Steinar Knutsen» seo

Commenting on Blogs for Knowledge, Brand Building and Market Leadership

Steinar — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:54:22 +0000

Commenting on other blogs is a fantastic strategy for building your brand online. So few people leave comments these days that you can easily differentiate yourself with this simple tactic. Not only does commenting get your name out there, it also gives you a chance to learn something new and connect with other thought leaders within your industry.

In my daily routine, I scan all of the blogs that I subscribe to in Google Reader. My goal is to choose three blog posts that I find interesting and leave my comment. I find that this gives me exposure to readers on that website, and often drives traffic back my website.

Do you comment on blogs on a regular basis? I’d love to hear your feedback.

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3 SEO Strategies You Can Execute Right Now

Steinar — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:09:25 +0000

Search engine optimization is something that all bloggers and online marketers address at some point. The goal is to drive more targeted to your site, but it seems as though the rules keep changing. Let’s explore at least three SEO strategies you can execute right now.

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1) Join Google Plus

Social media is obviously playing an increasingly important role in how people find information online and connect with brands in a meaningful way. Search engines recognize this and have, therefore, changed their algorithms to put social media in the spotlight.

The most recent evidence of this is the launch of Google Plus, an 80 million member strong social media platform run by Google. In the past it was common to find Facebook and Twitter content in Google search results, but in 2011 Google scrapped those relationships and now shows Google Plus content instead.

To take advantage of this I encourage you to set up a Google Plus account. Complete your profile as well as possible including information about you, locations you’ve lived, where you work, what you do, links to other online profiles & websites and your profile picture. Add a few new posts, including one to your website. Upload a few images and videos if you can. You want to send a signal to Google that your onboard and ready to participate.

Of course, the real power of Google Plus is the community, so start adding people to Circles. Comment on their posts, +1 their content and share their posts to your Circles. Mention them in you posts too. If you have a business, setup a Google Plus Page and repeat the steps above.

This entire process should take no more than about an hour and will establish a great baseline for you and your new relationship with Google. The key is to get your profile setup now, so that your “start date” is locked in. Google tends to place importance on the age of domains and other online assets, so consider this your first warning to get things rolling early.

2) Write Great Content

Writing unique content on your blog has and always will be a valuable method for driving search engine traffic to your site. Blogging on a regular basis sends a signal to Google that your website is relevant, among other things.

Personally, I like blogging because it forces me to really dive into important issues within my industry and provide additional clarity to my customers so they can make sense of what’s happening online. The more I blog about current events and trends within my industry, the more traffic I get from visitors looking for help on those topics. The same is true in any niche, so think about your market and what’s happening today. Pick a specific topic and write a couple blog posts that provide guidance for those looking for help.

If your nervous about blogging or have trouble getting started, I recommend that you just start writing without editing at first. You don’t want editing to get in the way of your stream of thought. Rather, get the ideas down on paper, and then go back later and edit for proper grammar and markup such as bold and italicizing. For example, I write this blog post using Siri – a voice to text dictation application on the iPhone. It took me just a few minutes to talk and the results was nearly 1000 words.

With every blog post that you write I also recommend you include categories and relevant tags. In WordPress, for example, you can choose these options when publishing each blog post. This creates additional pages within your site that Google can index and also provides helpful navigation for your users to discover content across your site.

When you finally publish your blog pos, share the link to your content on popular social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Plus. Soon, you’ll see traffic coming to your site that may otherwise have gone to the competition. Of course, use Google Analytics to see exactly how these people are finding your site and what keywords they used when they searched on search engines.

3) Comment on other Blogs

I’ve written about commenting on other blogs previously so I won’t get into too much detail here, but this remains a very powerful method for driving traffic to your website.

When you comment on other blogs or websites there are a few things that happen.

First, it forces you to really read the article, form your own opinion about the subject and then add value to the conversation.
The second thing that happens is that people that read that article will see your comment and your name. If you comment often, they will identify you as a thought leader within your niche. Furthermore, if you leave good comments, readers will click through to visit your website and learn more about you.
In some cases, search engines will also be indexing your comments – buildings backlinks that drive search engine optimization for your site over the long-run.

I hope you find these three strategies helpful. Obviously, as the search engines continues to evolve and new online platforms appear these strategies will change over time.

What is your favorite strategy for driving traffic to your website?

30DTC – Why are WordPress Tags Important?

Steinar — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:11:35 +0000

WordPress tags can sometimes be a real mystery, but they are very important.

User Navigation

1. WordPress tags help your readers navigate your content.

I like to compare them to the Index in the back of a book. These are all the specific, individual words that you as a reader are seeking, that may not be as obvious in the Table of Contents (categories).

If readers find one post interesting, they’re likely to find other posts that share a similar tag interesting as well.

Search Engine Traffic

2. WordPress tags can drive significant traffic to your website. When you use a tag in a post, WordPress creates an addition page. For example, this post has the tag “wordpress tags”, so WordPress automatically creates a page for … WordPress Tags.

Since the new page has your exact keywords in the URL, search engines have a better chance of understanding what that new page is about. Thus, they get indexed well and drive traffic when people search for that phrase on Google, etc.

Here’s a great example.

I recently wrote a blog post about Google Plus Pages and used the tag “google-plus-multiple-admins” because I knew that the lack of multiple administrator support was an issue and people would be searching for some clarification.

As you can see from the chart below, this drove a handful of new visitors to my site over the past few days.

Yes, there was traffic to that post from other channels, but the tags did contribute in their own, unique way.

I hope this helps. Do you use tags? Why or why not?

30DTC – Web Traffic Increased 15% in Week 1 of 30 Day Traffic Challenge

Steinar — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:56:49 +0000

I have a ways to go, but I’m happy with a modest 15% increase in web traffic to my site during the 1st week of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge.

What’s better is Time on Site doubled and my Bounce Rate went down ever so slightly. I’m focussed on Unique Visitors during the challenge and you can see my traffic went from 668 to 765 this week vs. last.

The most effective means of driving traffic have been:

writing more blog post across a variety of content that ultimately all ties together with internal links and references.
commenting on 3rd party blogs – I’m averaging 3 comments per day.
choosing keyword phrases from Webmaster Tools where I’m on the 2nd page of Google Search results. This is traffic that usually misses my site and goes elsewhere. I’m focussing on the long-tail phrases that have 1,000+ impressions today and I site on in the 10-40 spot in search engine results. I’m doing some cross-analysis with Market Samurai as well to further analyze competitive landscape.

Yesterday I setup Bing Webmaster Tools and I’m exciting to see what new information I can learn and apply to my strategy.

Talk soon!

30DTC – Driving Targeted Web Traffic with Long-Tail Keyword Research

Steinar — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:06:47 +0000

It’s day five of the 30 Day traffic challenge and a couple days ago I set out to optimize for the keyword phrase of targeted web traffic. I’m happy to report that some of the traffic to my website is indeed for this keyword search phrase.

This is not by accident. I used the phrase in a number of blog posts. I used it in some PDFs I uploaded to my website and to third-party websites and I used it been some comments that I left on some other blog posts.

I used it in a YouTube video and a couple quick podcast episodes at AudioBoo. At this point I hope you are thinking about some of the keyword phrases that you could be optimizing for on your website.

Search engine optimization is as much science as it is art. We don’t know the algorithms used by Google or Bing but simply guessing what the right keywords are is going to lead to failure and ultimately confuse the search engines.

On the flip side, if you use market research to understand the appropriate keywords you can drive targeted web traffic. I recommend Market Samurai as a great tool for understanding what the appropriate keywords are. In my case, I spend about 60 minutes to research some potentially promising keywords. I am by no means finished, but feel like I’m heading in the right direction.

What is your search engine optimization keyword research strategy?

30DTC – Using Mind Maps to Brainstorm Ideas and Map Out a Plan of Attack

Steinar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:13:33 +0000

It is day three of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge and today I am working on creating a mind map of all of the potential channels and opportunities to drive targeted web traffic to my website. I’m using a great tool on my iPad, iPhone and Mac called MindNode Pro, which is available at www.mindnode.com. Another great free mind mapping application I’ve used in the past is FreeMind.

Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm ideas graphically rather than writing down your ideas in a list. In particular, they allow you to get ideas out onto the table in a free-form fashion and then re-order or categorize your ideas in a more meaningful way. With MindNode, I can export my map as an image, pdf or text based outline among other formats.

You can see from the initial mind map that I’ve created there are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website. I’ve categorized my mind map into strategies, tools, measurement, and search engine optimization, plus a special category around stuff beyond increasing traffic, such as conversion and monetization. This is by no means complete but it gives me a starting point with which to move forward implementing my traffic getting strategy.

Here’s the same mind map exported as an html file … pretty cool, huh?

Increase Web Traffic

Beyond Traffic

Long term strategy
Business objectives
Converting visitors
Monetization

Measuring Traffic

Google Analytics
Quantcast
Alexa
Compete

Strategies

On my site

Blogging

Keyword rich posts
Controversial content that challenges common belief
Covering current events
Top ten lists

Subscriptions

Blog feed subscriptions
Newsletters
Auto responder series

Creating a simple tool or widget as a downloadable

WordPress plugin
Ebook
Excel templates
Simple workbook with forms to complete

Multimedia formats

Podcasting
Images
Video

On other sites

Press Releases
Paid traffic

PPC
Advertising
Affiliate Marketing

Social media

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Participating in Forums
Commenting on blog posts

Offline promotion

Tools

Market Samurai
Blogging editorial calendar
Google Reader
Subscription Services

Aweber
Mailchimp
Constant Contact
IContact

Search engine optimization

Keyword research
On-page

Leveraging what I already see working with current visitors

Off-page

Inbound links

Once my mind map is fairly complete, I will prioritize the action items and fill out my blogging editorial calendar. It is much easier this way to stay on track and feel like I have a plan of attack moving forward.

Mind maps are also great for outlining a table of contents for an eBook, white paper, or any writing assignment in general.

Do you use mind maps? How? Why? What tools do you like?

30DTC – Tracking Website Visitors in Real Time and Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

Steinar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:10:29 +0000

As part of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge, I’ll be spending a lot of time in Google Analytics. It’s nice actually, because it is giving me the chance to update a bunch of settings, really dig into some of data and get some hands-on experience with the new tools.

Tonight I stumbled across Google Analytics Real Time Reporting, which turns out was recently launched. Here’s a snapshot of the activity on my site right now. Three visitors – stunning, I know.

I have used real time tracking tools before, namely Woopra. For me, it never really made sense to watch a small handful of people on my site in real-time. I do have at least one client, however, who has upwards of 200 people on her site at any given time and in that case it’s fun to watch the traffic pass through.

Speaking of Woopra, I just found this relatively recent article that outlines 8 Free Tools for Live Website Tracking. Check it out if this is something that you want to explore further.

Tracking website traffic with Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

What probably makes most sense for the passive Analytics user is the Intelligence Alerts dashboard. It essentially provides you with a visually intuitive snapshot of the top 10 major changes in traffic behavior on your website.

For example, as you see in the screenshot below, my site saw a 98% increase in Pageviews and a 242% increase in Average Time on Site on Oct. 15th.

If I click on the details link to the right, I can see possible factors that influenced the shift and add annotations for future reference.

While these alerts are useful, I’ve found the Google Analytics Custom Email Alerts to be the best in terms of notifying me of any major traffic changes. If you click on the Settings Cog icon off to the right in your Analytics Dashboard you’ll find a place to setup custom alerts.

Here’s a screenshot from a new alert I just setup tonight to alert me when unique visitor traffic spikes by 25% vs. the previous day’s traffic.

Normally, I would recommend weekly or monthly based alerts, but given my short timeframe for the 30 Day Traffic Challenge, a daily window makes sense.

We’ll spend more time in Analytics later, since it is my main platform to measure traffic and define success this month. Any specific questions about Analytics you would like answered? My friend, Pierre DuBois, is an Analytics expert at Zimana and could likely help answer any questions we throw at him.

30DTC – Commenting on Other Blogs to Drive Traffic to My Website

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:50:18 +0000

It’s day two of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge and today I am going to embark on one of my favorite tactics for driving traffic which is commenting on other blogs. Commenting on other blogs has several implications for driving traffic.First, commenting on other blog posts get you involved in the conversation. It allows people to see who you are and click through to your website if you leave a link.

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Second, if enabled, your link on someone else’s blog post can be indexed by Google. By default most blogs use a no-follow rule which means that your link will not be indexed; however, with the help of Market Samurai I can find blogs that have this option set up to allow search engines to index my link. This creates a backlink to my website, which is one of the leading variables to determine how my site ranks on search engine results.

Third, leaving comments on other peopl’s blog posts forces me to keep on top of the latest trends, strategies and tactics others are using within my niche. In my case, I’m going to comment on blog posts that have to do with driving traffic to your website. I not only get to learn about what others are doing, but I get to use this information as inspiration for some of my upcoming blog posts.

For me, commenting on at least three blog posts per day is a reasonable frequency and pace that I can maintain over the course of 30 days. There is a ton of information on the Internet about driving traffic to your website so I feel like there will be no shortage of blog posts to find and comment on. This may or may not be the case for you depending on your niche.

A best practice when commenting on other people’s blog posts is to add insightful information to the original blog post. There’s nothing worse than leaving a boring comment with a link to your website. This adds no value and can ultimately hurt your search engine optimization. It can also hurt your reputation.

On the other hand, leaving an insightful comment that adds value to the conversation will draw additional comments and can help build your reputation overtime. You may even find some new people to follow online and build mutually beneficial relationships.

That’s it for now. I have some comments to leave. Do you regularly leave comments on other blogs? Why or why not?

Sent from my iPhone 4S

Current Website Unique Visitors and 30 Day Traffic Challenge Goal

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:24:24 +0000

The intention of this post is to establish the unique visitor traffic baseline for my 30 Day Traffic Challenge. Since this is about traffic, I turned to Google Analytics to see if I could easily determine an appropriate timeframe with which to compare my future performance.

It would be easy to use a monthly average based on the prior 12 months or year-to-date traffic, but since my traffic has steadily increased over that time, I didn’t feel that would really provide an accurate read on the situation.

In the following chart you can see I was able to identify 3 plateaus since the beginning of the year. In the Jan-Feb timeframe my traffic sat around 1,600 unique visitors per month. In the March to Jun period traffic hovered around 2,000 and from July thru October, it has increased to approximately 2,900 unique visitors per month. Given the sizable differences, I think it makes most sense to establish the baseline on the last 4 month period.

Next I focussed on the exact period in question. Google Analytics tells me I had 11,700 unique visitors during the last 4 months from July 1 – October 31st. Divided by 4, this is equivalent to 2,925 unique visitors per month.

So . . . 2,925 unique visitors per month is my baseline and 8,875 unique visitors is my goal for November!

Kinda scary if you think about it. A much safer metric to target would have been pageviews, since it’s relatively easier to get more page views from exiting traffic than to drive more unique traffic in general. But, I think targeting unique visitors is worth the fight — I need some new eyes on my content!

Again, some quick math concludes this is about 293 visitors per day. Sweet! We can do this!

———————–

Now that we’ve got that covered, let talk about some things I need to do right away.

Ping.fm

First, I just revisited my kick-off post for the 30 Day Traffic Challenge and “pinged it” with Ping.fm. This is a great tool, because it allows you to send a link to a number of popular social media and other bookmarking sites at once. For example, my Ping.fm account is set up to notify 16 social media sites, including my Twitter account and Facebook Page. This is a huge timesaver and has great search engine optimization implications.

There’s some debate over the use of tools such as Ping.fm to send the same post to multiple sites at once. My argument is that everyone has their preference for where they consume content. Some of my readers are on Twitter and others are on Facebook. There is some overlap but by and large, they are separate. Even if some of my followers are connected with me on multiple platforms, chances are that they have chosen one platform to spend a majority of their time on and therefore are probably not going to see my post more than once.

In terms of SEO, it’s clear that social media content is playing an increasing role in how content surfaces on the front page of major search engines. In my experience, it seems like roughly 40% of the search results I get on Google these days are related to one of my social media account relationships. I only see this trend continuing and therefore think it’s important to feed these platforms with links back to my website. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Meta Tag Keywords and Descriptions

Meta tag keywords and descriptions are still an important element of driving traffic to your site. Keywords in and of themselves are critical to any sep campaign. Long-tail keywords in particular are the keywords that users enter into search engines to find your content.

For most of us, long-tail keywords probably manifest themselves in the form of 1) our personal or brand name 2) a unique phrase we may use frequently throughout out website and blog posts and 3) a keyword phrase we’ve specifically researched and optimized our content around. All three are valid and can drive good traffic. Check your Google Analytics for more information.

One area I really need to work on is taking an extra minute to define my blog post meta tags and description. For the last 12 months or so I’ve just let my WordPress theme take care of this for me. Unfortunately, when I look at the source code of my pages, I’m not happy with the resulting meta tags, so I’m going to do this manually throughout the course of my challenge to really get a handle on this important detail.

Fortunately, the Thesis Theme I’m using for this blog has a great setup of post option boxes where I can set the meta tags.

I’ll explain this in more detail later, but I’m going to use a tool called Market Samurai to analyze my long-tail keyword choices and selection.

Any thoughts on meta tag keywords and descriptions?

30 Day Web Traffic Challenge

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:24:36 +0000

Much like a competitive athlete, I enjoy a challenge. Unfortunately, I’m not much into working out these days and with Thanksgiving approaching this would would really be a bad time for me to start an exercise or diet pan.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun, instead, to see if I can do something with my blog — like triple my traffic in 30 days. I was thinking I might try to double my traffic, but that doesn’t seem like enough of a stretch. Driving 3x as many visitors, however, seems a bit more exciting.

The other reason I’m doing this is because I get 2-3 calls per week from people who want their website to show up on the front page of Google search results. It’s got me thinking that a lot of people are looking for similar help and it would be fun to challenge myself to do the same on my lower ranking keyword phrases. The goal is to have a great set of resources and case studies compiled by the end of this challenge to share with my clients.

To do this, we should to establish a few ground rules:

I’ll share traffic stats from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools as needed. This may include #’s or a few screenshots and definitely plenty of discussion. I need to be completely transparent with you so that we both may learn along the way.
I don’t have a master plan. This challenge isn’t premeditated. I came up with the idea today as I was finally integrating my Google Adsense, Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts. I discovered some interesting traffic patterns and wanted to dedicate some time to fully understand the complete picture.
I’ll explore both on-page and off-page SEO strategies, plus some social media and back linking tactics. There is no silver bullet and I want to explore all my options to drive traffic. I’ve already done much of the leg work, but it’s really been a couple years since I really took a deep dive into my SEO. So much has changed!
I’ll share as much as I can along the way with blog posts, video and some audio. I’ll use the category 30 day traffic challenge with all my content so you might want to subscribe to that feed now if you want to follow along.
I need your help and input so please feel free to leave comments on my blog, my YouTube channel, on Twitter and Facebook.
Everything I learn and share is free information. No strings attached. I’ll probably have a few ebooks along the way and those will yours to keep as well.
I may include links to products for which I receive commission, also referred to as affiliate products. I only do this with products I use, trust and would recommend to my closest friends.

That’s it for now. First step is to map out a plan of attach tonight with MindNode just to get my head around where to start. I also need to get my hands on my latest stats and establish my starting traffic base.

How to Customize Your SEO Options in the Catalyst WordPress Theme Framework

Steinar — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:15:24 +0000

Catalyst is a wonderful WordPress Theme that allows you to customize your blog with over 800 built-in options. In my opinion, it’s the best WordPress Theme on the market today.

Customizing your blog’s search engine optimization options is pretty straightforward in the SEO section of the Catalyst Core Options.

Steps to Customize Your SEO Options in Catalyst:

The title tag is used by search engines and also displays in the banner across most the top when viewing your site in modern browsers. By default your should append the site name and description to the Title Tag. If you can include keywords in these two variables to increase likelihood of being found when people search on Google, etc. A drop down let’s you choose the order in which these display and you also have the option choose a unique tag separator. I would go with the default options if you’re not sure what to choose.
H1 tags are arguably one of the most important elements in terms of content being read by search engines. It’s like the title of a book – it defines the first thing people and search engines see when they index your site. Catalyst give you the option to wrap either the Title or Description in H1 tags. Using the tagline might be more effective if the tagline is keyword rich and includes a better description of what your site is about. If your title is strong and explains your content well, choose that instead. You also have the option to manually assign H1 tag placement.
By default, search engines will attempt to index all the pages on your site. If you are a prolific blogger or a heavy user of tags and categories, your main content can get buried by all the dynamically generated pages that tags and categories create. Generally speaking you should only have a handful of categories, so indexing these pages is fine. By selecting “NoIndex” you are signaling the search engines to avoid indexing certain sections of your site. By default, Cataylst sets Archive, Tag and Author pages to NoIndex. For most site owners this makes sense and should be left alone.
Nofollow Comment Author Links tells search engines not to index links that you, as the author, post in your comments. By and large links in your comments will be to third party content and should not be indexed.
As search engines index your site, they also take snapshot of individual pages and cache them for future use. You have the choice to NoArchive certain sections in Catalyst though I recommend you leave this set at the default which allows for caching.
Homepage SEO Options first give you the opportunity to indicate your site’s Homepage Meta Description. These descriptions used to play a major role in SEO, but play a somewhat less important rolls these days given the rise of importance in other on-page and off-page factors.
Nonetheless, it’s important to provide a description. One practical application is that the description you provide here is often what appears below your heading in search engine results. The the second line of text that people see when searching for your site. Make it catchy with a clear explanation of what your site is about and why someone should visit. Include keywords or long-tail keyword phrases if possible without keyword stuffing.
Homepage Meta Tags should contests of several long-tail keywords. These are phrases that someone might search to find your site. Personally, I like to use Market Samurai to help identify the most valuable keywords phrases. Picking the wrong keywords can be a waste of time, so choose wisely.
This section gives you same choices for selecting how search engine robots will index, follow and archive your homepage.This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.seomoz.org/blog and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL. For an in-depth article on this subject visit http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021646.html.

If you’re not familiar with Catalyst, I highly recommend you check it out today!

Search and Email Still Powerful Channels for Online Marketing

Steinar — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:28:43 +0000

Most of the hype over the past few years has been focussed on social media, and rightly so. In many cases, social media is a preferred communication channel over other forms on online marketing, but the fact remains that search and email are still among the most popular online activities and should still be considered valuable components of the marketing mix.

Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email …

… Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.

via Search and Email Still the Most Popular Online Activities – Pew Research Center.

There are a several tactics to leverage search and email activity to drive eyeballs to your website. Here are a few ideas:

Implement a Search Engine Optimization strategy on your website. This doesn’t have to be rocket science, but understanding the basics of SEO and doing a little bit everyday can drive a significant spike in traffic.
Write content on your website that answers your potential customers’ most pressing questions. What are the top 7 questions people always ask you and what are the top7 questions they should be asking you. Write helpful blog posts that address those questions and you’ll attract a growing audience.
Use a newsletter subscription service such as Aweber so that readers can subscribe to your blog via email. The fact is, most folks don’t really understand how to subscribe to your RSS feed and email is just more convenient.
Leverage the direct messaging capabilities of social media sites to send email to your followers. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube all provide you with this functionality to communicate privately, 1:1 via email.

What do you think? Are search and email still powerful marketing tools?

How to Increase Your WordPress Site Speed

Steinar — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:23:15 +0000

We’ve heard for a while now that Google considers site speed as key factor in their search rankings. In other words, they look favorably upon sites that load faster and thus give them preferential treatment in search rankings when someone is searching on Google.

Site speed can also dramatically effect visitor experience. If your site is slow to load, visitors may be more likely to bounce or leave the site prematurely. You all know the feeling when you visit a site and it takes for ever for content to show up. You don’t want to be that site! You want your site to deliver content quickly, especially with the increased use of mobile web browsing.

There are several actions you can take to speed up your site. Let’s cover a few of the basics to get you started.

Measure your site’s speed

Google is nice enough to provide an entire set of tools to help speed up your site, including a handy Chrome speed monitoring extension for Developer Tools and an online Google Speed Test tool.

The report from this test explains potential issues effecting your site’s speed and categorizing them into high, medium and low priority. Obviously, it’s in your best interest to address the high priority issues first and work your way down the list. In my case, I had site caching disabled which raised a “high priority” flag.

I also ran a second site speed test at WebPageTest.org. The feedback from test results are similar in nature to those generated by Google’s online tool with one major advantage: WebPageTest let’s you compare site speed before and after improvements. My original test tracked my site’s Page Load Time at nearly 9.5 seconds, which is dreadful. After a few tweaks I managed to reduce page speed to 5.8 and eventually to 5.4 seconds. I’m not done yet!

WebPageTest.org also gives you a score on a scale of 0-100 and allows you to bookmark your results so that you can come back any time to run additional tests. Maybe you could compare your site to a competitor or another site that you think loads quickly?

Cache your WordPress site to increase page speed

I recommend you install a WordPress caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. These services basically ”generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, so that they load faster. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.”

There are a ton of settings within both of these plugins, but the good news is that they are pretty self-explanatory with plenty of documentation to help you set things up right.

Once activated, you’ll notice a difference in site speed right away. Note that because you’re now caching your site, when you make changes to your site, they may not appear when you refresh your browser. To overcome this, either turn off the caching while updating your site or clear your browser’s cache file. It’s no big deal, but it can be confusing the first time you experience this.

Minify and Optimize your CSS

If you have a complex WordPress theme and multiple plugins, your site will slow down unless you properly optimize your javascript and css. You can do this manually, Wp-Minify is a great plugin that handles it for you.

There are only a few setting for this plugin and the default settings should do just fine. If you run into any problems, you may choose to exclude certain JavaScript or CSS files.

You can see in this screenshot that my page speed decreased by another full second after activating WP-Minify! Sweet!

Optimize your WordPress Database

If you’ve had your site up for any length of time, it’s likely that your MySql database is cluttered with extra content that is negatively impacting your site’s speed. Fortunately, there’s a great WordPress plugin to help clean up the mess.

WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.

via WordPress › WP-Optimize « WordPress Plugins.

Was this helpful? Let me know if your site speed improves!

18 Inbound Marketing Tactics to Drive Website Traffic and Search Engine Rank

Steinar — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:10:12 +0000

The number one question I get from website owners is “How can I drive more traffic to my site and rank higher in search engines?” This diagram from SEOmoz illustrates the pleathora of options and complexity involved in accomplishing this.

My guess is you’re actively executing on a handful of these tactics. I recommend you install Google Analytics and track their performance. Which channels are driving the most traffic, backlinks and ideal customers to your site? What new channels can you leverage to expand your footprint?

An Inspirational Story of Entrepreneurship: SEOmoz

Steinar — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:37:35 +0000

SEOmoz has been for some time one of the most popular go-to sources of SEO related information. Here’s a great story of their early beginnings and rise to superstardom.

The Story of Moz: 1981-2011

View more presentations from randfish

I’m particularly impressed with their ability to 1) listen to their customers 2) build products that customers want and 3) position, package and price their products in a meaningful way. My favorite chart is that in which the price continues to increase as the number of subscribers increases as well.

Video: Episode 4 Blogging for Business – Intro to Search Engine Optimization

Steinar — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:38:30 +0000

In our last video we talked about planning for your blog. In this video I provide a brief introduction and overview of search engine optimization (SEO) as it relates to blogging.

Search engine optimization is all of the on-page and off-page tactics you can do to drive traffic to your site when people search on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other popular search engines. The tactics we use can help maximize your exposure on those search engines.

On-page optimization is all the things you can do on your blog to help search engines know what your website is about. There’s coding you can do behind the scenes and optimization you can do with the content itself. For example, you want to include keywords throughout your site so readers and search engines can index your site for the appropriate words.

Off-site optimization is all the things you can do outside your site to maximize indexing and traffic. For example, submitting your RSS feed to feed aggregators, submitting your sitemap, and getting backlinks from other high PageRank sites.

The most popular blogging platforms support SEO to some degree and provide tools to help make it easier. The key at this point is to write great content.

In the next video we’ll discuss content creation and how to get started writing!

Video: A few words on the importance of video as a marketing channel for your business

Steinar — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:33:31 +0000

Obviously, I love video. It’s a great marketing channel for your business and is increasingly expected at some level by website visitors.

3 Reasons Why WordPress Blog Post Tags Are Important

Steinar — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:50:05 +0000

WordPress tags are an often overlooked option when publishing a new blog post. Based on some questions I heard this morning, it’s clear that there is some misunderstanding about the use of Tags and why they’ll important to the overall long-term health of you blog.

Listen or Download

3 Reasons WordPress Tags are Important

Tags are similar to the index at the end of a book. They help the reader find specific keywords hidden through your blog. Even better, they help readers find all the posts that are related to a particular Tag.
Tags are great for search engine optimization, since every tag creates a new url or page within your site that Google and other search engines may index.
Tags are also good for creating sub-categories around a niche topic. For example you may have a cooking category and several posts tagged as “breakfast”. Each tag has it’s own RSS feed, so you could use this to either target subscribers or submit your RSS feed to niche 3rd party sites.

How are you using tags?

Year-to-Date Blog Traffic Sources Analysis Illustrates Content Distribution Strategy

Steinar — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:21:39 +0000

I check Google Analytics a lot … probably more than most people … like a couple times a day. It facinates me to see where traffic is coming from and what people are searching for on Google that drives them to my site(s).

My website traffic analyses are typically very in-depth, however I just wanted to share my traffic sources year-to-date for steinarknutsen.com to illustrate a couple points.

Helpful Insights from 1st Quarter 2010 Traffic Sources

No surprise, Google is the 1st source of traffic. I blog regularly and do a lot to drive SEO, so this makes sense. Same goes for image search traffic (#15)
Good mix of social media traffic from Twitter (#3), Facebook (#6) and LinkedIn (#13). I participate in all three of these networks regularly at the same level or mix with which I see incoming traffic. This is by design.
A couple new media based sources, including YoutTube (#4) and podcastingnews (#9). I optimize all my videos and have a couple podcasts on iTunes. Podcastingnews.com picked me up from a video series I did on … podcasting!
I comment on other blogs everyday so that why I’m getting good traffic from industry niche sites like Mashable, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review.
My newsletter subscriber count is on the rise, but I only just started sharing info with them on a regular basis; hence, Aweber making the list (#14).

So what?

Well, what this tells me is that my strategy is working. The strategy is to create original content in multiple formats that’s convenient for my readers to consume. Not surprisingly, most of my customers come from Google, Twitter and Facebook. And yes, I’ve even met a client on YouTube!

What do your traffic sources look like? Why and what does that tell you about your content distribution strategy?

Google PageRank Checker – Check Google Page Rank of any Web Page

Steinar — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:05:24 +0000

Google PageRank is a factor that many consider important to search engine optimization and how your site ranks in Google search results. Here’s a site that lets you quickly check:

Google PageRank Checker – Check Google page rank of any web pages.

How to increase your PageRank? Well, that’s one of the great mysteries. Here’s how Google explains it:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Search Engine Optimization: Back to Basics

Steinar — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:00:03 +0000

Search engine optimization is the process of implementing on-page and off-page tactics to drive search engine results placement. In other words, the stuff you do to help your site show up on Google.

Long-tail keywords refer to the combination of terms into a phrase that represents your site, your products and services, etc. Think of them as the words that people might use when searching for your website, company or products on Google. Much like any marketing strategy in general, choosing the right long-tail keywords has strategic implications much like choosing the right target market, niche, or micro niche. The more focused you are, the more relevant you are to that audience.

On-page optimization refers to the activities to incorporate on your website to drive search performance. This may include proper coding, the content itself, a site index, the frequency with with new content is published, etc.

Off-page optimization is the collection of activities you execute outside the scope of your site to improve indexing and drive traffic. This may include submitting your site to search engines and other directories, submitting your RSS feed to 3rd party sites for syndication, commenting on other blog posts with high PageRank to drive inbound links. The list goes on.

What do you think? Are your SEO tactics driving more, higher targeted visitors to your site? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Optimize your WordPress Blog for SEO and User Experience – Joost de Valk (Video)

Steinar — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:37:56 +0000

Another great video from Joost de Valk “Yoast”, including some useful advice on strategies to optimize your WordPress blog for SEO and user experience.

In particular, Yoast shares some very helpful hints for Analytics, Automation, RSS, Commenting and Plugins. Hope you enjoy.

What tips do you have to share to optimize your WordPress blog for SEO and user experience?

How to generate inbound links with videos for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Steinar — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:04:49 +0000

Let’s discuss how to generate inbound links with videos for search engine optimization (SEO). Most folks don’t understand how video seo works and once you do, it can serve as a powerful means for driving traffic to your site.

Let’s use YouTube as an example. Here are the steps to optimize your video for inbound links (or backlinks).

Use you keywords in the Title (1st words if possible)
Use your keywords in the description
Use your keywords in the tags (use dashes to keep phrases whole; e.g., “real-estate-strategies”)
Put your url as the very first item in your description. For example, “htttp://www.mysite.com”. You must include “http” to make the link active.
Set up a Google Alert for your video title to see the the video spread and inbound links proliferate.

PRO TIP: Instead of uploading directly to YouTube, sign up for a free account at TubeMogul, which will syndicate your video to dozens of the leading video sharing sites.

For a good example, check out my Construction Site video on YouTube (over 250,000 views) or watch this quick tutorial on videos seo strategies:

What do you think? If you’re publishing video will this help generate inbound links?

13 Steps to Make Every Blog Post More SEO Friendly

Steinar — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:16:16 +0000

Below you’ll find 13 steps to make every blog post most SEO friendly. These steps leverage keyword research, social media, meta tags, and inbound linking strategies to optimize on-page and off-page tactics.

These steps are considered white-hat and assume your blog is already setup with a structure (code, tags, plugins, etc) that facilitates SEO. For example, you might consider WordPress with the All-in-One-SEO plugin, which helps you control meta tags, spiders, and rss to make the most of these SEO tactics.

13 Steps to Make Every Blog Post More SEO Friendly

Preparation
__ Identify your long-tail keyword phrase

On-Page Post Optimization
__ Include keywords in title
__ Include keywords in first 70 characters
__ Include keywords in at least one other place within post
__ Bold keywords throughout post
__ Include keywords in title, alt, and description of any images
__ Include keywords in tags or categories
__ Include keywords in Keyword meta tags
__ Include keywords in Description meta tags

Off-Page Post Optimization
__ Post to Digg with keywords
__ Post to Delicious with keywords
__ Post to StumbleUpon with keywords
__ Post to Twitter with keywords
__ Post 3 meaningful comments on other blog with keywords in your anchor text-based link

There is more you could do, but this is a good start.

What do you think? What other tactics do you use to individually optimize your blog posts?

Leveraging events to drive SEO traffic to your blog (Audio)

Steinar — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:42:23 +0000

Listen or Download

Upcoming events are a great opportunity for you to leverage keywords related to that event and drive SEO traffic to your blog.

If you can, research an event within your niche and identify 2-3 long-tail keyword phrases that a potential reader might use to search for information on Google. Write a few blog posts about the event and use these keywords in your title, post text, meta keywords, and meta description. Follow up your post with a link in Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and your other favorite social media and bookmarking sites.

In my experience, if there is little competition for the event I can usually score a top 3 position in Google if I choose my keywords correctly. There are several tools to conduct keyword research, but I suggest starting with Google Keyword Tool to familiarize yourself on the topic.

Although events come and go, the benefit of optimizing for them is the ability to attract new followers within your niche. Give it a try – it’s actually a bit fun.

What’s your experience leveraging events to drive SEO traffic to your blog? Any success or other tips to share?

Evidence that YouTube Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Works (Video)

Steinar — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:50:43 +0000

YouTube search engine optimization (SEO) is an often overlooked element that can drive significant views and traffic back to your website.

Setting up a search engine friendly video is very simple and only take a fraction of the time required to actually shoot, edit, and publish the video.

Keywords are critical in your title, description, and tags. In this video I provide an example of a video I uploaded 2 years ago, which continues to get a steady flow of viewers now topping 250,000.

The link in my description feeds these viewers back to my website of choice (another feature that 99% of videos fail to incorporate).

Why don’t people optimize their videos? What do think? Seems like good sense but it’s so often overlooked.

The video referenced in this article is the 1st video in this YouTube Search.

Deep Links for Search Engine Optimization

Steinar — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:36:47 +0000

It’s still shocking that many newbies don’t understand links. You don’t need to link to a lot of Web sites. You need a lot of good Web sites to link to you. And, it’s best if you can manage to get some of those links to include — in some fashion — the keywords that describe the page they’re linking to.

For example, if I’m linking to Search Engine Watch, I would want to link using the words “Search Engine Optimization News” within the anchor text of the link. If I wanted to “deep link” (that is to say, link deeper within the Search Engine Watch Web site), I would link to the Promotion & Link Building page using the words “Link Building Resources.”

via Top Signs Your Site Isn’t Ready for Prime Time, Part 2 – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

This strategy is so critical. I would also add that not only do you want to use your keywords in this deep linking strategy, but you should also link from sites that have a high PageRank.

For example, you could generate dozens of inbound links from sites with a Google PageRank of zero and your efforts would yield very little in-terms of SEO. Whereas one link from a .gov or .edu site with high PageRank could significantly improve your rank.

To lean more about PageRank, check out Wikipedia on PageRank

To check the PageRank of any site, check out prchecker.

Optimizing YouTube Videos for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Steinar — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:31:09 +0000

YouTube.com is the second most searched site on the Internet, next to Google, so you might conclude that it is the second largest search engine. It so happens that Google owns YouTube so the implications are something to be well understood and taken seriously as YouTube relates to your Internet Marketing strategy.

As the largest online video sharing site, YouTube is home to everything from Obama’s weekly radio address to corporate sponsored informercials and people showcasing their musical talent. The list goes on and anything you can imagine can be found on YouTube. It’s free to sign up, free to upload videos, and free to view videos. Honestly, there’s nothing stopping you from taking advantage of this great medium to communicate and engage with your market.

The fact is most people do not understand how to properly optimize their videos for search engines and thus most video get very little attention.

Keywords

As with any search engine optimization strategy, keywords are critical. Think of them as the combination of words or phrases that people search for on the Internet. Since YouTube videos are frequently indexed by major search engines, it’s important to understand some simple steps to make your videos more search engine friendly.

It so happens that you can also call out these keywords in a special Keywords section with every new video you upload. Here’s your chance to thoroughly differentiate your video from the pack.
Titles

The title of your video needs to include two things: 1) your keywords and 2) something to hook viewers as they scan through a list of titles. If you fail to include the right keywords, search engines will ignore your video and if you fail to use a catchy title viewers will ignore your video.

For example, instead of using a title such as “Great House on 1.3 Acres!”, you might get better results with “4581 Morgan Creek – House for Sale in Roseville, CA”. The first example would be fine if the video was for a specific client, but the second video will ultimately draw more viewers since it names the city and uses the keyword phrases “house for sale” and “Roseville, CA”.

Descriptions

The second most overlooked section of posting a video on YouTube is the description field. When search engines index your video, the description field is a key element.

First and foremost, if you have a URL that you want visitors to visit, put that as the first item in your description. By default, only the first few lines of the description are displayed above the fold, so you want your URL to be right there at the top in the most obvious position so viewers click on it. Be sure to format the link correctly so it’s an active link using “html://www.mysite.com”.

The description field is also a great place to pack in your keywords and keyword phrases. Take care not to overdo it – strive for something that makes sense and gets the point across, but still incorporates the keywords where possible. An extra bonus is that YouTube cross-references related videos and people are more likely to find your video if you follow these general guidelines.

What’s you experience with optimizing YouTube videos? Any tricks you’ve learned?

How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy

Steinar — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:23:10 +0000

Funny to find this article from May 2007 … so many small businesses still fail to understand the very basic strategies of Internet Marketing. Not you of course – those other guys.

Some Web 2.0 content management systems, such as blogs and wikis, are primed and relatively optimal for search engine visibility straight out of the box. Google, in particular, seems to adore blogs. Blogs and wikis have essentially replaced outdated forums, third-party product reviews, comments in guest books, and user groups because specific elements inherent to blogs and wikis are naturally search engine optimized. They’re textually rich, extensively interlinked, frequently updated, and rooted in semantic markup.

via How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy – ClickZ

Posted via web from steinarknutsen’s posterous

What are the best resources for a beginner of SEO ?

Steinar — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:22:37 +0000

Q: What are the best resources for a beginner of SEO ?

via Discussion: Search Engine Land | LinkedIn

I recommend SEObook.com, SEOmoz.com and SearchEngineWatch.com. You can also take a professional course, such those offered at SempoInstitute.com.

If you really want hands-on training, identify a niche, conduct keyword research, and build a traffic generation strategy. Maybe set up a free WordPress or Blogger account to test various tactics you learn along the way.

At that point, you might need to consider leveraging communities or building your own and implementing a conversion strategy. Depends on your objectives – which you should clearly understand before launching an SEO campaign.

Learning the basics is pretty straightforward. The toughest part may be identifying the right long-tail keywords – if you don’t know how to do this you could potentially waste a ton of money and time with both SEO and SEM especially.

Becoming truly proficient at SEO takes time, so have some patience and learn one new tactic everyday.

Hope this helps,
Steinar

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