Learn more about what can hurt your blog and how to do good link building.

Google Panda provides a huge incentive to produce good content

Google Panda Infographic

Via: Single Grain – A Digital Marketing Agency

Once you’ve decided on those questions, then it is time for the big one. How will you get readers to your website?

Search Engine Optimization

For years search engine optimization (and perhaps pay per click ads) was the way to go. To be sure it still plays a significant role and will for a very long time. However, the one problem today with seo is that it is a one way street. You only have to please the search engine.

But things have changed. It is not the only game in town anymore. There are multiple ways to get visitors to your website, and the options seem limitless. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even Google has gotten into the social media game with Google+. And, there are blog aggregators like technorati, and sharing sites like Stumbleupon and Reddit.

Recently, tech investor Roger McNamee gave a presentation at a TED event in California. In the presentation, McNamee said that index search (Google) peaked in 2008 with 90% of all websites being discovered through Google. Now it is down to 50%.

Why is that? I can find what I want quicker and easier in other places. If I want to learn about a car, I can go to cars.com. If I want a house, I can go to realtor.com. If I want a date I can go to match.com.

That doesn’t mean Google is disappearing. They are not. What it means is that they are not what they were in 2008 and more opportunities on the Internet are presenting themselves to publishers of great content.

Purpose of Your Blog or Website

So, I am back to purpose and audience.  In reality, the purpose of your blog is not to be the world’s #1 blog. Well, it may be, but suffice is to say there are very few of those.

The purpose of your business blog is not to sell something or promote yourself. Although it may do those things.

The real purpose of your blog ought to be to deepen customer relationships and increase referrals.

A search engine cannot do that for you. It can only connect a request with a need. Once the connection has been made with the site visitor, the game fundamentally changes.

Engaging with Your Audience

How will you engage and interact with your audience?

That’s the next big question, and that is really for you to determine. The way you engage your audience may be different to mine, and it may require a different strategy to deepen relationships.

The one commonality amongst all blogs and websites is that they must provide rich content that can help your audience solve their problems or meet their needs. And, it must be free.

In addition to great content, you may have a killer email newsletter. Do you have an easy way for them to subscribe to it?

Do you encourage your blog readers to leave comments by asking them engaging questions, including something like; “Please tell us how you feel by leaving a comment below.”

If you use social media, ask questions and learn what your followers are looking for. Every business has an entry point to helping your readers and social media followers. They followed you initially because they had a problem or need, and you had the answer or were able to help them.

You are in business because someone had a problem and you were able to help them solve it. Treat your blog and social media that way and it will prosper. Maybe not in a week or a month, but perhaps in 6-12 months you will be in a vastly different place.

Conclusion

SEO is a much needed and valuable tool. But by itself it is no longer enough. It is great for helping people get to your blog, but what happens afterwards?

If the purpose of your blog is to deepen customer relationships and increase referrals, then provide free value based content and ask questions that help solve their problems.

So is it seo or engagement? I say it’s both. You just have to know their purpose in what you are trying to accomplish.

Image © Red rockerz – Fotolia.com

For a newly set-up blog, the reason for organizing blog contest is probably because of the want increase the exposure and interactions that are happening around the blog. And that’s why I launched my iPad 2 giveaway over my site – Kissing Crust.

While for an established blog like Famousbloggers.net, the reason may towards strengthening the branding of the blog.

Let’s take the contest that Hesham has just announced the winners.  I am pretty sure the objectives behind the contest is strengthen the content base of Famousbloggers.net especially in relation to internet marketing contents. With this contest, it will help to push this site to be source of great internet marketing contents and therefore, will boost this site traffic and user engagements.

And in case your new year resolution is to have a way better blog in 2012, organizing contest can be one of the ways. Unfortunately, the result that you want to see after organizing your contest may not meet your expectation or even worse, cost you more than you can earn.

These 7 must-follow tips will ensure the success of your blog contest.  Are you ready to organize successful blog contest this year?

1- Set Up Your Objectives

The first thing you must do before launching your blog contest is to set what you want to achieve from the contest. The most important element for this pointer is to keep the objectives as simple as possible.

Don’t create contest to achieve everything that you can think of. If you want the contest to create interactions within you blog through blog commenting, create the contest that will encourage people to leave comment and that’s the only way they will win the contest – not through who tweet most, who share most in Facebook or must create contest reviews.

My advise: Have only one objective for one blog contest. It will make it easy for your contest to be understood and joined. This will help you too in managing and monitoring the success of your contest.

Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t. (Peter Drucker)

2- Use Contest/Giveaway Tools

Give yourselves a break. Use contest/giveaway tools like CompResult and RaffleCopter to manage your blog contest. You may not find it handy at first but trust me; when your blog contest gone viralled and thousands of people joining your contest, this kind of tool will definitely save the day.

I have always use RaffleCopter to organize the contests over my site. The reasons why I love it are you can moderate the entries, it will help you choose the winners and most importantly, it keeps the record of who join your contest.

This can be handy when you want to launch another contest in future. With simple emails, these are the people who will help to push your contest to go viral and be a success.

My advise: Save your time and effort if you can. If you not planning to use any tool, make a simple contest and avoid using point-based system to select the winner. Use Random.org if you can.

3- Get A Prize Everybody Want

You do not need to offer lots of prizes. What you need is to offer a prize that will make everybody gone crazy. For me, offering a brand new iPad 2 is definitely better than a contest with prizes that worth more than $1000.

People do everything for iPad 2. If you offer such prize, people will do everything for your blog to win.

So, instead of wasting $1000 for prizes that you still not sure whether will it get people excited, why don’t you simply get an iPad 2 worth only $499 for the winner which will definitely create a lot of buzz over Twitter?

My advise: Less is definitely more. By offering limited prizes, it will create a better sense of competition to get the top prizes which will leads to more participations and site visits.

4- Keep Close Relationship With Blog Sponsors

The iPad contest that I’m having over my site is also being sponsored with various WordPress theme developers like ColorLabs & Company and ProThemeDesign. By keeping close relationship with them, whenever I plan to organize blog contest in future, the chance of them supporting me is pretty high.

Plus, if you are lucky, the sponsors who are highly influential will also help you to promote your contest to their followers.

My advise: Sometimes, it only requires simple email and honesty to get others’ help.

5- Be Firm To The Winners

Before you launched your blog contest, be firm on how will you announce the winners and give the prizes. My suggestion is to announce the winners through announcement page and the winners should response to you within certain period of times to claim the prizes they have won. If they miss it, the prizes will be given to others.

By doing this, it helps you to save your time and to ensure you can settle everything as soon as possible.

My advise: Even though you have set some terms & conditions, it doesn’t hurt to bend the rules once in a while. After all, the winners have helped to promote your blog

6- Complement The Blog Contest

After a while, you may able to see the direction where the blog contest is going. Sometimes, the buzz that it receives may not as huge as you hope for.

If you are confident the buzz can grow further if it gets more exposure, take necessary action to bring more attention to your blog contest. You can use Twitter, Facebook and ways that can bring new audience to your blog contest.

For me, besides Twitter, this blog contest is also my way to tap to new audience to my iPad 2 giveaway that will end in January 2012 . Don’t forget join it ok? Be quick. It is going to end soon.

My advise: Keep monitoring your blog contest. Always have this question with you: What I want with this contest, have I achieved and if not, will I achieve when the contest ends?

7- Element Of Surprise

After your blog contest has ended, I can assure your site will change in a good way even though the impact can be differ; either minimal or significant.

So, why not you give some surprises the participants as a sign of appreciation?

For example, there are probably few who actively promote your blog contest but do not won any prize. So, give token of appreciations to them. They will definitely love you more!

My advise: Besides use your own fund, you can get help from the sponsor. I am sure some of the sponsors have no issue to give something extra to those who have indirectly promote their products.

Conclusion

Well, how do you find about the 7 tips of creating your next successful blog contest? Do you think it will create a successful blog contest?

Based on my past experiences, it will. What about you?

Last word of advise: Keep your contest as simple as possible but make the prize as attractive it can be. People will floak your contest and you will smile all day long seeing your blog grows day by day.

The Dating Game

What if you woke up, looked at the calendar on the wall, and all the blocks were blank? Or you glanced at your smartphone, only to discover everything date-related had disappeared? You wouldn’t think that little handheld was so smart, would you?

We know why knowing the date is important: appointments, deadlines, doctor visits, payday . . . So why do we think hiding the date on articles and blog posts is such a great idea?

I think the reason most people leave the date off is so that their content won’t appear “dated.” Dated is synomymous with “old,” and who wants their content to appear old when someone arrives for the first time? ”Old” online is a faulty anachronism: it’s the difference between ancient and antique. An antique is a desirable form of something from another time. It might be old, but it’s valuable and considered priceless by some.

Keeping That Date

The choice is always yours. Let’s look at some reasons to keep the date and make sure it is readily visible when someone drops in.

Being Relevant

Imagine stumbling across a news story that said something like “breaking news!” … You read the story and don’t realize this was something that happened over 2 years ago. — DialMe

“DialMe” makes a solid point in Timestamping Articles and Posts. Since your About Me or Contact pages are more or less static content, they don’t necessarily need to show when they were published. But adding a date to blog posts and articles will give readers an opportunity to decide for themselves if your content is relevant to their needs. It could also be the deciding factor in whether your visitor leaves a comment or asks an important question.

Being A Standup Kinda Guy (or Gal)

Content that has been around for a while could be considered anchor, pillar, or evergreen content — the kind of content that stands up to the passing of time. It provides information that is as relevant to the current time as it was when it was first written. A first-timer who lands on your article will be grateful to you — if you provide the answer she was seeking — no matter when it was written.

Examples of evergreen content include articles on how to increase customer referrals, hurricane survival tips, or how to leave a positive blogging legacy. Because this type of content is timely (and priceless), showing the date is less important than adding a date to blog posts where timestamping matters more.

Being on Time

I recently did a roundup of the best blog monetizing strategies over the past year. What if none of the articles had dates? My research would be screwed and my results would have been skewed! In fact, one of the strategies is about traffic generating contests and contests always have a start date and finite ending — so if the date of the post is left off, it could confuse would-be contestants.

Hey, Where’s My Date?

Blame it on the theme

Some themes don’t make it easy to add the date. Either the complexity of navigating options or the sheer number of options could effectively hide the feature. At the time of writing, I’m using the comprehensive Suffusion Theme by Sayontan Sinha. When I first installed it, it took me forever to locate the “show date” feature! However, once found, I was delighted to see a number of options for both displaying the date and leaving it hidden.

Lots of places to stash your date …

Your theme might allow you the freedom of displaying the date in lots of different ways or it might constrain you to only one or two locations. Here are some possible locations:

• above the blog post
• directly under the article title
• a small icon on the left side
• a small icon on the right side

Are you the one looking for a date?

What if you’re doing research for a topic and find an article you’d like to reference but it doesn’t have a date in one of the usual places? If you don’t see the date at first glance, try peeking in these unusual places.

• in the sidebar
• at the very bottom of the post
• in the footer

Lastly, check the comments . . .

Why would you check the comments? They might have a clue! Check the date of the first comment as well as the last comment. The first one will give you an idea of when the post was written. The last one will give an idea of whether or not the content is still relevant.

This almost brings us to the end of our time together …

Ditching Your Date

Like most stories in life, there are two sides to this one, too. In the dating game, the case can also be made against showing the date or timestamp on your blog posts, articles, and tutorials.

Are you hiding something from me?

I already mentioned how certain pages don’t really need a date. That’s not so much about hiding the date as it is about making a practical decision. We also covered evergreen or pillar content, so you could turn the date off on those, too, if you want. But next up is a case in which these fellows really do have something to hide! Read on …

Uh, Google made me do it!

We decided that more often than not, we would want to hide the date . . . But . . . we wanted an option to keep the date on a post if we felt readers would benefit from knowing the date of publication. — Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson and his buddy Ben Hunt claimed that Google slapped them for having old content, until they realized their clickthrough rates were actually suffering because they had dates on the older articles. The gist of it is that Google now displays a date alongside search results (SERPs); thus, someone encountering your relevant (evergreen) article that is dated several years ago will be less inclined to visit your post if they assume your information is outdated.

Once they figured out why the SERPs were causing them pain, they created a tutorial on how to remove the dates from SERP Snippets.

Time to Pop the Question!

Adding dates to blog posts and articles assures visitors that your content is relevant to their needs. Yet, sometimes it might be appropriate to hide the dates.

Well, it’s time to say goodbye, but before you go, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this dating game . . . (and thanks for reading!)

• Do you include dates on your blog posts or do you leave them off? Why?
• Have you ever thought about it one way or the other?
• What are other reasons to add a date or skip including them?

Image: © Olivier Le Moal – Fotolia.com

Internet marketing is getting harder every day with all its crazy competitions, many of us need to learn and discover how it works works, I bet you want to dominate your niche just like me, and you actually make money out of it!

My friend Peter Garety has launched his training and coaching program today, I’ve got a chance to enter to his site earlier this weekend and I really enjoyed what I’ve seen. Peter has a fantastic way to deliver the required piece of information that you actually need to know! Peter is a great coach, he also writes here on the blog, you can check out his posts and profile here: Peter Garety.

And, the Niche Evaluation Storm video training is great value for its price.

That’s why I am participating in its promotion, I think it will be useful, and that’s why I am sharing this with you, and by the way links are my affiliate!

Niche Evaluation Storm Review

The Niche Evaluation Storm is a step by step video training and live coaching, this means you will be learning from Peter a lot about niche domination, he is going to show you LIVE on the webinars how to build a complete money making business from scratch, and one of the best parts is to actually get in touch with him and ask any question that you have in mind.

This is great and incredibly affordable coaching opportunity that you really don’t want to miss out!

Here is what you will get:

• Instant access to Niche Evaluation Storm that will show you step by step how to select a profitable and unsaturated buyer niche, get targeted traffic, and make consistent monthly income online
• Complete niche business building MindMap (2 formats) that will save loads of time and will keep you on track at any moment
• 8 short and easy-to-follow MindMap video tutorials that will show exactly which steps you need to take at which point to build a profitable online business fast
• 10 Checklists supported by 10 ‘Watch Over My Shoulder’ videos that eliminate all the guessing and give you complete ‘Know-How’ to build a worthwhile income from your business
• Niche Market Evaluation Table that shows you step by step how to evaluate the whole niche market so that you know exactly what kind of results you can expect and how long it will take
• A super easy keyword research method that will instantly uncover profitable keywords that will drive buyer traffic to your sites
• Dedicated Q & A forum that will ensure you get all your questions answered.

You know? I respect people who teach others!

And, I live with the hope that you will learn something new from these 18 videos, and enjoy the live case study watching Peter making it! I am sure you will add new experiences to what you already have! Anyways, you don’t have anything to lose as this one is totally guaranteed!

Get Niche Evaluation Storm

I believe that there is no risk at all, so if you are not totally satisfied with the Niche Evaluation Storm, you should know that it has a 60-day money back guarantee, so if you don’t like it, then simply ask for your money back!

I made my review of the Niche Evaluation Storm short and straight to the point, there is actually a lot more details to read about it on the warrior post.

Previously, marketers had assumptions about how Google ranks the content, and with the introduction of Google+, the process has become more complicated and more ambiguous.

The Google Patent Application:

The Google Patent Application was published in May of 2008; this application gives some hints about how Google might rank the content in search engine results. A few of the hints are:

• The content originally furnished on a particular web page
• Responses and forum posts also affect the ranking of the content
• Comments and blog posts are also a contributor to the ranking of content
• The content shared on social media networks, also affects the ranking of original content

This kind of patent filing is aimed at working with websites where people are not allowed to interact without any kind of identification (mostly, via secure and personalized log-in procedure). This type of interaction (be it via posting comments or sharing some other type of content) is then vouched for being weighed and credential scores for each user are allocated accordingly, relative to those interactions. The lines below further explain about that.

The System of Patent Application:

The patent filing system works on the sites that allow a user to create content, interact with each other, and share thoughts. But for the creation of the content the users are required to register or fill in some information forms.

Credential Scores:

The patent filing system can be measured, by weighing the level of interactions that take place between users. This weighing of interactions assigns credential scores to the users. The factors that are weighed in assigning credential scores are:

• The quality of the content shared
• The replies received for a post
• The answers given to a question
• The rating given to a video or an image

The Constituents of Credential Score:

The posts or comments, which one sees in response to a search query, appear based on their credential score. In other words, credential score is synonymous to author rank. The two key constituents of credential score are given below:

1. Authority Score:

The authority score will be based upon the quality of responses you make on social networking websites, and the contributiveness score held by the person who shared the content responded.

2. Contributiveness Score:

The contributiveness score consists of the quality of the content person shares, along with the authority score of the people who respond to the content shared by the person.

Applying Credential Score on Google+:

Social media marketing companies need to find out how will Google+ affect the credential score, and how can they analyze the credential score on Google+. Applying credential score on Google+ Circles:

• When a person shares some content, the contributiveness score of that person will be calculated on the basis of authority score of the people who responded to the post.
• When someone responds to a post in Google+ Circles, his/her authority score will be calculated on the quality of response the person provides, and the contributiveness score of the person who originally shared the content.

The Implications of Credential Score:

In terms of the appearance of content of user in search engine results, there can be three implications of the credential score:

• The users who have higher contribution score will be able to see their comments or posts in the search results.
• The users with high quality input can be rewarded
• Those users who have low credential score, may be restricted from appearing in search engine results, and depending on the quality of their content can be regarded as spammers.

Conclusion:

The crux of the matter is that, the level of interactions and the quality of interactions that take place among users on different networks, directly affects the appearance and ranking of content in search engine results. For any internet marketing agency trying to play ahead of their competitors, staying abreast with such critical information is the key to success.

There are two ways to do this, the hard way and the easy way!

The hard way where you have to code and style to implement hreview in your WordPress theme, and the easy way where you simply install a plugin that gives you that power. So let me make things easy for you.

I’ve announced the under development product reviews plugin for Thesis Themes at ThesisAwesome.com blog, it’s a simple plugin that allow you to easily insert Google Rich Snippets for reviews and ratings to your posts and show rating stars in search results.

I call it the Thesis Theme Review Plugin.

Reviews examples

Here are a few examples of reviews I’ve made on the blog recently, and also some other reviews that I’ve updated from the past, you may look at them or search for them in Google and see how things looks like in the search results:

• Revenue Engine
• CommentLuv Premium
• PopUp Domination
• Engagement From Scratch
• Headway 3.0
• CurationSoft
• Market Samurai
• Gravity Forms

Also, notice the sidebar widget which has a list of recent reviews that I made especially for the plugin.

The future of Thesis Theme Review Plugin

As you can see from its name, the Thesis Theme Review Plugin works only with Thesis Themes, and it will be released as part of my ThesisAwesome.com membership site, this means if you are already a member and you did purchase any of my Thesis Child Themes, then you will have access to download the plugin for a very affordable price, plus the freedom to install it on any of your blogs. However, you also can purchase the plugin individually at a good low price.

Note: I don’t sell you a bunch of codes and files, I sell you my support, which means my time, so you are not actually paying me to download the plugin, but to get support and upgrades.

I will be updating you more on prices and when the plugin will be released for the public, this should’t take a lot of time. But for now I need beta testers, so keep reading.

Become a beta tester

I’ve already tested out the Thesis Theme Review Plugin here on the blog and some other blogs, I need to do more testing before releasing it, I need beta testers who are willing to provide feedback and help me out to test the plugin on different blogs with different layouts, this is great for the development process and your help should make it a better plugin.

I am going to accept only 5 -10 beta testers, so if you are willing to install and use the plugin on your blog help me test it out, and provide feedback, it might be yours for free.

Want to be a beta tester? contact me now.

One last thing, it’s a good idea to join my affiliate program before releasing the plugin, this may help you make extra money.

Also, I will give you some information on how I created the news section in case you are interested in implementing it on your own blog, however I won’t get deep into technical stuff, but I will point you to the right direction.

What is a Community News?

If you don’t know what community news section is, then let me give you a quick view…

The Community News section is a way of sharing knowledge, basically you have a section dedicated to receive links submissions from the community and publish it on your own blog. It’s so close to the idea of social bookmarking sites, but the technique and tools are different.

This technique is very popular among design related blogs, probably this explains a little about why design blogs can attract more traffic on the web by submitting their awesome showcases, tutorials, and inspiration posts. Community News sections has been and still used in several different ways, For example, there are some blog owners who do it manually, you submit a link to an article along with a short description, and the owner of the blog publish it manually.

But, some smarter design related blog owners and webmasters went beyond the manual boring work and stat to develop ways to automate the process as much as possible. However, there is no complete solution that you could use out of the box, you must add your own development and invest some time to create a good community news system for your blog.

Being a web designer and developer, I have been part of many news sites, I did followed this technique for a long time, especially when I first started my blog, and I must say it’s a fantastic and easy way to drive traffic, the only hard thing is to actually write good and high quality content so that everyone will love to link back to it and proudly promote it.

Here is a few blogs that I loved to share my design and WordPress related articles on:

• SpeckyBoy.com
• TopDesignMag.com
• Designm.ag
• DesignsMag.com

The examples above is just to show you how the submission process works and how actually your article will be archived and linked to. Keep reading as I will explain to you the differences between these ways and my way!

How Submitting News to a Community News can help my blog?

The idea here is that you submit links to your own blog posts and articles, this is helpful by two ways, firstly it’s a chance for more traffic to your article, and secondly you get a link back to your article, which could help your ranking in search engines!

I have tested this many times, and it simply works.

Actually, I am amazed that a few of the links I submitted during the last week were gaining some decent visits, some links even got ranked well in Google! You got to try it out yourself to judge it, submit an article!

How Famous Bloggers Community News is different!

Among all the sites I’ve seen in the past couple of years, not even a single site gives you any type of power or control over the way they present your links or the way they actually linking back to your article. Most of the news sections are archived in way that doesn’t really help your ranking unless it’s published manually in a round up form. I think the main focus was on traffic, but really SEO, and probably the idea was invented before web designers start to realize SEO and care for it.

This explains the wrong use of anchor text in links, for example: “read full article“, links to “original source“, or link to the full post title as an anchor text. This is the same thing in most of social bookmarking sites, which doesn’t really help you to rank for a specific keyword.

So, I thought to change all that!

My technique is completely different, and the changes I’ve done was really simple, but effective!

I thought to make use of SEO power, Keywords and Anchor text in the submissions, so You control the way your links are presented when you submit it.

• You decide the SEO Title and Description that will be displayed in SERPs.
• You decide your best keyword that will be used to link to your article.
• Best if all, you get a link within content, the real body of the post!

What you think?

Technical setup for the Community News

As I told you before, I have done several experiments trying to find the best way to get news submissions. You may think this is easy, you just go and use whatever form building plugin and start receiving submission right away!

Well… I wish this is possible, but no! It’s not that easy!

I’ve used TDO Mini Forms plugin which I think is great, but as you may know, the plugin wasn’t lucky enough due to lack of updates, probably this is why it was removed from WordPress plugins directory. However, I am having an older version and it’s actually working, but with a few glitches and missing features! You can check it out if you would like too, here is a link to the submission page on my other site.

Anyways, there is no plugin for this job yet! There is no complete solution for me, so I had to create my own and get assistance of some other plugins as well to complete the submission circle and make it fast and easy for me to publish the submissions on the blog! What I needed was something that saves me time, a lot of time! And, because I believe  if there is nothing that help me to do what I want, then I need to invent it!

So, I started with creating my own community news custom post type plugin based on information provided at WP Post Types codex page, then I started to build on top of it.

I ended up with using thee plugins:

1. My own Community News Custom Post Type Plugin
2. Gravity Forms Plugin (Read my review of Gravity Forms plugin)
3. Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types add-on

Of course, there were a few lines of CSS and function modifications added to the custom Thesis Theme Skin I am using on my blog to get things to work together!

And, the most interesting thing is I don’t have to edit anything, I don’t have to modify anyways, the whole process is automated except the publishing part, I just have to check the quality of news or article before publishing, which is not really a big deal yet!

I won’t get into much details about technical stuff, but I will point you out to other…

Useful resources I came across:

• Great resource about Custom Post Types in WordPress by Justin Tadlock (recommended!)
• I’ve followed Yoast‘s Power User Tip: Custom Post Type Feeds & Google to create the Community News RSS Feed (perfect!)
• And, of course WordPress Post Types at the codex.

Give it a try and tell me what you think!

Speaking about traffic, this is a great way, you submit your links, and I do the promotion, we both get traffic!

Click Here to Submit News

I don’t want to end up dealing with spam, so I decided to make the submission form available and free only for FamousBloggers.net’s contributors! However the plan can change any time, but at the mean time it won’t be a available for the public any time soon, as a way to guarantee that only quality articles will be shared.

As an SEO consultant, I find it necessary to keep up to date with modern SEO practices and techniques and below are some of the modern SEO practices and techniques that I have found useful.

Local SEO

If you look at Google’s search results (and even Bing’s) you will see they are showing the local businesses on top of their search results.

For example if you type in Los Angeles Bail Bonds, you will notice that all bail bonds locations in Los Angeles are shown first, then the other websites that are ranked organically below them. That shows the importance of local SEO. I wrote a post earlier on how you can rank for local SEO by making a lot of noise and getting a lot of good citations for your business using both online and offline marketing.

Social Media

Twitter, Facebook public pages, and now Google+ are influencing the search results. Google and Bing both have admitted they use social media links and content in their search results.

Content for Users First, then Search Engines

When creating content, make sure it is for the users first. Search engines are now looking for user signals such as bounce rate etc. in order to evaluate content. In other words, how users react to your content determines how good your content is therefore search engines rank it accordingly.

For example if  you have a Pizza shop and someone types in Pizza, lands on your website but spends very little time on your website and then clicks on the back button to leave your website, that could be a negative point for your website for key term pizza.

Content Freshness

In addition in writing quality content, Google is sending more organic traffic to sites with fresh quality content. This is where a lot of small businesses miss out because they have static pages with minimal content about their business and their products and services.

A good solution is to have a blog for your website.

Blogs are good for multiple reasons. You can write quality content on them about your products, services, company news, and even allow guests posts, helping you become popular in your market.

HTML5 and Microformats

Search engines rely on crawlers and robots to understand the content of your website. And while they are getting really good at it, you can help them understand the content of your website better by implementing microformats.

Google and Bing have worked together to develop Schema.org which is a website that contains a set of microformat standards that help search engines understand your content better.

Google Webmaster Tools (And Analytic)

Pay close attention to all the messages and data you get on Google Webmaster Tools. Google is attempting to communicate to you how they view your website, how many errors they see, what keywords they find relevant to your website, how many links coming to your website etc. Familiar yourself with Google webmaster tools and how you can use it effectively.

In addition to Google Webmaster tools, you should also be looking at your Google Analytics data (or any other analytic software you use). The difference between Google webmaster tools and Google analytics is that Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website and Google Analytic shows you public data about your website.

Both are essential to your SEO success.

Be Creative

Be creative and do something unique. The more creative and unique you are, the more chance people will talk about you and link to you, hence you improve your ranking.  A Google example is San Diego Storage directory.  After creating a self storage directory, they decided to add all self storage in San Diego for free, giving them premium listing long enough for them to get noticed.  That helped them get a lot attention from the webmasters of these websites and quite a few of them ended up linking back to the site hence it helped them with SEO.

Clicking the “publish” button shouldn’t feel like you’re just clicking “preview”.  Here’s how you can be sure to get some easy links and traffic to every new post you write.

1. Using Social Social news / voting sites to Promote New Content

First things first, Tweet your post and share it on Facebook… duh!

What’s next?

Share your new blog post on each and every relevant social site you can find.  Social voting sites in particular can lead to big gains in targeted traffic.  They have voting systems in place that can potentially get your post tons of visits.  The trick here is to…

• Add your content at the right time of day

Understand your niche and when they respond the most.  This gives you a better chance to get lots of votes that will get you published on the homepage.

• Write Click-worthy titles

Don’t publish your content until you’re sure you’ve got a great post title.  Your success in social sites rides heavily on the quality of your post title.

• Is it Targeted?

Make sure your post is targeted to the audience you’re sharing it with.  Also, submit it within the right category on the site and use plenty of related tags to make your submission easier to find.

There are social sites for every niche.

BlogEngage is a great example for the blogging community and many niches. Adding the upvote button plugin to your site from BE can also help your older content eventually reach the homepage.

You can view a list of the best social sites that I put together to help find some that suit you and your niche.

2. Blog commenting

The key to sending traffic with comments is simple:

1. Comment first or very soon
2. Make your comment interesting and valuable
3. Share a link that is relevant to the current post

CommentLuv blogs are by far the best for driving traffic because of the link to your most recent post that you get.  Here’s how you can make sure you’re early to the comments on a new blog post:

Strategy 1: Follow popular bloggers or blogging communities on Twitter.  Comment right away when a new post is tweeted.

Strategy 2: Subscribe to RSS feeds of popular blogs to get to new posts quickly.  Feedly is a great user-friendly app for following your favorites feeds.

Strategy 3: Search for CL blogs only using the search string “this blog uses premium commentluv” and add a keyword relevant to your niche/industry.  Then either…

1. Amend “&tbs=qdr:d” to the end of the URL to find only results from the last 24 hours

Or

1. Click on “More Search Tools” in the left-hand sidebar and choose only results from the last 24 hours

Pro Tip: We all know you can get 2 links from CommentLuv Premium enabled blogs – one in your name and one recent post.  But did you know you can actually get 3 links?  Here’s how…

If you allow Twitter to post to your Facebook Page then you can input your facebook page URL in to the website box when commenting.  Since FB pages have RSS feeds (yes you can submit this feed to aggregators/directories too) your most recent activity on your wall can be shared.

If you choose a post that was added to your FB page via Twitter this will actually post 2 links.  One will be to where you shared it on Facebook and the other will link to your post.  Talk about link love

3. Forum Participation

Forums are a great way to drive targeted traffic and build a reputation.  If you haven’t seen Brian’s post about his success with forums for traffic, well I don’t know where you’ve been.

You might already know of a few forums in your niche, but if not you can always visit Big Boards to find some popular ones or simply do a google search for forums in your industry.

It might be difficult to find a current thread where you can share a link to your recent post and not seem spammy.  Not to mention, you don’t want to link to your site in every post.  Instead, link to your new post in your signature so that all of your posts on the forum now lead to this post and then post helpful comments and answer questions.  Make sure to bold your link and make it enticing to click.

Pro Tip: How to Double, Triple, Quadruple your forum traffic

FACT: Like blog comments, a post near the top of a thread will likely get more signature clicks

FACT: Threads are bumped to the top of a forum after every new post

FACT: You can link to anything you want in your signature

How do we combine all this info for a traffic driving strategy?

1. Make a really insightful or helpful thread on the forum
2. Link to your helpful thread on the forum in your signature

Usually, after your thread falls off the first page of a forum you’re at the will of some wayward commenter to bring it back from the dead.  This only happens if someone finds the thread in Google or is using the internal search function.  Also, most people purposely won’t comment on an older thread because it can be annoying.

If you link to your own thread in your signature, every old and new post you make can get more eyeballs on your thread.  If just one of these people posts on it, it’s all the way back at the top again sending you more targeted traffic.

When this happens, wait until your thread falls off the first page to reply to any comments so it rises back to the top yet again and gets more clicks.

4. Build your RSS Subscribers

The most effective but most time consuming way to ensure your newest posts get traffic is by building up your RSS subscribers.  Obviously this isn’t a quick fix, but as a blogger you should always keep a concentration on buffing your subscribers.

Some places you can add links to your feed to build subscribers…

1. Your sidebar
2. The end of every post
3. Signature in your newsletter or email list emails
4. Your “Thanks for Commenting” email

Any time someone is enjoying your content you should have a call-to-action or readily available option for them to subscribe.

You can also publish your RSS feed around the web by submitting it to RSS directories.  You can download my own software, RSS Launch, for free to submit your feed(s) to many sites.

Are you struggling to get traffic to new posts?  Do you think the tips in this post will help you increase your traffic?