Building traffic and driving sales for Small Business and Bloggers since 2003.
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Last night the new Blog Services and Rates page went live.
My hope is that it will be helpful to you bloggers and small businesses because you can see everything we offer and exactly how much it costs. Total transparency…
So head on over and see how amazing your blog can be for just a few bucks.
-Brad
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Update: I’d like to thank all of the Sphinners out there who helped put this article on the front page. A special thanks goes out to these two who helped get this article there. Thanks!
We all know that Google uses the Click Thru Rate (CTR) in their paid listings. Heck, you can even see the CTR of each of your own running ads in the Google Adwords dashboard.
So with that same technology, is it sensible to think they use the same technology to improve the relevancy of their organic results too?
Case + Point:
Google has a limited amount of factors that they can distill from their own personal analytics. With that set of data, they have to try and extract the most meaning possible.
If Google serves the same 10 results for “Wordpress Consulting” over and over then hypothetically each result should get 10% of the clicks. [click to continue…]
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Today is a great day. I’d like to personally thank Toni at Automattic (the company that owns Wordpress) for accepting me into their Wordpress Consultant List. Thanks so much, and I hope to do Wordpress proud and be an asset to the Wordpress Community. Thanks!
Check out my newly revised Wordpress Consulting page.
Thanks again Toni!
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About six months ago, I released the Wordpress SEO Blueprint. It’s a short guide to simple, easy-to-implement techniques that will help get your Wordpress Blog indexed and rank for the keywords you’re going after.
The ebook has sold well and I’m very proud of the positive response from the readers of the Wordpress SEO Blueprint.
As my skills and focus have developed and changed, I realized that to up the ante in the Search Engine Optimization world, it’s important to let your secrets go eventually. That’s why this ebook is now available to everybody for free. [click to continue…]
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There comes a time in every blogger’s/webmaster’s/designer’s life where you get tired of working with a site. Maybe your interest in the niche slipped into non-existence or you got tired of the work and updates that seem never-ending. Sound familiar?
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It happens to all of us. No matter how much you try to keep up with your website, some links can get old and die. Maybe that cabbage recipe you love and linked to last christmas, or maybe it was the link to your friends website about being a single mom (actually, this link is very much alive… and it’s good enough to interest anyone, even if you aren’t a single mom), sometimes links go bad.
And that’s why this little tool can be super helpful:
This website will spider through all of your pages and let you know if any of those links are broken. I also use it to see how many pages are on my site from time to time… right now there are a shade over 250 pages…
Best of all, it’s simple and free.
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A Rant:
Does an advertisement like “Get More Traffic NOW” sound familiar? Doesn’t everybody just LOVE the idea of more, more, more traffic? Jeez, wouldn’t everything just be great if there was MORE traffic to your website?
Let me tell you something: More doesn’t cut it.
I don’t mean to be the guy to spoil the “More Traffic Party”, but it’s not more traffic that you want. It’s the RIGHT traffic you want.
You don’t see restaurant owners going out begging for just anybody to be in their restaurant… they aren’t looking for people just milling around with no money getting the rugs all dirty and getting in the way of the servers and what not. A restaurant wants the RIGHT kind of traffic too, in this case someone who is a)hungry and b)willing to pay what it costs to eat there. The 85% of the population who is either not hungry or has insufficient funds isn’t invited. That’s how you should be thinking about your website too.
What is the right traffic? Well it depends on your site, but usually the right traffic is someone who wants to buy your product, will click on an ad, or wants to hire you for a service. Too many webmasters are out there working for and paying for traffic that’s getting them NOWHERE.
How do you decide what traffic is the RIGHT traffic for your website? Well, that’s a good question, and one that doesn’t get a lot of attention sometimes. And it just so happens to be one of the best questions you can ask yourself.
And, it’s also a big enough question to justify an entirely new post. So until then, just remember that it’s not MORE you want, but the RIGHT traffic.
(The follow-up to this post is the first post in the How to Find the Right Traffic to your Website series. Click here to see it.)
-Brad
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Use this tool to check and see if the domain name for your business, organization, or just the domain name you’ve always thought would be cool or memorable is available.
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Today I was sitting in Northstar (one of my favorite places to grab a bite to eat and a good cup of overpriced coffee in the Short North) and decided to pick up some of my secretly favorite magazines. No, not the magazines you are thinking of. Nerdy magazines. Like Wired.
Within Wired, somewhere deep in the back of the magazine, there is an article about web scraping and how it’s a dangerous business to get in because the sites you are scraping from can shut off your access to their data anytime. And then, like David Copperfield making a yacht go “buh-bye”, you’ll find the value of your site and the fickle traffic that payed your bills before have disappeared.
-If you have no idea what I’m talking about with scrapers, then head over to the Wired Article (here) and brush up.-
What can we learn from this? I mean I haven’t had one client yet, ever, ask me to make them a web scraper (or bot), so how could this possibly teach us anything? It’s easy. When you are creating a sustainable website, there are no shortcuts.
Creating a sustainable website, one that will stand the test of time, Content Is King. Your content has to be:
1. Interesting
2. Unique (meaning you can’t copy&paste or just reword something that everybody already knows)
3. Well-written
4. Linkable (meaning that other people will read it, and want to link to it)
When I first started creating websites and trying to get tons of traffic, I thought that Quantity beat Quality anytime. Over time, it seems that the opposite is true.
On the other side of the computer screen is always a HUMAN BEING spending their time reading what you’ve written to meet some need that they have. Maybe they want to know how to build a better website, make their website more SEO compliant, or in the case of this article, trying to learn what the article from Wired can teach us.
And, for 99% of websites, that means writing great content or hiring someone to write great content for you. Without good content, your website doesn’t offer any value to the visitors, and no short-term fixes (including SEO) will make your site take flight.
So what does all of this mean in terms of how ACTUAL sites look?
Well, I’ll show you from some pages that I’ve written myself.
Cheating Page:
Why: OK, this is a page from my own site. See, we all do this sometimes. The reason this page doesn’t work is because it doesn’t really offer anything of value to the user… You. just because you are at my site doesn’t mean you care at all about another site I’m launching. I can’t image anyone reading this page and saying… “Wow, knowing about this site launching sure is interesting. I think I’ll link to that and tell me friends about it.” Honestly, not going to happen. Why don’t I erase the page? Well, it give’s me a link to the site, which helps the Columbus Restaurant Review Site in the Search Engines. (But if I had the time, it’d help MORE to write a more compelling page.)
Good Pages:
How To Dominate Your City in Google
Why: I wrote both of these pages over time. You know, I opened up Word and wrote and edited and edited and added and fact-checked and researched and all of that. It took time. It took energy. Heck, it was hard. But it paid off. People read these and comment, link, and somehow the Search Engines know that these are good pages and they give them prominent positions in the Indexes… which means more traffic and more money.
Do I walk the walk? Let me know if this article that you are reading write now is fluff or “stuff”. Leave a comment below about what you thought. And if you do think it’s stuff, why not let me take a look at your site and see if we can’t make some moves for you or your organization?
-Brad
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My name is Brad and I love to help people drive traffic and make great blogs. Thanks for coming by. If you like what you see here then check me out on twitter, or contact me directly to see how I can help your next project.
