The real opportunity with “fresh” content concerns adding new content (new pages) on a regular basis. Adding new pages  provides a number of benefits:  Each new web page added to the website creates a new entry point and a new destination for links from other websites.  Creating topically specific pages with text, images, video or other media provide a better user experience and  gives other websites interesting content to link to.  Of course a quantity of quality links from other relevant websites increases direct traffic and can positively influence search engine visibility, sending even more qualified visitors.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/seo-telephone-game-fresh-content/

The 10 for 10 Challenge

This does two things. First, it builds inbound links to your site, boosting your SEO and ultimately getting more traffic from search engines. Second, there’s an immediate effect of having the site owner, other readers, and commenters become aware of you, which might lead them to check out your site, using the link in the comment.

This works for both other blogs and for forums. It also works on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not convinced that it works as effectively there. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that point. There are a lot of people who read this site that have Etsy shops. Their forums are a great place to post.

I want to help you out, my precious readers. I want you to have a direct benefit from reading this blog. So, here’s what I’m going to do.

The Challenge

I’m announcing the “10 for 10 Challenge”.

Post at least 10 comments on other people’s sites for 10 days in a row. That’s a total of at least 100 comments.

Document the number of visitors to your site on the day you start and at the end of the 10th day. That’s 10 full days of visitors.

The Prize

Whoever has the greatest increase in those 10 days will get a promotional article on my site, including an interview with you, a review of your site and your products, and a link in the sidebar on walton.com, (which is great for your SEO.)

The Rules

You need to have Google Analytics installed on your site, or another statistics program that can be verified.

The 10th and final day must be on or before July 12, which is 2 weeks from the day this article is published. That will give you a couple days to get the statistics program installed if you don’t have it already and you can do a little research for where you want to leave comments. If you want to start now and pick the best 10 days to get your maximum number, you can do that too.

Send me a screenshot of the statistics program, show the number of visits for each of 10 days in a row. The site with the greatest increase in the number of visits between the first day and the tenth day will win.

That’s not a percentage, it’s the number. It’s not the number of page views, it’s the number of visits. It’s not just the 10th day either. It’s the first day compared to any other day within 10 days. If you have a bump on the 7th day, then it declines, take the number on the 7th day. We’re looking for the greatest increase.

The actual comments that you leave are not verified. The only thing we’re counting to win is the increase in the number of visits.

Email me with your results. Show me a screenshot. The winner will be determined based solely on my judgement and my decision is final.

The Strategy

The way to make this work is to know your market. Research where they hang out. Search Google for your keyword and the term “forums” to find forums related to your product. Use your keyword and try searching for “best keyword blogs”. You can search for just your keyword, note the top 10 results, and see which are blogs or places that accept comments.

Once you have a good list of places to leave comments, hit them all, every day. See what people are talking about first. Don’t just jumps in with “Please visit my site”. No one cares about that. You need to be helpful. Answer questions. Be an authority. Give solid information. Ask great questions. Be that interesting person at the party that everyone wants to talk to.

The Benefits

If you are not using a stats application now, you should be, and this challenge might push you into doing that. Going through the process of looking for sites to leave comments, then actually leaving them, will get you into a great habit that will SEO your site for the long run.

If you leave 10 comments a day for 10 days, you WILL have more traffic, regardless of this challenge. You may not win this, but you will have more traffic. Everyone who attempts this challenge will have more traffic.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?

The Problem
Let me be honest with you. When I wrote my book, The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO, I was hoping that people would read it, apply it to their web sites and become fabulously wealthy. They would be so happy with what I had to say, and they would love my advice so much, that they would pay a lot of money for my next books.

That didn’t happen.

I got a ton of feedback from people that said this is the most amazing book ever, that this is the first time that they understood SEO, that now they are in control of their SEO.

A few told me that they got the book and maybe read most of it, and they intend to get around to applying it real soon now.

Only a couple people actually ever applied the advice to their sites. The ones that did were successful.

NO ONE has told me that they tried anything in the book and it didn’t work.

The advice in the book is true, but not many people have applied it.

I've got the map. You drive.

The Fear
There’s a fear, deep inside the back of your mind, that causes you to hesitate before you do something that might fail. That fear is the obstacle to being successful. It’s the fear of failure.

In spite of that fear, you need to do what you need to do. Do it even if that voice in the back of your mind is telling you that you will fail and that you will be humiliated. Do it even if it hurts. Do it even if that voice is telling you that you are not good enough. Make a rational choice and don’t listen to the voice.

The Key To Success
The key to success is failure.

If you don’t try, you’ll never fail. The more times you try stuff, the more times you’ll fail. The more times you try stuff, the better chance that you’ll succeed. The key to success is failure.

The real message here is that you need to get off your butt and go out there and make it happen.

I don’t want to give advice or write books for people who are too afraid to do something about it. I want to be with a group of people who want to do what it takes to win, do what it takes to make things happen and achieve the goal.

Is that you?

I can give you the map, but you have to drive the car.

It’s time for a road trip.

* have titles that are descriptive instead of artsy and original. so instead of naming a necklace just “moon dream” i would include materials and colors if possible, without making it too long, but in a way that when you read the title you know what are the materials, basic colors and style of the item. also to keep up with relevancy its better to have the type of the item more to the beginning of the title, like i would try “necklace” not to be one of the last words but more to the begining

* first 160 characters of descriptions also function as keywords for search engines (this applies for your shop announcement as well). So if you can out more of those keywords in the beginning of your descriptions its great

*about tags- again descriptive, think of colors, styles, materials, textures when using them. Also if i used for example “hoops” in the title i wont use it again in tags, because title is already working as a tag for me. i would try to save slots for words i haven’t used in the title

*sections are your keywords too. now i am still a little lost with this because section names cant be too long and you want them to be relevant to their content, so if you sell jewelery its natural to have “earrings”, “bracelets”, etc, sections but at the same time these are very competitive, just imagine how many shops have sections like that. the key is somewhere in the middle- not that popular name for section but at the same time still descriptive enough to know approx what expect when seeing it.

* links inside the listing can be helpful too, like ones that link back to your shop or other relevant listings. some people might not be accustomed to etsy and not know exactly how to go back to your shop (if they even know they are in one)

Read the entire article at:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6493401

Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.

SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.

What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.

They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.

Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.

Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.

• Before You Do ANYTHING Else…
• Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition
• Sell Handmade Stuff On The Internet – SEO, Part One

When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.

Pick your top 3 keywords.

You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.

Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.

That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.

They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.

Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.

Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.

When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.

As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.

If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.

As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.

**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.

The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.

There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.

Feel the power.

I’d like to explain how it works.

The basic steps are:

1. Find out who is beating you in the search engines now.
2. Find out who is linking to those sites.
3. Find out how to get those same links to your own site.

Step One
I’m going to assume that you know what your keywords are. You can repeat this step for each of your keywords if you have multiples, but I’ll describe the process for only one keyword in this article.

Do a search for your keyword. Note the top 10 results. Write down (or copy and paste) each URL in the top 10 results. These are your competitors that you will try to beat.

Step Two
Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. You don’t have to log in unless you are working on your own sites. Up at the top of the page, there’s an input field with a button to “Explore URL”. Don’t put it in the “My Sites” input.

You have a list of 10 URLs from step one. Put in the first URL and hit the “Explore URL” button. This will return a list of all of the pages of the site you are exploring.

Remember that this is just what Yahoo has in it’s index and may or may not be accurate. It seems to be more accurate than the information that Google gives you, but it’s not perfect. It is not absolute truth, only a reasonable facsimile.

The first response is a list of all of the pages that exist on the site you are exploring. Keep in mind that this is according to Yahoo, not absolute truth.

Click on the button to the right of pages that says “inlinks”. This will display all links, from all places, to only the URL you are exploring.

I prefer to limit the number of links displayed to “Except from this domain”. That will not show you any links from any page at the domain name of the site you are exploring.

There’s some nuance here because technically, “www.walton.com” is a different site than “shops.walton.com”. Same domain name, but different sites. I really want to know how well the entire domain is doing, so I don’t care about what subdomain, (that’s the “www” vs. “shops” in my example) that links are pointing at. I want to exclude them all. I only want to see links from other people’s sites, not links from the site I’m exploring.

I also want to know how many links go to the “Entire Site”. There may be links to specific pages or blog posts or special pages. Most links go to the home page, but not all. I want to see all links to any page on this entire site.

You should have changed the first drop down menu to “Except from this domain” and the second drop down to “Entire site.” When you make those changes, it should refresh and display according to the new settings.

This will give you a list of up to 1,000 places that link to the site at the URL you put in.

Step Three
Look at them. Ponder them. Click through to the next page and the next page. Click on some of the links.

This is the hard part. You’ll have to be part Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Your goal is to figure out who is linking to this site and then find out how you can get them to link to you to.

Some questions you might ask while reviewing this list are:

• Are there a lot of links from the same site?
• Are the sites that link here related to the same keyword?
• Are there links from sites that obviously have nothing to do with the keyword?
• Are there any blogs that you can leave comments on?
• Are their any forums that you can leave comments on?
• Is the owner of this site (your competition) leaving comments on other’s sites?
• Are there links from directories or places that you can formally request links from?
• Are their links from article sites?
• Are there links that you can easily reproduce?

If you see a bunch of links from comments on other sites, then you know that you have to target those sites for your own comments.

If there are directories, you need to ask to be added to those directories too.

If there are links from article sites, then you need to write some articles.

A good, healthy set of links should be from random sites that are related to the keyword, but are just genuinely honest links because the other person liked what this site had to say.

If you write good content and people read it, they will link to your site too. Leave a comment on their site and build a relationship with them. They’ll check out your site and probably link to it.

If you are doing the social media thing, people should be twittering and facebooking your content. If this site is doing that, has great content and is social, then you’re even, because you have great content and you’re social too, right?

If that’s the case, get to know the sites that are linking to your competitors. Leave comments and get to know the people behind those sites. Reach out, be nice, be helpful, and get to know people, specifically the people that are linking to your competitors.

The Balance
The balance that you have to strike here is between being completely nice and goodhearted, innocently out to help make the world be a better place, and on the other hand, being a money grubbing, greedy pig.

You need to help make the world be a better place. I’m going to assume that when you sell your product to someone that makes the world a better place, or why are you selling it?

Leading with the kind heart and the helpful hand, you need to keep in the back of your mind the target of your competition. Yes, you should be nice, but you should also target those specific people that are helping your competition.

Rinse. Repeat.
Once you review the lists of links for each of the 10 URLs for this keyword, you should spend time, (every day!), working on getting links from each of those places. You have up to a thousand URLs for each of 10 keywords, so you have ten thousand places to get links from.

Start at the top and work your way down. When you get to the bottom, repeat.

Do that until you have so many quality links that your site is listed above your competition in the search engine results pages. Build the links, then build more links.

By that time, the world will be a much better place, because they’ve been buying your products instead of your competition’s, and you will have more money to increase your business even more.

What could be better than that?

If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Thanks!

That’s all well and good, but technically, you don’t really care about getting people to come to your web site. You really care about getting people to buy your stuff.

The Goodyear blimp in Los Angeles is based a few miles from where I live. We see it all the time. On today’s bike ride, it came out from over the city and turned South to cruise down the coast. It flew almost over my head before I could stop and get a camera out.

On sunny days, they fly airplanes over the water, parallel to the beach, with big banners flying behind them, advertising beer or some event. They fly up and down while surfers surf and sunbathers sunbathe, uninterested in them.

They blast out their message to everyone within sight. Does everyone run out and buy Goodyear tires? or buy Coors Lite? If they’re lucky, they get a small percentage of sales.

Is that what you are doing? Are you optimized for a keyword that brings a lot of people, but not the people that want to buy your products?

SEO traffic is great, but you should target people who love your products. Aim for the fans, not for the crowds. Work on relationships, not on quantity. It’s better to have people who are interested and stick around and read your stuff than the people who are clicking through and bouncing out within 8 seconds.

A practical step step to do that is to figure out who is coming to your site now. Where do they come from? What are they looking for? Who stays around? Who bounces quickly?

Google Analytics has a few ways to dig a little more information out of all that data. There’s a button named “Advanced Segments” above the chart on the main stats page. If you click on that, you can look at segments of the traffic, like new visitors or sources. In the right hand sidebar, there’s a link to “Custom Reports”.

Try to find out who these people are that come to your site and why they are coming there. Look at keywords. They might not be what you expect.

Those tools will give you hours of fun, sorting through data.

When you think you have a better idea of who all these people are, you can focus your site on giving them what they want. Then maybe, you can make a few more sales.

My wife looking for sea glass on a recent trip to Jalama Beach

If you read “The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO“, you know that there are many, many things that you can do to increase your search engine optimization and get more traffic.

The very easiest way to get traffic is to comment on other people’s blogs and leave a link to your site. They usually link your name to your site. Don’t be obnoxious about it. Don’t oversell yourself or be rude, but leaving a link is common and acceptable.

The other benefit of commenting on other people’s blogs is that they usually read your comments. If you are witty and relevant enough, they might even come check out your site. If you have great content on your site, (and you do, right?), then they might even become a fan of yours. Maybe they become a friend. Poof! A relationship is born.

The hard part of commenting on other people’s site is that it takes time. You don’t see results right away.

I nagged coached Deborah, my wife’s friend with the sea glass jewelry site, to leave comments. (Did you notice that? I linked to her again. Darn, she’s good.) Her attitude was “Yeah. Yeah. Whatever…” but I kept after her. She tried hard, but it was difficult to keep up the energy when the results don’t come quickly.

She checks the number of inbound links to her site using Site Explorer, a tool I discuss in the book.

I got this email from her recently.

We’ll today I’m officially over a thousand. Am I supposed to put this in a diary of something? I remember in late October when you were on me about having 46…It was drudgery to even think about posting comments, etc. Now it’s the 1st thing I do for work every morning. Thanks for the push.

-Deborah

It warms my little heart. Yes, she went from 46 inbound links to over a thousand. It took her 5 months. She achieved it. Along the way, she’s made new friends and her site is better known to the community.

I’m so proud.

It’s not a human, so it can only guess, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it find and what is important? How would you determine what a page is about?

Tip Number One - Just say it!

How many time have you looked at a web page and not quite known what it was about? There were a lot of sales talk mumbo jumbo, but they didn’t tell you exactly what the product or service was.

Tip Number One – Just say it!

If people don’t know what your page is about, how do you expect search engines to know? You need to indicate, with no doubt, no ambiguity, what this page is about. You need to tell people and you need to tell search engines with focus and clarity.

You know what people take their cues from, because you a people. What do search engines take their cues from, not being as smart and nuanced as us humans?

Here are some ways they decide what the page is about:

This is not keyword density.

Something that matters a bit more is the use of heading tags. Those <h1> and <h2> tags that are usually used to make copy bigger and bolder. Google sees them in a different way. They are seen as giving the page organization. A heading defines a section of a page, so they must be important. If the heading has the keyword, then the page must be about that keyword. The trick here is that the style for the heading is usually way too big. Change the style sheet to make them look normal or at least reasonable, then use headings to control what’s important on the page.

“Anchor Text” is the actual text that you click on on a web page to take you to another place. You can click on images or text, but the text that you actually click on is called “anchor text”. I said that twice because it’s important. Think about this. When you click on a link that says “bicycle seats”, what do you expect to find at the target page? That’s right. So search engines, being stupider than a normal human, figure that the anchor text used somewhere else to link to YOUR page, must indicate what your page is about. That seems to be a pretty good indicator of what your site should be ranked for in the search engines.

It now becomes critical what anchor text people use to link to your site from their site. All you have to do is change the anchor text on their sites. Oh, wait. You can’t do that. It’s on THEIR site, not yours. You have no control over their site. You might be screwed.

This is where the post on Building Links comes in handy. There are ways to get links to your site and control what the anchor text says.

The next thing that a search engine will use to figure out what to rank your site for is the number of links to your site, to your page. They actually score each page, but they know that those pages are on your site, so your site might, probably will, get ranked higher than an individual page for a keyword. If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

The last factor that I want to cover here is the page rank of those pages that do link to you. Google is putting more weight into what they are calling “authority”. A few links from a high authority site is worth a lot more than a ton of links from a low authority site. I’m not sure how to tell which is which, but larger, established, long term sites will be higher on the authority spectrum. Try to get links from these kinds of sites.

All of these factors get thrown into a big ‘ol bucket of numbers and they score your page for different keywords or phrases. When someone searches on a specific keyword or phrase, the look at all of the pages that have scores for those keywords and compare them. Whatever page has the highest score at the moment gets the top ranking. Some keywords get thousands, or millions, of searches a day. Some keywords have thousands, or millions, of pages that mention them. How does your site compare?

If you search for “does wordpress cost money” or “how much does wordpress cost” or even “wordpress cost” and you will find a page on my site ranked number one. That is primarily because one site out there put a link to my page in their blogroll, so they link to my page on my site from every page on their site. This is great if I wanted the world to know that WordPress is free, which I guess I do. I just want them to know that I’m awesome at SEO and web design also.

People do find me and I’m thankful for that. As long as I have enough stuff in the sidebars to get their attention and tell them that I do web development and SEO also, then I’m happy.

Anchor text is king. Long live the king.

Why Do They Rank So High?

Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.

westcoastseaglass.net
westcoastseaglass.net has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition-part-2.html