Top SEO blog posts of 2008!

These are my top blog posts of 2008. I’ve included posts on different subjects to keep it varied and interesting! Have a browse and take in the big SEO stories of 2008. Well the ones I’ve found interesting are here, if you have seen any *really* good ones, add a link in the comments!

SEO Jobs
Richard Baxter’s complete guide to getting a job in SEO is aimed at beginners but some of the information and links will be useful to even the more experienced of SEO’s. It is the most recent and most comprehensive guide on getting an SEO job I’ve seen and beats most of the generic advice you find on recruitment sites. Get a job in SEO!

Conspiracy theories
Consistently good blog with affiliate and black hat advice. I always like looking at the affiliate marketing blogs as they always seem to have good technical tips. This article outlines the incredible breadth of information Google gathers from users. While this is quite a frightening prospect, you can see why Google is such a profitable company, being able to target very specific demographics with relevant adverts is great for marketers and the end user. The high valuation of social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace is mostly down to the huge amount of information they can collect legitimately. Google has its fingers in so many more pies than social networking though, and this is why it will always know a scary amount of information about you, the user!

Usability blog post
This great post from SEOmoz, simply points out that links should look like links. While this might seem like stating the obvious, links have changed appearance a lot with Flash and CSS.Take a look at a hard-line usability website, and you’ll find a site that seemingly, has not been redesigned since 1995. The site makes use of very normal looking links and has always stuck to the blue/purple coloured link system. I’d probably want to run a few multivariate tests to check that any radical colour combinations work for your particular site. Find out how to make a link look like a link!

Affiliate blog post
While this post is from 2006 I only found it earlier this year. It struck me as a quite a good idea, use your business/personal blog as a way to organise an online poker event and include affiliate links to your poker site of choice. This helps network with your visitors and other blog friends while earning you a bit of cash too. Seems like a no-brainer!

WTF 1!
Probably one of the most entertaining SEO videos I’ve seen all year, no offence to SEOmoz who also post SEO videos, but this is far funnier than whiteboard Friday!

Content is king
This post is an attempt to find out an actual figure to measure duplicate content. Google always stated it "wanted to reward good behaviour rather than penalise bad".
For this reason Google will never release info on their duplicate content guidelines, they don't want us to design content to a minimum specification, they want content to be as good, and as useful as possible. Imagine if there was no quality control, spam would reign and no one would use the Internet because all they would find would be shoddy content. At least they try to reward great content!

WTF 2!
One of my favourite posts this year from The Register. It describes the inner workings of a new high tech search engine, its employees and why, without considerable amounts of Strawberries and Muffins, the new search engine would fail in its quest to dominate the “quantum porn” search niche. Find out more about this new fangled search engine!

Merry Xmas and have a Happy New Year!
I hope you all continue to read my blog, have a great Christmas and a happy new year, whether you are an SEO, Webmaster or Web designer, have a great 2009!I have some great new posts on the way, so add me to your RSS reader!

Improve Blog traffic in 5 steps!

1. Post regularly... I've noticed that total visits go up when content is kept fresh. I'm trying to post once a week at the moment and one thing I've noticed is that I'd rather spend a few hours writing a couple of articles at a time. I've found this works well for me, because I get really busy (like everyone else). So once I have a few nearly finished SEO articles in my drafts folder, I know a new post is probably just a little bit of work away. Get a few draft posts going and you'll find you can start a good post with a few notes and come back to it at a later date and make sure it is well done.

2. Get Stumbleupon... I'm getting quite a bit of referred traffic from other website at the moment and to increase this even more I told you a easy tactic in my traffic generating tips article. You want traffic from a high traffic blog or story, whatever. Stumbleupon simply allows users to add any webpage they think is good to Stumbleupon. Once added, other users will be able to find the webpage via the Stumbleupon toolbar and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down or nothing at all. The more users that find and click the "Thumbs Up" to show they like the Stumbled site, the more traffic Stumble will drive to the webpage. This tends to drive a lot of traffic to content that is genuinely good. Because users judge sites themselves, spam/low quality sites won't really get anywhere. To benefit, download Stumble find a blog using Stumble that is suitable and add a decent comment to the blog, making sure you add a URL. Some of the substantial traffic from these pages can rub off onto your own blog/website. Be careful not to spam for the sake of it though and watch out Stumbleupon will waste days of your life!

3. Give users the chance to feedback... Give your users the opportunity to add comments or feedback to your blog. I've seen articles on seomoz that say not to switch on comments till you have enough traffic to actually get comments, cos your site may look like a ghost blog... But I'd switch it on all the time and see what happens. Put Digg and Delicious buttons on each post and promote your RSS xml feed too. This should keep people coming back!

4. Internal linking... I get more search engine traffic to one particular SEO article than any other. So I'm in the process of going back through all my old articles and making sure they link to other relevant articles I 've made. So an article on "link building" might link to an article on "paid links". It helps the user find your other relevant posts, so if one post gets a lot of attention users can easily find more of your excellent content!

5.Check the basics... Make sure you spell everything correct and the post is easy to understand (Include diagrams if needed). Take a look at your blog settings and make sure you have unique title tags and descriptions. This is something I am doing right now, I don't know how to switch on unique titles and descriptions on blogspot... But I will let you know if I find out how...

6 SEO Ideas to improve traffic...

I thought I'd write a post with some ideas to improve and maintain traffic levels. Some of these are very quick and easy to get going on and some are a bit slower and require some programming skills, or access to someone with those skills. Have a look through and see if you can get started on one of these areas.

#1 Read up on your subject and be an expert
Recently I heard that an editor of Lonely Planet was fired because they had never visited the resorts they had written about. This shocked me a little because I had done some work for a travel company and re-written some content about their destinations. Although I had never visited the tourist places in question, I had done extensive online research. This gave me insight into, the type of people that visit these places, whether they would be old or young, spending a lot of money or keeping a tight budget. Once you've read many facts and opinions on something, you build up a much more informed and detailed insight into it. You begin to filter out inaccurate or unnecessary details, and you will be able to decide for yourself how accurate information on the subject is, based on your overall knowledge and opinion. Although in an ideal world I would have travelled to each and every destination I was writing about :) this was simply not possible... Unfortunately!

#2 Get sneaky
Look at the traffic searching for your competitors, wouldn't it be nice to get their brand name driving traffic to your site? Make a comparison page where you can talk about your competition and where they are weak in service/product. The repeated brand names on the page will help your page rank for their brand name. Make sure these pages are of use to your users though, there is nothing worse than spam landing pages. All you are doing is "tailoring" content for other search terms. Consider setting up stealth websites on different domains/hosting where you can make comparison pages without it looking like you are criticising your competition. You then simply link through to your official site to drive the new traffic there.

#3 Look at low risk high reward keywords
After some recent keyword research, I found that searches for a certain financial keyphrase were high because of the current credit crisis in the UK. Although the searches were high, the bounce rate on the sites (in the top ten on Google) was high because no one had actually optimised for these terms that well, and basically users wanted financial info on something where there was no info... All I had to do was create suitable copy, make sure the landing page had clear calls to action to convert the users into customers and hey presto, a page ranking at #1 on Google for a time sensitive keyword which will grow and grow in searches! By spotting this opportunity early, a page is easier to get to number one than after 10 other SEOs have seen it and start competing.

#4 Put together new functionality for your site
Get talking with the programmers and look at ways to improve your site. I was looking around a clients recruitment web site and once a job had been taken the job page was removed from the CMS meaning a page previously indexed on Google was now not there. Instead of 301ing the URL to another page, I suggested keeping the page and add a "Job no longer available" message and placing links to similar job pages on that page. The current content will stay and drive traffic and the links will make it obvious where users should go. Just be careful that when a similar job is added new, you use content different to the page you are maintaining. Try to think about what your users want from your site and add functionality to suit.

Some other new functionality I've looked at is Rate and Review software from Bazaar Voice.
This, as I've explained in previous posts lets users add product ratings and reviews to a site. This free content will help your site rank for a range of unique keyphrases and because users are adding the content, you do not need to second guess what you think your users will search for, just look at the language they use in the reviews area!

#5 Take a look at your stats
If you don't already have webstats, get them (Google Analytics is good). Have a good look at your stats, decide on what does well, (visits referred from a certain site) and look to develop on what drives visits already. For example, I found that this blog generates significantly more traffic from my comments on other blogs. Referring sites got me lots more traffic than many other areas. So I put together a quick plan, add decent, useful comments to high traffic blogs. To find high traffic blogs I used Stumble Upon. Once I have found a suitable blog (CSS ideas, HTML tips etc) I added a comment. As most stumbled sites will have more traffic, there is better chance of users looking at the URL left by your comment.

#6 Do some more research!
The Internet has plenty of resources, good and bad, so take a look around but don't believe all you read. A good source of SEO info (as well as this site) is SEOMOZ which has a range of different categories of SEO info, from downloadable beginner guides, a daily SEO blog, a SEOmoz users blog (YouMoz) and some great SEO tools, like page strength calculator and juicy links finder... Also there are various free guides, webinars and more available, I'll post links to these whenever I find them.

Get started on these and add comments/feedback and say how you got on!

Link to another SEO blog...

http://seo-uk.newsvine.com/ - Number of different posts about SEO.