People always say that you need to be in the first page of results in Google if you want to receive clicks, right? Well, this will hurt, but the reality is that merely being in the first page is not enough. In fact, if you are around the lowest positions, you could end up getting a meager 1% of the overall clicks on searches for those keywords.
This is a very hot topic, but strangely there it not a large amount of research around it. The most reliable study so far comes from the Cornell University. They used an eye tracking technology to discover what percentage of users would click on each of the 10 results appearing on the first page of Google for certain topics. The results, at least my opinion, are pretty shocking, as the image below illustrates (image via
SEO Researcher):
Let’s use some numbers to understand it better. Even if you manage to rank in the first page of Google for a keyword that receives 2,000 searches per day, you could end up receiving only 28 clicks daily if you appear on the ninth position. Even the web page appearing in the second position will only receive 268. Not a bad number, but it pales in comparison to the 1126 clicks that the first result would reap.
Read more
Bloggers and webmasters know that every single visitor helps to build up traffic, right? If that is the case, you should make sure that Google is correctly indexing your images, and that people searching for related image terms will have a chance to visit your blog.
Here is a quick check that you can perform to find that out. Just head to Google, and click on the “Images” link on the top left corner. That will take you to the Image Search. Now you just need to type on the search bar “
site:yourdomain.com“. This quiery will filter only the results coming from your site.
If your images are getting indexed correctly by Google you should be able to see a whole bunch of them on the search results.
Read more
@SalesBlogcast asks - “What’s the difference between haveing “links” vs. a “blog roll?” Benefits? Chosing wisely?”
Ultimately the word ‘blogroll’ is just a different term used to describe a list of links, usually on the sidebar of a blog. It’s just a different label for the list of links I guess.
When I first started blogging everyone had a blogroll but these days I don’t see as many. One of the problems with them when your blog grows is that they can become quite political to maintain. I ended up giving up on having one on ProBlogger as I had so many requests to be on it - now I just have one with my b5media co-workers.
The other thing about blogrolls is that I hear people trying to get on them because of the SEO benefits of doing so. I’m sure there is some Google juice passed from blog rolls but suspect it’s not massive. Google seem to have more of an emphasis on links in content rather than links that appear on every page on sidebars/footers from what I can see these days.
Read more
At the
iQ Bootcamp last week, in the
Future Now Panel session that I took part in we shared the resource of
Twitter.
One of the questions always come up when people hear about Twitter (one of the currently popular micro blogging platforms) is
‘what’s the purpose?’ closely followed by
‘isn’t it a waste of time’.
Well here is an example of where following Twitter has resulted in a potentially huge opportunity for one of the not for profit organisations I work with and I hope will be of assistance for you too.
Today I noticed a tweet (a message on Twitter) from Laura Fitton of
Pistachio Consulting (you can find Laura at @Pistachio on Twitter). She sent a message that she was doing a live video stream using
Qik and her mobile phone from PodCamp NYC.
Read more
@SeanBannister asks - “on Problogger your RSS shows the entire post but on DPS it only shows a teaser”
Whether to post excerpts or full feeds is something I’ve grappled with on and off for years now. I used on only do excerpts here on ProBlogger too but in the end decided to switch. The main thing that held me back from switching to full feeds on ProBlogger was the issue of duplicate content. I see a new blog scraping my content every day or two so there must be many sites with the same content as ProBlogger out there. This is frustrating and while I try to track down those who do so without any acknowledgement of source I can’t possibly stop them all.
The good thing now is that ProBlogger has authority in the eyes of Google as it’s been around for a few years and I’m pretty confident that Google ranks us as the original source of all the duplicate pages. I’m a little less confident of this with DPS so have kept it as an excerpt feed. Having said this - I’ll probably switch DPS to full feeds at sometime soonish as it’s got a fair ranking in Google now.
Further Reading on Full vs Partial RSS feeds: Read more
Recently it seems as if there have been a number of bloggers getting deals to publish books. Last week
Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett announced the release of their upcoming book. A few weeks ago Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim also published
Radically Transparent following the success of his blog.
Personally, I like the idea of bloggers that I recognize publishing books. I just ordered Darren and Chris’s book and I’m confident that it will be worth the price, because I’m already familiar with them and I respect and trust their insight and opinions.
As I was purchasing the book, it made me think about some other bloggers that I would like to write a book on a particular topic. Plenty of bloggers are selling informational products or giving away free ebooks, but there are a few specifics that I would like to see, and here they are:
Read more
Written by Steven Snell · Filed Under top tips | Comments Off
Campaign Monitor launches Google Analytics integration so you can analyze your web site analytics and email marketing campaigns from the same account.
![Building Findable Websites]()
Often times, the term SEO is mentioned in derogatory terms. With many of the poor techniques people use to garner site traffic, it's not hard to see why. However, Aaron Walter has recently finished a book entitled
Building Findable Websites which casts a wide net on the concept of building a quality web site that goes well beyond just the mere topic of SEO.
The concept of "findable websites" may be familiar if you recently read Aaron's article in A List Apart, entitled
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry. In the article, Mr. Walter talks of three very important things that a site needs to accomplish, helping people:
- find the web sites they seek,
- find the content on the site, and
- rediscover valuable content they've found.
The book covers plenty of topics including SEO, microformats, and integrating third-party APIs like Google Search. The
supporting site also has plenty of supporting content including five additional chapters.
Read more
ComScore recently released a report confirming that Google’s paid clicks for February were only 3% higher than the same period last year. If we then consider that this February had one extra day, the real growth is practically 0% year over year. There is also a 3% declined month over month (February had 515 million paid clicks, while January had 532 million). One point that is not clear is if those numbers are coming from Google’s search network alone or from a combination of the search and the content network. The latter case would probably be bad news for website owners and bloggers alike. Regardless, there is a clear flat trend on paid clicks. Could this be the delayed impact of Google’s latest changes on the ad formats and clickable areas? Or the casual Internet surfer is just getting used (and blind) to contextual advertising? Time will tell. Source:
Silicon Alley Insider
Partner:
MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About
One way to add depth to the posts that you write on your blog is to include the opinions of others on the topics that you’re exploring. The way that I see it is that when I write a post with just my own thoughts in it it can end up being a little one dimensional - but when I draw upon the experience of others also posts have the potential to become 2… or even 3 dimensional.
How do I do it?
Here are five ways that I’ve used lately to include the opinion of others in my posts:
1. Twitter - one of the things that I love about Twitter is that it has the ability to create instant conversations around virtually any topic. Next time you’re writing a post ask a question or two of your ‘followers’ on Twitter. Ask them for examples, get their opinion or survey them on their behavior on the topic you’re exploring.
Read more
