Archive for the 'SEO' Category

Cool Websites of the Month

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008


Let’s Make a Deal - The social network for venture investors. DealHorizon.com is new, but it’s yet another intriguing web concept from Aussy, John Sharp (CEO of Authentium.com, creators of Safe Central, an amazing end-to-end secure web browsing solution).

Live Video - Flixwagon provides a network for the live broadcasting of video feeds. Whenever I am on this site, I find myself refreshing my homepage every few minutes. There is something exciting about not knowing what’s going to steam across my laptop screen next.

Percentage Calculator - A simple site where you can calculate percentages and percentage increases. I use this all the time.

Spin Your Own - Make your own discs. Yeah, physcial CD’s are a dying medium, but there’s still nothing like burning a fresh disc packed with mp3’s favs and sharing it with friends.

SEO Tool - A nice SEO tool for seeing how well your website is doing in four key areas: 1) Inbound links (especially .edu and .gov links), 2) Number of indexed pages, 3) Site age (via Wayback machine), 4) DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory listing.

Need a Rhyme? - A rhyming dictionary every writer should have in their bag of bookmarks.

Free Translation - What’s not to like about Babel Fish, a quick and easy tool that translates online text and web page language into over 30 languages?

The Future of Search? - Ms. Dewey is an experimental Microsoft video search engine launched in 2006 with a touch of humor that plays prerecorded clips of Janina Gavankar, an actress who entertains you with her witty commentary based on your searches.

Poem Power - Selected poetry of e.e.cummings, a modern American poetry icon. Need I say more?

Do-It-Yourself Videos - A fun video search site. I especially like Revver’s how to section. So many magic trick reveals and Photoshop how-to’s. Sweet.

11 Link Bait Examples for Your Viewing Pleasure

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Link Bait

Link bait has been described as any form of link-worthy content that naturally attracts links, bookmarks or promotes viral behavior. Link bait can take the form of useful tools, cool widgets, humorous videos, or the just plain unusual. The key to link bait content is in its uniqueness and timing. Link bait is sometimes referred to as the holy grail of Search Engine Optimization, since this ‘premium’ content can drive huge amounts of organic (unpaid) website traffic.

Here are 11 link bait samples you may want to check out:

  1. Hilarious video that drives millions of visitors to FunnyOrDie.com
  2. Bruce Clay’s infamous, Search Engine Relationship Chart
  3. Akamai’s net usage graph showing who is reading the news
  4. Fundemental Particles and Interaction Chart (with a cool zooming feature!)
  5. How much of your favorite energy drink, soda, or caffeinated food would it take to kill you? (go)
  6. Preview how colors will look in your home
  7. Website text enhancer known as the We We Calc
  8. The 22 worst place names in the world (count the # of user comments)
  9. An interactive demo showcasing an IKEA-like website gone wild
  10. Eye candy that you can’t take your eyes off of
  11. Track the progress of your pregnancy using this baby development simulator

21 Ways to Enhance Your Website

Friday, September 12th, 2008

If you are looking to boost your website traffic, boost your organic search engine results and/or increase your overall site conversions (aka drive more sales), the following tips may help improve your success metrics.

Website Enhancement

How It Helps

1. Perform an H1 and H2 tag, page description & image tag review

Improve SEO results if your code is tagged properly and in line with SEO best practices

2. Do your keyword research

Before launching a new site or page on a site, determine what keywords are being searched for the most, and then ensure that page is saturated with a cluster of like keywords. Done right, this can maximize the total possible organic visits to a web page.

3. Conduct a spider simulation

See how the search engines view your web site. Make improvements earlier in the process to maximize SEO results.

4. Increase # .edu and .gov links

Examine the actual .edu and .gov links of high ranking competitor websites, then deconstruct & emulate their tactics to build up your .edu & .gov links

5. Conduct a page-by-page keyword density examination

Improves SEO results if pages are as keyword dense as SEO best practices say they should be

6. Add direct response elements to direct the user’s eye to specific content, offers or next steps. Examples: yellow highlighter effect, use of arrows, big simple buttons, multiple 1-800 numbers, etc.

Count # and style of direct response elements on a page. Ask yourself, if this page was the only page on your website that a web visitor saw, would it generate leads? If not, how could various DR help? Examples of DR: Arrows, large 800#’s, yellow pen highlighter effect, red Apply Now buttons, etc

7. Monitor Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete rank, etc

Establish baseline metrics and determine of your site is improving over time

8. Determine how many of your site’s pages are indexed by major engines?

Establish baseline metrics and determine of your site is improving over time. Plenty of free tools available online

9. Increase # inbound links

The more inbound links you have, from sites with some level of authority, the more site traffic you are likely to generate over time from organic search.

10. Optimize banner clicks and flow through

Banners are a form of direct response marketing that can compel a site visitor to become a lead prospect. By rotating out different banner designs & messaging via testing, you can improve your response rates (ie: sales)

11. Launch content syndication and external publishing of articles, PDF’s, podcasts, widgets & videos

Use external publishers to expand the reach of your content and get links back to your site. Metacafe, Scribd, Flickr and some examples of sites where your content can reside

12. Participate in social media, list serves and news commenting

Comment on others’ posts and mention one of your web pages in the comment and include a URL address to pick up a few more site visits, and perhaps another inbound link. Note: This doesn’t always work…and be sure to only post comments that are relevant

13. Enable RSS feeds

Publish regular content via RSS feeds (Real Simple Syndication)to let other websites pick up your content and embedded links.

14. Add link bait content

Generate more traffic and links to your website with content that is so well liked, visitors refer it to friends or link to it from their blog or website. Offering free, fun tools such as a website button generator is an example of link bait

15. Run content through the We We Calculator

Measure the effectiveness of your web page copy. Is it consumer focused? Consumers tend to respond better to content that speaks to their needs rather than to a company’s needs

16. Add more, quality content pages to your site

Deeper the site’s indexable pages are, the more SEO traffic you might be able to generate

17. Try paid links

There are a few above-board companies offering pay per click or paid link opportunities. As long as you are following search best practices, you may want to experiment to see what works

18. Test Yahoo SSP

Search submit pro can be an effective way to pay for ‘organic search results’ on Yahoo

19. Competitor analysis

Study what other company’s sites are ranking and why – then adopt a similar approach to boost SEO results on your website

20. Try user experience testing

Ask others to walk through your website, or conduct formal offline or online tests to identify simple design improvements. Provides immediate quick wins, such as identifying key issues in information architecture – by understanding how users struggle to find a key content within a website – which can provide the necessary proof that key changes need to be made

21. Place Google Analytics code on your site and do a deep dive

By placing Google Analytics code on your website, you can uncover numerous insights about user behavior. Analytics can also help you uncover problems and make design changes to increase conversions