SeaWaves Blog

This article is an entry to the Geeks Are Sexy ultimate “How To” contest. Geeks Are Sexy Technology News is about to have its two-year birthday, so they are running a contest to celebrate the occasion. If you’re a geek or want to be one, check out their site. It’s a great read.

With the recent PageRank (PR) update, I thought it would be a good idea to write about getting more Google traffic to your blog. First of all, don’t worry about PR, it’s a small part of Google’s algorithm. I write for a PR3 blog and it gets much more traffic than a PR7 site I know of.

Now that we got that out of the way, here are some practical tips for increasing your Google traffic.

My first principle is that getting a ton of Google traffic takes time. If you have a new site, be prepared to wait at least a couple months before you get a lot of Google traffic. If you’re in a competitive niche, it will take longer. Sure, Google will send you traffic in the meantime but the traffic for new sites will be much lower than older sites.

Search geeks like to use the term domain trust. This means Google takes its time evaluating new sites to see if they can trust them especially for competitive, high value keywords. If a new site can get enough quality links during that period and if it passes Google’s numerous spam filters, Google will increase that site’s domain trust and it will rank for a lot more keywords. Of course, this leads to higher Google traffic. This is why it’s a great idea to buy an older, trusted site.

How can you increase your domain trust more quickly? Here’s the number one rule: Get content-based links from quality sites. Content-based means in the body of the article, not the sidebar or the footer. And quality sites, well, these are the sites that are doing well on Google.

Here’s a tool that can help you figure out how much Google likes a site: SEO Digger. This tool tells you how many popular keywords a certain site ranks for in the top 20 of Google. The more keywords, the more Google likes the site. I like using this tool to compare the keyword counts of the sites in my niche.

A simpler method is just checking Alexa and Technorati rankings. Get links from the sites with higher rankings. Also, use Google search with the keywords you think your niche audience might use to find your site. Get links from the top 20 sites of those searches.

There are couple things you can do to get quality links. Here are some of my favorites ways:

• Write a great article (or get someone else to do it) and promote it to bloggers.
• Interview popular webmasters in your niche. You’ll often get a link back.
• Guest post.
• Leverage social media especially Digg. Create content that fits both Digg and your site and then get your friends to vote it up. If you hit the front page, you’ll oftentimes get a lot of quality links because of the massive exposure and traffic Digg sends.
• Build friendships with webmasters that have quality sites. Then, send them your best content without spamming. Also, make sure to link to them too. Networking is a two way street.

Notice I didn’t talk about keywords. Keywords are important. But if you know your niche well, you’ll be writing with relevant keywords.

So, don’t worry about keywords. Research your niche well. Know your audience well. And just write content that they would enjoy reading. Also, the bulk of the Google traffic you will receive will come from numerous long tail keywords, or keyword phrases that aren’t searched very often.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned. Be patient (or buy an older, trusted site), get a lot of content-based links from quality sites, and know your niche well. Good luck!

Maki has an excellent post about the difference between niches that deal with information and entertainment niches. When people think of blogging, many of them think blogging is passing on information that people can use in their lives. For example, a weight loss blog gives dieting tips and a business blog teaches you how to increase profits.

But don’t forget about the entertainment niche. Some of the highest trafficked sites have to do with entertainment. For example, celeb blogs get a ton of traffic because celebrity keywords have very high search volumes. And Maki says that entertainment has an advantage over information niches because entertainment taps into the emotion while information works primarily on the mind.

Because of this emotional pull, he writes:

Entertainment sites are inherently easier to monetize and are excellent ways of earning some extra cash.

Then he gives four reasons why the entertainment niche is a very profitable industry. Also, these reasons highlight more differences between the entertainment niche and the information niche. Maki’s four reasons are in bold and the comments after the reasons are mine.

1. Unilateral Content Structure and One-Way Dialog

Probloggers will tell you that engaging your readership is important for building your blog. However, that rule doesn’t apply to entertainment blogs. Visitors of entertainment blogs are looking for the latest news about TV shows, movies, or celebrities. They’re not looking to engage the entertainment blogger. And even though they leave comments, they don’t expect the blogger to respond. In information niches, the readership is much more likely to engage the blogger and except him to respond to their comments.

So, in the entertainment niche, you can basically just report the news and get a lot of traffic. Of course, adding your opinion will build the brand of your blog but it isn’t as important as in the information niche.

Since you don’t have to interact with entertainment visitors, entertainment sites are low maintenance. This will save you a lot of time and you can use that time to earn more money.

2. No Need to Solve Problems, No Need to Provide Specialized Knowledge

Good marketing is based on figuring out your audience’s problems and then providing a solution. But with an entertainment site, you don’t have any problems to solve. Your audience won’t be visiting your site to get solutions to a problem. They’re there to be entertained. So again, you save time in the entertainment niche because you won’t have to do the in-depth market research that’s required to be successful in information niches.

Also, Maki makes a great point about the wide appeal of entertainment sites. He writes:

Entertainment is a flat, one-dimensional niche that only requires you to consistently offer zero-barrier information based on popular and widely established concepts (celebrity brand names etc.). Anyone can enjoy pictures of Christian Bale or Jessica Alba but not everyone is fascinated by a blog about Wordpress.

3. Non-Savvy Audiences Are Great for Conversions

I’m not sure if I fully agree with Maki on this one. Yes, entertainment audiences are more likely to click on an ad because they are less tech savvy and less ad blind than information audiences. However, when it comes to affiliate links, I think entertainment audiences are less likely to convert because they’re not looking to buy. I think information audiences are more in the buying mode.

4. Exceptional Traffic Potential + Ease of Monetization

Like I said before, the potential traffic for entertainment sites is huge. Think about it. More people will search for Britney Spears than social media marketing. More people will search for the latest movie blockbuster than the latest internet marketing product. The entertainment audience is much bigger than niche markets.

Also, monetizing an entertainment site is easy. Maki says that the entertainment visitors don’t mind if the entertainment sites are too commercial and filled with a lot of ads.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to start a site or buy a site, you may want to jump into the entertainment niche. Here are Sea Waves, we have a couple entertainment blogs. These blogs are doing pretty well for us. Feel free to check them out for inspiration in starting your own entertainment site network.

http://popcrunch.com/
http://hiphop.popcrunch.com/
http://style.popcrunch.com/
http://tv.popcrunch.com/
http://celebritycowboy.com/
http://style.celebritycowboy.com/

Read Maki’s whole blog post: Four Reasons Why the Entertainment Niche is Great for Making Money

A couple days ago, I wrote about long-term link building. I said the best links to get in the long-term were the ones that were naturally given.

However, oftentimes it’s hard to get natural links. As webmasters learned about PageRank, many of them became stingy with their links. Even bloggers don’t link out like they used to.

If you can’t get naturally given links, you can still get links that look natural. Here are some principles to consider.

A good way to understand natural linking is to look at the opposite. What links don’t look natural to Google? The big G definitely hates the three P’s: poker, porn, pills. Don’t get links from sites that link out to these niches. Use this bad neighborhood tool to help you evaluate sites.

Relevancy is key. Try to get most of your links from sites in the same niche. It doesn’t look natural if most of your links come from off-topic sites.

Don’t get too many links from sites that are blatantly selling links. For example, try to stay away from Pay Per Post or Review Me blogs. If you do get links from them, make sure the blogs don’t have the Pay Per Post or Review Me badges in a prominent position on their layout.

Get links from sites doing well in Google. I like to use the SEO Digger tool to determine if a Google likes a certain site. This tool estimates how many popular keywords a site is ranking for in the top 20 of the SERPs.

General sites with many different topics sometimes pass link juice. However, these sites are risky. If a Google spambuster were to look at them, the links may be discounted. Before getting a link from a general site, look at the its content. Can you see many obvious paid links? Are most of the anchor text optimized with keywords? Are most of the articles unrelated to each other? If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, you should stay away from these sites.

Vary your anchor text. John Scott says if you buy links you should never use the same anchor text twice. Also, throw in a couple non-keyword anchor text like “click here”, “great article”, and even image links.

Get contextual links. Content-based links look the most natural. And there is evidence that Google gives the most weight to these types of links.

Reciprocal sitewide links are great if they are from relevant sites. But don’t overdo it. A sidebar with over 50 sites looks spammy and unnatural.

Finally, the best way is build natural looking links to actually get natural links. Those look the most natural Practically, this means a couple things.

Write quality content that attracts links naturally. For example, find out what people are linking out to and try to write similar material while having a unique viewpoint. Also, look for gaps in your niche. Cover important topics that no one else is covering. If you can, try to report important news before anyone else.

Write with social sites in mind so that your content gets a lot of exposure and gets passed around virally. Your content must be relevant to the social site. For example, if you want to get on Digg’s front page, write something that connects your niche to something tech related. Diggers love techy stuff. Also, you need to build friendships with the social media users so they can vote for your stuff. If you have webmaster friends, ask them for votes. Of course, offer to vote for their stuff too.

My favorite way to build natural links is to build relationships with other webmasters. Then, in a non-spammy way send them some of your content. Oftentimes they’ll link to you because friends like to link to friends. If you have really good targeted content, you can email bloggers without a prior relationship. Many bloggers are on the lookout for interesting content. Here is a good case study of this marketing tactic.

It’s takes more time, but if you can get 50 quality links that look natural, you can outrank a site with 1000 spammy, unnatural links.

I’ve been privileged to be part of a group of webmasters that seek to help each other. We’ve helped each other drive traffic, build links, and earn more money.

Networking is incredibly important today especially with driving traffic to your site. With social media sites having one of the fastest growing audiences on the web, they’re an excellent place to get traffic for your site. However, to use social media effectively, you need people to vote for you. You could pay people to vote for you. However, that’s not very efficient or cost-effective in the long run. When you network, you’ll find friends that can vote for you. But not only that, they have friends too. And those friends oftentimes become your friends and start voting for your stuff.

In some sense, networking scales well if you target people that are well-connected. Imagine if you befriended a popular blogger in your niche. You could ask them to promote your product or content. This leads to traffic, links, and profits. And through your relationship with this popular blogger, you will meet other popular bloggers.

Networking helps you to get free links. These links may be reciprocal, but at least, you can ask for a contextual link, which will give more link juice and brings higher quality traffic than a sitewide or blogroll link. And as you grow your network, you’ll be able to build more one-way links because many webmasters have multiple sites in different niches. You could link to someone’s celeb blog from your celeb blog in exchange for them linking to your tech blog from their tech blog. You could also consider guest posting.

Also, don’t forget the free advice that comes from webmaster friends. Whether it’s technical tips, domain names, or how to write a certain piece of content, the advice from other webmasters is very valuable.

Networking makes online business more enjoyable. We are social creatures and online business can be a lonely job. When you have someone to IM or email about your struggles and accomplishments, internet marketing becomes more enjoyable. And the more you enjoy your work, the better you will do in your business.

How has networking helped your online business?