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Written on 3/3/2009 at 5:26 am by

Learn How to Rank Highly in Search Engines – SEO Secrets

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization

seo-secrets-glenn.gifWant to learn how to make your blog rank well in Google? SEO Secrets is a resource worth considering.

Last year at an SEO conference I met a fellow Aussie by the name of Glenn Murray (pictured right). He introduced himself to me as an SEO copywriter and he made quite an impression. In fact he’s pretty much the only person that I met that day that I remember the name of.

The reason that Glenn was one of the few people that I still remember is that in a quiet and genuine way he stood out from the crowd. Many of the SEO types that I met that day were boastful and proud – Glenn was confident but far from cocky. He knew what he was talking about but didn’t seem to feel the need to let everyone know how good he was over and over again.

Glenn and I have kept in touch since that day – mainly via Twitter – and so when he emailed me recently to quietly tell me about his new SEO training ebook I was keen to check it out.

seo-secrets.jpgThe ebook is called SEO Secrets and you can read about it and a little of Glenn’s story here.

Typically Glenn’s sales page for this great e-book makes no outrageous claims. There are no promises to make you rank #1 for highly competitive terms or screenshots of hundred thousand dollar earnings on clickbank – just Glenn’s story and a description of what you get when you buy this resource (as well as a sample chapter and Table of Contents) – that’s the kind of guy Glenn is.

The book (currently in it’s second version) is 213 pages (including bibliography, index and glossary) of SEO wisdom. It has a section on WordPress 2.7, sections on link building (including a good section on linkbaiting), choosing keywords, optimizing web content as well as a fairly extensive bibliography for further reading (it is refreshing to see someone citing sources and providing this).

The teaching in this ebook is good – very good – particularly for those at a beginner to intermediate level who are looking for a comprehensive and all in the one place introduction to SEO. Those who have spent many many hours doing extensive research on the topic on their own will probably not find a lot of new things in this guide – but for those starting out it is well worth considering as a practical investment in your education.

Glenn has a gift at explaining concepts that can at times be quite complex – if you’re like me and not wired with the brain of a technical genius you’ll appreciate the way he talks you through the many areas of SEO covered in this book.

If you’re interested in discovering more about SEO check out the sample chapter and table of contents of SEO Secrets for yourself.

SEO-Secrets-1.jpg

Written on 2/27/2009 at 12:01 am by

How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Search Engine Optimization

In this series we’re looking at 9 things that bloggers need to work on once their blog moves out of ‘launch phase’ and into maturity.

Today I want to focus upon the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

While SEO is something that is well worth while focusing upon right from the start of your blog – I’ve found that it becomes particularly important once your blog is at least a few months old. In my experience it is not until a blog is 6 to 12 months old that it really begins to grow in its authority in Google.

I will not rehash everything I know about SEO here (I’ll link to some resources at the bottom of this post) but here are just two tasks that I think established bloggers will particularly want to focus upon (I’m assuming that you’ve got some of the basics like getting titles set up right):

1. Optimizing Successful Pages on Your Blog

I mentioned this earlier in this series of posts but one of the first things to do is to identify and analyze the pages that people are arriving to your blog on from Search Engines. If you’re like most blogs you’ll find that a handful of your old posts generate a significant percentage of your search engine traffic. Identify these pages and you can then go about increasing the ranking of those pages even further in Google by doing some of the following:

  • increasing keyword density of these pages – don’t add the keywords that people are searching for too many more times, but it can help to add them 1-2 times more, bold the keywords, add them to heading tags, add them to image tags etc.
  • increase the internal links to these pages – if you find a page that is getting a lot of search traffic, any extra links to the page that you can generate (from both within your blog and outside it) can help its authority. You might want to even highlight some of these pages in your sidebar or navigation – or to link to them within other posts on your blog on a similar topic.

2. Create More Content on Related Search Terms

Once you start getting a handle on what type of information that people are searching for you should begin to make a list of other related topics that you might want to write about. You can get ideas from this by looking at keywords that people use to arrive on your blog and thinking about synonyms for those words but also by looking at online services like Google Trends which maps what people are searching the web for.

Another good tool for analyzing search traffic and coming up with new topics to write about it 103bees which gives some metrics on the questions people are asking to find your blog. These questions are topics your readers are actually asking which shows you what they’re typing into Google. Another great tool to try is Lijit which is a search tool you can use on your blog (see it in my sidebar). This tracks what terms people are searching your blog for. The useful thing about it is that they also show you what terms people searched for that there was no search results on your blog for – very handy information.

There is A LOT more that you can do to increase the search engine authority of your blog. Part of it just comes down to writing great quality content over the long haul (which over time increases the number of doorways into your blog and grows the number of links from other sites to it) but below I’ve listed some other resources from both within ProBlogger and from SEO experts that will hopefully give you plenty of things to work on.

Further Reading:

Also – here are three helpful videos (particularly for WordPress Users) with some great tips from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Joost de Valk and Stephan Spencer.


WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies a4uexpo London 2008 from existem on Vimeo.

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Written on 12/16/2008 at 6:35 am by

9 SEO Plugins Every WordPress Blog Should Have

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services, Search Engine Optimization

Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.

seo-wordpress-plugins.pngThe best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.

WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.

I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

2. Redirection

From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to WordPress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.

Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.

3. Robots Meta

By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.

4. SEO Smart Links

One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.

SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.

5. SEO Friendly Images

Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.

6. Google Positioner

It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently

A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.

This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.

8. Nofollow Case by Case

The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in WordPress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.

9. SEO Slugs

Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.

This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.

Conclusion:

Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.

Written on 12/10/2008 at 1:56 pm by

What I Learned at Search Engine Bootcamp

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips, Search Engine Optimization

Last week I was fortunate enough to be given a pass to attend the Search Engine Bootcamp here in Melbourne. I tweeted throughout the day quite a bit – but thought I’d write up some of the tidbits that I took away from some of the sessions over the day.

There was a lot covered so I won’t go through it session by session (I missed a few at the start and end of the day too) but here are a few of the quotes and ideas that I came away with from different speakers (and a few thoughts on why they stood out).

Tim McDonald – Found Agency

Tim spoke about PayPerClick advertising and while I’m not into PPC I was interested to see a few similarities between what he spoke about as key ingredients to driving traffic with PPC and in techniques that we talk about in driving traffic organically through good blogging technique.

In one section he spoke about the reasons that people click on ads – including:

  • benefits – people click on ads that promise to benefit them in some way
  • brand – people click on ads with brand names that they recognize
  • differentiation – people click on ads that are different from others in some way
  • curiosity – people click on ads that make them curious
  • legibility – people click on ads that make sense
  • call to action – people click on ads with a call to action in them

What struck me as I looked over this list was that it could quite easily be translated into a list about how people read posts with headlines or titles with certain characteristics. When people are scanning through lists of potential posts to read in their RSS reader, on sites like Digg, in Search Engine Results – they’re more likely to click on titles to read the full post if it delivers in some of the above ways.

Nathan Stewart – Alkemi International

I heard Nathan speak earlier in the year and found him to have lots of good insights. Last week he spoke about landing pages and different aspects of websites that convert. Again – much of what he said could be applied to bloggers. Here’s a few tidbits that stood out to me:

Let Your Site (Blog) Evolve its Design – When redesigning sites – many people ‘dump’ their old sites and move onto a completely new version. The problem with this is that you fail to capitalize upon the lessons you’ve learned with your current design.

Nathan used Amazon as an example of how to do it better. If you look at Amazon from day to day and week to week you don’t notice a lot of changes in their design – but if you compare it from month to month and year to year you can see that their design is quite different. Their strategy is to incrementally change, or evolve, their design over time. Lots of small changes that are tested to see what works best – which over time add up to effective change in their design rather than just a complete redesign.

Why are websites failing to persuade people to take action:

Nathan shared three reasons.

1. poor planning – sites tend not to think about where they want to ‘lead’ their readers/visitors. Good planning will think about a site in terms of ‘paths’ that you want to lead people along to travel through a site and to a point of conversion.

2. no customer centric Architect – someone needs to take on the planning role. Many websites developments don’t have someone taking on responsibility for this.

3. upside down approach – too much focus upon graphic and navigation first and then content last. Start with content and add other graphical and navigational aspects later. Content (text based) is king.

Understand Your Visitor (Reader)

Nathan also focused quite a bit on getting into the shoes…. or more importantly the minds… of visitors to your site (or blog).

  • most people visit your site with a purpose in mind – understand what it is and deliver it
  • understand how your customer buys and makes decisions
  • actions only take place after a decision has been made – if you want people to ‘do’ something you need to help them make a series of decisions along the way rather than just tell them to do something. It’s not just about the final decision – but usually it is a series of decisions along the way.

It is really about understanding the world from your audience’s perspective. Knowing demographics (how many of your readers are male, how old they are, what their income is) doesn’t really tell you enough about your readers – you need to know how they think, how they make decisions, where they are in the decision making process when they visit your site etc.

Four types of People and their Buying Styles

Nathan presented a slide that presented four different types of people and the way that they made purchases. I wish he’d had this slide up longer because it fascinated me but I managed to get some of it down. He said that these four styles were based upon Myers Briggs personality types and that when designing a landing page for a website it was important to address all four buying styles in your copy.

The four types could be remembered with different characters from the Simpsons (and also Sex in the City):

  • Competitive – what can you do for me? (Bart)
  • Spontaneous – why should I buy it from you? (Homer)
  • Methodical – how does it work? – (Maggie)
  • Humanistic – who has used your product? – (Marge)

I didn’t get much more than that but Nathan talked about how the first two styles were much more fast paced buyers so should be addressed at the top of a landing page and that the last two were slower paced type people so you could address them lower on the page.

Jason West from WebSalad

Jason’s topic was Online Reputation Management. To be honest I thought I’d find this session more helpful than I did. Perhaps I know more about the topic than I thought I did, perhaps its just too big a topic for such a short session or perhaps it was because he kept talking about bloggers as ‘those bloggers’ :-)

One of the aspects that Jason spoke about quite a bit (he must have said it 10 or more times in his session) was the importance of owning Google with reputation management. He mentioned again and again how they didn’t really look much beyond Google what they did and didn’t focus upon managing people’s reputations in other forums like social media.

While I can understand why they do this (Google is probably the #1 place to focus and in some ways it is easier to manage) I think it’s dangerous not to include other sites. A recent example of how social media sites can really hurt a brand’s reputation was seen recently in the debacle that Motrin had with some of their advertising and the uproar that happened about it on Twitter. Under estimating what social media can do in terms of an online reputation can be dangerous and it will only become more and more dangerous.

One thing that Jason spoke about that I did find helpful was the way that they view Google for different search terms. They see the results page on Google for brands that they manage as ‘shelf space’ and look at what control they have over the different listings on the first two results pages on Google.

Another key quote from Jason – “A blogger can have more influence than a major brand has over their own brand online.”

Kate Gamble from Bruce Clay Australia

I found Kate (follow her here on Twitter) to be a refreshing way for my day to end at Search Engine Bootcamp (I had to leave after her session). While she said she hadn’t presented well she covered the topic of Social Media Marketing very comprehensively and clearly.
She spoke about the 4 C’s of Social Media:

  • Content
  • Context
  • Connections
  • Community

A process for Companies Wanting to Get into Social Media Marketing

She also outlined a helpful process for companies wanting to get into social media as a marketing tool.

  • listen – where are your people, people interested in what you’re interested in. Always start with this.
  • set objectives – get this clear
  • participate – based upon objectives
  • monitor – without this its largely a waste of time
  • report – what did you learn?
  • analyze – what does it mean?

This process is cyclical – so once you’re done you go back to listening.

Social Media Breadcrumbs

I also liked the concept of ‘creating social media breadcrumbs’ that Kate spoke about. A social media breadcrumb is a path that we create to lead those who find us on social media sites to other places that they can connect with us. So on a Twitter profile it might be a link to a page which has other social media sites that we have presence on or a link back to our blog. Kate spoke about how these ‘breadcrumbs’ should be consistent from site to site and have the same ‘story’ and ‘branding’.

Shiny Object Syndrome

Kate spoke about how everyone wants to play with the latest social media toy on the block – but this can actually be distracting and waste your time. Instead ‘go to where your people are’ – find out who those you want to interact with in social media are gathering and build a presence there – whether those places are the ‘cool’ places to be or not.

Calls to Action

We often think about developing Calls to Action in advertising and even in writing effective blog posts – but it isn’t something I’d given a lot of thought to with social media. Here’s the question:

what do you want ppl to do when they see your profile on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace….etc?

It’s actually a great question and one that need not be that complex to answer. Your answer might be – to drive people to visit my blog – or to check out my LinkedIn profile – or to buy my book. Once you know what you want people to do having seen you on these sites is to call them to do it and give them a clear way to do so.

Reflections on Search Engine Bootcamp

All in all I had a good day at this conference. It was a relatively small event (there must have been 30 or so in the room) but that made it better as it gave an opportunity to circulate, ask questions and not get lost in the crowd.
The content wasn’t what I’d call advanced – but was solid and well presented. As you can see above – I came away with a few things to think about. Interestingly most of it wasn’t really about search engines directly!

There were other speakers that I’ve not written about here (the full agenda is here) but I either missed them (there were a few I wish I’d seen earlier in the day) or didn’t find them quite as relevant for me.

I’m looking forward to SMX in Sydney next April now!

Written on 11/18/2008 at 12:03 am by

Search, Social and Direct Traffic – [TRAFFIC ANALYSIS]

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Case Studies, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

This morning I spent a little time doing some analysis (using Google Analytics) of the traffic coming into my main blog – Digital Photography School.

My analysis was stimulated by a question from a reader who in response to last week’s two posts examining the place of Digg and Social Bookmarkingin a bloggers priorities asked me:

What role does Social Bookmarking traffic play in your blog?

I decided to dig into the metrics on DPS and find out the answer… or at least that is what I started out doing…..

As I began to analyze the stats I realized that DPS has four main referrers of traffic – each are quite different from the others and yet each are very important. What follows in this post is me thinking out loud on each source of traffic and what it means to my blog.

Looking at the big picture

Lets start by looking at the big picture of the traffic coming into DPS. For the purpose of this post I’ll go back to the start of 2007 with my analysis (the time I started using Google Analytics) and I will only be looking at traffic coming into the DPS blog (ie this doesn’t include data on the forums).

Here’s a snapshot of all traffic coming into the DPS blog since 1 January 2007 (click to enlarge all images in this post).

DPS-Traffic-Social-bookmarking-spikes.png

You can see over the last 22 months that the DPS blog has had steady growth. There have been 11.5 million visitors, around 25 million page views and they stay on the site around two and a half minutes per visit.

At 1 January the average daily visitor numbers were around 4,000-5,000 visitors. At present they average around 23,000-25,000.

Looking specifically at the main sources of traffic to the blog – there are four that are responsible for a little under 70% of all of the above traffic:

  1. Google (26%)
  2. Direct Traffic (RSS, Newsletters, Browser Bookmarks etc) (21%)
  3. StumbleUpon (11%)
  4. Digg (9%)

The next highest referrers are significantly lower in how much traffic they bring in and include Yahoo, many other blogs (big and small) and Delicious.

As you can see – Google is a fairly important factor in my blog. Add other search traffic from Yahoo, MSN, AOL and search traffic is responsible for around 30% of the overall traffic.

If I was to categorize all of the social bookmarking traffic (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Popurls etc it accounts for around 24% of overall traffic (a little higher than ‘direct’).

OK – so this information is mildly interesting (to me at least) but when I dig down a little further and do some analysis of each type of traffic I find it more illuminating.

Digg Traffic

Since last week we were talking about Digg, lets start with that.

Here’s how Digg traffic to the DPS blog has looked over the last 22 months.

digg-traffic.png

Straight away we can see the nature of Digg traffic. It is either there or it isn’t. The spikes can be fairly significant (in most cases they range from 10,000 to 30,000 visitors) but between them the traffic from Digg rarely gets over 100 visitors a day.

Lets look at a few other stats on Digg visitors over this period:

  • They viewed 1.39 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
  • They spent an average of 54 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

So in comparison to overall averages Digg users are fairly fleeting (although note as fleeting as I hear some people saying).

One other thing worth saying about Digg visitors. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t ‘convert’ to regular readers. So lets have a look at my newsletter signups for the latest ‘Digg Event’ on DPS (that last spike on the chart).

DPS-Subscribers.png

As you’ll see there was a definite increase in subscriber numbers on the day of my last Digg event (Nov 13th). Of course that day had 14,000 visitors from Digg to the site and subscriber numbers were only up around 150 subscribers – so Digg users don’t become loyal readers in huge numbers – but some of them do convert. I’d suspect that RSS subscribers would increase by a similar sort of rate after a Digg event.

I’ve noticed similar sorts of increases in subscriber numbers on other ‘Digg events’. They don’t convert massively but I always do pick up extra readers each time – the stats on the site tend to look like this chart taken from my post – How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog:

200612091300

This is actually one of the biggest benefits of social bookmarking traffic for me. While the actual spike in traffic is nice – the real benefit comes from those readers you’re able to convert to regular readers. 100 extra readers adds up to thousands of page views over a year.

One more stat on ‘conversion to loyalty’:

Over the last few months I’ve had a test running on Google Analtyics that analyzes how many visitors ‘convert’ to subscribers. I’ve set up a ‘Goal’ on Google Analytics that is triggered as achieved when people reach the thank you page for my newsletter subscription (meaning when they convert to verified subscribers).

Digg Users get to this page 0.48% of the time. This is in comparison to an average of 2.24% for the overall site.

Do Digg Users Click Ads?

One of the great things about Google Analytics now is that you can track AdSense earnings if you link your AdSense and Analytics accounts (they’re still rolling this feature for some).

While AdSense TOS prohibits sharing of too much information on earnings I’ll share some vague stats with you on how different readers ‘convert’ with ads.

  • The CPM (earnings per 1000 page views) has converted with Digg readers at about half the site average.
  • The CTR (click through rate) of Digg users is about a third of the site average.

So the common perception that Digg users don’t click ads is backed up – to a point. Some of them do click and when you consider that you can get 30,000 of them visiting your site in a day this can add up.

Keep in mind that Digg traffic can be useful for monetizing a site in other ways – particularly when you’re making money on a CPM basis where you’re paid per page view.

StumbleUpon Traffic

StumbleUpon actually sends me more traffic than Digg does over time. Here’s how the traffic from SU looks over the last 22 months.

stumbleupon.png

Here we see that the nature of Stumble Upon traffic is actually quite different from Digg. While both are ‘bookmarking’ sites they are really quite different. When a post gets popular on StumbleUpon the traffic it generates is spread out over days (and even weeks and months). There’s often no single day when you get masses of traffic but rather it’s more of a slow burner (I’ve written more about this in a post titled Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic than Digg).

You’ll see that StumbleUpon traffic has actually grown significantly over time. What I put this down to is that as I’ve written more and more posts on my blog there have been more entry points for SU traffic. While traffic grows and then falls off to particular posts on SU if you have multiple posts generating traffic you can actually see it build to significant numbers (like they were in the period of June/July this year where I had about 6-7 posts doing very well in SU simultaneously).

Lets look at a couple of other metrics on the SU traffic:

  • They viewed 1.62 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
  • They spent an average of 1 minute and 7 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

So StumbleUpon traffic is a little more sticky than Digg traffic. They view more pages and stick around longer.

Do StumbleUpon users signup for the newsletter and become loyal? My stats show that 0.51% of them have reached the thank you page on my newsletter subscription process. Slightly higher than Digg users but a lot lower than overall site averages.

Do StumbleUpon users click ads?

Interestingly StumbleUpon users seem to click on ads less than Digg users with the limited amount of stats that I have on this. The CPM that I’m seeing with SU users is very similar to that for Digg users but the CTR was about a third of Digg users (and about a tenth of overall site averages).

Search Engine Traffic

My number one traffic source on DPS is that from search engines. Google takes the lions share of this but I’ve added in the others into this analysis (interestingly Yahoo has been on the increase of late). Here’s how the search engine traffic has grown over the last 22 months.

search-traffic.png

Again – a very different shaped chart to the others. The two spikes in traffic are both to do with search traffic increasing for terms around ‘fireworks photography’ at around 4th July – but other than that it’s very steady growth with little weekly spikes and troughs in traffic but not much else to note.

This traffic has gone up over time for a couple of main reasons:

1. I’ve been adding content – the more pages you have the more entry points that search engines can send people to

2. The sites authority has grown over time – the longer you’re around the more links you have pointing at your blog and the more authoritative search engines begin to give you.

Lets look at a couple of other stats from Search Engine Traffic:

  • They viewed 2.55 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
  • They spent an average of 3 minutes and 20 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

Interestingly Google readers view 2.51 pages and spend 3 minutes and 16 seconds while Yahoo readers view over 3 pages and spend over 4 minutes on the site.

In terms of ‘conversion’ via the newsletter – 2.72% of search engine visitors have made it to the thank you page (again it’s better for Yahoo than Google). This is better than the site average making search traffic more sticky than social media traffic.

Do Search Engine Readers Click Ads?

The common perception is that search engine referrals are more profitable when it comes to CPC advertising programs like AdSense. My stats back this up.

I’m seeing the CPM of my search traffic as about 10% higher than the site average and CTR up by about 10% also. Interestingly I’m seeing Yahoo traffic as about 30% higher than Google.

Direct Traffic

The last category of traffic that I want to analyze is what Google Analytics classifies as ‘direct’ traffic. This traffic includes those coming in from desktop RSS subscribers, newsletters, browser bookmarks, type in traffic etc. Here’s how this traffic has looked over the last 22 months.

direct-traffic.png

Again we see a fairly steady growth in this area. The weekly spikes coincide with when I’ve sent out newsletters. The bigger spikes mainly coincide with when we’ve run competitions in our newsletters.

The reason for the growth in this traffic is largely that I’ve worked very hard on building a newsletter list for this blog (particularly over the last year).

Lets look at some more stats on this direct traffic:

  • They viewed 2.28 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
  • They spent an average of 2 minutes and 55 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

Both of these stats are higher than the site average but lower than search engine traffic. However considering that many of these visitors come to the site on a weekly basis and view hundreds of pages a year these averages are pretty good.

In terms of ‘goal conversion’ (or getting these people to my thank you page of the newsletter signup – they convert at 2.08%. This is slightly under the site average but considering many of them have already signed up – it’s pretty good.

Do Direct Referrals Click Ads?

This one interested me because I suspected that these highly loyal readers would become pretty blind to AdSense ads over time. However they are bang on average for the site with both CTR and CPM performance almost exactly on the site average.

Concluding Thoughts

I know this post has been rather long and so I will keep my concluding thoughts brief (I considered posting this as a series of posts but hope it’s more helpful seeing everything side by side).

All traffic has its place and serves different purposes.

One of the main things that strikes me about this exercise is that while some people write off different types of traffic – that together they come together in fairly significant ways.

For example – Digg traffic may not be that sticky or profitable – however as I think back to the early days of DPS it was the early series of Digg spikes that helped to get the blog going.

Even going back before January 2007 (before the charts above) DPS was on the front page of Digg quite a few times. Each time this happened the site step ups in loyal readers to the blog. This helped it grow even though at the time the site wasn’t generating much search traffic.

Overtime search has been increasingly important to the site in finding new visitors. The Digg spikes are handy and still draw people in that have not seen us before but in many ways they’ve served their purpose for the site and now our Google and Yahoo authority has kicked in we’re starting to see more benefits from there.

As I look forward I see both ‘search’ and ‘direct’ traffic as taking over even more from social bookmarking traffic. If things continue to grow as they are search and direct traffic will out number even the biggest spikes that the site might get from Digg.

This doesn’t mean I’ll not value the bookmarking traffic – but it’ll play less of a roll.

Social Bookmarking as an SEO tool

One last unproven idea that has been lingering in my mind lately is the importance of social bookmarking as an SEO strategy. I’m not sure how much of an impact it has had on the growth of search traffic on DPS but surely all of the links to DPS from Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit and other social bookmarking sites have had an impact upon the site’s search authority.

Even posts that don’t get to the front page of Digg that are bookmarked there must at least be getting some search engine juice from the bookmark.

More than that – getting on the front page of Digg or going popular on Delicious often has the flow on effect of being linked to by a lot of other blogs and websites that watch these pages. For example my last appearance on the popular page on Delicious stimulated at least 30 or so links from other blogs. Again – each link is adding to the search engine authority of the blog.

Written on 11/6/2008 at 5:52 am by

Search Engine Optimization Training [VIDEO]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization

If you’re looking for some SEO teaching and have a spare 30 minutes you might find this video presentation by Stephan Spencer at a recent WordPress event.

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Written on 10/30/2008 at 4:02 am by

The Importance of Pillar Articles and why Obama and McCain are Idiots

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Search Engine Optimization, Writing Content

In this post – relatively new blogger CJ from Wise Money Matters shares what they’ve learned about using Pillar Articles (sometimes called evergreen content) to Grow Traffic to Your Blog.

I started blogging only 4 months ago. In the grand scheme of things, this is a very short time and my blog, wisemoneymatters.com, has a long way to go before I can become a “ProBlogger” like Darren. Due to my relative inexperience with blogging, I have spent the last 4 months scouring through various “how to blog” blogs such as Problogger, Copyblogger and have watched all of Yaro Stark’s BecomeABlogger videos. Through my studies I’ve heard about the importance of key core posts, also known as “pillar articles” but only recently have seen the effects of them.

Since my full-time work schedule doesn’t allow me enough time to fully market my blog via commenting on other blogs and engaging heavily in social media, I rely a lot on Google to pick up my posts. I do try to comment on at least 10 blogs per week, but to really jump start my blog, I should be doing closer to 10 per day. In the last month or so, since my blog has started to gain some steam and other bloggers are linking to me, my Google rankings for various search terms have been going up and certain pillar articles have really been the focus of most of my traffic.

In fact, here is a graph of my traffic sources via Google Analytics for the past month:

pillar-articles-traffic.png

In my personal opinion, while you need a good mixture of commenting on other blogs and social media interactivity, I find Search Engine traffic to be the best source of traffic for several reasons.

The primary reason is workload. Commenting on other blogs requires that I frequently visit those blogs to comment. I naturally comment on the blogs I already enjoy reading, but sometimes find myself simply going to various blogs to get my own name out. It’s simply work and not very fun. Frankly, I think it’s also kind of selfish as I’m not really adding much to the other blog but rather just trying to add to my own. Occasionally I make a good relationship with another blogger, such as Mr ToughMoneyLove from ToughMoneyLove.com, but that’s rare.

Social Media is even harder work. It requires constant attention which is something I don’t have. Maybe if I get to a “ProBlogger” status like Darren (he even took the time to add me as a friend on Facebook rather than waiting for me to add him… how cool is that?!?), I could find the time to devote to Social Media but until then, working my day job to pay the bills is more important.

With Search Engine traffic, it’s consistent traffic. As long as you don’t significantly lose your spot on a Google search term, you will get traffic over time. Little extra work is needed aside from making sure your posts are updated as needed. The traffic just keeps flowing.

Secondly, it’s attracting people who actually want your content. Often times when I comment on another personal finance blog, the only return traffic I get is that the owner of that blog comments on mine. While this can be good (see making good relationships above), it’s not really productive overall. The results of such efforts are often minimal. Granted, they do add up over time so I’m not suggesting stop commenting, but they aren’t as solid as someone who is actually searching for the information you are providing and seeing your site listed for the search term.

With things like Digg, you often have to go out of your way to make articles which specifically attract Digg users. Such articles often stray from the original core mission of your blog to get the “shock effect” that Digg users like so much. Worse than that, Digg users are there one day and gone the next. Don’t get me wrong, getting a good Digg has it’s rewards, but it requires so much energy for little consistency. I’m more of a passive blogger type of guy. Write a really good article which gets a good ranking on a popular Google search term and just let the people slowly stream in.

So don’t misunderstand me. You do need a good mixture of techniques to get your blog known but if time is a constraint, getting good solid Pillar Articles listed on Google should be your top priority and do the other stuff when you have extra time. Wait… does anyone actually ever have extra time?

Anyways, on to two types of Pillar Articles…

Seasonal Pillar Articles

Once the United States primaries had been pretty much finalized, I started to look at the two Presidential Candidates. I figured I could do a post comparing the candidates. Since my blog is a personal finance blog, I decided to look specifically at their economic stances. I wrote one blog post about each candidate. To give it a little spice, I titled them “Why Barack Obama is an idiot” and “Why John McCain is an idiot.”

I figured those titles would at least draw the attention of a few people. However, I never thought it would be so beneficial to my blog. Since the election has really become cutthroat, those 2 posts have been 2 of the most viewed posts on my blog.

Here is a list of the top 10 search terms from Google which landed on my site (click to enlarge):

pillar-articles-2.png

As you can see, those two posts make up the entire top 5 search terms for my site.

The keys to seasonal pillar articles

Key #1: Timing. This is the most important. You need to be the first for a particular subject. I wrote these posts when the candidates for both parties were initially decided. I could have written those posts last week, but I would have only had 1 week to get the traffic. On top of that, due to my low overall Google Pagerank, other similar articles were bound to be written and I wouldn’t have been able to get to the top of the Google listings.

For instance, if I type “Obama idiot” into Google, my page is 4th on the list. When I first wrote this article, there was only one other article with a similar title. Now the search is filled with such articles. For “McCain idiot,” I’m ranked 10th. When I first wrote this article there were no other articles with such a title and I was ranked #1. Due to my low PageRank and other factors, I’m now 10 being pushed out by the bigger websites.

So the key is to get in quick and early. The only downside is that when you notice such trends, you need to make sure and stay up to date on the post. For instance, when I initially wrote the McCain article, he had very little information available about his economic policy other than wanting to lower taxes. Now his plan has shaped and the information is now a little outdated. Also, both articles were written before the big decline on Wall Street and all of the bailouts, so neither of those issues were addressed.

Key #2: Good content. Frankly this is almost as important as #1. Timing will initially get you a high spot on Google searches, but good content will keep you there. This is something I struggle with because I’m not naturally a good writer. It’s important to continually check posts that make such a huge effect on your blog and remove any obvious mistakes. I edited the language and grammar of both of those posts at least 3 times after publishing them and realizing their popularity.

Key #3: Think outside the box. Since my blog is a personal finance blog, I was tempted to title the posts “Obama’s economic policies” and “McCain’s economic policies.” While both of those titles may have received some traffic, they most likely would not hold their place against the major media channels who typically cover such topics with similar titles and frankly those titles are just plain boring. They don’t evoke any emotion and would track minor attention. However, due to the strong opinions on both sides regarding the current candidates, the titles I chose were perfect. I did expect them to get some Digg traffic, but I do realize the actual content of the posts aren’t really Digg material so I’m not necessarily disappointed that they didn’t.

So when you combine those keys listed above, you can drive some serious traffic to your site for the course of the event or season. Now I fully expect these posts to fall off the radar after the election, but for the time being, I’m reaping the rewards. Also, I suspect that at least one of these posts will remain popular after the election. Which post will depend on which idiot gets elected.

I will also admit one downside to this particular example. Much of the traffic that comes to the site will be a one time visit (see my comment on Digg at the top). I realize that most people searching for these terms are not looking for personal finance advice. The flip side of that is I am reaching an untapped audience. The blogosphere is cluttered with personal finance blogs. Many people looking for a personal finance blog have already found the one or two (or ten) blogs that they are looking for. This gives me opportunity to reach an audience who may want personal finance advice but didn’t know it yet.

Further Reading from the ProBlogger Archives

All-time Pillar Articles

If you notice on the top 10 search terms in the image above, 4 of the top terms were related to “Top Paying Jobs.” This falls under an All-time Pillar Article. This drives a consistent amount of traffic to my website every single week. It’s currently listed as my most Popular Post on my website according to my site’s popularity plugin.

pillar-articles-popular-posts.png

I actually came across this by accident and wrote 2 posts about it. I did some research because I was interested myself in the top 50 highest paying jobs. I found a good list and basically cross posted it with my own comments. Then I was wondering about the top 50 highest paying jobs which don’t require a career. So I cross posted that as well. The results are great.

Again, this goes back to the passive traffic idea. I consistently receive traffic from these search terms. It’s not the quantity of the Seasonal Pillar Articles because the highest paying jobs is not the hot topic of the month, but it is consistent. That is one thing to remember when stumbling across such Pillar Articles. Don’t expect the masses to flock to your latest genius post. Give it time and let Google run it’s course. Sometimes you hit it and sometimes you miss.

There is however 1 primary key to making Pillar Articles that I learned from this experience. Post about what you want to know or learn. The only reason I have a post about the highest paying jobs is because I was curious. Since I don’t have a college degree myself, I was also interested in the highest paying jobs with no degree. The key is that if I’m curious about that, there has to be other people that are curious as well.

Now realize that Google has it’s preferences. If there is a hundred articles about the very post you are interested in writing, don’t expect to jump to the top. You should still write the article as over time your blog should gain a reputation (and therefore a higher PageRank) and the post will likely rise, but don’t be discouraged if that perfect post goes nowhere. Just keep writing great content and the traffic will follow.

I’d love to hear any other suggestions regarding tips on Pillar Articles as that’s what I really focus on and if you liked this article, please Digg it or Stumble it. I’m sure Darren would appreciate the extra traffic.

Written on 10/14/2008 at 12:01 am by

How to Get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Search Engine Optimization

“What is the best way to get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog?”

Last week I spoke at a Search Engine Marketing conference in Sydney about my experience of blogging. As part of the presentation I was asked to talk about my tips on getting traffic from search engines. I thought I’d share a few of the points I made here:

1. Search Traffic has been an important part of my blogging

The amount of traffic that the blogs I’ve worked on get from Search Engines varies considerably from blog to blog but on my two current blogs I get 25-35% of my traffic from Search Engines (largely Google).

Here’s a chart showing how Search Traffic fits into the mix of my photography blog traffic (from a couple of months back):

search-engine-traffic.png

You can see that Search Engine Traffic is not the biggest source of traffic (social media takes that award) but it is significant considering the site gets over a million visits a month.

2. Search Traffic isn’t Everything

Looking at the above chart you see that if I was to only ever focus upon Search Engine Traffic that I could potentially be loosing up to 67% of my blog’s traffic.

One of the main points I made yesterday is that people shouldn’t become obsessed by Search. While it has amazing potential – I find that sites grow best when they have a variety of sources of traffic (including from Search Engines).

Here is another chart from the presentation which shows the four main areas that I put effort into when thinking about driving traffic – Search, Social Media, Community and Content.

balance-in-search-engine-traffic.png

Search Engine Optimization, participating in social media, building community and producing content are four important elements of building a site that gets (and keeps) high levels of traffic. When a blogger becomes obsessed by any one of them (to the detriment of others) the site can suffer (or at least not realize its potential). When the four elements come together a blog can grow quite rapidly.

3. SEO is Important

Learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization is important as a blogger. While most blog platforms these days come fairly well optimized for Google there are always tweaks that can be made. For example on WordPress the title tags that are served up by default can be tweaked to not show your blog’s name on each post on your blog (or at least to put it after the post name).

There are also a lot of easy ways to optimize a post for search engine traffic while writing posts. For example formatting images well with SEO in mind and using good keywords in titles.

SEO really does make a difference and bloggers who learn the basics can see significant increases in traffic. It is well worth investing time into learning it.

Learn more SEO techniques in previous posts on ProBlogger:

Highly Recommended – Also check out Aaron Wall’s SEObook for some excellent training on SEO. Consider it an investment in learning how to drive traffic to your blog.

4. Great Content is More Important than SEO

I felt strange saying this at a conference where SEO companies were pitching for clients and talking about the importance of building links to a site – but in my experience the most important thing you can do to build your blog’s search engine traffic is to write the most amazing, useful, authoritative and inspiring content possible.

Here’s the question you need to be asking while writing each post:

How can I make this the type of post that people will want to share with others?

Search Engine authority has a habit of coming to those blogs who consistently produce content that enhances peoples lives, meets needs and solves problems. If you create something that does some of these things it is quite likely that the all important links that your blog needs to build search engine authority will come as people link up on their blogs, share the link on social messaging and bookmarking sites, email their friends etc

While great content doesn’t automatically equal lots of traffic – if you produce it consistently over time and actively participate in social media and within your blog’s niche it has a habit of building your traffic and search engine authority.

I’m not anti using link building strategies (ie asking people for links) but I’ve never really done it (I may have once or twice in the early days of my blogging). I know some bloggers who spend many hours each month ‘building links’ but wonder what would happen if instead they concentrated on using that time to build linkable content?

Perhaps I’m a little naive – but Google is in the business of ranking the best sites highest. They want to rank great content in the #1 position – so, my aim as a blogger is to write that kind of content.

Further Reading on Writing Great Blog Posts – How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause

How do you Get Search Engine Traffic To Your Blog?

There you have it my philosophy and approach to getting search engine traffic on blogs. What would you add?

Do you do much Search Engine Optimization? Is it something you put much time into or just let look after itself? What SEO techniques have been most effective for you?

Written on 8/28/2008 at 6:51 am by

A Downside of Getting to the Front Page of Digg

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

The Holy Grail of incoming links for many bloggers is an appearance on the front page of Digg. It has the potential to send tens of thousands of visitors and bring about a lot of secondary links from other sites who see it.

However the downside of a site the power of Digg linking to one of your articles is that it is an authoritative site in the eyes of Google.

Yesterday one of my posts – 15 Stunning Lightning Images – got to the front page of Digg. It was actually an old post that I’d recently updated and moved back onto the front page and it already had done pretty well on social media sites so had some link equity already.

The front page appearance on Digg brought a fresh influx of visitors which was fantastic but here’s what I saw in Google’s search results when I searched for Lightning Images this morning:

lightning-images-seprs.png

Yep – Digg out ranks the post it links to.

I fully expect this to change at some point as Google’s rankings are in constant states of change and even the link to my post above will give it a little extra authority but it is an issue that many bloggers face and should be aware of when submitting their posts to social media sites, or other sites and forums with established authority on Google. update: the DPS article now outranks the Digg one.

I’ve seen this same thing happen again and again on Digg but also when a site gets linked to like a site like Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Engadget etc who link back to the source of their story but use a similar title for their post to the post they’re linking to.

I don’t think this is the problem of the sites linking to posts – it’s probably more an issue for Google to work on – but post this as a little warning for bloggers active in promoting their blog posts on other sites.

It is still a good thing to get on the front page of Digg, just one consequence of doing so to keep in mind.

TIP: One quick tip for those of you who suffer from this problem. If you have any control for how your posts are submitted to Digg, try to get the title to be something different to the title of your blog post. For example, if the title of the Digg submission above had been ‘Lightning Pictures’ or something completely different like ‘Flash, Bang – 15 Images of Storms that Will Rock Your World’ then it wouldn’t rank as high for ‘lightning images’ as my own post.

Of course not everyone has control over how their posts are linked to – but if you do, it’s worth keeping in mind.

Update: OK – some have seen this post as me saying that this is a disaster, that people should avoid Digg, me overacting. Perhaps the way I wrote this conveyed that I thought it was a massive problem – it’s not massive, it’s not a disaster, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to a blogger – it’s simply one downside. I’ve commented on this more deeply below here.

All I attempted to do with this post was to point out one thing that people might be interested in when they have their posts on Digg. It’s not the be all and end all, getting on the front page of Digg is still a good thing, it’s just one of the consequences of it.