A simple internet marketing account from the weird and wonderful world wide web, with a bit of rage thrown in for good measure.
Hi Guys,
EggRage will be down this evening at 9PM for approximately 30 minutes as we upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.5 - after which everything will be back online and fully accessible again.
Thanks for understanding!
- John
All done now, we are sucessfully running Wordpress 2.5 and so far nothing has broken!
I’m going to be really ‘naughty’ here and break the trend of the thousands and thousands of April fools blogs that have gone up today. This has absolutely nothing to do with April the 1st!
Increasingly blogs are sold to companies not just as a part of their website, but as a legitimate SEO tool to be added on to their website and bring them additional traffic and positions. In order for this to happen however, they do need to actually use the blog, and use it well.
In the spirit of this, here are 5 reasons to subscribe to your clients’ RSS feeds!
1. To See If They Use Their Blog At All
Its all very well telling your client how much they are going to benefit from having a blog and how much traffic it will bring them, but if they don’t touch the damn thing then they won’t be getting much benefit at all. I have a dedicated folder for my clients’ blogs and when I see that a week has gone by and their name hasn’t turned bold in my list (an indicator that a new story has been published) I start sending emails. This may seem like more hassle to you than to them, but if you want to upsell them a higher SEO maintenance package in the future then you need to ensure that you get them results NOW!
2. To See If They Use Their Blog Correctly
I actually once had a client with a band website who on occasion would blog about the weather… Don’t even ask. Because I wasn’t subscribed to the feed, I didn’t realise until about a month later. Make sure your clients are using the right content for their blogs, remember, writing is not their strength and its not what they were hired for, so don’t expect them to know exactly what to write just because it’s their company. Ideally their posts should be an authority on their industry, and not sound too much like a press release, nor a personal opinion, rather an objective concise article employing a journalistic writing style.
3. To See If They Are Using Internal Linking
Too often clients will happily blog away like little rabbits, only for me to come along and find that they have not linked to a single one of the pages on their site. One solution to this (for wordpress) is to use the A-Links plugin, which automatically inserts a link when it detects the use of keywords that you specify. I’m not a fan of this technique as it can often make a good blog post look very spammy, but done correctly it can work ok. Clients often forget to even use their keywords in blogs, let alone links, so its a great thing to check for when you get a popup notification from your feed reader for one of your clients’ blogs.
4. To Asses The Current Affairs For Your Client
When it comes to doing monthly maintenance for a client, it always involves at least a small amount of external link building. Often finding a subject to write about or to link from can be a pain, especially if your client’s industry is one that you are not actively involved in. Being subscribed to their blog means that you will always have a fresh set of up to date news on what’s going on in your client’s industry (provided that they are following #2)
5. To Capitalise On SEO Opportunities Right Away
Sometimes I’ll see a really good blog by one of my clients come into my feed reader, really well written, great content, great images, and very social media friendly (diggable, if you will). Then I look at the title and my computer-screen-damaged eyes drop in dismay, another crap title! The title of a blog entry is SO important, probably more so than any other factor - hell I could write and entire other entry on blog titles alone! (and I probably will). Make sure your client’s titles are catchy, clickable, and use keywords, and if they’re missing any of those things then get in there and edit them!
The days of spamming your links manually in as many places and signing on to hundreds of link directories are over, you don’t need to do that type of work to get yourself traffic any more, and you don’t need a big expensive press campaign to promote your site either. You don’t even need to have a Google Adwords account.
Social Media is one of the fastest growing marketing formats in the entire world, and is miles ahead of the competition with the way it can target mass groups of specific market demographics. ‘How?’ you ask?
You have (most likely) at some point filled more information on the internet than a market research company could ever ask for, and you did it out of free will!
In case you’re still wondering…
What is Social Media?
Social media is Facebook, social media is MySpace, its Bebo, its Hi5, its Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Sphinn, Slashdot, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Simpy, Newsvine, Furl, Spurl, MyJeeves, Google Bookmarks, and many, many more. Social media is absolutely everywhere, social media is any site where users congregate and interact with each other.
So How Does Social Media Triple Your Traffic?
Pretty easily. On a social media site; you register, you fill out your profile, and you start interacting people. The type of site that you’re on dictates the type of interaction that you have with the other site users. On Facebook for example, you create your profile and keep in touch with your friends, organise events, and share stories and photos. While on Digg you submit news articles and the rest of the community vote on them based on whether or not they are ‘news-worthy’. While finally on twitter, you post constant 150 character messages on your profile telling the world what you’re doing at that moment in time, and anybody who is interested enough to care that you are eating beans on toast yet again can tune in to your ‘twittering’.
Essentially, all these sites are ways of getting links back to your site, and not just random links, but links on pages that are already getting a high amount of traffic, so you have a higher chance of some of them clicking through to your site.
My previous post on How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 hours highlighted just how powerful Digg can be, I would estimate based on experience that I generated the BBC over half a million page views based on my submission that day.
When I submitted my own article talking about how I got the 3,000 Diggs to this very site, it went mad on Stumbleupon, and I started getting 100-200 unique visitors a day. (not bad for a blog that was only 3 weeks old at the time) and so far just from that article this month I’ve generated over 1,600 visits and just under 4,000 page views.
Here are my stats for the first 10 days of March, 90% of which was down to Stumbleupon referrals.
My RSS Subscribers also jumped up by about 400% and have held pretty steadily since then. The best part is that since the large spike in traffic above, I’ve seen a consistently higher level of day to day traffic as well.
I should note in closing of this section that social media did not triple my traffic. It multiplied it by a factor of about 12.
So How Do You Get Started With Social Media?
Its quite simple really, if you don’t already have a MySpace or Facebook account, then go and get one! My personal favorites are Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. You will notice that I have all of these in a ‘Social Bookmark This!’ link at the bottom of all of my blogs. If you want this for your blog you can download the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.
Remember though, if you use social media just to spam your links, you will get nowhere. Social media sites are picky and choosey and they hate spam, so involve yourself in the community and you will reap the rewards, but you have to put in the time and the effort.
What have your experiences with social media been thus far? Got any great social media sites that I’ve missed here? Drop me a line in the comments!
So you are a budding wedding photographer and you have a website, its a good website, nay, its a great website, and you’ve decided that you are going to optimise it for search engines and make your site more accessible, and more easy to crawl so that as many of your pages as possible will be indexed, and more people will find and appreciate your work. You have decided that your first port of call will be to rename all your files to make use of appropriate key phrases, but you have a problem.
You want to rename /portfolio.htm to /wedding-photographer-portfolio.htm but currently your indexed page in Google links to /portfolio.htm and if you delete this page, anyone who finds you in a search engine will simply be given a 404 (not found) error when they click on your site. You can’t leave the page in place and set the new one live as well, or the old page will never be un-indexed, and the new one will never be indexed for the first time because it has the same content.
So what do you do?
You use 301 Redirects.
What is a Redirect?
Redirects come in two main forms, a 302 redirect (temporary), or a 301 redirect (permanent). Essentially a redirect tells any traffic to the url you specify to move on to a new page, it ‘redirects’ it. (see how that works?).
In the case of a 301 redirect, users are automatically taken to the new page, whereas search engines are informed that this page has moved to a new location, and that they should re-index the new URL.
How do I use a 301 Redirect?
There are many ways of implementing 301 redirects, from using server side scripting (eg php headers), Meta Refresh headers, Javascript Redirects, Frame Redirects, Redirect Loops, or my personal preference, which is the server side scripting in the form of an .htaccess redirect (for Apache) and http.ini redirect (for ISAPI).
If you’re using a Linux based server then setting up a 301 redirect is probably a lot simpler than you might imagine.
### 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.example.com/newpage.htm
The first line is simply a comment, so you can structure your .htaccess file when it’s getting full of things.
The second line consists of the following elements:
Tells the server what type of rule this is
Tells the server which page you are moving
Tells the server where the page is being moved to
Considerations
It should be noted that in order to comply with HTTP web standards, the location of where the page is being moved to must be an absolute URI (ie. it must have http://www.example.com/newpage.htm - and not just /newpage.htm)
Some browsers will let this slide if you forget to do it, but others will display a warning message to the user.
That’s all!
So if you want to get cracking with renaming some of your files to make better use of key phrases but don’t want to lose your indexed pages in Google - you now have your solution! Get to work!
Got any nifty 301 Redirect tricks? Drop me a line in the comments!