On this fine April Fool’s day BIGLIST foregos the tricks and brings you yet another collection of better than average SEO & SEM blog reviews. Over the past 2 years we’ve reviewed over 1,000 SEO blogs and we offer you 5 more to add to your RSS reader and get search engine smart. Think Traffic – This blog by internet entreprenuer Corbett Barr makes some serious promises: “…teach you the techniques, tools and knowledge you need to build real, sustainable web traffic without a big budget.” Sounds pretty good to me. Corbett relates his experiences with past projects and growing an audience for Think Traffic to the benefit of readers. This very new blog offers practical tips and is well designed enough to get our top listing for this week’s review. Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg – Best selling author of multiple books, Bryan Eisenberg begged me for months to add his new blog to the BIGLIST. I challenged Bryan to write another best selling book, start a new company, become a keynote speaker at several popular industry conferences and lose at least 30 pounds. (Hey, we set the bar high for the BIGLIST). Of course, I’m kidding about the challenge (and the begging). Bryan has accomplished all of those things and much more while writing an excellent blog on conversion optimization and internet marketing strategy with his brother Jeffrey, who is also a best selling author, keynote speaker and online marketing strategist for major brands. Jeff Bullas’s Blog – Jeff works as a sales and marketing manager at Infinity Technologies and his self-titled blog flavors towards social media – offering examples, case studies, lists of tips posts and insights from setting aside his traditional marketing roots and current focus on building trust and relationships with customers through social media, permission and inbound marketing. CanuckSEO – Long time internet marketing veteran Jim Rudnick writes with passion and flair about “Canadian SEO for Google Success!” as well as small business, local SEM and plenty of flavorful opinion posts on a variety of search marketing industry topics. Go for the tips, stay for the story telling and enthusiasm. Honorable Mention Lip Service – Laura Lippay is an ex-circus performer, SEO pioneer, very classy woman and currently Director of Technical Marketing for Yahoo! Media. Laura teases us all by occasionally writing about life and search marketing on this blog that just isn’t active enough to be added to the full BIGLIST. But the Feb 2010 posts are certainly worth an Honorable Mention. Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badges page .
Posts Tagged: traffic
17
Mar 10
Live from SXSW: Igniting U.S. fans for the 2010 World Cup
Online marketers of all stripes could relate when Chris Hall of the U.S. Soccer Federation quoted basketball great John Wooden at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas: “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” The Federation is ramping up their online game in anticipation of the June 11 start of the 2010 World Cup , the most widely viewed sporting event in the world. Tuesday’s SXSW Interactive session World Cup 2010: Engaging U.S. Soccer Fans Online laid out its numerous branding and execution challenges: The U.S. Soccer Federation has no broadcast rights to the World Cup. The World Cup 2010 brand, all game footage and multimedia belong to FIFA . Soccer as a spectator sport is barely on the U.S. sports radar. There’s an ardent underground community of fans, but the sport is just beginning to gain a foothold in this country’s sports consciousness. American soccer fans’ allegiance is largely local, yet the U.S. Soccer Federation has no local presence. Many soccer fans in the U.S. are in the Hispanic community. Marketing to a bilingual fan base adds layers of complexity. Organizationally, the U.S. Soccer Federation is still in the process of shifting from a command-and-control culture to a culture of empowering nonstaff to have brand control. The danger zones for social media tend to be politics, religion and sports. The organization expects they will have uninterrupted wireless access in South Africa. But it can’t bank on it. To rise to these significant challenges, the digital team at the U.S. Soccer Federation has: Done its homework . As the joke goes, English football fans are likelier to change their spouse than change their team allegiance. So the U.S. Soccer Federation talked with European football club peers to tap into their online strategy: Treat supporters as part of the family, give them what they want and keep them engaged. Decluttered its Web site . So far, the team’s Web work has focused on making ussoccer.com easy to find (via search engine optimization) and engaging in a way that drives passion, providing unique, behind-the-scenes perspectives, player interviews, off-the field footage that captures the excitement of the sport and videos of what the team is doing to prepare, travel to and experience the competition in South Africa. The team has also unified the site’s look and feel. Previously, the blog wasn’t connected to or telling the story of the U.S. Soccer Federation brand, so it was recently moved over from Blogspot to give a sense of brand consistency. According to Hall, the Federation considers the site a work in progress, not a one-time redesign. Activated brand evangelists . They’ve made it easy for fans to embed U.S. Soccer Federation video onto their blogs, sites and social networks. To enhance this sharing experience, ooyala.com has implemented an anchor-tag system which enables users to point directly to specific moments in the video that are relevant to them. Created foundations for real-world community . Pluck Media , recently acquired by Demand Media , has assisted with the Federation’s social-media strategy and elevated the level of user-generated content via blog and forum commenting. The Federation has also implemented a bar program that allows local bars to self-identify as places where the games are screened so local fans can watch matches together. Since bars are not always appropriate venues, the organization is also exploring other ways to bring families of fans together offline, such as house parties and community screenings. This kind of grass-roots organizing will be a focus of the Federation’s strategy moving forward. Closely monitored what fans are saying and where users are embedding their videos. The room was packed during the panel, replete with soccer fans and geeks who devoured the presentation but were not satisfied with the pace of the U.S. Soccer Federation’s progress. In the Q-and-A that followed, audience members said they want more passion in the coverage, more power for the fans to contribute to the site, better mobile accessibility and more sophisticated geo-based services such as Gowalla and Foursquare. They also homed in on how behind-the-curve the Federation is on Spanish-language adoption. The reasonable but unsatisfying answer — that Hispanic audiences are an important of the equation long term, but short term, they’re a small portion of their traffic — did not seem to satisfy these, the harshest critics. Still, the changes are a step in the right direction and can serve as guideposts for the rest of us who are reinventing and fine-tuning our own online strategies. Image credit, JM-Design , via Shutterstock
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Live from SXSW: Igniting U.S. fans for the 2010 World Cup
24
Feb 10
Web Linking – Important For Building Traffic
Many people think that they have an idea that will make quite a commotion on the internet. They build a business plan, create a professional looking website, and then they are confused and dismayed when they evaluate their web traffic and find out that almost know own is taking the time to check out their pages. These people forgot (or never knew) that the most important tactic for building consistent web traffic is web linking.
Many people don’t realize how integral web linking is to the success or failure of a particular website. In order to build a successful brick and mortar business, people will ask their friends to spread the word via personal communication, or they will put up signs or take out an ad in the newspaper. In the world of online business, web linking is the same type of strategy.
One of the most important factors to getting noticed by thousands, if not, millions of viewers on the internet are web linking. And this is a term that is used to imply how popular you are amongst viewers, other sites that have strong web traffic, and most of all, how well you are ranked in the search engines.
If you’re going to leverage web linking as a tool that will help to increase the popularity of your site, you’ve got to create a strategy for getting other sites to include links to you on their most popular pages. This can be hard, as all sites know that it is more advantageous to have an incoming link than an outgoing link.
Another thing that you have to think about when you are building your web linking networks is that you only want to build back links on sites that have something to do with the product or service that you’re offering.
The major search engines will notice if you are getting web linking from random sites that have nothing to do with your mission, and they will drop you down in the search results as a punishment for this sloppy tactic.
The best way to execute a web linking strategy is to hire an internet marketing firm that has experience promoting sites and businesses like yours. This way, you can be sure that you will get targeted exposure that will deliver the traffic you need.
Traffic is the lifeblood of a healthy website, and if your numbers are struggling, it’s time to try something new. Click here to learn about how web linking can increase your profits.