Create Content for Higher Search Engine Ranks
Bald Mt. Press can build, maintain, and promote a blog for your business.
Aye Caramba
When we started our free desktop wallpaper site back in 1996, we posted computer background pictures and organic gardening information. We were broke, I had figured out how to make sites win for searches, and we were making a little money off the affiliate programs. So we looked to our lives for material that would relate to merchandise.
The Simpsons were huge at the time, and we’re big fans. So, we started work on a Simpsons sounds and pictures site that we could weave in our Amazon and Posters affiliates accounts. When Google Ad words came along, we picked up another source of income. It’s all pocket change, but it helps pay for the costs of doing business.
We didn’t realize at the time that we were creating great link bait. Over the years, the Simpsons site has been a huge draw, and it still garners the most traffic of any section at Supak.com, with over 800 uniques per month. A lot of those people are linkerati types who create links to our site, and that has helped the main site, Supak.com, immensely.
Recently, Supak.com moved up to a PageRank of 5. A lot of that is because of incoming links, and plurality of our inbound links go to the Simpsons site. That alone is reason enough to update the thing more often. So, today, after watching the episode Homer Alone (known in our house as Rancho Relaxo), I grabbed a few of the best shots and made some small screen grabs to download from the Simpsons wallpaper pictures page.
Now I’m making my rounds through my blogs putting up links to the bait I set out (self baitarential). Hopefully these blog posts will get the word out that I have some fun free stuff to download, and we’ll pick up some more links and start that long quest for a PR6. Aye Caramba.
American Museum of Natural History Map and Guide
Had a nice conversation with a new friend, graphic designer Harriet Spear, the other day about what to do for a small, local business web site in order to help them win a search.
- Put the keywords, no more than 8, in the Title tag.
- Write a description meta tag that uses those 8 words, repeating the key 3 or 4 twice.
- Make a keywords meta tag even though most engines ignore that now. Some use it, and so it’s worth it.
- Use header tags in the body of the page to create an outline structure that is logical. Use the title tag keywords in the main header tags (h1’s and h2’s)
- Use those keywords in the body of the page 4 or 5 times.
- Have at least 400 words on the first page, with 400 on each other page if you can.
- Make sure that the title tags on subsequent pages use other keywords than the home page. Each page should have different keywords, or different combinations of the main keywords, preferably a little of both.
- Create a business blog, even if it’s hosted elsewhere–just link the blog and site together and try to make the styles and looks as close to the same as possible. Post to the blog regularly (once a week is good).
- Get listed in the major directories and Google Local Business.
- Get links from similar site with high PageRank.
Of course, that last one is the one I can help you with the most. Anyone can follow basic on-page SEO instructions. Getting high-quality links from like-minded sites is not easy. Especially if your site is new. You might have to give two links back for a link to a new site, or you may have to link from the home page when the other party is linking from a lower page of many other links, which diminishes the impact of your link.
If I do your site, I link to it from all my major sites, often from the front page. If you have me develop your blog, you get in my blog roll, which is on the front page of most of my major sites. The value of these links cannot be overstated in terms of how they make you rank on Google. Just ask my LA caterer client!
The internet is a lonely place until you find a niche, and then it can be a very crowded place. In the parlance of the freshwater nautical set, a lot of people floating on logs need you to toss them a line so they can get on your party barge. I thought of this when I was thinking of how my most successful clients have succeeded at pulling in new people to their business through the internet.
Both of these clients, a Los Angeles caterer and a Maui bed and breakfast owner/operator, crank out the content. This isn’t just about writing about how nice a sunset was, or how yet another customer gave a rave review. It’s about creating products (Los Angeles cupcakes or discount programs for volunteers on vacation in Hawaii) that they, and I, can talk about to people who search for those things on line. They see your party barge floating there, lined up nicely with all the others that fit their search parameters. They read the title of your site, and the short description the search engine returned, and they decide which line they’re going to pull (click) to go to the party.
Of course once they’re on board, they have to be convinced that you’re going to continuously bring the party, any time they need it, to their door, rec room, or vacation itinerary. This is where the product matters a lot more than the line I throw them. These business owners have been busting it for decades now, so I don’t have to worry about them closing the deal. I just have to make sure that we consistently get those lines out there. That’s why we developed Cherie’s Maui Blog, Hookipa Aikane, and Emma’s Los Angeles catering blog.
Every blog post, every picture, every sale, every mention in the press, every single difference that can be made in the tossing out of lines must be made, and it must be made consistently and abundantly.
I’m a small time guy. Obviously, we’re consistent, my clients and I, but not always that abundant. I don’t do this full time. But I can see how if you had something that could make a lot of money on line, and you did do it consistently and abundantly, you could put out a lot of attractive lines which people can use to reel themselves in.
Some of the people coming to your barge will be spammers. The more popular your barge gets, the more of those you’ll get. Then, which is especially true with my LA caterer client Emma, you’ll get a lot of people who want to take the job of the person who got you to the top of the search engine result page which they found you winning. I guess they have to start at the top, but it would seem more logical to go for someone who’s coming in 20th than for someone who’s winning a short-tailed key phrase already (since that person already has hired someone to get them there).
But then, the logic of this situation is that the more lines you have out there, and the closer to the front you come when the engine lines up the search results, the more attention you’re going to get from all kinds of people (spammers, job seekers, press, customers, competitors). So, as you get more attention, be prepared to spend more time weeding out the crab grass.
So, get that title and site description tight, well written, and full of the key-phrases for which you’d like to win, then get out there and start throwing out lines that have those words and phrases, written in as many different ways as you can write about them. Dream up new products or promotions and talk about them everyday on your blog. Make sure your blog posts to your social media accounts. Leave comments on other sites that are about your subject, and make sure your signatures there have links to you, and your logo if possible. Try to put up guest posts on other blogs. Offer people the chance to write a guest post on yours. Cross promote your business with charities and other like-minded organizations and businesses.
Keep tossing out those lines!
Am I getting link juice from my business’s Facebook page? Well, I have to admit that I do not test things nearly as much as I should. I’m more of a creative type, and keeping track of things, testing them, and playing detective and scientist to see what impact one link has on my SEO is such a daunting task that I just don’t do it much.
But a while back I read a post about link juice passing from Facebook and, always looking for another quality link for my clients, I tried it on my Bald Mountain Press Facebook Page. If you want to learn how to put links on your page using FBML (Facebook Markup Language), go read the post linked above.
As to how this has helped me, well it’s hard to tell. My BMP page on FB is relatively new. Even the Google PageRank prediction tools won’t venture a guess. I haven’t created many links to the page, but the piggy-back PageRank from FB alone should be enough to rate the page a two or three… And that will be juice passed along, because using FBML has allowed me to create links that are followed.
While I am lazy about testing, I can verify that it is a followed link by going to my Google Webmaster tools, and looking at the sites that link to my Bald Mt. Press site, and sure enough, there’s my www.facebook.com URL passing along the juice. A check of links to all the other sites I’ve linked to from within the FBML box shows that they’re all getting it. And after I made that box, a few clients did move up a couple of notches, but that could have been other factors. Hard to tell.
Of course, Facebook will probably find this loophole and close it, so I wouldn’t spend too much time on it. But this does bring up the question of how valuable social media marketing is. Is a small business like mine or my clients’ going to double their business because they got a Facebook page? No. But will they entice the linkerati (bloggers, webmasters, and others who have the power to create links) to link to them? Maybe. Depends on who their friends are on these sites. Will they get a few clicks they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten? Over time, of course.
But there is one little advantage that having a Facebook page, or a presence on any other social networking or bookmarking site, can give you: internal search results. Again, because my page is new, I’m not coming up on the search terms I like in a Facebook search (like “get higher search engine ranks“). I’m also still learning what kind of SEO the Facebook search engine likes to see. It’s new and not that good, so I have to settle for just working with name recognition now. At least that has been a success. If you search for “Bald Mountain Press” in the Facebook search, the BMP page comes right up. And that can be a big advantage for small businesses.
Say, for example, you’re into Maui Hawaii weddings, like my friend and client Klaus, who is a big fan of the Facebook. He made a Maui weddings page titled “Maui weddings”, which as of today has 13 fans. When I search FB for “Maui weddings” he comes up first, and it looks like the results are being ordered based on the number of fans each page has. As Facebook usage expands, and more and more people use the FB search engine, Klaus will get more traffic, more links, and more business through his Facebook page.
Note to Klaus: use the FBML to make a side box with links to your sites!
No matter how small your business, you can benefit from this. It only takes a few minutes, and it gets you up there in the Facebook search results, if only on a search for you business name. And it’s only going to get bigger, so, sure, spend a few minutes. Make a Facebook page for your business, and throw a little FBML box on there for some future link juice. Couldn’t hurt.
I often say “You’re either doing the right thing, or your not.” As a progressive and agnostic, I’ve often been accused of being an ethical relativist. Well, I’m not. I think torture is always wrong, that’s why I advocate the investigation of Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned it.
As people who are very active in the world of food, specifically organic gardening and grass-fed beef, we’re always doing our best to buy and promote food that is sustainable and healthy. This ethic, which is certainly absolute, is born from our environmentalism, which guides our choices regarding our behavior toward the planet. We can’t afford to be 100% sustainable yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand we should be.
So when, recently, my innkeeper friend Cherie wanted to do a web site to encourage people to volunteer while on vacation in Hawaii, I jumped at the chance. It didn’t pay much, but I spent a lot of time on it because I knew it could be successful and make a difference.
I just didn’t realize how right I was!
This site went public around the fourth of July this year. That’s, what? Five months. In five months, the Hawaii volunteer site has earned a Google PageRank of 4. My main site, Supak.com, which has existed since 1996 and has many more backlinks, is a 4. Such is the power of link bait. And why are volunteer opportunities for vacationers in Hawaii such powerful link bait? Because it is an example of people doing the right thing. People (well, most of them) like to do the right thing, and when they see it being done, they will link to it, or bookmark it, or Digg it, or share it on Facebook (note the sharing stick at the bottom of this post).
In this case, they’re doing the right thing in Hawaii, and they’re earning a discount on their stay at Cherie’s historic upcountry Maui bed and and breakfast. Plus, they’re earning a donation (taken from the price of their stay) to the organization for which they volunteer. Win-win-win.
A close look at the analytics and the webmaster tools shows me exactly what’s going on here. The linking that’s going on is not as extensive as I’d like (that I see in webmaster tools), but the links we have gotten are good ones. Most of them are the usual links I provide to my clients, from my usual set of web properties that are capable of passing some decent link juice. So, I’d expect a PR3 out of it. But a 4?
Looking through the traffic from referrals in the analytics, I’m seeing a decent amount of traffic coming from links that don’t show up in the webmaster tools links (interesting, that). There’s a link from the front page of a German travel forum site that’s a PR 4. There’s a good link from Women’s Entertainment Television, on a blog page with a PR4.
And that link, it turns out, is from a highly ranked blogger. I go on and on about how important blogs are, and here’s a case where some decent links, as I’ve described above, work to give a page a PR4 in less than six months. Have Fun • Do Good is “A blog for people who want to make the world a better place AND have fun!” Apparently, there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing and read that blog for inspiration. More importantly for our purposes, there are a ton of people who link to that blog, because it’s a PR6. Even though the post with the link to our volunteer site has fallen off the front page, and it just links to the WETV post (same blogger) the link juice from those archives is still enough to put us over the top into PR4 territory. Who knows who found us through that post, has linked to us, and will be sending us juice next…
So, for doing good, we’ve been rewarded by those who do good. And we’re just getting started. Many of the organizations to whom we linked will be linking back (lesson: be generous with your links), and we’ll be adding more on a regular basis. And, since it’s such a cool idea for doing good (and there’s financial incentive involved), I figure there will be many more people like Britt Bravo of Have Fun Do Good who will be linking to us as well.
Unless you have a giant web site with tons of content that would take even a steroid enhanced Google bot weeks to index, you don’t have enough content. And even then, if it’s just content that sits there, you shouldn’t be content with it. My research, and I’ll admit that I don’t do enough testing, has led me to believe that unless you’re adding water to the river of content out there, you’re just not going to get the same attention from the bots.
Hell, it’s hard enough to get clients to give me new things to say. Most of them run very small businesses, which means they run them, usually dealing with every little detail. It’s time consuming and exhausting, and the last thing they want to hear is me whining about how they haven’t posted lately, or given me something to post. Whether they’re running a gourmet restaurant near Cooperstown NY, or a historic bed and breakfast on Maui, it’s just never enough for me. And those are two of my better clients who post pretty regularly to their blogs (Cooperstown Restaurant and Hawaii B&B). Point is, in today’s social media, blog-driven, twitter obsessed world, you need to keep a constant stream of your own, pouring into the giant internet river of Web 2.0 that just keeps flowing. Don’t be content with your content.
One client who always understood this is Emma Tate, owner/operator of Culinary Delight Catering in Los Angeles. She’s always coming up with ideas for promotions, additions to the site, new menus, special discounts, and the like. She sends a constant stream of testimonials from clients who love her food and catering services. I’ve been her internet marketer for a couple of years now, and her site is getting her more business than ever, although in these hard times her ideas like discount wedding catering in Los Angeles have a lot to do with it.
Of course, the fact that she’s a great caterer (voted top five in MyFox LA’s hotlist the last two years–vote again this year) has a lot to do with it too.
Lately, she’s been giving me so much to post that I get overwhelmed! Where to put it on the site, how to work it in to the existing navigation structure, how not overload the readers… All serious time consuming efforts for someone who, like everyone else these days, wants to keep costs down.
So, I built her an LA Catering Blog. I know, sometimes it seems like I think blogs are the answer to everything. Well, from my perspective they are. When I meet someone who just wants to stay in touch with fans, say, when my son’s music career takes off, then we can have a social media based campaign built around a central web site, using facebook or twitter as the defacto blog. But for the kinds of clients I have now, a blog is the ideal way to go. I can host them on other big sites like Blogger, WordPress, or Typepad and can funnel some PageRank and even some decent traffic (through shared tags and the like) to the web sites through an intricate, deep-linking pattern that develops over time from the various posts. I can build another set of information pages, like “about” or “contact” pages where I can vary the usage of keywords and go after phrases that I didn’t have room for on the main site.
I used Typepad’s paid pro service because it’s easy to do SEO on their blogs. Also, I didn’t have any blogs on Typepad, and you gotta spread the love around to as many different IP addresses as you can.
But mostly, I can keep it all organized. A blog is very natural and automatic way of organizing the tons of content that Emma creates. I can put testimonials up and assign them to the LA Caterer’s Testimonials category, and voila! A new, easily organized testimonials page!
The blog can even encourage new content! I’ve been after Emma to give up some of her recipes, like her red-velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing, and now, with the ease of posting to a blog, she can send me a roughly worded (she’s a chef, writing is not her strong suit) recipe, I can post it, assign it to the recipe category, and boom, there’s a recipe page. The blog is hungry, I plan to tell her, in an appeal to her instincts to feed. Now, I can get even more content out of one of my most prolific content creators, and it will actually be easier to deal with it! Blog for productivity!
Love Your Nuts Logo
One thing is always the same with these graphics: I name them with keywords, and when I use them on the web, I use a different combination of those keywords in the image alt tag.
The alt tag has slipped in terms of prominence in the ranking algorithms. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. It is, however, a courtesy to those people with slow connections, people who turn images off to speed things up, and especially to visually impaired people–the audio page reader will read the image alt tag out loud. But the alt tag is absolutely necessary if you want to win image searches.
We get a lot of traffic to our computer backgrounds photography site through the Google image search. Our Hawaii stuff site, which features free desktop wallpaper pictures of Hawaii, also gets a lot of traffic from image searches. The images that come up in these searches all have the keywords that are searched for in the image names, and in the alt tags. Often, the text around the image has the keywords as well, and the page on which they appear would be a good candidate to do well in a regular search for those words.
So, it’s a good idea to name your images using the keywords that your site is using. Even if the image doesn’t make it to the top of an image search, it still adds the keywords to the page on which the image is used. And it adds those words in a place within the HTML that the google bot isn’t used to seeing them. I’ve found this to be a bonus, albeit a little one. Every little bit helps. If you’re branding, and you should be, getting your logo out there in the image search can be a very valuable thing. Every time a potential customer sees that logo, you’ve etched it a little further into their memory, so why not do this little extra keyword work to get that logo out there even further?
One little detail about link building: it’s important to get links out on as many servers as possible. Since I host a lot of sites on one server, linking between them doesn’t count as much as if they were hosted on a bunch of different servers. It’s a shame, really, but it’s one way the search engines weed out guys like me, who have big crops of web sites that all link together.
How much does this cost me? Well, it’s debatable. But I have done tests and links in from other IP addresses are worth at least a little more than links from the same machine. A lot of other factors are involved, but two links from the same machine’s sites that are both PR4’s is going to be worth more than two links form separate machines that are PR2’s. Generally.
It’s frustrating, but there is a gold mine of old IP’s available to any webmaster that’s been doing this a while. For example, today I was link building for Hawaii clients, and I remembered an old site, the old site of my Maui Bed and Breakfast client, that is actually hosted on Maui.net–an old and authoritative site. And there’s the old site for a Maui vacation rental site of a client who doesn’t use the site anymore, but there it sits on the Maui Gateway server, wasting away its PR2…
If you’re like me, and you host on a server other than your internet access company’s, you probably have tons of free disk space on your access host’s server that you’re not using, and that qualifies for a free link from your access server. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I had some old ones that went away, unfortunately, when I moved and switched ISPs, and that is one problem, unless you’re going to get the same ISP no matter where you move.
Of course, if you’re getting a good deal on hosting, you’re not going to want to host every new site you develop at a new IP address, but maybe occasionally you can get a new server. Or maybe your client’s who are developing a new site will keep the old one. Take advantage of those old homesteads, and link to and from them!
As I recently mentioned in Discount Everything, a post on my Backstage w/ Supak blog, a lot of my clients are trying to find ways to offer less for less in these trying times. Since very few can afford the huge weddings that were so popular not that long ago (what better to do in your overvalued, dangerously leveraged McMansion than go further into debt for a wedding with a carbon footprint reminiscent of the zoom-back in Godzilla to reveal that they’re standing in the impression?), I have clients offering discount wedding catering packages and inexpensive beach weddings on Maui. Another client is offering lodging discounts to people who volunteer while they’re on vacation in Hawaii.
Knowing all this doesn’t prepare me for my weekly look at the Analytics. I saw an increase in visits from keyword variations on the cupcake delivery in Los Angeles theme. My guess is that things are so bad now that people would rather get a dozen birthday cupcakes than shell out for a big fancy cake.
So, one of the things that I’ve learned today from my visit to Analytics (this searching for value has intensified in almost all the searches from which my clients are getting click-throughs) is that I need to publicize the discounts and less expensive options being offered by all my clients. My in-laws’ Cooperstown restaurant is selling more desserts and appetizers than entres, and even the entres have included the occasionally less expensive items (like gourmet hamburgers made from grass-fed beef).
Even my more high-end clients are offering discounts. I haven’t gotten the details yet, but if you’re looking for a Kauai Hawaii beach house vacation rental that’s now slightly more affordable than it was before, you should follow that link. This client has told me that they’ll be offering discounts now (most likely in the off-season). So, if you’re willing to go to the Hawaiian Island of Kauai while the Humpback Whales are up in Alaska eating, you could save a few bucks.
Ironwood tree on Kauai beach in front of Hawaii beach accommodations
The point is that your analytics are trying to tell you something. Sometimes you’ll find little nuggets of gold in there, and you’re only getting a few hits for them because you’re coming in 10th for it, but if you work on it, and create some anchor text that points at pages that say what it is more clearly, you can move up to 1st, and you’ll be surprised how many more hits that will get you for some terms. I make it a point to try to spend a little time with the analytics once a week. And my most interested clients want to see them once a month (I use the automatic email to send out my invoices, too).
My only fear is that Google will figure out how dependent we’ve all become on Analytics, and they’ll start charging for it…
My friend in Hawaii, Cherie Attix, runs the Hale Hookipa Inn Maui Bed and Breakfast. She also cares very deeply about her home, the Hawaiian Island of Maui, which she blogs about on her Maui blog. Recently, Cherie was recognized by O Magazine (part of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire) for her efforts in Voluntourism, or volunteer vacations in Hawaii.
Of course, this is an ethical, environmental, community-based project that I was more than happy to do for a reduced rate (provided I get to be a volunteer on vacation in Hawaii sponsor). I knew I would be encouraging people to give a little back to Hawaii when they visit, to help leave the place a little better than you found it.
When we lived on Maui for a year, I remember a trip to Haleakala National Park where a ranger stopped my wife and asked her not to take rocks from the crater as souvenirs. She held out her hands to reveal several Japanese brand cigarette butts (the most common kind to find up there), and he apologized and thanked her. It is in that spirit of stopping those butts from washing down the mountain into the ocean where turtles eat them and starve to death that we launched this site.
It’s chocked full of information (content is king) about volunteer projects on Maui. It’s organized so you can narrow right in on the organizations you’re most interested in.
From an SEO perspective, this site is gold. There’s all kinds of content, and plenty of room to expand. It’s Maui centric, for now, but could easily be adapted architecturally to include all the other islands: a potential mother load of long-tail key phrases (the percent of searches longer than 3 words is ever increasing as searches get smarter).
Volunteer on Vacation in Hawaii has all kinds of link bait potential… The original idea for the site was a page on the Maui B&B site about Voluntourism that was found, and linked to, by the good folks at O Magazine. Cherie’s been talking to all the organizations about whom we did a page, and we’re expecting all kinds of links back from a bunch of great-ranking .orgs! Maybe we’ll manage to get a .edu or a .gov!
Another aspect to the link bait is the do-the-right-thing mentality that powers a large part of the net. After all, this site is helping drive volunteers to projects that badly need them! It also drives money to them, and saves the volunteer a little too: Cherie is offering guests of her historic Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast a five percent discount on their stay, and is donating 5% of the cost of the stay to the organization for which the guest volunteers! This, of course, works as a marketing gem for Cherie, too!
So, that’s yet another link-bait aspect: save 5% on your stay and earn money for the organization of your choice! Volunteer! Talk about your Calls to Action! The ethical aspect of a site like this should not be underestimated. We’re hoping to drive a herd of volunteers into these programs, thereby making Hawaii a better place in terms of environment, culture, and community. We hope for the sake of all involved that this gets a lot of attention.
Bald Mt. Press
Supak.com
Destination Hawaii Maui Weddings Blog
Hookipa Aikane – Maui Hawaii Blog
Organic Kona Coffee Farming in Hawaii
The Rose and Kettle Cooperstown Restaurant Blog
