Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

So you have your cool little niche blog on your out-of-the-zip-file Wordpress or MovableType… and now you want to turn that side hobby into your day job. Even when you are a new blogger - or even an older one that just never quite got around to doing all that much after doing the initial install and maybe a few plugins - there are a lot of things you could do to enhance and optimize your blog that just never get done. Why not? Often its just an extreme feeling of overwhelmingness at “all that needs to be done” or just simply a time or skill issue. But it is these little enhancements - whether for reader usability, search engines, marketing or things just to make your actual blogging go a little bit easier and blogger-friendly - that can really take your blog to the next level… the one that actually earns you money.

Here are some quick and easy fixes you can make to your blog, and you can each one into the same amount of time it takes you to have your coffee break… yes, seriously, each one should take you 15 minutes or less! And it will leave you your lunch break as actual blog writing time. So now you have no excuse not to do at least some of these which will make your blog better for you, your readers and the search engines. And because each is such a quick thing to do, these are perfect for those who still have a day job but have dreams of being a full time blogger.

Some do require you to have FTP access to upload plugins. Many are Wordpress specific but could be easily adapted to your blog platform of choice.

Run far, far away from the default template
With the number of free blog templates out there, there is really no excuse to be running the default template on your blog unless you just finished installing it five minutes ago. To readers, this is the equivelant of running fingernails down a chalkboard. So even if you can’t afford to hire a designer to make you something custom yet, go and download a freebie one, just making sure it isn’t sponsored by “Buy Viagra” or “Texas Holdem”.

Where’s home?
If your logo is not linked to your homepage, make sure you have a clearly labeled link near the top that says “Home” so people can link to your website easily. Most Wordpress templates come with this, but some do not. The quickest way to do it is to add a new widget to the top of your Wordpress toolbar, although editing your header or sidebar file can be just about as quick, for those of you not using the widgetized Wordpress yet.

Get searching
Adding a search box can help those who wind up on your blog but can’t find exactly what they are looking for, whether because your categories re a bit too broad or you just have far too many entries for people to find a specific post they want to read. Wordpress has one by default, but if your blog is well indexed in Google, you might want to add an AdSense for Search box instead, so you could make a small amout of money from it as well.

Customize your 404 error page
If people end up on a page that doesn’t exist, a customized 404 page can go a long way to helping people find what they are looking for so they don’t simply hit the back button instead. Learn more on creating a 404 page in Eleven steps to creating a killer 404 page.

Underline your links
This is especially important if your blog is targeting a not-so-tech-savvy audience. So while those green mouseover links look hot, the lack of underline-ness can trick some people. And if you happen to be targeting the retired age group, you might want to go with the familiar blue underlined links, instead of just changing the green links to green underlined links. This can be changed in your template .css file.

Keep your navigation consistent
Yes, it can be tempting to make your entry pages with a completely different layout style than your main blog page, but this inconsistency can make it difficult for people to easily find what they are looking for when you navigation swaps sides, for example, or just looks completely different from what they saw on the previous page.

Keep your entries consistent
We all go through periods where we might post six times in a day but then go six weeks without a peep. If you know your schedule is going to get crazy next week, use your coffee breaks this week to write some short but sweet blog entries you can schedule to post next week when you are too busy to do it. Not every single blog post has to be posted the moment you write it. It is far better to post regularly and consistently than to suddenly write six posts in a day then nothing for a week… the better choice would have been to publish one of those blog posts each week instead. End up writing more? Then ramp it up to post two per week. Having a few blog posts saved in drafts that are not time dependent is also a good backup plan, then you can quickly post one when you realize you’ve gone three weeks without having time to blog.

Have a backup list of blog topics
Sometimes we just aren’t inspired by anything when we sit down to write a blog entry. Othertimes we think of ten different things to write about, but barely have time to write one. So when you come up with those blog ideas you don’t have time for, just write down the potential title and maybe jot down a couple of points and save it for one of those days when you have writer’s block and can’t think of a single thing to say.

Add a favicon
Many RSS readers use the favicon when they are displaying posts from your blog, so why not add a favicon to help your blog stand out more to readers when they go to their RSS reader. And not only that, the icon will show up in the address bar of the visitor’s browser, as well as showing in the tabs, if multiple tabs are opened to various other websites too. Don’t know how to do it? We have instructions here in Should a favicon be part of your online branding & marketing presence?

Add Sociable
Make it easy for people to share your content with other social networks by adding the Sociable plugin by Joost De Valk. You can see an example of it at the end of this post… and feel free to test it out

Do some spell checking on older posts
Are you known for being a bad speller or typo maven (like me at the moment, since I have to replace my keyboard this week, since not all the keys are reacting like they should!). Pick a category on your blog and do some quick spell checks on your older entries, especially the more popular ones. There could be a “teh” or a “somethign” lurking in your content. It can be easiest to open up the entry in your control panel and use the built in Firefox spell checker, use ieSpell in Internet Explorer or even the Google toolbar built-in spell checker. Many of these support multiple languages as well. You will probably be surprised at how often you made spelling mistakes if you don’t regularly spell check first, at you will probably find you accidentily spelled some crucial keywords wrong too. Just make sure none of those mistakes are actually driving a sizable amount of traffic before you fix them, because misspellings can be money makers.

Set up a blog-centric Twitter feed
I do all my personal Twittering @jenstar but I try to be very conscious of not doing much self-promotion of my own blogs there. But more and more people are using Twitter as their first choice for getting industry news. So while I will continue to twitter my most important blog entries there, I will also have set up TwitterFeeds on @jenniferslegg for those who want to get updated on all the blog posts here, as well as @jensense which is a feed for all my new AdSense & contextual advertising blog posts on JenSense.com. So once you have set up a new Twitter account for your blog, go to TwitterFeed and set it up to begin automatically posing everytime you have a new blog post.

Don’t require registration to post comments
Sure, i would be nice to be able to say that you have X,XXX number of registered users posting on your blog. But the reality is that unless they are extremely motivated to post a comment, they just won’t bother commenting once they see they need to register first. A few years ago, blog spam made this option popular, but with a good blog spam tool and comment moderation, there should be no reason why you should be requiring people to register first. If you remove it and you have even the tiniest amount of blog traffic, you should the number of comments shoot up.

Comment on the blogs you read
Take a minute to comment on a great blog post you have just finished reading. It doesn’t have to be anything totally deep, even just a “Thanks for the article, I never thought of marketing ___ from this perspective before, it is definitely giving me ideas!” Just be careful it isn’t too blog-spammy generic, so you want to make sure it relates to the blog entry you read. But chances are good that not only will the blog author visit your site, but other readers who have read the blog entry after you will see your blog and click through to your site. Some days, I can see 100+ visitors coming from someone else’s blog entry I was early to comment on. Obviously, in this case, it was the fact I was one of the first few people to comment, so more people saw it, so try and stick with blog entries written within the last few hours or no longer than a day or two old. And yes, most blogs no-follow those links, so you don’t get link juice, but that doesn’t mean there are not many other benefits from that link too!

Comment on your own blog
I am surprised at the number of bloggers who have many blog comments, yet rarely - if ever - comment back to their commenters themselves. Interacting with commenters can go a long way to increasing the number of comments each entry gets, as well as providing a useful “forum” to engage and interact with your readers, all on your own site! Once you start responding to those who comment, you should see your comment ratio go up.

Make it even easier to comment on your own blog
So now that you realize the power of commenting on your own blog, make it easy to reply to comments posted to your blog from within the control panel, even as you are approving comments. Absolute Comments adds a reply link next to the usual “Edit, Delete, Unapprove/Approve, Spam” options when viewing comments in admin… when you click reply, a text box will pop up to enter your reply comment. This means you don’t have to go and approve a comment and then go view the post outside the control panel to then reply to it. You will find you will reply to many more when it is quick and easy to do it.

Highlight your own comments
This is actually something I first saw on MajorNelson’s blog (XBox.com blogger) where all the comments he made were highlighted in green. Since he can have thousands of comments on a single blog entry - and mere hundreds on a slow day - it made it easy for users to see where his comments were, especially if it was about a support issue. Matt Cutt’s has made a post on how to do this, which has been on my to-do list for a few months now, even before he posted this!

Recognize your top commenters
Everyone likes recognition. You will need to tightly monitor for comments made just to increase comment count (the more popular you are the more likely this will happen) so make sure you have a tight comment policy in place. And you will want to set a time limit on it, such as top commenters in the last 7, 14 or 30 days, so it gives the new users to your site a shot at making the list. There are plenty of plugins that do this.

Show off the recent comments made
Again, you will need a strong moderation in place to prevent blog spam, but you can show snippets from the most recent comments made on your blog. And as a bonus, depending on what comments are made, it will highlight older blog entries that might be long gone from the front page of your blog or recent posts list.

Add your blog to your email signature
Yes, many of us are lazy and don’t add a signature to our emails, whether it is because we send out emails that are totally not related to the blog, or just one of those things that has been on the to do list forever. Add a blog and a short tag line to intrigue people to visit. You never know, your daughter’s softball coach might actually be a fan of whatever you blog about and your signature just got you a new reader.

Create or update your about you page
Have you recently received any awards, guest blogged on a high profile site, spoke at a conference or quoted in a major newspaper? If they aren’t all on your About You page of your blog, they definitely should be! It should include relevant information such as your bio, but also things like your username (preferably with profile links) to thinks like social media sites you belong to.

Create a contact us page
Don’t put your straight email address on your website. Use a contact form instead so you don’t need to worry about the spam. And this will also make it easy for people to contact you for quotes (whether quotes for articles or quotes for your services!) as well as to give you heads up on anything new and exciting. There is a great contact us plugin that includes spam protection so you shouldn’t have to deal with contact form spam.

RSS Feeds
Make sure your RSS feed button is placed prominently. If your RSS button is hidden away or not noticeable, you just might find that people won’t bother to subscribe rather than hunting around for it. Working on increasing your numbers? Remind people at the end of each blog entry where to subscribe. And if you get one blog entry that gets a lot of social media traffic suddenly? Make sure you make it easy for those people to subscribe so you don’t lose any traffic because while the added traffic is great, you want them to keep coming back long after they initially arrive because of a Stumble or Digg.

Offer full RSS feeds over snippets
Popular bloggers with thousands of subscribers are able to get away with offering snippets much easier than new bloggers who are trying to build up their readership. Many bloggers want them “on the site” rather than just in the RSS reader, but it is better to get them reading, enjoying and anticipating a full blog entry in their reader than it is to just give them a snippet they might only click through on 5% of the time. Once you have a large readership, then you can change to snippets if your heart is really set on it. But as you are in the phase where you are trying to attract and maintain readers, offering full feeds is definitely the best way to go.

Start tagging
The new Wordpress has built-in tagging, and there are plugins for the older versions. But make a point of tagging a few of your older blog entries a day, and before you know it, you will have a great tag representation of your posts for others to use.

Recommend related blog entries
You just wrote a fantastic blog entry that has been Stumbled and Dugg… but do you make it easy for those new-found fans to write other articles you have written on the same topic? It is easy to add a couple links to the end of a blog entry if you happen to notice it getting a ton of traffic suddenly. But sometimes you just won’t notice until the traffic is gone or you suddenly notice the comment numbers have shot up on a particular entry. If you install a recommended entries / related posts plugin, it will automatically pull several related blog entries to recommend to your readers at the end.

Highlight your most popular posts
What are your most popular posts of all time, either by page views or comment count? Add a list of popular posts to your sidebar. This gives them a bit of extra link juice, since chances are good it has been a long time since they saw the homepage. But also it gives your new readers a chance to see what they have missed but which were highly popular with readers.

Recommend other blogs
You don’t live in a closed world and believe it or not, some people won’t just read your blog and nothing else. So why not recommend other blogs you enjoy? Add them to your blogroll so readers can see what else you read. Not only are you sending traffic and links to blogs you admire, but you just might see some of those bloggers reciprocate and recommend your blog back to their own readers.

Get your own domain
Still lingering on yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.blogspot.com? Even if the yourname.com isn’t available, in the longrun it is still best to have your blog on your domain. So spend your coffee break looking up domain nams for your own yourname.com. Worried about your old blog entries? If you use Wordpress, they have ways to import from various hosted blog platforms either built in or as a plugin. So don’t let that stop you from moving to your very own domain name.

Don’t get too widget happy
Ah, widgets, they are great little things. But there are definite blogs that go overboard to such extreme measures that they overshadow everything else on the page - even the fantastic content you have written - or worse, stall the loading of the page completely so that I can’t even see what you have written. How to avoid widget overload? Don’t sit down one day and add twenty new things to your sidebar. Start with two or three, then slowly ramp them up. This way you can identify any load issues, and you won’t be stuck figuring which of the twenty you just added is causing problems.

Check for blog spam
Never got around to getting your Akismet API key? Do it now. Sure, if your blog is new, maybe you have been fortunate enough to only get a handful of spam comments and/or trackbacks on your blog, just enough that you can easily handle it in simple comment moderation. But trust me, there will be a tipping point when the slow trickle will become a flood. Has the flood already hit and you are knee deep in masses of comments awaiting moderation that you are certain legitimate ones are caught up in? Once the key is added, there will be a link to recheck the queue for spam and it will remove the bulk of spam. Think some blog spam might have slipped through unnoticed? Do a search within your Wordpress comments tab, because it will search for keywords not only in the text but in the URLs as well. So do a search for the usual suspects of keywords such as poker, holdem, viagra, cialis, mortgage, loans, debt, payday, xanax, phentermine. That said, don’t go and delete all comments with those keywords without reading them first… they could be completely legitimate comments that are using one of those words for a legitimate reason.

Check for signs of hacking
Similar to checking for spam, this involves doing a site:yoursite.com search in google, and appending one of the usual suspects of blog spam keywords (ie. “site:yoursite.com viagra” would be the search term). This could show up comment spam as well but will also show if there are any exploits or hacks where spammers have injected links into your site it should show up here.

Check those title tags
Wordpress has this nasty habit of putting the title of your blog first before the title of the blog entry. So if you have a longish blogname, you could be pushing the title of your individual entries right off of the Google search results. Even worse, depending on the version you use, could also be adding things like “Blog Archive” before getting around to displaying the title of the post in your title tag. More on this from Wordpress or just install the SEO Title Tag plugin.

Make sure you have good permalinks
Are your blog URLs something along the lines of http://www.yourfabulousblog.com/p?=89 Not very descriptive nor search-engine friendly. Make sure you are using permalinks that include information from the blog title such as http://www.yourfabulousblog.com/how-to-optimize-your-blog You can see how the second would be much more beneficial In Wordpress, you will find this choice under Options then click the Permalinks link. You can chose your link structure there, but do remember you may need to manually update or add a .htaccess file to do it depending on what your server permissions are for the relevant files.

Make your post slugs more manageable
This is one thing I consistently forget to do, and I know I’m not the only one! When publishing a new blog entry, your post slug (the permalink URL title that is usually the same as all the words in your blog entry title) should not be thirty words long, as some blog entry titles wind up being on occassion! So if you have a massively long title, you want to make sure you change the post slug from a-really-long-and-wordy-and-keyword-rich-title-of-my-blog-entry-that-is-super-exciting to keyword-rich-super-exciting-blog-entry or something else that is much shorter but is also descriptive enough for someone seeing it as well as having your all-important keywords included in it. I don’t always remember to do this before I post, but I generally remember something I have set to publish in the future sometime between the time I finished writing it and the time it actually goes live on the blog.

Write killer article titles
When you have a good article title, you can entice people to read something they wouldn’t have read with a poor title. The ability to write great titles is definitely a gift, but it can also be learned with the practice makes perfect rule of thumb. A blog entry with a great title is also much more likely to go viral because a lot of people that submit things to Digg, Sphinn etc just can’t be bothered to rewrite the title - nor would you really want them to. So a great title is crucial.

Have you optimized your images?
Sure, people either love love love the traffic they get from Google image search, or they despise it because they end up with image leechers. If you want to get as much traffic as possible, make sure your images are optimized so people can find them easier, especially if you tend to use images with cryptic filenames like tw445seo.jpg which might make perfect sense to you, but do absolutely nothing for anyone else. You can do this manually as you upload each photo, depending on your version of Wordpress, or you can use a plugin like SEO Friendly Images which does it for you automatically.

Add a technorati widget
Make it easy for people to favorite you on Technorati. First, you need to sign up and claim your blog, if you haven’t already. Then add a button like this:

(That is to this blog, if you’d like to favorite it!) You can go and grab the code to to this button right in Technorati, along with a whole host of other widgets, even adding links to the most recent blog entries on your personal list of favorites in Technorati.

And add some other easy RSS subscribe buttons too
Add links to things like Bloglines and Google Reader so your readers can subscribe to them easily. You can add them individually, use one of the wordpress plugins or use something like FeedButton which makes a rollover like this:

Fix for RSS scrapers
Don’t you just love it when you post a new blog post and then see it syndicated immediately on other websites? And especially if you see it ranking above yours… which can happen, if you know of the story about Search Engine Journal’s Journal. But, you might as well make sure you at least get some credit for it, so make sure you have a link going back to either your blog or your blog entry so that people who stumble upon the scrapers can find their way back to the original source… you! If you are code-savvy, you can edit the RSS yourself or you can use the RSS Footer plugin. Bonus tip: It works for ads too, your RSS ads will be displayed wherever your blog entries are scraped.

Make sure you are pinging Google
Are you pinging the Google blog server? The Google blog search updates incredibly fast - as in within minutes of pinging, you will see your blog entry in the blog search results, and it isn’t much later than most blog entries end up in the regular Google search too. Learn more about pinging Google here. Or you can submit your feed to Google here for a one-shot ping.

Label ads as ads
People hate being tricked, and this can impact whether people want to follow you or not. So if you accept advertising, label it as Sponsors or Advertisers. Add no-follow if you are concerned about appearing as though you are selling links. Bonus tip: This makes Google happier too.

Avoid going into advertising overload
This mistake seems to be made primarily by newer bloggers, but longtime bloggers can be just as guilty of this one too! You can make far more with one or two well-placed ads than you can with 10 different ads plastered all over your blog. And too many ads can also lead to poor usability for your readers, especially if there are a lot of flashy image ads going on.

Use nofollow on links if needed
Essentially, if you are selling links or you are linking to a site that you cannot vouch for its authority or trustworthiness, you should pop a nofollow on the link to stay in Google’s good books (if Google search traffic is important to you, that is). There are more penalties for sites identified as having sold links, so using nofollow can help prevent any future problems - or fix any current ones!

Link to other bloggers as you’d like to be linked
Remember the song Money for Nothing? Well, apply it to links. When you link to other’s blog entries, link to them as you would like them to theoretically link to you. You hate it when people refer to your blog but don’t include a link… or include an unlinked URL. So why should you do the same just to hoarde your link juice? The same applies to anchor text too… link with the blog entry title or blog name instead of things like “read the blog here”.

Subscribe to competitor’s RSS feeds
Yes, you can do this, it isn’t being disloyal to your own blog But you can great great ideas by seeing what your competitors are talking about and linking to, and you can use it to bounce off of for your own blog entries.

Link to your competitor’s blogs
Sure, you might see them as competitor who have more of the blog traffic you want. But a news flash… many of those subscribers might also subscribe to you too, it isn’t a case where readers have to pick one over the other. And chances are pretty good that other blogger isn’t viewing you as “competition” but rather a cool new look into the same market area. So link to those blogs you view as competition to yours, and good things can happen, such as that person now discovering your blog and maybe sending a link your way too. If they publish their trackbacks, your blog could show up on a blog entry they did that you wrote about. Blogging is an entirely different animal when it comes to linking to competitors, so just do it

Check on old links
You should definitely do a link health check on your blog on a regular basis. Visit your outbounds, check to see if you should nofollow anyone (especially for those blog entries you might have done before nofollow even existed) and just do an overall look at all your links to ensure they are all helping and not hurting you!

Robots.txt for duplicate content
Sometimes how the date archives are done on blogs you can end up with duplicate content because blog posts might be indexed under their own pages, their category pages and then a couple of date pages as well. Create a robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing the unneeded date pages. And be sure to run your robots.txt file through a robots.txt checker to be certain you haven’t accidentily made a mistake and told Google to not index your entire site… this has happened to bloggers, so it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your site’s indexing status!

Set up a Google Webmaster Central account
Sign up here and then verify your site. This will give you information on your site such as any 404 pages Googlebot has found, the number of subscribers (using Google Reader or iReader), top search queries and top clicked queries. And it will also serve to alert you if Google finds anything suspicious on your site that could affect indexing, such as if you have been selling text links and they caught you

Keep your blog updated with the latest version
It is important to ensure you keep your Wordpress, MovableType or whatever blog platform you use updated with the latest version. Yes, it can be a pain, but it is even a bigger pain to clean up a blog that has been exploited in some way. If you are too scared to do it yourself, hire someone to do it. Unfortunately, some exploits (such as ones that insert hidden links in your footer) can get your blog booted right out of Google. This one might take you a little bit longer than your coffee break - do this one on your lunch break or set aside some time in the evening or weekend to do it. But it is crucial to do this.

Backing up your blog
And while we talk about updating your blog, it is also important to backup your blog files and your database on a regular basis, so if disaster strikes you won’t discover you have lost all your template files and two years worth of blog posts…. believe me, I have seen it happen. So definitely take the time to backup all your related blog files.

Whew! That’s all folks Fifty-two quick and easy changes you can make to your blog to make it more user friendly, search engine friendly and yourself friendly too. Anything I missed that can be done quick and easy?

Please Digg

Being a top AdSense expert, I inevitably get many emails from publishers who have gotten their AdSense account suspended and then I get the sob story about how they won’t be able to pay their mortgage, they will have to let all their employees, etc etc. Trust me, I have heard it all! But regardless of their AdSense account being suspended, the real reason of their immediate money issues is the fact that they had all their eggs in one basket… in this case the AdSense basket. The same can go for someone who is working one killer affiliate program that suddenly ceases to exist one day, and is left with no viable alternative option to slip into the deceased affiliate program’s place.

The same applies for those that have their one killer website… their pride and joy, but unfortunately the one that brings in 95% of all their income. If you are old school SEO enough, you will remember that many people found themselves in this position when the now-infamous Florida update hit in November 16th, 2003. When Google updated their algorithm (which wasn’t done in a continuous style back then like it is now) that day, the forums lit up with people whose websites literally stopped getting any Google traffic overnight. And with the huge Google share even back then meant that people who were living the good life with their Google rankings suddenly found themselves scrambling in panic-mode to not only restore their rankings but to also restore the sudden loss of income, whether AdSense, affiliate income, or other.

So if you are one of those who has most of your eggs precariously balanced in a single basket, here is what you can do to diversify a bit so that you won’t have to go into panic-mode when disaster strikes your bottom line, and why you should do it. Keep reading…

We have all had that money maker website that ranks really well but are desperately afraid to touch anything on it, incase whatever it is about the site that Google’s secret sauce is so in love with gets destroyed in the process. But unfortunately, Google doesn’t necessarily like it either when a site hasn’t been updated in years, despite those killer rankings.

Not only that, humans don’t really like it when they can tell a site hasn’t been updated in ages either, and they couldn’t really care less whether Google loves it or not. And after all, sure, Google can drive the traffic, but if the mass majority of your visitors leave out of disdain when they see you 1999 web design, is it really worth keeping it looking as it did when you first launched it with your Frontpage 97 design skills? Which brings me to the question…

So when was the last time you really updated your website? And then the next obvious thing…

What makes your website look stale, outdated and old?
Keep reading…

Talk about 404 pages has suddenly hit the blogs over the past day because of the new way that the Google beta toolbar is handling 404 errors. Now, instead of showing a default server 404 erorr page, Google will instead show a few different options to try and find the site, whether it is heading up to the home page or searching in Google for the site. But, if you have a custom 404 error page (one that is longer than 512 bytes, which would generally cover most site’s custom 404 ages) Google will still display your custom 404 page.

Which brings up what many webmasters have been pondering… what exactly should go on a custom 404 page? Here are eleven things that should go on your custom 404 page.
Keep reading…

Have you ever thought about your robots.txt file, beyond how the various crawlers interact with it? Chances are that if you have one, you probably haven’t looked at it in since the day you created it. Well, it is time you take a fresh look at it and see how it looks not just to a bot’s eyes, but look at it through the eyes of a competitor.

You would be surprised at the number of sites and companies who use their robots.txt file as a way to keep bots out of certain directories on their site, but not considering the fact they have just pretty much handed the keys to those private areas over to their competitors. How? Because many people create their robots.txt file thinking that if the bots aren’t indexing those pages, no one will find it… but when you include those directories in your robots.txt file, you are telling real people exactly where those directories are. And surprisingly, many of those “secret” directories allow competitors to access it without requiring any kind of authentication or password. Keep reading…

If you are like me, you will inadvertantly be surfing along, click a link, then watch as everything grinds to a halt because that link you just clicked was actually linked to a PDF file. And worse, your Adobe Acrobat or Reader takes its sweet time as it loads all the extranous features, checks for updates, then lags horribly as Internet Explorer tries to crunch all 128 pages of PDF goodness it just loaded up.

That said, PDFs definitely have their place on the web… just be very careful about how you place them, so your visitors don’t feel the desire to leap through their computer screen and over to yours and strangle you for that poor placed PDF you just launched at them.

Label links as PDFs
You may think that people will actually notice when they mouse over the link and see the .pdf extension in their status bar. Well think again. Always ALWAYS label that link with some kind of notation that screams to people “Hey! Heads up! This is a PDF file!” That way people get the opportunity to save it to their hard drive before viewing, which cuts down the scrolling time considerably. I would argue that this is the most important usability tip for PDF files, but something a large number of websites just don’t do.

Give people some choices
Is the PDF only a page or two? Why not save the file also as an image, so people have the choice to view it as an image or a PDF. Or offer it in a Word or Excel document if applicable. There are some people who despise PDFs so much that they don’t even have Adobe Reader Installed on their computer. If you are concerned about theft, keep in mind that anyone can turn a PDF document into a Word document quite easily.

What the heck is a PDF and where do I get this reader thing?
And speaking of the Adobe Reader uninitiated types, don’t forget to include a link to Adobe Reader. And if your PDF needs to be opened in the latest (and supposedly greatest) version of Adobe, never assume that everyone has installed or upgraded their reader to the most recent version. While your SEO help site can probably get away with not having a link to reader, your site on collecting hockey jerseys probably cannot.

Help!
Are you serving up a 200 page Acrobat document? Keep in mind that most people don’t have a brand new computer with 4 GB of RAM and loading it through Firefox. So hit up a friend’s house with a far less powerful computer and click your PDF link and see what happens. Yep, it would appear your site crashes their browser… if it doesn’t actually crash it. This is because it takes so long to load a 200 page PDF file in an older and slower computer. So give instructions on how to save it to a hard drive, even being as bold as labelling part of the link as “RIGHT click to download this PDF”. This will save you the headache of the inevitable emails consisting of “I want to download your Really Cool PDF but it keeps crashing my browser”. Trust me, they will come, and they can come for PDFs with a smaller number of pages, especially those that make heavy use of varied fonts and images.

Link to a specific page within a PDF document
Want to highlight a certain page in a multiple page PDF document? You can link to a specific page within the PDF by using “http://www.example.com/document.pdf#page=3″ format, similar to how we link to a specific part of a webpage. Otherwise, the usual first page will show.

Link within the PDF too
Did you know PDF files show as backlinks when there is a link to your site within the document? Definitely use the web links tool in Acrobat to ensure all your URLs turn into links. And want to link keywords to specific webpages? You can do this too by selecting Tools then Link Tools. Highlight the text you want linked, select Link Action then Open a Web Page and enter the URL you want those keywords linked to. So yes, this does mean that all three major search engines index PDF files, as well as those imbedded backlinks.

Optimize your PDF
The past couple of years, Adobe Acrobat (full version) gives users the tools to self-otpimize PDFs when you create or edit them. So before you do your final save and upload it to your server for visitors. With the document open in Acrobat, select Edit, then Preferences. Select General on the left, then select “Save as Optimizes for Fast Web View”, click OK. Then save as usual. You can also reduce the size of your PDF by reducing the compatibility on it (such as the PDF only being compatible with the latest version and the one previous) however proceed with caution unless your site is in a high tech space, because most people who download Adobe Reader rarely upgrade it, so you could easily have people using versions 4 or 5 (or older!) and your PDF will not load or will load with errors in the versions your PDF is not compatible with.

Next time you decide to upload a PDF to your server, ensure that you are following these usability tips so that you aren’t alienating your visitors by throwing up PDF roadblocks in their way. And it is probably not a bad idea to go back and see how your sites are handling PDFs that are already in place… there are many, many websites out there that don’t follow many (or any!) of these rules!

Every so often, someone comes up with the idea that Google should offer a service that would allow webmasters to pay a fee to get specific information on ranking issues on a website, primarily for those sites that the owners feel should be ranking much better than it actually is. Because oftentimes, webmasters – particularly the “mom and pop” do it yourselfers who are not as in-tune to the latest algo changes and ranking updates – are at a loss for why their site can’t be found in Google or why they rank so far below their competitors.

While many webmasters would love to see this kind of service, the reality is that Google would never do this, at least not in my opinion. And here’s why

1. Catering to those with money. Not all webmasters would have the money to pay for the service. And suddenly Google is helping only those who can afford to pay, and too bad for those who can’t. And you know someone will raise the argument that it is the spammers who can most afford to pay Google for this kind of service

2. SEOs would be upset. Why? While they could utilize the service themselves, this would also mean that many of those people who might employ an SEO for ranking issues suddenly they wouldn’t have to since they could simply pay Google to tell them how to fix it themselves. End result, fewer businesses hiring SEOs for help, since now they can just pay Google to get that same info straight from the horse’s mouth.

3. Influencing the search rankings. Google could be accused of their organic listings suddenly being tainted by those who pay Google to help them rank better. And this certainly blurs the lines of the whole paid vs. unpaid listings in Google (although it certainly doesn’t stop Yahoo).

4. It’s just not very Google-y. Yes, they say they don’t do evil (although granted, some clearly disagree) but no matter how you slice or dice it, offering paid support to webmasters for their unpaid search listings is just a little bit on the evil side.

5. Google Webmaster Central. GWC has come a long way since the days it was originally a sitemaps tool. And fortunately for webmasters, they update it regularly adding new tools that webmasters can use to self-diagnose problems and issues Google could be having with their site. And there is no reason to believe that GWC has reached an end point for what they will make available to webmasters. However, perhaps some more documentation on not just how to use the tools, but why they are useful to site owners, would be good.

6. And there are, of course, those who would use it for evil, to see just how far various optimization techniques could be pushed and what exactly gets caught when an “innocent webmaster” pays for Google ranking support. And yes, we all know you would

So while a paid service offering help to webmasters would be nice, I just can’t see them doing it, at least not anytime in the near future. So webmasters will have to keep cornering Matt Cutts & the many other Googlers in an attempt to get personalized help for their sites at one of the industry conferences.

We have all been a newbie SEO at one time or another. But if you are new to the industry… or just need a refresher that you aren’t making a cardinal newbie error when it comes to your site’s optimization, here are some of the top and most frequent mistakes and how to fix them. And yes, I did one of these back in 1999… although fortunately it wasn’t one of the ones that would get me banned, either back then or now!

My site ranks for “some really obscure multi-keyword phrase”.

Wow, you rank number one for “search engine optimization in Smalltown USA”. But who actually searches for that? You can be number one for tens of thousands of obscure keyword combinations, but if no one is actually searching for any of them, you have just wasted your time and effort optimizing for them (but hopefully it was sheer coincidence that you rank for them, and not actual effort on your part!)

Instead, use one of the many tools on the market that can give you some idea of how many people are searching for various keyword combinations related to your industry and focus on the ones that can actually bring you traffic rather than the unusual or obscure ones that no one ever searches for except you when you check your rankings.

Only focusing on the homepage

In the short tail world, one would only need to focus on the homepage. But in the world where long tail is not only king but queen too, you cannot afford to let your internal pages go neglected while your homepage gets the royal treatment.

Consider your internal pages just as important as your homepage, and don’t forget that a large percentage of your visitors will actually enter your site through an internal page, and not the homepage, so ensure that you have suitable navigation in place so that the visitor won’t get lost if they didn’t happen to get to your site via your homepage.

Too much time and effort on the meta tags

Yes, once upon a time meta tags were a very important part of any search engine optimization campaign. But the fairy tale is over and while you definitely shouldn’t ignore the value of meta tags, they aren’t so much relevant nowadays for rankings as they are for displaying what shows in the search engine results page.

The robots.txt oops

I am still a person that triple checks any robots.txt file I do. And while I fortunately (knock on wood) have never had any problems by accidentally disallowing all bots from visiting any of my sites via a robots.txt-gone-bad, I have seen the results of newbie webmasters who think they are telling Googlebot and Slurp to visit their site, when they are actually disallowing them from visiting and indexing the entire site. Ooops.

If you too live in fear, run any robots.txt file through a validator the moment it goes up (to reduce the window of opportunity of a bot happening to visit when you have a messed up robots.txt file live on the site). And it is worth double checking Google Webmaster Central to make sure Googlebot doesn’t have any indexing problems stemming from robots.txt, or any other reason.

Focusing on the traffic numbers without checking the follow through

Wow, so you had ten thousand visitors today. That traffic is pretty decent, depending on your goals, but the most important figure is page views… and the bounce rate. If those ten thousand visitors have a bounce rate of 98% (meaning only 2% of those ten thousand actually stuck around to click a second page) you need to figure out why so many leave after their first page view. Reduce your bounce rate and your page views will go up, and you can turn the slightly over 10,000 page views into 20,000 or 30,000, simply by figuring out why 98% of your traffic leaves immediately and what you can do to ensure they stick around for at least another page or two.

Don’t forget it is much easier to make some changes to a page or website to keep a visitor on your site for a few additional page views than it is to optimize to get entirely new visitors.

It’s only about the links

There is no doubt that inbound links are very important to any website. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it is the only important thing about your site. Sure, throw enough links at even the crappiest site and it will probably rank… however it will also probably tank in the serps shortly after. For your site to live a happy and healthy existence in the search engine results, you need to include links in your SEO strategy, but we aware that it is only one piece of the entire SEO pie.

While there are also many other newbie SEO mistakes (hidden text, keyword stuffing and spammy linking strategies, just to name a few) these are some of the common ones that I am sure some of you can admit you just might have done in the past before you knew better!

It would be pretty nice if we could just select our top chosen keyword phrase as our anchor text and then use it for all incoming links we gather for our website. Unfortunately, it isn’t year 2000, and this technique just doesn’t hold the weight it once did, not to mention the fact that you very likely have more than one keyword phrase you want to rank well for.

So this brings us to the question of not only how to choose anchor text for brand new incoming links, but to also use anchor text in a way to make your backlinks look as natural as possible (even if they aren’t!) to the Google (and other search engine) powers-that-be. Here are some tips when it comes to selecting that crucial anchor text as well as things to consider once you start gathering (or buying) backlinks.

Keep reading…

We have all had friends who ask us for help getting into the world of online marketing and search engine optimization, wanting us to teach them everything we know so they can make just as much money as us while working in their pajamas from home all day… but without really wanting to put in the effort to do it. Not to mention the fact that you often feel you “have” to help them out if they ask because of that guilty complex you have of always being there for your friends. Now combine that with the fact you can almost guarantee that certain friends who ask you this will never actually be serious enough about it to make it work after you do help them out. So you don’t necessarily want to invest a huge amount of time or effort into it in case he decides he hates it!

Lucky for you, there are some ways you can be that good friend and give them the tools and help they need to get started with as little pain and suffering (yours!) involved. Here are some tips on what you can do to be helpful and supportive… yet not do everything for him, which unfortunately, as experience has proven, some of your so-called friends will want you to do!

Keep reading…