I like my web traffic to be regular, frequent and free. The simple plan outlined in this article will send you a lot of free traffic. And you can get it all in just 2 minutes a day. Here’s how…
- Schedule a 2 minutes appointment in your calendar – every day for the next 101 days
- Bookmark this website: 101 free directories for SEO link building
- Visit every single site at a rate of one per day over the next 101 days
- I recommend you do this first thing in the morning before you do anything else
In 101 days time you’ll have put your site in 101 different web directories. This helps you get traffic in multiple ways…
- You get 101 links to your site
- Some of your visitors will find you via the various directories
- Each link conveys some SEO value that improves the importance of your site in the eyes of search engines
- Each link is from a different domain. This domain diversity is also helpful
- The better you do in search engines, the more traffic you’ll get
The key to making this work is to do the following…
- Have answers for all the fields asked by directories in a notepad file ready to cut and paste (speeds up submission)
- Write a proper headline and description. Don’t simply submit a list of keywords. The better your description, the more likely it is to be accepted. Here’s an example….
Pain-free Root Canal Specialist in Battersea London
The pain of a root canal treatment is something many people still fear. You don’t need to worry thanks to the pain free root canal treatment offered by SW Smiles, the root canal specialist. We offer fast, convenient and friendly dental treatment in our modern London surgery. Visit our site and arrange your appointment today.
http://swsmiles.co.uk/root-canal-treatment.php
Health : Dentist - Get to know the short-cut keys for copy and paste on your computer (speeds up submission)
- Memorise the best category for your site so you can find it quickly (most directories have identical category definitions)
- Keep doing this for 101 days. Don’t quit half-way through. 100 sites will deliver more than twice the traffic that 50 sites will (i.e. there is a cumulative result that comes into play with link building)
The trouble with Google is that you can never find anything. That is to say, it tends to spit out the same tired old sites over and over and over and over again.
This is especially frustrating when it comes to finding new and exciting information. And it’s why I’ve decided to compile this list of useful SEO resources. Enjoy!
- Google Webmaster Guidelines – the place to start any SEO journey
- The DIY SEO Seminar – the best SEO course aimed at non-technical people
- The DIY SEO Guide – a free downloadable ebook
- 66 ways to get links to your site – a superb collection of link building ideas that continues to be updated
- 101 free link directories – all offering free one-way links to your sites. Link building is still the backbone of professional SEO link building
- SEO Quake – the brilliant Firefox (and now Chrome) add-on that does most of SEO’s heavy lifting for you (keyword density, meta tags, PageRank and more)
- Search Status – an add on for Firefox that does many useful things (e.g. highlighting all the no-follow links on a web page)
- SEO Books Free SEO Tools
- SEO Moz’s SEO Tools – some of which are free to use
- 32 article sites – useful for building contextual links
- Contextual links explained – put the power of contextual links to work for you
- More on contextual links
- Google PageRank explained – what do those mysterious numbers mean, and do you need high PageRank to top the search results?
- What is link juice – and how it can it be used to understand the flow of SEO value?
- Deep linking techniques – what are they and how can you take advantage?
- How to make Google understand – a discussion of a Google problem and its solution
- Yahoo Site Explorer – find out how many people link to your site
- What do you do when SEO gets in the way of the sales copy?
- Comprehensive introduction to SEO for beginners
My own approach to copywriting is definitely on the casual side. I arrived at this point via a lifetime of writing direct response copy that seeks to get a human being off his/her ass and filling out a reply coupon.
Anybody tasked with such a challenge soon learns that lead generation calls for a particular type of copy. And that overly complex language merely gets in the way.
This has almost certainly coloured my view of what makes for good copy. And yet, I can’t help wondering whether anybody will consider the following to be good copy?
There are 3 nodes of relevance to integrate holistically into an internet marketing campaign to ensure a healthy, robust online presence; those nodes or rather prerequisites are SEO, Syndication and Social Media.
Huh? What the f*** is that all about?
What makes this egregious piece of crap especially (cough) egregious is that it appears in the introductory teaser for a blog article. It’s supposed to persuade me that I want/need to read the article it promotes.
You can bet your bottom, middle and top dollar that I don’t want to read whatever follows that particular introduction. What I do want to do is remove my eyes and soak them bleach, just remove the stain left by that jumble of obfuscation.
My guess is this article was not written with human beings in mind. I suspect the intended audience is googlebot, and the objective is a push the author’s site further up Google’s results pages.
From time-to-time I’ve railed at Google for hijacking the net with its damned silly SEO rules that force everybody to play damned silly games as they try to worm their way to the top of page one. I’m not going to do that today (ahem). Instead, I’m going to rant about something else.
If you take a look around the web these days, you’ll find even worse content than the confusing nonsense in the above example. And it’s all thanks to a rather sordid little invention known as an article spinner.
The purpose of this nefarious little device is to take an article written in plain English, and ‘re-spin’ it many times over with slightly different words. The end result is a series of completely ‘different’ articles. Different in that they contain different words, strung together by a mindless automaton that has no idea if the resulting mess makes any sense at all.
What a ‘brilliant’ idea. Why I could run this article through a spinner, end up with 100 unique pieces of text. I could then pollute the web with my totally ‘unique’ content, and get myself a whopping 100 inbound contextual links – just like that.
Of course there’s one small flaw in this nefarious attempt to fool Google. The ‘spinning’ is being done by a computer program that lacks the ability to write proper English sentences. Such programs tend to spit out unreadable crap that was obviously not written by a real person. The resulting garbage fools no-one (and may not fool googlebot either).
It is a complete waste of time. Please stop doing it.
21
Help, I’m stuck in the middle of corporate hell
0 Comments | Posted by Wayne Davies in customer service
Want to build an organisation capable of giving excellent customer service? Then you better not build it like this.
In the recent UK election the Conservative Party tried to sell the electorate on a vision for a ‘Big Society‘.
Despite their best efforts, it failed to grab voters and the resulting mess is still being negotiated in shady deals conducted in the proverbial ‘smoked filled rooms’ of Westminster.
From a marketing perspective, it’s interesting to speculate on why the voters didn’t get excited by the concept.
The Labour Party wasted no time dubbing it a plan for a ‘DIY State’. And that gained plenty of media coverage. In fact – I first heard about the ‘Big Society’ via this very slur. That fact alone highlights the problem the Conservative Party faced in trying to get its message out to the people.
It also shows the Labour Party enjoy people with far more political and marketing skill than the poor old Conservative Party. The phrase ‘DIY State’ conveys far more emotional impact and meaning than ‘Big Society’.
For a start, the term DIY State implies capitalism. And that’s a dirty word for the majority of UK voters at the moment, thanks to the banking fiasco that the Labour government actually made possible.
The term also implies self-reliance, unlike the anaemic term ‘Big Society’. And yet that’s exactly what the Conservatives were trying to communicate. In essence, the Conservatives chose a catch-phrase that is devoid of any useful meaning from a marketing perspective.
Their chosen headline ‘grabber’ lacked even the ability to polarise the electorate.
This implies a lack of confidence on the part of the Tories, and they are seemingly unwilling to stand behind their own ideas. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a DIY State. I suspect many tax-payers would respond likewise.
It’s also interesting to note that the Conservative Party’s last election winner had no trouble speaking her mind.
Everybody who writes marketing copy can learn from the Conservative Party’s mistake. The words you chose to describe your vision play a vital role in how it’s received.
Weasel words chosen specifically to avoid upsetting people never work. They fail to inspire the faithful. And they provide the opposition with the means to upstage you by using forceful language in opposition.
Some people engage in a relentless pursuit of perfection. Others never seem to get anything done.
I suspect a large number of people in group A also find themselves in group B.
When it comes to your web marketing, it’s worth considering whether or not perfection is required to achieve your aims. Especially when you consider the nature of the Internet.
Offline marketing items can’t be changed after the fact. If you have 5,000 brochures printed, and then discover there’s a typo, you’re stuck with it.
The web is an altogether different proposition. It can be changed after the fact.
This means you can publish your latest marketing piece as soon as it’s ready, and then improve it over time. In other words, I’m advocating a “publish now, perfect later” approach to web marketing. Here’s why…
Let’s say any given marketing piece will take 7 days to perfect. If you publish today, you give the piece an extra 168 hours to work for you. There’s a good chance you’ll make sales as a result of its appearance during that time.
There is nothing to be gained from withholding something because it’s not yet perfect. If there are legal reasons to wait, naturally you should wait. What I’m talking about here is waiting only because you yourself feel the piece needs to be perfect before it goes live.
Search engines can’t index video content they way they do plain text. From an SEO perspective, it can seem that video content can’t help with search engine optimization (SEO).
As it happens, there are several ways you can use video to improve your ranking in search engines…
- Get your video ranked in Google through back links
- Upload your video to a third party site with high credibility (e.g. You Tube) and work on getting it ranked
- Transcribe your video to improve indexing
Of these 3 strategies, the last is the most useful in the long term with respect to your own site. Over time, you’ll post more video content. Some of these will prove to be very useful. People will find them, and link to them from their own sites (i.e. they’ll become link bait).
The end result is increased PageRank and credibility with Google and other search engines. That benefits your whole site, not just the pages that contain your most popular videos.
The challenge is to make sure Google correctly indexes each of your videos. An excellent way to achieve that is to transcribe it and post the resulting text on the page that contains the video.
You can see an example of this technique on the following UK Pension Cash site.
As you’ll see if you visit the above site, the full content of the video is not transcribed. Instead the content has been summarised, giving a visitor enough information to get the jist of the video. And provide Google with enough words and phrases to correctly index the page.
Ask 5 web marketing experts how they think businesses should use social media, and chances are, you’ll get 5 different answers. Maybe more.
My own view is that any use of social media is valid if it supports the business. There isn’t one correct way to use social media. I’ve seen social media used successfully to do the following…
- Generate leads
- Raise awareness about a new product
- Provide customer service
- Get feedback from clients
- Communicate with customers
- Take the place of custom components on a website
The plain fact is, social media provides two things of use to a business…
- A set of web-based tools that achieve specific tasks
- A built-in community of users
These are both useful to a business, but the second is an irresistable lure to a business that gets in the way of understanding the potential of the media. The existing community is seldom interested in anything the business has to say.
I think the key to making use of social media isn’t to try and exploit the existing community, but to build your own community. That needn’t be orientated toward sales either.
One of my suppliers uses Twitter to post real-time technical updates when things go wrong. This keeps all their customers information, and ensures the technical staff are free to focus on the problem instead wasting time answering the same questions over and over again.
One of my clients uses Blogger as its News page (i.e. press releases and related snippets of news), rather than create a custom component on its website. The built-in features of Blogger are ideal for this purpose. And it has the added SEO benefit of being hosted on an external domain. Over time, the news ‘page’ has gained PageRank and so increases the client’s exposure in Google (who own Blogger).
A deep link is a URL that links to a page within a website. That is, a page that isn’t the site’s homepage. For example…
Abicord wants to improve the rank of the smoking cessation page on its website. This page isn’t on the homepage, though it is linked from it. The smoking cessation page is specifically focussed on a stop smoking product.
Abicord wasn’t interested in keyword research and is happy with the keyword density of the current content. All it wanted was additional backlinks to help boost its deep linking.
In particular, it’s interested in having this page show up in sub-listings when people search for Abicord in Google. And deep linking is the key to encouraging Google to incorporate extra pages in its sub-listing.
11
Writing for the web is different
7 Comments | Posted by Ken Munn in Copywriting, SEO, Search engines, Web Marketing
Take your pick
Pick a piece of online copywriting you like. Even some of mine! Cut and paste it into a new document. Then print and read it. Odds are you’ll find it doesn’t work as well in print as it does in pixels.
Is this harder to read?
Writing for the web is different, because reading a screen is different. It’s harder than reading paper, so work to make web copy less difficult to read. Tempt the visitor to keep going.
Yours sincerely
The web is informal – when did you last see a webpage beginning “To whom it may concern”? Use the first person and active constructions. Take liberties with grammar and construction, as long as you know what you can get away with.
Byte sized*
Break a chunk of copy into short paragraphs – it looks less daunting.
Ask a designer
Any designer will tell you about the advantages of white space. That works on-screen too.
Love spiders
Pepper web content with headlines and sub-heads. It leads the visitor on. And it’s an SEO technique for grabbing spiders.
Key words and phrases
Only humans read print. But web pages are read by stupid software. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it just indexes words and phrases. So, repeat key words and phrases more frequently than you’d do for a human reader. However, spiders aren’t going to spend money with you so, for the sake of the humans out there, learn to repeat key words and key phrases unobtrusively.
Pixels, not print
Always proof check for typos and grammaticals by reading your copy as a print out. You’ll see more mistakes that way. Then proof read for sense and readability on screen, because that’s where everybody else will read it.
Keep it short
Bored yet?
*deliberate mispelling. But you knew that anyway.
