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Category Blog Promotion

Improve your PageRank and Get More Visitors

July 22, 2009

Short tip for today (Wednesday, July 22, 2009):

Most likely, you are interested in gaining more quality traffic and better blog ranking in search engines, as I am. There are multiple ways on the way to success, but one of the proven and widely recognized approaches to improve the position and attract more visitors is receiving quality backlinks. However, while task sounds simple and self-explanatory, the realization step is quite complicated. Comment Kahuna is one of the best free tools on the market, that will assist you in reaching your goal.

It is a simple, but efficient utility that helps you in searching blogs related to the niche of your website. Use it to offer informative comments on the blog posts. This will give your website quality backlinks that search engines looks for while evaluating your blog position. Many of these blogs get lots of visitors, so if your comment is interesting, relevant and informative, some will follow the link to your website.

Website: http://commentkahuna.com/

Happy socializing and moneymaking!

log, blogging, pr, pagerank, google, search, engines, seo, comments, dofollow, traffic, visitors, commentkahuna, free, software, freeware

17 comments | Email It | Add to Favorites | Category: Blog Promotion

How to Get Included in Google News

June 17, 2009

Google News can send tons of traffic and help you gather a lot of inbound links. Inclusion in Google News actually puts you far ahead of the general bloggers’ crowd and provides the worldwide exposure, validity, and media recognition. While it might be a challenging target, it is worth to strive and the results will be rewarding in terms of the blog visibility and eventually in related profits generation. For me, personally, it is probably a long way to go, since my some of the conditions, essential for consideration, are not in place. But, for you it might be just few steps ahead.

In this article by Ivan Strouchliak it is discussed the Google News editorial and technical requirements.

Editorial Guidelines

Content Requirements

Content must be 100% original. Google News does not support news scrapers. You can sign up for PR wires to track news updates from around the world (along with the clutter of press releases). Having buddies on the “inside” also goes a long way, since you can be the one to break hot stories (Search Engine Land, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Authors/Editors

Google requires more than one author for a website, so if you’re a one-man blog you won’t get into Google News. The number of authors/editors required is not specified, so all we can do is guess. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Round Table managed to get into Google News with five writers/editors and two featured writers, so you need at least several people.

Some forums state that the minimum required number of editors is three, but those are merely guesses.

Google News only includes sites that they perceive as operational organizations. This requires a clear editor/writer structure, author bios, company information, a physical address, phone numbers, etc. In short, it includes anything that shows you’re an operational publication that can produce consistent, high quality, fresh content.

Number of Articles Per Day (frequency)

There is no official statement on this from Google, but it’s obvious they want to see at least two to three quality articles per day.

Number of Articles on a Website

Just as with article frequency, there’s no word on this directly from Google. Common sense tells us, though, that you need a few hundred articles in the archive before they include you.

Content Format

Each article must have a clear title (more on titles in the technical section), author name and date of publication. It should also be a minimum of 200 to 300 words.

Ads

Google is 100 percent okay with ads on the site. In fact, it encourages all Google News publishers to use the AdSense Network. Advertisements also indicate that the site has visitors and a functional business model to support authors and continue publishing.

Multimedia

Google is okay with images within content, but does not allow content that consists of images only. The same goes for videos. You can include You Tube videos, but there must be words in an article to qualify it for Google News.

Overall, Google wants to see quality; this is probably the reason they have no clear qualifications. If a small publisher can contribute to the Google experience, Google editors will include that website, regardless of size.

Also keep in mind that once publisher is accepted in the index, everything else is handled by algorithms, without human input, so Google editors naturally want to make sure that the site will live up to the standards.

Article Titles

Titles should be news-like and clear. Browse CNN and the Wall Street Journal to get a feel for news headlines. They usually summarize content and include the names of the main players. Including names of companies will increase the likelihood of the article showing up for company specific searches (i.e. Google, Yahoo).

Title length should be between two and twenty-two words.

Date and time are prohibited in titles. If you’re using a content management system, you can disable that feature. Article titles should appear in both the <title> tag and somewhere on the page, for example <h1> of <h2> tags.

Google does not support the usage of the title as a link (the usual case on blogs), so you must disable this feature.

URLs

To be included in Google News, article URLs should follow Google News bot standards. URLs must be unique, and each unique URL must point to only one article. URLs must be permanent, without the use of session IDs. Google does not support dates in URLs, so set up your content management system to exclude dates.

Each URL must contain at least three digits. For example:

Bad:

www.site.com/news/article/54.html

Good:

www.site.com/news/article/547.html

www.site.com/news/article/4534343.html

Google cannot crawl articles that include a year in the URL.

URL Attributes that Prevent Crawling

Any of the URL attributes below will prevent the Google News bot from crawling your link:

/board/ or /boards/
/forum/ or /forums/
/messageboard
/showthread
?threadid= or &threaded
Anything that is similar in nature

Google does not support news posted in a forum format.

Template

Your website template should look like a news source. Milind Mody of eBrandz recommends staying away from a blog format.

JavaScript

Google News does not support JavaScript in any form, such as links, navigation or content hidden within a script.

Redirects

Google supports redirects, meaning you can plug content (like ads) in between Google News and your article. Guidelines include no session IDs (&ID=), use of 301s for permanent redirects and a minimal number of redirects to get from one page to another. Also set the redirect time period for a short amount of time and make sure that redirects don’t point to themselves.

Many companies show ads with delays before taking users to the actual article; this is why Google supports various redirects.

To find out how the crawler would see a redirect, disable cookie, JavaScript and CSS support in your browser. You will probably see plain and ugly pages.

Frames

Frames are evil; don’t use frames. Sites that use frames call upon the dark forces from the depths of hell to be punished by low rankings and crawler problems.

Language

Google News supports only one language per page. The best code is UTF-8. Keep only one language version of the article on one page to avoid problems. If you support more than one language, you can contact the Google Team to be featured in other countries.

No Support

Google News does not support PDF articles and non-permanent content (content which sits on a URL but changes from time to time).

Google's news crawler can spider dynamically generated content, such as .php, .asp and others, but it can run into problems which can prevent articles from appearing on Google News. It recommends that you use static URLs rather than dynamic URLs, or set your content management system to produce static looking links.

If you must use both dynamic and static URLs, block the Google bot from accessing dynamic ones to avoid duplicate content penalties. You can block the Google bot in robot.txt file.

Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links

Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Its automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.

Snippets of Content

Google shows content snippets in search results with keyword occurrences. It requires sites to have NO content, other than the article, in an area between the title and content.

Registration and Subscription Content

If you run on subscription revenues, Google can add more ROI to your bottom line. There are three ways to handle this, but first you must allow Google in. The G-crawler has to see content to classify it, and pay-walls prevent this. You can work around this issue by putting in an exception for the Google bot.

First, make sure the Google bot is allowed to crawl your pages (robot.txt).
Second, configure your servers to serve registration when Google bot comes from 66.249.64.0/20.

Once you let Google bot crawl your subscription pages, those pages will be featured on Google News. From that point on there are several options:

First click free. With this option visitors can reads full versions of your articles when and only when they come from Google News/Web Search. All other clicks on the site lead to the subscription page. Google claims they’ve increased subscription rates for some publishers with this method, and I believe it works best.
Once users read full articles, they have a clear idea of the quality of your articles, which is better than any marketing message. For example, from time to time I read tech-related Wall Street Journal articles and I am often amazed at their quality, depth and level of connections with stakeholders in the industry. After reading one of their articles I am more likely to subscribe then after reading only a small summary.
You can contact Google to arrange the first click free feature. Please note that only Google News/Google Search users will have access to the full article.
A subscription page. This one is plain and simple. When users click on the link they are directed to subscription page. This is not effective in getting more subscriptions.
Snippets of the page. You can also feature a partial snippet of the article with an offer to subscribe.

Feeds

Google does not require RSS feeds, but you can definitely benefit from having one. Feedburner offers free feeds, and all blog platforms produce RSS feeds by default.

blog, promotion, Google, News, popular, web, site, crawler, content, bot

17 comments | Email It | Add to Favorites | Category: Blog Promotion

Comments as source of a free traffic to your blog

March 17, 2008

In the course of investigation of the possible ways of bringing more traffic to the blog, leaving comments on other people blogs popped out as an acknowledged legitimate way of getting more exposure to your own blog ( http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/01/6-advices-on-blog-posting-techniques.html)

In this post, I want to review the commenting features and commenting techniques to increase the possible benefits in more details.

Leaving informative comments. Comments leaving technique brings the best outcomes when your comments are informative. Do not simply say “Good post” unless you have nothing else to say and yet you want to complement and encourage the author for the post. Avoid posting unrelated comments, targeting just your own exposure appearance, as it might give you more harm than profit. A thought provoking bloggers reaction or at least a meaningful quality comment only will get you good traffic. However, your controversial post should be justified and expressed politely, like in every intelligent interpersonal communication.
Leaving comments on the blogs with content that is related to your own blog topic of discussion. It is recommended to invest your time in the blog that are related to your own blogs in terms of the placement niche, topics of discussion, or somehow logically connected to your own posts. The reader, impressed be your post in the politics, might want to check your blog for more information about your views and bout yourselves as a person. He follows your link and gets to the blog, related to football. If the visitor is not a football fan, he will leave immediately, and will not be able to enjoy your thoughtful posts, just because he is not interested in football.
Your brand name and popularity. The blogging world is big, but there are popular blogs, popular names, you meet again and again in the blogosphere. Active participation brings your name higher on the reader’s perception lists, definitely, if you post quality, informative, and interesting comments. You get more popularity and your blogs get it too. Eventually, you build the constantly increasing group of followers that are waiting for your posts and when seeing your comment on their own or other blogs, they are drawing to read them just because they see your signature. Popularity does not come overnight, it is result of long, time-consuming, brand marketing strategy, so do not expect immediate returns, applying it.
Direct traffic to your blog. Blogging experts found a direct relationship between amounts of the valuable posts you make on other blogs with numbers of the received comments on your own blogs. So, the simple recommendation is - do invest your time in the commenting marketing technique and you will see immediate return on investment (ROI) through increased traffic you get.
Backlinks. Following straightforward backlinks targeting approach might be considered as artificial by some experts. But, it is fully legitimate and, as you following the appropriate, quality content submission guidelines, it will give you the guarantied automatic traffic. Look through the database of the blogs having the “no follow” link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link. Excellent D-list with more than 200 applicable blogs can be found through the link: http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/. If you prefer posting your comments strictly on high page rank pages from these blogs, go in Google and type there: site:URL of blog from the list and choose high page rank pages on which you can leave comments.
Virtual personal relationship. By commenting on the blogs, you can create informal virtual personal relationship with the author of the blog. Leaving your comments regularly in famous blogs, you can even form good relationship with the top bloggers. It is not easy to get accepted to the top bloggers circle, but who said that your posts are not worth to be on the top?

Blog Comments

Additional Reading:

http://www.bloggingtune.com/what-everybody-ought-to-know-about-blog-commenting/

http://www.bloggingtune.com/4-things-which-determine-the-traffic-you-will-get-from-comments/

http://roberteilers.com/2007/10/24/writing-blog-comments-equals-free-targeted-traffic/

http://www.earnexperience.com/archives/black-hat-blogging-techniques/

backlinks, blog, marketing, blog, promotion, Blogging, theory, comments,

1 comments | Email It | Add to Favorites | Category: Blog Promotion

Blog Carnival Announcement: Submit your Article

December 28, 2007

Sorry, but the blog post could not be located.

articles, submission, blog, carnival, blog, promotion, blog, writing, traffic, increase,

7 comments | Email It | Add to Favorites | Category: Blog Promotion

Closing Post to Blog Traffic Increase Overview

December 14, 2007

How to increase blog traffic without financial investments (part 11)

After extended exploration of the topic for 10 publications, I decided to close it. For me, if I feel tired from the task, I was enjoying before, it is time to make a short break. That is why; please accept this post as unofficial closing for the series of articles on the topic “How to increase blog traffic without financial investments”. It does not mean that I am going to get away from the topic for long, as it has the priority importance in the Blogging monetizing business. I have several ideas to implement soon enhancing the topic review.

Other Promotion Techniques – Brief Overview

I will just list several items that were not reviewed in the series for different reasons. But, since other authors mention them in their reviews, I might just overlook their marketing potential. Among them:

Posting on UseNet. Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. Dropping the seeds of the announcement for your Blog might give a boost to the site exposure.

Applying for Web Site Awards. Getting Best Blog Award in the featured category is a good way to show on the site, how good your Blog is, and also expose your site in the new niche. There are multiple online sites giving away the awards, you can easily find them through the search. I will mention just three of the top related sites:
1. Bloggers Choice Awards: http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/
2. The Weblog Awards: http://weblogawards.org/
3. Webbie Awards: http://www.webbyawards.com/

Submitting Blog to Design Galleries. The biggest list of the Design Galleries I could find online has been offered by Web Design Blog (99 sites in the body of the post, and more in the comments).

Link: http://webdesigngalleries.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/a-complete-list-of-web-design-galleries/

Interview Well-known Person. Arrange interview with someone well known in your industry, your marketing niche, or your local community. This interview will bring acknowledgement of your abilities to bring the newsworthy original material and will generate additional traffic to your Blog through the link from the interviewed person Blogs or Websites, since people tend to link back to their interviews.

Offer Contests. Organized contests will improve your reputation in the Bloggers community and will enhance your readers’ participation in your Blog activities. As you do that, utilize its marketing potential in full. For example, interview the contest winners and nominees, get their testimonials for your site, post related Press Releases, etc.

Participate in Meme Games. A meme is an idea transferred from person to person, from Blog to Blog like a virus. How does meme work? One Blogger is proposing idea like "Hey, let's post three facts about yourself that nobody knows yet!" He is forwarding it to his fellows Bloggers, tabbing them, and the game start its online brief, but bright, life with many people involved in the chain, until it dies down by itself or replaced by the new memes.

Additional Reading

As I promised in the first post, I am enclosing some of the Web Sites and Blogs, which were used for the publications, as references for additional reading:

http://www.motherreader.com/2007/10/kid-lit-blogging-session-ii-blog.html

http://www.blog-maniac.com/build-blog-traffic.htm

http://bloghit.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-to-explode-blog-traffic.html

http://www.rss-specifications.com/promote-your-blog.htm

http://blogpromotion.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggingplace.com/blog_promotion.htm

http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/blog/index.php/2006/12/14/blog-promotion-tips/

http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blog/blog-promotion/99-ways-to-promote-your-blog-for-free/

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html

http://www.v7n.com/forums/blog-promotion/49346-my-list-links-promote-blogs.html

http://impulseblogger.com/blog-promotion/

http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/blogs/13-blog-promotion-tips/

http://blog.sponsoredreviews.com/?p=47

http://topsecretblogger.com/bloggers-spykit-40-places-to-promote-your-blog-for-free/

http://www.successful-blog.com/1/20-blog-promotion-guides-to-inform-your-strategy/

http://www.blogsearchengine.com/2006/05/08/where-to-submit-your-rss/

http://www.thethinkingblog.com/2007/04/guide-to-blog-promotion.html

http://onlinepromotion.articlesarchive.net/10-ways-to-instantly-promote-your-blog-for-free.html

http://www.freeblogpromotion.com/articles/article-2.html

http://briansfreewebpromotion.blogspot.com/2007/09/promote-your-blog-free.html

http://youlkisblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/promotion-of-blogs-by-blogging-forums.html

http://www.canimakebigmoneyonline.com/index.php/20070517-101-free-ways-to-increase-your-blog-traffic/

http://synerjy.blogspot.com/2007/03/best-blog-promotion-techniques.html

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/blog_tips/

http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/blogs/index.html

I want to thank all the readers that provided their feedback to the publications. Good luck to everyone! Internet is huge. There is place for everybody to get her/his share of success and profits!