Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

Best of

The Only SEO Graph That Matters

by

With all the fuss about the pending August 2007 PageRank Update, I thought I’d try to refocus all the SEOs out there on the only thing that truly matters in SEO: search referral growth. It’s plain and simple. The ultimate goal of SEO should be to increase search referrals. This is often lost on those who focus their SEO efforts completely on building PageRank.

The golden rule of SEO: PageRank does not translate into Search Referrals.

So how have your SEO efforts been going? Not your PageRank building efforts;-) Your SEO efforts? When’s the last time you looked at a graph like this:

Three Ways To Engineer Good Content

by

Most new bloggers just take stabs in the dark. A new blogger knows her topic, and may even have a vague notion of keyword stuffing and pronoun removal.

But most new bloggers don’t know how to engineer good content. That’s why I’m writing this article. Because you can’t be a problogger until you know how to engineer good content.

Strategy 1: Reverse Engineer Search Logs

You probably already love stats. And even if you’ve just been stabbing in the dark with your blog writing, you probably have gotten some search results (out of billions of searches, Google is bound to send a few lost souls to your site…especially if you have an accidental phrase or two from one of your poems that goes something like “the freshly cut wood was supple, soft like the newborn skin of a naked child.” Ok. So you probably won’t want to reverse-engineer any searches that come into your logs on these phrases. Nonetheless, eventually you’ll find that Google has paired your blog’s pages with at least a few of billions of searches. Some of those are bound to be relevant to your site, we hope.

Your search logs are a gold mine. They tell you what people are looking for. And since you most probably maintain a blog with the intention of growing an audience, your search logs give you a priceless view of what your audience wants. Your task is to feed your audience what they want.

Let’s say that you’ve written an article on “Red Apples Grown in Oregon” but in the article, you’ve included the phrase “green apple orchards” and a few sentences later “green apples are primarily grown in Seattle Washington” – a few weeks after publishing this article, you notice that twenty visitors have come to your site on variations of the phrase “green apple orchards in Washington D.C.” – now you know that there are people looking for information on green apple orchards in Washington D.C. Google was sending these visitors to your site by mistake. Your task is to make sure the next time *is not* by mistake.

Spend at least twenty minutes each day analyzing your search logs for new and exciting topics that you hadn’t even dreamed of. Your search results allow you to reverse engineer the thoughts of your target audience.

Strategy 2: The Generic Drug Model: Re-engineer other people’s success

Take three successful blogs, two days monitoring the Digg/Reddit front pages, and call me in the morning. Seriously though, you just need to pay attention to what works and you’ll start to identify patterns. You’ll notice that bullet points fit nicely with human psychology… that numbered, how-to guides titillate the average online reader … that people like the number seven better than the number six and the number 10 better than the number nine … that people like strong opinions and believable controversy …

Got the point? Just start paying attention. That’s the key. Read the premier blogs and look at their headlines. 4-7 words tend to be ideal, unless you’ve just got to get the eighth to seal the deal. Notice that some of the best blogs post article series, keeping their readers attention for weeks on end and giving them something to look forward to.

Strategy 3: The “Duplicate Your Own Success” Model

Sooner or later, if you’re intentional about writing good content and creating linkbait, you’ll find success. Much of the time, you’ll also discover failure. Don’t let failure discourage you. Rather, focus on what works and don’t be afraid to try variations on a successful theme.

As you blog, you’ll discover your strengths and your weaknesses. Capitalize on your success by finding your voice and sticking to it. Did you land a front page Digg? Could you write the same basic article on a completely different topic? Then do it. Yesterday.

The important thing here is to not run away from you own success. There’s a temptation to feel like you’ve always got to do something new and original. Most of the great things in life are variations on pre-existing themes. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with what works.

Summary

So what’s the main theme of this article? Here it is in one sentence: First, discover what people want, respond to, and get excited by and then give it to them.

Don’t fall for the illusion of self-projection. Most of the world is dumber than you, and most of the world has different tastes. Give them what they want, not what you want. Then, as they say, you’re golden.

Optimal Meta Description Tag Code For WordPress

by

When Andy Hagans says something, I listen. And Andy Hagans (following Aaron Wall) says that META descriptions are back and important, not for keyword stuffing, so much as page differentiation.

Did you know that the default for most WordPress themes is to NOT include a META description? While title tags remain, in my view, the single most important SEO factor, one of the biggest problems you’ll face with any new-ish site is getting each page indexed. Google evaluates each page to see if it is important enough and different enough to separately indexed. If not, then you’ll find many of your pages going supplemental.

So how does one go about differentiating her site? Well, title tags are a start. But they aren’t enough. The on-page content should be at least 100 words. But sometimes that’s not enough. So what else can you do to help GOOG differentiate your pages and see them as index worthy? Make sure that every page has a unique META description.

But as I said, most WordPress themes don’t have META description code built in. That’s where this post comes in. Below, I include the code for what I think of as two variations of an ideal WordPress META description.

"/>

In the above code, you are basing the description completely on the title of the page. That’s a good start, and it may be the best option for complete differentiation, but in my view, a more complete solution would be something like the following addition

This page contains information about"/>

So what are your thoughts? What do you use to generate descriptions for your individual WordPress pages? If you’re not into an automated soluton via code, what are some of the plugins that you use?

Affiliate Marketing Q&A – Part One

by

When it comes to making money on the Internet, or more specifically with a blog, there are simply so many options out there, it can be a little overwhelming for someone starting out, trying to earn a living through blogging or through creating a website community. One of the highest paying and easiest to use ways to make money is with affiliate programs. Affiliate Marketing is a lot simpler than the blogging and marketing ‘gurus’ would like you to think, and I whipped up a questions and answers blog post, highlighting a conversation I had with a client a few weeks back.

Question – What’s the single easiest way to start Affiliate Marketing right now?

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer, let alone to start with… In Affiliate Marketing, relying on a ‘single’ technique or tactic, even just to get you going, is suicidal. You need to be using a wide range of different methods to drive traffic through your affiliate links – anything from PPC to blogging, SEO to viral marketing… It’s really up to you. In the Affiliate Defined videos I’m creating, there are some truly unique tactics, tricks, tips and ideas to get you started.

Question – Do you need a big website to successfully use Affiliate Marketing?

Absolutely not! You don’t even NEED a website! There are so many ways you can reach an audience on the Internet (whether you choose video marketing on sites like YouTube or PayPerClick advertising on networks like AdWords, maybe even a bit of t-shirt marketing from time to time) it’s reached a point where a website isn’t actually needed to earn an income online, and that’s what Affiliate Marketing is all about. Promoting other people’s products on other people’s websites!

Question – Do I need to have a big list of prospects to become a successful affiliate?

Let me tell you a secret… For the first five months as an Affiliate Marketer, I had NO list. NONE. Not even a single person. Building my list was initially slow (but once I knew how to build it I was getting opt-ins by the minute) and I didn’t see any profits at all. Why? I hadn’t built that vitally important relationship with my list. I was sending them the freebies to keep them on my newsletter, reading what I had to say, but they still didn’t have a clue who I was or what I was trying to achieve. You need to connect with your list. Tell them the odd funny story. Share an embarrassing secret or two.

So my answer to that question? No. You don’t need a list to be a successful Super-Affiliate, though admittedly, without one, I wouldn’t be earning half of what I do earn today. You live and learn I guess.

Question – Fair enough. You’ve made your point. So where can I start building my list?

My advice would be to check out GetResponse, the auto-responder I use. Their deliverability rates are second to none, their support is fantastic with forums, e-mail support, live chat and a great phoneline all at the disposal of members to use as frequently (or infrequently, as the case may be) as they wish. I’ve never had any reason to really contact the GetResponse support seeing as they have some excellent Camtasia walkthroughs on hand to teach the basics – though it’s great to know that if you do run into an issue, someone is just on the other end of a telephone.

Question – Right. So I don’t need a website or a list?

STRONGLY NOT ADVISED, but no. I guess it’s not entirely essential, however without one or the other you’ll certainly be in a bit of a pickle. There’s no excuse for not having a blog or a website though, with free ones easily creatable at Blogger.com alongside a whole host of other ‘free hosting’ websites. Naturally I recommend a self-hosted, top-level-domain site, but under some circumstances this isn’t always possible. Play around and give it your best shot though.

Question – What would be your number one piece of advice to an affiliate marketing newbie?

Selecting a single point would be incredibly hard, so I’d like to touch on a few related points, mainly focusing on mindset. One – Be yourself. You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again… Don’t try to be someone or something that you’re not. The truth worms it way outta the can eventually. Two – Keep believing. Self-belief and motivation is everything in the fast-paced Affiliate Marketing arena. If you’re not first – you’re last. If you don’t reach your targets – you lose. You need to stay with it. Stress and depression are common when getting started and mental barriers come by the dozen. Doubt. Worry. Regret. Uncertainty. “I wish I hadn’t said that.” – “I hope I made the right choice… ?” – “I’m scared… What if it doesn’t work?” It’s a painful uphill struggle, but from the top of the hill it’s plain sailing.

Expect Part Two sometime soon, and make sure to sign up at Affiliate Defined for more affiliate marketing tips. But for now, David Wilkinson – 13-Year Old ProBlogger, signing out.

Optimal Title Tag Code For WordPress

by

HTML title tags are, arguably, the single most important SEO ranking factor. Nailing the title tag could be the most important thing you do all year in your blog’s SEO campaign. Yet the average blogger simply inherits her WordPress theme’s title tag, without shaping it into SEO perfection. In this article I’m giving you the code for what I think are the two most optimal WordPress title tags.

I’ve been using the “Cutline” title tag code for the longest time, assuming that it was the best out there (and in some cases, it very well may be). But the other day, I decided to question all my basic blogging assumptions and re-think some critical questions from scratch. Having done that, I’ve come up with the following SEO optimized title tag code to place in your header file:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else bloginfo('name'); ?>

This is optimized for SEO, not necessarily for usability. For example, if branding is important to you, you might prefer the Cutline title code, a version of which I include here:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { ?><?php wp_title('',true); ?> | <?php } bloginfo('name'); ?>

The main difference here is whether or not the name of your blog gets included in the title of every page. It is my view that by putting your blog title in the title tag of every post, you dilute the SEO value of your article’s title.

7 Steps to launching a Great Blog

by

In the ‘Ask Your Blogging Questions Here’ thread, franky asks:

How do you really start a new (niche) blog? Many times the ’10 articles’ and ‘establish yourself as an authority’ is managed, but what pace to set during the first period?

There are two established strategies to successfully launch your blog – the big bang model or the bootstrapping model – and these differ in terms of resources available to the blog owner.

The Big Bang Approach

If you have any one of these two:

  • a lot of money
  • plenty of good contacts in the industry

This is the ideal way to go. You can write a lot of quality content in advance (around 30-50 articles), and around launch time either spend big or network big and get the word out as quickly and as widely as possible.

Lots of good content + a lot of eyeballs generally translates into a good, successful launch, but there are two factors that you have to cater for.

One, make sure you’re working in a profitable niche.

Two, make sure you have a ‘phase 2’ – a plan for what to do and how to manage your blog after the launch. It won’t be possible to maintain the same blogging rhythm as during launch, and you’ll have to find a solution that scales and not just eats up your time.

Bootstrapping Approach

Best if you don’t have much time or money. Simply start blogging, putting out 1-2 articles per day and posting them on your blog. Promote your blog but at this stage focus on the key activities – attracting attention of the top blogs, writing linkbait, getting links from trusted sources, etc.

The key here is to focus on what you can do with the resources available to you – so if you’re the only blogger and you can’t churn out 5 articles a day, don’t go down that road, it’s not sustainable or scalable. If you can’t spend 4 hours a day promoting your blog, ruthlessly eliminate all but the most important of promotion activities and spend just 1 hour.

Cut down using the 80/20 rule and focus on what’s really important – quality content, picking a good niche and promoting through the right channels.

A 7-Step Checklist to Launching A New Blog

This checklist is based on the strategies I used to launch my own blog, Soccerlens (see the DBT face off here).

  1. Provide resources that can be linked to, downloaded, read, discussed, etc. Do this at the start, and if possible prepare them in advance.

  2. Get initial links from high-PR, high-trust blogs such as Performancing and ProBlogger by participating in blogging contests and writing articles about your own blogging experiences. I’d add Marketing Pilgrim, Blog Herald and Daily Blog Tips to the list while Chris Garrett and Mark Ghosh do roundups as well. There are probably more that I’m missing – bottom-line, pro blogging sites are a good source of links.

    Think of all the people who’ve removed ‘no-follow’ from their blogs’ comments!

  3. Establish and settle into a blogging rhythm as quickly as possible. Don’t fret about writing 20 articles in advance – just start writing them one by and one and put them on your blog.

  4. Apply to be editor in Dmoz and BOTW Blog Directory for your niche’s category. If you’re accepted, build up those sections and add your site too 🙂 JoeAnt accepts applications automatically, so consider signing up there as well.

  5. Make a list of the top bloggers in your niche and collect as much info as you can about them. Read their blogs daily and understand what type of stories interest them and what they link to. Then for each author, tie in their interest in a couple of your articles and ping them the URLs (without asking for anything in return). Your goal is to get them to be regular readers, links will come by themselves.

  6. Remove all obstacles that prevent your readers from subscribing to your feed, from commenting on your blog, from sharing it with others, from linking to it and from finding things on your blog. This means not asking for ‘registration’ before commenting, showing your RSS feed (and email subscription box) above the fold, a prominent search box, a clear listing of site categories, social bookmarking icons (done subtly they look really good), etc.

  7. Have fun and be yourself – without these two things, your best work will come across as ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’. If your readers don’t see your passion in your writing, how are they going to respond? In kind, by not getting excited about what you’re writing and drifting away.

    Thanks Liz for teaching me this.

  8. Bonus Tip: I used the thought of beating my competition as motivation to work harder. Fretting about stats isn’t an ideal habit but if it helps you make your blog better then it does have some value.

It’s ok to start slow and build things up, but it’s important not to lose momentum once you’ve built it up – nothing is worse than taking your site to the top and then getting lazy and allowing it to fall back down in rankings, earnings and readership.

Also Read:

Starting a Professional Blog – Choosing a Niche
Starting a Professional Blog – Qualifying your Niche
Blogging Mistakes – Launching on an Empty Shell
How To: Launch A New Blog The Easy Way
Planning A New Blog Venture
10 Business Models for Bloggers
10 Key Ingredients of A Great Blog
Positioning Your Blog
10 Step Plan To A Profitable Blog

If you have any questions related to search marketing, blog promotion, WordPress or blogging in general, ask me here.

How To: Put The Right Price On Your Blog

by

How do you put a price on a blog?

The free valuation tools commonly available suck – you cannot place a value on your blog by counting links and PageRank and at the same time not considering actual revenues, site traffic and a dozen other factors that are relevant to blog valuation.

To be honest – there’s no perfect formula for blog valuation. What I can do is share the factors that I consider important (these may change depending on specific cases or on the buyer’s goals) and discuss one way of calculating the value of a blog. Feel free to jump in and share your own views here.

Valuation Factors to Consider

Niche Potential

Used to evaluate if a blog is making less or more than the average in that niche for a blog with that amount of traffic. If a blog is under-monetized then it gives the buyer leverage in the buying process. On the other hand, if the blog owner knows that his blog is under-monetized he can then focus on attracting advertisers and adding different revenue streams to his blog prior to putting it up for sale. Fatten the cow, so to speak.

If a blog is in a highly profitable niche this will have some impact on blog valuation, but this is only in relation to whether the site under-monetized or not.

Expenses

What does it cost to run the blog? Hosting, blogger time, promotion, administration – take everything into account.

Revenue Analysis

How much is that site earning?

How much did it earn in the last 6 months (month-by-month breakdown)? Take the average and that is a more realistic revenue estimate for the blog.

What are the major revenue sources? If it’s just one, it’s a risky proposition and the buyer invariably has an advantage in negotiations. On the other hand, if you have 3-4 or more sources of revenue and they all earn reasonably well, you have a very business and the price invariably goes up.

Traffic Sources

Does the blog have high search engine rankings?

How many feed subscribers?

Is there a mailing list / newsletter?

Is the comments section active or passive, and is there any value in the discussion (or are people just saying ‘this sucks’ and ‘that rocks’)?

Does the blog get mentioned regularly on other websites? Does this bring in traffic?

Premium

What is the site design worth?

What would the domain name alone be worth (think of branding, established reputation, etc)?

What is the content worth, if anything (search engine rankings and traffic matter here)?

Social Reputation

Some niches are more easily polarised than others (for example: pop culture and sports) and it’s easier to offend segments of the audience through them.

Is the blog recognised in its niche as a leading blog? Do fellow niche bloggers read the blog (a big, big positive)? Does the blog enjoy a negative reputation for past actions?

Anything positive is just bonus, but if the blog has a negative reputation it may become difficult to make it grow beyond a certain point.

On the flip side, how big a brand is this blog in its niche? Does it have media recognition? Is it recognised in non-niche circles as the leading blog in its niche (as Danny’s SearchEngineLand is)?

Blog Branding

Is the blog attached to the personal brand of the lead blogger or is it all about the content?

TechCrunch and MarketingPilgrim are two examples of blogs that were built on the personal reputation of their lead bloggers but have successfully moved away from personal branding and towards building the blog as a standalone brand.

If the blog relies strongly on the main blogger to relate to the community, it becomes difficult for new owners to run it with the same amount of success and as a result the price can go down.

How Do You Value a Blog

What are we going to do with these factors? I use a simplified valuation formula that works like this:

Blog Value = Premium + ((Monthly Revenue – Monthly Costs) x Multiplier)

The Premium is established based on the value of the content, site age, design, established rankings, community, etc. Revenue – Costs is a straightforward calculation.

The key difference where people have issues is the multiplier.

As Andy Hagans has discussed here, there’s a wide discrepancy between offline businesses and online blogs – whereas blogs often go for 1x or 2x their yearly profit, real-world businesses often go for 10x on yearly profit (plus premium).

The challenge here is to build defensible traffic, to have multiple monetization methods, to build a great brand, to have an active community and to make your blog indispensible to your niche.

The better you are at all of the above, the higher you can push that multiplier.

If your blog gets traffic exclusively from Yahoo, only earns from AdSense and is unknown outside your niche, it’s not going to get more than a 1x multiplier.

On the other hand, if your blog is the ProBlogger of its niche, you could name your asking price and easily charge a 5x or 10x multiplier.

A Few Problems

The problem with establishing a Premium and a Multiplier is that these decisions are subjective and as such the valuations of two experiences domainers will almost always differ. Because of this it’s always a good idea to have 2-3 people independently value a blog – whether you’re selling yours or looking to buy one.

Putting a price on your blog (and developing a blog exit strategy) is always a good idea no matter at what stage you are with your blog.

Have you valued your blog? If so, please share your methodology and what factors you considered most important.

10 Things You Must Know About WordPress Themes

by

Looking back at the code of my first attempt at a WordPress theme, I can easily see that without a proper understanding of WordPress theme template files and template tags, it can be a frustrating project to undertake. And although I am a HUGE fan of learning as you go, I wanted to share a few secrets that might save you a headache or two along the way.

1. The Loop
If you’re not familiar with “the loop”, you have no business trying to work with WordPress themes yet. The structure of the loop is simple, yet it’s vital to the development process. It goes a little something like this:



It is in essence a call to custom WordPress functions that query the database to see if you have posts. If you do (and while you do … it’s a PHP thing … a loop), then you can insert custom template tags inside the loop to display the content of the post. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that this is something you need to understand. For more on the loop, go to the WordPress codex.

2. Pages
WordPress did us all a huge favor when they implemented the ability to have static pages (as opposed to blog posts) for static content. For instance, an “About Me” page or a “Contact” page. Pages can be a powerful tool at your disposal. You need to know how to display pages, how to call pages, how to style pages, etc. Pages can also be a powerful tool in using WordPress as a website content management system.

3. Sub-Pages
Also very important. WordPress allows you to set up pages in a hierarchical structure. It lets you choose (if you so desire) a page to be the “parent” or “child” of another page. This is important, especially if using WordPress as a content management system. It can also be helpful in simply organizing your pages, or displaying lists of pages. Which leads me to…

4. List Pages
If you’re going to be releasing free themes, or just developing one for yourself or a client, you are going to need to know how to list links to your “pages”. Whether it’s a simple list of all your pages, or a custom list of only specific pages, you need to know how to output a list in any way you can think of. Say for instance that you wanted to list all the “child” pages of a particular “parent” page somewhere. How would you do it? Or how do you remedy the “nested list” problem in a horizontal navigation bar? These are questions you should be able to answer immediately.

5. Template Tags
This is more generic, but you need to be very familiar with how to display content of any type in a WordPress theme. Learn to love this page. It’s gonna save your butt quite a few times. Most important (in my opinion) would be the section titled “Post Tags”. You’ll definitely want to spend some time in that section.

6. Query Posts
I’ve written some pretty neat tutorials on this loop qualifier over at the Blog Herald, and for good reason. This is a powerful tool, and if you want to be a serious WordPress developer, you need to know it well. It can be too powerful sometimes, so be careful. Definitely know what you’re doing before you start using this to call specific data. It will affect the other loops that follow it (if using multiple loops). Nevertheless, if you use WordPress as a CMS, you can beat query_posts.

7. CSS
CSS and web design are becoming synonymous nowadays. And a WordPress theme is no exception. Know what HTML you are outputting by observing the div structure in your template files. Then, style accordingly in the style.css file. Hacks, browser limitations, workarounds, etc. must all be in your arsenal. Making a good WordPress theme is 75% CSS because people like pretty stuff. They could care less how you manipulated the loop, they just want to make sure it looks good.

8. PHP
Duh, right? WordPress is built on PHP. But it’s more than that. Eventually you will run into a problem that you can’t solve using the built in functions of WordPress or a plugin. When this happens, knowing PHP can do you a world of good. I’ve written custom scripts for clients that do things from call random images, to displaying custom content. And it would be beneficial to at least know a little PHP if you want to develop WordPress themes.

9. Comments are not secondary
If you expect people to use your themes, you must also expect them to want a successful blog. Like it or not, people use their comments to measure success, and if a blogger wants commenters to comment, the comments have to look nice. That’s where you come in. It really doesn’t matter WHAT the look like, as long as they flow with the look of the theme, and each comment is separate from the last and next. You’ll have to use your creative skill here, and understand how a good comments.php file looks. Like I said, this is not a secondary issue.

10. Widgetization
It’s no longer optional. Anything you can widgetize, you must. Users expect it, and for good reason. What better way to display data than by drag and drop? I’m a WordPress designer and even I have used widgets in the past. It just doesn’t make sense not to your sidebars and bottom bars. It’s also a good idea make sure you have sufficient style in your CSS to cover the widget content.

11. BONUS TIP – Conditional Tags
One thing I’ve noticed is that instead using multiple template tags for different content, you can use a conditional tag to check what type of page is being displayed. For instance, instead of a search.php file, you can just use the is_search() conditional tag to output search page listings. Also, the is_home() function can be used a for all kinds of things. It only outputs data if you’re on the homepage. And the possibilities are endless with conditional tags. I literally use them ALL the time. Probably one of the best ideas the WordPress guys ever had. Still waiting on that is_subpage() function though 🙂

Keep in mind that this is MY list. If you have something to add, please do so in the comments below. I’m always looking for new tips and cool tricks to add to my stockpile 🙂