Web Development

Brian Clark over at Copyblogger beat me to the punch. He wrote the ultimate guide to doing keyword research for your niche. It’s long, but well worth the read.

So why would a blogger care about keyword research? Basically, by knowing what people are searching for, and by knowing how to attract new readers through search, your blog can have a much bigger impact, much more quickly.

Keyword research also helps you to create structure for your blog. If you know the most popular topics that people are interested within your own niche, you can focus most of your content in that direction.

Keyword research is all about giving your readers what they want, so make sure to read Brian’s article for a great introductory tutorial.

Go read this now. Then this. That is all.

I encourage everyone to check this out. You can now browse the EatonWeb blog directory and monitor eight important statistical trends on all the blogs in the directory. Here’s what the graphs will look like:

So let’s say that you want to know the general statistical trends of a site like Randa Clay Design:

First go to the EatonWeb directory to see whether her blog is in the directory by doing a search:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/search/randa/1/

You’ll see that Randa does indeed have an entry in the EatonWeb directory:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/blogs/randa-clay-design/

Now, on her blog page in the directory, there’s a link to “View Advanced Stats”:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/dashboard/advanced/randa-clay-design/

Now anyone can visit the EatonWeb directory and see Advanced Stats for any blog that’s present.

As social media marketers, one of the most common questions we get about linkbaiting and social media promotion is this:

My niche is boring and / or non-technical – how do I turn it into something popular and linkable?

Last week I stumbled across a Wikipedia article that was, despite its dry (and boring) subject matter, doing quite well on Digg.

The article in question is this introductory piece on Montessori. You might want to take a few minutes to go through the article and figure out any angle that would make it interesting to the average Digg user. My best idea (and this was after reading the Digg link) was about how the Montessori system was a cover for brainwashing little children and sapping their creativity.

Paranoid delusions apart, I strongly doubt that my spin would have done better than this take:

Monetessori Method, the educational system of Google founders.

It is, for lack of a better term, f’n brilliant.

Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

I have to admit, when I saw this headline I was in a hurry as well and gave a blind digg before I had time to read the page itself.

The only problem with this linkbait (although to be fair it was just a test) was that it could have been done much better (in terms of optimizing the landing page and in attracting links, if the digger had set up a page on their own site instead).

If you want to do some linkbaiting for your website but are having trouble making your content *interesting*, stop forcing the issue. Instead, follow this simple 3 step process:

1. Find something interesting that appeals to the largest possible audience – it could be anything, Google, grave health risks, global warming, the war in iraq, etc.

For more in this, learn how to attract attention from mainstream media.

2. Find a common thread between the *interesting* and your *boring* content. The most important component is the title (see Michael Gray’s post on title bait) but you also need quality content to back it up.

3. Prep your linkbait for social media goodness. Make it easy for your readers (and especially readers from social media sites) to share your article, make it visually appealing (these two posts on formatting blog posts are good, standard advice for linkbait formatting as well).

Once you can master the art of making uninteresting content interesting using this process of association, the rest of the social promotion stuff is relatively easy to implement. Then, all you need are friends to digg your linkbait…

The old and ongoing discussion ‘Subdomain vs. Subdirectory’ reaches a new step.
Google has changed the policy against showing multiple subdomains on one SERP.

Nice input for all the Subdomain vs. Subdirectory discussions.

This definition made my day:

Just as a reminder, in a URL such as subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/ , the subdomain is “subdomain” and the subdirectory is “subdirectory” (also sometimes called a folder).

Thanks, Matt for this bullet proof definition. Even the Mac guys can understand it 🙂

Head over to the article Subdomains and subdirectories and see how the big SEO guys are positioning their diplomatic questions in the comments.

Should you choose a Subdomain or a Subdirectory? Some aspects:

Subdomain

• Subdomains are great for building different sites for totally different content.
• Subdomains allow testing new sites without affecting other content SEO wise.
• Subdomains allow to separate successful content to a new site with a specialized structure.
• Handling subdomains always means more administrative effort if you are using a platform which can’t handle subdomains.
• Handling subdomains can become a hassle if you don’t have full access to your web server. I.e. automatic creation of subdomains will be difficult.
• Switching from a subdomain to a real domain means in most hosting environments just some mouse clicks.

I love subdomains but it always takes some time, motivation and effort until I realize a new subdomain.

Subdirectories

• Testing in subdirectories can have very creepy side effects on the rest of the website.
• Subdirectories are easy to administrate. From the .htaccess, robot.txt to file organization point of view subdirectory bring great website overview on file level.
• Subdirectories offer no misunderstanding where root is. A little edit action at the address line always brings the reader back to home.
• Subdirectories will pop up nicely in your address line history.

Subdirectories are the easy way to go with related content for one website!

Painful Example: My News Kiosk

Using the RSS aggregator Gregarius I realized my personal local web news stand: News.Sankt-Georg.Info. My experience was pretty spectacular traffic wise:

• Having the aggregator in a sub-directory made my whole traffic drop 80%. Oops. I didn’t dig too much into the possible reasons. I watched the lower traffic for a week with some pain and then decided to use a subdomain.
• Having the aggregator in a subdomain brought back the old traffic level over night. I knew that lesson before but was too lazy to realize the test in a subdomain. Lesson learned!
• Having the aggregator in a subdomain now means that the aggregator is creating its own incoming SE traffic. The news kiosk is running by itself and gives me a nice opportunity to link to collected feeds from my homepage i.e. the collected d.i.u bookmarks.

It was no good idea to test the news aggregator in a subdirectory!

Lessons learned

• Always use a subdomain for website testing
• If a website flies well in a subdomain you should consider a unique domain for it.
• Only use subdirectories to structure pretty related content.

Some Software Solutions

• LifeType is able to automatically create subdomains if your server configuration allows it. If not, LifeType uses subdirectories to create a multi-blog environment. Bad idea (see above)!
• My preferred Blog-CMS is Textpattern. TXP is not capable of handling subdomains. But compared to WordPress it is capable of a very good subdirectory handling through sections. Textpattern is absolutely my choice if I need a fast and smart Blog-CMS solution on shared hosting.
• If your hosting offers enough performance it is always a good idea to throw a deeper look at the Drupal feature set. In our context: Multi-lingual Content, Multi-Site Deployment, Sub-sites / Roots

How do you handle the ‘Subdomain vs. Subdirectory’ issue?

How-To build some trendy content for your editorial calendar 2008.
Are you aware of the upcoming trends in 2008?

Some desktop research tips for finding the hot trends for 2008

After reading How-To Create An Editorial Calendar For A Blog you may want to work out some content items for your blog. The web savvy users of performancing.com may want to use some classical research sources and subscribe to the trend 2008 sources in advance.

Blog posts mentioning Trends 2008 per day for the past 30 days:

How-To find the trends for 2008 for your blog?

Sources for the ‘Trends 2008’

Nothing new. Just a reminder to be ahead. No scoop intended.

Search for Trends 2008 and refine the search for your niche.

• a9.com Trends 2008 – Even if this is the #1 because of the alphabetical listing I have no idea what the search result is trying to tell me 🙂
• Del.icio.us Trends 2008 – Definitely one of the hottest places to look for ‘Trends 2008’ pages because the bookmarks are added by real people!
• RSS feed for tag ‘Trends’ (Only one tag possible).
• Flickr Trends 2008 – Not too hot results but why not follow some photography communities?
• Great cluster page: Trends
• Google Trends 2008 – Always worth a look! Refine for news, blogs, images, etc. Add your preferred language i.e. &hl=en as parameter.
• A) News search: RSS feed for ‘Trends 2008’
• B) Blog search: RSS feed for ‘Trends 2008’
• Lonely Planet Trends 2008 – Not much but maybe you know other good search engines for travel related trends?
• Snap.com Trends 2008 – Linked to the classic view because of result quality. The enhanced version is great but the results are totally mixed. Check out the image view. Inspiring!
• StumbleUpon Trends – Tag search. Too bad that they don’t have a RSS feed for their tags.
• Technorati Trends 2008 – With Technorati it is nice that you can have an RSS feed for nearly everything
• RSS feed: Trends 2008

Bonus: OPML file for ‘Trends 2008’

If you are willing to follow the news about ‘Trends 2008’ I would recommend an OPML generator to get a nice block of feeds.

With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the ‘make monitor.opml’ button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format.

1. Create your personal OPML file here: Monitor This
2. Import the OPML file into your feed reader.
3. Monitor the feeds for relevance and delete the ones you don’t need.
4. Bingo – You will be informed about the latest search results automatically

You know that finding trends for your niche is a repeating event for your editorial calendar?

If you’re an SEO and haven’t been hiding in a cave you’ve likely been reading for the past few months about all the benefits of a marriage between SEO and domaining. Despite all the rhetoric, however, nobody has been real forthcoming with practical information about how to actually profitably combine the two fields. So without further adieu I’m going to explain what I believe to be the single most important and practical domaining technique for SEO’s. There will be no theory here, just a plain and simple explanation of how to implement domaining for SEOs.

Exact Match

The “exact match” domain is not a new concept. In fact, it’s the foundation of what domainers have been doing for years. An ‘exact match’ domain simply means that the URL is letter for letter the same as the keyword it is targeting.

So for “Hurricane Insurance” you purchase the URL www.HurricaneInsurance.com (sorry, I already own it).

The reason domainers love exact match domains, is that there are still millions of people out there surfing the interweb who haven’t grown accustomed to using Google or Yahoo! to search for things. These individuals often simply type the keyword into their URL bar (sometimes with or without the “www” or the “.com”. Because browsers fill in the blanks, there are dozens of people who land on www.hurricaneinsurance.com each month simply because it is an exact match domain. Domainers make their money by converting via landing pages on the domain.

So why does all of this matter for SEO-cum-domainers? Because of something called the ‘Google Exact Match Bump’.

The Google Exact Match Bump

SEO aren’t interested in buying up tens of thousands of domains and making a few pennies on each. Instead we specialize in buying a few domains and marching them up the search engines. That’s where exact match domains come in handy.

In addition to picking up a large number of links with keyword anchor text which is itself an exact match, Google treats the URL itself as a relevancy booster. Based on some testing, it is pretty clear that a major indicator of relevancy with search engines (particularly Google) are the words in a URL.

Simply stated, it is a whole lot easier to rank a site that has an exact match URL as compared to one that doesn’t.

Sub-Prime TLD’s

But if you’re considering going out and buying a bunch of high-traffic one and two word generic exact match .com’s in your niche, think again. For established online industries such as porn, dating, real estate, credit, insurance, web hosting, and investing you’re going to start at $100,000 and go well into the millions of dollars.

Thankfully, the Google exact match bump applies in a similar way to other tier one TLD’s. Buying an exact match .org or .net can go for anywhere from 1 to 20% of the value of the .com. While a .net or a .org does not get any type-in traffic, that only matters to domainers. For SEOs who are focused on marching their purchases up the search engine rankings, type-in traffic is so negligible that its almost not worth considering.

Putting it all together

Now that you know that the key to domaining for SEO’s is ‘one and two word generic exact match sub-prime TLD domains’ its time to put it all together. There are two primary ways you can put this information into action, enter proven industries or unproven industries.

Proven industries are like those mentioned above: “buying insurance online” is a proven model as is converting American Express business card leads. There is no question that having your exact match site rank for keywords in those niches is going to bring a big and certain return. Unfortunately, because the return is virtually guaranteed you will have to pay a premium for domains. A .net exact match domain in an industry as competitive as insurance or credit is going to go for the full 20% of the .com.

On the other hand, you can take this information and apply it to an unproven or semi-proven industry. This is an option if you have insider information and not a lot of capital to throw around. For example, if you have a friend in the wine business you can target obscure wine terms for your exact match purposes. Or, if you have a friend that is a lawyer you can ask him or her about obscure high-margin legal work. For example, I recently helped an attorney friend acquire domains related to Jones Act maritime law cases and trucking accident cases. Not only did I have no idea that those were lucrative leads, but it turns out not a lot of other SEOs and domainers did either, since some pretty decent exact match sub-prime TLD domains were available as freebies.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to utilize the one and two word generic exact match sub-prime TLD technique (Geez that’s a mouthful) to enter into established markets or unproven markets will depend upon your access to capital and aspirations.

Even after this, you’re going to need solid original design, top-notch content, and excellent on-page SEO. None of that is changed by the fact that you adopt this technique. The bottom line is that this technique is a practical and effective integration of the benefits of domaining with the traditional strengths of SEOs, and it’s an approach that I know flat-out works.

I was listening to NPR this weekend and out of the blue there was an interview with the Sex editor of Wired Magazine. She was talking about Web 2.0 and the porn industry.

The gist of the interview was this: historically, sex and porn have been technology drivers. But for some reason, the porn industry seems to be lagging in Web 2.0 options.

The first premise is obviously true. Nobody with half a brain seriously thinks that the internet and broadband would have developed as quickly as they did were it not for porn demand.

But you can go back even further. Porn was a major driving force behind VHS and home movies (privacy and secrecy) – guys didn’t have to go out of their homes to get a porn fix.

The fact is that porn has driven technological advance. I say that without a moral judgment. It’s just a fact.

So why might porn be lacking in Web 2.0? Well, a few answers were given:

1. The porn industry has historically relied on static, easily produced, non-changing content that is passively consumed.
2. There are major legal issues with giving users full control over content development (age restrictions, etc.) Policing content is notoriously hard to do.
3. Web 2.0 would decentralize and potentially destabilize a multi-billion dollar industry
4. Porn has historically been a “fleecing of the lambs” industry that caters to basic instincts and doesn’t need complexities

What would Web 2.0 porn look like?

It would include mashups, user provided soundtracks, user created content, social voting to highlight the best content, etc. All of this takes power of delivery away from the money makers and holds them accountable to the product they are producing. That, and the legal issues, are the main repressive forces that are causing the lag.