SEO Promises Debunked

I never thought I would be happy about anything having to do with the law, especially anything that had to do with lawsuits. It’s just a nasty business all around. But, finally, one of those SEO companies that promises particular rankings in the search engines has been called on their bluff. I don’t know how many times I have told clients not to believe claims that anyone or anything can guarantee search engine rank placement. I am relieved to see this affirmation, but saddened by the need for it to go this far.

Get Ready to Promote Your Blog

I’m trying to help a friend promote their business blog, but it is rough going.  I think they didn’t realize it would be so much work just making a blog worth promoting.
So here is my pre-promotion checklist.

1. Focus:  have a specific topic for your blog and keywords for that topic that you sew naturally into every posting.  Put these in a txt file and have it open whenever you post to remind you, until it becomes second nature.
2. Decent Branding:  Make your blog stand out from the crowd - in a good way, please, so people will remember it.
3. Tags:  Use them.
4. RSS: Make sure this is available for your blog.
5. Titles:  Make it catchy, but not so catchy that it stops describing what you blogged about.
6. Time & Consistency:  I like to wait until there’s at least a couple months of consistent postings before I send a blog out into the world. (This really depends on the kind of blog it is.)
7. Other Related Content:  Gather a list of other resources; links, pdfs, videos, etc. that you can add to your blog.  Some say that this is sending your visitor somewhere else, but I see it differently:  sending a visitor to a good resource will get them to check back to your blog for more good resources.
8. Professionalism:  I feel so silly saying this, but please remember to spell check your work and proof it carefully before publishing.

See?  That wasn’t so bad, now was it?

Traffic Source - Sharing Your Stuff

Your site must offer something to visitors that they will want or need, in essence, a reason for visitors to go there. This could be as simple as funny cat pictures for laughs to elaborate white papers about online security. Any route you go, there are sites on the web to help you get your stuff out there and in turn, promote your site.

Basic examples include:

YouTube (video)

Slide Share (presentations)

Flickr (pictures)

GigaSize (files in general)

With a little research, you can find a place to share what you have to offer.

Alexa Ranking - what does it mean to you?

Everyone wants to know how their site is performing on the web. Not everyone can look through server logs, place code on every page of their site, or sign up for statistical services that give you enough graphs to choke a mathematician. But almost everyone can visit a web page. For information about your site, or your competitors, try Alexa. Simple as that.

The first thing you need to know about the Alexa rating is that the statistics come from the users of the Alexa toolbar. (Be prepared for me to say this again because it’s easy to forget.) If you don’t have it installed in your browser, you aren’t participating in the ranking system for Alexa. I think this is a good thing. This means that we are seeing results for people that were savvy enough to know what a toolbar is and install one for their browser, which hopefully means they are capable of finding decent sites. So this is why you have to agree to the fact that they do send information about the sites you’ve visited to Alexa when you install it. Seems like terms and agreements are becoming increasingly commonplace these days, but that’s another blog post. Second, and most importantly, you are striving to see your number go down, not up. You are trying to be number one, not number 3,785,561 among your competitors. Poor sites fall into the 3-4 million category. If you are getting into the top 100,000, your site is performing great!

So Alexa takes the top level domains you have visited, plus how many unique pages you visited for a three month period, chews them a little and spits them out. You end up with a traffic ranking called Reach: how many unique global visitors. You get a Pageviews score: how many pages were uniquely requested from a given domain. (If someone hit the same page twice, it would still count as once.)

Alexa relies on page views to convey the amount of interest a visitor has in a site.

The more pages you are viewing form a domain, the more interesting or useful it must be, right? Then it takes those two and performs its magic and gives you your Traffic Rank.

The asterisk, should it appear on any statistics for your domain, means that Alexa has identified it as a personal blog or personal page. Everything else is the same.

Now remember - this is not all users - these numbers come from only Alexa toolbar users. So you are only looking at a particular slice of your overall visitors.