I was brought on to ‘Another Harvest Moon’ in order to develop the website and build the social media component of the marketing campaign. This is an exciting opportunity for me to combine my interests in the film and web worlds. You can see the current website and trailer here: http://anotherharvestmoon.com/, although one of the first steps in the project is going to be a complete redesign of the site by Sauce Creative Group. Sauce will provide all the design elements and I will be programming the site using WordPress.

This is a small indie film with a very small promotional budget but we are trying to create as much buzz as possible in order to help them get distribution. So we were looking for help with organizing and implementing an ambitious social media strategy.

Please check out their sites:

Official Webite: http://anotherharvestmoon.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/harvestmoonfilm

Twitter: http://twitter.com/harvestmoonfilm

Youtube: http://youtube.com/harvestmoonfilm

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Film, how to, marketing, SEO, social media, WordPress

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After any WordPress installation, there is a series of steps that I take in order to optimize the site, before I even think about what it will look like.

Remove or edit the Placeholder Content

There is a placeholder post titled ‘Hello World’. DELETE that, or edit it to be your actual first post.

There is a placeholder page called ‘About’. DELETE it or edit it to say what you want it to say.

Delete the user ‘admin’

If you used a one-click installation or had someone do it for you, you might have been given the default user name of ‘admin’. The problem is that hackers know that WordPress sites tend to have a user named ‘admin’ and even worse, the password is sometimes ‘admin’.

This is a huge security risk. You can not actually edit a username, so the solution is to create a new unique username and a more secure password, then DELETE the admin user.

Check your admin Email

Navigate to settings>general. Check the email address there and make sure you enter an email address you will actually check. This is the email used to notify you of comments, problems, etc.

Install and Configure Plugins

WordPress comes with two plugins already included. One should be activated and set-up and the other is a waste of time and should be deleted.

• Askimet – This is the WordPress spam protection. Activate this immediately. Once you do, you will be asked for a WordPress ‘API KEY’. You will need to go to WordPress.com to set-up an account there. Once you do, you will be able to find the ‘API KEY’ on your profile page. Copy it, return to your new site, and paste the ‘API KEY’ into the Askimet settings. You can find the Askimet settings in the admin menu under ‘Plugins>Askimet Configuration’.
• ‘Hello Dolly’ – This is a useless waste of space. Delete it. To say anything more would waste even more space.

When it comes to finding and adding more plugins, there are countless plugins available that can add a lot of capability to your site. Some are just for fun and completely optional, but others are highly recommended for any site and there is a list of plugins that I install on almost every site.

You can see my post about plugins here.

But here are two that shouldn’t be missed:

• All in one SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps

Navigate to the plugins page in the admin section. At the bottom, you will see the ‘Plugin Browser/Installer’. Click on that and you can search for plugins by type or by name. You can then install them with one click right from there.

Fix Permalinks

Each post and page that you create in WordPress has a permanent home called a ‘permalink’. This is simply a permanent (sort-of) URL that you can use to link directly to that post. When you first install and set-up WordPress, it creates URLs based on the ID number that it uses in the databse to keep track of everything. If you look at the URL, it will look something like this: ‘http://mysite.com/?p=1′.

The problem (besides being ugly – hence the name ‘ugly URL’ or ‘ugly permalink’) is that search engines use the URL as one of the most important factors for deciding what a page is about. Wouldn’t it be much better if you wrote a post about an event you just photographed and the URL could be something like ‘http://mysite.com/beverly-hills-wedding/’ instead of ‘http://mysite.com/?p=1′?

This is an easy fix in WordPress.

• In the admin area, navigate to settings>permalinks.
• Under ‘Common Settings’ you will probably see that ‘default’ is checked off.
• Under that is a series of options for more SEO friendly (and reader friendly) URLS.
• ‘Month and Name’ is best for sites with one author.
• ‘Day and Name’ would be better for a multi author site where you might expect tbe publishing a large amount of content.

The difference between ‘Day and Name’ and ‘Month and Name’ is simply that you can’t have duplicate URLS, so if you want a little  more room to allow for potential duplicate titles, use ‘Day and Name’. This would make everyday start fresh, because you are using the day, month and year as part of the URL. The odds of even a big site creating duplicate titles in one day are pretty slim.

What happen if you do create duplicate post titles? WordPress simple puts a ‘-2′, then’-3′ after the title. Nothing breaks. It’s not terrible.But we went through all of this for prettypermalinks that actually mean something and don’t have meaningless numbers. Might as well try to keep it that way.

Add Ping Services

Ping services allow different blog and RSS listing services to be notified when you post new content to your site. The idea is to help get the word out and hopefully drive some traffic to your site. By default, WordPress only lists one ping service – pingomatic. You can find this by navigating to settings>writing. Towards the bottom, you will see a textarea where you can enter ping services and only one is listed – http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. But there are many more ping services out there.

There are two lines of thought:

1. Use a small list of services that in turn ping several more.
2. Directly use the list of all services so that you are not relying on a message to be passed on.

To use a small list of services that will notify others, copy this list and paste it into the ping services area under settings>writing:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

To use a longer list of services to notify directly, copy this list and paste it into the ping services area under settings>writing:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

FURTHER READING:

• How ping services work – WordPress Ping Services. They also link to this detailed explanation of the two Ping lists.
• My post about plugins.

RECOMMENDATIONS?

I have tried to include all of the suggested steps that I have found over time. If there are any that I missed that could be added to help this be a more complete list, please leave a comment and let me know. I will try to add anything that improves the process.

This Article was written as part of the WpJumpStart System

Find Out More

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: SEO, web design resources, website starters, WordPress, WPJumpStart

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The problem is that when your site is visited from a link on the Digg site, it is now hidden within this bar as if the visitor is on Digg. There is no record of the visit to your site, because it was actually a visit to Digg. They simply display your site within theirs.

My question is is this: Is this a bad enough effect to justify blocking the DiggBar (or any frame that wants to hide your site)?

The DiggBar does make it easier for your content to be shared and ‘Dugg’. In the end, getting an article to be extremely popular on Digg, could still generate some buzz and awareness of your site. But is a burst in traffic worth it if the all the search engines are seeing is that the Digg url got all that traffic?

A Look at What Happens

Here is a look at what my recent article ‘An Introduction to SEO‘ looks like when visited from Digg (click to view full size):

As you can see, there are buttons to easily share your content through facebook and Twitter or digg the article yourself and add comments back to Digg.

That all sounds good, right

But you will also notice that the URL is a Digg URL and that is what you are sharing, not your own site. That part sounds really bad and it doesn’t actually look great to have a bar sitting on top of the design you worked so hard on (or paid someone a lot of money to work so hard on). It reminds me of the cheap old hosting services that gave you hosting in return for ads that ran on top of your page.

Plenty of people are blasting the DiggBar for using this method of serving sites within a frame, a technique that has been taboo and looked down upon for years.

Articles about the negative side:

• Webmonkey says the DiggBar is Evil
• DiggBar is Bad for SEO
• Yet another reason why DiggBar is Bad for SEO.

To make it all simple, Digg hides your site from search engines, meaning that all that traffic that might result from the Digg Effect will now go to Digg and not to your site.

Articles from Digg’s Side:

• Interview with Digg Co-Founder Kevin Rose
• Digg claims their DiggBar is NOT Evil

Ways Around the DiggBar

I found a couple solutions to this. One was to display a quick message to any Digg visitors asking them to please click over to the site. But people are lazy and this is an awkward method at best.

The second solution I found was a quick bit of javascript that redirects the traffic to your actual site. This javascript redirect will allow the site to be automatically redirected to your original URL, making sure the visitors from Digg get to your site.

To use this method all you have to do is find the ‘head’ tag in your code. It will look like this “</head>”:

In WordPress, you should find it in your theme’s ‘header.php’ file.

Then paste this code just before the “</head>”:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

My Conclusion (for now)

I like the javascript approach and have added it to my site. I think that if someone is visiting my site from Digg, they know how to use Digg, they know to look for that ‘Digg This’ link. So I don’t feel like the easy access to all that sharing in the DiggBar is such a huge benefit to be worth losing all that traffic. Plus, I have the ‘Share This’ buttons that allow anyone who likes my articles to add it Digg it,  Share it, Twitter it, Facebook it, Email it, or do anything else they want with it.

What do you think? DiggBar good or Evil? Or maybe a little of both?

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: diggbar, programming, SEO

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I started to write back, but in doing a couple quick searches in the name of research, I found enough interesting information that I decided to write a post explaining it all.

Subdomains vs Subdirectories

photo credit: Tim Dorr

First, let’s define what we are talking about: “blog.domain.com” is a subdomain while “domain.com/blog” is a subdirectory or a folder within a domain.

A subdirectory is used as a folder within one domain to organize smaller pieces of content, like a category of several pages. For most people they will only ever need subdirectories.

A subdomain creates more separation than just a folder, basically creating a stand alone site that could easily be it’s own domain. However, you may want to piggyback on the main domain name. For example, google.com is the main site. Gmail actually lives at mail.google.com. Google Maps lives at maps.google.com, and Google Documents at docs.google.com. These are each stand alone sites and could be their own domains but they make more sense under the google umbrella.

On my own domain, I setup several subdomains to handle different aspects of my business. One contains all the temporary websites while I build them, including several installatons of wordpress and a few standard html sites that I use to test things on. This allows me to work on projects without making the under construction site visble on the client’s domain. Another subdomain was specifically setup to handle my project management. I use a system called ProjectPier, an open source project management app that allows me to share and store files, messages and task lists with an entire team and with the client. Each one of these subdomains is basically a site in and of itself. I want to keep everything within those subdomains separate from my main site.

So there are some different reasons at the hosing/server level for keeping your site organized. But as far as the url, it doesn’t make too much difference to me whether something like a blog lives at blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog.

How do subdomains effect SEO?

According to this article, subdomains used to help with SEO because there was a chance domain.com AND blog.domain.com would show up in results while there was (and is) a limit on two pages per domain in a search engine results page (SERP). You might see two pages from one site rank really high for books, but amazon is not going to take up the whole front page. However, setting up subdomains apparently used to trick the search into thinking it was looking at a new site so technically several subdomains could all end up on the front page, which would look really good. Of course, google is all about trying to provide relevant results, so a page of subdomains should no longer happen. For example if you are a national construction company that wants to get listed for each city, you might setup subdomains like losangeles.mycompany.com and boston.mycompany.com, then just copy your site over and over, swapping out the keywords and every mention of the city to match the the site. The problem is that there is no real interesting or different content on all these sites and in fact it is very obviousy duplicate content so the SEO effect is actually negative. Or you might try cellphones.myphonestore.com, mobilephones.myphonestore.com, and on and on hoping that all of these ‘sites’ might rank high, but the best result anywhere within “myphonestore.com” is all that would show up.

One strategy that could make sense would be to create a subdomain for a section of your business or site that could really be a standalone site. If you are a department store, you may have “mystore.com” and use “electronics.mystore.com” to create a site with great SEO specific to electronics, since the searches will see it essentially a stand alone site about electronics. Then use “food.mystore.com” to target searches specific to food. If you had those things combined (along with ten others – shoes, jewelry, etc. ) the content is not as specific and may be confusing as to what the site is about. Meanwhile, they all still help pump up the image of the main domain “mysite.com”. You have created several specific relevant sites all benefitting from the main brand of “mystore.com”.

Which one should I use?

For most situations and for the average website, the easiest solution is a new subdirectory. If you are setting up a new blog, you can create a folder called “blog” install wordpress and you have your blog at “mydomain.com/blog”. There is no reason to use a whole subdomain for that. I like the simple idea that if you could almost justify starting an entirely new (but related) site, then use a subdomain. If you are simply adding a new category of pages with similar content, then just use a subdirectory. Save the subdomain for something that is big enough and clearly separate enough that it needs to be its own site.

What is your experience with subdomains?

If anyone has a set-up using subdomains, why did you go that route? Do you see any benefit or negative effects of setting it up that way?

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | 20 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hosting, Resources, SEO, tips

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photo credit: Robbie-73

Danny Brown has been a recent find of mine in the social media and PR world and a great addition to my reading. He is a PR consultant who writes some great articles with a very personal approach.

Continuum or Spectrum?

He recently had an interview with Tom Cunniff. The idea was The Continuum of Social Media. Being a physics geek, I had to check out anything with the word Continuum. The basic idea was that there is relationship between the size of the company (and the size of that company’s needed audience) to the percentage of their media being social media vs. traditional paid advertising. Small companies or individuals could benefit from 99% social media and 1% (in some cases, like mine, 0%) paid media. Meanwhile large corporations selling to huge markets would be more like 99% paid advertising to 1% social media. In between there is a whole continuous range of needs and uses of media. Continuum works but I keep coming back to the word spectrum as better representation of something that ranges from one end to the other. A continuum to me would suggest something wraps around on itself with no clear beginning or end.

In one of the responses to his own article, Danny left a comment mentioning the potential for bad word of mouth to spread very quickly. While the article was interesting in and of itself, this comment is what got me to thinking, and to respond with a comment of my own. Briefly, I pointed out that small companies can make use of social media to broadcast and advertise essentially for free like never before. The largest of companies would not benefit from the advertising they get from a few thousand followers on Twitter, since they need an audience of millions. What they do get however, is a chance to respond to the bad word of mouth on a personal basis that they have never had access to and potentially turn around some of that bad word of mouth.

Some New Ideas

After leaving the site, I kept thinking about this because it is the other side of exactly what the original article was talking about. Going back to my math roots, I realized this creates a great inverse relationship between a few things. To make it simpler, let me list the basic concepts:

• The smallest of companies (or individuals) can use social media to broadcast and start conversations that greatly help them.
• The largest of companies need a mass audience and will not benefit as much, needing to advertise on some level.
• The largest of companies will still be at risk of bad word of mouth, which can spread like wild fire now. On the other hand they can make use of social media to engage the consumer on a very personal level and possibly turn that around.
• The smallest of companies (or individuals) will still be at risk of bad word of mouth but their reach and their audience is limited. At first I thought this meant the damage would be limited. But now I have reversed that and think the damage could actually be GREATER because their ability to respond is limited.

This last point is the one that struck me. A good comparison would be a contractor who rips someone off. The word of mouth will spread around that customer’s group of friends and relatives, maybe that neighborhood (let’s use the word community), but the reach is limited. The contractor can go to the next community and do the same thing. Of course this kind of behavior will catch up with the contractor eventually but the idea is that they could keep hopping from community to community for a while. Compare that to a large international corporation whose brand could be tarnished forever because their scope is global. They have no next community to go to.

The Spiral

On the other hand, let’s take this into social media and see how things change. A small time individual (maybe a freelance web designer, like me?) could face a serious problem if bad word of mouth spreads. If some type of rumor, bad client experience, or anything negative were to somehow spread, it could very quickly grow beyond the reach of their small social circle. Now when that contractor goes to the next community there is a much better chance that the word has gotten out. Someone’s reputation and branding could be tarnished before they even have one. In addition to all this, they have no ability to take out a full page ad or 30 second TV spot to make sure their side is heard.

Final Thoughts

So we have something like this:

• Small companies benefit from Social Media with a better ability to market themselves and start conversations but could risk a limited ability to respond to and change or stop conversations.
• Larger companies might not need or even care about the small impact of Social Media on their initial marketing but could find a great way to connect directly to the conversations that are started about them.

Both of these are taking things to the extreme ends of the spectrum and there is a whole range of possibilities in between.

Can anyone add to this or relate some real world examples?

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marketing, Resources, SEO, social media, tips

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There are three sections to the site: the ‘Website Grader’, the ‘Twitter Grader’ and the ‘Press-Release Grader’. I have only used the website and Twitter sections, but would like to focus on how to use the Website Grader and walk you through the results for my site.

First thing is to go to the site: website.grader.com

Once you are there, you will see a form to input your site.

Make sure to uncheck the email box before submitting unless you want to end up on their mailing list. They actually offer a lot of great info, so it might be a good idea. I subscribe to their newsletter and RSS feed myself.

By the way, you will notice that you can tyoe in any site so type in mine if you want to see my whole printout. OR – and this is where the site gets really powerful, it allows you type in competitors’ sites and see how you differ. Give it a shot!

Next, we wait while their fancy animation tells us that our site is being analyzed. It might take a few minutes, so you can go answer an email or grab a fresh cup of coffee and come back.

When it is done you will find a whole page of information that rips apart every aspect of your site and grades it. It starts with the overall grade:

Below that, there is a lot of stuff. I just want to point out a few key areas of interest.

The first section is called the ON PAGE SEO and includes info about the metadata, number of images, number of headings and the structure of the site. It will spell out what is good and bad about each area of interest. For example, it has the following to say about my keywords:

As you can see, it is warning me that I have one too many keywords. I guess I will have to choose one or two to take out.

One element that I never thought of is the age of the domain and the amount of time until it expires. The grader was able to find that my domain expires in less than a year. The search engines actually factor this in when they rank the relevance of a site, assuming that a new site that will expire soon is not serious, whereas a site that has been around and WILL be around is more important. So, if you can buy up that domain name for a number of years at once.

It is telling me that my Google Page Rank is Zero, which is not surprising since this is my newly lauched personal site to showcase my web design and video work, which I get mainly by word of mouth. Google Page Ranks go from 0-10 and you can find out more about how that works here.

The printout goes on to detail whether or not your site is listed in four major search and listing sites: DMOZ Directory, ZoomInfo, DIGG, Del.icio.us. If you haven’t already, go make sure your site has been submitted. You may need to sign up for an account, but most will let you submit a URL. They also mention Yahoo Directory, but I left it out since that costs $299 to submit to. Not worth it for me.

Overall, I think grader.com offers one of the best starting points for improving the visibility of your sites. But strictly trying to enhance your SEO is not really enough anymore. Even this site points out blog listing sites and bookmarking sites, which are sometimes more important, depending on your site.

There are also an increasing number of ways to use social media and word of mouth to get people to your site. For an example of one of the best methods out there right now, I only have to point to this very post. I came across an interesting post on PIF. I commented. I recieved an email asking me to write a guest blog post. Now I have the chance to link back to my site and say, ‘For more information you can check out my post on Why SEO is Not Enough.’

Hopefully this post pointed out a new resource that will help you improve your site and your knowledge about SEO and web traffic. Please explore the grader.com site, they have lots of free articles and downloads (and of course paid services) that will help you along the way to improving the visiblity of your site.

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: products I endorse, Resources, SEO, tips, web apps

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You can read my post at PIF.

I also wrote a couple follow up ideas, just to get out some of my other thoughts on SEO – An Introduction to SEO & Why SEO is not Enough.

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: guest blog posts, SEO, writing

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Rather than get into the scam aspects here, I will just point out this article on ‘Black Hat’ vs ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques. Let’s just say that buying your way to the top through illegitimate means can get you BANNED from Google – the exact opposite of what you were trying to achieve.

Brief History of SEO and Keywords

I am going to greatly simplify here for the sake of keeping things short. If you think back to the early days of the Internet, so much was different. Sites were static and simple. Google was just starting to crawl the web. In these early days, it was fairly easy to add a few keywords to the site’s code and jump up in the search rankings.

The problem now is that the Internet has grown. There are millions of sites and those sites are much more complex and dynamic, constantly changing and pumping new content into the search engines. Google has grown to the top search engine (by far) in large part do to the programming it uses to dissect and rank sites. This search algorithm is extremely intelligent and uses a number of factors in determining how your page ranks in searches.

But to keep it simple, you need to do two things:

• 1) Make your site RELEVANT.
• 2) Make your site VISIBLE.

Basic SEO Practices

This article does a great job of outlining some of the major factors in optimizing your site for search engines. Most of it involves working with the HTML and other coding languages involved, so it gets a little tech heavy. But if you work with a web designer, they should be aware of this stuff. The main point is that a search engine reads your site. Not the way we see it, but through the code, looking specifically for a few things: the content, the metadata (fancy word for the keywords), how the site is linked to itself (internal links) and how it is linked to from other sites (external links).

Making Your Site Relevant

To be relevant, the site needs optimized content. This means information that readers will find useful and/or interesting. It means up to date and recently posted content.

But to the search engines, it needs a few more things that are a little more complex. Search engines want Headings that use important keywords and links that refer to other sections of the site. It also means that lots of other ‘relevant’ sites have linked to you and that when they link to you, the use important ‘anchor text’ for the links. For example, if Joe from down the street (who has no visitors) links to me with the words ‘CLICK HERE’, it means next to nothing. If the biggest web design site on the Internet links to me with the words ‘GREAT WEB DESIGNER’ that means a lot and the relevance of my site just went up.

The actual content of your site, though is purely up to you. Add as much fresh and relevant content as you can, as often as you can. There are countless ways to improve your writing and that is too broad of a topic to get into here, but the key is to be relevant and recent.

Making Your Site Visible

SEO is actually just the beginning of the process in making your site visible. I have outlined a few examples of other ways to drive traffic to your site in my article ‘Why SEO is Not Enough‘ , so I won’t repeat it here. With the expansion of social networking there are plenty of ways to get the word of mouth machine moving without ever showing up in the searches. Try this post from webdevlounge.com about using social media to market your blog or this one from Duct Tape Marketing for a more detailed explanation of ways to use all the social media options in concert with each other.

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: how to, marketing, SEO

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The Real Goal

Let’s start with our actual goal, which is not to rank #1 on Google, but to get more meaningful traffic to our site. Using SEO to rank higher in searches is merely one way of doing that. There are countless others. For example when I go to Geico.com, it is because I saw a TV commerical with a talking lizard, not because I searched for insurance in a search engine. When I first heard of GoDaddy.com it was because they had a memorable Super Bowl commercial with a hot spokeswoman, not because I found them online. I am not suggesting spending millions on a TV campaign, simply pointing out that there are other ways.

Before I get into solutions, let me relate an experience that will point out one of the major problems with basic SEO.

Ranking High with The Wrong Keywords Is Meaningless

I was once contacted by a potential client who wanted me to give a quote on SEO for his site. I looked over his site, put together a little proposal on a number of things I might be able to do and I also explained that SEO is actually a very complex and ongoing process. The problem is that this client was being told by someone else that adding some keywords would cost $250 per site and would guarantee #1 ranking on Google. Even after I explained that his site already HAD keywords, that it would take me all of 30 seconds to change or update those keywords and that anyone promising a #1 ranking on Google (for $250, no less!) is a scam, he decided the promise of a #1 ranking was too enticing.

Let’s look at this #1 ranking promise. There are several ways in which this little scam works. One is fairly harmless and you lose whatever money you paid. The other can actually be very harmful to the point of being BANNED from Google and you lose your money. Going by some of the estimates I have heard that go along with #1 promises, it could be a lot of money, too.

The harmful way involves illegal or at least dishonest, cloaked methods of basically spamming the search engines to think that your site is extremely popular and relevant. There is only one problem. Your site is not popular OR relevant and Google is extremely smart about this kind of thing. Once they discover it, your site is done and won’t show up in the searches at all. Let’s hope you haven’t gone that route.

The less harmful way is still a waste of time. Let’s say you get promised a #1 ranking but they fail to mention which keywords you will be ranked for. If your name is John Smith and you are a carpenter from Los Angeles, it would be ideal if you listed well when someone searches for ‘Los Angeles carpenter’ or maybe ‘Los Angeles contractor’. What if you rank #1 for ‘Los Angeles John Smith’? No one is searchng for that when they need a capenter. What is you rank #1 for ‘Las Vegas carpenter’? That is also meaningless, since you don’t live in Las Vegas. While this is not harmful to your site, it also not very helpful.

So let’s move onto solutions…

I am going to to outline a few quick examples of quick, easy ways to get some word-of-mouth flowing about your site and use some real-world examples of how they have worked or me.

COMMENTING ON BLOGS

There are many great reasons to comment on blogs.

Last week, I found an interesting article and commented on it. A while later, I was asked to write a guest blog post for the site, which will allow me to post back to my own site, sending people back to whatever page I send them to in the link. It took me all of two or three minutes to read that article and write a quick comment. I have yet to see the real results of this venture (since the guest post is not up yet) but I would like to pass along a similar experience from HowtoMakeMyBlog.com .He does a great job of spelling out how and why traffic was driven to his blog when he did a guest post.

If you spend time reading blogs (and since you’re here, I’m guessing you do), take the time to leave a comment when you find something helpful and expecially when it is a site that is relevant to what you do. If you remember from my post on SEO Basics, I mentioned the importance of having sites link back to you. Well, adding a comment is also leaving a link back to your site. While not every site allows search engines to follow the links in comments, many do. Even if the search engines don’t find you, all the people who read that post have the chance of following to your site. Just make sure you leave an added useful comment.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

A great starting point is this post from webdevlounge.com about using social media to market your blog. But there are countless social networking sites now, all of which can kick start a conversation about you and your site. The biggest right now by far are Twitter and Facebook, which can also be linked so that your Tweets show up in Facebook but those are just the beginning. One of the best posts I have seen on how to harness all of the social service together was from Duct Tape Marketing.

Alternative Search/Listing Services

A great resource for those with services that cater to local clients, webdesignfromscratch.com has put together a great list of places to list your site, all of which focus on local listings:

• People’s Guide
• Google Local
• HotFrog
• Windows Live
• Yahoo Local
• YellowPages.com
• BOTW.org
• Free Classified Advertising And Promotion
• Squidoo
• eBay

Read the full article here: 10 Ways to Promote a Business.   I would also add Yelp to this list. Check out Yelp and if no one has listed your business yet, list yourself and get some friends (or even better – clients) to give you reviews just to get the ball rolling.

This is not even close to an exhaustive resource for marketing resources online, but it is a start. Any other suggestions or sites that I missed?

© marty for Marty Thornley, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: how to, marketing, SEO

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