SEO Tip: Use Google Adwords for keyword suggestions

November 9, 2007 by 3 Comments

During my recent experiments with Google Adwords, I’ve learned a really cool way to explore new keywords relevant to my websites. No, it’s not the Keyword Tool you have available from your Adwords control panel. It’s the web access logs of your website.

How Google Adwords suggests you new keywords

When you start an Adwords campaign, you specify a list of keywords you think is relevant, and then perhaps use the provided keyword tool to expand this list. That’s the typical approach. But wait, there’s more.

Most often, users get to see your ad in a sidebar of Google ads added to the Google SERP (search results page). So people use certain words for their search, and then Google decides which ads are most relevant. Sometimes your ad is shown there as well. The search term used by a user doesn’t necessarily match any of the keywords from your Adwords campaign, and this is where the added value lies.

You see, every time such a user clicks on your ad, the keyword term will be specified in the request which goes to your website. In other words, in your logs it looks like the person searched for some keyword term and found your page as one of the results.

How can you benefit from this?

The beauty of this approach is this: you get suggestions for hundreds of very relevant keywords, some of them vastly different from the original idea you had behind your Adwords campaign. The reason these keywords are relevant is because people opted clicking on your ad, so it’s not a relevancy calculated by Google, but the human intelligence.
Simply start expanding your website by adding pages targeting the newly discovered keyword combinations, and over time this will bring you an increase in natural search engines traffic.

Filed Under: adwords, google, SEO, traffic

Join the BlogRush generation!

September 24, 2007 by Leave a Comment

BlogRush

BlogRush has finally arrived and is quickly picking up the pace! Looks like it’s developing rapidly, with many features promised to be released in the coming days.

If you’ve been waiting for increasing the amount of relevant traffic to your blog, then I suggest you join the BlogRush and start enjoying its benefits.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, I’ve compiled a very quick how-to on BlogRush.

What is BlogRush?

It’s a traffic attraction tool which helps you get relevant traffic. All the members of the BlogRush service place their blogs into certain categories, and by showing links to blogs in your category, you automatically earn points which will make other blogs show links to you.

There’s a lot of hype around BlogRush, and while some people absolutely love it, others have learned to hate it in a matter of just few days since the release. Visit the BlogRush website, watch the introductory video, and it will hopefully suggest how useful it will be for your blog. My opinion is that it’s worth a try. But whether it will be a huge success or not is still to be found out.

It’s been reported that some categories of BlogRush consist mostly of splogs, but it’s only a matter of time before BlogRush guys get rid of them – looks like they’re moving to a manual submission reviews pretty soon, which will rule out the possibility to abuse the service.

How does it work?

After your sign up to BlogRush, you’ll be asked to provide basic information about your blog – it’s name, main page link and the blog feed link. Then you’ll need to confirm the interest group your blog fits into most. The last step is for you to integrate a piece of BlogRush code into your sidebar, and it will result in looking something like this (browser-based readers of this blog can find the live BlogRush widget in my sidebar):

BlogRush widget

It’s currently a fixed design, but works on BlogRush flavours are already in progress – so pretty soon we’ll be able to customize the look of this widget to better suit our blogs.

Every time someone opens your blog, they’ll see the BlogRush widget with updated links to other blogs in the same interest group. By showing links to them, you earn points so that the BlogRush widgets on their pages will show links back to your blog.

Why use BlogRush?

Here is my personal list of the best reasons to join BlogRush:

  1. It’s an absolutely FREE service
  2. It’s (really) easy to get started – feel free to contact me and ask for help if you’re stuck
  3. The traffic you get is targeted – so you’re more likely to get really interested visitors
  4. It’s a smart way to grow readership – one more thing is that new BlogRush users who sign up using your referral link will bring you more and more traffic
  5. It’s a fun way to explore new websites in your niche

How to get started

Simply follow this BlogRush registration link, and answer all the questions (there won’t be many). You can add as many blogs as you like, and pick a relevant niche for each of them.

The next few days will definitely bring useful advices on optimizing your experience, and I’ll be sure to post the highlights up on this blog.

That’s it. Not sure how successful BlogRush will turn out, but seems to me it’s definitely worth a try! Let me know how you find it once you sign up.

Filed Under: blog, promotion, traffic

Proud Member of the Digital Folders Network

September 7, 2007 by 2 Comments

Digital Folders Network

I’d like to announce that as of this week, Perfect Blogger is a proud member of the Digital Folders Network.

Digital Folders is a very young project, and that’s part of the challenge that I like about it – being so close to the beginning of the network is always exciting as all the approaches and methods, changes and interactions are actively discussed and reworked to ensure the maximum usefulness of the participating blogs which keeping visitors and advertisers interested and happy.

If you’re interested in joining the network, please have a look at the current team. Both new bloggers (a new blog will be created and hosted for you) and established blogs are welcome.

For advertisement, read more on the advertise with us page.

Filed Under: blog, News, promotion, traffic

New WordPress Blog Install Checklist

August 6, 2007 by 3 Comments

I’ve recently started new blog, and thought it would be useful for you to know my checklist for making sure the website is build with SEO basics in mind, ready to attract traffic and has its feed delegated to FeedBurner service for easier management.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: blog, SEO, sitemaps, traffic, wordpress

Success Story: Get Thousands Subscribers in Just Three Months

April 25, 2007 by 4 Comments

Leo from Zen Habits has just posted a great article with some insights of the great success of his blog: 10 Ways I Got 4,700 Subscribers in Three Months.

I’ve been a regular reader of Zen Habits for quite sometime now, and so it gives me pleasure to see someone like Leo become successful. If you’re into personal development, do have a look around after you finish reading the article!

Here are the three most important keys to blogging success in my opinion:

  • useful content, posted regularly
  • thoughtful and catchy headlines
  • interaction with readers and other bloggers

 

For more, please read the full article. Thanks for sharing, Leo!

Filed Under: blog, promotion, traffic

Linkbaiting Roundup

September 20, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Linkbaiting seems to become a hot topic once again. Having enjoyed reading quite a number of really interesting posts on the topic in the last few days, I thought you would benefit from looking through them.

 

So here it is, the linkbaiting roundup for you: 

 

This should be enough to get you started, and if you come across another useful article or two, please let me know! In the meantime, I'll probably get busy creating a Blogging Glossary entry for linkbaiting.

Filed Under: blog, promotion, SEO, traffic

Google Analytics is Finally Open

August 16, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Great news!

 

Starting yesterday, new users can get an instant registration with Google Analytics service. Previously users had to submit their request and wait for the Google Analytics team to get back to them with an approval of the registration and a special invitation code.

According to the official blog, from now on the Google Analytics service is fully open to the public and you can get started in a matter of minutes.

 

I'm working on a Google Analytics page in the Blogging Tools section of PerfectBlogger, and I'll be sure to let you all know as soon as I update this page.   

Filed Under: analytics, blog, google, promotion, SEO, traffic

Challenges Facing Blogs

August 10, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger posted a list of Challenges Facing Young and Older Blogs today,  and I just wanted to point you to his post and also add some thoughts of my own.

I think, Disillusionment with a Niche is as big and as serious a problem for new bloggers as it is for older ones.

Recently, I see far too many bloggers starting new blogs in search of a quick passive income opportunity – they misjudge the niche and raise their expectations too high. Not only are they hoping to earn top dollar starting with the day one, but they also expect it to happen almost automatically, assuming they're going to rank high in the niche.

The reality is though, that it takes a fairly long time to establish a reputation and get regular visitors for any project. Even if you're a gifted writer with incredibly interesting and relevant ideas, it might take you few month to get regular traffic, firstly because of the Google indexing delay (your pages are indexed almost instantly, but they usually are not shown in Google search results for a month or two), and secondly is because traffic brings traffic. So if you have major resources pointing to your new project, you'll grow pretty quick.

Of course, the irony is that usually you have to write lots of useful content, earn the trust and respect, and get some initial traffic before any of the major projects out there will notice you and start linking to you :)

Filed Under: blog, google, promotion, traffic

Simple Ways To Get Out of Google Sandbox

August 5, 2006 by 1 Comment

Everyone faces this problem when starting a new website: how to get your website indexed by search engines as quickly as possible? This post will show you a quick way to get out of Google Sandbox with minimum efforts on your part.

 

Two Months To Fully Index Your Content

My access logs show that it took Google just about 2 months to fully reveal the contents of one of my newly created blogs. This obviously takes the usual lag of a few days  it takes Google bots to index the most recent content.

Impressively enough, Google bots start indexing your new website in a matter of just few days. My blog was indexed for the first time when it was only 3 days old! Bear in mind though, I've pointed Google to it using its website submission form.

 

Easy Tips For The Best Results 

Below are just a few really easy tips for your website optimization which will help Google index your content as quickly as possible:

  • Use Permalinks
    Permalinks     are definitely the first thing to do. There's been a lot of talking about it on various SEO sites, and the general knowledge I've gained is that Google is likely to pay attention at how people would access your pages.

    Important: make sure your permalinks structure is well-thought beforehand, as it will be hard to change it at a later time.

    If you're using a recent enough content management system or blog engine, you probably have no real directories with your articles and blog entries, but instead all the content is stored in a database, and nice URLs are made using permalinks. It's a simple enough concept: do some planning and make sure your URLs look the best.

    No dynamic URLs – it's really important that you have as less variables in your URLs as possible (none ideally). Again, because it is important that your URLs are simple and easy to read and follow.

  • Google Sitemaps
    Google Sitemaps are the easiest and quickest way to let Google know what pages your website has. Not only can you provide the list of all the pages you want indexed, but you can also specify the importance of each page so that Google bots pay more attention to it.

    Google Sitemaps is quite a flexible service, and since it's fairly popular too, there are already tons of freely available tools out there to suit all your needs. I really liked the SiteMap XML script in PHP – you specify a link to it in your Google Sitemaps account, and every time Google accesses this script, it automatically scans your website and provides a ready SiteMap in XML form. Very convenient and pretty easy to configure.

  • Have As Many Pages Of Real Content As Possible
    All I had was 10 articles to start with, because I didn't want to put too much content online just yet. I wanted to see if it's possible to get out of Google sandbox with such a small number of pages. And here's the answer: yes, it is quite possible!.

    What make your content real? Here are just a few things to keep in mind:

    • Write your articles yourself: DON'T grab texts from any online resources – this will not give you much weight in terms of Google search engine, as Google bots will be more interested in a fresh, original content
    • Be unique: you need to be as original as possible – because only really unique articles and ideas will get the most interest. This is mostly to do with human readers of your blog and not Google bots, but I still think it's a good advice.

  • Put Google AdSense ads on every page with the content
    Luckily I've had AdSense account activated beforehand using a rather popular project of mine, so it was not a problem at all for me to stick a square block of AdSense ads onto every page with useful content.

    There is an opinion that having AdSense on your pages urges Google bots to come and index your pages more quickly simply because Google really has to have your pages indexed before it can provide meaningful content-targeted ads.

    While it's not 100% accurate, because AdSense also is capable of scanning your pages on-the-fly and provide meaningful ads for the most obvious keywords in your content, I certainly see no harm in placing ads.

    My ads became meaningful in just a couple of days, but I had to wait for another 2 months before my pages got visible in Google search results.

  • Trackback to popular sites
    I've only trackbacked to one site again because I wanted to see if it would be enough. It sure was enough! I got only 10 visitors or so from that website, but the point was made – I've been visited through an external link. A trackback is a great and simple way to let others know about your content.

  • Link to other projects of yours
    There is definitely no harm in linking to other projects of yours, especially to the long-established and popular ones. If you have only a handful of projects (not hundreds), then it's also okay to link back to your project – it will not add much of a weight to your new project from the search engine point of view, but it would not look like you're trying to earn a better PageRank by linking from tons of your own projects neither.

 

As you can see, it's all been about letting Google know your site is out there and really has to be indexed fully at some stage. Sitemaps help Google find its way around your website, and AdSense could also be a useful hint to get your site indexed as Google cannot serve content-targeted ads without having indexed the content first.

But the best advice is to never stop experimenting! Some things might work for my projects, but will not for yours. Similarly, you can as easily come up with the most brilliant solutions to getting your site indexed in the least time possible. Just don't forget to share the knowledge! ;) 

Filed Under: adsense, blog, google, SEO, traffic

ProBlogger: A Very Useful Blog

August 2, 2006 by 2 Comments

The more time I spend reading Darren Rowse's ProBlogger blog, the more I realize there's so much learning to be done!

I like ProBlogger a lot. It's one of these resources you know you'll find something useful on, so I sometimes just start reading through a series or a category of posts, and it's incredible how much stuff I've been thinking or worrying about is already explained and covered on ProBlogger's pages!

I can hardly find a blogging-related topic which isn't covered there (although this probably means I'm very new to the blogging and simply have tons of stuff to learn): general blogging tips, SEO, WordPress customization, AdSense – you name it! It's like a book (hey, that's an idea! It'll be a bestseller for sure!).

For some blogs, you enjoy the reading so much that you feel almost scared as you dig deeper and deeper into archives, because you know that someday you're going to reach the bottom of the posts archive, and that will the end. But with Darren's resource it's much better – not only it is a very comprehensive guide, but it's also a very dynamic one, so there is lots of useful and relevant information added daily.

I think I'm a fan of ProBlogger. After all, it is such a pleasure to learn from someone who grew knowledgeable in the field simply by trying all the steps you've already taken plus hunders more which you're only planning to take.

Filed Under: blog, promotion, SEO, traffic, wordpress
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