Optimize the Most Underutilized Page of Your Blog

Whilst it’s easy to get excited about crafting your latest blog post it’s far less likely you’ll be kept awake at night thinking about your blog’s Contact page. Indeed many bloggers don’t even bother to add a Contact page to their blog at all—but this can be a big mistake. As you’re about to discover, when contact pages are done right, they can become one of the most important parts of your entire blog…
Image copyright kpwerker, licensed under Creative Commons
A key blogging concept that sets it apart from running a standard static website is the “community” element. Blogs are built for discussion and networking and any blog worth its salt will have a group of like-minded subscribers reading and contributing on a regular basis.
In the same vein, your Contact page is just one more way to interact with your blog visitors. Here are just a few of the many types of email you might get as a result of having a contact page—just take a look at all these benefits.
Spelling mistakes. Grammatical errors. Broken links. Strange page alignments. Despite your best efforts sooner or later a few issues are likely to creep into your blog, either because you failed to proofread your writing before publishing, or because of changes to old posts that you haven’t noticed (such as the removal of photos you’ve linked to, affiliate programs closing down, or linked websites changing their site structure).
Sure, it can be both a little frustrating and embarrassing when someone contacts you to say that something isn’t quite right on your site but would you rather resolve the issue or leave the problem to run for the foreseeable future?
Making it easy to contact you allows your visitors to report any problems they are having with your site. That enables you to not only quickly resolve these, but to really take care of your readers by responding to thank them for the heads-up, apologizing for the situation, and telling them what you’ve done to resolve their problem.
Anyone releasing new products—from publishers to manufacturers—likes to get feedback on new products. It not only helps them make their product the very best it can be, but can also help to make their latest release more visible to potential consumers.
A highly-visible blog written by someone who clearly knows what are talking about can be an ideal avenue for this. It’s not uncommon for the blogger to be contacted in person and offered free products to look at that closely relate to the subject of their blog.
Without a Contact page, you make it very difficult for anyone to offer these to you. You miss out on potentially interesting and unique content, and freebies too!
The most profitable affiliate campaign I have ever run was as a result of being approached through the Contact form on one of my blogs. The gentleman who contacted me was one of the founders of a well-known online company who had since sold it and was setting up a new venture. He’d tweaked his sales process to within an inch of its life and was looking for a few beta testers.
That one affiliate program replaced my full-time income the day I added the links to my site.
And it was all because I ran a visible blog and was easy to contact. Without my Contact form, I’d never have been invited to join this “private” affiliate program and would be literally tens of thousands of dollars worse off.
Ever wonder what your blog visitors really want to read about? Ever spend hours working on a post only for it to get little or no response from your subscribers?
Actually getting out there and surrounding yourself with your readers is one of the very best ways to create a uniquely tailored blog that’s perfectly in line with the interests and expectations of your audience.
And one ideal way to understand your visitors better is quite simply to pay attention to the questions you get asked. Look for common themes that you’re asked about on a regular basis and construct blog posts that specifically target these.
A friend of mine with a small travel blog recently got contacted by an online advertising company which offered her a monthly advertising deal that, by itself, is equivalent to around 50% of the salary from her job. And all she has to do is paste a few adverts into her blog—a job that will take a few hours at most.
A 50% pay rise just for being easy to contact? Yes, contact pages really can bring in some amazing opportunities.
The media constantly needs “experts”—for interviewing, fact-checking, raising awareness, consultancy and so on—and a visible and easily-contactable blogger makes a perfect target for these media professionals.
All these benefits from having a contact page on your blog that’s easy to find and encourages feedback? Hopefully you’re starting to see why you need to overhaul your Contact page! But what should you do to make the most of all these opportunities?
The first step with publishing a Contact page is to make it easy to find. Ensure that anyone who wants to contact you can quickly and easily find your Contact page.
A great service for helping you understand how easy your website is to use is UserTesting, where real visitors who have never been to your website are set assignments (such as “Find my Contact page”). They carry out these challenges on video while describing their thoughts so you can exactly how real-life visitors view your site, and how easy it is to navigate.
A well-designed Contact page doesn’t just provide information on how to get in touch with you—it actively encourages anyone reading your page to drop you a line. Let it be known that you love to hear from your readers, that you’re a real person and that you genuinely value their feedback.
What should your visitors expect when they contact you? Try to improve the whole experience for your readers by giving advice on how long it normally takes you to respond to different types of queries, what type of contact you encourage (and what you simply don’t have the time to respond to), and so on.
Even consider giving tips on how you like to be contacted. For example do you prefer email, phone, Twitter, or Facebook? Do you prefer detailed messages, or short, to-the-point contacts? Are there any essential elements that your visitors need to ensure they include in their message to you?
Too many contact pages simply provide an email address on which you can be contacted. However, if you’re a blogger you’re probably involved in social media in a variety of ways, so your Contact page is another great place to list these profiles, thus offering more opportunities for interaction and growing your social network.
There are two problems with simply providing an email address on your Contact page. The first is that there is a risk your email address will be harvested by spammers who will then bombard you with junk email. The other is quite simply that you make it more difficult for people to contact you—and as a result you will reduce the number of messages you receive.
While it seems like a tiny thing having a Contact form that readers can fill in and send straight from your Contact page will make life significantly easier for your visitors and so encourage them to contact you.
Does your blog have a contact page? Has it helped you connect with your readers, the media, and others? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Find out how Richard Adams generates over 232,000 free visitors to his blogs per year at WordPress Traffic Explosion or visit his lifestyle design blog for tips on building an online business around your passions.

This guest post is by Richard Adams of WordPress Traffic Explosion.
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Increase Website Traffic Through Profitable Alliances

Pinky swear?

Call it what you want: alliance, partnership, JV – all roads lead to Rome.
The topic of the day is to find ways to increase your website traffic through alliances with other bloggers that benefit all parties involved.
This works no matter what stage your blog is in, how much perceived authority you, as a blogger, have, how big your readership is – the only thing that matters is VALUE.
You don’t think you have much value to offer to other bloggers?
Well, what about your readers? Do you provide value to them? There you go.
We all have something we do better than the other blogger, know more about something than the next guy – we all have something to offer that someone else might want or need.
And if you still think you have nothing, then, quite honestly you’d better close up the shop and go home now.
So, working together with other bloggers to achieve the greater good…
Why would you want to do that to begin with?
1.   Gain access to a new audience
Ideally, you want to partner with someone who has some fresh ears to hear what you have to say.
For instance, if you take a look at the comment section of a potential partner and you see all the same people commenting on their blog as on yours, this might not be the most productive “traffic borrowing” partnership.
2.   Promoting each other
Whether it be social networks, each other blogs, lists, promoting your partners and being promoted in return is a huge benefit not to be overlooked.
3.   Promoting products
Word of mouth advertising has always been the best endorsement you can get for any product.
Partnerships can be a powerful way to spread the word about your new product.
Profit sharing, as in affiliate marketing, or giving your partners’ audience a special discount works even better.
4.   Creating social proof
Being connected with influential bloggers will cement your reputation as the one to pay attention to.
Now that we know that the potential benefits of a partnership are huge, it’s time to learn what exactly we can offer to each other to create a win-win for everyone involved.
1.   Links / Mentions
One of the easiest forms of collaboration, it happens to be one of the most effective ones as well.
It increases website traffic by exposing your links to respective audiences and creates quality in-content link building.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but you can see the examples of me promoting other bloggers and you, my readers, all the time and quite honestly, I love doing it.
I’ve benefited greatly from it through creating more traffic from the mentioned blogs, as well as more comments – at the very least from the bloggers themselves , from being mentioned on their blogs in return, from referral business even, like consulting clients, blog audits, etc.
2.   Promoting in a post
Every once in a while, I like to highlight specific bloggers and the interesting projects they are currently working on like I recently did with Alex Whalley’s 30-day Unique Article Wizard Challenge in this post:
I didn’t do it to get Alex to write about me – truly, but what it did was created an even stronger professional bond as well as built up a personal friendship, not to mention that Alex does mention me a whole lot in his fabulous scribbles on his popular blog.
3.   Guest posting
Yes, I can hold this note for a long time.
Imagine you’d like to network with a blogger who seems to be simply unapproachable because of his/her strong reputation in the blogging community. The kind of blogger you really would love to get to know better, in other words.
You can’t and shouldn’t just send them an email, however nice it might be, introducing yourself and letting them know you are after a piece of their attention.
Of course, not.
But submit an awesome blog post, start commenting on their blog, and sooner than later they know who you are and you are on an email basis with them. Sweet spot to be at.
4.   Introducing each other
That happens all the time.
You know someone I want to know? Requesting an introduction is in order, assuming, of course, that I already networked with you, linked to you, and am on a first name basis with you.
Twitter is great for that, by the way.
Just recently Gail Gardner from Growmap.com thought that I should definitely be introduced to Donna Anderson from WhiteHatWriting.com, and within minutes of that idea the following tweets were sent out:

Now, thanks to Gail, Donna and I have become each other’s fans – who knows where that relationship will take us in the future!
5.   Swap ads
Simple enough, yet with a twist.
Find a blog with an untapped audience!
Don’t just go to a blogger you are already sharing the readership with. Find someone whose content doesn’t compete, but rather compliments yours.
Then approach them with the idea to swap ads and “exchange” traffic.
6.   Offer your freebie as a bonus
Know someone with a great product and think your freebie will make a great bonus to it?
Everyone loves a good bonus and as long as it’s not in competition with the product – naturally, this should be an easy deal to make.
7.   Co-registration
Get some bloggers with great newsletters together and start promoting each other on a thank you page your new subscribers will see right after they sign up to your list.
“…I think you’d really love to check out these newsletters I subscribe to and know to provide tremendous value:…”
8.   Product co-creation
Yes, everyone wanting to make any serious money online needs their own product at some point.
Having hard time with that idea? Have no clue how to even approach it?
Partner with someone who is in the same boat – two heads are better than one.
Better yet, find someone who already has an idea or is in some stages of development of a product, but needs your expertise to make it complete.
Think outside the box on this one.
Great example of that:
My good friends, Mavis Nong of AttractionMarketingOnline.com and Phill Turner of PhillTurner.com, who happened to meet on my blog, have recently co-created a great product called “Underground Blogging Secrets“.
Did I mention they met on my blog?
They obviously kept their eyes open for opportunities to expand their businesses and when such presented itself to form an alliance and build each other up through co-creation of the “Underground Blogging Secrets“, both Mavis and Phill were ready.

Needless to say, I am very proud of both of them and happily demand a management fee for introduction.
Seriously though – the product is great and I highly recommend you check out “Underground Blogging Secrets” today.
9.   Special discounts
Have a product already?
Offer a special discount to the readers of a particular blog.
Exclusivity is still a hot commodity and will guarantee to bring you red-hot traffic ready to buy.
10.   Run a contest.
This one is definitely better done with a partner or two – less work, better results.
The really hard part is attracting some strong sponsors; connections are the key here. However, if you’ve done the initial steps listed above and already positioned yourself as an authority figure in your niche, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The best part about blogging contests is having the contestants promote YOUR blog to THEIR followers and readership.
As you can see, the benefits of alliances and partnerships speak for themselves.
No blog is an island and your networking abilities are simply crucial to your ultimate success as a blogger.
These 10 ways should give you plenty of food for thought.
Just remember to think outside the box and be smart about how you approach the “unapproachables”.
What did I miss? Comment to show me that you’re alive!


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How to Make Google Crawl Budget Work in Your Favor

Keep your Google crawl budget uncut...

As I look at many blogs on a daily basis during my blog audits and other consulting services I provide, I run into the problem of bloggers squandering their precious time with Google bots on all sorts of links that shouldn’t be on their home page to begin with.
In order for me to explain what I mean, we first need to address the way Google crawls any website and how they determine how much time they would spend there.
The way Google bots first discover and consequently index and rank your blog pages is by following the links from other sites and within your own blog.
This is how Matt Cutts describes the process in one of his interviews:

“The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.”

I need to remind you here that there’s a difference between the PageRank displayed in your toolbar (visible PR), which is updated every once in a blue moon and is obsolete the minute it’s updated and actual PR that Google updates on an ongoing basis.
According to the green bar, Traffic Generation Cafe has no PR, yet Google crawls my blog on a daily basis – a sure sign that my PR is higher than Google would like to show, for whatever reason.
Learn more about the difference between real and visible PR in this post:
So, Google follows links from other websites to your home page.
As they crawl your home page, they discover other links that lead deeper into your blog. But since Google bots won’t follow all those links to the infinity, wouldn’t you want to make sure they definitely crawl the most important pages first?
And that’s precisely why what you link to from your home page and other important pages is so vital for you to maximize your face time with Google bots.
Now let’s talk about some to the links that I often see on the home page that really have no business of being there.
Do you have that little link at the bottom of your blog that says “WordPress Admin Login“?
Sure it might be useful to you as far as logging in to your dashboard from any page on your blog, but what if I told you that this is one of the most linked-to pages on many blogs I see?
Do you really want to waste your crawl budget on an admin page? I know, rhetorical question…
Plus, now WordPress gives you an option to display an admin bar on any page of your blog without it actually being shown to your readers.
It’s an option you can choose under Users ==> Your Profile:

So how do you get rid of the link?
Your theme is what you should look into.
I use Thesis theme on my blog and with Thesis, I would go under Design Options ==> Display Options ==> Administration.
If you are using any other theme, just poke around to see if you have a similar option.

I had no idea this was an issue until very recently when I started seeing these kinds of most linked-to pages on different blogs:
http://www.YourSite.com/page/2/
As I did a little digging into, I realized that my blog had it as well, and it all stems from using a plugin that would display page numbers on your home page for all the posts you’ve ever written as opposed to just giving you the default “Older Posts”, “Newer Posts”.
What happens when you use a plugin like that is that you are essentially adding more and more links to your home page, sending Google bots all over the blog, as opposed to strategically showing them the posts you’d like them to crawl.
So get rid of any plugins that create pagination like that and stick with the default Wordress way to separating your blog posts into pages.
You can find this option under Settings ==> Reading.

Just choose the number of posts you’d like to show on each page and you’ll be all set to go.
By the way, the same goes for comment pagination.
When you choose to break up your comments into pages, not only do you create the extra clicks your readers have to navigate if they want to see the whole discussion, but also create a bunch of useless pages with DUPLICATE content on them.
To learn more about duplicate content and its effects on your blog, read the following post:
Getting rid of comment pagination is pretty simple: go into Settings ==> Discussion, and make sure your “Break comments into pages” box is unchecked.

Even though duplicate content is a common problem that you can find on pretty much any site with more than a couple of pages, there’s a good reason to be aware of it and how it affects your face time with Google bots.
Here’s another excerpt from Matt’s interview:

“Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content. So we might tend to not crawl quite as much from that site.”

The duplicate content post above will give you all the info you need as to how to avoid the issue of duplicate content on your site as much as possible.
This is one of the most overused blog structuring techniques I see on so many blogs.
Somehow many bloggers decide that the more categories and tags they use, the better – not quite sure why.
Your categories and tags determine your basic blog structure as well as the theme of your blog.
The more categories you use, especially generic ones or the ones that are not really related to your blog theme (see the screenshot below), the more diluted your overall blog theme will appear to both your readers and particularly Google bots, which might in turn affect your search engine rankings.

What is the benefit for your readers to see a category “focusing”? Or “success”?
Look at it from the search engine perspective as well. How are they supposed to theme your blog with generic categories like these?
My suggestions on categories:
Keep the focus as narrow as possible – I’d suggest to stay within 5-8 categories. I know it’s an arbitrary number, but it’s a good one to keep in mind, IMHO.Use your KEYWORDS as category names. Take a look at mine in the navigation bar below my header – these are my categories and I would love to rank for each and every one of those keywords.Don’t dump each post into every imaginable category; pick one or two only.Don’t link to categories from your home page UNLESS they are well-researched keywords and are highly related to the theme of your blog.
TAGS:
The same goes for tags.
Tags are nothing but well-researched keywords you assign to each post hoping to rank for them at some point.
To learn more about tags and how they can affect your rankings, read this post at Kikolani.com:
Here’s also some additional reading on how to correctly structure your blog:
Whether it’s big or small, they are still links, and your page rank will be leaking from your main page to the tag pages.
It’s smarter to have your page rank flow to your individual posts rather than tag pages.
I would definitely remove the tag cloud, if you are still using one.
More on the topic:
Affiliate marketing is how many bloggers make their money online, including yours truly.
So of course I won’t tell you to get rid of your affiliate links on your home or any other page you’d like to display them on, but at the very least, NOFOLLOW those links! Plus, make sure they open in a new window to prevent your readers from leaving your blog.
Let’s face it: we all feel pressured to display all kinds of social media icons and widgets in our sidebars.
Their positive effect on getting connected with our readers in social media realms is debatable, yet their negative effect as far as leading both our readers and Google bots away from our blog is obvious.
Once again, I am not going to say you shouldn’t have them, but use common sense as far as how many different widgets and icons you choose to display: once again, this is the case when more is not better.
ALWAYS nofollow those links though and make sure they open in a new window as with affiliate links.
Personally, I would stay away from displaying various networks that are not widely used by most of your readers, as well as widgets that display Twitter feed, etc. Not too many of your readers find any use for them, trust me, yet they add the amount of links that lead away from your blog.
I am definitely a big fan of displaying one of these widgets in your sidebar, but only one.
To me, popular posts widget, which is determined by the amount of comments each post has, makes the most sense to display.
If you choose to show recent posts, you are just duplicating what your home page already shows, plus it’s easy to find that info by clicking over to home page from anywhere else on the blog, whereas getting to most commented/popular posts is impossible without the widget.
This is how you can easily improve your rankings for the posts you are trying to rank for.
Create a sidebar widget where you simply link to your best cornerstone pages using keywords as anchor text and you instantly gain some great internal backlinks leading both your readers and Google bots directly to those pages.
Take a look at how I do it on my blog (you can see the widget towards the top of the sidebar):

Displaying hundreds of links that send your visitors as well as Google bots on a wild goose chase looking for your best content isn’t a great way to go, as you can see.
I would strongly suggest you strategically narrow down the number of links you display on your home page that will be beneficial to your overall linking strategy.
Don’t be afraid to give your visitors fewer choices. Clean, uncluttered look definitely shows to convert much better and decrease your bounce rates, providing for easy navigation that makes sense.
Can you think of other links I forgot about? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

Image credit: TheChive.com


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Top Google Ranking Factors of 2011: The 60 Second Tour

It’s not every day that the world’s leading SEO experts get together to collaborate on a project of this magnitude: coming to a relative consensus on what presumably are the most important ranking factors in Google algorithm right now, how they changed in the past 2 years, and what Google has for us in the future.
That’s exactly what Rand Fishkin’s of SEOmoz.org 2011 Search Engine Factors report is all about.
It contains the findings from 132 world’s leading SEO experts and their collective opinion represents what the SEO world perceives to be the most important factors to organic search engine rankings.
The report itself is quite lengthy and requires a lot of digestion, so I decided to present it to you in a more concise manner and the goal of the post is to answer the following question: how does or should this report affect how you do (or should start doing) SEO for your blog.

1.   SEOs believe that the power of links is declining, although it still represents 43% of all the deciding factors (down from 67% in 2009).
2.   Diversity of links outweighs pure quantity. (Link Building Mixology: Your “How To Do It The Right Way” Guide)
3.   Exact anchor texts appear to have slightly less significance over partial anchor texts. (Your Ultimate Anchor Text Tutorial – from Basic to Advanced)
4.   Domain authority matters when ranking pages (the more authority your domain has, the better your posts will rank).
5.   Presence of nofollow links is important to good search engine rankings.
6.   Among the most important on-page factors are the title tag, preferably with your keyword as the first word, URL (see my post on What’s in a Slug? for more on that), and H1 tag.
7.   Content is EXTREMELY important: the freshness, the uniqueness, the length – longer posts tend to rank better.
8.   Long titles/URLs are still likely bad for SEO.
9.   Social sharing factors appear to have a fair significance in rankings, i.e. get more retweets/FB shares! (PageRank, Meet SocialRank: How Does Going Social Help Your Search Engine Rankings?; also, check out this helpful post on social bookmarking tools.)
It’s important to remember that these are just opinions, but since Google is not telling, these opinions are the closest thing we get.
Have an opinion? Comment to show me that you’re alive!



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But What If Google Thinks YOU are an Internet Marketer?

I’ve read several accounts this morning in Facebook and across several blogs that lead to the possibility that Google is shutting down content from Internet Marketers, or content believed to be associated with internet marketing. And at first glance, some folks think that’s a good thing, believing that they’re all a bunch of spammers and scammers, so what does it matter?
Well, first, hasn’t that mistake been made before? Franchising was thought to be a scam in its early days, rather than a legitimate business practice. Google didn’t use to like search engine optimization firms, and at one point, it seemed they were at war with them, and anyone who looked like them. Now there’s a relationship between Google and the search industry, to the point that Google representatives will come to speak at events.
When I first came online, I thought internet marketing was all about scamming me out of my money too. Then I encountered the kindness of Allen Says, without whom I would not have made my first affiliate sale. He was very supportive and kind to me in my early days, way back in 98 when people would look at you blankly if you told them what the World Wide Web was.
Then there’s Marlon Sanders, who rescued me from having to retire due to health problems. And Mark Joyner, who I had the pleasure of working with for three months, who has taught me so much over the years.
Now, I don’t consider myself an internet marketer, and never really have. It’s not that the industry has a bad name, or that I don’t want to be associated with it. It’s that internet marketers aren’t my target market, though I get a wonderfully supportive fan base from there. I’ve always targeted other audiences. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my IM audience.
Still, I’m lumped together with internet marketing as a C-list guru, one of the “underground” players, and I’m okay with that. But here’s what should scare you in this case – it’s possible that so are people who work in social media, as far as Google is concerned.
Because in observing the pattern of what’s happening with accounts that are getting locked or suspended, it looks as if they’re going after a subset of keywords across the entire YouTube site, and shutting down anyone in that family of words, then going back through and manually reinstating people whose content isn’t of the typical fare that’s associated with that area. One site got a note that a mention of YouTube in the title was why their account was shut down.
Darren from Problogger, who later was reinstated, was shut down because one of his videos had a title that included “making money online”. And he’s a YouTube partner.
Some of the visible people got their accounts back but what about people who are as legitimate but aren’t as popular, or don’t have any influence or leverage? What if they come after you?
While I like to think how great it would be to see less spam on YouTube and in Google results, if my theory of how they are deciding is right, it seems like the execution is majorly flawed.
People take what Google says as fact, not opinion. So using the same violation message they use for accounts they’re reviewing and accounts that are legitimately posting “how to scam YouTube views” or “how to make a living online” type of video content is damaging to the reputation of people who may not deserve it.
Where this gets scary is that Google decides, ultimately, who they think is an internet marketer and who isn’t. I’m not an internet marketer, but I have lots of fans from that industry, party due to some advertising and partnerships with some of the more recognizable names.
And yeah, YouTube is a free service, and we should play by their rules to use their service – but that’s not the issue. Go take a look at some of those blog posts. Many of them were not in violation, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “well, technically” or “legally speaking”. If they’re getting booted for bogus reasons, and no one really cares, or automatically sides with Google because “well, they’re Google, they must be right,” then what happens when they come after you?

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