Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Send Me Free Stuff (and I’ll Blog About You)!

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

I have just come across a blog entry by John Lamerton titled Send Me Free Stuff which has shown me yet another way,  that I would never have thought of on my own, of using your website or blog to your advantage.  The basic idea behind this was to make a blind request for free stuff to anyone who would be willing to send it to him in return for him writing a blog entry about the product they he received.

Why would anyone send him free stuff?  Every company that has their own website is competing against everyone else for search engine rankings… the higher the rankings the more traffic, more sales, more comissions etc but one factor in gaining a better search engine ranking is obtaining backlinks.  The company could make their money back many times over if they send out a freebie to someone who then writes about it on a busy blog.

I’m not sure if this would still work now or not… would a high profile blogger be happy with including product advertisements within their blog just for the sake of a few freebies or would they prefer to just stick to their topic of choice?

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More WordPress Modifications – Meta Description

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

I’ve been quite lucky with my this new Lots of Freebies blog as within a week Google had indexed a few of the blog pages I had created but I knew that was too easy.  Unfortunately the summary that appears below the page title didn’t appear to be appropriate and resembled more about the layout than the content as it basically listed the links within the top navigation bar of the site.  As you can imagine this is not very helpful and it certainly does not make the content look like it has any relevance to the page.

On further investigation I found that WordPress does not include the meta keywords or meta description in the page header… so it appears that I’ve come across another part of WordPress that I need to tweak.  I can actually understand the reasoning behind removing these tags which is that:-

  • WordPress can not read your mind so it cannot create dynamic keyword and descriptions for each page, or at least it cannot with any great focus on the topic.
  • Some search engines no longer use these as they are subject to abuse and those of us who are dishonest often add completely irrelevant keywords in order to obtain a better ranking and exposure.

Read the full blog…

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Increase your RSS Readers with rssHugger

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
rssHuggerThere doesn’t seem to be a day goes by now that I’m not trying to find ways to improve the Lots of Freebies website or find new ways to encourage new visitors and today is no exception.  Today, I happened to cross a site called rssHugger which is aimed more at bloggers, or at least websites that also include a blog.

rssHugger aims to bring bloggers and readers closer together and provide the blogger with good backlinks provided the content is useful to the reader which is a good for both the blogger and the reader as there is enough junk floating around out there already.

The rssHugger website has some useful features like being able to browse through the blog directory to find blogs which are relevant to you, although I personally would like to see free text search option as well, and in addition there is a random blog option which works similarly to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” or StumbleUpon.

Read the full blog…

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dofollow or nofollow – Update

Monday, December 29th, 2008

It would appear that Word Press uses the “nofollow” attribute as default on all outbound links which are included in comments (which I didn’t catch right away).  This seems a little odd that WordPress is still using nofollow by default  but my understanding is that this is meant as a method of reducing spamming on blogs. 

I do not believe there is any harm disabling the “nofollow” and converting to a “dofollow” approach as comments require authorisation by default and you can also install any number of spam fighting plugins if you are experiencing spamming on your blogs.

We have now ensured that any links on your comments are followed through to the destination site by using the NoFollow Free plugin.  If you intend to use this on your own WordPress blog then ensure you enable the options (once the plugin in uploaded and actived) via Settings -> NOFF, otherwise the comments will still use the “nofollow” attribute.

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dofollow or nofollow? What is the difference and benefits?

Monday, December 29th, 2008

One method of getting additional traffic to your website is adding a link back to your webiste when posting on other people blogs, but some of these sites operate using nofollow links and others use dofollow links but what’s the difference?

Essentially these methods are for search engines only and they do exactly what they say. 

NoFollow means:-

  • that the search engines do not follow the link through to your website
  • that the link does not count as a backlink

DoFollow means:-

  • that the search engines are allowed to continue through to your website
  • that the link does count as a backlink.

So why post on blogs which use nofollow?  From my research on this there are 2 main reasons to post in blogs which use nofollow:-

  1. Human visitors don’t just visit blogs using dofollow so you can still receive human traffic from nofollow blogs.
  2. If all your traffic comes from dofollow backlinks then search engines may interpret this as artificially generated traffic for the sake to receiving higher rankings and for websites with good content then natural traffic should be part of the balance.

We have decided to operate a dofollow policy because at then end of the day we wish to receive additional traffic from other peoples blogs and we believe that we should give our readers the same opportunity from our site.  In addtion to this we have decided to implement CommentLuv to provide our readers with a link to your latest blog post within any comments you make.

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