Jamdo Marketing Blog

By now, you’ve probably figured out that links are the lifeblood of your blog but I still constantly hear the question of how to get backlinks. Getting links pointing to your blog affects everything from search engine spidering through to referral traffic and Google Page Rank. In fact, it’s pretty difficult to understate the importance of links when you are developing a site. I have mentioned a few of these tips before, but I thought it might be time to reiterate what still works.

So where and how do you get links?

There are plenty of ways to get links to your site. It just takes a little work.

Ask

Asking similar themed blogs and sites is going to be your best way of getting high-value one way links from respected websites. Type in your keywords to the search engines and you should find plenty of relevant candidates. Just email the owners and ask them to mention your site to their readers. If you have a reasonable quality site, then you should get a positive response from many of them. Usually positive response rates vary between 20% and 50%. It’s basically a numbers game - the more people you send email to asking for links, then the more links you are likely to get. Don’t forget to follow the ettiquette of emailing bloggers when you do this.

Blog Comments

Commenting on other people’s blogs is also a good way to get backlinks. Many people will have the nofollow tags on their blogs comments, but this doesn’t seem to stop Yahoo. Also many people are starting to realise the futility of the nofollow tag and are ditching it altogether, meaning that they give full Google search engine love to your comment links. Drop relevant comments on people’s blogs on a daily basis and you will get lots of links and a bit of traffic too.

Reciprocal Exchange Sites

There are thousands of people looking to do reciprocal link exchanges with new sites. Look at places like Link Metro to find these other webmasters. Don’t go too crazy with this technique as it is not as good as getting a one-way link, but it can still be worthwhile. Make sure your link partners are using the correct anchor text in their links to you.

Buy Links

Buying links is frowned upon by Google, but it still works. Be sure to buy links from only relevant sites that have a decent page rank and preferably some traffic as well. Again, don’t go too crazy with this as there are plenty of ways to get links for free. You can find people selling text links at the DigitalPoint Forums as well as Text Link Ads.

Social Bookmarking

If you are usining social bookmarking sites such as Simpy, Del.icio.us and Furl then you are building up the backlinks to your site automatically. In fact, it is a good idea to use Only Wire and sign up for all of the services they offer. These links will help your site rank and may even bring you a little traffic if you have good content. The search engines spider social bookmarking sites like crazy so you will get spider activity from this technique very quickly.

Forums

Putting a link in your signature in forums is also a way to get backlinks. Often they are not the greatest in terms of search engine love, but they can still be crawled by the search engines and you will get a lot of people following them, especially if you post in a relevant forum that is busy and you are a little descriptive or inventive with the signature you use. Find good forums over at Big Boards.

Article Distribution

Writing articles is a great way to get one way links. By writing the article yourself, placing a link to your site in it, and then distributing it to article directories and other sites, you are achieving several things. For starters, there’s the backlink itself. Then there is the fact that the link will be on a relevant page because you wrote the content. Then there is the fact that article directories such as iSnare and eZineArticles are used by thousands of people so the chances of your article getting picked up by several sites is pretty good. The more often you submit quality articles, the more quality, one-way backlinks you will get.

Press Releases

Submitting press releases to the major press release sites will get you one-way links to your site and might even get you some press coverage in which case you will get even more links. PR Web is the main site for this, but there are plenty of others that will also publish your release. Now you just have to think of an idea.

A Sneaky Tip

Search engines count links from .edu and .gov sites more than links from other sites with extensions like .com and .info. They regard government and edcational institutions as more trustworthy in whi they link to and therefore afford them “trusted site” status. Now, one sneaky way to get a .edu backlink is to find the casual emplyment service of your local university. List a “casual job” with them for your site. You will have to pay a student for the work they do (university students are decent writers so get them to develop some content or something). But you will now have a one way backlink from a .edu site. If you worded your job description correctly, then it should be a relevant page too! Ofcourse, you will have to find a university that leaves the jobs up on their site, but that shouldnt’ be too difficult.

Guest Blogging

Many blogs are thrilled when somebody offers to write some content for them. So thrilled in fact that the standard payment is generally a free backlink to the author’s site or blog. Take advantage of this and start emailing people asking if they would like you to write an article in return for a backlink. You will also get a good response to an offer like this in any of the webmaster forums.

Testimonials

I haven’t actually used this one myself, but a lot of people will offer testimonials on a product in return for a backlink. Not exactly free of a conflict of interests, but at least they get their backlinks. As long as the testimonial is truthful I don’t see any huge harm in it though. I have seen this most often on pages for ebooks and downloadable programs. So if you buy something, why not offer up a testimonial in return for a link?

Conclusions

I am sure there are a few other ways to get backlinks to your site, but these are the main ones. I know that some people also like submitting to directories (which can’t hurt) but it has never been a real winner for me. If you continue to do the things above, however, you will build a nice collection of backlinks for your site.

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Getting people to visit your blog in the first place take a bit of work. In order to maximise the benefit of that work, getting them to hang around on your blog for longer than just the first page should be one of your goals.

That means making your blog “sticky.”

Stickiness is simply a factor of making your blog more ttractive to visitors as a means to increasing the amount of page views per visitor.

By having people stay on your blog for longer you increase your chances fo being able to turn them into repeat visitors and your also help the profitablity of your blog.

There are quite a few little things that you can do to encourage people to stay longer by making your blog sticky.

1) Content

The most obvious of these is to have compelling content. If you can wow your vsiitors with the first blog entry that they read of yours, then the chances are that they are going to stay around and read a few more. Spending a little extra time making sure you create good content will pay major dividends in the future.

There are a few ways to go about improving your content. Usually its a case of doing good research and writing a comprehensive summary of that. You should also employ good blog writing techniques and make sure that your linking strategy is a major benefit to your readers. Your goal should be to entertain your readers and give them what they were looking for when they arrived. Hoopefully then, they will stick around for more.

2) Similar Stories

People usually start reading a blog post for one reason and one reason alone - interest. Whether that interest is personal, academic or professional they are always looking for something that they think they might find in that blog post. You need to take advantage of that.

The easiest way is to give them more of the same thing. That means showing them similar articles to the one they are reading in the hope that those similar articles might also spark their interest and get them to read them also.

One very popular tool for this is the Related Entries Wordpress plugin (for Wordpress blogs). It will show your visitor a list of similar articles from your blog that they might also enjoy. The list is usually placed at the end of your blog post. This spot is a hotspot for getting a good click through rate so you should use it.

3) Internal Linking Strategy

If you are unable or don’t wish to install that plugin (and even if you do install it), then you should employ a good internal linking strategy. That means linking to your other posts from within the body of your blog post. To make maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that the link anchor text is relevant and explains what the reader can expect to find if they click on the link. Don’t forget to also keep the principals of good blog SEO in mind when you are deciding on your anchor text.

If you want, you can also mention other articles you have written in your concluding paragraph that relate to the current article (with links). If you spell it out for your readers, you will get a good response!

As a further part of your internal linking strategy, you may also wish to highlight popular or posts or posts that you think will grab people’s interest. There are a few ways to do this. You can get a “most popular” posts plugin for wordpress called MostWanted (also require the StatTraq plugin), which assesses the popularity of posts based on how often people view each post. Alternatively you can manually put the links to your posts in a prominent position (Problogger does this well with his best posts in the header of the page). In general, I would favour the second option as it gives you more control and also because your most popular stories often gain popularity throught the search engines for topics that are tangental or unrelated to the theme of your blog.

4) Newsletter

Having some way to bring people back to your blog is good too. A newsletter is probably the obvious way here. You need to put the subscription box in a prominent position and let your readers know about it. Jamdo uses Zookoda. You can set it up to automatically inform your subscribers of new posts so there is minimum input required on your part after the intial setup. It will help you keep people coming back.

Concluding Thoughts

Blog stickiness doesn’t end with these tips. There are literally hundreds of things you can do to keep people on your site. Interactivity such as polls and having a pretty design are a couple that spring to mind that I won’t go into here. But remember to keep testing new things and responding to the behaviour of your audience.

This is a process fo evolution and very few people are able to have a perfect blog straight off the starting block. But if you keep improving things on your blog, your audience will appreciate it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, plugins, zookoda

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If you are not familiar with WikiPedia, then it’s probably something you should explore a little as it can be very useful to your blogging in several ways.

Wikipedia is just a big online encylopedia that anyone can alter and edit. That means it has a massive amount of content and it most probably even has a lot of content on your niche. The search engines also love Wikipedia and certainly people do too.

This presents bloggers with an opportunity.

If you are an expert in your niche (and after a few weeks of writing, you are likely to at least know more than 95% of the population about that topic) then there are many things you can do in conjunction with Wikipedia that will benefit both your blog and the quality of information in your niche. Unfortunately the quality of information on Wikipedia is not always excellent (I have written about this and the pending evolution of Web 3.0 before), but again, this is something that should be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem.

So what are these potential benefits that Wikipedia gives the blogger that I am talking about?

Ideas

If you are struggling to come up with ideas, then Wikipedia can be a great resource. I am not so much talking about what Wikipedia says as what it doesn’t say that presents an opportunity for you. If you are familiar with a particular topic, then head over to Wikipedia and see what it says about that topic. If you think that the entry is lacking, then write a blog about what is missing.

Also look at what other pages the entry is linking to (within Wikipedia). These other pages may have missing information that will give you an idea for a blog post. Get to it and write! In fact, I have found a lot fo entries in Wikipedia that are very much underdone. In fact, the only topics that seem to be at all comprehensive are the ones about technology and the internet. Most other topics have heaps of room for improvement.

By simply seeing what is left out of Wikipedia, you will get ideas for your own writing. Moreover, most of the ideas that you get will fall under the banner of evergreen content which means you will be writing reference material that will be useful for longer than a week or two.

Also don’t forget to check out the list of links at the bottom of the relevant entries. They will usually introduce you to a stack of useful sites in your area. You will be able to add the conversations that they have started and contact other web masters in your niche.

Links

As I mentioned, the search engines love Wikipedia and you will also notice that a lot of their internal pages have very solid Google PR.  You will also remember that anyone is allowed to edit the pages. You therefore have an opportunity to get a one way link from a highly relevant page with good PR to your new relevant, well written and well researched blog post. I have put that in bold italics because it is imperative that you add something worthwhile to the pool of information.

Irrelevant links to highly commercialised web pages will be deleted by the community very quickly. In fact, you may even have your link deleted if you have adsense on your page though I have never had a link deleted (though I have always linked only to quality content).

Now, I certainly do NOT recommend spamming Wikipedia with a bunch of new links in a short period of time, nor linking to content that doesn’t add any information to the subject. You will get a bad reputation on Wikipedia and they are very good at seeing who is altering which pages on the site.

External Links

As you know, the search engine algorythms take into account the links on your blog to other pages. If you want to put links in your own posts, then the relevant page of Wikipedia is a good one to consider. Linking out to reputable sites with relevant content will give a nice little boost to your own blog’s SEO.

Concluding Thoughts

Wikipedia is a useful tool in your arsenal. I certainly don’t recommend spamming it with links or interfering with your competitor’s links as some others do, but if you use it in a constructive manner, then you can get a win-win scenario.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, blogging, web 2.0, web 3.0, linking, seo

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There’s alwys a lot of talk around web master forums like Sitepoint and Digitalpoint by people who are having trouble getting their new sites or blogs indexed by the search engines.

The trouble that many people have had with getting indexed has led to rumours that Google will leave you out of the search engine results for up to a year - a phenomenon otherwise known as the Google Sandbox.

But that is a myth.

Getting a new site indexed really isn’t that hard - you just need to give the search engines what they want. Figuring out what they want isn’t that difficult either - you just need to think of it from their point of view.

Submitting Your Site - I have never ever submitted a site to a search engine by hand. It never seems to work and there are much quicker ways of getting indexed than this method. I don’t even know the submission URLs for submitting new sites and blogs to the search engines. Don’t bother.

Links - Search engines love links. It’s the main way that they find new and unknown material. Getting links pointing to your site is the primary way that you are going to get it listed in the quickest possible time. For a new blog, this means you need to do a few things. You should start by bookmarking your new stories at social bookmarking sites like http://del.icio.us and http://reddit.com cos they will give you a few incoming links (the search engines love those types of sites). You should consider getting an account at http://OnlyWire.com which will let you bookmark a whole bunch of sites at the same time. These links will get the search engines spiders visiting your site quite quickly. They won’t get your site indexed quickly by themselves, but they won’t hurt either.

You will also want to email other bloggers in your niche and ask them to link to you. Links from well established relevant sites with a high Google Page Rank will be your BEST chance of getting indexed by the search engines in the shortest possible time. Google especially will know if you are getting relevant links because their algorythm takes into account the keywords on the pages that link to you. If you get a link from pages with irrelevant keywords then the benefit will not be as good. These links will help show the search engine that you have useful content (thats why these blogs and sites would link to you!) Now you just need one more piece to the puzzle.

Content - Original content will be the final key to getting your site indexed quickly. If you are using borrowed or scraped content, the search engines will see it as such and they won’t bother indexing you too quickly. If your content is original and preferably well optimised, then they will be falling over themselves to get your pages into their result as soon as possible.

The search engines want to offer their users high quality content that many people find useful. They measure that by how your peers treat you (by linking to you) and by the originality of your content.

Give the search engines what they want and you will get indexed quickly.

I managed it in 13 days with a slightly disorganised launch for a new blog. I am sure by offering lots of original content and geting lots of incoming links from highly relevant, quality sites, you can beat the 13 day mark.

Technorati Tags: blogs, seo, Google, Yahoo, search engines, sandbox, serps

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I recently had the pleasure of taking posession of a new computer and once my excitement had died down at not having to tolerate my old pile of junk any longer, I realised I now had the task of setting things up again, so that I had all the tools at my disposal for blogging.

Now, I like things to go smoothly and easily. If I find a piece of software that is even a slight improvement, I will dump my existing setup like a hot potato. But I found, after getting my new computer, that I actrually quite liked the setup I had for browsing and blogging.

And so I went hunting for all of my old software and plugins. This is how I did it and why I wanted to keep each piece of the puzzle the way it was.

Firefox

If you are not using Firefox yet, then you are a fool. It is SO much better than IE that it’s difficult to describe. I love tabbed browsing so that I can switch between web pages and look at another web page while I am waiting for a slow page to load somewhere else. A few other browsers also have tabbed browsing, but at the moment my love affair with Firefox continues. Another reason I like it is because there are a lot of plugins that I like that can be used with Firefox. Get it here.

Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar is a handy little piece of kit to have if you are into stuff like blogging and online marketing. The most handy things on the toolbar are the Page Rank display that will let you know the PR of the page you are currently visiting and also the “info” button that will let you easily search the backlinks and similar sites to the page you are currently on. This is useful in giving you a quick snapshot of your competitor’s sites and even how your own sites are doing in Google. And finding out is very quick. Get the Google toolbar for Firefox here.

Search Status Plugin

This is a great plugin that lets you know the Alexa ranking (and Google PR) for the site you are visiting. One of the downfalls of Firefox is that Alexa has not developed a toolbar specifically for it, but this plugin takes care of that. The Alexa ranking of the site is displayed in teh toolbar at teh bottom of your screen in a status bar (very similar to the Google PR display) and you can find the exact Alexa rank of the page you are visiting by simply scrolling over the icon in your toolbar. While Alexa isn’t super accurate, it is a good indication of popular sites and is therefore once again, handy for spying on the competition or for checking out the progress of your own sites. There is also a handy function to give you various search data from the main search engines regarding the site you are on. That includes backlinks, indexed pages etc etc - again, extremely handy for Geeks like us. Get the Plugin here.

Blogger Web Comments Plugin

This is a neat little plugin that was developed by Glen Murphy of Google. It is a little icon that sits in the browser toolbar at the bootom of your screen and when somebody has blogged about the site you are on, it displays a little “dialog box” icon (or several if there is more than one comment). It is extremely handy for finding out what the blogopshere is saying about a hot news item or your own blog. It works on any page too (not just blogs). A great way to surf in the internet if you are researching a particular niche. It’s only drawback is that at the moment, it only displays blogs powered by blogger or that show up on Google Blog search - it would be really handy if they added Technorati blogs too, but it’s still a great tool.

Performancing for Firefox

I have written enough about PFF on previous occassions for most of you to know what it is, but if you are still not sure there here is a brief rundown. PFF is a blogging tool that allows you to blog straight from your browser. Just click on the little icon that sits in your toolbar at teh bottom of the screen and a blogging platform will pop up. It allows you to drag and drop pics from the web straight into your post or upload them to your own site. You can set it up to post on mutiple blogs too. In fact you can do almost everything and more that most blogging platforms allow you to do. It is awesome and every blogger should use it. Get it over at performancing.com

GreaseMonkey Script for CoComment

If you use CoComment to track your blog conversations (and you should be both contributing to other people’s blogs AND tracking those conversations) then this is a handy little script that you can install to automatically track. It will detect when you are on a blog and will automatically send your comment to CoComment if you make one (don’t worry, it will ask first). It just makes the whole process a lot simpler and quicker. Download it directly here.

Closing Thoughts

These are my “must haves” for blogging. I love them all and think most bloggers would get a lot of value out of them. I strongly encourage you to check them out.

But I am sure there are plenty of other great plugins and free software for us bloggers. If you have any suggestions or favourites, please feel free to leave a comment or link!

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, plugins, firefox, Google

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