Tag Archives ⇒ traffic

Using Arkayne to bring focused traffic to your site

· Brandon Hann

I discovered a new, free service that you may have already noticed on my site, but didn’t even know where it was coming from. I’m talking about a new form of link building that actually makes sense. It’s called Arkayne and the two best things about it are: it’s free and it integrates with WordPress. Getting quality backlinks has never been easier!

I found them during my search for a plugin that would display related content on my blog posts to help link my site together because we all know how hard it is to keep our visitors on our site and if they don’t actually search for something, they may never see it! All I was looking for was a feature that allows me to write a blog post and have the plugin run around all my previous posts and display some links with related tags and/or keywords.

I can’t tell you how awesome this service is, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

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If you don’t have a few minutes to spare to finish the video, this is basically what it does. You have an account profile on their site that you use to promote your site plus your social networking account which include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You then add some basic information about your site. Over on WordPress, you install the free plugin, insert your custom API code and let the magic begin!

In time, Arkayne will read through your entire site and essentially index your content on their site via links in your account. This makes you searchable to all Arkayne users. What will happen is people on the site will find your blog and if they deem it interesting and/or useful, they will click on Recommend and you basically have a “follower”. You, in turn, will also recommend blogs you find interesting and useful. This is a very useful tool for link building, which will get those coveted backlinks your site needs.

As time moves on, all of your posts will start to generate related links to other sites in the network and those sites who have recommended you will have your link show up on their posts. So just like other ranking sites, the more people that find your site useful, the more sites your links show up on.

Beyond that, you still get the feature I was originally looking for and that is this plugin will scour your site looking for related content that you’ve posted and place those links as well. You can even set how many links of each type are shown, from 1-5. You can see below that I currently have it set to show 3 of my links and 4 outside links.

The site appears to be running with a small amount of users so far (or least in the searches I did), but I have a lot of faith in this site due to it’s nature. Of course, only time will tell.

Join Arkayne Today!!

How to write perfect web page titles

· Brandon Hann

Ok, so perfect might be too strong of a word, but the point is that most people mistake the title of a particular web page to be the same as the main title of their site. Unless ALL of your web pages have exactly the same content on them, this is not the case.

I like to think of it like this. Let’s say you’re a book publisher called Ledfrog Publishing. You want to publish three books with these subjects: ‘making money online’, ‘how to play the game of soccer’ and ‘how to make a website’. Now you want to title them, so naturally you come up with “The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”, “Playing The Game of Fútbol” and “Create a Website in 10 Minutes”. These are all great titles because people would know exactly what they’re getting into just by looking at the cover. What you wouldn’t do is name them all “Ledfrog Publishing”, right?

If that came so naturally to you, then why are you making simple mistakes when naming your webpages?! I’m not yelling at you, but I am here to help! For the record, the reason people make these mistakes is because they think of their website as being one giant book and therefore, as long as they name the site correctly, every “page” within should follow a natural order.

Well this is true if everybody who came to your site stopped off at your homepage and then navigated through it page by page from there. However, I can almost bet that most of your traffic comes from a search engine and visitors likely found it by clicking on a keyword they searched for. What this means is that they landed at your site on some random “page in your book” and unless they click on something else, they are completely unaware of your site!

So instead of your site being a giant book, think of it as being the publisher and all the books are the web pages within. This will help you think of creative (and valuable) titles for each page.

I found a great guide online for creating titles and I wanted to summarize the process here. Remember that search engine optimization is extremely important to your site and it will dictate how much traffic you get.

What is a title?

Go to Google, do a search on anything you want and when you look at the results, you’ll see the blue titles that provide the text that’s closely related to your search. Try a few searches and even switch the keywords around a bit. You’ll notice that the results drastically change based on a few changes. This is because one site or another has written a title that better matches your search query. A title rests within the HTML code and is often overlooked by a web designer.

How do I write an effective title?

Read your page before you post it online. Read it twice if you have to. Start extracting keywords that summarize that page and write them down. You can even write down the most commonly used keywords. Once you have a nice list, start creating 60 character titles that match those keywords. Don’t just list them. As a helpful tool, search for high-ranking sites that have similar content and see how they’re naming their pages. You don’t want to copy them, but get an idea of the format.

Remember that you will be ranked for the words you use in your titles. If you start adding words like: about us, contact me, home, etc. you’re going to be ranked for those words first and not for the content of your site. This is another reason not to name every page the same as your site’s title.

Why do some sites consistantly rank high?

As with all other SEO tips, no one trick works alone. You need a combination of great titles, original content, good keywords, backlinks and regular updates to keep your site ranking high. As a result, some sites hit the nail on the head for more than one SEO category and that usually explains why they’re always at the top.

There’s really not much to it once you change your thought process on what a title’s function is and how it relates to your page. The goal is to show the usefulness of the page to Google and your visitors. The last tip I can give you is take a look at your titles and ask yourself if you would click on your own site if you saw it pop up on Google.

Social Bookmarking – Technorati

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure at some point in your blogging career, you’ve seen an article or two that pops up on the mega blog site, Technorati.com, but you probably didn’t know much about it. Don’t feel bad; neither did I.

We all know and love Google for they’ve been able to accomplish in the Internet industry (it’s amazing that we can now call this an industry!), and now we can love Technorati for doing great things just for blogs. As a reader, you’re able to search some millions of blogs all around the world talking about anything you can imagine. From there, you can leave comments, Digg articles, re-tweet your favorite bits of information, write for the site as a free lancer and even advertise your business there.

Freelance Writing

But as a writer, you can do one more important thing: promote your blog. Everywhere on this site, you read about posting quality content, finding backlinks and getting ranked high in Google. Well, here’s another way to promote and all it requires you to do is create an account. You can use Technorati to promote your blog and gain exposure and web traffic for your site.

Once you create your account, you “claim” your blog by adding a link to it and then Technorati will have you place some random text somewhere on your site. Within a few days, they will have found your site, verified you’re the author of it and then added it to your account. Now, whenever you post an article on your site, it will be referenced in your account and therefore, searchable. The more you post, the more likely your stuff will be found and that equals more traffic for your blog.

The advantage here is that you are listing your content specifically to a blog community. Being listed here can only help your cause over at Google. One thing to remember is that above and beyond any tips you’re going to find about how to create a successful blog, the most important one is whether you’re credible or not. I’ve said it many times before, but I’ll say it again. You can have a wonderful site with tons of content, but if nobody cares about what you have to say, then you’re lost and your site is considered dead.

Technorati Ranking

Technorati will also rank your blog against every listed blog in the database so you can watch your site gain popularity as your rank climbs higher and higher. Here’s a screenshot of my account page showing my claimed blog and ranking:

As you can see, at the time of this writing, I’m ranked at 40,606! I plan to drop this number as fast as possible and if/when I do, I’ll post a follow-up to this post to give you an idea of how long (and how many posts later) it took to get to that position. I may also post the traffic/rank ratio to help you get an idea of where your site ranks.

I think another great thing about Technorati is that you can claim multiple blogs. Just keep adding them to your account and you can then compare ranks between them to find out which ones are more popular. You mix this site together with your WordPress stats and Google Analytics, you will know exactly how to fix your blog if you need to.

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