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8 Ways you can safely sell Links on your Website

November 23, 2010 By

If you’ve had a blog for awhile, you may be getting inquiries from potential advertisers and others about paid links. It’s one benefit of building a blog for the long term – others will pay you for advertising links.

As you can imagine, this can become quite lucrative over time.

In many respects though, Google frowns upon this practice and penalizes sites it sees as unnaturally manipulating search results. What they do (as well as Bing) is use link-based analysis to determine the quality of a site and its relevance to the keyword in question. Google believes buying and selling links circumvents this process and makes results less relevant and helpful to its searchers.

However, if you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will find that not all paid links violate their rules. In fact, if links are bought/sold for advertising purposes and not to pass on PageRank and manipulate search results, then it’s totally okay.

If you’re getting inquiries about advertising links, there are 8 ways you can safely sell links on your site without being penalized Google.

1. Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link

Adding this code into the link adds the link to your site but prevents your site from passing any “link juice” to the other site – basically it ensures the other site only receives traffic from the link and not a PageRank boost. This suggestion comes directly from Google so you can be 100% sure that it’s okay.

2. Only link to intermediate pages that include a robots.txt file

Robots.txt blocks search engine spiders from crawling a page. Most websites want their pages to be crawled. Therefore, you can redirect links to an intermediate page that includes this characteristic. Using an intermediate page strips the link of any PageRank benefits and ensures the link is for traffic only…this is another one of Google’s recommendations.

3. Avoid “link farm” schemes

Link farms are websites whose only purpose is to pass PageRank and link to other sites. While you probably would not use one, you need to be careful that your site doesn’t appear as one. Understandably, Google does not like link farm sites at all. In order to avoid looking like you’re a link farm site, embed links within relevant content and avoid having them all in one place.

4. Negotiate link sales for the long term

Consistent rotation of links is another red flag for the search engines as they make your site look like a link farm. Therefore, to fly under the radar, you should select paid links carefully and keep them consistent for as long as possible.

5. Don’t advertise that you’re selling links

This is advice that usually isn’t heeded online. If you advertise you’re selling links, you will get a lot of requests from spammers and banned sites. While the money may be tempting, be patient and wait for quality advertisers to come to you. This will give you better link partners and reduce your frustration.

6. Use HTML links only

Some link buyers may be using JavaScript or some other code in order to update or change the text and URL of the link at a future time. Avoid this by sticking with HTML based links.

7. Only link to relevant sites with quality content

Relevancy between links and keywords is the first thing search engines look for. Therefore, you should be sure that links you’re using point to quality content. Doing so helps search engines achieve their #1 goal, which is delivering the most relevant content to their users. In turn, they’ll reward you for it.

8. Be selective on who you partner with for links

Carefully evaluate sites before linking to them and ask yourself if you want your visitors going there. Do a site:yoursite.com search in Google on the company and see if they’ve had any penalties in the past that may hurt you if you partner with them.

One good rule of thumb when dealing with paid links – only deal with sites you would link to without payment. Doing so ensures you only sell links that are of use to your visitors. Selling links shouldn’t be your main source of income but they can provide a nice bonus.

Remember, Google frowns on selling links for PageRank and other purposes. However, you can do it safely by following the 8 steps mentioned above.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Eyetracking Studies Reveal Users Read Webpages in an F-Shaped Pattern

November 18, 2010 By

Don’t be shocked by this – most users will only read a fraction of what you write on a webpage.

Now I’m by no means implying that web copy is useless. But considering the fact that readers typically scan a page for important points, you have to setup your content in a way that reflects this reality.

An experiment by usability expert Jakob Nielsen evaluated over 230 users and how they read a webpage. He found readers’ behavior was fairly consistent across different types of websites, exhibiting the following three general characteristics:

1. First is a horizontal movement that usually occurs across the upper parts of the content area, which forms the top part of      the F-shape.

2. Next, users go down the page on the left side a little bit then read horizontally again for a bit, forming the middle part of the F-shape.

3. Finally, users will scan the copy’s left side slowly to the bottom of the page. Depending on the user and the content, this is either a slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid streak on the heatmap or a fast scan, which is evidenced by a spottier heatmap. Either way, this forms the stem of the F-shape.

Of course, this is just a generalization as users may take a third scan across the page (making an E-shape with the eyetracking heatmap) or only read across once at the top (making an inverted L-shape with the eyetracking heatmap).

And as the eyetracking heatmap shows below, users interact with pages differently depending on what’s included on each. But as you can see, each of these roughly follows the F-shaped pattern.

The middle image for instance, an e-commerce site, includes products and prices, which is why the second horizontal part of the F-shape is lower down on the screen.

On the third image, a search engine results page, the second horizontal line is a bit longer than the top since the second headline is longer. While the second headline seemed more interesting and was longer than the first headline, users typically don’t read secondary headlines as much.

What does all of this mean for your content?

As we’ve said before, users won’t read your copy word by word. Most will scan the page to pick out important points and see if the site answers their questions and addresses their concerns.

Therefore, you need to include the most important information in the first 2 paragraphs. In all likelihood, users will read the first paragraph more closely than the second.

Also, start sub-headings, paragraphs and bullet points with “information-carrying” words. Since users typically scan the left side of the page (as shown by the eyetracking studies), you will want to be sure you include high-impact words at the beginning to draw their interest.

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day, Usability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Ways You Can Still Use Frames and Have High Rankings

November 10, 2010 By

One of the tenets of good site architecture is avoiding frames. While they may look nice, they’ve only spelled trouble in the past from an SEO perspective. If you have a bunch of great content wrapped up in frames, nobody would be able to find it since search engine spiders could not crawl frames.

That is of course you’re very knowledgeable and know how you can both have frames and an easy-crawlable site.

To clarify, a frame is actually an HTML element that pulls content from another URL and directs it to a URL of your choice…in a non-technical sense, frames essentially copy everything on a page to mirror it on another page. There are some good reasons why you would want to use frames…just be careful on how you use them to ensure your site indeed gets crawled by the search engine spiders.

Use specific tags in your HTML code to ensure framed content gets indexed

It’s not that Google and Bing don’t index content within a <frameset> tag but what usually occurs is the search engines will index framed and non-framed content separately and catalogue them as two separate pages.

Viewing frames as images is a good way to look at them. If you absolutely must use frames, you should provide a keyword-rich description of the image in case it doesn’t load. The <noframe> tag explains to users and search engines what the framed content is if it fails to load.

<noframes>Put your keyword-rich frame describing content here.</noframes>

Two important things to consider when using <noframes>: (1) place them as high up on the page as possible so it’s easily readable by search engine spiders and users whose browsers don’t support frames and (2) be sure the <noframe> tag is outside the <frames> or <iframes> tag. If it isn’t, that content may not get picked up by the search engine spiders.

Another “frames” tag for that’s gaining a lot of popularity is the <iframe> tag. It’s used to embed dynamic information and a wide variety of widgets on a site…Facebook’s “Like” button/widget is one common use for an <iframe> tag.

Many who use <iframe> though don’t realize that it doesn’t generate a link back to their site – which is one of the main reasons to use the tag in the first place.

Fortunately, there is a way to get that link by setting up the code as indexable content with the <iframe> tag. Setting up the code in the following way will get the content and any links indexed.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:150px; height:50px;” allowTransparency=”true”>

Content, and links will get indexed here by most engines as it is visible text on the page. Anything that is pulled in using the iframe tag, will not get indexed with the page. So if you want your iframe powered widgets to generate a link back to your site, make sure and include that code in this area.

</iframe>

Generally speaking, we avoid frames on sites we work with if at all possible since it’s very difficult to ensure the content is indexed by the search engines and readable by our users. <Iframe> tags on the other hand can be a good method of building links when they’re used properly.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Eye-Tracking Studies Reveal Impact of Images on Web Pages

November 2, 2010 By

It’s been a long held view that images on web pages help with customer retention and conversions. But new eye-tracking studies from usability expert Jakob Nielsen shows dramatic differences in the impact different types of images have.

In short, users pay attention to photos and images containing relevant information while they tend to ignore images designed to “jazz up” a web page.

Even with high-speed Internet connections and ultra fast downloads, Nielsen’s research shows how users continue to be annoyed with flashy images containing no real information.

E-commerce sites for instance benefit tremendously from product photos as shown by the image below on the left.

Another popular photo option – enlarged product photos when requested by the user. Five years ago, Nielsen said not including a large enough photo so customers could see a product in more detail was one of the biggest mistakes webmasters made. While users dislike big photos that get in their way, they do seem to like looking at them per their requests when evaluating a product.

One more takeaway from Nielsen’s eye-tracking study regarding e-commerce sites – copying what the big guys do isn’t always the best idea as shown by the image from Amazon.com above. Since Amazon offers such a wide-range of products, they have a standardized layout for their pages. What works for some products doesn’t work so well for others for them.

On the other hand, the Pottery Barn (whose image is above), has a generally narrow range of products. They can tailor images to specific products much easier and as a result, these images get more attention.

Assuring customers they’re dealing with real people by including a head shot or portrait of important company personnel is another way images are very beneficial

In fact, it’s also been a long held view that including portraits of company employees was crucial to effectively presenting a company’s image online. This helps users put a name with a face and assures them they’re not dealing with some “faceless” corporation that’s far removed from them.

Look at the following example – according to this eye-tracking study, users spent 10% more time looking at the portraits than the rest of the site’s content, which accounted for 316% more content than the portraits themselves.

However, if it’s obvious the pictures are stock photos and don’t represent actual people at a company, users tend to ignore them.

In the end, pictures can contribute a lot of value to your website if they’re done right. Simply copying and pasting generic images to your page will largely be ignored according to these studies.

Filed Under: Online Marketing, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day, Usability Tagged With: , , , , ,

Webinar Shows How Small Businesses Can Maximize Their Homepage’s Value

October 28, 2010 By

I recently was finally able to take an hour and watch a webinar put together by our friends at Marketing Experiments. Originally airing on Sept. 1st, the webinar provided some great tips on optimizing a homepage to maximize conversions and revenues.

Homepages are different than landing pages according to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, who says the homepage serves as the “entry to the house that explains all of the rooms in the house.” Landing pages on the other hand are very specific to a particular product or service.

To put it another way – landing pages introduce offers while homepages introduce the company behind those offers

Therefore, your homepage should describe all of the products and services you offer in a general sense so readers can clearly understand how you can solve their problem…a homepage shouldn’t try and do everything but rather briefly explain all of the “rooms in the house.”

According to a survey of the webinar’s live audience, one of the most common challenges webmasters face when designing a home page is having too many messages for such a small space.

Unfortunately, many homepages do not live up to their potential because they get trapped in at least one of the following five pitfalls:

1. Trying to achieve too many objectives with the homepage

2. Failing to start a conversation (either you have no copy at all or it’s very plain and boring)

3. Over-reliance on multimedia to communicate value

4. Making the homepage a landing page

5. Assuming best practices will work for you

I found pitfall #5 to be very interesting – assuming best practices will always work for you can be a recipe for at best mediocrity and at worst disaster. Flint and the team illustrated this quite well with a site that had a popup box to enter contact information, which goes against some “best practice” suggestions. Amazingly, the site that did this saw an incredible jump in conversions!

Avoiding these 5 common pitfalls can go a long way toward ensuring your homepage generates conversions and engages visitors.

The webinar takes about an hour of your time so I urge you to take a look…they also discuss eye-path and ways you can control what people see and hear on your homepage…enjoy!

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Usability Tagged With: , , , , ,
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