Shameless Advertising

Not all Traffic Is the Same - Why Spamming Makes No Sense.

I recently Stumbled on a really useless spamming technique that really had me scratching my head, wondering why people would even bother doing something this stupid.

It basically involved using MySpace and an automatic friender. Basically you’d open up a profile, then use this specific program to add anyone and everyone you could to the friends list. Then you send out a bulletin with links to your website.

I don’t understand why anyone would think this was a good idea. First off, it is a form of spamming. Ignoring any questions of morality, you would be booted from MySpace and depending on your ISP and locality, you could have your account cancelled at your internet provider and/or be prosecuted.

Secondly, while many of the “friends” may click this link, not all traffic is good traffic. What you would have is a few thousand people loading your front page and then immediately clicking the back button or closing the window. It’s the equivalent of an un-targeted ad campaign. Yes, occasionally someone their junk mail and reads it, but the vast majority of people take one look and then just chuck it, wasting the resources of whoever sent it.

If you are going to spend time and effort to drive traffic to your site, make sure you are sending targeted traffic to your site. Post an article on a related site. Purchase advertising on a relevant site. Heck, leave comments on blogs where the users will be interested in your site. But don’t just waste time and server resources spamming people.

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This Post Title Sucks

Hey, all you bloggers out there. Are you taking the time to write an attention grabbing post title?

It seems like such an insignificant detail, but it can make a big difference. The post title just doesn’t show up at the top of the post, but it will appear in your RSS feed, on Pingbacks, and on similar links. Do you really think people are going to click on a lackluster post title?

On the other hand, don’t go crazy with the post title and create one that’s attention-grabbing but has nothing to do with the actual post. The additional traffic isn’t going to help you any if it bounces right back out again.

In short, write a creative, attention-grabbing, relevant post title every time.

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Hats Off - BlackHatSEO vs WhiteHatSEO

If you’ve been reading the SEO (search engine optimization) blogs, then you’ve probably come across the “blackhatseo” (black hat seo) or “whitehatseo” (white hat seo). If you’re wondering what hats have to do with your website, then you’re not alone.

The idea of “black hat” vs “white hat” comes from the old spaghetti westerns where the good guy often had a white or light colored hat and clothing and the bad guy had a black or dark colored hat and clothing. This made distinguishing between the good and bad guys easy, even with little characterization.

Make sense yet?

Black hat tactics are things like spamming, cramming unrelated keywords into posts, or creating websites only to link to your other websites. They often feel like “cheating” and the object of most of these tactics is to exploit the algorithms that search engines use. Unfortunately for the saps who use these kinds of schemes, the Google and the other major search engines wise up quickly and penalize sites that use these tactics. If you come across a blog touting an idea that seems “fishy”, it’s probably blackhatseo.

White hat tactics are your usual methods for gaining Page Rank. You won’t feel dirty using these tactics. They include concepts like leaving meaningful comments on blogs and sites, having lots of rich content, and making good use of alt and title tags.

Keep your nose clean and your hat bleached if you want to gain and maintain a good Google Page Rank.

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Website Sin Number One - Infrequent Updates

One of the worst things you can do if you are planning to improve your visitor return rate is to not update your content.

… just ignore the date on the last entry and stay with me here.

Think about it. Do you consistently go back to a website that never updates? I sure don’t, especially not when there’s little content to begin with. You need fresh content to keep your repeat visitors interested and to assure the new visitors that they’re not reading old news.

On the other hand, you don’t want to update for the sake of updating. A bunch of boring articles or uninteresting news posts and people will begin to assume that the updates will continue in that manner.

What I’ve been trying to do lately for some of my other blogs is set up automatic posting. With an article queue, at least I can be assured that something will be updated. Of course this won’t work with a news blog, unless your readers enjoy last week’s news-bites.

Another idea is to just set aside thirty minutes to an hour each week per website for either content writing or general updates. Generally speaking, each of my fandom sites has a particular day when I make sure that any necessary updating is done. (Guess which blog was not on that list *cough*)

With a little work, frequent updating and fresh content can keep visitors returning.

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Making the Most of Your Keywords

For this post, I’m going to assume you understand and have implemented Meta Keywords in the header of your page.

Now then, you’ve put every keyword you could possibly think has some relevance to your site up in the head of your page. You’re all done, right?

Wrong!

You have to put your keywords to good use if you want a good Page Rank. What do I mean? I mean you have to translate those keywords into rich content.

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Page Rank and Linking

There is some confusion among the average webmaster over whether or not linking to other sites will hurt your Google Page Rank. Because a incoming link from another site with a high Page Rank will boost a site’s Page Rank, webmasters fear that by linking to other sites they will “give away” their Page Rank. If you link to another site, will you diminish your own site?

The short answer is: Not Normally.

In fact, it can actually help raise your Page Rank. Linking to other content-rich sites can help raise your Page Rank, if those sites are relevant to your own site. So go ahead and link to your references (not only is this good practice to avoid charges of plagiarism, but it encourages others to do the same for you.) You can even offer “further reading” links without fear of sending your own site into Google oblivion.

Link-Exchanges (where two sites agree to link to one another) also work well when both sites have similar concepts.

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