Good News on Special Display Ads On SMM Blogs

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Barry Welford

Actually there is bad news and there is good news.

The bad news is that the extra 10% discount available on orders during February no longer applies.

The arrangement is that you can buy display ads on all four SMM blogs with a discount arrangement if you buy the same space on more than one blog. The other three blogs are:

The Other Bloke’s Blog – Business and Internet Marketing from a Canadian perspective
Senior Money Memos – Personal Finance from a senior perspective
StayGoLinks – the Mobile Web from a desktop perspective

The more blogs on which you purchase display ads, the bigger the discount. Detailed information on visitor traffic, rates and discounts is given on the SMM Blogs Display Ads web page.

The good news is that ad rates were set on the basis of visitor traffic for the month of February. Currently in March for all four blogs the total pageview traffic is over 20, 000 pageviews per month. This represents on average more than a 100% increase in visitor traffic over that for February. The cost per impression is thus half of what it was in February.

As usual, it is first come, first served. Click here to learn more on Display Ads traffic and rates.

Technorati Tags: display ads, rates, visitor traffic

Exponential Marketing – Meme Links

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Barry Welford

Exponential marketing is another way of describing viral marketing. It brings out more strongly that each person in the chain of communication passes on the word to several other people. In a way it has similarities with MLM – multi-level marketing.

A meme is a new word created to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet. This works because each person is encouraged to tag as many people as possible and ask them to spread the word. Like MLM, the meme process can occasionally run out of people to whom to pass the word but in its early stages it can be very effective.

There is one on the go at the moment to publicize the IM Spring Break. This is a conference put on by IMBroadcast.com, the first video sharing site strictly for the Internet Marketing community. It was founded by three Internet Marketers, Loren Baker, Jordan Kasteler, and Dave Snyder.

On their blog, they describe a contest involving a meme, whereby the winner will get free attendance at the conference. The winner will be the person getting the most involvement in the meme-spreading as mentioned by pingbacks to their blog post. The blog post should list the 7 things you think will happen at IM Spring Break with emphasis on news-worthiness.

Alysson Fergison (aka SEOaly) hopes to be that winner and she tagged among others David Leonhardt of The Happy Guy Marketing. He in turn has included me as one of his tags.

I must admit it sounds to be a very amiable event with a really good crowd. Just see some of the attendees: Loren Baker, Jordan Kasteler, Dave Snyder, Chris Winfield, Rae Hoffman, Greg Finn, Kenny Hyder, Steve Plunkett, Zaibatsu (Reg Sadler), Neal Rodriguez, Brent Csutoras, Todd Malicoat, and Jeff Quipp. With such participants, one might question what will not happen at this IM Spring Break. Rae Hoffman is even discussing NDA so perhaps what goes on at the Hilton Deerfield Beach will stay there in the spirit of Non-disclosure.

Perhaps those I tag for the meme will be more creative on 7 things that will occur. I’m tagging via their Twitter presences Ruud Hein, Donna Fontenot and Peter Meyers. After all we have got to do our best to get SEOaly to that Break for the mud-wrestling event.

Technorati Tags: exponential, meme, tag, viral

Special Display Ad Rates On SMM Blogs During February 2009

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Barry Welford

You can now buy display ads on all four SMM blogs with a discount arrangement if you buy the same space on more than one blog. The other three blogs are:

The Other Bloke’s Blog – Business and Internet Marketing from a Canadian perspective
Senior Money Memos – Personal Finance from a senior perspective
StayGoLinks – the Mobile Web from a desktop perspective

The more blogs on which you purchase display ads, the bigger the discount. Here is the link for detailed information on rates and discounts for SMM Blogs Display Ads.

As a special bonus to encourage you to check out the details, there is an extra 10% discount available on orders during February. Your purchase including the discount locks in the ad rates at the time of purchase, even if later there should be a rise in the ad rates. To benefit, payment for your display ads must be made with PayPal prior to midnight PST February 28.

Technorati Tags: display ads, rates, special

Foolish Footers

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Barry Welford

Footer – the foundation of a building

The footers we are talking about here are those defined by Google as follows: Text printed in the bottom margin of each page in a word processing document. Although as you will find later, that other foundation definition is worth thinking about. Here in particular, we are talking about the online versions on which by coincidence the knowledgeable Ann Smarty has recently offered the following advice: handle your site footers wisely. In summary she concludes:

make your website footer relevant and useful;

don’t add too many elements to the footer – it should be clean and concise;

focus on people (SEO value of the footer is too insignificant anyway);

follow the common fashion: people want to see common elements at these common places.

As a general rule, that seems eminently sensible advice. However I noticed that two very successful bloggers, Darren Rowse and John Chow adopted a somewhat different approach. Go to either of their blogs and scroll down to the bottom of the webpage. What do you find? In both cases there is a full screen of footer information. That got me thinking.

So often our approach to online web pages is conditioned by our much longer association with the printed page. That is where the word footer comes from. It suggests minimal content. However consider the way in which many people arrive at a web page. Either they are going there for content since someone gave them a link or they did a keyword search and ended up at that page, again looking for content. Most of them are not interested in any information about the blog owner or the rest of the blog as they arrive.

Of course the blog owner may wish them to look at advertisements which help to monetize the blog and ensure its survival. If those advertisements are from Google, then Google is working very hard to provide advertisements that will be of interest to visitors to the web page. If so there is every incentive to ensure that both content and advertisements appear ‘above the fold’, in other words on the initial screen that is viewed.

If anyone wants more information on other items in the blog or the blog author, they are certainly motivated to wander around a little and find what they are looking for. This suggests such information can be ‘below the fold’ since visitors may naturally scroll down to find such information. In consequence this blog now has an extended footer giving even more information than those of Darren Rowse and John Chow. By clicking on the link to Full Blog Info, your screen will show the footer, which is about a screenful on a 1024 x 768 resolution monitor. I believe it is a very logical approach, even though it seems to go against standard practice.

It may not appeal to everyone since it is somewhat unusual. However I don’t believe it’s foolish and I am most interested in visitors’ reactions. Why not add your thoughts on how this different approach works for you.

Technorati Tags: above the fold, advertisements, content, footer

Website Signposts To Help Visitors Find Their Way Around

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Barry Welford

Introduction

Where can I find what I’m looking for?

Website visitors can be either humans or robots / spiders from the search engines. Although human visitors are what you are seeking, those robots are important since their efforts will result in many other human visitors coming to your website. Many websites find that more than two thirds of the traffic may well come from Google. Luckily what works for humans usually works well for robots too.

The Website Structure

Having appropriate webpages that people may wish to visit is clearly important. The rules to follow are clearly laid out in an article by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian entitled Navigation – Make it Easy to Get Around.

Although written in 2000, the principles are still the same:

It isn’t difficult if you put yourself in your customer’s position and think about the things you would like best on a site like this. Here are some essential questions to answer:

Where am I? – an aid to one’s present location on the site

Where do I go next? – a roadmap or directory of the entire site

How do I get there? – an intuitive or descriptive system of navigation

Am I still on this site? – a consistent look-and-feel across different sections of the site

The Scent Of Information

In some cases particularly with larger sites, the human visitor may get slightly confused. He or she may have only a general notion of what they are looking for. Jared Spool has introduced the concept of the Scent Of Information. Just as a tracker dog may follow the scent to find their objective, your human website visitor needs some confirmation that they are heading in the right direction. Spool and his team at User Interface Engineering have refined these notions and a summary of their findings is available in their report summary at Designing for the Scent of Information

Conclusion

Getting a human visitor to a web page of your website is a challenge. Once they have arrived, you hope that your website will be ‘sticky’ enough that they stay around. A big part of that is achieved by ensuring there are highly visible signposts to other web pages they might like to visit. Tags and categories are second lines of defense to ensure they do not click away.

Technorati Tags: breadcrumbs, categories, scent, tags, website structure

Courtesy Andy Beard

Another important way of staying on top of breaking news is with Google Blogsearch. It went through a rough spot during recent months but it’s now back functioning well to alert you to Hot News Items. That too is relying on RSS news feeds. All in all, it’s good to be aware of the power of RSS news feeds. If making May 1 RSS News Feeds Awareness Day can help spread the message, then let’s all ping away.

Technorati Tags: Awareness Day, May 1, news feed, newsfeed, RSS

Google Blog Post Snippets Are Now Dated Just For You

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Barry Welford

Malte Landwehr commented on an earlier post on the changes in Google snippets for blog posts. He noted that the Google snippet dates on his blog posts appeared in a German format and therefore required more characters than the English version. He surmised that this meant that less of the Description meta tag could be used in creating the snippet.

As far as we can tell this does not seem to be the case. Below are shown the starting text in the SERP snippets for the same blog post in four different language versions of Google. In each case the date is shown in the language of the searcher. In each case also, the snippet used the same 138 characters from the Description meta tag.

Google – English – http://www.google.com

Google – French – http://www.google.fr/

Google – Finnish – http://www.google.com/ig?hl=fi

Google – Saudi Arabia – http://www.google.com/ig?hl=ar

Danny Sullivan has questioned in Sphinn whether this is a real phenomenon. However it seems to be the case for blog posts that appear in more popular searches. The posts on the same blog that preceded and followed this post, which are less popular, still currently come up in SERPs without dates. Whether this dating becomes the general rule or disappears at some time can only be a matter of conjecture at the moment.

If you have any views on what is happening here, then please add your comments.

Technorati Tags: Description, language, snippet

Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Barry Welford

A previous post discussed the importance of Google snippets in bringing visitors to your Web pages. It is of course important to rank towards the top or even #1 on a Google keyword Search Engine Report Page (SERP). However if the Google snippets for the items at #2 or #3 are much more engaging then perhaps the searcher will click there instead.

The creation of those Google snippets is an entirely automatic process. In other words it’s a computer-generated snippet. Google does try to help you to get better snippets. Matt Cutts has even made a short video about snippets (just over 8 minutes) – tip of the hat to Kathryn Katz. A key element in getting good snippets is the description meta tag. There is an interesting discussion currently going on in the Cre8asite Forums about that. One most useful piece of advice from Ron Carnell is to have a sentence of not more than 155 characters and spaces in that meta tag. Since this is the length of a typical Google snippet, then it is highly likely that your engaging sentence will be used as the snippet.

That was true until about four days ago. Suddenly there has been a switch in the automatic snippet creation process, at least for blog posts. It is not yet universal for all blog posts but seems to occur for ones that frequently come up in keyword searches. Here is an example:

The snippet for such blog posts now starts with the date of the post displayed in the language of the searcher. In English this uses up about 17 characters of the snippet including the ellipsis (…). Since the total length is still 155 characters and spaces, this leaves only 138 characters and spaces for you to write that engaging sentence.

It’s still early days so whether this change will be applied to all blog posts or will remain a permanent feature for Google is still in question. Yahoo! and MSN/Live still seem to be working with the longer 155 characters snippets. Anyone with a WordPress blog who uses the All-in-one-SEOpack plugin is faced with a dilemma. It suggests that descriptions should not be longer than 160 characters, but that number should now perhaps be reduced.

Technorati Tags: clickthrough, keyword, snippet

Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Posted on March 9, 2008 by Barry Welford

For good SEO, choose the right title.

As we all spend more time in social media, such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or Sphinn, the ability to write catchy headlines becomes as important as it ever was. If someone skimming through a list of possible topics is intrigued by your headline, then they may dip in to find out what it’s all about. That’s why Brian Clark suggested you should be writing Magnetic Headlines. If you were using WordPress to write your blog, then you would presumably put that catchy headline in that field labelled Title. It all seems so easy, but in fact it’s a little too easy. In what follows to avoid confusion, we’ll call what appears in that WordPress Title field the Headline.

Although your Headline may be written to attract human beings, it may not work well in a search engine keyword ranking. Since the largest proportion of the traffic to your website will come via search engines, it may be worth using something that the search engine robots will find attractive. The problem is that WordPress uses the expression in that Title field in a number of different ways. It is of course used as the headline in the < H1 > heading for your blog. It is also used as the Title element in the head of your blog page. This is the text that appears in the bar across the top of the screen. If you have nominated Pretty Permalinks, then the WordPress will also use the same text to develop the URL for the post.

Creating Optimal Titles

This is where the dilemma arises. The Title in the head of the blog page is very important in search engine rankings. The URL may also have a slight effect on these rankings. Optimizing the text for search engine robots will likely produce something, which is not necessarily one of those Magnetic Headlines that was being suggested.

Luckily help is at hand from a variety of sources. For example, Stephan Spencer and his colleagues have developed SEO Title Tag 2.1.3, which allows you to specify a Title for the blog post, which can be different from the headline. A more complete solution is provided by the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn from Uberdose. This not only allows an independent title but also has a number of other useful features. Even used ‘out of the box’ with default settings the PlugIn will achieve a good part of what is needed to optimize your blog posts for the Search Engines. Katy Castro has a good description of how to use it.

Getting the Meta Description Right

An equally important element in getting search engine traffic to your blog post is the text in the Meta Description for the blog post. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to prepare a separate description for each page. If you don’t, the default is that it will take the first 155 or so characters from the start of the post and use that. That avoids a problem Google has in indexing blog posts that all have the same Meta Description. Checking your website with the Google Webmaster Tools website will tell you whether duplicate descriptions is a problem for your blog.

By writing the most engaging description of your blog post in 155 or less characters, you increase the chance that this is what Google will show in its search engine report pages (SERPs). Most such snippets are a jumble of words that Google selects to try to show that its selection may be relevant to the keyword search. A well-crafted sentence will encourage many more visitors to click through to your blog post.

Although the Keywords MetaTag is of limited value nowadays, the plug-in does allow you to specify what keywords are most appropriate. Again if you do not specify keywords, the plug-in will select keywords by default from either the categories or from any tags that post may have.

The URL Of The Blog Post

A secondary factor in the optimization of the blog post is the URL for the blog post. Selecting the Pretty Permalinks option is one important step here for a WordPress blog. Unfortunately as mentioned above, this is again derived from the Headline of the blog post. You will find the text used in the Post Slug element in the right hand column of the Edit screen. It is derived by taking the Headline of the Post, putting all letters in lower case and adding hyphens between the words. This is not something where the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn helps. However as the WordPress Codex recommends, if you want to create a more memorable URL, then you can create such a one using lower case words and hyphens. Often taking the Title you have derived for the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn and converting it will be a good way to go.