Before we get to the good stuff, it’s important to touch on some of the issues which negatively impact your SEO and resulting traffic. The following are issues I encounter almost all of the time (and mostly because the blog owner does not realize the following issues).

Negative SEO Issues:

• Make sure you retain the services of a professional web hosting provider. If the server hosting your account is often unavailable, that means Googlebot also cannot access it. The more often this occurs, the less traffic will be referred to you (because your blog will not be as prominent in search results, as it could be).

• Don’t participate in “keyword stuffing” when writing your content. Keyword stuffing is the action of adding keywords to your content, beyond what  in context, renders as reasonable. Excessive repetition of any particular word or phrasing via  content description, title tags, (any other) meta tags and the post content tends to raise a red flag with the search engines. Read what Google has to say about keyword stuffing and if you have suffered a negative as a result, you can resubmit your blog (after fixing the issues first) for consideration.

• Do not link to or exchange links with lower quality spam or splog sites. To be quite blunt, doing this associates (and places) your blog in a bad neighbourhood. Here is a direct quote from Google:

…Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links…

• Don’t duplicate your content or the content of another blog or web site. Distinctive and original, in demand content will serve you best. Copying content from another source, even with permission, is nothing more than a copy. The original site with the original copy will garner search engine traffic – Not the copied content.

Blogs Links and SEO:

In my opinion, an important aspect of improving your blog’s value (to Google as well as readers) is ensuring valuable (high ranking) inbound links point to your blog – and that you in turn link (outbound) to valuable, relevant content. Below are some of the aspects I’d commonly advise and blog (or site) owner.

• Allow your links to develop some age. The older a link is, generally, the more circulated it becomes. Old, well established links are ideal for your blog.

• The popularity of the inbound link also has a positive effect on your ranking. For example, a blog with a PR (Page Rank) of 6 provides more benefit that one that has a PR of 3. But don’t rule out the value of lower PR inbound links. I’d enjoy the value of one or two hundred inbound links from a PR3 blog anytime. So what I’m I suggesting? Consider the value of the inbound links by also examining their PR. One tool I use to accomplish this is a Firefox plugin called SEOQuake. It’s a simple tool that allows you to see the page rank of any site you wish. You get get the plugin directly from Mozilla’s SeoQuake SEO extension page.

• One thing (you may have less control over) is the anchor text of the inbound link. Anchor text is the text used for the link itself and… the text immediately surrounding it. That text should be relevant to the content it is linking too. Anchor text of “Baking” pointing to a page about painting is just not going to work well.

• Again, remember that outbound links are important. According to Google’s official blog “Linking out: Often it’s just applying common sense“.

Your Blog and Your Domain:

Many are not aware that your domain name registration now appears to have an effect on your SEO.  To backtrack, in 2005, Google’s patent application specifically addressed this issue by saying:

“…Domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith…”

• So it is probably a good idea to register your domain name for a longer period (than just 1 or 2 years). Incidentally, you can read United States Patent Application #20050071741. The gist of the pertinent sections of that patent application allude to the following additional issues for domain SEO:

“…the age, or other information, regarding a name server associated with a domain may be used to predict the legitimacy of the domain. A “good” name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a “bad” name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new. The newness of a name server might not automatically be a negative factor in determining the legitimacy of the associated domain, but in combination with other factors, such as ones described herein, it could be…”

• This essentially suggests that Name Servers (DNS) hosting your domain record is better contaning  a mix of different domains from different registrars. It appears Google considers this “Good”.

Finally, further advice is to ensure that you keep your domain on focus. For example, if your domain name contains keywords such as trees, weddings, real estate, law, or some other topic; ensure that your content is specific to the subject matter that your domain name suggests. If for example, you plan on launching content that is not directly related to the subject of the domain, then it may be advisable to launch it under a domain name that is more suited to the subject matter.

Keywords:

One aspect I think most of us are aware of is the issue of keywords. Specifically that we should place appropriate keywords in our document Meta Tags. (What is a keyword meta tag? – You can find out by reading Phil Bradley’s  “Meta tags – what, where, when, why?“). However did you know that the Meta tags for keyword, description and so forth do not have the effect they once did? Quite frankly, in my opinion they are a waste of time, and only useful for smaller search engines or directories, etc. that still use them – Which is why I still use meta tags.

In my opinion the only valuable use of keywords is to place the within your content! The post from Search Engine Watch, “How To Use HTML Meta Tags” says it best with their quote “Meta tags are not a magic solution”.

If you produce valuable content, Google and other search engines will be able to gather all they keyword information without any coded directions (such as meta tags).

SEO Tools for Your Blog:

In order to facilitate better SEO, there are some blog tools (WordPress plugins) that I use (and which you may want to put to good use as well). Two of the best free ones (in my opinion are:

• All in One SEO Pack provides automated (SEO) out of the box. Specifically, it takes care of titles, descriptions, keywords and duplicate content.
• Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap for your blog. This helps googlebot better crawl your blog. It reduces the crawl time and improves speed.

In conclusion, I’d like to remind everyone who is new to SEO (and blogging). The focus should be to provide quality and in demand content. Having said this, don’t misunderstand me. Quality content is critical (that what readers are looking for) – But quality content isn’t the “key” to blog success. However, this is another topic for another day; which I have touched on in an earlier post Quality Content is Not “The” Key to a Blog Success.

Before I forget, there is one tool I really should mention, it’s the Canonical URL’s plugin. What this does is help resolve the issue of someone visiting your blog using a different URL. This is also common fro individuals who have registered more that one domain, but have them all pointing to one hosting account. Because they are different domains, this could suggest “Duplicate Content” – Not good. To learn a bit more, check out the Google video below:

What issues have you encountered with regards to Blog SEO? What do you do that I didn’t include here? Have a thought? A comment? Let us know below! – Cheers!

I’ve posted about this subject before in “How to Deter Scrapers and Hotlinkers“, which discusses a bit more of the hands-on and some web based tools you can use to help protect your content.

Many of us have may have read all sorts of articles and other blog posts that delve into the legalities, copyright laws, rights and so forth. That’s not something I’m going to discuss as I think there’s too much discussion (and not enough action). If not, just take a look on Google and you’ll find a plethora of posts on the subject. The fact of the matter remains that we can file as many DMCA notices, cease and desist letters, etc. as we want. Often the content thief (called a “scraper” or “splogger”) does not care. After all they already have your content and you can cry and stamp your feet as much as you want – Many of them will simply not budge, especially if they are out of your geographical area or jurisdiction.

A case in point, on one of my other (self hosted) wordpress blogs, several pages were regularly being lifted by a web site in China. The only recourse was that Google removed the stolen content from search results (the hosting provider, etc. did nothing) – Even though Google was removing their search results, that didn’t stop them from adding more (from my stolen content)! Locally (North/South America and Europe) however, that blog has had a 100% success record in take downs of stolen content found on blog sties such as wordpress.com (Automattic), blogspot.com (Google), etc. Providing I followed their DMCA procedures, all issues were resolved.

In my opinion, this approach is ineffective, costly (with long distance faxing) and quite frankly a waste of time (at one point I was filing about 15 DMCA’s a day for that blog). Why? We need to be proactive not reactive! A client of mine uses the tagline “Predictable is preventable” for his blog and security business. And he’s right! We need to deter, curtail and control such theft attacks against our blog content.

It’s difficult to stop such activity, until you can see it occurring, as such, I hope the following tools will help you:

Grab yourself a copy of Antileech. It’s a plugin that does not stop sploggers, rather (in the developers words) “…produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content…” The benefits here are that sploggers seldom read all the content. They have an automatied system grabbing thousands of pages – And now they will have backlinks to your original content, inviting the reader of the splog (containing fake content) to visit your blog instead. That’s link love!

Another effective tool in your arsenal is ©Feed, which allows you to place a digital fingerprint and copyright notice in your content feed (RSS). For those not familiar, in most cases, your RSS is used to facilitate content theft. What’s RSS? Common Craft’s video below easily explains it:

In the words of the ©feed developers “…You can use html. You can add the IP of a feed reader and digital fingerprint for an explicit key. There can also be a domain name for a whitelist and this domains became not the message [sic]. The plugin search for this key at content theft [sic]. It is furthermore possible to add comments and related posts to the feed. For the related post feature it uses a database-search for the content. You can use the plugin “Simple Tagging” for related posts in a feed. The copyright notice can be added even when using entry excerpts…”

Needless to say, the above two tools are very robust and take a proactive approach.  There are some other resources I’ve bumped into over time, that provide good reading and further insight:

• Jamming the scraper signals
• How You Can Stop Dirty Feed Scrapers In 3 Easy Steps
• Benefiting from Blog Scrapers
• Google – Duplicate content due to scrapers

Hopefully the above helps you (especially those who emailed me asking)!

Do you have any good solutions? What tools do you use? Feel free to comment your thoughts below.

“How to measure traffic to tweets & twitter profile? On regular web pages you can include some tracking codes to generate traffic reports, click-through%, etc. (Google Analytics, eXteme, etc.). How can I measure the traffic to individual tweets and my Twitter profile?”

It dawned on me that all of us who use twitter to increase our business (or personal) visibility have no tool that measures traffic going to our twitter profiles or individual tweets. For my readers who are not on twitter yet, the video below will explain, what twitter is, and should allow you to realize how important and effective it can be in promoting your business; and increasing your visibility to existing or potential clients:

Back to the question at hand, unfortunately until twitter allows its members access to such data, I don’t see a way that we could gather statistics that show the traffic to our twitter profiles or specific tweets. In my opinion, a great solution would entail twitter having an agreement with Google Analytics to that end. That would be a win-win-win scenario. We win by garnering access to such statistics, Google wins (as we need an analytics account to access our twitter profile and tweet statistics, thereby increasing their user base) and twitter wins by becoming even more valuable to the business community (and in turn increasing membership).

The only immediate advice I could offer (and offer to you) was:

“I’ve not seen twitter release access to that in their API. Currently the only method I see is in my own stats (looking at the referrer), which at least gives me an idea of who clicked on the link (in the twitter profile) to reach your page. I also, don’t think there’s a way to track traffic TO individual tweets (again, that would mean twitter would need to allow access to that data).

Since you mentioned Google Analytics, this link (following) should at least give you something: Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track

Also helpful: Simple Way to Track Your Twitter Tweets Using Google Analytics

Please remember that  methods such as this are only of value to track actual click throughs to your designated pages.”

I’m hoping the powers-that-be at Google and Twitter pick up the idea on this post and try to make it work.

What tools do you use to track or analyze traffic from twitter? Do any of you have a tool, code, idea or an existing web based service that can provide statistics to your tweets and twitter profile? Thoughts, comments? Feel free to ad them below.

Oh… and one shameless plug, please follow me on twitter to keep an eye on what’s going on in BloggerSavvy and access the tons of useful and helpful links, tips and tools I find on the web.

Before we review some of the things we can do, let’s define what a “bounce rate” actually is, and see which tools can help us determine  our bounce rates.

“Bounce rate” has two definitions. According to Google (analytics) it refers to the act of a visitor entering your blog (or web site) and leaving within the first five seconds. More commonly, we understand it to mean the percentage (or number) of visits to your blog, where the visitor enters and exits the same page without visiting any other pages on your blog. Evidently we want visitors to remain on our blogs.

The top two tools I use to compare and find bounce rates are:

1. AWStats. AWStats is robust and is a standard statistics gathering system on most web servers.
2. Google Analytics. Is an online analytics service operated by Google.

Both of the above tools will help you determine your bounce rates. Personally I favour Google Analytics for ease. Additionally, I’d recommend reading Jacob Neilsen’s post “Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click“. In that post he discusses the trend where “…ever-more users are arriving deep within websites rather than entering them through the homepage…” and that your home page should really be your “orienteering point” (from which visitors can access to explore your blog further). He goes on to explain that we should focus on reducing bounce rates for Loyal users. Again, it’s a good read (and short).

What steps can we take to improve (reduce) our bounce rates?

• Provide links with which they can subscribe to your RSS feed (appearing on every page).
• For those who prefer notifications of new posts (and comments replies), provide the link or feature that enables them to subscribe. Two plugins that can assist you providing such features are: Subscribe To Comments and Subscribe2.
• Provide a feature that will inform them of similar content that they may be interested in (further reading). One plugin that can help with this is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
• Remember that visitors do not always arrive at the home page, so it will also help to ensure you have a search feature (to enable them to narrow down their search on your blog).
• Ensure you retain reliable web hosting services. If a site takes too long to access, visitors will move on.
• Highlight your feature or your most popular posts in the sidebar of your blog, (some of them may capture further interest).
• Ensure your blog is catering to your targeted niche. If your blog is about food and it visually looks more appealing to car enthusiasts, your bounce rate will increase.

The above reduced the bounce rates on my first blog by about 5% on average. Upon review I noticed that the bounce rate was also effected by the types of visitors I was receiving. For example, Stumbleupon campaign traffic incurred a lower bounce rate than traffic from Digg (which for me, had a super high bounce rate – 85%). Why? In my opinion, Stumbleupon visitors were visiting because they were more targeted, whereas my perceptions of Digg traffic was of a less “targeted” nature. As such, the issue that raises up again is the niche focus of the blog.  A blog that has posts with little relation to each other is going to have a higher bounce rate than a blog where the posts are naturally related to each other.

What are your thoughts on this? What are your experiences? Feel free to comment and add your input!

I chose my Linux (Ubuntu) based blog, selecting the statistics for a full year (July 17, 2007 to July 17, 2008 – Since it I didn’t start promoting it until July) and was rather surprised by a couple things. I assumed that Google would still be the prime traffic source. I also assumed that all the links from other (non-blog, “traditional” sites) sites would rank high. I was surprised in both cases. I personally found it interesting to note that you get a good statistical perspective on a day-to-day basis, but you’ll get a more accurate view if you stand back and look at the big picture over a longer time period. Here are the results below:

As you can see above, Social Media sites took the lead (just a tich ahead of Google). I also found it significant that inbound traffic from other blogs had a clear lead over inbound traffic from “traditional” (static) web sites. Equally surprising was how I saw that Google outperformed inbound search engine traffic by a massive lead.

The specific driving force within the Social Media (36.41% traffic), without question was StumbleUpon, which championed a massive lead of social media based traffic at 85.56%. Just look at the Social Media results breakdown below:

One thing I found interesting to note is some users of StumbleUpon shared some of the post links they saw in Reddit and Digg. So… while some posts that went viral, Digg and Reddit produced traffic spikes, they were only significant for a short time period. Instead, social media sites  (primarily StumbleUpon) saved those “traffic spiked” posts and subsequently that blog enjoyed long term, year round traffic.

What did I learn from our discussion and an examination of the blog statistics? Among several things, below are some of the points that were more predominant.

• There’s a lot of discussion about to benefits or lack thereof, with regards to using sites that can provide instant massive traffic volume (such as Digg). While sites such as Digg may provide short term spikes (for the average blog). Visitors to sites such can and will share your post link with others. As such, don’t discount the power of sites such as Digg. Short term effect, but a long term social effect.
• Google still loves me. Humour aside, SEO or the lack thereof can have a large effect on traffic form search engines – I think we know that. More to the point however, I noticed that the posts that are heavily shared on social sites have a much higher page rank than those which don’t, appearing higher in search results. It seems to me therefore, to continue providing quality content that is of value to the “community”.
• Continue to participate in blogging and other dynamic platforms. Convert the remainder of my old-fashioned static site to dynamic packages (blogging, CMS, etc.)  Why? When you post a blog, it pings site update services (such as pingomatic). Static (“traditional”) sites don’t do that. Each time a post is published RSS readers obtain the updates, automatically. These are things that help drive repeat visits (subscribers). Many of which might be adding your posts to various social sites.

While I’m fairly sure many blog sites may follow the general pattern I’ve seen with my traffic sources. I don’t think they will all follow the pattern established in the social media site rankings. This is mainly an issue of blog character, readership, blogsphere area and so forth. Not all blogs are in the same neighbourhood and have the same types of readers. For example a blog that focuses on internet marketing, I would assume might have more traffic from Sphinn, for example.

All too often, I find business owners (and site owners) oblivious to the power that dynamic sites can bring them, and how they are better able to make use of social media sites. In other cases, business owners simply don’t believe what they are being told as they appear not to have a good grasp of how the Internet really works and how their potential market really uses it.  My previous post “Why Every Business Can Benefit Form a Blog” for example, shows that a UK survey indicates “…66% of businesses believe that blogs are becoming more influential as an information source…” While this number is UK based, I assume it may be similar in other geographic regions and , more importantly, will to grow!

It will be interesting to see how the trends change over time. Perhaps one of the upcomming issues that search engines will need to address even further than they are now, is the inherent appeal of sites (such as blogs) that are better equipped to address the needs of site visitors. What new tools will be available to blogs desiring visibility in a growing webscape? As the video in my prior post (link at the top) suggested, we’ll need to rethink ourselves.