Well, not all the points mentioned in my last post were covered (a lot were, but we didn’t get to all of them) however a lot of other great stuff was discussed and (in my humble opinion) the night went really well. The following info may not flow perfectly as I’m trying to recollect some of the more interesting/important things before I go to bed and forget.

Questions started with:

Q. Is it better to get links from relevant websites that relate to my business?
A. Most definitely

Q. Is it better to get links from .edu and .gov domains?
A. Yes, when relevant… but even if not entirely relevant, they’re still very good to have. The reason that these types of links are so well trusted is because most .gov and .edu sites just won’t link-out to anyone.

We discussed linking out to authoritive sites as being a good thing.

The topic of ‘no-follow’ links came-up and if you’re really keen on learning more about this (as well as how to use it to sculpt PageRank, have a look at Matt Cutts’ article (for those of you who don’t know this guy, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Search Spam devision)… now here’s the article: PageRank sculpting. Also, don’t avoid using forums, blogs or other social media sites that use no-follow because even though they may not pass any linkjuice, the content is often syndicated on other sites that DO follow.

For those wanting to know how to view their own PageRank, it was recommended to try downloading Google’s toolbar.

Also using internal links (ie. links to pages within your own site) can be a great way of maximising keyword-rich anchor text.

If you’re going to have a blog, host it on your own site and don’t use externally hosted blog systems like Blogger or Wordpress.com. Also microsites have their place, but if you really want to get the greatest benefit for all your online efforts, keep everything on your own domain.

On the point of blogging – blogs rank far faster than any other standard website content. This is due to a concept called ‘Query Deserves Freshness‘. To take advantage of this you can blog or keep your general website content fresh (although if you’ve got a site that is ranking well with the current content, it’s better to ADD new pages or content instead of just replacing the old stuff).

While obvious paid links should be avoided, some paid links are beneficial such as links from the Yahoo Directory are helpful and Google actually endorses Yahoo’s services in this instance. Another good directory to be listed with is Dmoz, but make sure you choose the right category to list in and be prepared to wait.

For linkbaiting, there are 5 major hooks that are most commonly used:

- resource
- contrary
- attack
- humour
- news

The example Matt used was SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 awards (a prime example of the resource hook plus an additional hook later mentioned – flattery)… and now they have another link to add to their 6000+ links.

To view some of the more influential links to a site, Andy introduced us to Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

Embedding relevant YouTube vids to your site is yet another way to add flavour and if you’re the one who created the vids you can use this as a technique to have the vid appear in the search results. This is when Andy pulled-up the Will It Blend example. On a side-note, when videos and other items like this are blended into the general search results, this is referred to as Google’s Universal Search.

Flash and splash pages should be avoided because the search engines have trouble reading them, they can be slow to load, cannot be viewed on mobile browsers and in many cases (other than looking kinda cool the first time you look at it) they don’t really give any great value to your customers.

The concept of deep linking was mentioned a few times through out the evening but not really clearly defined – so deep linking basically means getting links to your internal pages as well as links to your homepage. While most links you gain will point to your homepage, getting deeper links pointing to your internal pages will have a much greater impact on your overall SEO performance.

P.O.S.T. method should be used if/when you decide to embrace social media:

People – find the right people to connect with (and then actually communicate and connect with them)
Objectives – decide why you want to use social media and what you want to get out of it
Strategy – prepare a plan of how best to connect with the right people in order to achieve your objects
Technology – then determine the best technology and social media networks make this all happen

My explanations for the POST acronym probably aren’t 100% perfect as Matt explained it far better than I could. Matt also went on to discuss how well Dell use social media and their philosophy that there is no traditional marketing anymore, only adapting marketing. Dell’s many twitter accounts were mentioned along with their site: IdeaStorm.

The night was finished with Andy re-enforcing how crucial it is to have great content, Matt saying that as well as inbound links, you should also ensure your site architecture is perfect to get the greatest value from all the inbound links… and I closed the last question about how you shouldn’t trust SEOs that guarantee top rankings.

Overall it was a brilliant night – lots of really great questions were asked and hopefully we answered them adequately.

If you were at the event and believe I overlooked anything, please let me know via the comments.

Networx Panel – Updated Info on ‘How to win links and influence people’

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The rest of this post is a run-down of what we’ve been up to lately and doesn’t contain any proper SEO-related techniques, tips or tricks… so if you’re ok with a few paragraphs of shameless self-promotion poorly masked by what I like to refer to as ‘achievements’ then read on … Otherwise check-back in a week or two when the usual blogging should resume.

A couple of months back we had a guest blog post feature on Canada’s premiere SEO blog – Search Engine People, about Google Trends and Insights for Search – read more here: What’s Hot Google.

We then headed down to Sydney to the best annual Australian search marketing conference / expo – SMX Sydney. Thanks to Kalena, Barry, Lisa and the team at Search Strategies I was fortunate enough to win a free pass by designing a promo shirt for the Search Engine College. You can read more about the two-day conference here, here, here, here and here.

Since then, I’ve been helping the Search Engine College catch-up with a backlog of SEO-related questions on the Ask Kalena blog… launched a fun viral project called Epic Boss Fail and now I’m guest speaking on the topic of link building at a Brisbane Networking event.

If you’re in the Brisbane area, there are still tickets available to attend the networking evening – How to win links and influence people which is happening on Monday night the 22nd of June. You can book online here (and as an added bonus, if you mention the word ‘PurpleCow’ when you register you’ll be able to bring along a friend for free).

As mentioned above, the regular weekly blogging schedule should resume in a week or two, so if you have any ideas or suggestions you’d like to see on here in future posts, please let me know via comments or follow me on Twitter.

Where have we been? Everywhere but here…

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Basically Ben comments on a thread over at WMW which indicates that social media is a waste of time and doesn’t yield a great deal of SEO value.

I both agree and disagree with this.

But before continuing, it’s important to understand what SEO is and what it isn’t.

In previous years SEO was all about doing keyword research, applying a few tweaks to the site and then getting some inbound links and presto, you’d be
ranking at the top.

As the Internet and search engines have evolved, many companies are now starting to use the web more effectively, (many still haven’t, but that’s really a whole nother post) so competing with such sites requires better quality content (and more of it), an intuitive and easy-to-use site navigation, regular updates to keep people coming back and a site that looks reasonably aesthetically pleasing.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t rank well without these things, but it only takes 8 seconds for someone to develop a first impression and if your first impressions aren’t great, then you’re fighting an uphill battle to convert that visitor into a sale.

As a result of this, some SEOs started encouraging clients to improve their site’s design, layout, content etc. because all of this would make for better conversions at
the end of the day. This extended the craft of SEO into online usability, which technically isn’t SEO, but it helps immensely with the whole process.

The same comment can then be applied to marketers who focus on viral material or linkbait. These types of promotions, if done well, can drive substantial traffic and work wonders for (or destroy) a brand, as well as attracting links in the process. Once again, not technically SEO, but also a useful means of gaining traffic with the added bonus of some links. Now, one could then go on to argue about the SEO benefit gained from such links, and I’ll agree that some social media links aren’t particularly helpful in passing link juice (take blog comments, twitter, wikipedia and everything else that utilises the ‘nofollow’ attribute). But the goal for a viral campaign is really more about gaining awareness on a global scale, so it really can’t be measured using the same metrics as conventional old-school SEO.

Which leads me to using social media for business purposes or to help promote a particular site or product. This also isn’t specifically SEO, and can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. The whole purpose of social media is to share and connect with others – to be social. The challenging part then becomes – how does one be social, while still trying to promote a website?

Blogging is a great way to share and demonstrate your knowledge in a certain area. Take this SEO blog – I try and discuss various SEO related topics that I think people might be interested in and share tips and information that they can help people improve their rankings. By sharing this information, I’m hoping it also shows I have a reasonable knowledge of the industry and if those readers find the SEO process too challenging, they’ll hopefully employ my services to help them out.

The key is to provide information that is interesting and helpful and written with passion. If you can achieve this, there is certainly a benefit to start blogging. The same then applies to other social media tools.

Take Twitter for example – if you only share information like “making a cup of coffee” or “replying to some emails”… it isn’t particularly engaging, nor does it give anyone a reason to follow you. But if you were sharing info about your industry by making comments like “just read this great article about….” or “new legislation for… what does everyone think” etc. You’ve just turned the tool into another platform where you can demonstrate your knowledge while connecting with others who also share a similar interest.

The problem is that most businesses and website owners will do one of three things with social media:

• they’ll create profiles on all the latest social sites and then think “well, that’s social media taken care of… hey, why aren’t I getting any traffic from it?”
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account but forget that they created it for business purposes and start making posts about the weather or what they had for breakfast that morning… and then wonder why it isn’t helping them with their branding
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account and spam the crap out of it by pushing their brand and website to anyone and everyone which just pisses people off

So, to sum-up, I think that all forms of online marketing (be it organic SEO, viral, social media, pay-per-click etc. etc.) all has its place and can be beneficial if used properly. Not all of these are technically SEO, but still important when marketing in the ever-changing online world.

Most importantly though, goals need to be set for each marketing method and different metrics need to be applied to measure the performance of each campaign. If you try and track the performance of social media using SEO metrics, you’ll find that it doesn’t yield brilliant results – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile – it simply means that social media is different to old-school organic SEO and subsequently can’t be measured in the same way.

The blurred line between what is SEO and what isn’t

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Bo was researching the experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger for her Honours Thesis and asked if I’d be willing to assist by providing some information and feedback based on my blogging knowledge and experience.

Being the search geek that I am, I was delighted to help.

When talking with Bo (via email) she pointed-out that there has always been an ‘unofficial’ assumption, backed-up by a lot of the literature on blogging, that blog readers are bloggers and vice versa.

So instead of focusing on this, she was going to take a slightly different approach – conducting research into the kinds of relationships that are developed when the readers of blogs do not maintain a blog themselves and do not know their blogger of choice offline.

With that in mind, what kinds of personal investments do these readers have with their favourite blog/blogger.

There were some rather interesting findings, outlined in the thesis abstract below:

As a relatively new type of communicative medium, blogs have become a popular platform for a diverse range of people and purposes. Although much research has been conducted on the practice of blogging from the blogger’s perspective and the impact that blogging has had upon mainstream media, there has been a comparatively smaller interest in blog readers.

The research that has focused on the blog reader has undertaken a general inquiry into why readers read particular blogs. With the hope of adding to this body of knowledge, this research sets out to explore the relationship between blog readers and their blogger of choice and the extent to which parasocial theory can be applied in the interpretation of such a relationship.

In order to carry out such research aims, I conducted an open-ended, email-based qualitative survey that explored the key themes of history and regularity of use, perceptions of reader-blogger relationships, attraction, identification and modes of interaction. Survey responses were then coded and thematically categorised, using words, phrases and whole sentences as the unit of analysis.

The findings suggest that the way blog readers approach and perceive particular bloggers is largely determined by the type of blog that is published. This was most apparent when comparing how readers of science and political blogs make connections with the blogger to how readers of personal blogs approach the blogger.

Therefore, I propose that parasocial theory is most useful when conceptualised in terms of the types of parasociality that different blog types are associated with.

Another salient theme to emerge from this research was the tendency for blog readers to place an importance on the interaction between fellow readers despite refraining from such interaction themselves. In addition, blog readers generally expressed a limited desire for offline interaction with the blogger.

For those unfamiliar with parasocial theory, it is a scientific concept to describe a particular type of one-sided relationship, where one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not. The most common form of such relationships are those shared between celebrities and audience or fans (the fans feel they intimately know the celebrity, however the celebrity knows very little, if anything, about their individual fans).

The core difference between what is commonly considered a parasocial relationship (eg. a fan and a celebrity) and the relationship shared between bloggers and their non-blogging readers is that blog readers don’t have great aspirations to meet the blogger in person. This is more closely related to the relationship seen between an author and their readers.

For instance, a novel may have sold over a million copies and many of those readers will continue to purchase new work released by that author, but only a small percentage of that audience show an interest in meeting face-to-face.

The only other point I wanted to make in reference to Bo’s findings (and this is purely from my own experience and observation), is that bloggers in the search optimisation and search marketing industries do (generally) show a genuine interest in connecting with their readers.

This could be because many of us are social media enthusiasts, or simply appreciate that our whole discipline is based on continually changing algorithms, so the more connections we have, the more people we liaise with, means the more information we can use to establish our SEO hypothesis.

So to further this research started by Bo, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding the relationships shared between bloggers and readers.

Experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger

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Even though we’re not huge, I like to think that this SiteMost SEO Blog is reasonably successful (well at least by my performance indicators it is). Each month we continuing to attract new subscribers (sure it’s slow, but people continue to signup), traffic to the site is good, our readers are starting to add the odd comment or two and our posts occasionally end-up on social media sites such as Sphinn, StumbleUpon and one even made it onto Digg.

So how does one achieve this success?

Before you can measure the ’success’ of something, you need to first identify what you define as ’successful’. What is important to you, what are your goals, what milestones do you have etc. etc. Here’s some stuff that might help:

• Blog Metrics – Six recommendations for measuring your success
• Blog analytics tools
• The 7 most important metrics for Bloggers
• Using stats and goal tracking for your blog

Once you work-out what’s important to you (and your blog) and more importantly, how you’ll measure these goals over time – the next step is to make sure your blog is Search Engine ready.

Fortunately blogging platforms such as WordPress are designed with a good initial search architecture, but if you’d like to take things a little further, Aaron Wall’s Bloggers Guide to SEO is a great start if you’re new to the Search Optimisation game.

There are also plenty of plugins and widgets that you can add to your blog to improve your SEO performance. One of the best is the All in One SEO Pack and for others, I’d suggest having a look at: Graywolf’s post about SEO Plugins for Wordpress and sign-up for Joost’s SEO Plugin’s Mailing List for ongoing updates on the latest and greatest plugins to try.

So now you have a SEO ready blog, your goals are clearly defined and you’ll know how to track the performance… the next step is making sure you have content that will be appealing to the broader community.

Fortunately Copyblogger has already compiled a brilliant list about creating content that attracts links and drives traffic in the social media environment.

Also on the topic of blog promotion, Problogger explains how he’d promote his blog if he were starting again. Darren has also recently compiled a list of great guest-posts from other bloggers on each of their blogging tipping-points as well as sharing his own.

So there’s a bunch of resources on what others have done. But what have we done?

Well, we’ve applied most of the above techniques, but here are a specific list of things that have been most successful for SiteMost:

• Back in December 2007 our blog was featured in a review by Problogger. This caused a spike in our subscriber numbers (many of which have remained loyal readers).
• After having a number of our articles appear in the Daily SearchCap, we made it onto the blogroll of Search Engine Land.
• Guest posting, submitting articles and being actively involved in communities such as SEOmoz and Sphinn also gained some exposure and created some great contacts.
• Interacting with other SEOs through social media sites like StumbleUpon and using tools like Twitter has also been an integral part of our growth. On the topic of Twitter, here’s 35 Twitter tips from other Twitter users.
• Meeting local blogger in offline social environments has also been really enjoyable and has helped reinforce our authority in the local community. This is something that many bloggers overlook. Just because blogging is an online activity doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and take the social aspects offline and interact with other like-minded people face-to-face.

I find that I read a lot, but when things are busy and I don’t have much time, I tend to move onto the next post and don’t add any feedback. So my next challenge is to start to comment a lot more on other blogs and start to interact a lot more with the global community.

The important thing to remember is that when you start a blog, it isn’t about getting thousands of new readers and so much traffic that your host panics everytime you publish a new post. If you start with 5 regular readers which increases to 10 the following month – you’ve just doubled your traffic!

Take it slow, clearly define your goals, measure the things you do to see what works and what doesn’t (every blog is different and what works for one, may not work for another) but most importantly – have fun. I remember looking through one of my Mum’s old cookbooks and at the end of each recipe, the final step would always be ‘Enjoy’.

There’s no point cooking if you aren’t going to enjoy the food and there’s no point blogging if you aren’t going to enjoy connecting with others through the power of text.

How to improve your blog’s performance

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Since then, over 52328 words have been written attracting 127 comments, about 150 subscribers and over 45,000 visits to the site.

In the grand scheme of things, these stats are pretty insignificant when compared with many of the other blogs I read – but I’m pretty happy with the results and it will be interesting to see how things continue to grow over the next 12 months.

Over the last year I’ve met some incredible people (some in person, some through social media channels) and the wealth of knowledge I’ve gained from each and every one of these people has been priceless.

Although the term ‘friend’ is used quite loosely on many social networking sites, I believe I have made some genuine friendships as a direct result of blogging… and to me, this has been far more fulfilling than any of the statistics above.

To help start the next 12 months off on the ‘right foot’ I’d love your feedback on what you’ve liked, disliked and what you’d like to see here in the years to come.

Happy Birthday SiteMost Blog

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There are many others, but these are just some of the ways that people have shared ideas and left their mark on society.

Why do people do this?

It’s human nature to want to tell your story – to be immortalised through words or images and blogging is simply the 21st century’s way of doing this.

I started a personal blog a couple of years ago because I wanted to keep in touch with friends overseas but could never find the time to email each of them… and I didn’t want to spam them with generic emails, but I still wanted to keep in contact. When they would call me and ask what I had been up to, on the spur of the moment, I could never recall half the stuff I had done recently.

So I started a blog.

Blogging helps me take note of the everyday stuff that would otherwise go unnoted. It helps me share ideas directly after they happen so that the emotions that go with the recent event shine through in my writing.

Although some people wouldn’t want to sit-down and spend an hour writing about random happenings. Perhaps you don’t think that anything interesting enough happens in your life to justify a full blog post. Some people would rather just jot down a few thoughts, ideas or snippets of what is currently going on. If this is you, then I’d recommend micro-blogging through Twitter (but be warned, it can be quite addictive).

The other great thing about a blog (be it a full blog on it’s own domain, a blog built-in to one of the many social networking sites or even a microblog on Twitter) is that it can be incredibly stress relieving. If you’ve had a crap day you can always have a rant on your blog and I can guarantee you that afterwards you’ll feel so much better for getting it off your chest.

But who would read it?

I only ever expected a few friends to read my personal blog and maybe a couple of family members and I had no idea how many people would read this corporate blog… but that’s where I was wrong.

A few humorous posts inspired by some funny emails I received, plus the odd story of me doing something stupid (which is a fairly common occurrence) seemed to attract a few odd, long-tail searches. This lead to a few people thinking the content was worthy for a couple of social media sites and before I knew it, I had a bunch of complete strangers regularly checking-out what I had been up to.

This is less likely to happen with a corporate blog, but the concepts are still the same. Once your clients know you have a blog, they are more likely to take a greater interest in your business. It will give your company a voice that will appear to be speaking directly to those readers – and the impact this will have on word-of-mouth traffic (both online and offline) will become noticeable.

There are many other great reasons to have a blog – things like: the search engines indexing the pages faster than any other type of website, it’s probably the easiest way to add fresh content to an existing website, it can attract great long-tail search terms and you’d be amazed at the links you can gain without even trying… but even after all of this, if you’re still not inspired you to start a blog of your own, I’d like to invite my readers can share their blogging advice and success stories, which will hopefully change your mind.

Blogging … a natural evolution

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Plenty of great suggestions and advice were provided by the community, so as my New Years Resolution, I’ll be making many changes and improvements to this blog over the coming weeks.

To keep tabs on the updates and to pay homage to those who offered suggestions (both good and bad) I’ve setup a special ‘Blog Updates‘ page which I’ll update whenever changes are made.

I can’t promise that I’ll make all the changes since some comments contradict others – plus, there’s a couple of pieces of advice that whilst I appreciate, I don’t think I’ll act on.

If anyone has any other advice on how they think I can make the site better, please let me know (but also, please be patient as I’ll be rolling-out the updates progressively… so it won’t happen overnight – but it will happen).

Thanks again to everyone who contributed and happy New Year!

SiteMost’s New Years Resolution

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The prospect of being mentioned on such a reputable site, the quality of the inbound link from ProBlogger, the additional traffic (which I hoped to convert into subscribers) plus the promise of some solid blogging advice all seemed fantastic… then it hit me.

I’ve just publicly asked a huge group of people to tell me what they really think of my site (which is in some respects a reflection of me)… I was effectively asking people to criticize me.

Fortunately everyone was not only incredibly helpful, but they were also very nice and amongst the constructive criticism, there were also some compliments. Overall, I’m really pleased with the feedback which you can read about here.

Even without making any changes yet, my subscriber numbers have nearly doubled and I expect that to improve even further as I incorporate the various community recommendations over the coming weeks.

I know that it might seem scary asking for this type of feedback, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s been one of the best things I’ve done.

Also, just because the review process is now complete doesn’t mean you should stop giving me feedback. Keep the comments coming and collectively we can make this one of the best blogs around.

Reviewed by the ProBlogger community

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I would always leave assignments to the very last minute and inevitably every imaginable thing would go wrong.

On one such occasion my teacher told me that I should have applied The Six P’s. He then went on to tell me that The Six P’s were: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Whilst this didn’t change my assignment writing habits, the concept of the six P’s has always stuck with me and been applied to many other aspects of my life.

Why am I telling you about an alliteration I learnt at school?

Recently there have been a lot of unplanned things happening in my life. I’ve had some relationship issues, my grandmother passed away and SiteMost has received more SEO inquiries than any other month. I’ve been juggling personal issues whilst still trying to provide my new and existing clients with the high level of service they’ve come to expect.

Something had to give, and in this instance it was my blogging-related tasks.

My Google Reader was busting at the seams with unread items and the usual two or three posts I try and write each week simply haven’t happened.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing, and looking back over the last few weeks, I wish I had of planned ahead.

How can you plan for the unexpected?

Whilst the recent events have been unfortunate, it’s certainly not the last time I’ll ever be faced with unexpected circumstances. The same applies to everyone – I’d love to think that everything will always run smoothly, but the reality is that it won’t and you need to have some planning in place to help you get through such times.

A few months ago Problogger.net did a post about 8 Things to do on your Blog when you’re Sick and a lot of the suggestions can be applied to any blog to help keep things going when times get tough. A few of my favorite’s include:

• Asking your readers for questions or run a poll – This technique has worked well for bloggers like Shoemoney, Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin (to name but a few). If your readership is still fairly limited, running a poll can be just as good.
• Update/re-post an old post or point back to something in your archives – you have to remember that some of your newer readers may not have gone back through your archives and read all your posts, so it can be quite helpful to re-post or link to older items that have been popular in the past.
• Guest posts – having a friend or fellow blogger write a guest post for you can help add some flavor to your blog. Chances are you may even attract some new subscribers from the guest-blogger’s loyal readers.
• Always have some ‘reserve posts’ saved and ready to go – it is always a good idea to have a handful of posts ‘on the go’ at any one time. If you can’t think of something to write or if unexpected issues occur, it’s a lot easier to quickly tidy-up a post you started writing a month or two ago than to come-up with something from scratch (especially when you’re pressed for time or ideas).

So now you have no excuse to be caught by unexpected events – let’s just hope I can follow my own advice.

Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

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