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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Tip Top Traffic - Site On Steroids Update

Last week I told you in detail how I optimized my website, based on the excellent advice from Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook. (If you're interested, I've reviewed it here.) So how has it been going?

Stats on the rise

Swimmingly, as they say in the UK. This month, I've had more than 20,000 hits and, more importantly, more than 16,000 page views. That's 7 pages a visitor (double what I was told a good count would be). About 40% of my visitors are staying longer than 30 seconds. That's good, but there's no time to rest on my laurels. I've still got to find a way to keep the other 60% on my site for longer. I'm learning a few more techniques that I'll share with you once I've seen how they work out.

Using my traffic

So what am I going to do with all this traffic? Launch a monthly newsletter, of course. The newsletter will be available from the end of March and will contain freelance writing tips, resources and articles. I'm also going to add more free-to-reprint articles to my site to keep visitors interested in what I have to offer.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Write - Share - Learn

A number of posts I've been reading over the last couple of weeks have got me thinking about why I came to WritingUp and why I stay. I think the WritingUp motto has a lot to do with it, though as you can see, I would make one small change.

Write

As a writer, I like WritingUp because it gives me a chance to practice my craft and to talk to other people in the profession (such as danahinders, gracepub, lisaloganwrites, J Harker and Ed Butts, to name only a few) On my other blog, I do a lot of creative writing, reviews, travel tales and so on. Here, I mostly stick to writing about writing (which is what I know most about), web development and promotion and resources for writers. The reason I do this brings me to the next part of the motto.

I write about these things because I enjoy sharing what I know and there are lots of people here who share their expertise as well. When people read and comment (and even when they don't) I learn a lot about what interests them and whether the way I write works for readers. Other people who are sharing include treyster, believin, synchronicity, AmberCentral, keywoman, and many more.

Learn

By the same token, I have learned a lot from people here, about networking, about markets for my writing, about the publishing business, about the internet and so much more. I like to think that this is part of the community building that is the latest part of WritingUp to come under the microscope (see posts from wcbelew, Mitch, Ashok and others.)

What about earning?

Yes, of course I hope to make some money from this, but I'm not expecting to get rich. The real value of WritingUp for me lies in the friends and acquaintances I've met, in the the sense of community and in the writing, sharing and learning that goes on.

I'm tired of seeing the same old names

Yes, you probably are. So here are the other people I've bookmarked; I've learned a lot from them, too: Atlastorm, deorre, jjarrett, Katryn, majansa, nikithal, saphirdragonfly, velvetdreams. There are more, but I've only listed the ones who've updated their blogs recently.

So now it's your turn. Which blogger or which post have you found most valuable here?

Friday, February 24, 2006

How To Put Your Site On Steroids: A Quickish Fix

For the past week I've been sharing with you everything I know about website development and promotion. If you've been following the series, then skip to the next section to see which of these strategies have worked best for me. If not, then here's a recap:

Website Optimization And Promotion

First, I looked at why it's important to do keyword research and where you can find free tools to help you do it. I then looked at how you can place keywords within metatags. Visitors to your site may not see them, but the search engines certainly will! Third, there was the importance of cross-linking, the use of a sitemap to help search engines find all your content, and the use of a robots.txt file to be in control of who is allowed to search your site. Part four considered other tools for site promotion, including directory submission and deep submission of particularly interesting links. Article marketing was the subject of part five and I highlighted a couple of ways to use this strategy to best effect. Part six gave you additional options for promotion, including networking, syndication with RSS, tagging and keeping the content fresh.

Site Promotion Quick Fix

I'll admit that all this promotion is a slow process. It's taken me nearly eight months to get my traffic to its current levels. But if you don't have a lot of time, here's my quick fix solution. These are the strategies that have proved most effective and have brought the most traffic to my site.

Write articles for Ezinearticles
Distribute the same articles through Article Marketer
Blog about the issues in your articles and link back to your articles or site
This will create inbound links and regular fresh content for your site.
Watch your hits and page views rise and find your site in the search engines.

Best of luck, and thanks for reading.

How To Keep Your Website Traffic

If you've been following this series of posts, by now you should know almost everything I know about website promotion. We've talked about keyword research and placement, the importance of a sitemap, search engine submission and article marketing. But it's not over yet. There are still a few things you can do to increase and retain the traffic you've started to build up. Here are a few suggestions to keep those numbers on the rise.

Speak out

Join a few forums that are relevant to your area and post regularly. Like WritingUp, most forums allow you to customise your signature so that every comment you make has a link back to your site or blog. These posts are also indexed by search engines. I must admit that maintaining three blogs and growing a writing business doesn't leave me much time for forum posting, but the posts I made a few months ago are still appearing in search engine results.

Get a blog

This strategy also works well for blogs. The advantage of blogging is that that you can write more or less what you like and there's nothing to stop you from putting in affiliate links. This is perhaps the quickest way to get your content found as, for the time being at least, Google, Yahoo and MSN can't get enough of blogs and bloggers.

Network like crazy

Sign up with Ryze, a networking site where you can find people with similar interests. Most networks have promotion days where you can advertise your products or services. WritingUp members can go straight to the Vertical Blog Tunnel, which is moderated by Mitch Allen and is a good place to start.

Bookmarks on steroids

Make use of tagging. Posts or sites that are tagged by Technorati and del.icio.us (a social bookmarking service) are picked up very quickly by search engines.

Keep it fresh

If you've got your own site, you can keep the traffic coming and rise higher in the results pages by keeping the site content fresh. Add a couple of pages to the site or update something at least once a week. Better yet, add a blog to your site and update it regularly; this will keep the site fresh as far as search engines are concerned. You can then use a service like Pingoat to alert sites when your blog content has changed; there is also a blog directory where you can list your blog. One option I'm also considering when I finally get around to hosting sharonhurleyhall.com is to just have a blog with a few static pages. (I think this suggestion came from Ashok.)

Syndicate to accumulate

Finally, add an RSS (really simple syndication) feed for site updates and news (or include updates in your blog, which is likely to have its own RSS feed). Use the pinging service to alert people that your content has changed. See Haven's post on RSS for more information. If you then burn your feed with Feedburner, then you can make this happen automatically.

If you do all this, the traffic will keep increasing. Just so you know there's hope, this month I have had 700 unique visitors, more than 15,000 page views and 19,000 hits on my doublehdesign website.

In the final instalment of this series, I'll offer my quick-fix solution for increasing site traffic and a quick recap of the key points.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

How To Market With Articles: Shameless Self-Promotion

Now that you've made your site search engine friendly and submitted it to search engines and directories, it's time to up the ante and use a few more tried and true methods of raising your site's (or blog's) profile. If you're blogging here, you already have a head start, as you can use your posts to promote yourself, your site or your blog.

How To Promote Yourself With Article Marketing

Article directories are websites that have articles on almost every subject. Some are all-purpose, covering everything from family issues to healthcare, while others have a niche, such as computer advice or art. All of them are hungry for content. Here's how you can provide that content and promote your site, blog or business at the same time.

Step 1: Write an article. This can be about almost anything, as long as it's useful. Your blog posts here are a good starting point. Keep the articles short (250-500 words) and remember to spell-check.
Step 2: Sign up with an article directory and submit your article. Many article directories will vet your work before approving it. Whatever their guidelines, stick to them and your article should be approved. Avoid self-promotion or promotional links in the body of your article. Most article directories disallow this.
Step3: Make the resource box work for you. The resource box is where you can put your bio and a few links to your site, blog or product.

Example:I have three different resource boxes that I use on EzineArticles - and I have changed the content a few times over the last few months. Click on a couple of my articles to have a look (try this one on interviews and this one on funeral planning ). In the first, I link to my WritingUp blog; in the second, to a resource I'm promoting.

Article Submission

Article submission services extend the strategy. Although I recommend EzineArticles, I have also found the Article Marketer service to be effective. Article Marketer is NOT an article directory. Like EzineArticles, you submit your article (with bio) and get it approved. The article is then sent out to hundreds or thousands of publishers and article lists, depending on the service you choose. I'm on a budget, so I'm using the free service, which claims that 3500 people see my articles. You can set release dates, which is great if you want to submit articles while on holiday, and they just KEEP ON SUBMITTING your articles. Another option for article submission is Isnare, but you have to pay for this.

How To Automate Your Article Submissions

Many of the article directories run on the Article Dashboard script, and there's a free article submission tool that targets these sites. It's called Article Distributor. It incorporates signup details and an article formatting screen and will automatically paste your article into the correct boxes on these sites. Don't worry, it doesn't allow spam. You still have to select the category and press enter on each site. (Please note: The Article Distributor developer has stopped downloads while he works on the next version.)

Multiple Article Submissions: Pros and Cons

Pros: Your work is everywhere, with links back to your site. Inbound links are GOOD.
Cons: your work is everywhere; Google hates duplicate content

Some of my free to reprint articles are published in 20 or 30 locations, and as far as I can tell, this hasn't affected my appearance on Google, Yahoo or MSN. Perhaps that's because the articles are all relevant to the locations where they've been reprinted. I don't really know, but so far the strategy is working.

In the next part of this series, I look at other ways you could promote your website or blog.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

There's Life Beyond Google

A little submissiveness goes a long way, especially when you're talking about website promotion. Once you've finished all the on-page optimization of your site, by doing keyword research, keyword placement and creating a sitemap, it's time to get the word out to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Haven has a tip on search engine submission, which has the submission addresses for Google, Yahoo and MSN. As Haven points out, you only need to submit the main - or index - page of your site; if you've got a good sitemap, the search engines will do the rest - eventually.

Beyond Google, Yahoo and MSN

It can take a while for your site to show up on the 'Big 3' (Google is a particularly tough nut to crack), so there are a few strategies you can use to improve your chances. Google, Yahoo and MSN also crawl other search engines, so submitting to some of the lesser known ones (which are likely to list you faster) will help to get you on their list. A resource I found really useful was WebCEO, free software that automates website management and tracking. It includes keyword and page optimisation tools and a very good submission tool. (See Gracepub's review)

What else can I do to promote my website?

Glad you asked. You can also submit your website to relevant directories, and I know of another free resource that will help you to do it. The SEO friendly directory list catalogues directories by interest and country and includes PageRank information for each directory listed. That means you can decide which directories are worth bothering with. I started with the 9s and 8s and worked my way down to the 3s and subnmitted my site to so many directories that I've forgotten which ones they are. Be warned, this will take time, as in many cases you'll have to submit your site manually. But if you're listed by external websites, Google, Yahoo and MSN will start to like you.

How can I make the most of this site promotion strategy?

Resubmit your site every six months to keep the listing fresh and practice deep submission - submitting links to individual pages that you think are important. (Samishra has a good post on this.) This works for blogs, too. I have submitted the URLs for most of my posts and they show up on Google (if you click on 'show omitted results').

One final tip: you might want to set up a disposable email address just for site submission, because you will get a LOT of email. You'll also find that you've been subscribed to lots of site promotion newsletters, most of which are a waste of time, IMHO. I set up a new one on my domain and once I've confirmed my directory listing, I can then ignore everything else that comes to that address.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

SEO: What's Under The Hood?

In Keyword Placement, I talked about using keywords in metatags and content to optimize your website. Now we're going to extend the strategy a bit further. Remember that you can highlight keywords within the text on your page. To make your site more search-engine friendly some of these keywords into links going further into your site. This will tell Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines which have found your home page that there's something else to look at.

Why do I need links to optimize my website?

Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines like pages with lots of links. Inbound links are best (those are links from other sites to your page) - and will improve your PageRank quickly, but cross-linking of pages within your site is also good. Cross-linking shows that different pages of your website are relevant to each other - and relevance is a big factor in improving PageRank. If you know what you want to do with your site, this will be an easy step to take.

Why do I need a sitemap?

A sitemap is one of the best ways of letting the search engines find the rest of your site. You should have a link to it off your home page and it should contain links to all the pages you want the search engines to find. A sitemap makes it easy for search engines and users to find everything on your site.

If you have a big site, this can take a while, but luckily there are lots of free tools that will do it for you.

Freefind provides a sitemap and free (ad-sponsored) search box for your site. Their free service will create a sitemap page, which you can customise to suit your web template. They will also search your site at specified intervals and update the sitemap. If you use the search box, they will also provide statistics about what visitors to your website searched for. The ads are quite unobtrusive, but if you don't want them you can upgrade to the paid service.

You can also create a special Google Sitemap (here's why) and upload it to your server. Two free online services are:

You can also download Google's own Sitemap Generator.

How else can search engines find my site?

Some search engines look for a special file called a robots.txt file. This stays on your server and tells it which search engines can search your site and which can't. The reason to have one is so that you can block any search engine bots that bring spam in their wake. (This is only a basic level of protection, which relies on spam bots respecting the boundaries you have set.) However, you can also specify which folders search engines are allowed to spider just in case you're storing anything confidential on your server.

You can create a robots.txt file here then upload it to your server. It also provides an example of a robots.txt file.

How can I use this on my blog?

Even if you don't host your own blog, you can use some of these techniques to improve its position in the search engines. You can certainly highlight certain keywords and link them to other posts you have made - and you can do an index post, which links to all your posts (or to all posts in a certain category). Haven has a good example here. If your webhost is providing your blog software, then you can also use a robots.txt file.

On-site links, a sitemap and a robots.txt file are all useful tools in search engine optimization, but there's still more you can do to get your site noticed. In part four, I'll look at strategies and tools for search engine submission.

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