David Leonhardt’s SEO Marketing Express

Phew! I just finished removing all the broken links from this website. It would have been a fairly small undertaking if not for the blog. The blog creates hundreds of pages and the broken links can appear in comments, posts, sidebars and all sorts of hidden files. And since broken link checkers report all sorts of anomalies, such as RSS links, the list to wade through is quite large.

But it is worthwhile. A website that points to a lot of broken links is one that is not maintained. Put quite simply, if Google has the option of listing two equally relevant websites for a particular search, why would it list the one that appears not to be as up-to-date. I have no empirical evidence to show that broken links hurt ranking (if you do, please let me know), but common sense says that somewhere in the algorithm broken links play a role.

This posting is counterintuitive, but I have found a way to get more leads from this website.  Here is the story:

On all the services pages, we would encourage people to email or to phone.  We made it very clear that we prefer email for first contact.  This was in order to do some triage, and not spend half-an-hour on the phone with someone who will never be a client.  Also, once on the phone, a person is inclined to ask a hundred questions, whereas by email they are more likley to confine themselves to those questions that are actually relevant. 

I estimate that at least 80% of queries would come in by email, but still too many by phone.  Furthermore, the email queries often contained very little information, so there was still a bit of back and forth before we could assess what to do with each query.

So we replaced our message with a contact form on each page.  Our phone number and email address are still easy to find on our contact page, but we are now prompting people to contact us using a form.  The form contains all the basic information we need to understand a potential client’s project.  The key is to customize each form for the specific type of project. 

For instance, if you go to http://www.seo-writer.com/freelance/report-writer.html, you will see that the form is very specific about what type of report the client wants written.  On the other hand, http://www.seo-writer.com/freelance/book-writer.html contains different fields based on what is appropriate for that service.

Unexpected website conversion bonus

We loaded the forms to the pages, and two things happened.  First, the suspected.  In several days, there have been no phone calls.  In several days, there have been no emails.  In the several days there have been more total queries.  Yes, the forms are helping drive leads.  I would have though it would be the opposite, since we are forcing people to think a little about their project before contacting us (not a bad thing, mind you, but something I would thing that would act as a small barrier).  I suspect that by giving people an indication of what information we need and making it easy for them to provide it without writing from scratch, we are increasing our leads. 

Will that increase our revenue, our actual conversions?  Too early to tell.  But I sure hope so!

We have just added a new page to the website, offering an affordable, customized and comprehensive 99-point SEO Audit Checkup for your website.  This is a superb way to begin an SEO campaign for an established whose owners need to know where to start.  Whether doing the SEO in-house or outsourcing it, an outside audit is a good way to get a handle on the size and direction of the SEO needs.

You might have noticed a new look for the blog, building on the design of the rest of the site (but more bloggy, less commercial).

You might also have noticed that we are also offering preview snapshots of  and links within the blog posts.  This is cool, although they don’t always work.  There is also the MyBlogLog widget on the upper left side, showing you  your very own face (if you happen to be logged in to your MyBlogLog account when you come a-callin’).

You might have noticed that we have a new page listed at the top called “blog advertising”.  Yes, we do accept advertising or sponsored posts, and we have set up very specific guidelines to avoid potential conflicts of interest, including transparency, relevance and freedom to say “this website simply does not deliver”.

In preparing to accept advertising, I did some research on what others are doing.  Tim Nash recently made a similar decision to mine, and given that he is a well-respected contributor at Webdigity, one of the more interesting forums around, I asked him if he would be willing to be a guest blogger and share his thoughts on paid blog posts.  What follows is his commentary…

I’m a blogger not a journalist!
 

Once upon a time I started a website it had a single page about me, these days I run several websites participate on 2 blogs regularly and guest blog on numerous others. I spend 60 hours a week working on the web one way or another. Why am I telling you this? Well in all those hours across all those sites I see reviews and I meet people and products and I think cool I will write about that, 90% of the time I don’t but occasionally I get beyond the first few lines. So when some one turns up and offers you a few dollars to write a review about their site or product are you going to say no?
 

I consider myself to be an ethical blogger in that I always declare when a post is paid for I only accept “jobs” where they are after my honest review. In many ways I consider myself simply being given a nudge out of the door of course I can already hear the screams from the anti paid per post lobby.
 

“The PayPerPost model brings up memories of payola in the music industry, something the FCC and state attorney generals are still trying to eliminate or control. Given the distributed and unlicensed nature of the blogosphere, controlling payoffs to bloggers will be exponentially more difficult.”
Tech Crunch - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/12/the-payperpost-virus-spreads/
 

This is one of the biggest arguments against pay per post — are you being bribed and if so does it matter? If a journalist on a big paper was found to be on the pay of a company how would we react, outrage, anger certainly the end of their career, but why?
 

It’s down to trust and authority we believe our newspapers to be independent of such things this is of course not true but perception is everything. The journalist may never write a positive review about the company but we perceive our trust has been breached we have been let down.
 

But I’m a blogger! I write in my spare time and if some one says here some money to write about xxx then sure I will write about it. If you don’t like it don’t read it! The problem comes when the personal integrity of the blogger is breached which is summed up nicely by Stuntdubl
 

“If everybody writes positive reviews of CRAP - it’s a surefire way for the whole idea to suck. It’s not a surprise that people will accept money to write reviews or analysis - the big question will be HOW MUCH it costs for a review. “
Stuntdubl http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/11/10/reviewme-2/
 

Here it is laid out on a plate If I accept $30 for an impartial review that’s cool what if I’m given $500 or $1000 can I really remain impartial when offered larger sums of money; I’ll let you know
 

Advice for Bloggers
So here some advice if you’re going to try Pay per post or similar.

• Set up a disclaimer page discuss which services you use
  
• Offer a way to view the site without PPP
  
• Make PPP very clear and obvious (I use the tag PPP plus disclaimer)
  
• Try to make your posts interesting and on topic, just because its paid for doesn’t mean it can’t be part of your normal blogging cycle.
  

A final cautioning word of warning, some search engines believe Paid links should not be allowed and to steps to prevent these links and pages appearing in the index  Grey Wolf has a great post on this; so is paid per post worth it?
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/googles-policy-on-no-follow-and-reviews-is-hypocritical-and-wrong/
 

About Me
Tim Nash is a reputation management consultant, co-founder and primary consultant for Venture Skills, a “New media” IT company which specialises in search engine optimisation, reputation management, and technical side of online marketing. When not working at Venture Skills, posting site reviews on forums he can be found teaching at a local university where he lecturers in Search Engine Optimisation and Information Retrieval.
 

http://www.timnash.me.uk
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com
 

You know you’ve made it when somebody publishes your photo on Flickr.  Well, nobody’s published mine yet, but somebody did publish my website’s photo.  OK, so that somebody was me, but it is part of a humorous series of photos, so I though I would share it here: Voodoo Love Doll at the laptop…

Not long after the offical launch of TheBookmarketer, we have already added some new social bookmarking sites. 

You will note that we have added Zaadz, Kaboodle, Jumpup, i89 and Searchles.  I can’t be certain, but for most of these we might be the only multi-site bookmarking service to offer them as an option. 

There will be more updates later, and soon I will provide some webmaster tips on social bookmarking propotion - the white hat way.

Just for the record, here are our pages at these websites:

• Zaadz
• Kaboodle
• Jumpup
• i89
• Searchles

I love Loren Baker’s post on 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.  It goes right in line with my thinking when I posted the comments about Wikipedia and the NoFollow attribute, and the experiment to test the NoFollow attribute, with no stop-the-presses-results. 

I have said this many times before…the World Wide Web (www) works when linking is encouraged.  The Only One Orphan (ooo) works when linking is discouraged. 

Thanks to Loren for showing me the DoFollow WordPress Plugin.  If you post a comment here, you can be sure there will be no NoFollow attribute on your link. 

This is the official launch of TheBookmarketer.  It is tempting to call this a revolution in website marketing, to use the typical hype of online marketing gurus…but it’s not.  It’s not about hype, it is about substance.  It’s not a revolution, it is a big step forward in the Web 2.0 revolution that is already under way.  And it is an extraordinarily handy and easy tool to give website owners and bloggers a competitive edge. TheBookmarketer is a social bookmarking tool.  In my next post, I will give a complete rundown of social marketing, why it is important to webmasters and bloggers and how you can harness its awesome power.  In this post, I will simply explain what TheBookmarketer is, what it is not, who should use it, how it is better than several “similar” tools, and why I have gone to the effort and expense to make it so good and give it to you for free. 

WHAT THEBOOKMARKETER IS… 

• TheBookmarketer helps your visitors promote your site in many ways.  

• TheBookmarketer is a set-it-and-forget tool, a free snippet of code you have to add to your SSI or include file only once. Ever.  

• TheBookmarketer helps you win with Google’s 2007 algorithm changes.  

• TheBookmarketer helps build valuable one-way links to your website.  

• TheBookmarketer helps create “natural linking” patterns that impress search engines.  

• TheBookmarketer  helps build deep links that tell the search engines that your website has depth.  

• TheBookmarketer draws other interested social bookmark users to your site (targeted traffic).  

WHAT THEBOOKMARKETER IS NOT…  

• TheBookmarketer is not an “automated traffic machine”.  Those don’t generally give you quality traffic.  

• TheBookmarketer is not a 0 to 60 in 5.2 link-builder.  It builds links at a speed that reflects a) the number of visitors to a page, and b) the value they get out of the content of the page.  

• TheBookmarketer is not a guarantee of success on its own; you need quality content that others will feel is worth bookmarking for later use or for sharing with friends or colleagues.  

WHO SHOULD USE THEBOOKMARKETER… 

TheBookmarketer can help any website get wider exposure and higher search engine rankings.  However, certain types of sites stand the most to gain:   

• Content-rich portals and information sites, including directories and article directories.  

• Ezines with online archives.  

• Blogs and online forums with always new and useful information.  

• Ecommerce stores with descriptions of products that people might want to save for later use of share with others.  

• Photo- or video-sharing websites.  

• News websites, general or niche  

• Any website with either new or useful information  

HOW THEBOOKMARKETER IS BETTER THAN “SIMILAR” TOOLS… 

Technically, you do not need a tool to prompt your visitors to social bookmark your pages.  You could add code for each social bookmarking site by hand.  The disadvantage to that is that it is a lot of work…a lot of work getting started and a lot of work keeping up-to-date when in a fast-changing field.  And you won’t be able to cover as many social bookmarking websites.  There are a handful of social bookmarking tools for webmasters around, but we made TheBookmarketer better in 5 ways:  

• At this point, only TheBookmarketer has the Google Bookmarks submit link.  

• Only TheBookmarketer allows you to check your stats (see the email form at the top of http://www.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker.php.  

• The Bookmarkerter has the largest list of social bookmarking sites, offering the best reach of potential visitors and the best breadth of incoming links (and we plan to add to the list).  

• TheBookmarketer makes the most popular sites easy to access by floating them to the top.  

• I am committed to keeping TheBookmarketer very current so you don’t have to think about it.   

WHY I INVESTED THE EFFORT AND MONEY TO DEVELOP THEBOOKMARKETER JUST TO GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE… 

Marketing.  It’s that simple.  We are a website marketing company and what better way to introduce ourselves to you and to those people who will be bookmarking your pages than by demonstrating our ability to help you market your website.  That is the same reason why we are committed to keeping it current for you and ensuring that it remains the very best tool possible.  See it in action at the bottom of this post…