The Easy Guide

He started developing blogs and websites in 2005, and The Easy Guide is the place where he shares what he learned along the way. The blog was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently it is ranked among the 500 most popular blogs in the world (according to Technorati) and among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world (according to AdvertisingAge).

Rey has also provided consulting services for many companies and organizations (including the United States federal government), and he is the founder of the online marketing and business training program Online Profits.

When he is not involved with online projects, he likes to write in the third person about himself.

The WebConfs website has a very useful list of “Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website.” Basically they collected all the major factors that might affect the search optimization of your site, attributing a score to them. The score ranges from -3, which is very bad for your site, to +3, which is very good. Below you will find a summary of the most important factors:

Keywords

• Keyword in title tag (+3)
• Keyword in URL (+3)
• Keyword density in document (+3)
• Keyword in H1 and H2 headings (+3)
• Keyword in the beginning of document (+2)
• Keyword in ALT tags (+2)
• Keyword in Meta tags (+1)
• Keyword stuffing (-3)

Links

• Anchor text of inbound links (+3)
• Origin of inbound links (+3)
• Links from similar sites (+3)
• Links from .edu and .gov sites (+3)
• Anchor text of internal links (+2)
• Many outgoing links (-1)
• Outbound links to bad neighbors (-3)
• Cross-linking (-3)

Meta Tags

• Description Meta Tag (+1)
• Keywords Meta Tag (+1)
• Refresh Meta Tag (-1)

Content

• Unique content (+3)
• Frequent updates (+3)
• Age of content (+2)
• Poor coding or design (-2)
• Invisible text (-3)
• Doorway pages (-3)
• Duplicate content (-3)

Other factors

• Site accessibility (+3)
• Sitemap (+2)
• Site size (+2)
• Site age (+2)
• Top-level domain (+1)
• URL length (0)
• Hosting downtime (-1)
• Flash (-2)
• Misused Redirects (-3)

Google is updating the PageRank scores as you read this. What is PageRank? According to Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Notice that in reality what is being updated is the toolbar score, which is the value that you see through the Google toolbar when visiting websites. The “internal” Pagerank, the one used for ranking websites on the search results, is actually constantly updated. You can read more about this topic on a very detailed article from Search Engine Land titled “What is Google PageRank? A Guide for Searchers and Webmasters.”

Inserting the rel=’nofollow’ tag within links will inform Google and other search engines that they should not follow that link (i.e. not sharing the link love). Most of the times using this attribute is a bad idea because it will remove the value of external links, like in the Wikipedia case.

What about the links pointing to your Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed)? Feedburner provides an outstanding service and they do deserve recognition, but could a rel=’nofollow’ tag on those links have some benefits?

First of all many blogs have their Feedburner feed page ranking higher on search engines than the blog itself for most keywords. This is not optimal since a potential reader might end up visiting the feed page and not visiting the blog at all.

Secondly, provided you publish full feeds, the Feedburner feed page will also have the same content of your Homepage, possibly resulting on duplicate content penalties.

Inserting a nofollow tag on the feed links could resolve the first problem and improve the second one, specially if your feed links are sitewide and your blog has a high Pagerank.

Update: Marketing Pilgrim has a post with more suggestions for this issue.

Google Blog Search is a new tool that is gaining popularity on the Internet lately. The Blog Search might also be a good source of visitors if your blog rank on the first positions for specific keywords, but what factors does Google take into account to elaborate the search results?

The “Seo by the Sea” blog has an interesting article analyzing a new patent from Google that contains some indicators about the positive and negative factors affecting blog ranking, check it out:

Positive Factors:

• Popularity of the blog (RSS subscriptions)
• Implied popularity (how many clicks search results get)
• Inclusion in blogrolls
• Inclusion in “high quality” blogrolls
• Tagging of posts (also from users)
• References to the blog by sources other than blogs
• Pagerank

Negative Factors:

• Predictable frequency of posts (short bursts of posts might indicate spam)
• Content of the blog does not match content of the feed
• Content includes spam keywords
• Duplicated content
• Posts have all the same size
• Link distribution of the blog
• Posts primarily link to one page or site

The Google Blogoscoped blog has an interesting article covering the basics of search engine optimization. There are some basic guidelines for making your blog more search engine friendly, with tips about writing original stuff, making the posts accessible and spreading the word about your site.

The most useful part, however, is the final checklist on SEO techniques that should be avoided, check it out:

1. Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong
2. Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it
3. Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 ranking”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort
4. Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you
5. Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on)
6. Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content
7. Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites (and don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free)
8. Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it
9. Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content
10. Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such
11. Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines
12. Don’t “over-optimize”; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job
13. In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low

You can read the full article here.

The Meta Description Tag (placed between the head and /head tags) is used by some search engines to create the snippets of text that you see right below the results on search queries. It does not carry any weight in the search algorithm of Google, but it does carry a certain weight for Yahoo and other smaller search engines so you should not neglect it altogether.

One problem with the Meta Description Tag of most websites is that it is static. People usually include a general description about the site, which is suitable only to the home page. Should a visitor find an internal page (say a single post) through a search engine the tag will be the same, containing no information about the content of that internal page whatsoever. You can use the SEO tools listed here to check the quality of your meta description tags.

In order to optimize your Meta Description Tag you should make it dynamic, making sure that it will include the first few lines of text of every single page on your site. A very simple way to do this under the Wordpress platform is to make the Description tag equal to the post excerpt, like the code below illustrates.

<meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt() ?>" />

Alternatively you can download a plugin called Head META Description. Just upload the plugin, activate it and insert the following line on your header:

<?php head_meta_desc(); ?>

The plugin will generate the Meta Description automatically, either by extracting the first words of your posts or by displaying the post excerpt (you can configure it).

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation.

A robots.txt is a simple text file that can be created with Notepad. If you are using Wordpress a sample robots.txt file would be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/

“User-agent: *” means that all the search bots (from Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on) should use those instructions to crawl your website. Unless your website is complex you will not need to set different instructions for different spiders.

“Disallow: /wp-” will make sure that the search engines will not crawl the Wordpress files. This line will exclude all files and foldes starting with “wp-” from the indexation, avoiding duplicated content and admin files.

If you are not using Wordpress just substitute the Disallow lines with files or folders on your website that should not be crawled, for instance:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /any other folder to be excluded/

After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and you are done!

This is a guest post by Tony Hue. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Over a week ago, we welcomed the arrival of 2010 with much anticipation. 2009 was a year many people simply wanted to forget and move on from. For bloggers everywhere, the beginning of a new year is a reinvigorating time to reflect on the past year and look forward to the promise of the future ahead.

So, how did your blog fare in 2009? Regardless of the level of success you achieved there is always room to improve. Let’s take a look at 18 timeless blogging tips on how to improve your blog and stand above the competition.

1. Judge a blog by its cover – If it doesn’t look pretty, people have a hard time focusing on what you have to say. Take a look at the home page of your blog, focusing on the uppermost region (without scrolling down). Would you want to take a look around after arriving on the home page as a new visitor?

2. Comment smartly and consistently – Bloggers are tired of seeing the overused “Nice post!” or “This is really interesting!” Stand out by trying to put some thought into your comments and, most importantly, make it sound like you actually read the article.

3. Get a Gravatar- Before you start commenting on blogs, it’s a good idea to register your own gravatar. If you follow step 2, readers and blog owners will become familiar with you for better or for worse.

4. Show your personality in your writing – Establishing a voice in your writing is a crucial element is producing content that people will want to keep coming back over and over again for more. Don’t be that Average Joe in a sea of Average Joes.

5. Use plenty of pictures in your blog posts – No one wants to see endless blocks of text, especially while reading online. The moment your readers’ mind wanders off, they’ll be jumping to another site before you know it. Here are some great sources for finding images: Flickr, Photobucket, picapp, Google Image Search.

6. Study SEO like your life depended on it - Driving traffic to your blog through search engines is what you call “organic traffic.” Other types include referral sites, and direct traffic. Of the three mentioned, organic traffic is what you need to be able to sustain long-term visibility of your blog. To help you get started, take a look at this comprehensive guide on SEO: The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings For Your Blog.

7. Start with a WordPress.com blog and then switch over to a self-hosted WordPress blog - Three reasons to use WordPress: 1) Lots of people use it 2) Recognition and reputation 3) Strong support. If you are just started blogging, I recommend you get a free WordPress.com blog to get your feet wet. It can’t hurt you to do so and besides, what’s the rush?

8. Avoid grammar mistakes by proofreading – One thing that really annoys me about a blog is poor grammar. If you were listening to your teacher lecture about quantum physics and his grammar is dreadful, you would want to leave that class in a heartbeat. Same thing with blogs. You came looking for value but it’s all mixed up with a misplaced “has” and “their” and terrible spelling. Would you want to keep reading? Probably not.

9. Make you blog content rich in media – In my Studio Art class last quarter, we studied about human culture and psychology (Shrug). It would’ve been the most boring class in my entire schedule if my professor had not included numerous videos and other media into out 1- 1/2 hour long lectures. It kept me attentive and engaged. and helped me connect topics more cohesively. In other words, utilize the power of Youtube and other media sources and incorporate them accordingly into your blog content.

10. Figure out your niche and stick to it – If someone asked you what your blog was about, would you be able to answer without hesitation? If not, write down in 140 characters or less(no pun intended) a succinct and clear definition of what your blog is about. E.g: Pet Food Blog- The Blog where Pet Owners can Learn How to Better Feed Their Beloved Pets. The second important thing is “to keep the main the main thing.” If you feel like writing a post about electron polarization and its effect on our ecosystem (shrug), do you really think that readers to your Pet Food Blog would appreciate it?

11. Blog on a set schedule – There is no right answer to how often one should blog. Whatever schedule you start out with, make sure you stick with it every week. Take for example, Mashable. After visiting the site a couple of times, you can safely expect to see a new article every single day. The important thing is that they stick with that routine.

12. Reply to comments on your blog – Replying to questions or comments from readers is your way of letting people know that your blog is “alive.” It gives readers the opportunity to interact and engage in conversation. Best thing of all? It artificially inflates the true number of people who comment on your blog. Very sweeeeeet.

13. Make it easy for readers to navigate your blog – If it takes more than 3 seconds to look for a search bar or category list on your blog, than your site’s navigation needs to be improved. No one likes the feeling of being in an unfamiliar place with no directions to their destination. They feel desperate, unhappy, and hopeless. The thing with being lost in an unfamiliar site as opposed to being lost in a shopping mall is that readers can easily exit with a single click of a button. This will definitely not help your blog traffic.

14. Put an author section in your blog posts – No one wants to read material written by a face-less author, let alone by one without a name. Check out this article by Chris Spooner on how you to create your own author section.

15. Forget about the stats – How much time do you spend checking the stats of traffic to your blog? You’ll be amazed by how much more productive you will be if you focus on maximizing the time you spend writing new blog posts instead. One method to fight off your debilitating addiction for numbers is to disconnect your computer from the internet. Say what?! Yep, that’s right. If you can’t get online, you can’t get look at your stats. Pull out Microsoft Word and start writing your next blog post there. It’ll work out. Trust me.

16. Don’t think about making money…at first – If making money from your blog is your primary goal, I will not argue against that. The problem with focusing solely on money in the beginning is that you lose sight of the far more significant goal every new blog must reach first: quality content. What good will you provide your readers if you only post hundreds of affiliate links and self-promotional articles in the hope of winning people’s credit card numbers? Don’t be greedy. Money is great but don’t let it destroy your blog.

17. Write killer headlines - With eye-catching headlines, you have effectively completed over 50% of your blog’s advertising. Tell me, would you rather read an article titled, “How to Cook Delicious Spaghetti Sauce” or “How to Make Your Spaghetti Sauce Taste Orgasmic” ? (I apologize if you were eating) Anyways, the point is to avoid the overused and generic blog titles and strive for ones that are unique and thought-provoking.

18. Guest post – Don’t let the thought of submitting your written articles to other reputable blogs intimidate you. Remember, if you don’t try, how can you possibly succeed?

So what are you waiting for? 2010 is almost over! Time waits for nobody!

Tony Hue is a broke college student mired hopelessly in mountains of debt. Send him a check by visiting his blog LonePlacebo, where he writes about social media, technology, and his hilariously sad life. He’s also on Twitter @loneplacebo.