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I'm catching up on my SEO knowledge. Has anyone watched Lynda.com's course on it? I know the field is always changing, but I wanted some feedback on some good resources for those who kind of know the basics. Any input on Lynda.com or other sources?
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Sep 16, 2013 01:07
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No. 9 posted:I'm catching up on my SEO knowledge. Has anyone watched Lynda.com's course on it? I know the field is always changing, but I wanted some feedback on some good resources for those who kind of know the basics. Any input on Lynda.com or other sources? I can't speak for their SEO courses, as I haven't run through them, but I'm a fan of their programming courses. If their SEO classes are done with the same quality, then I'd say they're worth it.
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Sep 17, 2013 01:14
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Whoo, got my domain registered and hosting procured. Now I just need to wait for the accounts to be finished setting up before I can jump in and start building a blog. I suppose I should be writing up my first several posts while I wait, but I'm real anxious to start messing with settings. EDIT: Goddamn, writing blog posts is hard work. Well, I guess anything you've never done before is hard. But I've got a lot of respect for all of you right now. PurpleLizardWizard fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 17, 2013 22:43
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OK I have googled around but am extremely bad at knowing what I'm doing still. I got a thing for $100 in advertising for a $25 buy in from Google, so I gave that a shot. I underbid massively because I don't really care if I'm front page and it would probably make my money stretch further anyway. Below is some of my latest data, and I've got a total of two linkbacks and . . . well that's it. So can someone who's done this before tell me if this is what a month old blog should be performing like? I'm sure everyone goes through it, but I'm looking at the ~$90 I spent on this site so far and I'm kiiiiiiiinda starting to think that I should just sell the damned thing and just find other arenas to make some cash on the side.
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Sep 20, 2013 18:33
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Couple things: Spending money on Adwords to a site monetized by Adsense will not pay off. Adwords campaigns, or any campaign, is typically directed towards a landing page, which is trying to sell something. Did you use a conversion-focused landing page, or link to your homepage? Also, what kind of keywords were you bidding on? What you sell and how you sell it will depend on what people are looking for. What do you mean about two linkbacks? Links and Adwords don't really relate to one another - Adwords neither provides or benefits from backlinks. But unless you more agressively monetize your site (with an ebook of your own, or some other product about interviews), I don't see paid ads making sense. Social media and SEO would be your best bet.
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Sep 20, 2013 20:50
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Two blogs linked back to me after I linked some of my words in a post to one of their posts. I thought the same thing about adwords . . . but I make bad decisions. In the end I figured that $100 of free advertising for $25 of not-free advertising wouldn't be a bad kick start to visibility, but I might be wrong. I have an Amazon ad widget that includes my ebook (Kindle formatting screwed it up pretty bad though, still fixing that) and some other interview related products; I interrupt all the posts and articles with it, and figured I would drive some traffic and see how well it does compared to adwords. I linked the ads to the "How to answer interview questions" page, and it told me the front page bid was like $4 and so I said I would pay $1 for whatever that would get me. code:
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Sep 20, 2013 21:04
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If you already have an ebook, then that is what you should be pushing. Drop everything else and make your landing page a funnel. The thing with the current ads is that they can be skipped. They are not essential to the content of the webpage. A good landing page leads irresistibly to the sale. Give a taste on the page, but to get the rest, lead to your ebook. As far as http://www.interviewscience.com/interview-guides/learn-how-to-answer-interview-questions/, it's OK, but not ideal. There's a lot of text blocks - web writing should be in much smaller chunks, with more images, bullet points, etc. to break it up. The writing is also a bit lofty for a sales piece. People just want answers/info, especially when you are dealing with paid search. Your first paragraph is: "Most everyone is motivated to learn how to answer interview questions, but they rarely investigate how to better answer the question than the competition. Experience plays a role, but recognizing the experiences that you’ve already had is usually the dividing line. Let’s start with how to analyze the general communication structure of potential answers to interview questions." Most people would bail on that, simple because it's so clinical sounding.
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Sep 20, 2013 21:14
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The ebook is kinda a crap workbook, originally intended to be a freebie for signing up for the newsletter. Still working the kinks in the formatting first because I have no idea what the Kindle is doing to my PDF but I hate it. However, I get what you're saying and I'll work at it. Writing for the web is going to be a struggle, because I'm wordy and well . . . here's that paragraph: quote:Result Thanks though. I'll work on it, and appreciate the frank feedback.
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Sep 20, 2013 21:33
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FAN OF NICKELBACK posted:The ebook is kinda a crap workbook, originally intended to be a freebie for signing up for the newsletter. Still working the kinks in the formatting first because I have no idea what the Kindle is doing to my PDF but I hate it. Slowly, slowly, over the course of weeks, the advice that arrives in your email inbox will start seeping into your head, and you will find that your natural wordy tendency will be replaced by writing appropriately for the target venue for what you're writing. You'll start writing tighter, simpler, effective copy for your sales page, and leave the high-falutin' fancy city slicker words for the e-book you're pitching. 
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Sep 21, 2013 07:29
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Also, start reading and rereading the Gary Halbert newsletter. The guy has an amazing casual style. He's a master. http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletter-archives.htm
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Sep 21, 2013 17:08
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So, I'm considering grabbing Genesis, but I can't figure out if I need a child theme to go with the framework. The FAQ talks about how the child theme is the "paint job" while the framework is the "engine"  , but I'm not seeing anything on if I need a child theme to be able to do anything. I've got no problem with tinkering something up myself, especially since few of the themes seem to address what I want, but do any of you guys know if that's even an option? Note: Total Wordpress newb here, but I love tinkering. PurpleLizardWizard fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Sep 21, 2013 |
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Sep 21, 2013 18:07
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Thanks for all the advice guys, I just rewrote that landing page and I'm working on the rest. If anyone else is new and getting started, definitely take their advice (and click their links). PurpleLizardWizard, Here's a good explanation of child/parent themes. Basically it lets you do updates to the parent theme without losing customizations.
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Sep 21, 2013 18:28
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Thanks, FAN OF NICKELBACK, that link helped me figure it out. Looks like I'll want to pick up some basic child theme, as, while I'm great at tweaking and frankensteining stuff up, I'm not too great at starting from a blank slate.
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Sep 21, 2013 18:53
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I updated the OP: removed old advice, added some links to good posts in this thread, added links to keyword tools and some of the blogs I follow that have good advice.
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Sep 22, 2013 16:11
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sim posted:I updated the OP: removed old advice, added some links to good posts in this thread, added links to keyword tools and some of the blogs I follow that have good advice.
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Sep 25, 2013 03:49
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^^ I would love some sort of a guide. Wordpress has gotten more complicated since my last website kick, and it would have been nice to have a super-simple reference. Is there a more general blog thread? I started one about home organization/cooking which seems to be trendy now. It definitely has the potential to make money (I'd even be happy if it covered its server costs) but I would be happy without that as well. I just want to get people to look at it.  I remember trading links and making buttons like, 8 years ago but I don't think it's that simple anymore.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:25
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I'm curious what some of y'all think/plan to do about Google's decision to pretty much eliminate keyword-specific analytics? For those who don't know, Google is basically going to start protecting all searches. That means in analytics there will no longer be a chance to see which keywords were used to send people to your page, or where your page is ranking for specific keywords. That (not provided) that makes up a big chunk of most people's analytics info will soon be the *only* keyword data you see. Of course this doesn't affect AdWords/PPC keywords. Google is keeping that alive and well, which is understandable. It's a good way by them to push people toward spending money on AdWords campaigns and using more paid search than organic ranking. But for blogs like many in this thread we monetize in such a way that getting people there through PPC campaigns isn't always the smart way to do it. More than that, I wonder how this will affect keyword research in the future? Can we expect to reach a point where we can't even easily find niches to explore because there is no more keyword search data available to us? Sure there's always Bing and the like, but as far as I see it there's no way to escape the fact that Google absolutely owns search. I'm wondering if someone with more SEO or analytics experience can shed some light on what the future is bringing here.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:39
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Nohtenki posted:
Starting out myself, but what I've read seems to indicate that one of the best ways to build popularity now if you've got good content is to guest post. Find someone with more readers than you, comment on their stuff in insightful ways, maybe reference them a few times, and then approach them about a post you would like to do for them. They get more content for their blog with minimal effort, they feel good about helping you out, and you get a new stream of readers. You don't even need to find someone that's doing the exact same thing as you. If you feel that a good chunk of their readers might like you and you can stretch a bit to make it relevant to that blog, feel free to step outside of your usual to make a guest post. EDIT: As an example for stretching, let's say you came across a blog on working efficiently that you liked. You could offer a post on organizing offices. It's within your specialty and is relevant to readers of this other blog. Might not be a great choice for reader conversion, but it's the idea. PurpleLizardWizard fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 18:05
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warheadr posted:I'm curious what some of y'all think/plan to do about Google's decision to pretty much eliminate keyword-specific analytics? For those who don't know, Google is basically going to start protecting all searches...Can we expect to reach a point where we can't even easily find niches to explore because there is no more keyword search data available to us? It comes down to 'if you remove the tools that tell me how people get to my site, so I can focus my efforts (and spend my dollars efficientl), then I will go to a competitor who WILL tell me what I need to know.' Yahoo was the search king once, too. The fall wasn't overnight, but it did happen - because a competitor offered better information, and the reality is the the common user searching Google does not provide them revenue - business does.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:27
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How do I grow my Facebook follow-ship? My total monthly unique visitors are about 20x higher than my facebook fan count. Granted most of my traffic comes from referrals but my direct uniques are still completely out of whack with FB. I have slowly and 100% naturally grown my fanbase and I try to keep a steady stream of reposts and outside content flowing through my facebook feed in order to appease my fans but I am still disappointed with the numbers and I want to throw some money at it. I have no interest in buying fans although, it seems like many of my competitors who have less site traffic are doing just that, unless I'm missing something like a snowball effect @ > 10,000 fans. I am trying to build recurring referral traffic and add credibility to my brand name which is beginning to extend outside of the blog. Are there any case studies on using their internal advertising system? What other options are there? I have been considering give-aways as an easy way to generate new fans, is there anywhere I can read about a similar strategy? Where do I start? Bobx66 fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 15:04
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Bobx66 posted:How do I grow my Facebook follow-ship? My total monthly unique visitors are about 20x higher than my facebook fan count. Granted most of my traffic comes from referrals but my direct uniques are still completely out of whack with FB. I have slowly and 100% naturally grown my fanbase and I try to keep a steady stream of reposts and outside content flowing through my facebook feed in order to appease my fans but I am still disappointed with the numbers and I want to throw some money at it. Here's a couple articles I found helpful http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/facebook http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/lifestyle-business-first-step
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Sep 26, 2013 15:22
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If i'm making a blog that will include youtube videos, should the videos be posted on the excerpts on the home page, or only on the full page after you've clicked the read more link?
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Sep 26, 2013 19:13
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Bobx66 posted:How do I grow my Facebook follow-ship? My total monthly unique visitors are about 20x higher than my facebook fan count. Granted most of my traffic comes from referrals but my direct uniques are still completely out of whack with FB. I have slowly and 100% naturally grown my fanbase and I try to keep a steady stream of reposts and outside content flowing through my facebook feed in order to appease my fans but I am still disappointed with the numbers and I want to throw some money at it. yeah, i bought some fake likes on fiverr. I think I got like 3k but about 2.5k of them went away within a month or two. I did see an increase of real likes though. I don't think I would do it again. What is your blog again?
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Sep 26, 2013 23:41
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I can't get Google to approve my site for AdSense, I'm not sure why. It's a blog with probably 30 or so posts, decent length posts where I usually reference news articles about the blog topic and write about them. I am not sure what to do. Do I need traffic? Does it have to be older than a few months? I may just give up on it and try to get adsense onto a blogspot blog I have. Is there any way to do this? Right now my AdSense account is associated with the first site, which is not being accepted.
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Sep 29, 2013 18:21
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^^^^^^^^ Good roundup.Kenny Rogers posted:Google is going to have to walk a delicate line between doing what they think is best, and alienating business (and the SEO professionals that serve every industry) to the point that Google stops being the 'go-to' location for ad spend. Actually this likely has the opposite effect. You get raw search keyword data from AdWords clicks and this isn't changing. Most larger SEO agencies were already running test AdWords campaigns to find targetable keywords, now this practice will become much more common. Aggregate your content into traffic buckets, target each bucket with an AdWords test campain, find the profitable keywords, refocus content. What does this mean for Google? A lot more AdWords revenue. Will there be additional winners from this change? Yes, my early guesses are HitTail and SEMrush.
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Oct 2, 2013 14:39
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mcsuede posted:^^^^^^^^ Good roundup. Yeah, after reading that roundup in depth, it seems likely that it's going to weed out people who are more or less at the "hobbyist" level (like more than a few people in this here thread, unfortunately) and require you to up your game - and to an extent, your stakes, in that it will make more sense for you to spend $50-100 on an testing campaign for AdWords in an attempt to optimize your site with known good data to successfully get that back over time. Unfortunately, I'm still at the 'hobbyist' level with my sites. I'm finding it difficult to come up with an idea that I'm both moderately knowledgeable about (relative expert-ism), and interested in, *and* in an area that's not already super saturated by people just like me.
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Oct 2, 2013 21:59
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Kenny Rogers posted:Yeah, after reading that roundup in depth, it seems likely that it's going to weed out people who are more or less at the "hobbyist" level (like more than a few people in this here thread, unfortunately) and require you to up your game - and to an extent, your stakes, in that it will make more sense for you to spend $50-100 on an testing campaign for AdWords in an attempt to optimize your site with known good data to successfully get that back over time. Keyword research isn't going away, just the ability to easily see what phrases searchers are using to find your content. As long as you're spending good time on the research phase, and writing content with as much long-tail and semantically related content as possible, you don't have a lot to worry about. You can watch your landing page traffic to see what's working and what's not (you should only be targeting one phrase per page). You can then also group your landing pages into 'content buckets' and see which content is driving more traffic, to refocus your overall targeting. More sophisticated methods are really only needed at the agency level. If you want something to replace the GA keyword reports, I suggest a combination of HitTail and plugins to monitor your internal search like Relevanssi.
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Oct 3, 2013 15:34
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mcsuede posted:Keyword research isn't going away, just the ability to easily see what phrases searchers are using to find your content. As long as you're spending good time on the research phase, and writing content with as much long-tail and semantically related content as possible, you don't have a lot to worry about. You can watch your landing page traffic to see what's working and what's not (you should only be targeting one phrase per page). You can then also group your landing pages into 'content buckets' and see which content is driving more traffic, to refocus your overall targeting. More sophisticated methods are really only needed at the agency level. If you want something to replace the GA keyword reports, I suggest a combination of HitTail and plugins to monitor your internal search like Relevanssi. Unless I'm completely blind and missing something huge in that "Hey, what about..." phase?
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Oct 4, 2013 01:28
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Kenny Rogers posted:What's missing in the equation now (that I can see) is to be in a position much like I find myself in at the moment, where I'm in the "early research" phase - With the securification of search phrases, it seems that I'm losing the ability to just go to the tool and drop 50 ideas on it and get a baseline whether it's even worth it or not to invest the time to take it to the level you were talking about... That tool is called the Keyword Planner (formerly Keyword Tool) and is located in Adwords, available for free--though I prefer to use Long Tail Pro combined with Moz Keyword Research.
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Oct 4, 2013 16:17
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Well, poo poo. That's what I get for not paying any drat attention to the meat and potatoes of this discussion. I blame moving apartments this week. I even posted a link to a pretty drat good I Can't Use Keyword Tool Anymore, HALP, I'm Not Good At Keyword Planner article in the last couple pages, and with my moving distraction in my head I conflated "Encrypted Keyword Data" with "Keyword Planning Research", thinking Keyword Planner was now going to be useless. loving derp.
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Oct 4, 2013 18:27
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So adsense has pulled the ads on my site because of "inappropriate content" and it's impossible to get them to tell me what that is. I've switched to chitika temporarily and the clicks get about 1 or 2 cents each rather than the 50-90 cents of before. Any other good ad servers or ways of getting google to open a dialogue?
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Oct 20, 2013 13:16
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the mattness posted:So adsense has pulled the ads on my site because of "inappropriate content" and it's impossible to get them to tell me what that is. I've switched to chitika temporarily and the clicks get about 1 or 2 cents each rather than the 50-90 cents of before. Any other good ad servers or ways of getting google to open a dialogue? Google are usually quite reluctant about appealing these types of things - a ban is usually for life. Chitika is a good alternative if you're just looking for PayPerClick, however have you thought about being an affiliate advertiser? You have greater control and get to choose the products to advertise yourself, Amazon Asociates and ClickBank are good affiliate networks. They usually don't care about inappropiate content, as you'll be really be forced into picking the most appropriate products - as these are the products your audience is most likely to click on. I'd definitely give it a try - if you can find the right products to advertise, you're potentially looking at doubling/tripling what you were getting with Google.
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Oct 20, 2013 16:49
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Every time I've been in trouble for Google they've given an example url, they also only disabled on the domain with the problem. Do you have ads all over half-naked women photos or in the middle of articles talking about sexy things?
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Oct 20, 2013 17:48
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It's getting to the holiday season, I'm starting to get steady increases to traffic on my Black Friday website so I spent a couple hours yesterday cleaning up my site and getting some new hosting to handle the incoming traffic. Here's last year's stats: This is was for the month of November. CPC wasn't as great as last year but it was still a good result. This was for a Black Friday niche for a specific store. There's tons of money still to be made so if you have an idea for a blog for the holidays get a jump on it soon rather than later. My question: I have a Mailchimp mailing list which is quickly approaching it's free 2k subscriber limit. I think I'd rather just let user subscribe to my posts by email instead of sending out a newsletter. Any suggestions on good plugins to do something? Wordpress offers the Jetpack plugin that does it but it's pretty limited.
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Nov 3, 2013 17:45
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There's no good AND free alternative. Either use the Jetpack plugin or start paying MailChimp or another vendor.
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Nov 4, 2013 22:07
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I haven't made my way through the entire thread yet, so maybe this has been discussed. What's the opinion on naming for a blog? Is it better to be catchy and clever or straight to the point? I am looking at a market that I am passionate about and have lots of knowledge / experience in. I think I could make some pretty good/interesting content. However, the subject is kind of boring sounding. It's Food Science. What is best for keyword purposes etc? Edit: After further reading some of the posts on this page and in the rest of the thread -- it looks like something catchy/memorable is the better way to go? Doesn't sound like google cares about your name being the keyword anymore. Stryguy fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 02:23
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Google does care* but the larger issue is do you want a name that's brandable or one that's discoverable. Most markets are so saturated now that brandable makes more sense, as you'll be using other techniques to drive long-tail traffic. *Cares in the following ways: relevance correlation (hummingbird, LSI) keyword closer to url root gives small boost, but domain.com/%postname%/ accomplishes this almost as well as an EMD. EMD (exact match domains) are not worth a giant boost as they used to be, which is what you're referencing, due to more of a reliance on semantic search and quality/authority signals. mcsuede fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 16:44
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mcsuede posted:There's no good AND free alternative. Either use the Jetpack plugin or start paying MailChimp or another vendor. Oh, I have no problem paying for a plugin or service, I've spent over $100 on plugins for the site this month already. My issue was with mailchimp's payment structure requiring a monthly fee for a service I use 2 weeks out of the year. Either case, I found a setup that works for me that I might was well share with anyone who's looking to build a bigger list. First you'll need an SMTP mail sender service to send out your emails. There's a bunch out there but the most cost-effective services I've for smallish lists are Mandrill by Mailchimp and Dyn Email. http://mandrill.com http://dyn.com/email/ Mandrill is free up to the first 12k emails sent per month and Dyn has a $3 monthly fee for 10k emails sent. Mandrill places an initial limit of 250 emails/hr for new accounts, Dyn has no limit but asks you a few questions to verify you aren't a spammer when you setup your account. One main issue I'm having with Dyn is that my newsletters are ending up in spam boxes but this seems unusual and I'm talking to Dyn about it. As far as Wordpress plugins go, you have a few options. Subscribe2 - http://wordpress.org/plugins/subscribe2/ MailPoet - http://www.mailpoet.com Sendpress - https://sendpress.com Mailpoet and Sendpress are very good programs but are fairly limited in their basic versions so expect to pay for the Pro version. They aren't terribly expensive at around $100 or so, and if you've got a good sized newsletter you're gonna need it. Most features are available in the free version to sub-2k lists. I ended up using Subscribe2. The plugin is free, it supports SMTP hosts and does daily, weekly, and per-post emails. You can also curate your subscriber list, do double opt-in and has a few form functions. No limit on subscriber count but they do have a pro version that offers some more functionality that you probably wouldn't need to a basic blog, mainly advanced click tracking and stats that your SMTP provider may already have.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:35
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FCKGW posted:It's getting to the holiday season, I'm starting to get steady increases to traffic on my Black Friday website so I spent a couple hours yesterday cleaning up my site and getting some new hosting to handle the incoming traffic. Here's last year's stats: Hey man, I think I've asked you this before, but could you go into a little more detail about running a black friday site? I'll PM you also.
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Nov 9, 2013 01:20
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