Simple, his kungfu was better than mine.

Actually it’s a lot more complicated than that but not by much. First, to truly understand why bavotasan.com is a higher ranking, we should first understand some of the mechanics. Google PageRank (as we’ve talked about before) is just one measure of a web site’s success but it’s a critical one. It measures how much Google believes your website is worth and in the process, how much value they give to it. A high PR value means a better placement in the results, so getting a high PR is the first step to getting a great SEO value.

Getting a PR of 0 is easy, everybody starts with one. Getting a one is still fairly simple, a two is what most should aim for, a three means Google has faith in you, four means you’re pretty impressive, five … you’re on fire and six? Now six is something you should envy. It means that you’re heads and tails above the rest, so how do you get a PageRank of six?

Step one … have a website people care to read. I’m always impressed with how great the content on Chris’s website is. It’s not just good, it’s great. He takes the time to research his posts, he puts a lot of effort into it and in the end he works hard. That’s the first step, make sure the content you write is worth writing.

Step two … get people to link to you. On this step, Chris is a master. My website has ~216 people linking to it (you can always see it here) but bavotasan.com …. 5,370 people link to his website! That’s right … Chris has over 5,000 more people linking to his website than I do, so it’s no wonder that he’s kicking my butt with a PageRank of 6 vs. my PageRank of 5.

So, the secret to successful online marketing?

1) Write things people want to read

2) Get people to link to your great content

3) … there’s got to be more right?

Well … as for #3, I want to hear from you so here’s my idea …

Win a Free iPod

Chris’s website (http://www.bavotasan.com) is one that I truly love, it’s a great site with a lot of useful information but that’s not why he’s kicking my butt so here’s my challenge to all of you.

Write a post on your blog and tell me why Chris’s website is kicking my PageRank ass and I’ll enter your name to win an iPod, it doesn’t even have to be purple. I’ll order a brand new iPod Nano from Apple’s website and ship it anywhere in the US or Canada for one lucky winner.

Include a link to this article as well as at least one article on Chris’s website and leave me a comment below with a link to your submission. Posts must be submitted prior to October 31st and will be tallied between the 1st and 15th of November, you can enter multiple times from different domains but there’s only one iPod to give away. If you’d prefer to email me your link, feel free.

Meta Tags are Dead

There’s absolutely no proof that major search engines ignore META data, in fact my experience is that well used meta tags are almost always rewarded while horrible meta tags are almost always punished. Make sure that the meta tags you use on each page are specific to that specific content and relevant.

Multiple Domain Names Help Your Business

There’s some truth to this rumor but only if you use them right (Marketing With Sub Domains and Other Neat Tricks). If your business has 100 domain names and they all reproduce the same content, you’ll actually hurt yourself because Google will confuse content as repetitive. Instead, install a copy of WordPress MU (multiuser) and host 100 completely different websites, each with valuable information and resources specific to those domain names or redirect your domain names using .htaccess level redirects to tell Google your domain is pointing to another.

Doorway Pages Help Your Ranking

This is a big one, but it’s completely untrue! Doorway pages are special pages designed as landing pages which are specifically programmed to appeal to visitors but more importantly override major search engines understand of what your website is all about. Doorway pages are only linked from external websites and use a series of ‘black hat SEO’ techniques to override the search engines …. why doesn’t it work? Simple, major search engines such as Google hate being tricked. Remember, Google isn’t a company it’s a culture and the people who make up that culture want to be the best search engine in the world. If they believe you’re lying to them, they’ll kick you off their search engine.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s are Critical

No so fast, they make look great and even show up highlighted in result pages but there’s no concrete evidence to suggest making your URL’s pretty vs. database generated strings has any impact on your rankings at all. In fact, Matt Cutt’s (Google’s voice to the people and all around SEO guru) makes it clear that Google’s smart enough to ignore SEO friendly URL’s. So should you stop using them? Not a chance, they don’t hurt and they make the site easier  for people to use.

SEO is a One Time Fix

Hiring a reputable SEO consultant isn’t a one time fix, there are many aspects to building a great search engine ranking and it takes time, effort and patients.

A while back, I mentioned that I went down to New Orleans to help a friend out on his website and since early April, I’ve been consumed with the Great Chefs website, it’s not completely finished yet and I’m sure there will be many changes over the coming months but I wanted to share the progress with you and explain some of the choices so that other restaurants and chefs could see how the Internet can be better utilized for their business.

Rich Search Engine Friendly Content

For those who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I’m a huge fan of content. In fact, I don’t believe there’s anything more important on a website and when it comes to making a website successful, content truly is king.

SEO Features

Search Engine Optimization isn’t about tricking Google, it’s about helping Google understand what’s on your website and that’s exactly what we do with Great Chefs. Take for example the recipe page, this page has been carefully designed to contain significant value for Google and other search engines without taking away from the value of the page for the reader. In fact, the page was designed to provide the reader with quality navigation before worrying what Google found.

This is the true strength of a website, serving the needs of the user, your customers while ensuring the information is easily read and understood by popular search engines. The Great Chefs website includes SEO tactics hidden from the general public but optimized for search engines including:

1. automated sitemap.xml creation and optimization which helps major search engines find deep pages it might otherwise miss;
2. automated notification services to major search engines of page updates, additions and changes to the structure of the website which ensures an accurate listing on engines;
3. creation and maintenance of META data tags for search engines including the powerful META description and META keyword tags for all pages;
4. optimized nofollow and noindex META data for duplicate content to avoid being penalized for content appearing in multiple areas;
5. W3C compliant xHTML 1.0 publishing structure;
6. canonical URL’s to indicate content which appears on Great Chefs website as original
7. enforced www. to ensure all pages are only indexed on the main (www.greatchefs.com) domain, not a secondary domain such as greatchefs.com.

In addition to these hidden tactics for optimizing the website, the pages also feature a wide variety of tactics clearly visible to users of the website.

1. rich pages with links to free giveaways, each containing descriptive titles and appropriate attributes (rel, title, href);
2. proper use of the HTML <title> tag to inform search engines that a webpage is about specific items. For example, Bermuda Wahoo and Lentils with Foie Gras as a title;
3. use of attractive website addresses such as http://www.greatchefs.com/bananas-foster-bread-pudding/ instead of http://www.greatchefs.com/?p=4507 to help visitors find content;
4. proper use of the <h1> and <h2> heading tags to ensure the webpage structure is clear to both visitors and search engine robots;
5. deep linking from products and free giveaways to similar content on the website, designed to help users locate items of interest;
6. inclusion of a comprehensive sitemap for visitors to locate content easily;
7. an easy to use search tool, providing easy access to all areas of the website

Promoted Content

Beyond simply deep linking content (the process of ensuring pages other than your homepage are linked to), I also wanted to highlight and feature the great programs Great Chefs Television has created over the years and add some distinct color to the pages. To accomplish this, I added a special highlighted content at the bottom of the pages. This area is automatically generated each time a page is cached (we’ll get the that in a moment) and randomly selects three products from the store, tests to see if there is a featured graphic and displays it along with a text description. This way, each webpage has a different collection of three great TV shows at the bottom, giving both users and search engines the ability to find distinctly different content.

Interlinked Content

One of the things which pleased me most about the way the Great Chefs website turned out is it’s ability to automatically link and re-link content from other areas of the website. For example, the free daily videos are linked from both the easily accessible free cooking videos page as well as each individual series.

This allows visitors to quickly locate videos which have been published from a given series (for example, Great Chefs Great Cities) to determine if they would like to buy the series similar to how the video game industry would let you download a free trial version.

Free Recipes

With over 700 amazing chefs in the Great Chefs family, the television program has thousands of award winning recipes and books to share with the world. Every day, the people at Great Chefs select three wonderful recipes from their archives and post them for free on the website.

To make sure you never miss a great free recipe, I’ve built in a number of tools:

Subscribing to Great Chefs

To help ensure people have access to all our great free recipes,  the website automatically published the latest recipe links to both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re familiar with RSS readers or have an email account, you can also receive free daily updates to the recipes via email subscription or RSS feeds hosted by Google.

Free Videos

What kind of television station would put up a website and not give away free, award winning cooking shows? Every day, Great Chefs posts two recipes from their hit TV show directly to YouTube where fans can subscribe to be kept up to date and watch the program in High Quality.

You can also receive notifications via Facebook and Twitter, email subscription or RSS feeds. In fact, if you really want to make the most of the Great Chefs Television free videos, you can even subscribe to the service on your iPhone or iPod via the iTunes store or the PodCast service!

Chef Biographies

With over 700 chefs appearing in 2,100 series episodes and hundreds of more specials the Great Chefs website is home to biographies on the vast majority of the chefs who have graced the television program. Of course no index is complete, so if you know any links or projects these Great Chefs are involved in, why not comment on their profiles!

Blog

Each area of the website, including the videos, recipes and biographies includes the ability for visitors to leave comments and links to related content. Soon, the website will also feature a daily blog for those interested in cooking shows and the industry as a whole.

DVD Store

Perhaps the most important part of the website is the store. While most people never reach the sales pages of the Great Chefs store, it’s critical that visitors are made aware of the fact it’s possible to purchase the product. Simply put, while you can watch the show for free online the purpose on the website is to sell DVD’s.

With that in mind, each free DVD (or recipe) page has been designed to offer links to the DVD from which it was created and the homepage of the website is set to promote the DVD’s upon each visit.

On the DVD pages themselves, navigation makes it easy to purchase the discs as either a complete set or individual items, with the focus being on ensuring customers are able to purchase online using Googles secure checkout system or via a toll free telephone number.

Each collection shows a 3D rendered collection of exactly what customers can expect to receive in their order, including an accurate depiction of the number of discs in the set. Since it is possible to also order each disc as an individual item, the recipes included on each disc are listed for visitors to choose from.

Google Integration

One of the major differences between the Great Chefs project and many other previous websites that I’ve worked on is the level of Google integration that I went with on this particular project. In addition to ensuring the Webmaster Tools was fully supported by the website, we’re also using:

1. Google Analytics to provide daily tracking of website traffic, page testing and optimization settings;
2. Google Feedburner to provide easy access to daily RSS and email subscriptions
3. Google AdWords with integration with Analytics to promote and market the website;
4. Google AdSense to sell advertising in the footer of most pages as well as on free content located throughout the website;
5. Google Checkout for online shopping cart integration and to offer a fast, safe and secure means to order online;
6. Google GMail to host the email for the Great Chefs web domain and finally;
7. YouTube to host the video files displayed on the website

Automation

Running a website is hard work, in fact it’s not just time consuming it’s also extremely technical and the great people at Great Chefs Television all have tons of work to do already without having to learn about Search Engine Optimization, Organic Marketing, keyword density and all the other things that make promoting a website successful. That’s why the vast majority of the website is completely automated.

Easy Updates

Knowing that the team at Great Chefs do amazing work on their television series, I wanted to ensure they had the ability to do the same on their website without having to make any of them learn extensive HTML programming. To do this, I used the powerful WordPress content management tool to build a robust solution capable of serving their needs while making it easy for them to update content.

Fast Pages

A website is useless if it’s not fast, that’s why the website makes the most of caching technology to rapidly build and store dynamically generated content. Instead of rebuilding the webpage each time a visitor comes to the site, the Great Chefs website rebuilds the pages only when needed.

Service Integration

When the staff of Great Chefs updates their website, it automatically generates Email and RSS updates for people who are subscribed, as well as informing Twitter and Facebook of the recent changes. Podcasts and Apple iTunes are automatically updated within minutes of fresh videos being posted to YouTube. This ensures that quality content is distributed to all areas of Great Chefs, without having to spend countless hours reproducing the same content in multiple sources.

The Future of Great Chefs

Over the next few months, there will be a lot of great new features added to the Great Chefs website, I hope you’ll join me in supporting the wonderful television series and as always I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improving the website!

Usage

To use the Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress plugin, simply download and install onto your WordPress website. You can then add it to your theme by inserting the code <?php echo timu_technorati_tags() ;?> to your blog theme files or to a sidebar widget.

Output

The tag generates a comma separated list of tags complete with Technorati links. I choose to return it as a value rather than write it directly so that if you’d like to make changes or process the results, you can do it easy.

You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to rate the plugin if you’ve enjoyed it.

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Then, stop asking how to get people to find your website and start asking yourself why would people want to find your website. The trick to the Internet is that it focusses the marketing drive on the consumer, not the company so get out of the ’90s and start trying to make it about the end user instead of your business.

How to make it about the end user

When I was with the US Beer Drinking Team I came up with a marketing concept called Me Marketing, at its core was the simple belief that everybody was (in their own mind at least) special, so if you wanted to market to them all you needed to do was ensure that your business or product solved a problem that they believed they had.

I wrote an article a while back called 25 Things to Do to Increase Your Website Traffic Right Now, which offers some advice for people just starting out as well as a recent post entitled 25 simple ways to make WordPress SEO friendly which  talks about some of the things you can do to make your website more Search Engine Friendly but remember the best way to build readers isn’t to create SEO friendly content, it’s to create content people actually want to read and share with their friends.

The title tag

In HTML there are two tags that can make a website sink or swim. The first is your title tag. Located in the <head> section of your websites HTML the <title> tag controls what search engines think your sites name is. This title commonly includes both the name of your website and the name of the article that is stored on a specific page but which is more important?

To search engines the answer is easy, it’s the name of the page that people are on … not the name of your website, so placing the content in the right order is critical! Instead of placing My Site Name || My Post, I can instantly improve my ranking by posting My Post || My Site Name. To do this in WordPress, simply open your header.php file and make the required changes.

The H1 tag

No tag is more misunderstood or more poorly used than the poor H1 tag. It’s the most critical tag in the entire body of a post, yet people waste it on their website title! It’s not really you’re fault … WordPress themes often mistakenly use the <h1> tag as the title of a website.

To fix this, open your header.php file and remove the <h1> from around your site name. Replace it with a <div> tag such as <div id=’logo’> so that you can format your title to look how you’d like.

The H1 tag is meant to encompass the page title, so next you’ll have to open and edit your single.php and page.php files to ensure your title is using an <h1>. Remember, there should only be one <h1> on an entire page!

H2 … H6 tags

Document structure guidelines dictate how these tags should be used. They’re mean for headings, not formating! If your document has multiple depths, use <h2> .. <h6> tags to structure your document depth, for example an <h3> tag should only ever follow an <h2> tag. Remember, search engine robots are looking for consistent order and logic in a page.

W3C Validation

There’s a little debate over how important it is to validate your pages, my opinion on the subject is simply that if a robot (which is all search engines are) can’t read your page … how can they index it? Run your page through the validator at The W3C Markup Validation Service.

Images

When naming images, use descriptive keywords in the filenames as well as the ALT tags. ALT tags are used to “display” the images to people who can’t see but they’re also hand for companies like Google to understand what the image contains.

Friendly URL’s

Does Google really care if your URL’s include keywords? Wow, great question. According to Matt Cutts (Googler Prime) … no but it’s more attractive and it’s one of those simple SEO things that helps make our websites feel more friendly.

Anchor Tags 

Remember to add titles and rel values to your anchor tags! The title can be added through the WordPress WYSIWYG editor but rel tags? You’ll have to delve into the HTML if you want to use them effectively.

Meta Descriptions

Like the <title> tag, Meta description tags are found in the header.php file for WordPress and instruct web search engines what your website is about. These description tags should be updated for every page and remember, it should reflect the content … not the site!

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are also stored in your <head> section and summarize the article for search engines. Want a clever trick? Use the post tags as your comma separated list of keywords! That way, you’ll be sure to get rich, descriptive tags to match your content.

Content Placement

Remember that the content for your website is the most important part! Make sure it’s as close to the top of your HTML as possible or else search engines might not be able to find it.

HTML Clutter

One great way to keep HTML clutter to a minimum is to link as much as your code as possible to external files. This keeps your document as empty as possible so Google (and other robots) know that your content is key.

Fresh Content Matters!

Websites are like restaurants, people want fresh content and Google knows it. One great way to optimize your content for Google is to ensure your content is always fresh, using a blog or a forum is a great way to keep fresh content online.

Link to Quality Content

Search engines love links so if you have a favorite website that helps your audience, link to it (remember to use the title tag as well!), this will not only increase your standing with search engines but it’ll help build a great community

Avoid Flash

Flash is a great tool, we all love it and it sure is sexy but … no matter what anybody tells you it can not be read properly be search engines and if search engine robots can’t see your site, your website is worthless. It’s just that simple, I’m sorry.

Include a Sitemap File

Robots search for content on your website by crawling (literally traveling from link to link) this is a painful long process so help them out by posting a sitemap.xml file for them to read! This file orders your content and helps robots to understand where fresh content is located on your site.

Include a Sitemap Page 

Sitemaps aren’t just for robots anymore! Help people find everything on your site by including a comprensive page with all your links in a single place. This also ensures that SEO robots can find all your links.

Build a better footer

Footers are an easy way to help both people and robots easily find important content on your website.

Use Tags and Categories

WordPress has some wonderful SEO features build right in, so use them! Every one of your posts should use categories to help optimize them but they should also link to each other! By linking your article to list of other articles which use those keywords, you’re helping index your content.

Deep link your articles

If you’re writing an article that could benefit from another article on your website, include a hyperlink to the supporting piece! It’s called deep linking but I like to think of it as common sense, after all if you’re not willing to cite your own articles why should others?

Keyword your titles

What words do you want people to use to find your site? Use those words in your title! Don’t push your luck though, nobody likes a keyword spammer so make sure your article title is natural but try to use the words that you’d search Google in hopes of finding your article with.

Keyword your page content

Don’t be shy to sprinkle your article with your keywords either, especially your header links! Make sure that whenever you have a chance you’ve used the words and phrases that you feel people would search for in Google.

Know your competition 

Search for your competion in Google, what terms are they using? Should you be using the same to compete with them in search engines? You can optimize your website for your community, your industry or your products … make sure you’re doing the best job you can.

Don’t duplicate your content

Content should only appear once on your website and only on your website! Don’t fall into the habit of posting other peoples recycled posts on your site and be careful that WordPress isn’t duplicating content on your site. If you’ve posted your content to two categories, chances are that Google is penalizing you for it so make sure you’re only allowing it to be indexed once!

Format your text

We touched on this with regards to using headers but your website should also use tags to format your text! Search engines respect tags such as <cite>, <strong> (<b>), <em> (<i>) and <blockquote> so why not use the to help robots understand your content?

Write better content

I’ve said it before … but here’s tip #25 … write better content. Well written, formatted and structured content is still the best SEO value you’ll ever earn.

What makes one website stunning while another is bland? The header of course! Visually speaking it’s one of the most important elements of a website, so let’s take a look at ten sexy blog headers to see what they’re doing right (and what you’re doing wrong?).

The Mi-24 Hind helicopter pictured below is apparently serving with a Canadian unit in  Afghanistan (I’ve had a couple people tell me this helicopter isn’t with the Canadians although there seems to be some debate as to who’s it with). If anybody can confirm (or deny) this and let me know who to credit for these great photos I would really appreciate it.

A shot of the bird in the air:

A close up of the artwork:

If anybody can provide me a link (or two) of who this pretty little bird belongs to, I’d love to credit the correct people. Thanks.

Do you wish there was a way to combine your two loves? Well now you can with the totally excellent, completely amazing, stunningly spectacular and organically organized SEO poster from Prospect MX.

Thanks to Donna at SEO Scoop for the link.

Speaking of illustrations, Rebecca has posted what I think has to be the funniest series of illustration on the Internet this week, my inbox will never look the same again.

1. Free WordPress Theme – Pink Flowers
   
2. Bloody Mess of a WordPress Theme
3. Free Community Friendly Theme
4. Free WordPress Theme – One Night in Paris
5. Free SEO WordPress Theme for Small Business Web Sites
6. WordPress Magazine Theme – Free Dark Version
7. Smashingly Good Free Magazine Theme for WordPress
8. Free Magazine WordPress Theme
9. Free WordPress Theme – a Night in Paris
10. Minimalist Fixed Free WordPress Theme

Do you like what you see? Let me know, leave me a comment or tell me what you think is wrong with the themes and I’ll be sure to tweak them in the coming months.

I kid you not. Actually, it’s got to do with my kitchen, old news papers and the English League Football results from 1929.

My house was built at the turn of the century (the last century) and it looks like the last renovations got started just before the great depression since behind the boards in my old living room (my new kitchen) are 1929 news papers. Hopefully, since this is the first time the house has been renovated since then … it’s not going to be a sign of the coming economy.

As I pull down the old boards I’ve been photographing various articles and advertisements, this is one of my favorites. For those of my readers who are English, or fans of English football (soccer) you’ll appreciate that Chelsea is at the top of the division … it’s just not the First. :)

There’s a lot of great old news paper clippings on the walls. I’ll be posting more of them throughout the winter, so if you’re looking for something other than Search Engine Optimization advice feel free to keep checking back in this area of the site.

So what types of sites have high page ranks? It might actually surprise you.

An online casino website such as After Work Casino has a tremendously respectable Google PageRank of 6 while sex.com, which sold for $14 million in January 2006 manages only a 5 (the same as thisismyurl.com). Even more surprisingly, $9,999,950 bought fund.com a PR of just … 3. A quick search of Google reveals a small part of why.

Inbound Links

Google has a build in tool for web masters which allows us to view the statistics of any website on the Internet and measure how many websites are linking to it. When we look at the online casino website afterworkcasino.com, using the link: syntax, it reveals 324 inbound links while fund.com, a $10,000,000 domain name has only 9 inbound links.  In my article Does Your Web Site Help, or Hurt Your Business? I mentioned that I wouldn’t link to a website because I understood how the Internet works. In this case, if I had linked to his website, Google would have interpreted my link as a vote.

Using the Google link: operator

Using the simple link: syntax (you can try it here) you’ll see that the first step to an online casino building such a respectable PR value is in it building a strong volume of incoming links. The second part of the equation? The quality of each link.

Quality of course is measured in PageRank for the incoming website. There’s a great article over on Wikipedia about the PageRank system, what it basically boils down to is that Google assigns your website a score based on the volume and rank of each website that links to your website.

For example: If a friend linked his website (PR4) to your website, Google would take his PR4 link as a “vote” for your website. If dozens of PR4 websites linked to you? Google would know your website was at least a PR4 worthy website.

Where it gets tricky however is that the number of outbound links on a page effects the value of the outbound link, as does a number of hidden factors known only to Google.

Earning a High PageRank

Higher PageRanks equal higher positioning on Google’s search results. That’s important to any business, so getting a high PR is important to business but how do you do it? This article has demonstrated the technical mechanics of earning a high PR. To apply it in real life, all you really need to do is convince other, highly regarded websites in your industry to link to you.

To earn a high rank in Google, follow these simple steps:

1. Write great content. The best way to increase your inbound links, and the most passive method is to write content that people want to read. Write about your industry, your products and your market on your own website. If it’s helpful, people will link to it.
2. Write for other websites. Get in touch with others in your area or specialty and write special guest articles for sites such as your local business ground. The back links to your business, combined with the exposure will add significantly to your presence on the web.
3. Community Involvement. One of the best things about blogs is the comment area below each post. As a blog owner, I look forward to your constructive comments, as long as they’re related to the post. Better yet, Google sees the link as a step from one website to another. We can discuss dofollow limitations in another article. Beyond blogs, forums and other public message boards are also great places to link to your website.

So, you have your domain name registered and you’ve setup hosting. Maybe you’ve already installed a great package such as WordPress and of course, you did this all by reading my great article called Can You Put Up a Web Site for Less Than $100? but now the moment of truth, how do you drive traffic to your website?

What is the value of traffic?

A few years ago I was sitting in a board room with the CEO, VP of Marketing and online marketing manager for —– Corporation. The marketing manager was just wrapping up a presentation and explaining that in order for the companies website to make money, they needed to drive 1,000,000 visitors a month to the site. Her math was based on the old rule of 10’s. For every ten people who come to your site, one will look around. For every ten who looks around … blah blah blah, anyways her proposal was that we needed to buy lots of ads (surprising since her department was in charge of buying ads) and then we could sit back and rake in the cash.

During this exchange I must have chuckled or snorted or something rude because the CEO turned and asked me if I had something to add. I then explained that we didn’t need 1,000,000 new visitors to the site, we simply needed 10,000 people interested in buying our product. In fact, I went as far as to tell them that for a fraction of the proposed marketing department budget ($100,000 a month) I could drive a million people a day to the site. How you might ask? Simple I would reply, buy $100k a month work of banners that simply read “Want to get f—-d? Click here.” … only without the dashes.

Obviously, my advice wasn’t well received but the fact still stands that getting traffic is not what you want, or at least it shouldn’t be what you want. I have a web template on my site that gets 30,000 hits a month … not one of those visitors converts into a lead. So, before we talk about how to get traffic to your website, the more important question is … what type of traffic do you want to get to your website?

How to generate traffic to a website

First off, let me go against every piece of advice you’ll find on SEO websites and tell you to forget Google. Heck, search my own website and you’ll find out that I’m back peddling on my own advice but maybe I’ve been drinking or something. My new, improved 2009 advice still stands, forget Google. If you want to build traffic to your website, focus on what really matters … content, content, content. Write good content, follow my next advice and respect your elders.

Build a strong site structure

We live in a world of RSS, smart phones, Wii surfers (280 of my visits last month came from Wii surfers), Sony PSP users, Mac users, people on Internet Explorer, FireFox and a ton of other systems. Don’t design a website to look good in a web browser (somewhere a designer just cried a little), instead design a website to function effectively in all browsers. This will help your site be accessible to the blind, perform well in automated crawlers and be readable to users. 

Be a positive part of the community

Use your website to help improve the internet, not take away from it. An old boss of mine gave a lecture once, he spoke about being assertive vs. being aggressive. Don is a brilliant speaker, he simplified the two words by defining assertiveness as  being willing to standup for your rights, while being aggressive required you to take away the rights of others.

This point really hit home for me and made me think about websites. Build assertive website, boldly proclaim your place on the Internet and stand for your believes but don’t be aggressive, there’s no reason to try to tear down others or over power them.

Give a little, get a lot

I wrote the other day about how I got a Google PageRank of 5, what I didn’t really touch on was the importance of giving back to those around you. The Internet is filled with some really remarkable people, some great websites and a lot of amazing blogs. Most of these people write daily, with little feedback from those who read their blogs. Take the time to comment on their articles when you see a piece of interest, thank them for advice and question them when you disagree. This doesn’t just give them a reason to keep blogging, it also gives your website some great exposure. My most popular incoming links? Those that link to an article on my own site, supporting a point on another blog.

What’s the lesson here? Contribute to every forum, blog, newsgroup, message board, social networking website and social discussion you can add something positive to but remember … nobody likes a self promoter, so make sure you have something positive to say.

Finally, read.

The best investment I ever made in my business was an RSS reader. Now I can’t live without it. My iPhone chirps away all day long, pulling down excerpts of articles by some of the Internet’s top performers … they’re literally giving away the secrets to their success, if only you’re willing to read.

Alexa measures your website performance by volunteer users, in effect millions of average people agree to allow Alexa to collect statistics about their surfing habits and from that data, Alexa tracks and monitors activity on the Internet. At Halloween this year, Alexa ranked my website at 2,291,883. Today it’s at 231,354 which is a 1790% improvement for spending about 20 minutes a day on my website.

Google on the other hand ranks your website by looking at who your website connects to and in return, who connects to your website. That’s a pretty over simplified way to look at it but it’s also the general gist of the method. It’s a bit like a popularity contest, Google believes that if websites with high page ranks (the system is from 0 to 10) link to you consistently, your content must be of a certain value.

So now that you understand what a PageRank and Alexa ranking mean, here’s how I earned my respectable rankings in both … (drum roll anybody?) … quality content, consistently posted.

I know that you’re all hoping for a much better answer than that but sadly it’s the truth. My very good friend Chris Bavota jumped from a PR0 to a PR4 in just three months, doing exactly the same thing … he posts great articles that people love to read and he makes sure that he does it regularly.

Chris and I followed some easy to understand advice:

• we registered a good domain name that people could remember
• hosted with a reliable hosting company so people could find us
• installed a great software package to help us manage his content
• ensured the code was clean so Google could read it
• built quality content that people wanted to read 

Once that was done, both Chris and I did what any self respecting blog owner would do:

• we used deep linking techniques to ensure our readers know about related content on our website
• we posted links to other peoples blogs, helping our readers find similar content
• we let other blog owners know that we had articles of interest for their readers

There are no scams, no black hat SEO techniques, no short cuts and no tricks. Quality rankings on a quality search engine takes nothing more than a little bit of effort, quality content and the determination to contribute something positive to the Internet as a whole.

What I’m asking for is a recommendation, from your website to mine. Simply a link to one of my articles, an interesting sample, a free download or even a review of what you’ve learnt from my posts over the past several months and you’ll help me achieve my goals. 

Google Stats for thisismyurl.com

As of this morning, Google reported that 78 other websites link to me. That’s pretty good but I’d love to see that number five time higher so I’m willing to give away something valuable to me in return for you giving me your link.

My time.

It’s actually the only thing that I have, so here’s the deal; for every new link from a unique domain to my website between now and New Years eve, I will personally donate one hour of my time to a charity or non profit group to help them build a better website, improve their online presence or increase their marketing savvy. I’ll give away free hosting to help their cause, register domains to save them money or assist them with the latest version of WordPress.

If you’d like to participate, simply link from your website, blog or forum to any of my pages. You can also Digg this story or other articles on my site to help increase awareness of the campaign.

Thanks to everybody who’s helping.

The web is still too young for us to come up with such a snappy statement but there’s a similar concept for us. Your website’s success is directly associated to the quality of your search engine optimization.

Why? That makes no sense right? Especially if, as a couple of my recent clients told me, you don’t plan on using Google as the main source of your traffic. Well there’s part of the problem … where you plan to generate traffic is irrelevant, traffic is organic and it ebbs or flows based on what it, not you dictate so if you’re looking to get more website traffic it’s time to find a good partner to help.

How? The first thing you need to do is either start reading a lot of materials and blogs or find a search engine optimization company who can assist by offering comprehensive search engine optimization services. If you want to save some upfront money, you can start by reading basically everything by Matt Cutts, he’s one of Google’s boys … OK, secretly I think Matt might actually be Google. It’s just a theory but I think that Google is run off his laptop, when you search for something he personally types the results. Maybe not, but USA Today has a great article with him on driving traffic to your website.

When? That’s an easy one. It’s an odd fact but the best time to optimize your website is the exact same as the best time to plant an apple tree, ten years ago. The second best time is today.

If you’re looking for some great websites to help you better understand Search Engine Optmization, give these great articles a read:

• Is it possible to get 400 unique daily visitors and Google PageRank of 4 in just 10 days?
• Diving Into The (Google) Zeitgeist
• My SEO Session at Startonomics: Watch the Video
• What Google SearchWiki Means for Your Rankings

First, when you add a link to your website we want to assign a class to it like so:

<a href=’http://www.thisismyurl.com’ class=’noshow’>

In my case, I’ve labeled this link with the special tag noshow which will let me affect the appearance. Next in the CSS, let’s add a special rule for it:

a.noshow {
     /* this is what we want the normal link to appear as */
     text-decoration: none;
     font-color: #000000; /* (assuming your default text is black) */
}

a.noshow:hover {
     /* when people mouse over the link */
     font-color: #000000; /* (assuming your default text is black) */
     cursor: default;
}

As you’ll see since rules cascade from in a logical order, the text-decoration rule automatically applies to the hover state since it applies to the normal state but since hover states have their own color, we have to redefine it.

There you go … now you can put links on your website that nobody knows are there.

When you look at my home page, all the articles appear to be the same but they’re not. One of them is special and both Google and I know it’s special but you don’t because I’ve purposely altered the appearance of the article title to look like the others in the list. It’s a simple trick with massive Search Engine Optimization benefits but very few people do it.

On my home page, I load the most recent posts and display the title along with an excerpt for each just like most websites but what I do is a little different … I wrap the first story in an <h1> tag and the rest in <h2> tags. For those of you who don’t know much about document heirarcy I wrote a whole piece on document structure in Dreamweaver a while back but I’ll explain the basics for you here. A document can have only one main heading tag, it’s the most important thing on the page. Most people would assume that my name is the most important thing on the home page since it’s the biggest and it’s at the top but that would be fairly narcissistic don’t you think?

No, the most important thing on the page is the title of the article I want you to look at. In all my sub pages, the most important thing is the title of the page, which I them wrap in an anchor tag to ensure Google understands just how important it is. For example:

<h1><a href=”http://www.thisismyurl.com/tutorials/placing-page-content-in-adobe-dreamweaver/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to Placing page content in Adobe Dreamweaver”>Placing page content in Adobe Dreamweaver</a></h1>

Note that it’s in the <h1> tag, which tells Google that it’s REALLY, REALLY important … in fact, it’s the most important element on the page. Way, way more important than my name which is a rather paltry <strong>  tag:

<strong><a title=”Building global business with dynamic results.” href=”http://www.thisismyurl.com/”>Christopher Ross</a></strong>

Sure, my name looks important for branding purposes but when Google and other robots index my page, they see past the name and go right to the meat of the page … my <h1> tag which represents what the page is actually about. What then, to do on the home page? After all, I still want to tell the search engine robots what is important on my website but I can’t very well tell it all my titles are equally important and equally the top …

This is where I have to admit that I’ve told a small fib. Barely worth mentioning but a tiny fib all the same, my first story in the list of home page stories is always wrapped in an <h1> story which tells Google it’s the main heading for the page while all the rest on the page are wrapped in <h2> tags which tells Google they’re still important but not nearly as important as the first.

Sure, it’s more important from a document heirarchy point of view but I don’t want the first story jumping off the page visually, so I don’t want to make it bigger or bolder than the rest of them, which is where the trick comes in. Luckily it’s an easy fix using Cascading Style Sheets:

#homepagecontent h1,h2 {
     font-size: 24px;
     line-height: 30px;
     margin: 0px;
     padding: 0px;
     text-align: left;
}

#homepagecontent h1 a,h2 a {
     color: #123456;
     text-decoration: none;
     font-weight: normal;
}

#homepagecontent h1 a:hover,h2 a:hover {
     color: #cccccc;
     border-bottom: dotted 1px #cccccc;
}

What you’re looking at is the CSS that I use for my home page, the #homepagecontent tells your web browser to only apply this on the home page, while the formating for the three states of activity (normal, anchor and anchor:hover. By defining both the h1 and the h2 CSS descriptions to be exactly the same, I’ve instructed the web browsers to make them appear to the visual eye identical.

Remember the purpose of a well structured document is to organize your document but that shouldn’t interfere with how you present that data to your audience.

This theme started out as a Christmas theme for WordPress but when I couldn’t find a good set of Christmas lights it all went horribly, horribly wrong. It’s based off the Free Community Friendly Theme I did earlier today so you can see how easily things can be modified.

As with my earlier themes, this one is optimized for search engine optimization.

• Download Theme
• Preview Theme

The code is here:

<?php if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){
echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>’;
} else {
echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>’;
}?>

You can find it on a ton of blogs:

• like here
• or here
• even here