Blog promotions are a must if you’re serious about getting traffic to your website, but if you’ve taken the time to research S.E.O. you start seeing some of the same tips coming up over and over again. We’ve all seen the top 10 SEO plugins for WordPress post before and that’s all well and good, but these should just be considered good practices. Things you’re likely already doing if you’re paying attention. Here are a few tips you may not have heard before that work and take little time to set up.
Use Twitterfeed And Ping.fm to Submit Your Blog Posts Automatically
This is a great tip if you maintain a number of blogs that are fueled by other people. Where I work we have several company blogs that are maintained by several different writers. Every time one of them writes a blog post they are automatically posted to twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Linkedin, Jaiku, Plurk, Friendfeed and Plaxo. This is great as these folks are very good at what they do, but don’t necessarily know anything about S.E.O.
So what is Twitterfeed you ask? Twitterfeed is a free service that will syndicate your rss feed to a number of different social networks. I have my Twitterfeed set up to feed to ping.fm. My ping.fm account is then set up to hit all my social networks. Now every time I or anyone else make a post to my website these services are automatically updated. Follow the step by step tutorial here.
Use Custom Error Pages To Drive Traffic
I noticed after making some major updates to my website that my visitors were routinely winding up on my error pages. Search results from Google were off because I moved a section of my site into a new directory. So with my 404 pages becoming my most viewed it was time to change the content that was found here.
If your readers can’t find what they’re looking for right off the bat they’re gonna bounce on you. If they came to your site from a search on Google chances are you may write about something else they would be interested in. They may or may not find what they were originally looking for here, but they may see something else that sparks their interest. I use Delicious link rolls to update my error page with links to my last top 10 stories. These are complete with titles and short descriptions. This way you provide options rather than just the option of hitting your back button.
Use Flickr For Yahoo Traffic
This is something I’ve been doing for some time now and have noticed a significant jump in Yahoo traffic. Using Flickr images on your site works great for not only Yahoo, but I’ve noticed more listings with Google images as well.
Flickr which is owned by Yahoo places a higher importance on images hosted here with their defined image search. This is nice 2-fold because you can add multiple tags to your photos once images are uploaded here. By adding tags your essentially adding multiple keywords which come up in searches on Yahoo. These images can be made further relevant by adding your photos into defined sets.
1. Sign up for a Flickr account here.
2. Upload your photos.
3. Keep your image titles specific as those will be given the most importance by the search engines.
4. Tag each photo with your set of most relevant keywords. You can add more or delete words at any time so go nuts.
5. Add a backlink in the default comment section of each flickr post.
6. Post images from Flickr on your website and link back to them. This will help increase your Page Rank and will create a backlink to your website or post that will make it more relevant.
Follow the step by step directions here.
If you like what you’ve read here feel free to stop by my website for more web design tutorials and social media marketing tips.
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Twitter: bbrian017
What an excellent guest post Nate! Thanks so much for taking the time and producing this quality content for our readers to learn from. Right now my custom 404 page is lame and I’m going to make a point to change it. I figure I should have similar stories on a 404 not found page that way the visitor will have similar stories for what they were initially searching for.
I’ve never used any feed services. Maybe it’s because I spend so much time here at blog engage I almost forgot to look other places. It’s ironic but I touched base on this “Look for other places to market my blog” in my latest article on my personal blog.
Interesting theory behind yahoo ranking Flickr images higher because they own them. Perhaps many of our members can test this out and see if it proved to work for them as well.
Thanks again and feel free to post as often as possible.
.-= bbrian017´s last blog ..Re examining your blogging values =-.
Twitter: lukeslytalker
Hi Brian,
Thanks a lot. I’ve been meaning to post all week, but life’s been a bit too busy. These were just a few; what I thought, neat tips to share.
I’m telling you Twitterfeed/ Ping.fm tip works and it’s automated. So for instance this post right here within a half an hour would hit delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku, and on and on and on. You get the idea.
The Flickr thing is something I’d heard about a while ago. It does get more image views and straight up website traffic. To this day Yahoo is where I get a majority of my traffic. Oddly enough not Google.
I’m my companies social media manager so I’m always toying around with SEO and social networks. So I’m sure I’ll have cool to share in the not so distant future.
.-= Nate Balcom´s last blog ..How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Facebook Fan Pages =-.
Twitter: lukeslytalker
Rather I’ll have something cool to share in the not so distant future.
-Cheers
.-= Nate Balcom´s last blog ..How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Facebook Fan Pages =-.
Twitter: bbrian017
I look forward to it Nate you are welcomed to guest post here as much as you like.
.-= bbrian017´s last blog ..Re examining your blogging values =-.
Twitter: zxxxt
I didn’t know Flickr really help in driving traffic.
.-= ZXT´s last blog ..What’s Hot on YouTube =-.
Twitter: lukeslytalker
Yep it’s true. I wrote a more thorough tutorial here if you’re interested in trying it out.
http://jasonmarshall.net/2009/05/increase-your-yahoo-traffic-with-flickr-images/
.-= Nate Balcom´s last blog ..Hootsuite Is Sweet! Aprils Fools, No Seriously It’s Worth Checking Out =-.
Twitter: zxxxt
I’m checking it right now Nate. Thanks for sharing.
.-= ZXT´s last blog ..Happy Easter =-.
Twitter: quirkyjessi
The last I heard, when your Flickr images show up in image search results, it takes people to Flickr and not to your site, though. Whereas using Photobucket, for example, when they click the image, it takes them directly to your site. Have they changed that? Or are you just banking on the trickle effect of it hopefully increasing your search position through Yahoo overall?
.-= Jessi´s last blog .."Wheel-Skates" take the best of bikes and skates =-.
Twitter: lukeslytalker
Flickr by default adds a, “nofollow”, tag to it’s images. I read that you can actually add a follow tag to your images if you go back in and edit any links you add by calling the title tag follow. I’ve not tried it as it sounds a little fishy to me. However, your images have a higher importance to Yahoo image search, which Google also picks up. The real power of using Flickr for traffic is the tagging options and joining groups. It’s a more word of mouth type approach, but it does work. The more relevant tags you add the easier you are to find in Flickr search. The more groups you join the more people add you as a friend and these updates go to their inbox.
.-= Nate Balcom´s last blog ..Hootsuite Is Sweet! Aprils Fools, No Seriously It’s Worth Checking Out =-.
Twitter: quirkyjessi
It sounds like the key is not to just upload your photos to Flickr, but to actually use it full-blown as a social networking site that you put time and energy into then. I know lots of people who use Flickr for that and they get a lot of traffic from it, but just as a storage place, I don’t know that the increase in possible Yahoo rankings will go far for most.
Twitter: cks1988
This is the first time i heard about to use Flickr for SEO. I will try it now. I see there are a lot of advantages by using Flickr for SEO. We can build up the backlinks too. Thanks for your sharing!
.-= KS Chen´s last blog ..Win the Prizes for SEO =-.
Nate. Awesome post! Great tips (I haven’t seen these before)!!!!
Interesting theory behind the Yahoo spike as well.
Hey Nate, Awesome post! Great tips
Very Interesting theory.
Twitter: lukeslytalker
Thanks I’ve been trying to ramp up my guest posting efforts. I started reading about this on Dosh Dosh some time ago and noticed that it really did work for some websites.
Nate Balcom recently posted..Download Over 150 Colorful Droid Wallpapers
My questions is does the backlinks built in flickr help SERP? as far as I know, it does not give SEO juice to a website. What is your opinion?
There is a problem with Ping.fm, it does not allow people to choose thumbnail for facebook post, it randomly pick thumbnail image, sometimes it is not relevant. I think hootsuite might be a better choice, what do you think?
Great tips ahead. I’ve been trying one of those 3 tips and about the flickr I haven’t yet, I will try very soon. Thanks for the tips.
LOVE LOVE LOVE this post! Great info, I would say for me, the most useful was the flickr advice, I would have never thought about that. Thank you
I thought I would share an update from practicing these tips… Ok, I did the flickr suggestion, even though flickr applies a rel-nofollow to the tag, And guess what I am showing 7 links in my webmaster tools…. what a great suggestion.
Thanks!
To show up in google images try adding some pics to picasa, your blogger account, +1, google blogs, profile.. see if they show up and how quickly…
ping.fm is a great suggestion, thank you for the great article…
hey I came from your 404 page, great idea. I am going to re-do custom 404 page right away
Best wishes, Jenn