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The most significant challenge that bloggers face is attracting visitors. For new bloggers nothing can be more frustrating than trying to figure out how to get people to see the content that you’ve spent time preparing.
Getting visitors to your blog is possible and quite realistic if you’re willing to put in some effort to get the exposure that you need. If you’re spending hours on blog posts and you feel like that work is being wasted because not enough people are seeing the posts, we’ll take a look at some things that you can do to get the right exposure.
Here are some things that you can do to get your blog posts in front of more people and to get more impact from each post.
With the number of blogs online growing every day, it is increasingly difficult to stand out and achieve success with your blog. In the end, many bloggers that start out with high hopes and expectations wind up deciding that blogging really isn’t worth their time. Those who have some patience and a plan to achieve specific goals with their blog will have a much greater likelihood of long-term success.
In this post we’ll look at 7 things that you should be doing to set yourself up for success and to avoid common pitfalls. The topics covered here should prove to be helpful for bloggers who are just getting started or for those who have been feeling like their efforts haven’t been producing enough results. Here are 7 things that all bloggers should be doing.
There are a lot of different types of blogs out there. Some break news, others provide though-provoking articles or commentary, and there are always corporate blogs, and the list could go on. For example, in the design industry there are several different blog types, including: news, tutorials, inspiration (lists/showcases), in-depth articles. Of course, most blogs publish posts that overlap into a few different types, but in general an established blog will have developed some sort of role that keeps readers coming back.
NY Times writer David Segal wrote a great article about JC Penney attempt to ‘’cheat’’ Google and increase their organic rankings. As we know, Google’s goal is to search every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant sites that match the query you typed in. But what is the cost of being a relevant website and ranking number one for numerous keywords? JC Penney unfortunately found out the cost of trying to fool Google into instant rankings across the board. These sorts of tactics, known as “Black Hat” SEO, comes with consequences (and is of course not what we recommend). This article brings up the issue of using Black Hat versus White Hat SEO.
JC Penney hired an Internet Marketing firm helped them improve their website rankings. The firm was able to get Penney’s website ranking to number one for terms you wouldn’t necessarily consider JC Penney to be the genuine best result for. The way they achieved this seemingly incredible feat was by linking hundreds upon hundreds of websites to jcpenney.com. This strategy is typically considered “black hat” and their quick rise to power alerted some analysts that something could be wrong.
Part of Google’s ranking system revolves around the number and quality of links to a site, essentially measuring its popularity. Google looked into some of the back links the company was using to boost its search rankings. The clear giveaway was that their webpages received links from irrelevant sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, diamond drills, tiles, and real estate. Upon further review, most of the sites that linked to them were all but abandoned. Google refers to these tactics as “link schemes.” Even though the abandoned sites had nothing to do with Penney products, with enough of them, they help. Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s Webspam team commented on the issue saying, “Am I happy this happened? Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”
So what did this marketing firm cost JC Penney? To quote David Segal, “The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.” Google’s corrective action resulted in essentially demoting the company. Within a few hours, JC Penney’s rankings tanked. This isn’t the first time a large company has been demoted by Google. BMW of Germany had their site was taken down for using doorway pages, or in other words, pages that users will never see, but attract search engine spiders like a bear to honey.
Holmes: On the Case for a Good Back Link
Inbound links or back linking is a tricky topic. It’s difficult to write about, can be tedious to implement and there are many gotchas to avoid. Why should I want to tackle this on a Monday morning I ask myself?
The fact is, this area of SEO is still as important as ever and the rules of the game periodically change, as search engines continue their Darwinian evolution right in front of our eyes. I encourage you to take the Sherlock Holmes approach with link building as I help you investigate the evidence, deciphering the good from the bad ways to get links.
I’ll keep it simple by saying that search engines consider a vote for your website, from another one of good authority and relevance one of the prime factors in search engine results.
With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.
For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.
Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.
When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.
Many clients ask their web designers to optimize their website to increase visibility with search engines and to attract more visitors. Some designers and agencies offer specific SEO (search engine optimization) services and others want nothing to do with SEO. Most clients that ask for a search engine optimized website understand very little about what is involved in SEO and what it takes to achieve top rankings for competitive keywords.
Because web design and SEO are closely related, it’s a topic that designers are frequently asked about, but there is often a lot of gray area about what is the responsibility of the designer and what is within the designer’s power. While many clients want the designer to create a website that ranks well and attracts targeted visitors, SEO is really an ongoing process that involves much more than the design and coding of the site. Things like keyword research, content development, and link building are also critical aspects of optimizing a website for search engines, and typically these are all ongoing processes.
Although SEO involves much more than just design, there is still a lot that the designer can do to set the foundation for an optimized website. If the designer creates a search engine-friendly site any future and ongoing SEO efforts will have a greater impact. In my opinion, web design and SEO are separate services, and a designer cannot create a truly optimized website without other pieces to the puzzle. The designer should create a search-friendly site and educate clients on what else will need to be done (such as content development and link building) in order to effectively optimize the site for searches.
In this post we’ll take a detailed look at the subject of web designers and SEO and many of the issues that are involved.
Link building is considered to be an important part of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. Complete link building will help to drive more traffic on your website and will try to place your site amongst the top rankings of the search engine. In the recent days, the SEO professionals follow different types of link building services like one way link, two way link and three way link. Remember that just applying to these services cannot increase the traffic on your website. Simultaneously, if you try to analyze various top ranking sites and organize an operation of link building between the two, then this can work better.
The link building service is not so easy to follow as it seems to be. Also, the linking concept has great impact on making your site famous. Here are some useful tips that can help to attract more people towards your site.
One of the best ways is to search the most targeted words of Google. Get the top sites relating these keywords and get the links of these sites. You can get some more links by analyzing the top ranking sites and try to get them also. In case if you are not able to get the links of the top most sites, then you can also trace the back links of those sites.
You might think why the link building of so much importance. With the help of link building, you can build various other hyperlinks of the top ranking sites. This will be helpful in increasing the page rank of your website. With the increase in the page rank, the traffic towards your site will automatically increase and your site will become more popular in the search engine. When the traffic increases on your site, this means that other websites have started developing trust in your site to share different information. This is liked by the bots which are the computers that perform indexing and ranking of any website. This will drive more traffic towards your site. At the end of the day, every website is interested in gaining money either for donations or for marketing their products or services. If this cycle continues smoothly and with progress, then you can have a huge business online.
You have the option to build the needed backlinks to your site yourself or outsource to a link building service provider who can do the site promotion for you. If you choose to outsource, make sure you perform a background check before hiring a link building service provider.
This is pretty much well known in the webmaster community that we need to invest a lot of time and efforts on link building in order to get higher ranking for our sites. All the leading search engines these days follow the similar policy when it comes to handing over certain ranking. While there are few other variables factored in, link building is measured to be the single biggest and most important criteria in SERP ranking. Now that we know about the backlink requirement, the obvious question comes to mind which is whether one should invest huge amount of time building backlinks to his or her site or should outsourcing to a ink building service provider would be a more viable option?
Answer to the question can vary based on few factors. It is important to understand the techniques and process of link building before one starts a link building campaign. Once you are comfortable with the whole process and tricks, you should then do some research to identify the backlink requirement for your site. You need to do some competitive analysis to see how many backlinks your competitors have for their given ranking.
Link building is a tremendously time intense practice. If you own a site that is not very much competitive, then it is easier for you to build the backlinks yourself as you would not need many. By the way, if you are in a highly competitive market and you discover that your competitors have tons backlinks, then it would be an intelligent decision for you to use a link building service provider to assist you with your link building campaign. Building so much backlinks all by yourself is not only time intense but most of the time quite impossible.
A common question among those that are fairly new to SEO or internet marketing is how to best build links and promote a website that is brand new. Being that the website is new, it will certainly be a bit of an uphill battle at first. But here’s a few tips and strategies to give you a bit of jump start to your link building services and site promotion efforts.
Submit to Directories
While the true value of links from website directories is arguable, there are a few good ones out there that may be more beneficial that others. And there are certainly ones out there that aren’t worth your time. A few that I would consider recommending are dmoz, lii (librarians internet index), business.com, and joeant.
As another option, there are some companies out there that will submit your website to directories for you. The fee ranges from minimal to absurd. But if you’re looking for an easy way to get your site on a lot of directories, you may want to look into such services.
When building links you should always be careful not to represent unnatural link behaviour. Failure to do so may see you link building efforts wasted.
Effective link building is a complex affair and can be an extremely time consuming and laborious task. However quality links are extremely powerful and a constant flow of incoming links is essential for any website hoping to compete in the search engine marketplace.
When building links you should always be careful not to represent unnatural link behaviour. Failure to do so may see you link building efforts wasted. So how do you avoid being flagged as a site that participates in unnatural linking behaviour? Here are a few key pointers you should keep at the forefront of your mind when building links:
Deep Linking Google will give more weight to a site with 500 links all pointing to different pages on a site than it will a site with 750 links all pointing to the homepage. Link exchange programs can be used to acquire high volumes of links in an effort to boost rankings. The traits of a website that participates in such a program are a high percentage of inbound links all pointing to the same destination URL.
Search Engine Optimization
