Have you realised that a good, eye-catching site design can be a great ally in your link building efforts? Let me show you how to go about this.
Why you could use a beautiful design for link building
People just love beauty. It’s a fact. Not that you should feel miserable if your site doesn’t look that good. Content still matters and always will. However, when you have a truly good-looking site or blog, many people will want to share its link with others regardless of the content’s quality. Besides, there are many sites which specialise in linking to beautiful pieces of web design.
A beautiful design will certainly create backlink opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise. (more…)
I bet you have read several articles on how to build links by leaving comments on do-follow blogs. But you must know that the vast majority of blogs have the “no-follow” attribute appended to all links left in their comment areas, hence hindering them from passing link juice.
Should all those blogs be ignored by you? Of course not! There’s a way to use them in your link building campaigns and I’m going to tell you what it is: leave several good comments on several no-follow blogs to get noticed by the bloggers and their readers.
Yes, it’s that obvious. And if you don’t have any spamming tendencies, you’ll find it very easy as well. (more…)
All over the Internet you can find guides and tutorials that will teach you how to make money by creating and selling eBooks. This looks like a good idea indeed. However, what I’m going to suggest is that you create a good eBook and… give it away. Yes, it means you won’t make money immediately. No, it doesn’t mean you won’t make money later.
Why should I offer my eBooks for free when I could be selling them?
There’s a good reason for this: by giving high-quality info away you’ll generate backlinks for your site or blog. (more…)
Now seems to be a good time to try to drive more StumbleUpon traffic to your website. It’s been announced on the StumbleUpon blog that the old 200-friend limit will be lifted. Moreover, stumblers will be able to subscribe to someone’s stumbles without becoming a friend.
Why should you care about StumbleUpon’s friends limit?
At StumbleUpon, whenever you stumble and review a page/image/video, the link and your comment are displayed on your friends’ homepages. Therefore, having a large amount of StumbleUpon friends can help you spread the word about your own sites and/or sites that belong to your partners or friends. This is why you want to be added as a friend by as many stumblers as possible. However, StumbleUpon used to have a 200-friend limit for all accounts. Such limit obviously harmed StumbleUpon’s networking potential.
Now that the limit is about to end and stumblers will be able to subscribe to as many people as they want, you can add everyone and everyone can reciprocate. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should subscribe to you, nor that you should reciprocate all subscriptions. (more…)
In a previous article I discussed the importance of niches for a site or blog’s success. However, many people build their sites without having a niche in mind, because they either don’t know any better or they simply don’t care much for the consequences. While some of them will eventually modify their content in order to fit it in a niche, others will still prefer having a general/miscellaneous site. If you belong in the latter category, you may be wondering what you can do to drive traffic to your pages.
Well, all is not lost. Here are some tips to help you get some search engine love, retain visitors and increase pageviews:
1. Pretend that each page on your site is a sort of mini site on a specific niche — and optimise it accordingly. Make sure that the page’s title is highly optimised and relevant to its topic. The description meta tag, the alt tags and the written content should all contain related keywords. If you want to cover a different subject, create a new page for it, instead of cramming it into an existing one. (more…)
I know it’s hard to believe, but for a long time I thought Google didn’t like blogs.
Some years ago, I read on an Internet marketing site — I can’t remember its address — that blogs were falling out of favour from Google and wouldn’t rank well, if at all. That piece of (mis)information had been written by a man who looked like an authority in site traffic, so I just assumed he was right and, unfortunately, I decided to ignore blogging. How silly I was.
Misinformation on blogging is still spread on a regular basis
Nowadays, just when you’d think blogs have gone mainstream, you’ll still stumble upon articles meant to classify blogging as a major waste of time. Their authors will tell you to avoid blogs if you want to succeed on the Internet. What’s worse: most of this (bad) advice is directed towards business owners. (more…)
It doesn’t take much browsing across Internet marketing sites to realise that having a niche is mandatory. This is the piece of advice that you’ll find everywhere you go: choose a niche for your site or blog and stick to it.
Why having a niche is so important anyway?
1. Niches help your visitors find what they want
When you give too many options to your readers, they may get confused, bored and eventually leave your site. People don’t have much time; they want to get things as fast as possible. They want to arrive to your blog and make sure that its topic is interesting to them. So, stick to a niche and help your visitors stay focused. Don’t distract them with pages on ten different, unrelated subjects.
2. Search engine optimisation is much easier with niches
Build your site around a specific subject and you’ll automatically help Google identify your content as relevant to all related search terms. It’s that simple. Now, I don’t mean that this is the only thing you need to do in order to rank well. Search engine optimisation is a process that involves several steps. But picking a proper niche for your site is one of them — a very sensible one. (more…)
How can you choose the best headline — or at least the most appropriate one — for each article? I’m going to offer some suggestions that may help you make a decision next time you write a new post.
Why should I care about writing deadlines anyway?
Because each article’s headline is like an ad.
The headline is obviously the very first thing readers will see. If it doesn’t catch their attention, you’ll be in trouble. Some readers will proceed to read the article descriptions or excerpts available on search engines and social media sites, even when a headline doesn’t look particularly interesting. But many won’t do it. If your headline doesn’t make they feel compelled to read on, you’ll lose them.
Of course, the whole article must be good, not only its title. But then again, a good article without a good headline may pass unnoticed.
How is a good headline like?
While it depends on your audience — not all types of readers will react equally to the same titles — , it’s safe to say that the best headlines are the ones that let your readers know in advance what your articles are about. It’s a matter of usability: people feel more comfortable when they know what they are going to see after clicking on a link. (more…)
The technology that propels Google and other search engines might be ahead of our time but one of the most basic principles, Information Retrieval (IR) was propounded in the middle of 20th century and is still at the core of search engine technology. At that time and for another 40 years information retrieval was used in government labs and research facilities that had retrieval systems. The scientists at that time working on developing the search function realized that the quality of a search result depended on two concepts: (more…)
Since Google gets the lion’s share of search queries, it’s about the worst nightmare to have your website taken down from Google’s search results. If it happens, try not to panic. Follow these steps to determine the cause, and with any luck, you can fix it in no time. (more…)
