Posted by Ruth Miller on Wed 2nd April 2008 at 09:49 AM, Filed in Network News
Since redesigning our blogs in May 2007, traffic figures have continued to rise dramatically, with our total page impressions per month rising to 1.5 million.
This is a staggering increase of 1000% since January 2007.
Well done to everybody who has contributed. Lets hope our meteoric rise continues for the rest of 2008.
The value of links to and from your site can not be underestimated in a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) context. Tied into this is the kind of text other sites link to you by. This is otherwise known as anchor text. The frequency of links to your site under certain keyword combinations can determine how highly your pages rank within a search engine. For instance, lots of inbound links from other sites with the words “big apple” would help my sites content appear higher up in searches for those keywords.
This principle is widely accepted as a key, bona fide, SEO techique.
Darren at Problogger recently wrote about how this extends to internal links on your blog
He says:
“When you link to yourself (for example linking to a previous link that you’ve written) you should consider doing so with descriptive words of the post rather than generic words.”
Darren offers the following example:
If I wanted to link to my previous post titled ‘blogging for beginners’ in a post rather than linking like this:
‘you can read my post on blogging for beginners here‘
it would be more powerful in terms of the search engine ranking of the post to link to it as:
‘you can read my previous post on the topic, blogging for beginners‘
This makes perfect sense from an SEO perspective. It is also more meaningful to your readership. i.e their more inclined to click on a link pointing to your archives if they have some idea where it’s going to take them. ’Here’ doesn’t really say much about where a link will take you. I am as guilty as the next man on this point - just to confim that I’m well out of my ivory tower!
Posted by Peter Brady on Thu 12th July 2007 at 07:17 PM, Filed in Case Studies
Chantelle Znideric was looking to change her career and go from an employed Graphic Designer to a self employed personal shopper and stylist – her dream job. She planned the career change over 12 months and started with a blog (TopStylista).
Chantelle joined the Orbital Media Network and received a professionally designed blog, plus all the advice she needed to get started. She has posted consistently over the last 12 months with traffic levels now reaching 100,000 page impressions per month. She also has a diary full of styling days from people who have visited her blog and who appreciate her tips, news and witty critique. TopStylista is also generating revenue in it’s own right through advertising, affilitate schemes and sponsorship.
Chantelle said “my blog has gone from nowhere to being one of the leading fashion blogs in the UK, attracting 20,000 unique users a month, many of whom have an interest in my services”. She added “for relatively little cost, the rewards over the past 15 months have been massive.”
1. Release news or a revised perspective on your particular topic.
2. Comment on other blogs - it helps build relationships and traffic.
3. Try to make each post timeless. You want your content to generate traffic years ahead.
Read more...
Both brands and agencies need to wake up to the power of the blogosphere, they are after all religiously followed by millions of fanatical trend setters hungry for information before everyone else (and his dog) gets hold of it!
Therefore to not integrate a blog strategy for your PR should be a crime. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Popular bloggers are a unique entity in themselves – to get results from them you need to understand how they think. They, just like their loyal followers are passionate about their subjects, and it’s obvious from the opinions they share and the audiences they attract, that some are even becoming celebrities in their own right.
They constantly need feeding with ‘hot off the press’ information related to their subject before any of other bloggers in their field get their hands on it… they are therefore ‘competitive trend setters’. Give them what they want, and in a format they can relate to and they will publish it.
Mailing out a standard release is just not enough; they take too long to read and don’t provide immediate relevance. Make bloggers your best friends and they will count on you for cutting edge information. Remember that they also have the power to slate your product/service, therefore you need to have your wits about you. Treat every single blogger with respect and personalise the information you give them, picking out relevance to their individual blogs and audiences.
