• Bring constant traffic to your site
• Create an interactive and dedicated community

First of all, this quick guide doesn’t apply to any of the black hat projects that you’d might have. It simply doesn’t work this way.

You will need to have a site that:

• Is community oriented: this implies one or more of the following:
  • visitors can create accounts on your site
  • visitors can create content on your site
  • visitors can comment on the existing content
  • any other way of interaction between the visitors and your site
• Is not static: this implies that you have periodically fresh content (news/articles)

Using twitter for traffic and community has 2 ways:

1. The passive way. This is pretty straight forward. Create a twitter account, announce that on your site, make a link on the homepage or on your template, add your website to your twitter profile and start using twitter. That rest will follow. Slowly but steady.

2. The active way. This is what this post is about.

• First of all, start doing the steps from the passive way.
• Than use twitter for 1-2 weeks, periodically adding content
• Identify twitter users that might be interested in your site. Do that by searching in Google for: site:twitter.com [keyword]. Where the [keyword] represents the main keywords for your website. If you do that, you’ll get as results people that have used on their twits that keyword. Some of them have used them accidentally, but most of them will have a real interest in your topics.
• Make a list of all the profiles identified. From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones. Many of them will reciprocate.
• Start interacting with the followed profiles, try to answer any conversations.
• Make periodical announcements of new content on your website and be active in answering any feedback.
• If you have an RSS feed for your site, for your own good don’t be an idiot and add that to your twitter account. Is one of the most annoying and lame behaviors and will soon result in people following you to use the block button

Well, that’s it. happy twitting and if you will use this mini guide, feel free to post in comments any results that you will get

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• Due to the nature of content, the law requires is
• Marketing / demographic purposes
• both

This tip doesn’t refer to porn sites. Over there is a simple 2 buttons solution: Are you 18+? YES / NO

This tip is useful for sites  that fall under the 3rd category, sites that require age verification for both legal and marketing purposes (ex: game websites)

There are 2 ways you can do this:

1. Dropdown boxes
2. Text boxes

The correct answer in this case is to use text boxes. This is so because by using dropdowns your demographic data will be false. This happens because in general users are too lazy to go through a scrolling list and identify the correct values. They will just scroll enough to be the legal age and that’s it. If you use dropdowns, don’t be surprised if the web marketing department will say that your latest gory shooter is played by persons aged 50+.

By using text boxes, users are forced to input some data and in this case they just too lazy to lie about it and they’ll input the correct values.

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If you describe to a technical person those features, or even if you only name them, instantly they’ll understand what are they about and they’ll see great use in them. Unfortunately we, technical people, tend to forget that our frame of mind has nothing to do with the regular user. The regular user that comes in huge numbers and it’s our main revenue source. And by forgetting that, we overdevelop things that we like and by doing that we overdelay the launch of the product or we ignore the common features considering them insignificant.

The YouTube features I mentioned above work like total crap. The playlists never display the correct number of videos and the custom players never display all the videos and more than that, this morning were displaying other people playlists. Who the hell cares beside me and maybe a dozen other people. Youtube works well on what is suppsoed to do. Upload and play videos.

If you are in a control position, try explaining to the top management or your client that the fancy crap he needs are not worth any delay. Time is money and the markets are crowded. Release in small chunks and release often. Keep in mind that your products has a final target in the masses not in the elites. Screw the early adopters. Let them complain. If your unique, fancy (and useless most of the cases)  features are so important, the early adopters will wait for them.

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First of all you need to validate any email address that your users use for registering an account. This is important for 2 reasons:

1. Helps those users that misspell their address
2. Prevents bot attacks (on one of my sites I had a bot that created 10k accounts in 2h)

Emailing your users, gives them a reminder of your service. I consider myself an early adopter and I create accounts on various services and than I tend to forget them. If I don’t have an email from you in the first 5min, your chances to be forgotten are very high.

Also, periodically email your users, especially those with none to less activity to remind them how useful your service is and if you had added new features. There is no golden rule on how often you have to email them but from a few tests you will be able to figure it out.

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So, moving to the subject. Google recently announced that their Sitelinks feature from the SERPs has doubled the number of items from 4 to 8. Even though this has been announced only 7th december, I’ve seen it active for over a month.

Why Sitelinks are important? Well, take it this way. If you are #1 for a query, a user has 9(NINE!) access points to your website. Nine access points that are above the fold. You really couldn’t ask for more.

If you look at what Google says about Sitelinks, you’ll see that they are pretty vague and mysterious about it and they give you no hints on how you can control them.

Here are a few hints based on my experience:

• Sitelinks appear only when a query shows your main page as #1. I haven’t seen any examples for secondary pages, but it also applies for the first page of a subdomain. Usually any query can trigger sitelinks, but I’ve seen a few examples where it doesn’t.
  • TIP: Start again optimizing your main page for high traffic keywords
• Sitelinks are available for Google.com and in very few cases for international domains.
  • TIP: plan your optimization with the .com in mind and the rest will follow
• Sitelinks appear for old domains in general. My site where I’ve observed them is 2 years old
  • TIP: if you are #1 and you don’t have sitelinks, don’t pannic. They will appear in time
• Sitelinks appear for high volume of content.
  • TIP: My site has ~3000 pages. If you have very few pages, start creating content.
• Sitelinks are in fact, pages that have the most internal links (in your site). That’s why you will usually see sitelinks that mirror a website menu (menu links are on all pages).
  • TIP: This is valuable information about how Sitelinks are created. Try to determine what are the most important 8 pages within your website (beside the homepage) and get to work. Use nofollow on site wide links that are not important and link those 8 pages from every page. For those 8 links try using the following in any combination: title attribute, strong/em tag, h1,2,3.
• Sitelinks labels. It seems that those are extracted from the text of the links and not from the title or other content on the page.
  • TIP: Pay attention on how you are linking your target pages and keep the same text all over the site. For maximum effect, try using a maximum of 2 words.
• Even though you cannot control directly what sitelinks you have, you can remove unwaanted ones.
  • TIP: In order to do that, you need to have a Google Webmaster Account and your site authenticated. If you already have Sitelinks for your site, you’ll find them there and you can block those that are innacurate. It takes ~7days for the changes to propagate in the SERPs. Note that once you remove a link, it will not be automatically replaced with another. For my website I have removed 2 links that weren’t appropriate and now I have only 6. Perhaps in time Google will add another 2.
• Google Operating System mentions another factor: traffic data. Basically this implies that Google uses data gathered trough Google Toolbar (or other analytics means like Google Analytics or Google Adsense) to determine what are your most visited pages. Looking at my Sitelinks and at my top 50 pages I cannot say that this is 100% correct. Only 2 out of 8 pages could have been turned into sitelinks through this. Even if this is true, it looks that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you receive from Google but your general traffic for a specific page:
  • TIP: In order to control the traffic for a specific page, here are a few things that you can do.
    • Design your layout in such way that your target pages receive the most traffic
    • Use social tools (digg, del.icio.us,stumble upon) to dirrect traffic to your most important 8 pages.

Well this is all. Hope you find this useful in your SEO efforts. If your lucky enough to have sitelinks, start optimizing those pages for the best conversion, and if you don’t have them right now, I hope that this guide will help you.

See you on the second part to learn why being #1 is not so important and what you can do to make it important

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Today, I am gonna tell you why is a good thing.

I have a small site that’s one of the best in its niche. A few weeks ago, I received a link exchange email and I checked the website requesting it. To my surprise, it was a total clone of my own website, starting from the categories, content and monetization. Unfortunatelly for the sad bastard, here are my aces:

• My site is 2 years old
• Lots of natural links
• Lots of authority links
• 8000 RSS feed subscribers
• Excellent internal links on Google

Why the appearance of the clone is a good thing? Well, in order to take my position in the niche, he is forced to throw in the heavy artillery. He is forced to try a lot of optimization methods and he is forced to gain a LOT of incoming links. Due to the fact that he is a cheap competitor, he is not buying links but he is gaining them through request and submissions. Because my site was doing great through link baits and natural link growth, I’ve never payed attention (read this as: I was too lazy) to gain more external links. Now, the competitor is doing all the hard work (research) for me and all I have to do is to use Yahoo Site Explorer to track his actions and follow his steps

To summarize: if a competitor appears don’t go nuts. If it is a spammer he’ll get kicked by search engines algorithmically. If it is a good competitor and you have some advantages on him, analyze his steps and stay one step ahead always.

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Once the Live webmaster tools were announced, I decided to give it a try. The tools that they are currently providing are not enough not raise my interest so I decided to test drive it with the banned (?)  site.

Today, I saw that the site got back, more pages indexed and with more keywords in the SERPs (the traffic still sucks though).

Now I am going to submit a few more websites to see if the pattern repeats.

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The good news is that I like the idea and the current implementation. But, nobody is perfect, at least in the early stages, and here is my wish list:

• I like the fact that they promote the fact that you can leave their service and take the comments with you. This means freedom and is important. But the sad part is there are no tutorials or tools on how to do this. I am aware that technically this is not possible for Blogger based blogs, but they can build up some wordpress tools.
• Comments provide feedback to blog owners. But more than that they provide unique content for search engines. Due to the fact that Intensedebate is javascript based this factor dissapears. Again. Make a php script for WP blogs.
• Search. Where is the freakin search on my Intensedebate account?
• Details about the commenters. Wordpress gives me the IP of a commenter. A service like Intensedebate can offer more than that (IP/Country/Browser etc)
• Create ghosts accounts for those that are not already users. This implies that an account is created for each person based on his email address. By doing that a ghost account can be claimed through email validation
• Give me an option to stay logged in. I hate logging in every day.

This are a few things that came up in my mind. I’ll add more if I remember any. I am very aware that the things I’ve listed are not a piece of cake. But this is what I want
P.S. Please guys pay attention to the javascript. I had 2 sites down for a few hours because of that. If that happens again I am out. With or without comments

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Buy a custom module. For this there is Plingger which is very cheap, only 10USD. This ping by default 13 engines and more can be added.  If you are in a hurry this is for you.

If you are not willing to invest in such a module there is another option for you: Feedburner. Here are the steps that you need to make:

1. Go to Feedburner and burn a feed for each of your sections.
2. For each feed, go to the “Publicize” tab and activate the “Pingshot” service.
3. Check the  Google Blog Search Engine and Ping-O-Matic and than add 3 more search engines of your choice

If you want to deeply integrate your Pligg based website with feedburner, here is a tutorial on how to do it. This will allow you to get statistics for your RSS feeds.

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The service has also an associated blog that will let the users know all the latest development so don’t forget to subscribe to their feed.

read more | digg story

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