If you are concerned to bring lots of traffic to your online property, then there’s no discussion about which is the better choice.  A blog will perform very much more strongly than a website for reasons we will shortly discuss. Indeed if blogs had come along before websites, there would now only be a small fraction of the websites we see on the Internet.

Blogging is Proactive

The biggest reason why blogs outperform websites is that blogs are proactive while regular websites are reactive.  A blog can signal to Google or the other search engines the instant that new material has been added.  On the other hand, if you change a web page,  Google will only be aware of the change the next time one of their spiders happens to check out that specific  blog post.  That factor alone has an enormous impact on the search engine visibility of blog posts.  However the specific visibility of any particular blog can be improved or diminished by more detailed decisions on particular features of the blog.

By observation, this search-engine visibility of blog posts is greatly speeded up now with the adoption by Google of its new search infrastructure, ‘caffeine’, during the summer.  You can check this by doing Google Alerts on keywords in your post and seeing how rapidly these are triggered. It really is most impressive.

Ways to improve your blog visibility

Two particular practices can materially improve blog posts visibility.

• Regular blog posts, even if short
• Add links to blog posts to interconnect

Regular blog posts have a number of important benefits, all of which ratchet up the search engine visibility:

• The RSS news feeds are pinging the search engines more frequently
• Web pages that change more frequently encourage the search engine spiders to crawl the web pages more frequently

The other useful way of strengthening important blog posts is to add links to them from other blog posts.  Although internal links are probably not as important as external links, they do provide paths for spiders to follow and will encourage more thorough indexing.

What to avoid with your blog

Although blogs do have this inherent search engine visibility, it is possible to severely handicap how visible the individual blog posts will be.  The key parameter here is the number of times a new blog post appears on the blog front page.  It turns out that the extremes reduce the impact of individual blog posts.

• Having a static ‘Home page’
• Having too many blog posts on the ‘front page’

With a static home page, new individual blog posts only appear as singles or as entries within category or tag pages.  Although they may be no less visible to humans or search engine spiders that follow the news feeds, general readers visiting ‘the blog’ may never click on a link to spot the latest web page.

If one goes with the default home page of a blog, where say 5 or 10  blog posts may appear in sequence, then again the potential search engine visibility of the individual blog posts is reduced.  By showing only say 3 or even only the latest blog post, that content gets the added advantage of recency coupled with the greater ‘PageRank’ strength of the home page.

Conclusion

Sometimes these ‘big picture’ questions about the basic blog site architecture get forgotten,  However by making some right choices, the overall search engine visibility of the total blog content can be significantly improved.  That is something no blog owner should casually overlook.

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Post from: BPWrap

Blogging For Maximum Google Visibility

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The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson.  The Wikipedia explanation describes what he had defined

Hyperlinks are the basic building block of hypertexts. For example, some key words in a wiki such as Wikipedia are highlighted, and provide links to explanations of those words at other pages in the same wiki.
In directed links, the area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor (or source anchor); its target (or destination anchor) is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a specific location within another page or document.

He also coined the word hypertext and the associated word hypermedia.  He bemoaned the fact that the latter had not taken off and instead became what we often call interactive media.

The hyperlink concept is really very powerful.  However Microsoft, as it has done with so many great ideas, did not leverage that power.  It is true that files or documents in the Office Suite of programs always have the hyperlinking capability.  So you will find:

• Word hyperlinks
• Excel hyperlinks
• Powerpoint hyperlinks, and   
• Outlook hyperlinks

Adobe also to an extent slowed down the wider use of hyperlinks since it is only recently that you can now create a PDF document with their software with active hyperlinks.

Luckily the hyperlink concept is much too powerful to be sidelined by this somewhat lukewarm support.  What really caused the hyperlink concept to take off was the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  No longer would a hyperlink merely connect you with some other point in the same document.  You could now connect with some online website that could be half way round the world.

The other powerful influence was that the two Google founders latched on to the notion that hyperlinks confirmed the popularity or authority of web pages.  They then they used this concept within their search algorithm.  Since for a given Web page they were interested in hyperlinks pointing to that web page, they used the term Backlink instead of hyperlink.  If they had only stuck with the term hyperlink, then again the concept might have gained more general understanding.

The strength of hyperlinks is confirmed by what was written in 1999.  As the ClueTrain Manifesto authors pointed out, almost everyone was hyperlinking and this was a movement that could not be stopped.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Ten years later, the strength of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web they made possible cannot be denied.  Most website owners acknowledge the mutual networking benefits they receive and include hyperlinks to other relevant sites that their visitors may wish to visit.  This summer there was even a question whether the BBC had finally changed policy and was using hyperlinks to external sources.  The answer is unclear but the eventual outcome will undoubtedly include external hyperlinks.

The latest word from Google points to an even greater support for the hyperlink concept.  The Google Webmaster Central Blog is now encouraging webmasters to include named anchors to define sections of their webpages and tips on how to do this best.  This will mean that a keyword search could actually rank most highly a hyperlink to a point within a document that is deemed to be most relevant.

As the Official Google Blog explains, the aim is to enable users to get to the information they want faster. Searchers will now find additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

If you have such web pages, this should ensure greater visibility and higher rankings for sections of your information-packed pages, so this is something to carefully consider. As a small test, you may wish to see how these internal web page links for Therapeutic Riding Associations and for Associations for the Disabled rank in Google searches for those terms. Once indexed, they should rank highly in related searches. Those hyperlinks certainly deserve some serious respect now.

Post from: BPWrap

Hyperlinks Get Even More Respect

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Their announcement in June gave the following details:

Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.

While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it’s far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.

If you click on any fact, you’ll see the sources Google Squared gathered it from as well as a list of other possible values that you can investigate. So even if your square isn’t perfect at the beginning, it’s easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer in no time. Once you’ve got a square you’re happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.

If I had seen that, I might not have grasped the full potential. However the latest news indicates that Google Squared has quality improvements and allows sorting and exporting.

At launch, your first square could include at most 30 facts or cells. With today’s update, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five companies and six categories, now you’ll see a table with 20 companies and up to six attributes.

The quality of the information is also better, because we’re ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. Now we’re actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven’t found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.

We’ve also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly. We’ve also added the ability to export data from Squared to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file, which should make it easier to do interesting things with the data.

Google Squared is extremely useful if you want to find a list of potential company leads. Suppose you are a wine distributor and you want to develop a list of restaurants in Langley, BC. Just do a search with Google Squared for Restaurants in Langley, BC. The result is a spreadsheet of key factors for the entries including telephone numbers.

You can download this as a CSV file and open it in Excel or you can transfer it to a Google spreadsheet within Google Documents.

Try it! I think you’ll be impressed.

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Leads Generation With Google Squared

Posts from the Archives

• January 14, 2005 -- Is The Wal-Mart Blog Coming Soon? (1)
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• December 20, 2006 -- Duplicate Content, A Blessing Or A Curse (0)
• January 25, 2008 -- I Twitter Therefore I Am (10)

Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London by Tagishsimon and used under GNU Free Documentation License

You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.

That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.

Jill said that Rand’s advice could

… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.

Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.

Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

Post from: BPWrap

Users Or Search Engines Is A False SEO Debate

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Below the Search box, the buttons also are increased in size and are now more square:

It is surprising how that I’m Feeling Lucky button survives.  Even more so when you realize that whenever this button is clicked, it may well cost Google in lost advertising revenues.

The thinking behind this change is not at all clear, given so many adverse reactions.

The official word is that the Google Search Box is now S-U-P-E-R sized.  Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience introduces it as follows:

For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use.

It is perhaps something that only its Mother could love.

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Google Chooses Big Ugly

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• October 15, 2008 -- A World Without Google (11)
• March 3, 2005 -- The new J Walter Thompson – JWT (0)
• July 19, 2009 -- Wot No Google Local Search (5)
• January 20, 2006 -- 50 milliseconds – what's that as a percentage? (0)
• February 22, 2008 -- Will Business Boldly Go Into The Social Media? (19)

It now has been updated and brought together in one place in an e-book (PDF file).  Here are more details on the Marketing Right Now e-book.  The aim is to help entrepreneurs and SOHO (small office, home office) workers start their business in the right way and then grow it successfully.  It covers all aspects of this in a concise 55 pages.

It is intended as a work book, which is the reason for presenting this as an e-book.  It discusses throughout what are the success keys of business and in an Annex presents these keys to success in a single page work sheet.  It does suggest ways of doing extra reading, but the action-oriented entrepreneur will find the essential first steps are covered so that the action plan can start quickly.

Three Key Factors

Why is this book different from all the others that appear so frequently?  The major difference is that this is geared for rapid action rather than slow and leisurely planning.

There are also three important principles that influence how actions should be taken:

• Internet mindset
  The Internet creates greater openness and changes the balance of power between buyers and sellers
• Customer-centric
  Unless you see things the way the customer does, you may be surprised when they are cool about what you thought might be good for them.
• Time Is Job One 
  Time is valued by customers much more than companies acknowledge.  Offering attractive time-related services to your customers will give a competitive advantage.

Why Pay For An E-book

One reaction to an e-book may be to question why it is not free.  There are so many things written on the Internet that are free.  Why would someone not explore those? 

Well of course they can but their own time must be factored into the equation.  It is the principle that Chris Anderson discusses in his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  In this case you can see a good part of the information in the blog posts mentioned earlier and very little has changed since then.  However if your time is valuable, then you may feel it is an equitable arrangement to pay the author a modest contribution so that you have the content in a more usable format that will save your time.

The advantage of an e-book is that you know exactly what you are paying for.  Many sources of marketing information are put behind walls and you must pay a monthly entry fee to have access. One cannot be sure exactly what is the ROI for such more hefty investments, but usually there are a few glowing customer references to encourage you to enter the door. 

If you want to get a better appreciation of such ‘closed gardens’, Chris Garrett wrote a description of how he Built His Authority Blogger Member Site.  As he says there  is a good deal of interest in Teaching Sells and membership sites in general, so he wanted to set out how you can easily create your own membership site using WordPress.

Membership sites are certainly one possibility if you think you will have the time and dedication (and money) to follow all that they have to offer and then take the necessary actions.  If you are not sure about what is in that ‘brown paper bag’, then a more appropriate way to go may be a modestly priced e-book that covers all you need.

Post from: BPWrap

Marketing Right Now e-book

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Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

Post from: BPWrap

Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

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Online retail sales showed promising growth in Canada. Sales reached $12.6- billion in 2006 — a 61% rise over three years — according to a 2007 Statistics Canada report. Online sales increased only by 3% in 2008, says the Raleigh, N.C.-based media marketing company Sage Works, but are up 9% for the first eight months of 2009.

Canadians have not embraced the online shopping model with the same verve as their U.S. counterparts. Fear of credit card fraud is an issue.  Darrell MacMullin, general manager PayPal Canada, says “Canadians have one of the highest sensitivities globally when it comes to security.”

Nevertheless some online stores have achieved remarkable success including the following:

• online retailer WineOnline.ca
• RedFlagDeals.com, for online bargains in Canada
• online mall cybershopping.ca
• MaternityCorner.com
• ssense.com, fashion retailers
• rocketfuelcoffee.com

Raman Kashyap, owner of cybershopping.ca, suggests that for success, companies have to be very niche-oriented and have strong social networking programs.  If they can also still any credit security concerns and provide rapid response service, they should have it made.

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Rapid Response Service For Online Success

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Internet Explorer 6 should be given a respectful and speedy burial according to Shane Richmond in the online Telegraph. He encourages you to tell an IT person that Internet Explorer 6 must die.

If you’re not familiar with online chat shorthand, “kthxbye” is a slang term generally used sarcastically as a condescending and dismissive insult (”Thank-you for your useless contribution to this discussion, now please go away”).

Richmond writes that:

IE6 was never a top-notch product. And these days it’s even more of a nightmare to work with, resulting in extra time and money being spent ensuring that websites are compatible with the damned thing.  Digg, Facebook and YouTube are all about to end their support for IE 6 and are recommending that users switch to a browser that works.

Among those speaking out against IE6 is a group of more than 70 developers who have banded together to form a project called ie6nomore.

Despite this clamor, according to the BBC, Microsoft is backing a long life for IE6. Indeed the software giant now says it will support IE6 until 2014, four years beyond their original deadline.  Their reasons may be more bound up with strategy versus Google and its cloud computing initiative than with what is best for customers.

The opposition as documented in the online Telegraph is virulent:

A crueller person might say that any IT manager who forces his company to run IE 6 in 2009 is dangerously incompetent and should probably not be in charge of anything more complicated than buying biscuits. However, it’s possible that they’re doing this because their company uses an intranet – or some other custom-built web service – that was designed to work in IE 6 and is useless in any other browser.

It is suggested that victims locked in by corporate policy should use one of the range of posters produced by the helpful people at Hey IT!

It is suggested that you should print it out and stick it on your computer, around the office or on your IT manager’s forehead. The Internet as a whole will be much improved when we all have said kthxbye (or should that be kthnxbye) to the worn and weary Internet Explorer 6.

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Internet Explorer 6 kthxbye

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Introduction

AWeber provides a fine email newsletter marketing service, so you might question whether what Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) writes in an article on Email Deliverability Tips may represent a slightly biased view of the situation.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Having found that my own email newsletter delivery system has encountered even worse problems than that, I can state that Tom Kulzer is not in any way exaggerating.  The following article describes what I found and what you need to do. It all concerns an email version of the monthly SMM Newsletter. 

This has been delivered to just under 1,000 subscribers for many months.  Originally it was a text newsletter but for some months has been an HTML newsletter.  It is issued using the Pimex Mail Express newsletter software.  It was sent out in blocks of 20 with a 5 second gap between blocks.  Suddenly this month something triggered the Shaw Spam filtering system and although it appeared to have been sent, it never got to its recipients.  Explanations and solutions follow.

Although it describes a multi-delivery email message, you should note that some of these problems can affect single email messages that are junked on the way to their recipient, even if they wish to receive the communication.

What Is Junk Mail

You should be clear that there are two definitions of Junk Mail.  You may believe it is mail that you do not wish to receive.  Your email delivery system has a different definition and different email delivery systems have slightly different definitions.  Each has a computer algorithm that applies a host of factors to determine whether any given email message should be deemed Junk or not.  Part of it is determined by who is sending the email message and part by its content.  In some spam filtering systems, particular senders can be whitelisted.  In other cases, this is not possible, for example Gmail.

Your IP Reputation

The key parameter in the system used by many ISPs, the Cisco IronPort SenderBase Security Network, is the Reputation of the individual IP.  This is determined by the Senderbase Reputation evaluator.

The Reputation can be shown as Good, Neutral and Poor.  Only the first Good reputation gives an assurance that email will be delivered.  For both the other categories, mail may be caught in a Junk trap.  The Reputation for the SMM IP (70.70.29.11) at the time of writing is Poor.  By ensuring no continuing transgressions, a weak reputation may gradually be restored.  There are other databases that may be consulted.  SpamCop is another but that has no indication about the SMM IP.

What weakens the IP Reputation

The SMM IP (70.70.29.11) is used for only minimal email apart from the batch of emails once per month.  The ISP tech support felt that this highly bunched up activity might have triggered the Poor Reputation value.  This could have the appearance of virus or trojan related email activity. 500 emails per hour may well be a possible acceptable limit although it is probably prudent to have no more than say 200 going out per hour.  This is undoubtedly affected by whether each is a simple text message for a few hundred bytes or multimedia or HTML messages that could be 25 kb or much, much more.

What Aspects Make Junk Mail

In testing different variants of the SMM Newsletter to try to avoid the Junk trap, some interesting facts emerged.  It should be noted that each ISP or service receiving an email message may have different degrees of stringency.  Indeed with the Shaw email service you can select the level of spam you are willing to tolerate.  It turned out that Gmail treated as Junk what was acceptable to the medium level of stringency for Shaw.

The fact that an email is HTML is perhaps the biggest factor affecting how a message will be assessed in Junk terms.  Another is the quality of the URLs (hyperlinks) that may appear within the message.  Initially a URL shortening service had been used for the link to the online version of the SMM newsletter.  The domain for the URL shortener turned out to be on a URL black list (https://admin.uribl.com/) and this was sufficient to cause the email to be Junk for Gmail (although not for Shaw).  Another black list service is to be found at http://www.surbl.org/ and you can check particular  URLs you are not sure about  at http://george.surbl.org/lookup.html

One way of avoiding that problem is to use your own URL ’shortening’ service.  The shorter URL for the SMM Newsletter is http://www.otherbb.com/n.htm  The page n.htm does not exist.  Instead a 301 redirect is arranged in the .htaccess file on the domain to transfer automatically from n.htm to the actual online newsletter.

The Junk Mail solution for the SMM Newsletter

Given that the IP being used for transmitting the SMM Newsletter is still rated Poor by some services, the decision was made to use a text version of the Newsletter with a minimal number of URLs included and using the 301 redirect approach for the link to the actual online Newsletter.  Even so there were 1% of bounces due to possible spam content of the Newsletter, although there was no questionable content in the Newsletter.

A Surer Solution To Avoid Junk Email concerns

Another way of avoidng these Junk concerns and many other concerns of publishing a successful email newsletter is to use one of the commercial services.  One which is highly rated by its users is that provided by AWeber (for which I am an affiliate).  If you would like to check out what is involved, why not sign in for that Free Test Drive in the form on the right.  You won’t regret it. The service provides all you could possibly need.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re now ready to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, you will find that AWeber has all you need to make email marketing work for you.

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Stop Your Email Newsletter Being Junk – A Case Study

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