What Is A Blog Comment

Have you ever read a blog and thought I really like that, or maybe read something that you disagreed with or had an alternative view about, well some blogs allow users to comment about articles they have written. In theory this is supposed to create animated discussion about the blog, and become it’s own marketing tool, however, usually it just becomes a place for spammers to bottom feed.

For many blog owners spammy, off topic comments, have become such an issue, that they either turn off the ability to comment altogether or worst of all (like mine) become no follow. (For information on the nofollow tag please see my earlier Post.

So What Benefit Do Blog’s Have In Terms Of Marketing And What Is The Correct Etiquette To Get Your Post’s Approved?

Blog’s have a huge benefit in terms or marketing. like forum posts, commenting on well known blogs, can increase your chance of being known for what you do, meaning more visitors will come and have a look at your website and increase the likelihood of a conversion.  There are also in some cases an SEO benefit, as getting a link back to your own site on a theme related subject, still rules the roost in terms of link juice.

Finding quality dofollow blog’s can be a headache though. Many blog owners realise this and have developed a way for customer’s to know whether there blog are dofollow or not, by a handy little images with the words ‘U comment, I follow’. In fact one trick if your looking for blogs to comment on is just do a google image search for ‘U comment I follow’ and find a list of dofollow blog’s (this does not allow you find theme related blogs however).

Another way to find dofollow blog’s is to search a do follow blog directory. Just do  a search for do follow blogs and you will find sites that list dofollow blogs, by category or theme or you could always try free do follow blogging software like G-locks fast blog finder (I have had mixed results with this).

Okay I have Found Do Follow Blogs – No What

Okay so you have a list of theme related blog’s, and you want to make sure that they get accepted, and not end up in the spam sin bin, here is a list of do’s and dont’s

DO’s & Don’ts:-

• Read the Article. It’s amazing how many people just see the link, and post a useless comment like ‘Nice blog’ or ‘I like this’ – Most blog owners will see right through this. Amazingly they actually want you to read the info first.
• NEVER! Use blog commenting software. These automatically send comments to 1000’s of blogs. Unfortunately most of the comments are useless and will never be accepted, and may even infuriate the blog owner enough for him/her to stop comments altogether.
• A Good Tip – Is to forget putting your keyword in the Name field. Most blog sites these days will disapprove your comment. Instead put a name in there, your website and a contact email. You will still get link juice and a big thumbs up from the blog owner.
• Don’t criticize or post unhelpful comments. Remember these could be potential customers seeing your comment’s.

Blogging is an excellent tool and it still has it’s place in an Internet marketing strategy. By following the above guidelines and keeping your comments on topic and relevant, we can help to keep an ethical and loving blogging atmosphere. Happy blogging!.

The No-follow tag is a simple piece of code that can be added to links on a website to tell Googlebot not to follow a link, and thus preserve some of the page rank of your site to its most important pages. Examples of when you would use this is in the case of non-important pages content wise, such as contact us, privacy, terms and conditions etc.

it appears under the code rel-nofollow so if you had  link that you thought would be intersting to your customers but you really didn’t want Google to give away all you hard earned link juice you would enter the following <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com/">Anchor Text</a>

In 2008, Matt Cutts, Google’s software engineer posted the following

From now on, when Google sees the attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

However be very careful when obtaining links back to your site, that you make sure that this tag isn’t added, otherwise you could be wasting your time placing a link on that sit, as it would add no link juice or have any effect to your rankings.

To find out whether a site has no follow tag’s, there is an excellent firefox plugin called NoFollow. Any links on a site that have the nofollow tag are highlighted in red, whilst dofollow are in grey.

I use this tool all the time, and find a great timesaver.

We  found ideas from Google’s keyword tool with the expected search volumes.

The following keyword’s look Good

Dry Cleaning Newcastle, Dry Cleaners Newcastle

All In Title

But how competitive is the market?. In Google.co.uk this brings up 189,000 sites, Sounds like a lot, right?. Well the truth is these might not be directly trying to rank for this keyword, and so we need to know how many competitors are actually targetting this keyword in there SEO practices.

We do this via the all in title. To do an all-in-title search all you need to is put quotation marks round the word your wanting to check “Dry Cleaners Newcastle” – So now I see there are 24,600 competitors, with the keyword Dry Cleaners Newcastle either in the title, description or url. (anything above 400,000 sites is considered competitive for most niches)

Finding out how fast your site should load is not an easy question to ask. If your page has interactive features, such as flash, video or photo’s, it is obviously going to be taking longer to load, then say a site with pure text.

However, If your site takes more than around 4-7 seconds to load, you may want to see if you can reduce this. One way to do this is look at your images on your site, Could these be reduced in size, could your we designers place code, in external javascript files?.

There are a number of tools to check the current page speed of your site. One of my favourite is http://www.pingdom.com. Here you type in your url, and you get to watch your page load in real time, while the tool tracks how long in seconds your site takes to load. I find the tool works really well, and because it breaksdown the load times of each item, it’s easy to highlight in page speed problems.

How much of a ranking factor speed is nobody knows however, if you can tick all the right boxes in helping Google decide that your site is an authorative site, with rich content, quick load times, and quality links, you should see the fruits of your labour in good rankings for keywords.

The first is to think about what your site sells or the service your provide. Do you provide a local service? or is it an ecommerce site with  a national audience. If your providing a local service say a dry cleaning service in Newcastle, you will want to make sure you add Newcastle to the end of your keywords. The reason for this is :-

1)Google although providing some location baed search, still needs some help, so having your keyword as Laundry Services, won’t help you be shown in Newcastle.

2)Most users will type in the location to find what there after.

Once you have an idea of what it is you do, you then want to start generating a list of what keywords you would consider people would look for. Look at your competitiors for ideas, ask family and friends and get a list together.

For help in finding keyword ideas, there are a lot of free tools that will give you some help. For instance Google’s keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and will produce hundreds of ideas along with the number of people that search for this word. Just put your list of keywords in and you will soon find the most popular keyword’s for your website.

Once you have done this, hit the download button to export the data to spreadsheet, You know have a list of related keywords for your site.

There are obviously other steps to deciding which keyword’s to use and ill feature these in a future post.

If you have already clicked on a site in the Google result’s this will more then likely show first. For instance if I type in ‘SEO Sheffield’ into Google, Optimize-Yorkshire will be the first results shown (Im hoping If I stare at it long enough I will actually be true). This is because I have clicked on the site before, and therefore Google shows results according my search preferences.

In terms of SEO, yes it can be a pain. Until recently the changes only seemed to show when logged into your Google account, now it seems to be rolled out into your search history.

So Is SEO DEAD?

Google often brings up different ways of doing things, and SEO’s then get an inventive and find a way around it. In my Opinion, this just make’s it vital to make sure that when a user see your results in Google, that you have the most eye catching title and description, that a user will want to click on. Then instead of being 4th or 5th when the user types in the keyword, your results will show first!!.

On a side note if you want to see how your site is performing without personalised search  there is the option to turn this off.

On the far right under the login on Google you will see ‘View Customizations’ just click on this and then click see results without improvements.

So how do companies are looking to improve there visability in the search engines root out the bad from the Good?. I aim to try and give you some tips on what to look out for below.

Organic V Pay-Per Click

One of the first questions you need to ask is what is the service they are providing. Pay per click service is ususally provided by Google’s adword services, and means you listing appears in the sponsored listings above the organic listings see below

The problem with this is every time somebody clicks on your ad it can cost anything between £.50-£7 a click. Bear in mind some ad’s can be clicked 7 times a day and you soon have to invest in a huge amount of money for you ad’s to only appear a handful a times a day. Once your budget runs out then so does the visability of your ad. Basically you will no longer be shown.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO. Obtaining organic SEO results consists of two parts which I shall discuss briefly here. Onpage – This is basically finding keywords your customers use to find your business and placing them strategically in your website, to advise Google where your site should be placed  when people search. The second part is off page seo, where links are placed on related websites back to yours, consider this like a voting system site A votes for Site B. The more quality votes you get, the more authority you have for ranking for a tem in Google. Apart from paying somebody to do the work, the clicks are free. Whether you recieve 10 or 1,000 clicks your wesbite will be visable, as long as you keep up the work.

As there are many factors to look our, I shall write this as a serioes of articles. Look out for part II shortly, and thank you for reading.

It’s not just the book that has took a hit, as many people have turned away from yell.com to find companies via search engines like Google.

Search Engines are free to advertise in (if you take out the pay per click option) and this is why more and more businesses are turning towards SEO instead an expensive annual advert in yell.com, which many not result in any business.

I speak to many companies and politely listen as they explain that the yellow pages brings them in enough business. I answer “How do you know?”, They answer “Well it’s the yellow pages, people must come to my business via them.”. I then ask them to do a simple experiement. Over the next week I get them to monitor how much of there business, whether its a phone call or an email enquiry. Usually the week after they contact me back and advise “Do you know, not one of our clients has come via the yellow page?. Ive cancelled my account.”

This is not to say that business should withdraw there ad’s, however next time your contracts up for renewal, consider recording how much traffic it actually brings in and whether that budget could be more effective on other forms of marketing.