ImproveSeo.info » Blog Promotion

Permalinks make Wordpress slow.

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:08:55 +0000

I just read an interesting post about wordpress permalinks:
Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding Wordpress Permalinks. The post describe in details the speed problems which comes in wordpress when the Permalinks are activated.

The main issue is generate by the wordpress architecture. All the maps between the permalink url and the real items are kept in the database. When a webpage is displayed wordpress has to retrieve a number of items from the database equal to the number of internal links displayed in that page.

The solution proposed by the author is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable. In the same time he blames seo experts for teaching wrong tips and tricks.

Seo experts are seo experts. Usually they will teach you how to do push your pages up in the search engines. Optimizing your blog should be only the second priority. So you have to remember to use all the time some caching mechanism for wordpress, especially when you use permalinks. You can try WP-CACHE or WP Super Cache.

Paid Links. Google Bet Against Future?

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:19:11 +0000

I think everybody knows what Google thinks about paid links(dofollow paid links because the nofollow links are accepted). They hate it for 2 reasons:

First of all they can not detect it, control it, measure it. The entire Google castle was built on the “measuring” what other pages “think” about a specific page. In simple words: back links. If links could be traded as any other resource the rich players will put lots of money in buying links. Google algorithms will be affected to some degree and the quality of the results will suffer.

The second reason for which Google don’t like it is the fact that their revenues might be affected. Most if not all the Google revenues are based on advertising. Google castle is build on the backlinks net foundation and powered by the ad marketplace they built. Content on web becomes more and more and grows much faster than the money spent on ads.

More and more people will be tempted to sell ads when they will realize that a sold link might bring more money than an embedded ad unit. On the other side people will realize that a paid link is not bringing only new visitors but an improved search engine position.

I’m sure that if there would not be the terrible punishment of losing the place in the eternal Google index the link trading would flourish. Let’s try to imagine how the world would be if the link trading would be “legal”. First of all lets assume big players will put their money in paid links and will reach the sky in SERP pages. A new job will appear called SEO profession(wait this job already exists). The site owners selling links will have more money; they will also buy links to promote their websites.

The question to be asked is “Would the paid links affect the quality of search?”. Somehow when we think about paid search we think that bad sites will reach the top just because they afford to buy more links. How is that different of what happens today? Bad sites can pay good SEO professionals to push them in the top. It’s more probable to reach the top of the engines with good SEO than with good quality.

Google already have some powerfull algorithms and it can measure and control what’s happening on web right now. Why to make the web to play by your own rules and not leave it free to control and regulate itself? The response is obvious, but is it profitable also on long term? It’s not a bet agains future, to freeze or to force the market in the direction you want, instead of adapting yourself for the market changes? How long the little site owner will agree to make 50$ a month from adsense when he can make those money from selling 2 links?

How to improve your SEO Startegy using Military Principles

admin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:34:09 +0000

I recently read an interesting post on Tim Ferris Blog: Napolean on News and Information Management. It is a post about some of Napoleon’s quotes about managing information, and prioritizing tasks. It was really interesting because I was starting to ask myself a lot of questions after reading it. Maybe you’ll ask how come it is related to SEO? Actually it isn’t. But for every thing you try to achieve you need a strategy. SEO is no different than any other thing.

That’s why in this post I will try to apply “military” principles to practical SEO. First of all lets’ establish very clear what we want to achieve through. Lets define SEO as a set of actions we are going to perform in order to achieve the best results we can get based on what resourced we have. By resources we can understand our time, money or other people’s time and money which can be used in a seo campaign. The results of course should be increased number of visitors and better positions in search engines.

The way you select the techniques and prioritize your tasks will bring(or not) crowds of visitors on your sites. Looking for different information about all kind of strategies on Wikipedia I came to this a set of millitary principles:

Army’s United States Army Field Manual (FM-3-0) of Military Operations (sections 4-32 to 4-39) are:

Objective (Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective)
Offensive (Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative)
Mass (Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time)
Economy of Force (Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts)
Maneuver (Place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power)
Unity of Command (For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander)
Security (Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage)
Surprise (Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared)
Simplicity (Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding)

I think most of the points are relevant as well for SEO tactics:

You need to define an clear and attainable objective. Don’t confuse the objectives with the means to achieve it.
Concentrate the “combat power” at the decisive place and time. Have you lost your time submitting your site to useless directories? Did you lost your time focusing on more than one thing with minimum benefits from each of them instead of doing one very well?
Economy of Force: Have you lost too much time on insignificant jobs that could be avoided or commissioned to less expert people?
Unity of Command: Did you concentrated all the efforts to an accountable person?
Simplicity: How clear are your plans. Do you know every momnet what you have to do?

I think the millitary strategy principles mentioned can be applied with success to any domain, especially to SEO.

4 Fatal Mistakes the Beginner Blogger Does

admin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:06:23 +0000

I’ve compiled a list of mistakes that most of the beginner blogger do. The list came from my experience, I’ve done the mistakes from the list and I’m still tempted to do some of them.

Writing or buying as much content as possible. Most of the time he focus on quantity than on quality. A blog always need quality content. When writing or buying content for a blog, keep in mind that a visitor that come to your site to leave it after 10 seconds and not come it again brings no value. For a new blog it loses potential visitors and subscribers.
Getting as many links as possible, no matter what. The most used methods includes spamming forums with unrelated posts and leaving “Just want to say hello” comments on every blog they land. Forum postings and blog comments are are effective only when used to post relevant information and to build a brand to your online presence. Forums and Blogs are social tools and they should be used as such. They pass no page rank and the search engine reputation passed by them is 0 or very close to it.
Focusing on optimizing the blog instead of adding more quality content. This is what everyone does when he starts a blog. Everyone reads a lot of SEO related news and they try to optimize their blog. The result is that too much time is spent for optimizing a blog which contains little content, instead of spending it on adding more content.
Being a solitaire blogger. Focusing most of the time on adding quality content and optimization is not the best way to promote a blog. Every successful blogger is a very social blogger. The chance for a blog to compete with mammoth sites super optimized is to be a part of the blogosphere and to be promoted on social media. You can achieve it by linking to and being linked from other blogs, having a social profile on social media sites and building relations with other people.
Not focusing on the same niche. It’s hard to find all the time interesting topics on the same niche. Most of the bloggers are tempted to write something interesting even if is not related to their niche. This will make them to lose some subscribers and regular visitors who are interested in the blog niche but are disappointed that they have to read many unrelated articles.

Blog Promotion: Starting a New Blog

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:46:16 +0000

I decided to start a new series of posts about blog promotion. I noticed that my blog attracts only a few visitors. That’s made me ask myself what have I done wrong? Or what I have not done and I should do?

I know one thing was missing from this blog. Quality content. I started the blog several months ago because I thought it would be nice to play around a little bit, to see what a blog means and I was interested to learn new stuff about SEO. Now that I played enough with it I want to be more serious(but not too serious). I discovered a lot of things reading the forums, blogs and experimenting, and I’m prepared to discover new things which I’m going to share here. I’m not a SEO expert(yet), but I’ll try to discover the best techniques for having a successful blog and share them with you.

But before starting you have to think again if you are ready to learn new things, write quality content, and promote the blog and if you have the time for it. I’m not going to say that you need 1 or 10 hours daily or to make some recipes on how to have a successful blog in 61 steps. It’s up to you how much time you want to spend and this will help you have a successful blog sooner or later.

The most difficult part when you have a blog is to attract more and more visitors. Depending on how many visitors you have, you need to choose between different approaches for promoting it. If you have a blog with just a few visitors daily or if you don’t have any other visitor except yourself then you have to adopt specific techniques for promotion. If you already established a well-known blog you need to use other techniques. One thing you have to remember: in order to be successful any blog needs quality content. Quality content means unique content, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Before starting discovering the techniques to use for growing blogs we should take a look on the path every successful blog takes. We’ll start form point zero: the blog is started without content and visitors. First of all you need content, so you start to write it. Second of all you need visitors. We just identified the main ingredients of a successful blog: content and visitors. And we need a link between them: promotion through different channels. By promotion we should understand the way we can reach new potential visitors through various distribution channels.

As I said, for each blog you start, add content and identify channels through you can make it available to potential visitors. In order to make it a truly successful blog you have to reach the phase when content promotes your blog. Forget for the moment all the crappy techniques you can read in so many places about doing link building by yourself. Forget about directory submission, about submitting your link to 100 social bookmarking sites, about flooding blogs with comments and the list goes on. All you have to keep in mind is the golden rule: Once you reach a certain exposure your blog will promote itself through it’s content which is so unique, and hard to find that everyone will want to bookmark and share it.

The first stage is to reach a critical mass of visitors that when you add useful content will share it bringing you new visitors. It’s all about transforming your visitors in promoters of your blog. In order to reach that stage you have to: 1. write quality content, 2. have some relevant visitors to your niche who might find information on your blog useful. Those methods includes:

relevant blog comments
forums promotion through relevant posts and signatures, without spamming
enroll with your blog to blog directories and blog communities like myboglog and blogcatalog

Using only the above mentioned techniques does not guarantees success. There is something more to understand. Think to your blog as a site competing with other sites. Your competing with large content sites like about.com, answers.com or online stores like amazon.com having a lot of content. They develop a lot of internal linking and have the sites super optimized for search engines. As a solitaire blogger you’ll never be able to compete with such abominations. Unless your not a solitaire blogger. I think this is the main reason for which only bloggers being very social can reach the top.

What being social means? Its hard to describe but easy to understand. Being a social blogger means to develop relations with other bloggers. Not because you have to but because you like what they write, it means writing about what trey write about, being generous with outgoing links, linking to what you like, without expecting them to link back.

You have to use blog comments like a social person, not like a spammer. Make your voice heard to bloggers you like by commenting on their blogs. They might read your blog and link back to you. Be active on forums and provide useful information to to other users. Again, be social, not spammer. When relevant and useful you can post a link of your blog. Enter to blog communities and make your voice known. Find other bloggers you like and develop relations to them.

I think this is the the recipe to bring the success:

write a critical mass of quality content
after the blog is started promote through various channels to reach new visitors, being social, without spamming.
establish a critical mass of relevant visitors who will promote your quality content by sharing and bookmarking it because is unique, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Those should be the goals and in the same time the means to achieve them. Let’s call it strategy and now we have to identify the tactics and techniques to action. As you noticed I didn’t mention seo techniques(the standard manipulation techniques of of the content, backlinks internal linking and so on), because those are not so important as the utility the blog brings to its readers.

This post is just the beginning of Blog Promotion series. All the techniques that will be described in the series will be applied on this blog. The effects and efficiency of the techniques can be measured in real time. When this post was published for the first time there were only 10 subscribers on this blog and less that 100 visitors daily. Further more the extension of the domain is .info. It is considered a SEO handicap by some folks. I consider it the opportunity to prove that it doesn’t really matter.

kwout.com – a simple way to capture snippets from webpages (0)

When to use Forum Signature & Blog Comments

admin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:17:27 +0000

Forum signatures and blog comments are one of the most debated seo methods and in the same time, one of the most easy and accessible thing. Most of the seo experts say it’s useless and for sure when you have a blog with 5000 subscribers posting on forums just to get a few backlinks is a waste of time. After all, the question is not if forums signatures and blog comments are effective, but in what conditions they are effective. I mentioned the example of sites having 5000 subscribers. For big sites the subscribers represents the actual channel of creating backlinks. If 5000 people read a new post, maybe 5 of them have blogs and will generate backlinks, and other 10 people will find it interesting, share and bookmark it.

What to do if you have a new blog having 1 visitor and you are that visitor. The chances to get backlinks are approximately 0, and every new visitor is important. I think in this situation posting on forums and commenting on relevant blogs worth it. But you have to keep in mind that nobody likes the spammers(not even other spammers), so it’s better not to be one and to follow a few rules:

post only useful information, relevant to the forum/post you’re using
try to use forums/posts in your niche
be polite and don’t judge other people. If they say crappy things, don’t attack them, just combat what they say.
if you don’t have something relevant and useful to say then don’t post.

After all keep in mind you promote more than a link site, you promote the brand of a website, and an online profile and you don’t want people to associate it with some spam.

Forums Signatures

You should never relay on the reputation(link juice) given by the forum backlinks, even if the links are dofollow. Search engines developed complex algorithms and forum links have a pattern that is easy to detect and forums signatures backlinks have a low value.

Forums are great to bring targeted visitors and is better to use them wisely. Don’t post on each thread, try to add useful and documented information. A good post in a forum thread if much better than 10 spammy ones, if it’s informative and clarifies some doubts. People will spend more time reading it instead of skipping and the chances to land on your page are higher. After all “The Value of the Link is directly proportional to how hard it is to get, as mentioned in a post about forum signatures from nbridges media.

Blog Comments Blog comments in most of the cases are nofollow. It’s hard to find important blogs having dofollow comments. You can use specialized tools like Fast Blog Finder. A small demo of how to use it is here.

The most important fact about blog commenting is that you can get noticed by other bloggers with high established blogs. If your blog is interesting they subscribe to it and they can add backlinks to what you post.

How to Achieve Best Results on Long Term using Social Media

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:08:36 +0000

Everyone wants to reach the first page of social bookmarking and social sharing sites. On the other side there are many people describing that being on first page of digg or similar sites don’t have long term effects.First of all, reaching the first page of an important social bookmarking site will bring a big crowd on your site, only for a few days. It will not result in a constant traffic for long periods of time, as a direct effect of being on the first page, but it might generate indirectly traffic on long term. A few guidelines should be taken in consideration.

Webpage Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the webpage will be noticed by the crowd. This is not enough if you want more than many visitors for a few days.

The page must be really useful to make the visitors come back to the site and convince them that it’s something that deserves to be shared to the community. The page should contain useful content that is hard to find or unique.

Website Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the site will be noticed by the crowd. To benefit on long term you must ensure that the visitors will remember it:

the entire site have relevant and useful content.
the similar content should be visible, observable and accessible to the user in a matter of seconds. The pages where the visitors might roam directly from the landing page should be relevant to what they are looking for.
the layout and design of the site of the site is crucial, even more important than the content. The first impression matters, and if the first impression is not good there might not be a second one. The site should look simple and clean to be understandable from a single look.
the site should be brandable with a visible logo. When visitors land for the first time to your site, they should feel it’s unique. If you don’t want to buy a unique theme then you should use one which is not very popular in your blog niche.
have accessible social bookmarking and sharing buttons for more sites. Once a page reach the top in one SMB other will follow. It’s better for the visitors to have an accessible way to vote one page on other social media sites.

RSS and email subscribers

Depending on how good you content is a percent of the visitors might subscribe by rss or email. A few techniques will increase the percent of visitors subscribing:

have a visible rss button
have a visible subscribe by email controls
have a regularly updated site, but not to “regularly ” – I personally avoid blogs having too many posts, but I read that users like blogs updated regularly. From my point of view I’m not annoyed and I don’t unsubscribe from a blog having a post per month but I avoid those filling my reader with many irrelevant posts daily.

Google Algorithms optimized for Google Products?

admin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:02:39 +0000

… or Google Products Optimized for Google Algorithms?

I just read an interesting post about the first results in google when searching for blog. Not only that the first results were from google products, but there is no reference to Wordpress or TypePad in the first 10 results. Some people think google is changing their algorithms to promote their own products. I personally don’t think that google changes algorithms to promote their own products. I think is the other way around. People working at different google products knows google algorithms and knows how to optimize their products better than everyone else simply because everyone else doesn’t know how google algorithms works.

I don’t think is fair to have a competition on a market delivering content between 2 categories: people knowing google’s secret alghoritms and people guessing the algorithms. Moreover, It’s hard for me to imagine that someone can think that a company being involved in search and delivering content will not promote its content using its search.

I think one lesson for SEO experts would be to keep an eye on products delivering content like Blogger, Google Knol, Youtube,… to see how they are changed and SEO optimized. They will have a lot to learn from this.

The Best 10 Blog Directories

admin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:44:07 +0000

Blog promotion requires some specific SEO methods. A good way to get backlinks for blogs are blog directories. Here is a list with the blog directories I consider the best. Most of them requires a reciprocical link:

BlogCatalog – is the one I like the most, it has a good design and can generate a little traffic to your wesite. It is more than a simple directory, it tries to add a little social spice to the classic directory recipe. It publishes also the RSS feeds and has PR5. Adding your blog to it requires ownership verification. This is done by embedding a small image in your homepage. One the site is verified, the image can be removed, but keeping it will provide some advantages: the statistical information and the probably the internal rating of the blog based on it.
Blogged.com – is a PR7 blog directory, where you can add your blog without having to embed some widget in your code. The blog is reviewed in 1-3 working days by a reviewer who rate the blog when approving it. Like for blogcatalog.com blogged requires the verification of the blog ownership by embedding a image in your blog homepage which can be removed after. The blog is still listed without an known author if it’s not verified. Blogged.com also uses the RSS feeds to aggregate the blog content.
Technorati – is not a blog directory in the classic way, it’s a blog search engine, indexing 112 millions blog(source). However you can use it to add your profile there and to make sure your blog is indexed.
GlobeOfBlogs.com – a PR7 directory.
BlogTopList – a blog PR6 directory containing a lot of blogs. It does not contain a direct link to your blog(the link is redirected).
Bloggapedia.com – a PR 5 blog combined with a blog search engine.
Blogarama.com – a PR4 blog directory started in 2002.
Bloggernity.com – a PR4 blog search directory with a simple interface.
BlogSearchEngine.com – A nice looking directory and search engine blog, PR3.
TopBlogArea.com – A PR3 blog directory.
BlogListing.net – A PR3 Directory powered by phplinkdirectory.

Other Blog Directories:

TopBlogging – just another PR0 blog directory. It does not have something special just the usual stuff and its PR is not very encouraging.
Other blog directories: BlogFlux.com, FeedBoy.com.

ImproveSeo.info » Blog Promotion

Permalinks make Wordpress slow.

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