I find it hard to believe, but at Themespress.com, you can get a wordpress theme designed to look like a pre-existing site for only $10. I highly recommend it if you have a site and wish to add a blog. Or, if you have a site and wish to have a free CMS… wordpress is great.
And if you’ve ever wondered about why Alexa stinks, this guy has some thoughts. But some people really do use it as a tool to estimate traffic so if you can get your rank up cheaply, it’s worth it.
I blogged a few weeks ago about Google and how they won over a dissatisfied customer with a timely note and a little humor. I got a much better and more practical example of wowing a customer, or in this case, merely a visitor.
I visited a blog at LifeLearningToday yesterday and left a comment. Give Yourself a Raise Today!. Later last night, I received an email from AgentSully starting as follows:
I just wanted to send you a quick note and thank you for taking the time to visit my blog recently. Since my goal is to help my readers, I hope you found value in your visit.
Has that ever happened before? She thanked me for my visit and went on to invite me to subscribe. She isn’t profiting from me… just appreciative that I took the time to stop by. This is the way to build loyal customers. Surprise them by taking the time to touch them. You think the Washington Post would personally type up a note thanking me for reading their piece on the Supreme Court decisions yesterday? (FYI, I didn’t receive such a note). I read an article but by the end of the day, had interacted with a person. If you are struggling to rise to the cream of the crop in whatever you’re doing, treat your ‘customers’ surprisingly well and you’ll do great.
Guy Kawasaki’s blog has a great post on DIY PR. When you have a company that needs promoting, it’s a great place to start. There are ten tips on his blog but here one I wanted to remember:
Ideas are the precious things. Most entrepreneurs are bursting with unconventional ideas: Maybe you think an ad-crazy Silicon Valley has lost its nerve; maybe you’re a grown woman delivering pizzas to diffident recruits in Stanford’s computer science lab; maybe you’ve always wanted to meet the hairy guy living in a trailer park who sends you the inspired spam about mail-order pheromones. These are the kinds of ideas that journalists love.
Imagine how you would finish this sentence if you having two beers with your best friend: “You know the strangest thing about what we’re going through is …” What comes next is your best story idea. Even if the story isn’t about your company, you’ll be a part of the conversation. The rest will come naturally.
There’s a great case study on link bait at SEOmoz. The thing that really separates this is that he gives data on his results. Too often it’s general actions rather than specific ones. Still missing are the specific keywords he was targeting, but that doesn’t really change how you can take this case study and apply the specifics to your situation.
One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.
“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”
Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…
Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”
That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…
This article (The True Value of a Resource Library for Your Website) does a great job advocating for sites to create a resource library of sorts to increase their link authority, percieved trust, indexed pages and stickiness. The risk (not mentioned in the article) is that you’ll spread your trustrank too thin. If you site is sufficiently trusted to rank well for 50 pages, and you add 100, it could hurt your search engine results for all the pages. That would be counterproductive if you recieve fewer sales leads to your store because you created a resource library. That said, the library will likely attract links and increase your trustrank, imporving your ranking (and for many more keywords)
About the Resource Library:
While it’s true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn’t end there — they also provide benefits that can directly impact any business. First of all, they spread goodwill among a business’s prospect base - and its non-prospect base as well. The site is seen by visitors as offering free information about important subject matter - and that makes it a more attractive site to return to in the future when a purchase will be made or a service established.
Second, with a solid resource library, the site puts itself in a great position to organically attract important inbound links. Outside sites will notice the offerings of important and unbiased information and link to individual articles or to the resource library as a whole. This will boost traffic and rankings overall.
Third, if the articles in the section are optimized properly, they will also boost rankings for popular and competitive keyphrases, driving additional targeted traffic to the site. The traffic may enter the site at the articles, but visitors are then likely to click for further information about the site itself.
I love this hittail… it give great suggestions for creating content. Not always great but it’s worht setting up and letting it gather data to make suggestions. I’ve had several instances where it’s given the same advice that I’ve come to after my more detailed research and testing. It’s a good tool. Anyhow, I wanted to point out a nice idea they had on their blog. It’s about scoring well in search engines for people looking for negative things about your company. The great thing about the idea (posting real complaints followed by how you resolved things) is that it’s ethical, effective at getting those hits and it seems like it might truely sway someone who is trying to figure out if you’re the type of company that they’d like to do business with. here’s a quote and the link:
World class customer service is a much more viable alternative to flogging. And if you want some miraculous free advice, take the successfully closed support cases, mark them up with “black-out” stripes to protect the identities involved, and publish them as successfully closed customer service cases. It will fill the search results on the same keywords, but every single one will be a mini-success-story. Yep, it works. Hooray!
Job-Hunt.org: An Old-Fashioned Success Story is a great case study of sorts about how to use PR, networking and quality content to build your site and your brand.
Grey wolf blog has a nice post on promoting a local business here. His tips:
I have been doing SEO for some time now and I have been witness to many a strange occurrence regarding serps. Most of these weird occurrence I would have to say are directly attributed to a Google Filter or Google penalty. So I have been inspired by a post over at webmasterworld and as far as I know there is not a current list out online that list’s all of the potential Google penalties so I have decided to put together an arbitrary list of potential Google Penalties. Please note that there is no proof i.e. press release from Google stating these exist but rather these are ideas, theories and assumptions from SEO’s experiences.
Tropical SEO » Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing talks about linkbaiting. First he stresses the importance of the title with this jewel:
Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:
- Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
- The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
- Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
- Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
- Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
- Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
- Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
- Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
- Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
- What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting
He then give great tips about content, including making it scannable, losing the ads and getting friendly bumbs from friends.