Create an Awesome Home Business

5 Ways to Build Links to Your Site

Martin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:37:12 +0000

Another question I saw recently: how do I build incoming links to my site?

So why are incoming links important?

Because they are the search engines’ way of assessing how good your site is. And if they think your site is good they’ll send you lots of visitors.

The logic goes that if lots of sites (particularly good quality, high traffic sites) are linking to your site it must be good.

Plus the number and quality of incoming links forms the major part of the off-site bit of search engine optimisation.

So how do you build lots of incoming links to your site?

With a lot of work!

Seriously – off-site optimisation is a never ending process of generating and retaining as many high quality links to your site as possible.

Ways to Build High Quality Links

1. Blog Directories.

Blog directories like Blogarama, Blog Traffic Resource and others, are a good place to start. But they’re not going to bring you floods of traffic, despite their promotional blurb.

When I first set up this blog I registered it on a lot of Blog directories and I can tell you that the traffic coming from them was minimal.

And since blog directories have sprung up all over the place even the links from them are of questionable quality these days.

None the less – every little helps, especially when you’re just starting out, so this is a good place to start.

If you look under the ‘Useful Links’ heading in the sidebar to the right you’ll see the blog directories where this site is registered.

You’ll need to reciprocate with a link to each Directory but, once you’ve developed a healthy flow of traffic, you can begin to remove some of the links and cut down on the number of directories.

2. Social Sites.

The first big jump in the number of visitors to this blog came when I started seriously working the social sites.

Beware, though. Many articles you read on Social Marketing (or Social Network Marketing) tell you to register on as many sites as you can. I did that in the early days of this site and nearly killed myself.

You cannot get any benefit from the social sites unless you’re active in them.

So unless you’ve employed an army of people to be active in the social sites on your behalf, your best bet is to think carefully about which sites will bring you the most benefit and just focus on them.

I focus on 4 sites at the moment and that’s quite enough. But, because I’m active in those 4, they all bring me quite a bit of traffic.

More than all the sites combined when I was trying to manage 11 of them, and I’m a lot less frazzled now.

Important things to remember with social sites: make sure your profile is filled out as fully as possible, including your real name and, of course, a link to your blog.

People like to know you’re real, and a fully completed profile is one of the factors that helps them know that.

Also – don’t spam..! Just participate in the community, answer questions, make friends and become known.

And make sure you participate every day.

As the number of visitors to your site grows so will the number of links, provided you’ve got good quality information on your site.

3. Commenting on Other Blogs

To some this seems counter-intuitive, but if you make thoughtful and valuable comments on other people’s blogs not only will the blog writer notice you but his readers will as well.

That will increase your traffic and, as long as you’ve got good information on your blog, it will bring links too.

A lot of blogs tell the search engines not to follow links from their site (the infamous no-follow tag) but ignore that.

If you’re worried about whether a blog has ‘nofollow’ set in its META tags you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

Concentrate on adding valuable input to the article (through your comments) and the visitors and links will follow.

Remember – there’s nothing to stop you turning a high quality comment you’ve written on someone else’s blog into a post on your own blog in the future, so you can kill two birds with one stone.

4. Link to your blog from your own sites

These are the other sites you own – your Squidoo lens, HubPage, and other blogs you have. Make sure the subjects of the sites are relevant to your blog and link to it.

In all cases you can put several links to your blog: One in the Recommended Sites or Blogroll section of your lens or HubPage, and as many as you like throughout the ‘page’ in each.

5. Participate in Forums

This is very similar to social sites and a lot of the same rules apply.

A big advantage with forums, though, is that you can create what’s effectively a mini ad in the footer of your posts.

Known as your signature, most social sites will enable you to create and add a link with some descriptive text and display it below each of your posts.

Most links from forums are ‘no follow’ so the links themselves don’t have much value in Google’s world, but they’ll bring you visitors and (as long as your content is good) visitors will often result in links.

As with social sites – don’t spam. You’re likely to be black-balled if you do and many will throw you out of the forum.

Keep your comments polite and helpful and, as people get to know and trust you, the number of visitors (and, as a result, links) will start to climb.

Good Quality Content

If there’s one thing that runs through each of the methods I’ve touched on, it’s the need for good quality information on your blog.

Without that you’ll be dead in the water.

So here’s a good approach to follow:

Make sure your site is set up properly for the search engines. See this article for more details if your blog is on WordPress
Write good quality, well researched articles that answer questions, solve problems or provide entertainment. And keep doing it.
Carry out the 5 link building steps I’ve set out in this article – and keep doing it. It’s a continuous process.

It will take time to build links to your site, particularly if you’re writing in a highly competitive niche, so keep at it.

Persistence cannot be over-rated as a requirement for success

Share on Facebook

How To Make a WordPress Post Sticky

Martin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:48:15 +0000

I see a lot of questions asking how to make a WordPress post sticky.

A sticky post is one that stays on the front page of your blog so that, same as sticky posts in forums, it will always be displaid first.

What’s the point of that?

It depends on the content of your blog, but any post you want everyone to read would qualify.

It could be your commenting policy, directions for how to achieve something on your site or notice of an important upcoming event.

There’s a difference between Featured Posts and Sticky Posts:

Featured posts are driven by your theme and, depending on your theme’s functionality, you can set criteria in your control panel that will enable it to define which posts should be featured.

Featured posts could change automatically as different posts meet (or fall short of) your criteria.

Sticky posts in WordPress are simpler, and driven by WordPress rather than your theme. You flag a post as sticky and it will stay on your front page until you remove the sticky flag.

So, here’s how to make a post sticky:

In your Add New Post screen, to the right of the editing window, is the Publish Box (1 below)

Inside the publish box are 3 factors you can edit: status, visibility and publish (2 above).

If you click the edit link next to ‘visibility’ the rows below it will expand.

Under the first option (public) is a sub option: ‘Stick this post to the front page’.

Click the check box to make the post sticky and it will be stuck to the front page of your blog until you uncheck that box again.

That’s all there is to it – no need for plugins or anything more complex.

Share on Facebook

What is WordPress?

Martin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:50:15 +0000

In this post I referred to a question I saw in one of the forums: what is WordPress?

Given that I write this blog for people who are new, or relatively new, to working on-line, and it contains over 40 articles on WordPress, I have been remiss in not writing one that describes exactly what it is.

So here you go: WordPress is a free, open source platform that is primarily used for blogs but can also be used to create normal static sites, forums or content management systems.

Bet that helped..!

OK – here’s WordPress in plain, simple terms:

It is, as I mentioned above, an open source application and it was originally designed to provide a blogging platform.

But, because it’s open source, and because of the vision of its founder, WordPress is now used to power many different types of sites.

It’s also used by some very big names to power very big sites – like the Larry King Live Blog and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

That’s not meant to be discouraging, by the way, if you’re new to this. It’s meant to demonstrate that it’s a pretty good system.

And, as I said above, it’s free.

Because it’s open source, a huge developer community has grown up focused on building add-ons (called plugins) and themes (often referred to as templates) for WordPress.

Today there are over 4000 plugins available to download from the WordPress site (plus more that are stored on the developers’ sites) and many thousands of themes.

In addition to all that WordPress itself contains widgets.

All these things enable you to add as much personalisation as you want, and pretty much any functionality you can think of, to the base WordPress application – usually with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The Basic WordPress Platform

The basic WordPress platform enables you to set up a simple blog or website that you run on-line.

That means that you don’t need to bother with HTML editors (there’s one built in) or FTPing your website from your PC to the server.

There are two types of WordPress: WordPress.com is a site that hosts WordPress blogs and where you can open an account and start a blog very quickly and easily, without the need for any technical skills.

It provides a similar service to Blogger – another free blogging site where you can set up and run a blog.

The second type of WordPress is one where you download and install the software on your server.

It’s called self-hosted WordPress or sometimes it’s called WordPress.org, because that’s the site from which you download the application.

Self hosted WordPress gives you more control over the look, feel and functionality of your site than WordPress.com blogs do. But the downside is that you need to manage and maintain your blog yourself.

That’s not complex, by the way, but it means you have to do upgrades when they’re available (only a click of 1 button) and if it all goes horribly wrong you’ll need to get help from someone who knows about WordPress.

WordPress themselves have made the entire process of installing and maintaining your self hosted blog as painless as it’s possible to be.

Plus, there’s so much help available on-line through forums and blogs (like the one you’re reading now!) that you’re never going to find yourself stuck.

So let’s look at some of the components that make WordPress (self-hosted) so powerful.

Wordpress Widgets

The first thing that enables you to personalise your WordPress site are the built in widgets.

These are modules that sit in the sidebars. Many of them are preprogrammed to display specific information like your last posts, the tags you’ve used, links you have to other sites and so on.

There’s also a text widget that enables you to insert anything you like as long as it’s HTML based. That means you can install scripts (for things like an Aweber opt in form, or a You Tube video) or you can dream up and install your own creation.

It’s the equivalent of an HTML page – but displayed in your sidebar.

There’s no limit to the number of text widgets you can add to your site. So you can add opt in forms, ads, widgets from social sites or whatever else – and as many of them as you like.

Widgets are easy to activate or deactivate – and there are instructions on how to do so here.

WordPress Plugins

The next thing you can use to personalise your WordPress platform are plugins.

There are more than 4000 plugins available to download from the WordPress.org site and they add almost any kind of functionality you can think of to your platform.

You can add plugins to improve protection against spammers and hackers, to make it easy to back up your blog database, to improve search engine effectiveness, to add a forum, to add image galleries and almost anything else you can think of.

Most plugins are free to download and install, although most also have a PayPal donate button. It’s good form to donate when the plugins are good and do their stuff, but it is voluntary.

Most plugin authors provide support for their plugins, including upgrades with new functionality and security improvements.

Finding and inserting plugins is very straightforward. There are instructions on how to find them here and on how to install them here.

WordPress Themes

The third thing you use to personalise your site are themes or templates.

Themes define the layout of your site – the number and positioning of sidebars, colour schemes, fonts, the header and footer, and so on.

As with plugins there are thousands of free themes. More than 650 on the WordPress.org site alone, and thousands more that you can Google for.

If you’re looking for a specific type of theme – e.g. a music based theme – you can simply Google for ‘WordPress music themes’ and you’ll get more results than you can shake a stick at.

There are lots and lots of excellent free themes but there are also some very badly coded ones, including ones where spam has been inserted into the code.

So you need to be careful if you’re looking for free themes – and be sure to get them from reputable sites.

Premium (or paid for) themes are generally well coded and also have support forums and regular upgrades.

There are usually two pricing options. There’s a Personal option which allows you to use the theme on one of your own sites and a Developer’s option which allows you to use it on as many sites as you like, but usually your own. Check the T’s & C’s of the theme you buy to be sure.

The bar on premium themes is being raised all the time and, for example, the Thesis theme, which I’m using on this site, is more like a supplementary platform than a theme.

It enables you to drop some SEO plugins and enables non technical users to make good use of WordPress’ flexibility much more easily.

There are instructions on finding WordPress themes here and on installing them here.

Summary

OK – so that’s WordPress.

It may seem daunting at first but, like anything, once you get to play around with it and see how it works I think you’ll find it very easy and intuitive.

If you’re interested in moving to WordPress one of the best ways to do it is to set up a free WordPress blog at WordPress.com.

That way you can learn how everything works and become familiar with the User Interface.

Then, when you move to a self-hosted version, you’re already familiar with the logic and the transition will be a lot easier.

If you have any questions leave a comment below, and if you’d like a complete tutorial on how to install it, configure it, add widgets, plugins and themes, write and promote your first article you’ll find it here. (It’s on-line, so it’s absolutely free).

Share on Facebook

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

Martin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:59:54 +0000

I’ve read a lot of posts on overcoming writer’s block (or blogger’s block) recently so I thought I’d add one of my own.

If you’re blogging to a schedule (you should be, if you’re treating your blog as a business) the time for your next article will often come around when you’re feeling uninspired.

You’re left staring at the ceiling, wondering what the heck you’re going to write about.

It happens to most of us – it certainly happens to me.

So here’s what I do when that happens:

I go to the forums.

I’m a member of three pretty active forums and two social sites, all focused on my niche. I participate in them regularly as part of my social marketing activities.

So I log in and do a search on whatever subject I want to write about.

A lot of the articles on this site are about WordPress, so I often go in and do a search on WordPress.

The results usually contain all sorts of questions about working with WordPress.

As soon as I find a question that I can answer I write a blog post about it and, hey presto, I’ve met my publishing schedule.

A good practice to get into if you’re regularly participating in forums is to make a note of questions you’ve answered and keep your answers for future posts.

Right now I have 5 blog post subjects lined up as a result of doing this, so my next few publishing dates are all catered for.

For further ideas on beating writer’s block there are two articles I’ve read recently which are pretty good: find them here (this one contains over 100 suggestions from people in the comments area) and here.

Both are well worth a read.

Share on Facebook

Making an ASS out of U and ME

Martin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:57:09 +0000

I’ve had two reality checks in the last 24 hours:

Firstly, I was helping a friend with something last night when he asked me to explain one of my articles to him (this one).

And I thought I wrote clear, jargon-free posts!

The second was a question someone asked in the Warrior Forum: ‘What is WordPress’?

And I’d been thinking for ages that everyone (at least everyone working on-line) knew what it was.

Both those incidents made me pause and think.

Here’s why:

I write this blog for people who are new or fairly new to working on-line. So to have someone who’s been blogging for a year ask me to explain one of my articles is a rude awakening.

I’m clearly not writing for the people I’m targetting.

Likewise, the person who asked what WordPress is. I’ve never explained that on this site – yet I’m targetting on-line newbies.

So what’s the lesson I learnt?

To get out of my head and into the heads of the people I’m writing for.

It’s too easy to assume a level of knowledge in others, whether you’re writing for them or talking to them.

And people don’t like to tell you they don’t understand what you’re on about for fear of looking dumb.

Which leads to the huge likelihood of a botched communication.

I’d forgotten a great lesson I learnt years ago: don’t assume. If you do, you’re likely to make an:

ASS out of U and ME

So my apologies to everyone who I’ve confused in the past, and I’ll do my best to be clearer going forwards.

And in return, a favour: if I’ve not made my points clear please give me a hard time in the comments section.

Share on Facebook

How To Build a Loyal Customer Base

Martin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:56:32 +0000

I saw a question recently where someone was asking for advice on providing an Internet Marketing consulting service.

It was apparently their first, or one of their first, consulting gigs.

The question was full of vibes about how to protect themselves by making sure their client couldn’t take anything they came up with to another consultant.

It had a protectionist feel about it (self protection, that is).

But I think that’s the wrong approach.

I’m a great believer in ‘give and ye shall receive’.

It’s an approach that’s worked for me, and it’s worked for others too.

With that in mind, I’ve copied below the answer I offered:

Speaking from my own experience, I’d suggest you help this doctor for a minimal fee and use this project (assuming the good Doctor accepts your proposal) to learn the business of providing Internet Marketing consulting.

You can’t just rattle off a few points and be concerned about preventing him from taking your suggestions to his current consultant. That’s the wrong focus.

You should focus on building the relationship.

If you build the relationship with him, so that he trusts your advice and intentions, he won’t take his business (or your ideas) anywhere.

But he may well do so if he doesn’t believe you have his best interests at heart.

My suggestion:

Charge the doctor a minimal fee and focus on winning his confidence.

Demonstrate that you truly know what you’re on about and can provide better value than his current consultant/advisor can.

Work WITH the doctor, treat it as a partnership, learn and understand his business and provide the best advice you can.

Later, when people like the doctor are singing your praises and business is flooding through the door – that’s when you can start wondering whether people are taking your ideas to competitors.

But by then it probably won’t matter that much.

Share on Facebook

How to Write an Optimised Article

Martin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:53:48 +0000

Interesting question in the Warrior Forum today: are WordPress posts treated as pages on-line and should I target individual keywords in posts?

The short answer is ‘yes’ and ‘yes’.

Which led me to thinking about how to write an optimised article.

Here are the steps I follow:

Step 1: Optimising my post content.

The first step I fix in my mind is the point of the post. What’s the key message I want to communicate?

For me, one of the easiest ways of doing that is to look for questions – exactly as I did with this article.

The answer to the question is the message I want to communicate.

Once I’ve got my key message (my destination) I need to map out how I’m going to get there.

That means working out what examples, analogies, sub-headings and arguments I want to make to lead my reader through to my key message.

I often take a piece of paper and write my key message at the bottom. Then I start from the top and jot down the examples and arguments I want to make leading down to the key message.

That helps me to create an effective structure for my post. It’s designed to lead my reader logically through to my key message.

Having got my framework, I then get down to writing the article.

Step 2: Identify my keywords.

Contrary to a lot of advice I’ve read, I don’t identify my keywords up front. I find that constrains my writing.

I follow the process in step 1 and then I identify my keywords – usually just two or three.

I jot them down, and then think about what I’d type into Google if I was searching for what I’d just written about – and I modify the keywords accordingly.

Then I go to the keywords tool in Adwords and type in my first choice keyword. That will bring back a list of related search terms, from which I may pick one or two more, giving me a total of 4 or 5 keywords.

I try to pick one that has a high number of searches but low number of results. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I definitely try to get the best ratio of searches to results I can.

Step 3: Review and edit my post.

Having got my keywords tied down I then review and edit my article.

I leave a gap of at least 3 hours between writing my post and editing it. Sometimes I leave it until the next day.

The reason is that coming back to my article a day later enables me to read it with fresh eyes – as my reader would.

That makes my editing way more effective.

During the editing process I also review my headings and sub headings to see if they can be changed to align more closely with the keywords I selected.

But, most importantly, I do not alter any of the text in the post to accommodate my keywords. To me it’s very important to write for people, not the search engines.

I can always tell a post that’s been written for the search engines within the first paragraph – stuffed with keywords. And I don’t read any further.

In any case, my keywords came from my text so there should be no need to re-align them.

Step 4: Fill out my META description, title and keywords

Once I’ve completed my editing I turn to the META tags.

I use the All-in-one-SEO-pack plugin, which enables me to define the META title, description and keywords in the ‘Add New Post’ screen for each article I write.

The META title is what appears in the search results as the blue link to the site – I make sure this accurately describes what’s on the page and contains my main keyword as close to the beginning as possible.

Remember that the title field as a whole only allows 80 characters, so if the title fields on your blog are set up to include your blog title (e.g. Post Title | Blog Title) keep your post title as short as possible while still making it descriptive.

The description field is what appears under the blue link in the search results. I treat this like an Adwords ad and write a description that amplifies the title and entices people to click through.

Again, I make sure the description contains my first choice keyword

With the description field you have a maximum of 160 characters, and I always keep my descriptions to 150 characters or less.

A short, accurate and enticing description can greatly increase the chances of people clicking through to your site from the search results.

Step 5: Preview and publish my post.

Once I’ve completed the META tags I hit preview and check the article again. Reading the article in a different layout (preview instead of the Add New Post window) often helps to highlight typos or grammar glitches which I’d missed because I’d got too used to the add/edit format.

If I’m happy with the Preview then I publish it.

So to summarise:

One of the key principles I adhere to religiously is to write for people, not the search engines.

That’s why I write my post before selecting the keywords I’ll use. I let the post give me the keywords rather than the other way round.

For maximum search engines effectiveness keep to one subject per post – your key message.

I find the steps I’ve set out above enable me to:

Write content that’s focused on the key message
Find Keywords that truly reflect the article
Generate META tags that also reflect the article

… All of which leads to posts that are well optimised for the search engines.

Share on Facebook

You Can Build it But They’ll Not Necessarily Come

Martin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:57:04 +0000

10 years ago ‘build it and they’ll come’ worked on-line. Today it doesn’t.

Today there are so many web pages out there that any site that hopes to receive visitors has to be positioned well and promoted cleverly.

And the bar is getting higher all the time.

Someone with next to zero technical skills can sign up with Blogger or WordPress.com and have a well optimised site up and published within half an hour.

The barrier to entry is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago, but the bar to being found is a zillion times higher.

So how do you get found on-line quickly today?

Here are the steps I go through to get a new site established on-line:

Step 1: Make sure that each page on your site is structured properly (on-site SEO).

That means creating your META tags, using your H and image alt tags correctly and writing focused content.

Each page on your site should be focused on a specific subject.

There are lots articles that talk about optimising a page for certain keywords. When I first read things like that I felt intimidated. It all sounded too technical and complex.

But if you focus each page on your site on one specific subject it will automatically become optimised for its keywords.

For example, if your site is about web design services and one of the services you offer is WordPress installations and maintenance, then you need to use one page to talk about your WordPress services, and only your WordPress services.

As long as you do that, the fact that you’re only talking about WordPress on that page will automatically result in it being optimised for the keyword ‘WordPress’.

There are some steps you need to add manually:

Make sure ‘WordPress’ figures in your heading and sub headings.

And include ‘WordPress’ in your META title, description and keyword tags.

As long as you do that then, hey presto – your page will be optimised for the keyword ‘WordPress’.

So the message is: keep each page focused on one subject, and make sure your keyword figures in your title, description and keywords META tags.

Step 2: Create a Sitemap and submit it to the search engines.

There are lots of places on-line where you can create an XML sitemap (for the search engines) for free. It will take you no more than 10 minutes, unless you’ve created a huge site.

So create your sitemap, save the sitemap.xml file and upload it to the root directory of your new website

Then submit it to the search engines.

This does not mean using one of those submission services that ‘blasts’ your site to thousands of search engines. That’s a sure way to death on-line.

You only need to submit your site to 3, maximum 4 search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

So be sure you do so manually – don’t use a submission service!

The easiest of all is Google. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster’s Tools account get one. It’s free and, as long as you have a Google account, all you have to do is add it to your services.

When you’ve got Google Webmaster’s Tools set up you need to add and verify your site. Unusually for Google, this is a reasonably intuitive process.

They’ll give you a verification code that you need to put on your site. You can do this in two ways:

By adding a META tag (which Google will give you) to your index page
By creating a blank HTML file using the code they give you as the filename (with the extension .html).

Once you’ve uploaded the file (either the index.html file with the extra META tag or the new HTML file) you select whichever method you’ve chosen from the drop down menu, click ‘Verify’ and, as long as Google finds the code, you’ll be verified in about 5 seconds.

Then you need to submit your site map – which is simply a case of adding the URL of your sitemap (for example http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) to a field on the sitemap page and clicking ’submit’.

That entire process will take you around 10 – 15 minutes. It will then take Google anything up to 24 hours to download your sitemap.

Indexing your site (so that it appears in search results) will, though, take them a lot longer. This is the process of crawling your entire site (not just your sitemap) and adding what it finds to its cache.

But once you’ve gone through those steps all you need to do is wait – everything else will happen in Google’s time.

Step 3: Let the bookmarking and social sites know your new site is there.

Be careful here because some sites (like Digg and Newsvine) don’t like you promoting your own stuff exclusively. So this works well when you promote your new site on social sites where you’re active.

For example I’m active on Twitter, so promoting a new site there is effective for me. I’m not active on Digg, so promoting it there would not work.

One site that I find very useful is OnlyWire. This is a site where you can add your login details for up to around 30 bookmarking and social sites.

Once that’s set up you only need to bookmark a page on OnlyWire and OW will automatically add your page to all the social and bookmarking sites you’ve set up in your profile.

So when I’ve put up a new site, I’ll pick a page and bookmark it on OnlyWire. The OnlyWire bookmarking page gives you options to add tags and your own comments, and these are passed forward to the social sites you’ve set up.

On a side note, this works particularly well with Delicious because you can set up an automatic distribution from Delicious to your blog of the bookmarks you make.

So my process goes like this: I bookmark a page with OnlyWire and add my own comments in the comments section.

OnlyWire distributes that bookmark to Delicious (among others) and Delicious then distributes that bookmark (along with my additional comments) to one of my blogs.

That creates a new blog post.

This is the only way that I’ll use an ‘automated’ process to create blog posts. It’s not really automated because I am actually writing the post myself (by adding my own comments in the OnlyWire comments area). I’m just submitting it via OnlyWire and Delicious.

If you haven’t looked into OnlyWire you should.

Step 4: Consider a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign

On some of my new sites I set up a small PPC campaign to kick start some traffic.

As soon as I’m getting as much traffic from the natural search results and other non-paid sources as I am from PPC, I cut the PPC campaign.

PPC is a very quick way of getting targetted visitors to your site quickly, but be careful: it can be hugely expensive if you set it up wrong.

Step 5: Create as many links to your site as you can.

If you have other sites (blogs, Squidoo lenses, HubPages or similar) link to your new site from them.

Write a blog article introducing your new site (as long as the content would be relevant to your readers).

If you don’t have other sites you should create some. The bigger the on-line footprint you can get the better, and adding a new site to an existing network of sites will get it noticed more quickly than setting one up in the middle of nowhere.

OK – so those are the steps I go through to get a new site noticed as quickly as possible.

What steps do you use?

Share on Facebook

Why Don’t My Comments Get Approved?

Martin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:39:48 +0000

I saw an interesting question in a forum this week: Why don’t the comments I leave on blogs get approved?

I can only speak for myself, but here are some of my thoughts, for what they’re worth:

I get a lot of comments that are clearly there just for the link. I mean screamingly, obviously just for the link.

They don’t add any value to the article at all and, 99.9% of the time, the sites that they link back to are either biz opp sign up pages or shopping cart sites.

Depending on the content of the comment, I either delete it or mark it as spam.

I make it clear in my About page that, although I have a pretty liberal comment approval policy, I have zero tolerance for comments that are there just for the link.

My site is my place. I have no obligation to approve comments. Any comments.

But, as I make clear in my About page, if a comment adds to the conversation and clearly has thought and insight behind it, it will be approved.

And, BTW, I don’t have a lot of comments on this blog. Which is absolutely fine by me. I’d rather have one valuable comment on a post than 10 pointless ones.

Looked at from the other side, I don’t comment on a lot of blogs.

But those that I do comment on are ones where I’ve spent some time and where I’ve developed a feel for the blog and its followers.

I do that before I start making comments.

That enables me to get to ‘know’ the community a little bit and to get a sense of what’s going on.

It’s no different from joining a new forum – I follow the same approach. I spend some time looking around and getting a sense of the culture of the place before jumping in with comments.

Nothing wrong with using Comment Kahuna and other tools like that to find blogs in your niche. But my suggestion would be that, once you find relevant blogs, you spend some time finding out the lay of the land before making comments.

And, when you do make comments, be sure they add value to the conversation – meaning add some new information, or a different view point.

Think of a comment as a blog post. On a couple of articles on this site there’s more and better information in the comments than there is in the original article.

So there’s no reason why you couldn’t turn a good quality comment into a blog post.

Do that, and link back to the blog you made the original comment on, and you’re starting to build a relationship with that blogger.

Then your comments will be approved – pretty much every time.

Share on Facebook

How to Set Up The Google XML Sitemap Generator

Martin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:50:22 +0000

Many thanks to Jake Hyten for asking this question: how to set up the Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin.

Thanks for your question, Jake – and the steps follow with the greatest of pleasure

Firstly, why would you want to install the Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin?

Because it creates a sitemap for the Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask search engines, automatically re-builds it whenever you write or edit a post and pings those 4 search engines as soon as you publish it.

Under estimate the value of that at your peril!

All your sites should have XML compliant site maps because they help the search engines work out what it’s about. And they can’t send you traffic if they don’t know that!

But a normal static sitemap that you can create at any number of places on-line needs to be updated manually every time you add or remove a page.

A bit of a pain.

The Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin does everything automatically. A huge time saver.

Further, if your blog’s in a sub-directory you can locate your Sitemap Generator in the root folder and have it generate a sitemap for your entire site – not just your blog.

That’s really cool.

So here’s how to set it up

Step 1: Click on the XML-Sitemap link in the Settings section of your menu.

You’ll see this screen:

The top section (above Basic Options) just gives you key information about the last time your site map was built. Unless you’ve initiated a manual build, this will be the time of the last post you published.

Step 2: Set some initial options in the Basic Options section.

I normally check all of the options except ‘enable manual site building via GET request’. This option enables you to manually initiate a sitemap build remotely – via a mobile browser or PDA for example.

I don’t blog by email or use desktop applications to create new posts, so I don’t have any need for this functionality.

However, if you do use desktop applications to update your blog then checking this option will enable you to access and rebuild your sitemap manually, and remotely. The auto rebuild of your sitemap doesn’t always happen when you post with desktop applications.

In order for the plugin to notify Yahoo whenever you update your blog you’ll need to get an application ID from Yahoo.

This is very straightforward: clicking the link underneath the box for your application ID will take you to a Yahoo sign in page, and logging in to your Yahoo account will take you to the application account set up page.

Fill out the fields on that page. If your blog is in a sub-directory be sure to enter its full URL (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/blog) . Ignore the check boxes at the bottom (they’re greyed out anyway) and click ‘Continue’.

The next screen will display your application ID key. Copy it, go back to the basic options section and paste it into the field provided.

The Advanced Options are all about improving the efficiency with which the plugin operates – by increasing memory, limiting the time it’s allowed to take to re-build the sitemap or limiting the number of posts to be included.

Unless you’re experiencing problems with your sitemap taking too long to re-build itself after publishing a post, you should not normally need to touch any of these.

Step 3: Additional Pages.

If your blog is in a sub-directory and you want the XML Sitemap to include other (non WordPress) pages from your site, then you should add the address of your root or other directory in this section.

Click the ‘Add New Page’ link at the bottom of the section and enter the details.

You’ll also need to move your sitemap.xml file to the directory you’ve specified (covered in the next section).

Step 4: Set the post priority calculation method (see 2 in the image above).

Prioritisation is a way of directing the robots to the most important pages on your site.

I do not use automatic prioritisation, so I check the top radio button.

Automatic prioritisation frequently results in the index page of your blog (the starting page) getting the highest priority and all the others getting the same priority just below it.

I prefer more granularity and I also prefer my posts to have a higher priority than my home page. This is because I take care to optimise each of my posts, so giving them a higher priority here makes the best use of the optimisation I’ve done.

I also like to raise the priority of my static pages.

For some strange reason the actual setting of priorities in the plugin is done at the bottom of the page rather than here, so I’ll come back to that later with a screen shot

Step 5: Define the location of your sitemap file.

On the site from which these screen shots come, WordPress is installed in the root directory and there are no other files or pages in the domain. Therefore I’ve just accepted the default location setting.

On another of my sites, though, WordPress is in a sub-directory and on that site I’ve moved the sitemap file to the root directory so I can have it map all the pages on that domain.

If you do that you need to specify both the path to the sitemap file and the URL of the sitemap file. The plugin will suggest both elements – see the examples above – just edit them as necessary.

(I’ve blacked out the actual paths for my sitemap in the image above, but where the blacked out bits are the plugin will suggest the path based on your actual server set up and sitemap location).

Step 6: Sitemap content (second section in the image above)

In this section you can specify what should be included in your sitemap.

Removing unnecessary content reduces the sitemap build time during your post publishing process, and that will speed up the publishing of your new articles.

I’ve excluded the ‘following pages of multi-page posts’, ‘archives’ and ‘author’ pages.

Archives and author pages because the content of these pages is already indexed in posts and static pages, and following pages of multi-page posts because it’s un-necessary.

Step 7: Excluded items.

This section allows you to exclude categories from your sitemap.

Used along with the noindex meta tag, this is a way of protecting categories that you want to keep private or restricted to selected viewers.

If you don’t want posts in a specific category to turn up in search results you can check the category here.

Likewise, if you want to protect specific posts list their IDs in the box at the bottom.

To increase the protection of posts you want to keep private you should also specify ‘noindex’ in the ‘Robots’ meta tag for each post or page you want to protect.

Step 8: Change frequencies

The second item in the image above allows you to tell the robots how often specific pages are likely to change on your site.

The site I’ve taken these shots from is set up with a static page as the start (Home) page, so I’ve set the home page to a weekly update while my posts are set to daily update.

If your blog is set up as a blog – i.e. where your home page reflects your most recent posts – then you should set the home page and the posts update frequency to the same.

For the rest you can see the frequencies I’ve selected – you’re welcome to use the same or vary them depending on how you operate your blog.

Step 9: Priorities

This is the section I referred to earlier – it’s where you can set your priorities if you choose not to use automatic prioritisation.

In this section I’ve set the highest priority to both posts and pages. As I mentioned earlier I optimise those every time I publish a new one, so giving them a higher priority here helps to make the most of that optimisation work.

My Home page in this image is set at a slightly lower priority than my posts and pages because of the way I’ve set up this site, using a static page as the start page.

On my other WordPress site, which is set up as a traditional blog, I’ve set my home page at the highest priority. This is because the Home page will change every time I write a new post.

For the rest of the elements you can see that I’ve set tags and category pages much lower and archives lower still.

These are all just other ways of looking at the same data on your site and, having set high priorities for pages and posts and not excluded any elements from the sitemap, I’ve got everything covered in the most efficient way possible.

OK, so that’s how I set up my Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin. How do you set yours up? Leave a comment and let us know.

Share on Facebook