David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

One of the most amazing things about the Internet is that it brings the world together.  For instance, this website brings visitors from all over the world (which is a great thing for someone like me, who enjoys multilingual SEO).  However, I do not often see a website demonstrating how broad its reach is. 

Many websites feature language and currency options, and a few show testimonials from a variety of locations.  And occasionally I have seen a map widget that shows red dots where visitors come from.  But surprisingly, I have never seen a blogger share with his readers where the other readers come from.  Given that blogging is a conversational format, I would think this would be a natural.

Below is a map of where our visitors come from.  This was cut and pasted directly from Google Analytics, so it’s easy to do.  Just for the record, this does not include blog traffic.  A couple days ago I realized that I do not have Google Analytics tracking on the blog, just on the main website.  I have corrected that, but for now this is where our website visitors come from.  It’s pretty impressive when you think that people from almost everywhere outside of the Sahara have been on the website in the past month.

By the way, if we go back a year, most of the yellow spaces turn green, with a handful each from Bolivia, Mongolia and Paraguay and even a couple from Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea.

If you run a blog, why not write a post like this, sharing with your readers where their fellow readers come from.  Help bring the world just a little closer together.

Just for fun, I went back through 2008 to see if I could narrow down the top 10 best blog posts I published during the year. It’s amazing how much writing a person can do in one year. I looked for those posts that are the most substantial and useful, and hopefully will stand the test of time.

It was not easy to choose just ten, but the following are my top 10 picks, in reverse order by date:

1. Bounce Rate SEO Fallacies
Regular readers might be getting tired of hearing from me on this topic by now, so I will simply say that this story already continues in two posts I have made in the past 24 hours, and this post spurred a debate at Sphinn

2. Website Optimization for Telephone Leads
This post is one that fills a pretty unique niche. In fact, I don’t think I have seen a handful of blog posts or articles in my life linking SEO and telephone leads. This is a very practical how-to post.

3. You Need Sucky Links
I get tired of all the emphasis on PageRank and how some website owners try to avoid getting sucky links. I don’t mean links from really bad neighborhoods, just low quality links that don’t count for much. But these are pretty important, nonetheless. Read the post to find out why.

4. Offline Links Count, Too
Folks in the online world tend to forget that there is a real world out there, and “links” in the real world can do wonders for one’s business.

5. Earlybird Link-building
File this one under “advanced SEO tactics”. Why wait until your website is completely developed and launched to start building your links? Give the search engines a taste of what will be on your site before it actually is. This is another how-to post, which drew a pretty good discussion.

6. How to get More Value from Your SEO Consultant
This is the one “SEO business” post I selected for the top 10 of 2008. It is important not to lose site of the client-consultant relationship.

7. New Google Rank-check Tool Is Released
Call the title a spoof or a prank, but topic is some seriously good advice for the search engines.

8. Why Blogs Are Good for SEO
Prospective clients almost always get this piece of free advice: “Get a blog.” This is one post that I expect to be just as valid in 2012 as it is today … and that’s an eternity in SEO.

9. Yahoo Violating Nofollow Attribute
I chose this post because it seems even truer today than it did back then. In fact, just prior to Christmas, I found several new batches of “nofollow” backlinks showing up in Yahoo. It might be that PageRank is not passed along through “nofollow” links, but I am pretty sure they count for quite a bit. Although best practice is to make sure I get nofollow-free links for my clients, I jump at good nofollow links, too.

10. Link Exchanges: It’s Not the Size of the PR but How You Use It
If you love that pesky little green bar on the Google Toolbar, don’t read this post; it will only irritate you. For newbies, a welcome to a sneak peak at how this SEO specialist evaluates possible link exchanges.

So that’s it. A whole year of SEO advice condensed into a single post. If you like any of these posts, please Sphinn them or Digg them of Mixx them or Stumble them so that others might enjoy them, too.

Happy 2009!

Regular readers might notice something different on this blog. If you are the first to read this post, you will have to go to an older post to view it. It’s called the Intense Debate Plugin for WordPress. It offers some really cool features that this blog did not have before:

• Avatars for those people registered (not sure where). You can see this at http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/2008/11/10/you-need-sucky-links/
• Voting up or down on the quality of the comments
• Ability to respond directly to somone else’s comments (much more conversational!)

Sadly, when I first installed it, the plugin nixed my WYSWYG editor, until we could load the new WordPress 2.7.  It looks like any comments posted in those few days between initial installation and making it work have been lost.  I am still trying to recoup them, but it doesn’t look good.

To all those Canadians on social bookmarking websites like Digg and Reddit who were wondering, “Will I ever see a Canadian story make it to the home page?”…

…well, the answer is yes!  In fact, if you rush over right now to Zoomit Canada, you find nothing but Canadian stories on the home page.  That’s because Zoomit Canada is the social bookmarking website made for Canadians:  ”Canada’s News, Chosen By You.” 

And if you’re not Canadian, here’s your chance to do all your Canadian friends a favor.  let them know that they can…

• submit Canadian stories to Zoomit Canada .
• vote for their favorite stories (actually, it’s spelled “favourite” in Canada)
• comment on stories to share their opinion.

Like Digg, it’s free.  Unlike Digg, you are welcome to submit your own blog post…so long as it, you or your blog is Canadian, of course.

There is a really cool contest happening over at Bloggeries forum, and not just because you can win an Ipod Nano 8GB.  It seems that Rob is trying to brand his service in the same way the Kleenex has been branded.  No matter what grand of “facial tissue” you have on hand, let’s face it, you call it a Kleenex. 

Rob wants you to do the same thing with “bloggeries”.  Every time you publish a blog post…oops, I mean a “bloggery”, he wants you to use that term.  If enough people start referring to their posts as bloggeries, his Bloggeries.com forum, directory and other services will get a massive branding boost.  People on the Internet do not think enough about branding, so this is a superb contest — probably the freshest idea I have seen in a while, and one I am already thinking how I could apply to some of my own ventures.

By the way, although I am a member of Bloggeries and occasionally stop in on the forum, I am busy and I would have missed this if I was not following Rob on Twitter.  I am sold – Twitter is great.  You can follow me at  http://twitter.com/amabaie .

P.S.: I just ran this bloggery through a Microsoft spell-check and it seems they haven’t caught on yet.  Rob, better get in touch with the folks at Microsoft.

One of my clients wants to create a blog that will really stand out in her niche and become a destination.  She asked for a few tips, so here is what I suggested: 

1. Unique topic - anything that people have not heard before, surprises or even shocks, cuts through the clutter and gives practical advice (where people usually find a 20  minute speech), or is edgy or controversial. 

2. Participation via comments – invite participation and get people returning. Although my blog is almost a hobby (when pressed for time, client work comes first, so sometimes I go as much as a month between posts), I have done three things technically that have increased participation: 1) I made it a do-follow blog, so more people come to comment on it, making it a more happening place.  2) I am trying to respond to comments with follow-up comments, for the same result. 3) My WordPress sends me two notices, one when a comment is posted for me to moderate, and a second when the comment goes live.  To this second email, I respond with a note like this:

I approved your comment, so please don’t forget to social bookmark the post.  Because mine is a DoFollow blog, your website will benefit from the SEO-friendly link.  It is therefore to your advantage to give this page some link juice by social bookmarking it.  You will see at the bottom of the post some icons for one-click social bookmarking:
http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/2008/05/05/why-blogs-are-good-for-seo
 
Or it would be even better if you could share some of my ramblings with your readers by blogging about them and linking back to the original posts. 

This has gotten me some social bookmarks and also has lead to a few other link exchanges. 

3. Social bookmarking – I have a free script for that at http://www.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker.php 

4. Building big communities at MyBlogLog.com, BlogCatalog.com, SpicyPage.com, and probably a few others.  There probably is a good way to promote it also through article directory communities such as EzineArticles.com .

5. Guest post exchanges can be good, bringing new perspectives to your blog and reaching out to the audiences of other blogs.

6. Posting really insightful comments on well-read blogs can also lead to others following your link — but you have to get there early, before the crowds have come and gone.

7. I have found that just visiting blogs listed at MyBlogLog has resulted in the bloggers visiting my blogs.  A lot of bloggers watch for a new face to show up on their widget, and they visit the blogs in return.  If you have great content, they’ll be back.

Hot on the heels of writing again about the NoFollow attribute, I though I would also write again about the DoFollow plugin.  Here is a list of blogs that have installed some form of DoFollow feature.  This list will be updated so that new DoFollow blogs can be added over time.

Due to a Script Failure, this list is no longer available

You might also want to list your blog at what is probably the most effective blog directory, at least from an SEO perspective. Bloggeries offers a listing not just for your home page, but also to the five most recent posts…helping drive traffic. This is not a free directory, but the price is well worth it. My blogs are all listed there. Submit your blog to the Bloggeries Directory.

It was not all that long ago that I wrote how Wikipedia should be spanked for using the NoFollow attribute on all external links. 

NOFOLLOW BACKGROUND

Just by way of history, NoFollow is an attribute the search engines approved to help combat blog comment link spam.  The problem was that so many bloggers were too lazy to moderate comments, that tons of spammy links were being created in blog comments around the world and this was skewing search engine results.  NoFollow neuters any link it is applied to, so bloggers were encouraged to place it on any links they could not vouch for. 

So many blogging programs made NoFollow the default setting for external links.  For instance, this blog uses WordPress, and I had to apply the DoFollow plugin to un-neuter comment links.  Most bloggers have no clue about this and unwittingly act as agents of Web neutering.

However, the opposite problem has since happened, that billions of legitimate links have the NoFollow attribute applied to them, since most bloggers are not even aware of the NoFollow attribute.  And then Wikipedia, one of the top authorities who weighs its external links more carefully than anyone, applied the NoFollow attribute to all external links.  Arguably, by removing the most carefully scrutinized links on the Internet from the search engine algorithms, Wikipedia has skewed the search results as much as any spammy blackhat SEO tactic ever could.

And I still say they should be spanked. 

FIREFOX PLUGIN

Now you can easily see NoFollow links, whether created by laziness, unawareness or nastiness.  This is very helpful when deciding the SEO value of any participation on the Web.  Needless to say, SEO is a factor in much of what I do online, so these tips can come in handy. In fact there are two ways, one of which worked on my computer and one of which did not.  Both require FireFox, which is a very handy browser for SEO work.

The first way is by a handy little hack, which has worked for a lot of people, but for some reason it does not like me.  The hack is good because it can be manually controlled in all sorts of way (except, obviously, by me).  TDavid explains the Firefox NoFollow highlight hack quite well here.  Cheerfully, he seems to be even less of a fan of Wikipedia’s NoFollow chop-chop than I am!

The other way, which worked well on my computer, is a plugin called SearchStatus, which, among other handy tools, makes all NoFollow links show up pink in my FireFox browser window.  Here is a screenshot to show you just an example.  This is from a page from — you guessed it! — Wikipedia.  Click the image for a larger view.  See how pink it is?

Wikipedia, consider yourself spanked!

A couple days ago I wrote about how blogs are good for SEO.  Today, I would like to offer one additional reason.

RSS.

RSS helps your SEO efforts in two ways.  First, you can submit your feed to RSS-specific directories, and that of course brings a number of links to yet another page on your domain.  That is good, especially for a new website that lacks the credibility to be referenced in blogs and portals, and lacks the link-juice most link-exchange partners seek.  One caveat is that some RSS directories will accept only tried and true feeds, so you might have to go back a year later when you have proven yourself.

In addition to the link-juice that RSS offers, if your content is good and you take your blog seriously, those RSS directories should generate traffic.  The number of people who take advantage of RSS feeds is small, but these are Internet diehards.  These are people with voracious appetites for information and are more likely to buy over the Internet than the typical surfer.   Many of them are bloggers themselves who use RSS as a means of gathering research and ideas quicker than by surfing.  Exposing your blog feed to them is a great way to build the best links of all – natural ones that your website earns because of its superior content.

Content alone won’t win the SEO battle.  But content publicized can.  And RSS is a means of publicizing.

Just a few reasons why a blog is a great tool for SEO.

• Fresh content – the search engines love that.
• Growing website – the search engines love that, too.
• Multiple variations of keywords to attract highly-targeted long-tale searchers.
• Highly relevant pages from which to link into the main pages of your website.
• Keeps you in touch with your topic, not just the technicalities of SEO.
• You can submit your blog to blog-specific directories, providing extra link love.
• You can easily trade content, not just links.
• Assuming you can generate even a modest amount of traffic for your blog, you can get links to individual posts through social bookmarking (especially if you have a tool like TheBookmarketer at the bottom of each post, as I do).
• Blog open doors to real-people networking on the Internet, and that is always helpful when it comes to link-building and other forms of collaboration, such as blogrolls and webrings.

There are probably a few dozen more reasons why blogs are good for SEO, so why not post your favorite reasons in the comments section below?