Some weeks ago I explained you the difference between Social Traffic and Search Engine Traffic and I told you it is recommended to work on build Search Engine Traffic because with a little work it grows up month by month without having to put as much effort on it as the Social Traffic need. Here are some key factors to increase this traffic:

• Write content constantly, do it daily or almost daily. This is due to two reasons. First one, Search Engines love webs/blogs that update content often so this sites usually rank better than static ones. Second reason, if you have a lot of content there are more chances of being a result of a search, don’t you think it is logical?
• Write good titles for your posts or articles. I mean you have to place some keywords in it, and don’t write too long titles with many words in it. There is a thing called “Keyword density” and it is the ratio of keywords to total words. You must find the point of equilibrium between good titles for your readers and good titles for search engines. Look at the title of this post, Key Factors To Increase Search Engine Traffic, it couldn’t be better. I placed as much keywords as I could (search, engine, traffic, increase, key, factors) and also it is good for readers. This time was easy, other times it is more difficult.
• Place keywords in the post, specially in the first paragraph, and bold them to increase their relevance as I did above. The keyword density is also important in the content, not only in the title. There are people who take in count the exact ratio of keywords to total words and tell about ratios of 15%, 18% as the best ones … I think it is a bit exaggerated to take things so far. Just place your keywords in the text and bold them. You must be aware it may be dangerous to repeat too many times the same keyword in your post. A search engine may notice you want to rank better for that keyword in a not natural way so you can be penalized.
• Write content daily or almost daily…mmm wait, I told you this one before. Yes, it is the most important. Don’t forget it.

This are tactics from the point of view of the content. There is another point of view, the marketing, but we will discuss it other day

If you liked it then share it with others

This post should have been the very first of the series about Marketing Your Blog. This post falls within both categories Marketing and SEO at the same time because it is a very, very important point in these topics. Believe me, you can’t start blogging better than having your own domain name. This is like your business card. Which of the following options sound better?:

• binaryant.wordpress.com
• binaryant.blogspot.com
• www.binaryant.com

I hope you chose the last one, other way we have a problem… No, I’m sure you chose the dot com domain. If you have a blog and you don’t have your own domain I can only think that it is because you don’t know how cheap are the domains nowadays. For example you can register your .com in BlueHost for only $10/year. How much do you spend in sweets every year? Surely more than these $10.

Are you still thinking of you don’t need your own domain? Ok, listen. Imagine that you have your amazing blog under a free sub domain like a .wordpress.com or a .blogspot.com, something like myreallycoolsite.wordpress.com. It is really good so you increase your visitors month by month. You start to rank high on Google and on other search engines because people link your content due to its quality. And suddenly, one day, you realise that you are so good to be hosted under a free, too long, and ugly sub domain. What happen with your ranks, with all those links pointing to your blog, with all the traffic coming to it? That day you will remember the advise someone told you about buying your own domain and start working on it, and also you’ll remember that it only cost $10.

It is true that with some work,effort and time you can redirect the traffic and the links to your new domain name, but as I just said some work, effort and time are needed. So why don’t you save energy and time working on your own domain name from the beginning?

When I started to write this post I told you that it is good to market your blog because it shows a more professional and serious picture of you, but also I told you that it is good in SEO terms. Search engines put more value on domain names that on free sub domain names. And the older the domain is the more value they put on.

I hope to have changed your mind about free sub domains, but if not I’m sure you’ll see it as time goes by and your site grows in popularity.

If you liked it then share it with others

I’m not referring to acting or producing movies. I’m talking in SEO terms. I don’t know how one day I ended my blogging jumps in Tom Cruise’s Official Website. He is celebrating 25 anniversary of his first starring role in a film, you know, Risky Business. When I found his site I didn’t have an English blog so I compared in SEO terms and ranks my Spanish one versus Tom Cruise’s site. Ranks on 9st of May were:

• Binary Ant .es (my Spanish Blog)
  • PR: 3
  • Alexa: 840.508
• Tom Cruise
  • PR: not ranked
  • Alexa: 2.843.682

As you can see I was ahead on ranks and also I was ahead in link baiting. The domain tomcruise.com was registered on 1996 so it was too strange for a so very old domain and also taking in count that it is a Hollywood star domain. I investigated a bit this domain and I got to the conclusion that there are too many things very bad done. For example Google doesn’t like that domain, the reason later, and it is very poor work on link baiting and promotion.

Today, now I have an English blog , I came again to Tom’s Website and I noticed an small change, let’s see the ranks:

• Tom Cruise
  • PR: not ranked
  • Alexa: 159.210

• BinaryAnt .es
  • PR: 3
  • Alexa: 374.359
• BinaryAnt .com
  • PR:0
  • Alexa: 1.300.219 (be careful, I’m going higher and higher)

I’m ahead again in link baiting but now Tom is higher than me in Alexa ranking. How did Tom achieve this improvement? Because things around Tom’s site are more or less equal than the fist time. How did Tom manage to increase his web traffic? I have the answer:

Yes, Tom is paying sponsored links in Google for the keywords “Tom Cruise“. It is unbelievable that the Official Tom Cruise Site doesn’t even rank in the first ten pages of results when you search Google for “Tom Cruise” and I don’t want to imagine where could be appear. Also it doesn’t rank well for “Official Tom Cruise Site“.

What is wrong here? First of all, Tom’s site is a beautiful web with lots of videos and images of all of his movies… but it is one of the worst things you can do to rank well in search engines. In SEO terms the web site is doing the opposite to the recommended rules.

1. It is completely developed in flash!! The web doesn’t have internal links because it doesn’t have pages, all is flash. Spiders can’t crawl this kind of webs, so they can’t index every single part of the web.
2. A web like this, entirely developed in flash, takes a lot of time to load and this causes this two things:
   • The visitor leaves the site tired of waiting every time he clicks on a link.
   • Google penalize the site because it takes long time to load, so the site goes down in rank.

Google doesn’t like Tom’s website. I know that it is difficult for a website like this, or a corporate website, to work on link baiting because it is not possible to exchange links, but you are Tom Cruise!! I’m sure that you can do things quite better.

If you liked it then share it with others

This plugin, All In One SEO Pack, is one that I have been wanting to try out a few weeks ago because it makes certain changes in order to optimize the blog in some SEO points. Well I have to admit that I tested before in the Spanish Binary Ant and I’m totally happy with the results. The necessity of a plugin like this comes from the policy adopted by WordPress developers about Meta tags. The default WordPress installation does not include any Meta components like Meta Tags or Meta Description.

What are Meta Tags? These are lines of code that provide additional information to the search engines. Meta Tag for Keywords is something like:

<meta name="keywords" content="business, entrepeneur, solutions, development" />

and it indicates which are the keywords for the website.

Meta Tag for Description can be something like this:

<meta name="description" content="John Smith's Company provides solutions in
web development." />

and it provides to search engines a description they can use to associate with your website when is part of the result of a search. There are more tags but these two are enought, at least in this post. Are they necessary? Meta Tag for Description is recommended because if you don’t have it the search engine will take the first words that appear in your web as a description. And Meta Tag for Keywords depends on the search engine. Some put more value on it than others, but it takes you only few seconds to put it and also provides more information so I can’t think in a reason for not using it. Having said that let’s continue.

To solve this lack of Meta Tags in WordPress I investigated various plugins until I reached the conclusion that this is most valuable for solving this problem and also it gives solution to other points. The solutions offered by All In the SEO Pack are:

1. Meta Tags for Keywords and Description for your home page,categories, articles…
2. Optimizing titles (in terms of SEO), eliminating unnecessary words of the title and giving preference to the title of the article opposite the name of your blog. It decrease the number of words in the title of the page to give greater value to each, and it locates first the title of the article. Perhaps it’s a bit fuzzy. One example, first the original title and second the optimized one:

• Binary Ant Dot Com » Blog Archive » Plugin All In One SEO Pack
• Plugin All In One SEO Pack | Binary Ant Dot Com

3. Control of duplicated content by the use of “noindex” modifiers in categories and archives.

The installation as simple as ever:

1. Download and unpack the plugin on your computer.
2. Upload to the plugins folder on your server.
3. Activate it.

And the access to the configuration is through the path Settings> All In One SEO Pack. The configuration options are simple and the control panel for this plugin is quite clear. It is a very highly recommended plugin.

If you liked it then share it with others

At the end of February I wrote an article in my spanish blog about an article written by Carl Ocab, What did he learn after 12 months?, and at point 3 Carl stated that Marketing is more important than Content. Although it seems at first glance that it could be because you need to generate a little traffic somehow, bit by bit I see that the content is as important or more than marketing. This reasoning comes from the results I saw month by month in the Spanish version of Binary Ant.

Since I started with the blog I have worked a lot promoting it through social networks, contacting other webmasters, visiting blogs and commenting on them, making linkbaiting… and all this things brought me visits, and also in a higher number each month. So Why I believe content is as important ot more than marketing? Let’s see what benefits we get by writing good content:

• If you write regularly you’ll be much more eligible for being the result of a search. Search engines see that your site is an active one that is updating content often so they can promoted your site upward in search results.
• Having a big amount of information also makes your site more likely that a search is on something that you wrote. I have commented several times, you can extend your range of possible keys for a search result by writing more articles.
• Finally, if your content has some quality is very likely that someone will kink you. For example my WordPress Guide in its Spanish version was commented on several blogs that I never would have thought that I linked.

Write good content is showing an increasingly effect. Today my Spanish blog gets from search engines 40% of the total traffic because I write almost every day. To this if we add the visitors who come because they find useful something that I publish I might say that only by the content I get about 50% of the traffic. Therefore, for this 50%, the content is as important or more than marketing.

Of course, if you have a website where you can not generate daily content you’ll forced to use mostly marketing.

If you liked it then share it with others