Author Archives: Michael Busch

How to get “Awesome Links”

Getting links is not easy and getting good links is even harder. So what about awesome links?
Rand Fishkin, CEO of SeoMOZ has a wonderful way of explaining, so have fun watching the video below:

How to choose keywords that will convert

I am often asked how to choose keywords. Mostly this relates to the Blogsearch for Blogs with no nofollow-Tag. For this matter choosing keywords is not so important – as it is only for finding blogs with a topic you are familiar with – in order to enable you to make quality comments.

But what about the keywords you build your site around and what about the keywords you use when commenting on a do-follow blog? Here it is extremely important to choose wisely. First of all, you will want to know wether there is a sufficient search volume for a given term. For that purpose tools like Keyword Elite are very helpful (And by the way Keyword Elite can help you with quite a few other keyword related tasks.

But this doesn’t help you in the decision wether a keyword is just very popular or wether a person searching for it actually intends to buy something. Now what if you were a search engine and could just look up your statistics … wouldn’t that be great?

Well, there is something near to it: The “Commercial Intention” checking tool over at Microsoft AdCenter Labs. You can find it here: Commercial Intention Tester

Give it a try and share your opinion, just leave a comment on this blog post!

Website traffic according Prof. Hans von Puppet

Website traffic can have it’s cons, too – at least if you rely on the information on website traffic that the well known internet scientiest Professor Hans von Puppet has about the topic. This one is not too serious but I thought that a little bit of fun in our world of bits and bytes and google ups and downs will not hurt 😉

What is more important? Relevance or page load speed?

Recently the signals from google that page load speeds plays a more and more important role as a ranking factor were quite clear.
This lead to quite a few people asking whether page speed might even be more important than relevance.
Well – page speed is one out of more than 200 factors important for ranking.
Listen to what Matt cutts can tell us about it:

Buy the dofollow blog list

I sometimes get asked whether I sell “The list of dofollow blogs” …
To make it short: No – because there is not really one “list”. The dofollow search here on seo-traffic-guide.de always returns a fresh set of URLs that gets checked for nofollow/dofollow status when the search is made (with a little buffer for same term searches in a short time).
If you enter the same search term a couple of months later the list will probably look completely different because new URL will be found for that term…
I see that compiling such a list might be useful for folks who work for several different client in different niches. I know that there are other sites selling lists like that and maybe I could make quite a bit of money with that, but right now I have not met a product yet that met my idea of a quality list.
Should I go through the hassle of building such a list? What are your ideas – please tell me in the comments!

What will change in 2011

Funnily Matt Cutts is answering his own question this time. He is explaining what the google webspam team is going to implement in 2011.
He calls it “back to basics” – but see for yourself:

Give a link and win a copy of “Click here to order” by Joel Comm

What is this about?
I want to support the mission circle Ayopaya (sorry there are only a few pages in english as it is a german organization) in its efforts to create a better life for people in Bolivia – the poorest country in South America.

How will this be achieved?
I want to get more backlinks for the mission circle’s donations page and hope tho encourage more people to give a donation however small it may be (believe me 2€ or 2 $ can make a difference!)

How can you help?
Put a link to one of the following pages on somewhere on your website:
http://www.ayopaya.de/kontakt/online-spenden/de/ (this one is preferred)
http://www.ayopaya.de or
http://www.ayopaya.de/2008/10/28/der-fortschritt-ist-eine-schnecke/de/ or
http://www.ayopaya.de/es/ or any other page on the website.
Be sure that your anchor text contains the words “Online spenden” or “Online Spende”. You are encouraged to vary the anchor text a little like “Online spenden for Bolivia” or something like that.

What is in for you?
Two things: First of all I will reward you with a backlink to your site from my website here (seo-traffic-guide.de) As your link points to ayopaya.de and my backlink comes from seo-traffic-guide.de this is Semi-3-way linking and will be seen as a one way link by google.
Second: On Epiphany I will check the referral statistics on the ayopaya webpage a will have alook who of the participants of my little help contest here will have sent the most traffic to the ayopaya page. The winner will receive a copy of Joel Comm’s latest book “Click here to order”

[Update: Time prolonged until Easter 2009]

So what do you have to do?
Set a link to the ayopaya.de page, use one of the mentioned anchor texts, write me an email or use the contact form to tell me where your link is located and what site you want your backlink pointing to (don’t forget to include a good anchor text for your backlink)! Encourage people to visit the ayopaya page via your link to increase your chances to win your copy of Joel Comm’s book.

And now go creating links…

Michael

Hidden content google+ vs Facebook

So you were reading my last post about revealing content only to people who like your page in facebook and were now wondering whether the same can be done in google+, too?

Well, of course there is a solution for exactly that, too:

It is called PlusLocker, and you can see it in action here:

Click here to get your copy:
==>PlusLocker WordPress plugin

Blog commenting and Akismet

I recently had a comment here on the blog from a reader who was concerned that commentig big style could bring you into trouble with Akismet (and other Anti-Spam plugins) The answer got a longer longer, so I decided to make it into a blog post.
Akismet and all the other Anti-Spam plugins are really a blessing for any webmaster who owns a blog with anything near decent traffic.
To be honest – I could not survive the spam flood if I did not have those myself. As I write this there are already more than 100 spam comments sitting in my spam folder. And I was not happy to find areally useful comment falsely being flagged as spam(In fact I was told that my donation form was not working). Conclusion: Akismet – this can really bring you into trouble if you are not catious when you comment.
There are people out there who flag every comment with a link or every comment from someone they don’t know as spam. Of course that is not the idea behind Akismet, but that is how some people use it 🙁
It is a wise idea to act with caution, have a look around the blogs you are planning to comment on. What is the quality of the other comment, what does the blog athor write about commenting – does he or she encourage commenting, etc. Then of course put some thought in your comments – the better your comment and the more related and valuable for the authors topic you comment is, the higher is the probability that it will go through and you won’t run into trouble.
But what if it already happened and how could you know you are in trouble? To know for sure you need a blog with akismet installed (you could get one at wordpress.com) and have to make a comment there. If your comment gets sorted into spam, you know you have been flagged.
How to lift the ban?
Difficult question – I have not run into that situation myself, but I recently had a good read about that. Head over to Barbara Ling and read what she did:
How to fix an Akismet Ban

Mike

Improve traffic you already have – analyze your Exit Traffic

The major goal of SEO ist getting more traffic to your website. But is getting more traffic all you need to be successful? Of course not! More often than not you will have a goal on your page, like you want your visitors to opt-in to your list, or download something or buy something from you. As you probably know this is called a conversion. It really is a good idea to track your conversions, as this will give you a lot of hints what to improve on your site.

In order to get more conversions on your website, you want your traffic to be relevant to the topic of the site. If you “buy visitors” from some obscure ebay merchant, you will perhaps get 100 000 visitors – but no conversions, as those “visitors” are not at all interested in your site.

If you get organic traffic from search engines, for example by optimizing for a keyword by using the nofollow blog search on seo-traffic-guide.de, the visitors to your site are already searching for what you have to offer – this leads to a much, much better conversion rate!

But there is one more thing you can do:

Even though your visitors came to your site because they were searching for something you have to offer, many of them will leave your site without giving you a conversion. This is quite normal, but you don’t have to put up with a high percentage of “no-conversion-visitors”.

Whatt if you could find out why they are leaving? Is there a good way to analyze your Exit Traffic? You can not find out for everyone but you can find out for quite a few by using the “Second Chance Profits” Scripts. They offer a easy to use way to survey your leaving visitors and thus find out where to improve to get better conversions. It doesn’t matter wether you sell something and can make an improved offer for someone before he or she leaves and doesn’t buy at all or if you just want to ask a few questions wht was wrong and why they leave. You can easily do that with Second Chance Profits.

Are you afraid that such a powerful piece of software will cost you big bucks? Well – that is the good news: “Second Chance Profits” comes for less than 10 dollars! It is only $9.97 so everyone can afford it and immediatly start having bettter results!

Check out “Second Chance Profits” and add another valuable building block to your online success!