Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

In this day and age, it is becoming much more difficult to find a never-registered domain name, especially for top level domains. So the reality is that many of us are having to purchase domain names instead. So if you are considering purchasing a domain name, here are some tips you should follow, check and research to make sure your chosen “perfect” domain name really is as perfect as you want to believe it is.

Keyword research
If you are planning to buy a domain name – especially if it is in a market area you are new to – definitely take the time to do some keyword research to see what the most advantageous keywords are to have in your domain name. Check the keyword research section of my blog if this isn’t your strong suit and you need a primer.

Brandable
Does the name have brand appeal? You want people to not just remember the site, but to link to it to. And domain names that are brandable will do better. Think about it.. what is better, Google.com or Truly-The-Best-Search-Engine-Ever.com? Google has definite brand appeal - even if how they came up with the name was unusual… and shows that sometimes those spur of the moment domain name ideas that many of us come up with on a whim can really work out well in the end.

Check Archive.org
Did your desired domain name have a previous life as a XXX porn portal? Or feature hardcore spam with thousands of doorway pages? Do be aware that some site’s histories take so much work to rise above the past life that it makes much more sense to go with a domain with a clean history. Do be aware that some sellers might hide the previous life by banning the archive bot, so you’ll need to do further super sleuthing to discover what was there in the past. This also applies to domains that you are buying “brand new” because it could have been previously owned and the owner let it expire.

Avoid hyphens whenever possible
Hyphens are associated with old time spam, when you used to see buy-keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword-now.com (and no, that unfortunately isn’t an exaggeration!) If you absolutely have to use a hyphen, limit it to two or less, but preferably one. Every hyphen adds a level of spamminess perception, even if the intended site will be as white as the driven snow.

Domain length
A shorter domain name is better than a longer one, especially if you will be getting type in traffic. Avoid really long domain names whenever possible and try to stay under 15 characters if you can. If you have two domain names that are equal in your eyes except for the fact one is 18 characters and the other is 9, I’d go for the one with 9.

Go with a quality top level domain.
Whether it is a .com in the US or a .co.uk in England, go with a top level domain (TLD) whenever possible. No matter how you slice and dice it, Example.com or Example.co.uk sounds so much better than Example.biz

If you are not TLD, check what is on it
Many years ago a friend started a business targeting moms and their kids and went and registered her website with a .ca extension. She had the URL advertised on her vehicle, on mail outs, on her business cards, etc. Except there was a small problem… people kept forgetting it was .ca and went to the .com version instead, which happened to be a spyware ridden hardcore porn site. So if you can’t get the most common domain extension for your target market, check to see what it on it before you make your final decision to go for the alternative TLD.

What about misspellings and variations
Don’t forget there are differences with how people spell certain words in different countries. It is “search engine optimization” in the US but “search engine optimisation” in the UK. So if you are targeting worldwide, it can be worth the extra expense to buy those common spelling variations that type-ins might do.

Check backlinks
Not all blacklinks are created equal. Are there a bunch of incoming spam links? Or hate links? Or anything that could raise suspicions that something isn’t all right with this domain name?

Check for pages indexed
Any pages indexed, whether currently on the domain or still previously indexed? Generally, indexed pages is a good sign, then see if those pages rank for anything as an added bonus.

Trademarks?
A surprising number of domains are for sale because there are potential trademark or legal issues that the owner just doesn’t want to deal with. A quick search in the US trademark database will show up any trademarks that could be problematic in the future. You don’t want to achieve rankings and traffic only to lose the domain to a trademark holder, unless you are willing to take that risk because the benefits outweigh the risks in your eyes.

Double entendres
The often mentioned fictional Pen Island is a classic example. Pen Island.com sounds innocent enough. But put it all together in a lower case domain name, and suddenly you get penisland.com… Good old Penis Land. Another one, expertsexchange.com (Experts Exchange) is often mentioned when it comes to making sure you consider all double entrendres with that “perfect” domain name. It is better to discover the problems before you buy than to have someone point it out after you have invested time, effort and money into it.

When you are buying a domain name –especially when it could be a pricey one – you want to make sure you are not going to fall victim to a critical problem that could cause issues with your “perfect” domain name down the road. By following these steps, you should ensure that you have as few problems as possible.

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

I received an email from a website today saying that since I hadn’t been reading the weekly newsletter, they were going to automatically unsubscribe me unless I resubmitted by subscription. Now, I thought this was odd for a number of reasons.

First, I am a paying member of this website. In fact, it is the only website I can think of off the top of my head that I pay for the content behind the login screen.

Second, I visited this site and logged in within the last week. I know this for certain since it is a cooking site, and I was grabbing a recipe I have made from the site previously.

Third, this email newsletter is (I believe) for paying subscribers only.

Fourth, I still have six months left on my current membership cycle.

So I next looked in my Outlook and noticed “Click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message.” Ah, yes, a 1×1 tracking pixel was in the email. So yes, because Outlook didn’t download images - and honestly, it wasn’t obvious there were pictures missing, since there were no other images within the message that I could click to get the images - I am being automatically unsubscribed.

Now, I can see the fact that websites might not want to send newsletters to those who aren’t reading them. But I am a paying member, who has logged in very recently, yet I am being unsubscribed because my current email program of choice doesn’t download images…. nor do many of the other email programs that the majority of people use these days.

What should this website have done instead? A few things…

First, why not aknowledge the fact that I could really be reading your newsletter even though your tracking pixels say otherwise? Adding something like “Some email programs don’t open images, so you might be reading our newsletter with eager anticipation the moment it hits your in box, but we just don’t realize it. Confirming your subscription will help us know that you are indeed reading your newsletter, even if our techies think you aren’t.”

Check if the lack of reading is because it is getting caught up in a spam filter. Include something along the lines of “Is this the first time you have heard anything from the ____ newsletter since you first signed up? If so, reconfirm your subscription, then be sure to add us@somerecipesite.com to your white list, so the next one won’t accidentily end up in your spam folder.”

Check my subscription. It can’t be hard to match active subscribers with non-active ones, especially when its all tied to the same email address.

Then, if I don’t reconfirm my email address, then step up to the plate and email a couple of weeks later with the

We know that unwanted e-mail can be a hassle, so we want to make sure you’d like to continue your subscription. If you’d like to keep receiving weekly newsletters from us, please click here. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll unsubscribe you.

message that I actually did receive today from this website.

Moral of the story: Don’t use 1×1 tracking pixels to track just who is reading your email newsletter, especially when you are using it to automatically unsubscribe readers from that newsletter. Not only will your numbers be waaaaay off, but you will lose loyal readers who might forget to reconfirm or are annoyed by the fact they are getting automatically unsubscribed. And of course, not to mention the impact it has on those who suddenly are reminded that big brother is watching to see which newsletters they are reading and how often they read.

And for the record, I decided not to resubscribe because of how they handled it.

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…

It is surprising as I go through hat tips on various posts in my RSS reader that some blogs I end up on are lacking some things that I consider to be fundamentals to a blog. You know, those important things that all blogs should not be without, yet time and time again I run across blogs missing at least one or sometimes multiple things that are pretty crucial. And not only that, many of these things are crucial to the overall usability of a blog, which can be directly related to both your number of subscribers as well as how often those subscribers read your blog entries.

How does your blog stack up to the challenge of what all successful blogs should have?
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…

I talked about why usability testing is so important for website owners, and why it is also important to test those internal entry pages, and not strictly the homepage. But once you have your usability testers held captive, here are some questions you can ask them after their perusal through your money website.

You can either ask testers for written answers or just ask them verbally. You will likely get more honest replies with written answers, however, because of how much time this would take, you will need to severly cut back the number of questions you ask. And written answers would need to be done with a “while you wait” mentality because the longer your tester delays in writing them, the less accurate they will be, both in what they say and with how much they actually remember after the fact.

And of course, remain neutral. They won’t want to answer very thruthfully if you respond to one of their answers with an “Are you crazy?” or “How could you possible have thought that?”, no matter how well you know the person! Always remain neutral, listen to the answers carefully, and do your best not to lead your testers onto the answers you want? For example “Could you tell this site was for teenage girls?” would likely elicit a yes, even if the person thought it was for moms with six or more kids. Asking “who do you think the intended audience is?” would definitely get you the answers you were looking for.

And don’t talk too much tech or geek. If you use your mother-in-law as a tester, would she know what a “browser” is or know what a “javascript style menu” is? Take care that you don’t go too far over your tester’s heads with terminology that is familiar to those in the web industry, but definitely not many in the mainstream public.

After he or she is done surfing around, ask some questions…

Have you visited this site before?
Previous familiarization with a site can skew first impressions.

What do you think the purpose of this site is? (ie. selling, informing, entertainment, etc)
If they think it is a selling site, but it is actually a content information site, question what made them think the purpose was different than it really is.

Who do you think the intended audience is?
You know your targeted demographic, but perhaps they noticed clues that would leave them to believe a completely different audience was intended.

Could you find what you were looking for?
You want to know if everything was there the user expected or if there was something he or she thought they’d find but didn’t

Was it easy to get to the home page from the page you started on?
If the user expresses trouble getting to the home page, reassess your navigation structure or find out where they expected to find a link to the home page but didn’t.

Was there something missing you were expecting to see?
For prompting, you can ask about more text, more images, a FAQ, a question answered, etc.

Could you tell what the page was about?
If they sound confused, ask specifically what they thought it was about, and what those indicators were.

Was anything too obtrusive?
Particularly important if you use pop-up or pop-under ads, IntelliTXT type advertising products, an in-your-face style of ad placement, use of flash, etc.

Was anything too well hidden?
If you noticed he or she seemed to be hunting around the site, prompt with this.

Problems or kudos on the color scheme?
Too flashy? Too bland? Just right?

Easy to read (both font style and size)?
Was the font size too large or small? Was the chosen font difficult to read or in a color that made the text not as readable as it could have been?

How did you find the layout of the site?
Was everything organized well and set out as expected? If the layout is not a usual style, question that experience as well.

How intuitive and helpful is the navigation system?
If you are using any kind of javascript or floating menus, this question is crucial to find out if there were any problems from a visitor’s perspective. Oftentimes there are.

Did you notice… (advertising, newsletter signup, video, search box… etc)
Any other elements of the site or design you need to ask?

What would encourage you to return to this site in the future?
Was there something that could have been added to increase the return visitor rate?

Name your three favorite things about the site, and your three least favorite
This usually can bring up the unexpected things about your site that either endear people to it, or make them more likely to bounce quickly.

If you could change one thing on the site, whether it is major or minor, what would be at the top of the to do list?
You will get all kinds of responses, however it can help you gauge what people see as the most important things that hindered their experience. But if multiple people all say how annoying a single element is, such as the auto-play video you placed on the home page is, chances are good you should probably remove it the same night!

Obviously you can change these questions to suit your particular site. I will also be doing a new entry on usability testing specifically on ecommerce sites, to get you read for the holiday season. Look for that by the end of this month!

Note: Anyone contacting me (for consulting or anything else) through the Contact Form recently, please resend. I guess my funky Outlook spam filter thought anything with the “JenniferSlegg.com contact form” in the subject line was pretty darn suspicious and junked them all, even with the protection level set to low. Ah, the joys of Vista! And mini-rant: Why can’t I simply whitelist a particular subject line on the built-in spam fighter?

In the world of long-tail searches, chances are pretty good that visitors are having their initial contact on your site by landing on an internal page of your site rather than your user-friendly home page. But have you ever had a look at one of your internal pages from a “brand new visitor” perspective? Because if you did, chances are good that you might be surprised to see that you are not really giving those new visitors a very sticky experience. So try looking at one of your top internal entry pages through a new visitor’s eyes.

Okay, so we all are just a little biased when it comes to how we see our own sites, especially ones we have poured blood, sweat and tears into. And while doing an eyetracking study can be expensive, you can easily do a poor man’s version of something similar. Sit a friend, preferably one who has little knowledge of your money website, or perhaps a bit of knowledge of the market area without having been a visitor of your site previously.

But first, you need to pick which pages to test. You will need to have a look at any analytics or stats program to find out which pages are your top entry pages (meaning the pages that new visitors on your site visit first), and pick a couple of internal pages that have the highest % of entry page visitors. Then you want to pick a page with a high bounce rate. If you have two pages that each account for 20% of entry page views, but one has an 80% bounce rate while the other is only 25%, it makes sense to use the page with the 80% bounce rate, because for some reason, 80% of all people that visit that internal page will view just that one page before they leave the site. Obviously it makes the most sense for you to figure out why so many people leave after their first page view on your site! You will also want to do a quick check of the page to make sure there isn’t something obvious that is accounting for such a high bounce rate, such as a coding error breaking the page after the header or another equally obvious problem that you can attribute the high bounce rate to. Nothing is more embarassing than bleeding money from a website due to your own mistake! But also look to evaluate what you think of the page overall.

Each time you sit a tester down, instead of loading up your home page, use one of those internal entry pages. You can give a couple of hints, such as “pretend you found this page by searching for popular keyword phrase” or actually have them do that search and find your site that way. But avoid telling him or her everything about your site and what it does. After all, you want to see if your testers can figure that out for themselves.

Do they immediately focus on the content? Or are they lost just trying to find where the article starts because you have two large ad units and a huge header, pushing your article below the fold? Can they tell what the page is about? Are you actually offering up what the people searched for, or is it a slightly skewed version of their keyword search that your tester is having problems finding specifically?

When that mouse starts moving, look and see what it does…. is it heading to the navigation system (hopefully you have one!) or is it wandering all over the place as the person tries to figure out where to go next. Do they seem to be looking for something that is missing, such as a search box?

How to they leave the page? Click the logo to go to the home page (which hopefully is linked to the home page)? Click a breadcrumb link? Leave the page by using the search box? Select something from navigation? Click an ad (although be wary if they go to click AdSense from your own IP address!) Or, gasp, click the back button?

Seeing how new visitors interact with those pages will really help you find and resolve issues you may not have realized you had, simply because you know the site so well. You might also want to ask them questions after they have finished surfing through your site (more on that in List of questions to ask your usability testers) to alert you to thinks you might not have realized, since someone might not neccessarily say that they hate the color scheme as they navigate through, but is definitely something you can discover in a Q&A after the fact.

Think your internal pages are brilliant to begin with? Just go ahead and check your bounce rate on your top internal entry pages and make sure. If it is above 50%, you definitely have some work to do… unless you are an arbitrage site, then hopefully your bounce rate is offset with a high CTR rate!

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!

When you create the content on your landing page, it is important to consider not only the elements that go into your landing page design, but also consider the things that should be avoided. Yet time after time I come across landing pages – some which advertisers are paying premium prices per click to send traffic to – that seem to break many of the landing page rules and very likely result in a high loss of potential conversions.

So what are the things that should and shouldn’t be included on a landing page? Here are some tips on creating and maintaining a high converting landing page for both organic and paid search results. And as an added bonus, some of these also help with your AdWords quality score if you are having issues with it.

Keep reading…