? This site gets a tremendous amount of traffic and on your sales page you’re allowed to list your URL. It’s another great way to get an inbound link and a way for people to find you.

19) Load a video on YouTube and 57 other video sites (the rest listed on Red Hot Internet Publicity blog).
20) While this isn’t a tip per se, it’s still important. If you’re going to go through all the trouble of getting traffic to your site, make sure your site is converting this traffic into something. Get folks to sign up for something, your newsletter, the RSS feed on your blog. Whatever it is, getting their email address will help you remarket to them when the time is right. Studies show that visitors landing on a site often don’t buy the first time. That’s ok! You want to get them into your marketing funnel so you can market to them again and again – not in a way that’s obtrusive, offensive or downright annoying, but in a way that is helping them with their own mission.

21) Go to forums and create a signature. Help people out. They will want to see your site if your advice is good.
Adapted and edited from a post by Penny C. Sansevieri, from

http://www.amarketingexpert.com/

Social meter – how popular is your blog?

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I just used social meter to check where my blog appeared in social networking sites and was surprised to see many were in Spurl – a site I’d never heard of.

Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage’s social popularity. Currently we scan Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web.

Do keywords matter?

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More and more we are told my SEO experts that keywords are no longer the best way to get highly indexed in search engines. But I used one keyword generator and I’m sure it helped a bit.

1. Good Keywords v2.01 finds the best keywords for your web pages. Features include Keyword Suggestions, Phrase Builder, Keyword Organizer, Misspelled Words, and Site and Link Popularity Finder.

2. Golden Phrases 1.0.3 is a analyzing utility that scans specified log files to retrieve all search phrases used by your visitors to find your website through search engines. It gathers search phrase statistics and determines the position of your site on search engines for every phrase. Its unique “Perspectivity rating” technology also allows you to find which keyphrases were not used.

3. PPC Keyword Generator is a powerful keyphrase permutator/generator. Generate 100s of keyphrases in seconds, remove duplicate keyphrases automatically, define per-keyphrase custom CPC/URLs and import/export.

4. Hixus Keyword Inventor 1.0 is a SEO and keyword popularity analysis front-end for the the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Speeds up the process of finding popular keywords.

5. e3KWDCheck 2.5b is a lightweight and fast SEO tool for analyzing keyword density within text documents. It can also retrieve and analyze online web documents using the built-in address bar.

6. Get Keywords 1.0 is a small program that finds keywords in files and then creates an optimized web page using selected keywords. Features include automatic words search, add/remove keywords options, web page creation and preview, etc.

7. Keyword Digger 1.0 is a simple tool designed to search Overture for all keywords people entered during the previous month. Provides the number of times a keyword was searched and up to 100 different variations for that term.

8. AnalogX Keyword Extractor v1.03 extracts keywords from a webpage, and then sorts and indexes them based on their usage and position. Once indexed, you can adjust search-engine specific weighting factors and keyword criteria to get the best possible view of how a search engine sees your site. An older program but still useful.