Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device.

Before you cast me aside as being on the bleeding edge of technology and that I don’t really register as being statistically significant, I’ll share three links with you:

• 91% of business pros use iPads for work, 83% loyal to Apple
• 12% of iPad owners in the enterprise no longer use their laptop
• The iPad has Become the Metric By Which Tablet Traffic is Measured

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Not a problem. I figured I’d head on over to Sears, get a link to the product manual, and do it the long way. Turns out ManageMyLife.com does such a bad job of user detection that they think I don’t have the Adobe Reader installed and can’t view the PDF for my model number.

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Great. So I had a hard time getting a video on how to fix my dishwasher and viewing the PDF for the instruction manual on my iPad. I had to go upstairs and use my laptop. Boo hoo on me for having first world problems, right? What we really have here is a case of bad site design and usability for not designing in a site that fails gracefully when it gets user agent detection wrong. As a marketer and SEO, these things matter and they are going to matter more in the future …

First World Problems

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice. They aren’t going to share your link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social network, and if they do it will be the way I did: to make fun of you or use you as an example of a McFail. Search engines are getting smarter. They are using lots of signals to determine which sites rank. These days, usability and engagement are two key signals and, as Google gets better at measuring them more accurately, they’ll play an even more prominent role.

So what should site owners do in these cases:

• Avoid using proprietary audio/video/pdf viewers and players. If you need to for advertising reasons, build a more bulletproof system of user agent detection and fail gracefully into a condition that allows users to still get the content.
• Don’t let the same content exist on a mobile subdomain (link) and normal domain (link) as this only leads to trouble when content gets shared across mobile devices and laptops (looks squarely in the direction of Facebook and Youtube). Use one URL improve your user agent detection if you need to do so, but try to design a system that is user agent agnostic.
• The number and kind of devices that people are going to use is only going to increase in the coming years. This is a problem that you will have to deal with sooner or later. If you design systems that are flexible and embrace these platforms, you will have an easier time building links, getting content shared, and improving the on site signals and metrics that the search engines are using.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Jaroslav74

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

In a recent statement Larry Page said if you don’t get SPYW then maybe you shouldn’t work at Google. To understand why he thinks this is such a good idea–and why the rest of the world thinks it isn’t–we need to revisit the concept of filter bubbles and why they are such a bad idea.

Last year Eli Pariser released the book the Filter Bubble (see my review of the the Filter Bubble). As part of the promotion, he was asked to speak at TED. While I wasn’t there, I understand from people who were in attendance that it made several Googlers in the audience … lets go with “uncomfortable” …

We come back to the basic concept of filter bubbles. Using filter bubbles only works if everyone in your filter bubble is smart, worldly-wise, and open minded to different view points and perspectives. Paradoxically, this is self-defeating logic. If your filter bubble is “good” and you don’t realize that everyone else’s isn’t, you’ll never get why filters bubbles and ideas like SPYW are such  bad ideas.

As regular users notice a decline in the quality of Google results, most of them won’t understand or quite frankly care that the people in their friend network are to blame. There is only so long you can serve inferior results and distract people with cutesy holiday logos before they decide to try another search engine.

photo credit: Shutterstock/NemesisINC

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t

When you run a corporate blog sometimes it’s difficult to come up with interesting topics on a regular basis. In the past I’ve spoken about a few options like creating a series, how to posts and evergreen content. In this article I’d like to tackle another option, blogging to your existing customers, and turning them into return/repeat customers.

If you are selling products or services, chances are you good you probably have 10 – 20 questions your customers ask about how to use products, correctly, better or more effectively. Typically most companies create an FAQ where they answer all of these questions on one page. While this does work it’s not an optimal solution from an SEO traffic perspective.

Unless your questions and answers are very short, ideally you want to create a single page optimized for each question, this gives you the ability to create narrowly focussed posts around specific keyword phrases that will rank better and drive more traffic. Bear in mind this is something of a balancing act, and you may find these posts don’t get enough traffic on their own and have to be combined (see how to do a content audit) , so there is some experimentation, trial and error involved.

The next thing you need to consider is targeting and writing your posts using the same natural language, phrases,and queries that your consumers use, and not using your own internal company terminology. For example one consulting client I had insisted on using the term “waste receptacles” instead of “garbage pails”. This “wisdom” was firmly entrenched all the way up to the “C” level and they were completely inflexible on the matter, no matter how much keyword data I showed them to the contrary. We ended up doing some custom programming to catch internal searches for “garbage pails” and reroute the traffic to “waste receptacles” but we never ranked for those terms in the search engines.

Once you’ve got the basic questions covered, you can expand showing them how to use your products in new ways they never thought off, how to take advantage of advanced features, and use little known aspects of your products. You can even look for opportunities to tie into social media asking customers to submit pictures of their products in use. Cuisinart holds a recipe swap every few months, home improvement stores look for before and after shots, and fashion companies look for UGC photos of people wearing their clothing, shoes or fashion accessories.

One last option to consider is optimizing for some of your competitions keywords. Bear in mind SEO for your competition is not without consequences and not for the faint of heart, so think about it before you decide to start down that path.

Enough with the theory lets look at some real world examples of this in place. I’m a huge fan of the Sonos in home music system (full disclosure I was sent a review unit in the past see my Sonos Review post for more details). However to be honest I really really love it, in fact I’m a huge brand advocate of the product. Spend 5 minutes talking to me about it at a conference or on twitter and you’ll see me affection for the product is genuine. Sonos regularly blogs about how to use their system and how to get the most out of it with posts like Using line in on Sonos products or how to use AirPlay on Sonos Music systems. In fact they have a whole tips & tricks section.

Another example is the Whole Foods blog. In addition to recipes they have posts about how to cook with styles customers may not be familiar with like learn how to cook broiled fish or how to use new food types like Quiona (it’s a small grain like cous-cous).

The key lesson from these examples is don’t blog just to get new customers, blog to reach and help your existing customers, if you do it correctly they will stay repeat customers and pass along their experiences with their family and friends, and share them on Facebook, twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Look at your popular customer service questions and inquiries and look for ways to create optimized posts around those topics
• Use natural language and phrases your customers use, avoid internal terminology and marketing language
• Look for opportunities to show advanced or little known features
• Make your customers smarter this turns them into brand advocates
• While there is some danger optimizing for your competitions keywords can sometimes work to your advantage

photo credit: Shutterstock/darren Baker

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Write Blog Posts For Your Existing and Repeat Customers

Whenever you are involved in an ORM (Online Reputation Management) campaign, your goal is to displace negative results in the search engines with positive results. In a previous post we looked at creating microsites. In this post, we are going to look at leveraging social media profiles.

As with every search result in Google, the top results are generally made up of the most trusted and authoritative results, so it makes the most sense for us to talk about the most trusted authoritative social media sites at the moment: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google plus.

Facebook

Facebook is by far one the most popular and visited sites in social media; however, for many people, it can also be the most problematic. The most common issue on Facebook is people or their friends posting unflattering or unflattering status updates or pictures. That status update or pic from that party weekend in Cancun where you …. let’s just not even mention it again … may have been funny at the time, but it’s not funny when you are applying for a job, trying to get the condo board to think you are a qualified, responsible tenant, or trying to prove that drunk driving incident really wasn’t you. Thanks to Facebook’s new timeline feature, it makes it incredibly easy for someone to skim through your profile and isolate those “wild college years.” My suggestion? Create a “close friends” group and edit all those items so only they can see them (see How to Create a Friend List). Alternatively, you could “go nuclear” and just block all the old info on your timeline. It’s much more drastic but also a lot more bulletproof.

If you are a company, you may not have those drunken college years to contend with, but you may not have a rich history, or even a profile. If you don’t have a profile, start one. I’d link to a resource but, to be honest, Facebook changes so often that the link would need to be updated every few months. Instead, just Google it [how to create a business profile on facebook].

Sadly, we all now have to treat our Facebook status updates like a Public Relations team. Don’t post anything outlandish or crazy that you don’t want to be associated with. An alternative course is to regularly post completely off the wall crazy information that is completely unbelievable. This gives you a bit of wiggle room and allows you to have plausible deniability. This really is only an option for personal accounts and not businesses.

Twitter

The next site you need to focus on is Twitter. Again, if the person or company you are doing ORM for doesn’t have an account, you’ll need to get one going ASAP. The more trusted and authoritative your Twitter account is, the better it will rank in the SERPs. While Klout isn’t perfect, it’s a good place to start. If the Twitter account isn’t posting content now on a regular basis, you’ll need to start. To get the most out of social media with the least amount of time, I suggest using Hootsuite and or Bufferapp (see How to be Involved on Twitter in Less than an Hour a day). Post good content, share good links, respond when someone talks to you (using the @ symbol). If you want to drive your Klout score up, get followed by people who already have a high Klout score. Have conversations back and forth with them ( it’s the back and forth that really counts). This advice holds true for a business account as well as for a personal one.

LinkedIn

Most people who have jobs have, at the very least, a LinkedIn account. If they haven’t changed jobs or at least tried to get new job in the past few years, their LinkedIn profile is probably outdated and could use some updating. Within the past few years, LinkedIn has added the ability to create company pages (see creating company profiles on LinkedIn). If you are doing ORM for a company, please ask all of your key employees to create profiles and to update their profiles to link to the company profile.

Google Plus

Google Plus is the latest serious player in the social media profile space. At the time this post was written Google had made some serious aggressive changes to “force” Google Plus results, giving them higher and greater exposure. Whether this is a long term change that will stick remains to be seen. At the very least the person you are doing ORM work for should claim and create a Google Plus profile. However, for maximum results, they will need to verify the profile and connect it to articles or posts they have written (see How To Create A Google Author Account). If you are doing ORM for a business or organization, see how to create a Google plus profile for your business. Again, these services are in flux so the actual steps may change.

You could simply set up these profiles, but to get the most out of them you need to keep them looking as “lived in” as possible. That means updating semi-regularly and connecting or being friends with other users and having a dialog or conversation with some of them. With the exception of Google+, all of these services have API’s so you can update them with tools on a scheduled basis such as Hootsuite or Bufferapp.

Once you have these accounts looking lived in, you can start pointing links to them. You want to use optimal anchor text (ie, the person’s name or name of the company in most cases). However, you do want there to be some variation. If 100% of the links pointing to a site have a 100% anchor text match, it look manipulated and and artificial, so mix it up a bit. You can do some interlinking but be careful: interlinking all of them, creating a nest of sites, link brothel, or artificial link pyramid designed just to manipulate link equity will stick out and will probably be discounted.

While I only spoke about four social sites in this article, there are hundreds of websites you can create profiles on for ORM. It doesn’t make sense to try and set up and populate all of them. If you want to establish them and prevent someone else from squatting on them, use a service like KnowEm. Once you have them secured, you can cherry pick the best or most appropriate ones to flesh out and work with.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• When performing ORM, set up and register individual or business profiles
• The most important services currently are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus
• Use a service like KnowEm to secure secondary profiles
• Flesh out the most important or relevant profiles
• Come up with a plan for updating the profiles on a regular basis
• Develop and interlink the profiles without making it look overly manipulated
• Give the profiles a human feel and build trust signal by having back and forth conversations, interactions, and engagement with other profiles, especially profiles with established trust signals

photo credit: Shutterstock/82048177

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Using Social Media Profiles for ORM

This is a guest post by Gab Goldenberg, author of the advanced SEO book. Get a free chapter on link building here and check out his book affiliate program – the site boasts a 5.5% conversion rate to sale!

Affiliate web design is not only unique because it’s purpose is to generate conversions – in contrast to providing an outlet for frustrated artists – but it has to do so in a limited environment where the conversion has to happen on a third party site. Here are the 10 key web design rules for affiliates.

10. Problem: You need to send the traffic onwards, with minimal bounce rate on the merchant site.

Solution: Therefore, prepare your traffic by including visual elements of the merchant’s landing page on your own site.

Logos are a minimum, but try cropping the hero shot and using that or some stock photo face that’s on the lander… use things people will recognize after clicking through and reassure them this is what they clicked through to see. Only using text links is lazy and less likely to work.

Similarly, either repeat or paraphrase the merchant’s headline with your headline and call to action.

9. Problem: Merchant sites don’t show shipping costs [or other costs, ex.: book clubs, hidden fees] easily. This means people will abandon the cart in higher rates.

Solution: Gather the info yourself and inform your visitors exactly of all charges ahead of time.

8. Problem: Visitors care about the merchant/ the merchant’s product. Not you.

Solution: Provide a value add that encourages people to refer their friends to you. Are your reviews updated periodically? Do they get a bonus if they buy through your affiliate link? (E.g. similar to cashback affs, but you can offer bonuses like info products, tools, stickers, support etc) Do you have some unique value add like BBGeeks.com‘s reviews of network coverage organized by geography?
7. Problem: Your design is intended to yield a sale, once, and once-only.  

Solution: It’s OK to start with pushing your traffic to convert right away, you’re only ever going to get value from that customer once… so you should figure out how to get that traffic into an email (or phone, direct mail, personal contact) list you can monetize repeatedly. Generating leads for the aerospace field? Why not invite leads to your aerospace summer retreat?

6. Problem: Your claims aren’t credible.

Solution: Substantiate them with pics and video. Did you really buy that top fom the Gap? Show a picture of yourself in it with the matching bag. Weight-loss product really work? Show before/after or record yourself doing it, and prove the dates are real with newspapers in your vid.

5. Problem: You’re too enthusiastic about the affiliate product. Every reference to it on your site is linked, the “negatives” in your review are that the merchant is too helpful and generous etc… skeptical consumers don’t click.

Solution: Use one call to action above the fold, and one for every scroll of screen real estate downwards. How many pixels to a scroll? Check your analytics for visitors’ most common screen resolutions.

4. Problem: You overestimate how much persuasion people need and have too much copy.

Solution: Short copy vs long copy depends on several factors, chief amongst which is price and second degree of need. You can get names and emails with a title, picture and 2-3 bulleted benefits. (I once wrote a sales letter with 20 reasons to subscribe to my free RSS feed. Ooops.)

Note: Price includes total price, because people aren’t stupid and get that a $50 monthly subscription is a helluva lot more than a one-time $50 purchase.

3. Problem: You’re starting with visuals/templates as opposed to copy.

Solution: Form serves function. Figure out what you want to do, and create a page (or find a template) that matches that. Don’t start with visuals and then try to fit your copy/ purpose into it. For example, I’ve seen complicated SaaS software trying to sell me on a $50 subscription with hardly any copy on the landing page, because the lander featured a big spot for a hero image / video (which was meant for newbies very unfamiliar with the category of product, and thus didn’t help me) and then some horizontally aligned features with 3 lines of adwords-length copy each.

2. Problem: Your blog posts lack email subscription forms. I don’t mean in the sidebar or in a dhtml overlay-popup. I mean in the post.

Solution: Scott Brinker from IonInteractive.com (no association, though I did get a free review copy of their CRO book Honest Seduction) showed a brilliant type of landing page at Pubcon 2010. He featured a full length article featuring X ways to do Y… and then there was an opt-in form above the fold embedded in the copy, right-aligned, saying “Get 10 more ways to do Y”…

Obviously you can’t do that for every blog post, but your popular posts should have that sort of integration so you get max value out of each post. On the backend, you can need to figure out how to send a custom initial autoresponder if you want all these people on the same list, or you can create multiple duplicate lists.

Another more general way to do this is to have your forms tied to your blog post’s category or tag, in which case you have a general free report for the “seo” category” and another for the “affiliate” category.

1. Problem: Your landing page is leaky. Yes, affiliates have leaks too, not just merchants.

Solution: Get rid of all the extra junk on your landing page. Standard navigation on your product review blog post? Use a WP custom post type with a blank sidebar or comment it out for that page. Use Google Website Optimizer to test the two and watch CTR soar on the nav-free page.

p.p.s. Problem #11: WordPress is your default landing page creation/testing engine. Even using something like Thesis or Affiliate Theme, you’re strongly limiting your ability to test graphics, in terms of layout, hero shots, and more. Either use purpose built testing software that has a built-in landing page creation/editing, or get some graphics and html. I use Bharce for graphics and PSD to HTML/CSS for slicing.

photo credit: Shutterstock/SSGuy

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5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
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12. Krystal Glass Whiteboards - Glass writing boards for offices, boardrooms, and classrooms.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

10 Commandments of Affiliate Web Design

Generally speaking, Using Microsites is a bad idea. However, Using Microsites is a good idea is when you are conducting an ORM campaign (Online Reputation Management) and are looking to displace some negative or unfavorable results. In this post, I’ll cover the basic theory, give some tips on how to use them, and show you an example.

Unless there is a legal precedent or court ruling, it’s nearly impossible to get a page removed from Google. In fact, trying to get a page removed often gets it more attention and links and actually ends up making things worse for you (see the the Streisand effect). Ideally, you want to displace those negative SERP listings you have no control or influence over with positive listings of sites you do control and influence.  If you don’t currently have sites that work for this, you’ll need to create sites that you do control and can link to.

The Research and Information Angle

People love getting things for free, especially if it’s valuable research or information. Giving away free white papers or PDF’s is a tried and true practice, but when you are doing it for ORM you need to remember your ONLY goal is building links to that website. You want to make sure you are giving away something that is really high quality–something on par with the research from HubSpot or Trendwatching. While those sites are using the free research as a lead generation or sales tool, you want to avoid even the slightest hint of commercialization. You want the research to be as high quality as possible, as uncommercialized as possible, and as easy to obtain and share the link as you can get. The site should be small and have minimal navigation. You will want to have one page optimized for the company or person’s name you are performing the ORM campaign for. The page should be linked to from every other page on the website. It should have optimal internal anchor text.

The Charity Angle

If the company or person you are doing ORM for participates in charitable events or is big donor to charities, you can create a separate domain highlighting this activity. If they aren’t, I would strongly suggest it. Create a small website with very little commercial intent and highlight all of of the charity work being done. Use pictures and multi-media. Try to show this is a long term involvement and not just a new initiative. Try to get a link from the charity directly to the microsite with anchor text as optimal as you can. Remember the person’s name or company’s name is optimal. Do NOT use commercial keywords.

Employee Achievements

If the company you are doing ORM work for has done or been involved in any notable industry accomplishments, create a website highlighting it. If they have a diverse makeup, highlight that. If they are involved in community projects, highlight that. Basically, anything that is noteworthy and not self-serving is a possible item to consider adding. Again, keep the microsite as commercial free as possible. The less commercial it looks, the easier it will be to get links for. The more links and the more authoritative the links you build, the better the microsite will rank.

Company History

If you are doing ORM for a company with a long, rich, or noteworthy history, highlighting that on its own microsite is another option. While it’s clearly a lot more self-serving than the other options mentioned above, sometimes you need to occupy a few slots and this can help you do it it.

Contests

Contests are tricky: every state has its own laws and regulations about what you can and can’t do. However, if you can give away a decent enough prize, building links is a walk in the park. For maximum effectiveness try to include a UGC component and encourage people to link/share the URL of their submission.  Doing so puts free link building and social proof right at your fingertips.

Viral Content

Linkbait and viral content are tried and true link building methods. If you put the content on a microsite, you can often be a lot edgier that your main website. Unless it completely backfires, edgier almost always gets you more links and higher SERPS.

Domain Names

Try to choose domain names with the terms you are trying to rank for. The closer to an exact match, the better. The only reason you might want to avoid an exact match is domain length and billboard quality. The power and potential of short domains and easy to remember domains should not be underestimated.

Maintenance

Design the site to be as low maintenance as possible. You should refresh or add some new content at least once a year, but keep it reasonable. Also remember that you will have to renew the domain names and hosting as long as the bad pages you need to displace exist. Think about and consider the long term consequences and obligations.

Interlinking

You don’t want to create the appearance of constructing a link nest or link brothel. Interlink sparingly and only when needed. Linking to every microsite from the main company site makes sense, but linking them all to each other looks “funny.” Additionally, the sites will all rank better if they have unique sets of backlinks.

Examples

Despite being the largest fast food company in the United States, McDonald’s had a ORM problem on the internet a few years ago. I’m not going to debate whether or not McDonald’s is trying to clean things up by adding healthy food options or if they are just pandering to the public with empty token gestures. What is true is that McDonald’s has done an amazing job of cleaning up their SERP from an ORM perspective [McDonalds]

McDonalds SERP

Compare Mcdonalds to [High Fructose Corn Syrup]

High Fructose Corn Syrup

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• While microsites generally aren’t a good idea for ORM, they are essential
• Create research sites and give away high quality information
• Create a website to highlight your charitable involvement and activities
• Create a website to highlight employees and noteworthy work or achievements
• Create a website to highlight company history or information
• Create a website for contests you run or your historical contests
• Create a viral content site that is edgier than your normal company tone
• Choose domain names with exact name and/or easy to remember qualities
• Design site to be as low maintenance as possible
• Keep sites as commercial free as possible
• Interlink sparingly. Don’t create a nest of sites or link brother to pump up your main domain. Strive to give each site its own diverse backlink profile

photo credit: Shutterstock/Ariwasabi

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3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
4. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
9. Link Building Services - Hire WeBuildLink.com for well-planned advanced link building campaigns. Very affordable. Contact us now for a FREE evaluation.
10. Join 500+ top agencies & publishers who rely on The HOTH every day. US based, enterprise-grade support. High quality, contextually relevant links. 100% money back guarantee. Try it now.
11. Professional website designs - Get a unique brand image with website designs that sets you apart and convert your visitors into customers. Make a brand, not just a website
12. Krystal Glass Whiteboards - Glass writing boards for offices, boardrooms, and classrooms.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Creating Microsites for ORM

When you are looking to build links and drive traffic, one of the time tested methods that continues to work is creating “how to” style posts. In this article, we’ll look at some examples and discuss how to get the most out of the tactic, how to take advantage of seasonal search/traffic volume, and some potential trouble spots to watch out for.

From the earliest days of the internet, people have turned to search engines to find information and to solve problems. When you create “how to” posts, you fill this “information vacuum.” If your posts are good, interesting, funny, informative or otherwise noteworthy, you will be rewarded with links and/or Facebook likes, Twitter mentions or other social signals. While you will have to do a little promotion to “prime the pump” and start the sharing and exposure, people will share it on their own if your piece is good enough.

But enough theory. Let’s look at some “how to” examples.  First up is from the Huffington Post: “How to Tell When Chocolate Goes Bad”

How to tell When Chocolate Goes Bad

We’ve all picked up the old Valentine’s, Halloween, or Christmas chocolate and wondered if it was safe to eat. This post answers that questions and lets you know what that white stuff on an old piece of chocolate really is. This post could have been improved with some picture examples, but it’s fine as it stands. This kind of post would work in a food-related website, gift-related website, or mom/family website.

Next up: “How to Tile a Bathroom”

How to Tile a Bathroom

Tiling a bathroom is project that requires some skill, but it is within the reach of most DIY weekend warriors with some technical abilities. It’s also something that’s highly bookmark-able and shareable if it’s easy to understand. This type of content would work on DIY sites, home repair websites, building material websites, or tile stores. That article had good picture use. Adding a video or two could help, but it’s something that could be done down the road.

The previous two “how to” articles are examples of evergreen content (ie content that doesn’t need to change or be updated often). Next, I’d like to take a look at “how to” posts that will change over time.  Take a look at “[How to setup a wireless network]“.

If you look at the SERP you’ll see three of the results don’t have a date and one post that does–and it’s an old date, in this case 2003. If I’m looking to solve a computer problem, I probably don’t want information from 2003; I want something from within the last 12-18 months (for more information on how Google determines page dates, see How Google is Reverse Engineering Page Dates). If you are writing a “how to” post and it has a limited shelf life, having a dated post isn’t a bad thing (ie how to format a Windows XP hard drive). However, in most cases, you will want your “how to” posts to rank for longer periods of time, so either don’t show the date on the page or update the information and update the publication date. If you choose to update the post, use a living URL implementation to preserve your existing links and social proof.

Unless you are running a news website, it’s very likely that there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of “how to” posts. If you run an eCommerce website, you should start with your most popular products and create “how to” guides for each of them. If you think you are going to have a large library of “how to” posts, you may want to put them in specific directory. I’d also suggest using a slightly less commercial template: people tend to link and share posts that don’t look overly commercial more often. I’d also avoid numbers in your URLs to avoid the problem of search engines mis-interpreting dates. Doing so also doesn’t box you into an editorial mismatch if you change numbers/steps in the future. I’d also look for ways to maximize seasonal search volume by updating your seasonal content. For example, a “how to” post on carving a turkey will get more traction, links, and traffic if you publish it in the beginning of November instead of the middle of March. Lastly, try to phrase your “how to” posts to match the queries users are actually typing into a search engine. For example “How to Save Some Sheckels When Getting Hitched” is not going to drive the same amount of traffic as “How to Save Money When You Are Planning a Wedding.”

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Look to create “how to” posts for your most popular products or search terms
• Use natural language that matches what consumers will use
• Be careful of dates on evergreen posts
• Decide if archiving old information or updating them with living URLs is better for your situation
• Avoid using numbers and dates in URLs
• Time your posts/updates to tie in with peak search volume or interest
• Have a separate template for informational posts to increase linking and sharing

photo credit: Shutterstock/Dmitry Suzdalev

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts

Many of the poorly ranking websites that I am asked to fix share a common problem – they do not link out to any websites.  Apparently, some people still think this is a terrible idea and go to extremes to never link out to anyone. Taking any idea to an extreme is generally never a good plan.  By changing the outbound link policy, I have been able to help many sites boost their rankings.  Let’s be clear – I am not talking about blindly linking to random sites.  I am talking about linking out to quality websites that are relevant to the specific web page content.

Why would I be so generous with my link juice?  Here are some of my thoughts:

#1 – It encourages others to link back to you.
When you link out to websites, you encourage others to link back.  Think about all the quality reciprocal link exchanges you can build.  Having a large exchange of reciprocal links can boost the direct referrals to your website and the more websites linking to you is helpful (even if they are reciprocal).   If you are a NY law firm it makes sense to cross promote — aka link exchange — with a NJ law firm.  You also will increase the chance of gaining one-way links.  Think about a blogger who is creating an article about your industry.  Will they be more likely to include your site as a reference in their article if you are a dead-end site or a gateway to many other relevant resources?

#2 – It improves user experience.
By linking to relevant websites, you improve the user experience by adding more value to your website.  You are probably worried that by having some outbound links you will lose some traffic.  Based on my years of experience, overall you will actually gain traffic.  Huh?  That is because the user is more likely to return to your site and use it again and again since you helped them to discover other valuable sites.  A dead-end site is good for a one time visit but a website that is a gateway to great resources is worthy of repeat visits.  You might be wondering why I am bringing up the user experience when this article is about boosting Google rankings.  Well, Google has been incorporating usage quality signals into their ranking algorithm.  By improving your engagement quality signals, you will also helping rankings.

#3 – Why else do search engine patents talk about it?
Several search engine patents discuss how search engines might reward sites for having good outbound links.  Simply filing a patent does not guarantee the search engines are using the technology and rewarding linking websites, but it would make good sense for them.  These patent filings have pointed out that there is a high correlation between the quality of a website and the quality of its outbound links.  That is not surprising when you sit back and reflect on it.  To make your head hurt even more check out the latest search engine patents at SEO by the Sea.

#4 – Little risk for big reward.
By adding an outbound link to one of my pages, I lose very little.  I might lose some link juice that would have otherwise flowed to my internal pages, but we are talking a very small percentage.  Look at one of your pages and count all the links.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you have over 50 links on your page.  Using an over simplified link distribution calculation (since link distribution in the real world is never simple) that means adding a link will result in only a 2% loss of the link juice from that single page.  Two percent of link juice for the chance to add a new link partner, boost usage signals and possibly trigger other quality signals is a good gamble from my point of view.

By linking out to other websites, you have the potential for many rewards.  I’ve been told this is a controversial topic so please do not take my word for it.  Do some research on your own.  Here is a 2005 outbound linking case study.  Another easy test would be to look at the webpages that rank well and then see how many link out vs. how many are dead-end websites.  If you see there is a correlation, do a small test by adding relevant outbound links to a few of your pages and see what happens.  I am confident you will be happy with the results. At the very least, you will learn something interesting from this easy test.

ps How well is this article ranking for lead balloon?

photo credit: Shutterstock/coka

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5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Outbound Linking Can Boost Rankings

At the dawn of the internet websites were created without much thought as to what changes, if any, would need be made in the future. To keep your website relevant, gaining new links, keeping users satisfied and getting traffic from search engines, you need to have a maintenance plan. As with any maintenance plan small improvements performed regularly are better than large radical changes made infrequently.

Perform a Content Audit

If you only do one thing from this checklist performing a content audit on a regular basis should be it. Regularly check for outdated content, prune back or eliminate dead or useless pages/sections. Keep your website as big as it needs to be, no bigger, there’s not a lot of value in having lots of pages users never visit, and search engines don’t send traffic to.

Improve Internal Linking

It’s important you use your internal links wisely and inbound link equity effectively by creating link hubs wisely. There should be some shift in terms you auto link as new content gets added and old content loses popularity.

Clean Up Your URL Structure

Your URL structure is largely defined by your CMS, however you usually have options. Shorter is better than longer, directory/folders are nice but not necessary,and you should avoid dates or numbers sequences that look like dates whenever possible. Avoid parameters if at all possible, and stay away from mobile subdomains. Depending on what you are doing “wrong” and how “bad” it is you want to think before making any huge radical changes or fixing what’s “broken”. Using the rel=”canonical” tag can help solve some of these problems, but it’s a best to get it right, and not use band aid solutions for bad information architecture.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

In 2011 I wrote how I felt giving your website mobile compatibility should be your number 1 IT project, I still feel that way. While devices like the iPad were designed to be consumption devices, consumers are using them to make purchases. Creating a dedicated app may get you up to speed faster, but in the long run its more maintenance, and doesn’t solve the problem of a bad user experience for users who don’t have the app. Use one URL, serve the content & style sheet via user agent detection, do not use parameters or mobile subdomains.

Stop Renewing Domains You Aren’t Using

Anyone who has been in the industry for a while, likey has a sizable domain portfolio, while $10 a domain may not sound like a lot of money, every hundred domains you register is $1000 a year. If they don’t have any exact match, high keyword value, aren’t earning you any money, and you aren’t going to develop them in 5 years, don’t renew it and stop throwing money away. This of course doesn’t apply to vanity domains or misspellings you may be holding for trademark or branding purposes.

Re-Evaluate Your Microsite Strategy

Microsites are an often abused SEO tactic (see When is Using Microsites a Good Idea). Chances are at some point, you have dabbled and have microsites out there. If you are over the spam line, or dancing right next to it, it might be time to pull the plug, especially if it’s not bringing you traffic or income (directly or indirectly). Maybe you have microsites covering two aspects of a niche, is it big enough to require more than one website, can you dedicate the time to running multiple microsites? If something is costing you more in time or money than it is generating in revenue, that’s usually a good indicator it’s time has come to an end. Not every website can last forever, some get a good 3, 5 or 10 year run, some longer, but few can last forever.

Look into Speeding up Your Website

Look into making your pages and site as whole as fast as possible. The days of flash are gone, and if you are using Ajax or other scripting technologies sure you are using them smartly (see tips for Ajax for SEO). Eventually shifting to HTML 5 should make its way onto your priority list.

Develop a Testing Platform

Everyone who is involved in website publishing, marketing, or optimization, should have 1 or 2 test sites. Ideally these should be real websites that are public, have real information, and aren’t sitting on an authority domain. You want them to be low maintenance and have low commercial intent, it makes it so much easier to run and build links for. A yearly local community project/event makes an excellent topic.

Re-Evaluate Your Social Media Strategy

At this stage there are very few websites niches that wouldn’t benefit from being involved in social media. You need to look at your social media game plan and make sure you are getting something out of it and it is worth the time investment (see Is Social Media About Conversations). Look into tools like Raven Tools, Hootsuite, and Bufferapp to help you automate, get more done with less time investment.

Pay Attention to Important News and Trends

It’s important to stay on top of news or trends in the industry, but it’s easy to spend to much time reading news and information and not doing any work. It’s important to know about major changes like Panda or when the Atlantic writes about the glut of infographics and Matt Cutts shares it, it’s not important you follow the daily drama ego stroking that permeates the tech industry on sites like techmeme. Set a daily limit to how much time you spend on keeping up to date, use services like summify to help you extract the most value in the least amount of time.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Perform a content audit regularly, keep your website lean and mean
• Maximize your inbound link equity with smart internal linking
• Look at your URL structure keep it clean and make sure it’s not creating problems
• Make Your website as mobile friendly as possible, don’t take shortcut solutions that will haunt you later
• Re-evaluate your microsite strategy, use it where it makes sense, kill it where it doesn’t
• Consolidate your domain portfolio
• Look to increase your page speed, kill flash use Ajax where necessary and look to shift to HTML 5
• Develop a testing platform
• Re-evaluate your social media strategy, look to get more value with less time investment
• Pay attention to important news don’t waste time on things that aren’t

photo credit: Shutterstock/ Jean Valley

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3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
4. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Tips on How To Improve Your Website – Checklist

Gab Goldenberg wrote the Beginner’s Guide to Remote Usability Testing and about the mobile usability of text fields for Usability Post.

Due to a surgery that’s left me unable to sit for the time being, I’ve recently been in the position to make much more extensive use of my iPod touch for browsing the web. And besides for realizing that the WP core needs a mobile friendly backend, I picked up on the darker side of mobile detection in sites. Namely, cloaking.

Or at least, that’s the unwitting, painful result of certain forms of mobile device detecting software. Instead of serving the page someone requested by clicking on a search result listing, people get taken to the mobile homepage or directory/folder index.

While it’s not done with ill intent like all the hacked, cloaked and redirected pages on harvard.edu et al hawking “OEM” software (@Matt Cutts, please crack down on that cheeky junk already), the end result is users are mislead. And I am sure it shows in the bounce rates.

A better approach is that taken on sites like Lifehacker where mobile detection yields an optimized experience with the page you requested being served, in a narrower format and without sidebars. It’s a user friendly experience we can all get behind.

[edit: You can see that form of mobile experience here on Wolf Howl too.]

Tapped from my iPod

photo credit: Shutterstock/Red Riding Hood

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5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
9. Link Building Services - Hire WeBuildLink.com for well-planned advanced link building campaigns. Very affordable. Contact us now for a FREE evaluation.
10. Join 500+ top agencies & publishers who rely on The HOTH every day. US based, enterprise-grade support. High quality, contextually relevant links. 100% money back guarantee. Try it now.
11. Professional website designs - Get a unique brand image with website designs that sets you apart and convert your visitors into customers. Make a brand, not just a website
12. Krystal Glass Whiteboards - Glass writing boards for offices, boardrooms, and classrooms.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Detect Mobile Devices? Are You Cloaking Your Way To Bad Usability?