VIDEO: Learn from Shoemoney, my daughter, Duane and Steve (oh, and me too!) how to monetize your blog
I’m in NYC for SMX East which starts tomorrow and I’m really looking forward it. But I’m also gearing up for Blog World Expo in a couple weeks. That’s because my daughter Chloe Spencer, the Neopets blogger, is going to be speaking there on a panel called “Are You Getting The Most Money Out Of Your Blog As You Can?” along with heavy hitters Dave Taylor, Tim Jones, and Chris Pirillo. The session is scheduled for Friday, October 16 at 11:30am.
Thinking about this panel reminded me of another panel that Chloe was a part of, also on the same topic, last year at DMA08. The session was called “Blog Monetization: From Soup to Nuts” and the heavy hitters that time were: Jeremy Schoemaker, Duane Forrester, Steve Spangler, and me. And thinking about that session reminded me that I had neglected to post the video of the session to this blog. Doh! So here it is…
The order of speakers was:
- me, founder of Netconcepts, co-author of The Art of SEO (coming out this month!)
- Chloe, teen blogger and AdSense entrepreneur,
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An SEO & Web Marketing Blog: Scatterings
The Internet : Going Global and other myths
It’s 2011. We’re embracing the 3rd decade of public internet access. Since 1991, home use of the internet has been mushrooming. Google has been at the forefront of the use of the internet. If you want to find something on the internet, you use Google. Ok, maybe you use Bing or Yahoo, but same thing really.
Why? Search engines have the whole internet read and indexed, stored and filed, cross referenced. Google has been going since 1994 and in 2001/2 became the biggest search engine in the world (by use and by documents indexed – the then used benchmark). You can read more about the history of Google on my slideshare.
With all of these documents, Google has to look at different ways to present information. It’s slowing moving towards the concept/idea of a Symantic Web but allowing cross-referencing. Google is learning to return results on the way you use results. It’s using Places (Geo-Targeting) and Organic Ranking. It displays results by Blogs, Discussions, Real-time (twitter), Video (including Youtube) and Images. It uses User Ratings and reviews, average prices and other data (Google Snippets).
It’s a vastly different animal from 10 years ago. So why do pre-Google myths still surround us? Some of them are made up and some of them are just scary. Many of them are issued like edicts by self-professed experts. But they’re all debunkable – Google goes to comprehensive lengths to distribute accurate information but we’ve too many soap-box experts willing to shout out rather than sit back and listen.
This is a quick list of my favourite, pet-peeve Internet Myths. I hear them daily. I read about them on Fora (plural for Forums), blogs and in advice given to clients. Sit back – some of them seem like complete fact – but these are all bona fida Internet Urban Legends. If you hear any SEO Guru espousing the virtues of these – run, run away fast!
1. Keywords and Keywords density: Why do 1990′s SEO “tips” still survive into 2011? Because its easy to understand. It’s based, loosely, on a library-style indexing system. Really – Google is going to rank you for “Hotels Dublin” because you have it 101 times on your home page and you competitor fell short at 100? Forget it – Myth Busted: Google doesn’t respect a Keywords Meta-tag!
Snake oil Hint: Keywords are just text.
2. You get penalised for duplicate content: I’ve been lectured on this at length. I keep 4 domains with exact, duplicate content that are all at least 5 years old and none of them are penalised. I don’t need to – Google has a video on it. Duplicate content, that you own, is not necessarily penalised. Cloned, syndicated, plaguarised and scraped content being different. Rolled up content is not penalised content. This is actually quite a complex area but I’ll keep it simple – its how I can tell the cowboys from the real researchers!
Snake Oil Hint: Be careful but be weary when someone pontificates on this one!
3. .COM is global: This is the worst and most damaging myth of all. A .COM, for most parts is a TLD but it’s not necessarily Global….
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SEO Blog
On-page and Off-page SEO
When it comes to on-page and off-page search engine optimization, keywords are necessary to get a website ranked in Google and other search engines. Keywords are intrinsically related to search terms – words and phrases that people enter into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter 2 to 5-word phrases in Google to find what they are looking for. Google in turn analyzes all pages in its index and lists the pages which contain those search terms. Each web page usually contains one or two keywords that are repeated more often than others throughout the site. These keywords dictate the “theme” of a website.
In addition, Google analyzes other sites that contain links to your site. Specifically, Google looks to see if the text of a link (the clickable part) that points to your site also contain those same keywords.
Page importance is all about links – their quantity, quality, and strength, which we will discuss later on. This part of the algorithm includes Google PageRank (PR).
Google looks for links that point to your site from other websites. Google believes a link from website A to website B is a “vote” for the importance of website B. In this way, other websites add votes for your website, which in turn helps increase a pages PageRank value on your site. Each page on your site has a PR value. Usually the PR value is the highest for the home page as most people will link to your home page rather than another page on your site.
The more web pages that link to your site, and the more vital in turn those pages are, the more vital Google thinks your site is and hence the higher your PageRank value. Moreover, it is the quality, as well as the quantity, of links that
matter – not all links are valued the same. Keep in mind that PageRank is but a single (albeit vital) factor used in ranking.
Sites that are highly optimized for on-page factors can outrank sites that are less optimized but have higher PageRank.
PageRank value is assigned after comparing every page in the Google index against one another. This is billions and billions of web pages.
Note that PageRank does NOT factor in keywords or phrases used on your site.
About The Author
Author is running Article Directory and is a Internet…
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Seo Blog – Search Engine Optimization Resources
3 Marketing Lessons from Kate Middleton’s Biggest Secret
Whether or not you’re into the most talked about wedding of the century (ahem, William and Catherine aka Kate in case you haven’t been watching the news), you probably haven’t been able escape the speculation of what the soon-to-be princess will be wearing on her big day.
In fact, chatter about Kate’s wedding dress is one of the highest search trends on Google and every possible mention of it stirs up even more gossip.
Keeping Middleton’s wedding dress under wraps actually teaches us an important lesson about marketing. Kate’s biggest secret – her wedding dress – is an excellent example of creating anticipation, excitement and buzz.
Here are three marketing takeaways from the Royal Wedding:
1. Make Exciting News Early
It’s common for companies to announce news when it happens. When this occurs, there is so much missed opportunity left on the table by not making a pre-announcement way beforehand. If William and Catherine decided to announce their wedding date on the wedding day itself, companies currently profiting from the event would lose out on a lot of money.
This is the same reason companies like Apple schedule exciting press announcements regarding new product releases: to generate pre-release buzz. In another example, Netezza (now an IBM company) created an entertaining video of a popular industry authority sneaking into their facility in order to get a first-hand peek of a not-yet-released product (here’s a copy). Think creative and out-of-the box when looking to generate buzz, and start by doing it early.
2. Don’t Give Away The Secret Too Early
The fact that we have to wait until April 29th to see the dress is creating a snowball effect of buzz. Every day that gets closer to the wedding, the more fans itch to see it and the thrill of a possible glimpse of the dress itself keeps us captivated. But at the same time, we know when our curiosity will be satisfied, so we’re not left in torture.
When you think about creating buzz for your company, give a date (or approximate timeframe) as to when something will be announced, but give yourself enough time to generate that buzz. This is the same technique that movies do when trailers are released. This gives your audience an expected day that they’ll be waiting for.
3. Give Your Audience What They Crave
Everyone who’s into the Royal Wedding can’t stop talking about it and the media is certainly taking advantage. TV shows and online media networks have been featuring the wedding almost every day this week. Their audience wants to know every detail about the event, and the media is delivering. Look into ways you can satisfy your audience’s craving to create some word-of-mouth buzz.
Final Thoughts
Overall, when you’re thinking about creating buzz for your company, whether it be over a huge product release, a new partnership, or simply a wedding dress, think about the non-traditional and bold ways you can make that news exciting to your audience.
What other takeaways do you suggest?
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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
Are Stumbleupon and Reddit Beating Digg on Traffic?
Just been having a look at the Alexa rankings of some of the top social news websites and was surprised to see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both apparently getting more traffic then digg. Have a look at the graph below:
The results are very close so it is hard to tell who is getting the most by looking at the graph, but if you look at the traffic rank for each site you will see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both supposed to be getting more traffic then digg. Here are the traffic ranks for each site:
- Stumbleupon – 117th most popular site on the web.
- Reddit – 135th most popular site on the web.
- Digg – 138th most popular site on the web.
I am not surprised that Stumbleupon has come out on top, our linkbait articles always seem to get lots of traffic from the social bookmarking site, one of them that we did a few years ago has had almost half a million visitors from it and another that we did just a couple of months ago has already had 274K.
Up until a few months ago digg was way ahead of both of them in the Alexa rankings, I think the drop in traffic could be something to do with the site re-design that they did last August.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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SEOCO Blog
Digg Promotion for your Google rankings and traffic
Digg is the most popular content sharing website at the moment. And if you are the online marketer, it may become very useful tool for getting traffic (I mean the targetted traffic!) and also increase your Google rankings.
So what we need to get profit from Digg? Everything is simple – we need to rank on the first page of Digg for your particular website subject (Is it science, gaming or smth else). Seemingly everything is very simple: we should just obtain as more Diggs as we can and wait for good rankings. But here you must understand that the number of Diggs is not the single factor which Digg is considering when ranking your submissions. It also considers the traffic levels of the story category, user history and user reports. By the way Digg is very skilled with the spam struggle.
Thus if you try to promote your submissions using spam methods, you are very unlikely to get good results. Try to PLAY following Digg rules and you will succeed.
Above I listed several factors, which Digg considers in rankings: Diggs number, category traffic level, user history and user reports. The second factor couldn`t be influenced (you just need to be careful when selecting the category for your submission). The user abuse reports are also smth uncontrolled, but you will have no problem with them if you will not spam and be gentle in communication.
What we can directly control is the submission Diggs number and user history. Firstly you should never Digg your own news. For getting as much Diggs as possible you must offer people really interesting and valuable information (the examples could be found at Digg tops).
To provide yourself with a good user history, you must be very active within Digg. Write comments, Digg news, submit Diggs. BUT you shouldn`t submit just your own websites pages, because it is very unnatural and in this case Digg will mark you as spammer.
So now I hope you`ve got enough information to start your Digg campaign and make it really effective.
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SEO Blog
Changes of Domain
Domain changes can be worrisome from an SEO perspective. This is only natural as we spend our time building up the strength of particular domains so that they can compete with others. Will Google recognize the old site at the new domain? Will all of the link equity carry over to the new domain?
By considering the problems involved with a change of domain before you execute, it is possible to alleviate many concerns. There is no guarantee that everything will go perfectly, but a little preparation will go a long way to making your transfer as successful as possible.
URL Mapping: Where are we going?
If the change of domain is the only action occurring, then it is likely that a one-to-one redirect, page-to-page, will be sufficient. This may not be the case, though, if the structure of your site will be simultaneously changing with the domain.
Architecture Adjustment
If you will be implementing any changes in site navigation resulting in new URLs, or will simply be changing the URL structure on the new site, this issue must be carefully considered. Test all redirect rules on a stage server before committing a domain change to be as confident as possible that there are no 301 loops or 404 errors. Many of the other items in this blog post are potential problems surrounding this one action: messing up the redirect rules is the only method guaranteed to turn your change of domain into a disaster.
And, naturally, make sure these redirects are implemented as permanent redirects (301 status codes) for optimum link juice channeling.
Measuring Change
Different place and different face.
While changing some site elements at the same time as the domain is unavoidable in most cases, be careful about too many simultaneous changes. If things like design or content are changed at the same time as site location, it will become much more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to tell whether any issues with indexation or rankings are caused by a problem with the site move or the other changes that occurred at the same time.
Webmaster Tools: Before, During, After.
What Webmaster Tools theoretically looks like.
Before making any changes, ensure that all applicable domains are verified in Google Webmaster Tools. This includes both www. and bare versions of the domain where possible. It can be painful to have to go back and verify an original domain after redirects are already in place.
During the change (i.e. immediately after redirects have been put in place) submit a change of address in Webmaster Tools. If your domains have been verified, this is quite straightforward.
After the change, be sure to submit your new sitemap to Webmaster Tools if it has not been picked up already by Google. Monitor for crawler errors and indexation. If you desire a more granular assessment of indexation through sitemaps, see Rob Ousbey’s post on indexation problems.
Links
A link.
Juice passed through redirects decays over time. In order to prevent this where possible, any internal or external links under your control should be change immediately after the redirects to your new domain are implemented. In other cases, you may be able to outreach to other sites linking to your domain in order to get links changed. Prepare a list of sites beforehand for this outreach in order to get this done as quickly as possible.
Another good practice is to have link bait prepared to launch immediately following your move. This will help create an influx of links and social signals to your new domain, hopefully jump-starting crawling and indexation of the new site.
Daily Check Up
The fabled checklist.
After all is said and done, not everything is said and done. A bit of daily monitoring is in order. Some of these things are essentially noted above, but as a checklist of sorts:
- Monitor Webmaster Tools for 4xx/5xx errors.
- Check 301s (i.e. not 302s) and 301 loops. Obviously 301s don’t magically change into 302s, but with a lot of changes happening things can fall through the cracks.
- If you have access, monitor crawl rates for old and new domains.
- Monitor indexation via sitemaps in WMT.
- Monitor traffic via Analytics.
That about wraps it up… good luck on your own changes!
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Distilled – Monitoring your Reputation Online
Why Not All Shopping Search Engines Have Lost in the UK Google Panda/Quality Update
Everybody is talking about content farms as if they were the only type of sites hit by the latest large Google update. That’s a very limited viewpoint.
One of the most striking effects of the UK version of Google’s quality update dubbed Panda has been the huge losses by shopping search engines and review sites that focus on price comparison. Not all such services have lost though.
Among the losers were international heavyweights like:
- Ciao.co.uk
- Shopping.com
- Bizrate.com
- Idealo.co.uk
- Kelkoo.co.uk
- Shopzilla.co.uk
They have felt the negative impact of the Panda update in the UK by losing at least half or in many cases most of their Google rankings. The press has been covering only Ciao.co.uk because it’s a Microsoft site which filed a complaint against Google prior to the update.
There is one obvious exception though, and nobody covers it. Pricerunner.co.uk hasn’t lost. Why? Just visit the site and then one or more of the others. Can you see it? You don’t have to be an SEO expert to find out what the difference is. I want to describe it anyway for those who don’t have the time to review the sites themselves in depth.
There are several quite obvious factors why Pricerunner has been spared as the only real price comparison site. They might be obvious to me but difficult to discern for you, so I will share my analysis of the positive aspects of Pricerunner that have made it stand out among the downranked shopping search industry:
Clean modern web design
It’s obvious that Pricerunner has a clean web design (diseño web), with lots of white space and a clear focus. It has a central feature article on top of the homepage, whereas most other price comparison sites just overwhelm the user with a portal-like link list nobody can overlook easily.
Proper usability and readability
It’s not just the positive first impression you get from looking at the Pricerunner site. You won’t bounce after visiting the homepage, but then you will stay even longer due to well-structured site architecture and readable structure.
Valuable editorial content
Unlike the other classic shopping search engines, which only display auto-fed content from the shops they work with, you’ll find really valuable editorial content on Pricerunner. I’ve tested the price comparison sites by looking for vacuum cleaners. I’m by no means an expert on them (who is?), so I was glad to find some additional in-depth info, aka “buying advice“, on what to look for. Otherwise only brands, reviews and prices would remain there to judge. That’s OK if you already know what you are looking for, but otherwise you don’t even know whether the reviews are trustworthy or the products worth their money.
Healthy backlink profile
I’ve compared the backlink profiles of both losers and the winner, and guess what I found right on top of my Open Site Explorer query? Both Ciao.co.uk and Idealo.co.uk, two sites out of those with the biggest losses during the quality update, had spammy links, guess where, on Google.com itself! They were placed on autogenerated Google Notebook pages (they have been removed now it seems). Apart from that they had barely any quality links. Ciao had several from Techcrunch because they have sued Google but that’s almost all. Pricerunner has the likes of Opera, DMOZ, Mashable and Search Engine Watch linking to it in highly relevant contexts.
Now just look at the main generic keywords Pricerunner is currently ranking for in the UK:
- price – #2
- price comparison – #1
- compare prices – #1
- shopping – #5
Whoever is responsible for Pricerunner’s content and SEO strategy deserves a raise of at least 50%. For all the others: copy this strategy now.
© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why Not All Shopping Search Engines Have Lost in the UK Google Panda/Quality Update
Related posts:
- 30+ Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners
- 30 Quick & Clean Conversion Optimization Techniques for Buttons, Forms, Copy, Shopping Carts etc.
- Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size
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SEOptimise » Blog
Google Grapples Groupon
Just a few short months ago, Google offered approximately 6 billion dollars in a buy-out offer for the deal-of-the-day online coupon giant Groupon. Groupon declined the unprecedented offer and stated that they would be conducting an IPO soon afterwards.
Groupon stated that they could raise as much as $ 1 billion in the IPO, which could come in the second half of 2011, although the exact size had not yet been determined. Groupon is likely to pick Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to lead a second-half IPO that could value the fast-growing daily deals site at $ 15 billion to $ 20 billion. Considering the size of the buy-out offer, it was clear that Google had plans to launch into the deal-a-day enterprise with or without Groupon.
Google announced that they will be launching their new Google Offers service. The online coupon site is still in Beta form and is currently only offering deals in Portland, Oregon but will be releasing the service next in New York and to the San Francisco Bay Areas.
At this point in time, Google has no plans of launching the service outside of the US. Clearly Google is waiting to see how much of the market they can pull away from Groupon before expanding too quickly.
It will certainly be an interesting battle as Groupon and Google faceoff to see who will end up dominating the online coupon market. Considering the value of the companies and amount of revenue involved, it looks to be quite entertaining. One thing is for certain. Google does not like competition…There can be only one.
If you are a business in the Portland area, you can sign up for this service here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleofferscontact/ Drop us line with your comments regarding the service. We would love to hear about your experience with the new Google Offers.
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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog