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One of the techniques used to attract search engine spiders to your blog or website is called pinging. Essentially, you alert the search engine of any changes to your site and it draws a crawler to reindex the content. This works on the same basic technology as the Trackback and Pingback with which you might be familiar through your blog; you ping the blog to which you are sending a Trackback and it alerts them that you’ve made a chance – posted an article.
There are a number of ongoing discussions about the validity of pinging; whether or not it is still used, whether or not it adds value, whether or not it can harm you by appearing spammy…. Frankly, I err on the side of fundamentals, as always, and say, ping the search engines. Unless you ARE spamming, it strikes me as a good practice to help index your site. Besides, I’ve never been penalized and can only cite increases in organic search traffic (albeit via overall optimization and not targeted testing of the ping).
All that said, this topic only occurred to me as I pondered the slow demise of Yahoo; overcome by the leviathan that is Microsoft. There are more stats and blog posts about the battle for search than I can shake a stick at (I like this one because it references a guy I used to work with at Yahoo); bottom line, bing is a player – outside of Google, THE player. So the question we want to answer, is how do you get there.
Like Webmaster Central on Google, to ping bing, Microsoft has bing Webmaster Center. Sign in with a Live ID (now a bing ID?) and add your site and the sitemap URL. This isn’t exactly pinging in the context that I’ve just explained it but is part of the critical foundation to which I referred.
I haven’t yet figured out how to add bing to the list of services your blog pings (look in your settings for a feature that lets define who to ping). Essentially, you should be able to simply add bing to a list and have the technology take over. In the interim, should you want to ping bing directly, I’m trying to test or discover if you can add this URL to that list: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx
One of the keys to success in affiliate marketing is contextual relevance. Sure, there is no fixed cost associating with running your program through the thousands of coupon and deal related sites that exist to make a quick buck. Unfortunately, the time spent managing an extensive set of publishers and keeping an eye out for the ever present fraud, sucks the value out of the few leads or sales you might generate from a site that doesn’t reach your target audience.
Finding unique ways to reach your consumer pays off in dividends. Why not through blog plugins?
Mind you, I’m not talking about creating affiliate widgets or plugins to promote your business through blogs, I’m talking about reaching the blogger, a unique audience, through the plugin application. In a win for plugin developers, you can help them monetize their work without their needing to turn to the email spam or lead gen models that many use today. Offer a valuable product or service to the audience that consumes the plugin, and the developer has an unobtrusive, mutually valuable, revenue stream.
Consider the promotion of Omniture through Alex King’s Popularity Contest, MailChimp to bloggers who use Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7, or SEO books and services from within Semper Fi’s fantastic All in One SEO Plugin. Don’t misunderstanding me, I don’t mean to suggest that those plugins are doing this, and I hope they don’t look to me unfavorably for suggesting the possibility, my point is those plugins reach bloggers with clear intent and interest in the products or services that could be promoted through the Admin pages of the WordPress dashboard. Truth be told, I’m fearful of commercializing WordPress; on the other hand, I’m a huge fan of the belief that targeted advertising is good content and affiliate programs only appear where they work – I can’t say I’m distasteful of valuable products and services recommended through tools I use.
Win/win
At Outright.com, we’re offering free income and expense tracking, simple bookkeeping, to help entrepreneurs earning some money take care of their taxes. My target audience? The AdSense or affiliate plugin user; the blogger with some revenue from their blog, the blogger who has income to track, expenses to deduct, and taxes to pay. Contextual relevance to an AdSense plugin? You bet. And the performance has been exceptional.
Manoj Thulasidas set up such a partnership with his fantastic AdSense plugins. Conversion rates are high, validating demand from bloggers using AdSense for an effective, efficient, and inexpensive means of tracking their income and expenses. Grab Easy Adsenser to add AdSense banners and widgets to your blog posts and sidebar or use AdSense Now for a turnkey, simple integration.
If you reach bloggers earning some income through your plugins. Come check out what we’re doing through our affiliate program. You can get started quickly with ShareASale or if a LinkShare publisher, jump into our program through their Lead Advantage Network. I’d love to hear from anyone trying this; I know there are a few and I expect to find more success stories to share.
Well I have spent the better part of the holiday designing and wrapping up a new site. Interpreting my blog’s title, you might imagine my last name to be O’Brien, that is unless you make the mistake of interpreting my name as Brian with the SEO… you get the idea. To be sure, I am decidedly Irish, though indirectly so. To give my weary brain a break from all things internet and search, I’ve founded The O’Brien Store.
What does any of this have to do with Facebook? I’m getting there; in the proper spirit of a Marketer, please indulge me as I promote the site and encourage your visitation and participation. The O’Brien Store is founded on a the spirit of a traditional Irish Pub. Pubs in Ireland were often opened in hardware or grocery stores to capitalize on the space and diversify revenue streams. Undoubtedly, the evolution of pubs in Ireland had other benefits; what man of yore wouldn’t be happy to do the grocery shopping? Point is, Irish pubs are warm, inviting social experiences that serve many needs. Obviously, I can’t well serve Guinness online any more than Shepherd’s Pie so we’re doing what we can to serve Irish heritage, history, and wit with Irish gifts and products in the mix. As part of the experience, you can join The Blarney Social Club and participate in the discussion, find friends and fans of the site, and earn rewards care of…. you got it: Facebook.
Facebook has done an exceptional job at fostering development and adoption of Facebook Connect with supportive developer resources and an engaged group of engineers. Simply, Connect allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This enables websites to implement and offer many of the features of the Facebook Platform off of Facebook. Many are supposing that Facebook Connect will quickly relegate OpenID to the ranks of New Coke (or for those younger amongst you, DRM). Perhaps the more important question is how will Google’s less than stellar record of customer support hinder their success with rival platform Friend Connect?
Don’t get me wrong, the better part of my time has been spent work on the site itself with the integration of Facebook relatively easy. Facebook engineers are publishing videos to help developers get started all while encouraging 3rd party involvement and contribution.
One of the most valuable tools for bloggers is that which was designed by Sociable.es owner Javier Reyes. The plugin adds the Connect login function and profile features to your blog with a simple activation. Javier is doing an exceptional job keeping up with the demand for his WordPress application; chasing bugs, helping the rest of us who can’t get our divs and spans straight, and releasing ongoing enhancements.
Truth be told, I did some customization to the widget and plugin so your experience won’t look exactly the same as that which I have here but I couldn’t have done that without Javier and developer Daniel Guth (sorry I can’t translate his blog for you ). With a little help, you can be live in a couple hours.
Come take a break from being viral or searching for how to get on position higher in results. First one is on me.
WordPress – The celebrated blog platform, favored by search marketers for its amazing degree of customization and built-in optimization, comes in two flavors:
Hosted by wordpress.com: Gets you started as quickly and easily as the perhaps more well known hosted, and Google owned, Blogger.
The WordPress platform provided by wordpress.org: The downloadable version of WordPress which, while needing to be hosted by your own server or service, is infinitely customizable.
While other blog platforms exist, most notably the TypePad and Movable Type solutions offered by Six Apart, WordPress offers a fairly simple CMS and a rich plugins enabling customization for everything from video to eCommerce.
Therein lied an opportunity. In 1994, I founded a music website until recently known as The Octopus’s Garden. It was (is), in many ways, an exercise in web design and optimization as well as an outlet for my passion for music. Unfortunately, theoctopussgarden.com was obtained long before I had the chance (now by a squatter) so I picked up the obscure rareexception.com. Long story short, the site became my test bed for SEO. How does one effectively design a site with an unusual, unrelated domain name? Largely, I had to depend on fewer, key foundations of SEO: content, structure, and keywords.
Unfortunately, while the site has been a success in which I can be proud, I could never break through a series of traffic benchmarks I had set for myself.
Until I tried WordPress.
Huh?
How does a blog platform serve a traditional website? It was years ago when I first met NetConcepts’ Stephan Spencer and learned of the idea. It seems Stephan, long a fan of WordPress and SEO, designed netconcepts.com entirely in WP. Truth be told, I don’t recall if I misheard him, nor whether or not it’s still the case (let alone really ever was), but I was intrigued by the idea. So much so that years later, I’ve finally had a chance to redesign and relaunch the The Octopus’s Garden as, appropriately, the Rare Exception, entirely in WordPress. While this isn’t a tutorial in WordPress, here’s a rough how to:
Download WordPress from wordpress.org and install it on a hosted server (don’t use the hosted version of WordPress that you get from the .com – download it)
In Settings, change the Reading setting for ‘Front Page Displays’ to a static page
Make sure to use Permalinks – a good custom structure the eliminates the dates is /%category%/%postname%/
Design the Page template to have the look and feel you want for your home page
You want to remove the Archive (which lists posts by date) and rename the sidebar widgets to serve a site rather that a blog (“Popular Posts” works for a blog – “Popular Pages” is more appropriate)
Post templates are the other pages in the site – you can give them a slightly differently look and feel
Most importantly, you want to remove the dates from the posts so that they appear as static pages rather than time dependent opinions
I like retaining the Comments but a more appropriate naming convention might be “Discussion”
Now, perhaps the most important part of this article, the Why Bother?
It works. On that change alone I’ve seen a 3X increase in organic search traffic. 3-4 times as many bots crawl the site at any moment and the introduction of Comments, as a form of feedback, enables readers to dynamically participate in the debate about classic music rumors and mythologies. In turn, the pages are dynamically updated while ensuring they remain unique from other instances of the content that have mysteriously appeared on other sites throughout the past 15 years.
Using Yahoo Pipes, I’ve enabled dynamic updates to RSS subscribers, leveraging that ongoing comment-based discussion. WordPress creates two distinct feeds, one for posts (which becomes moot when your site doesn’t have posts like a blog), and another for comments (should subscribers want to receive updates on comments). By blending the two feeds as one, I deliver to my subscribers all of the comments, as updates made to the site; reengaging my audience to stay apprised of other opinions about PID or Pink Floyd and the Wizard of Oz. Consider how the same can be done of your products or services, enabling customer feedback as a form of retention.
3X as much traffic merely using WordPress to host a website. Don’t misunderstand me, it takes some minor programming skills to customize the templates, let alone the time required to simply make such a significant overhaul, so it isn’t without its costs but the ROI is significant. You also need a series of plugins for optimizing the title tags, XML sitemaps, site search, and mitigating spam – all told I have close to 40 plugins helping customize the Rare Exception. That said, the structured URLs, dynamic nature of blog platforms, and various methods for updating users (and bots), easily enabled by WordPress, are challenging projects for a typical website CMS or eCommerce platform.
I’ve had a dozen folks ask me about blogs since only the first of the year so here’s an episode from CommonCraft Productions, allowing me to, once again, cop out on a real post (I promise I won’t make it a habit)
The CommonCraft Show has found a niche with these unique videos providing brief explanations of popular and varied topics. They are contagious and informative, check them out.
……. If you were one of the lucky few, you were greeted by some welcoming adult content when last reading the blog. To you I say, you’re welcome. It’s not like you don’t get enough porn in your inbox; I do what I can.
Point is, the virus has been cleaned up so seobrien is safe and open for business (perhaps not the right choice of words considering those ads…).
IF you use WordPress and have not upgraded to 2.3, do so immediately! The virus was the result of a security flaw in previous versions.
). With a little help, you can be live in a couple hours.
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