Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

1. Too Many Topics

You talk about everything from earthworm digestion to butt-rock and philanthropy and wonder why you can’t develop a reader base. Dial in. Focus on a subject or cluster of related subjects rather than repeating that middle school exercise where you write continuously for 15 minutes.

2. Low Pages per Visit

The pages per visit metric can be useful in measuring visitor engagement with your content. See if you can’t squeeze one or two additional page views out of each visitor by linking to other posts within your post, making intuitive navigation and using cross-engagement strategies like tag clouds and featured articles.

3. More Ads than Content

Don’t make users mine for something meaningful. Placing a tiny nugget of useful content in the dead center of the page and placing ads on four sides then throwing timed JavaScript bombs that ask questions and invite users to take surveys is just plain irritating.

Getting a consumer to trip on an advertisement will do very little for conversion. Articles that are 300 words should not span 5 pages. Yeah we’re on to you.

4. Bum Feeds

Yep, the new theme comes with an RSS button but does it work? How does your site look through a feed? People will try once, maybe twice to activate a feed subscription. If it doesn’t work you have 1 less subscriber.

5. Too Many Plugins

Too many plugins are hazardous to your blog. Plugins do all kinds of cool things but they are written by the multitude. Study up on each plugin before using it. Make sure anything you enable has been reviewed and is compatible with your framework version AND theme. Try to keep up on updates to avoid security vulnerabilities.

A few well executed plugins can greatly improve your blog while too many can become STDs for Wordpress.

6. Widget Farm

Widgets are an easy way to manage additional features on your blog. Don’t get overzealous with the widgets! Enabling every widget you can get a hold of bogs up appearance, clutters information and over-stimulates the user.

7. The Content Isn’t Yours

Yes you can copyright, copyscape, hash-slice imagery and publish summary feeds but some slacker is still going to steal your content. Don’t be that guy.

You are legally able to use up to 1/3 of an original piece so long as you properly attribute your source. Original content is ALWAYS king.

8. Too Many Broken Links

Don’t have em. Periodically check for busted links with an admin panel like Google Webmaster tools or crawl your site with a link-checking tool to see what’s busted.

9. You Hate the Subject

Faking enthusiasm for a subject reads like a furniture manual. Find your motivation and write about something you actually care about. If you’re building out a company blog find a way to make it your own.

10. Search Doesn’t Like You!

This one’s easy. All you have to do is click this button:

I think it’s interesting that people are now appending year numbers to the queries they type into Google and other search engines. I thought I was the only person looking for specific information within specific chronological periods. Great minds think alike, I suppose.

So here we are at the end of 2008 and people want to know how to build trusted links to their Web sites. And they don’t want yesterday’s SEO advice on the subject — they want current, 2008-era advice on how to build trusted links to their Web sites.

The whole question (”how do I build trusted links to my website”?) raises the issue of how obsessed people must still be with links. You would think that at least some people would have gotten the message by now that it isn’t all about links. After all, as more people look for sources of trusted links, they must understand that all those cheap, easy-to-obtain links they were building previously don’t pass value.

Okay, we can leave the lecture on SEO efficiency for another blog. If you really want a 2008-era method for obtaining trusted links to your site, here are some suggestions:

1. Avoid social media Web sites like the plague.
2. Create value in whatever sites you contribute to.
3. Reward the sites that help you.
4. Focus on creating content that helps the sites you want to link to you.
5. Think more in terms about building sites that can help themselves

Sites that search engines trust are trusted because so many people use them. It’s not that the search indexing algorithms are tracking visits (although that may be one factor taken into consideration when assigning trust), it’s that a heavily used site looks different from a site that people avoid like the plague.

Heavily used sites have a lot of activity — they publish original content often, they link out to other sites liberally, they have activity in their communities, they attract many low-value links naturally.

The less traffic a site receives, the less likely it is to publish new content. The less new content a site publishes, the fewer new outbound links it creates. The fewer new outbound links a site creates, the fewer referrals it sends to other sites. The fewer referrals it sends to other sites, the less likely other sites are to recognize its contributions to their communities, the less likely people are to mention the site casually.

You can’t even get low-value links if no one thinks you’re worth linking to.

Now, when I say “low-value links”, I’m not talking about links from article archives, press release distribution services, social media sites, and “seo-friendly” directories — those are all crap links. There is at least some value in a “low-value link” — a link from a Web site almost no one has heard of, which doesn’t have much content, and which only gets a trickle of traffic.

People in the SEO community all want to be on the front page of DIGG and Sphinn. Screw DIGG and Sphinn — the amount of time you spend submitting your whitless articles to those sites could be better spent cultivating relationships with small, low-visibility sites that are trusted because they’ve been around long enough to have established good track records in the search engines.

Of course, those sites may not link to crap content so you may be stuck submitting to DIGG and Sphinn until you figure out the difference between good content and cheap, off-the-cuff content.

You build trusted links to your site by earning the trust of Webmasters whose sites are deemed trustworthy by the search engines. Competing for links from the same influencers everyone else is chasing is just plain stupid. There are millions of trusted Web sites out there, and most of them are being ignored by the link-greedy SEO community.

Make sure you have some good content, and then share it strategically, helping to build value in sites that can help your sites. That doesn’t mean changing your tactics from submitting badly written schlock articles to archives to submitting them directly to unsuspecting Webmasters. It means you should think about ways you can actually help other sites — without lecturing them.

Those Web sites will link to your sites when they see the value you help them create for their visitors.

Many Web sites that mix dynamic data on their front pages discard massive amounts of indexable data on a regular basis. Go to any major news site like CNN and ask yourself: what happens to that front page image when the headlines are refreshed?

There is, in fact, historical value in preserving mashup page images as static HTML pages. These pages serve as special index pages to historical content on high production Web sites. The spirit of Web 2.0 has taught Webmasters to invest their resources in throwaway information that exists for a brief time and then vanishes completely.

The unique organization and compilation you produce in your on-site mashups of new content every day (or every hour) may, in fact, serve as exactly the kind of unique content you need to boost your site’s internal navigation.

If a site publishes more than 10 new articles a day, there is intrinsic value in preserving the original “front page” mashup that introduces visitors to those articles. However, in today’s framework-pattern of constantly scrolling sites, the story excerpts and images are typically dropped completely while headlines are added to scrolling “archive” pages.

Those archive pages slowly repaginate their contents into long chains of almost useless link lists.

If you have the ability to create a mashup of new content for your home page, you should have the ability to create a snapshot image of that page that can be archived for future indexing and reference. People do, in fact, visit such snapshot pages as they search for older content in its original context. You can depend on archive.org to do this for you on a sporadic and incomplete basis or you can do it for yourself.

There are undoubtedly some practical limits to how many mashup snapshots one should archive. For example, I am not sure how useful it would be to archive every change made to a mashup. If you can capture all or a majority of your scrolling content on a daily or weekly basis, I think that would be easier for your visitors (who must, after all, search through the archive — don’t make their task more difficult by overloading it with duplicate content).

Spammers have in fact been creating snapshot archives on their spam blogs for years. I find these types of sites all the time, but their snapshots are built around RSS feeds scraped from other people’s sites and are pretty easy to identify. Real searchers are not interested in that type of content. But if they visit your site to read your articles to begin with, then your articles must have sufficient intrinsic value to be worth indexing — and thus your front page mashups also have intrinsic value.

Preserving that value helps you ensure that older content stays well-connected in your site and available through site search and alternative on-site navigation.

Matt Cutts recently told WebPronews that Google is relatively satisfied with its current subdomain management in search results.

In other words, they set out to do something specific and they feel they have done a pretty good job. But subdomains continue to dominate some brand queries. A lot of SEOs were predicting as recently as only a couple of months ago that some day nearly all the subdomains would vanish from Google’s search results.

In fact, subdomains seem to be thriving in Google’s search results. It’s just that the subdomains we find tend to provide more unique or distinctive value than they might have in the past. Or not.

Okay, no system is perfect but it does look like Google has made a good faith effort to help searchers find differentiated content when subdomains still dominate the search results. The search engine optimization strategist can still rely on subdomains when taking uniqueness of content into consideration. So the old approach of using a CMS and template with keyword substitution may not work as well as it once did, but you can still target subdomains toward keywords provided you back off on your use of boilerplate.

Subdomains remain a two-edged sword for optimizers. They have been used for geotargeting essentially duplicate content, as well as for differentiating content by seller or provider. But subdomains can be used in many other ways.

For example, a complex ecommerce site can utilize subdomains to provide different presentational formats for its product categories. People do have different expectations when it comes to searching for health and beauty products than when searching for books or videos. Although it may be convenient to use only one CMS template for an entire site, you can distinguish your category brand values by giving each their own templates, their own site search tools, and their own subdomains.

The optimization benefit arises from the flexibility not the uniformity that subdomains offer you. You can create essentially unique Web sites under one domain umbrella. Some of those sites can provide support, community, and research information. Some of those sites can focus on sales, marketing, and building business relationships.

Subdomains should not be viewed as mere extensions of Web site root directories. They offer legitimate platform branding value that cannot be matched by subdirectories. You use use subdomains to make it easier for people to find the right content by branding the content with a recognizable subdomain.

Just make sure the content really deserves its own subdomain.

For the sake of discussion let’s assume that you are a manufacturer of hammers. Like many manufacturers you have constructed a line of hammers intended for unique purposes, carpentry, framing, jewelry etc. Within those classes you have subdivisions or series of quality ranging from entry level to professional grade. We’ll assume that you want to wholesale your hammers directly from your website but you aren’t seeing the conversion you anticipated. One obstacle may be mismatching your traffic with the paths they are taking through your website.

Among your carpentry hammers you have a super-deluxe hammer called the C-90, from the most expensive “C” series. This stellar, super-deluxe carpentry hammer has a dedicated product page on the website.

So how do you get this hammer in front of people that are most likely to buy it? If you just optimize the product page for “C-90” and call it good you will be missing out on the bigger percentage that are just looking for a super-deluxe carpentry hammer. Only those alerted by direct or viral marketing will find the C-90 because they know exactly what to look for. A better solution would be to create paths on your website to funnel traffic.

If your site is found by someone looking for a carpentry hammer then tell them about your different series. If your site is found by someone looking for a super-deluxe carpentry hammer then tell them about the C Series. If your site is found by someone looking for the C-90 then tell them about the C-90. Seem obvious? Then optimize that way.

You want to channel potential buyers from the search engine result pages (SERPs) through appropriate landing pages to the page that their query has qualified them for. In other words, if a consumer punches in “super-deluxe carpentry hammers” then you know that you have someone ready to be wooed on your presentation of the C series of hammers. If a consumer finds your site by simply searching on “carpentry hammers” they may need to be further qualified before they are ready to convert.

Most of the time you will get a maximum of 2 listings in the search results so make them count!

Here are some hypothetical scenarios:

Query:

“super-deluxe carpentry hammers”

Really may be asking:

What is the best carpentry hammer I can buy?

Possible Answers:

C series overview
Page with comparison of C series to competitors
Page with comparison of C series to lesser series

Query:

“carpentry hammers”

Really may be asking:

Who makes a decent carpentry hammer?

Possible Answers:

Carpentry hammers overview page
Page showing the companies dedication to making great [carpentry] hammers
Making a case for what series a professional would choose vs. the casual handyman

Query:

“C-90”

Really may be saying:

I’ve heard of the C-90 but I’m not sure if I’m ready to buy it yet.

Possible answers:

C-90 model page
Industry specific pages justifying the price tag with supporting features and benefits
Positive custom feedback or reviews

Think of yourself as the consumer and what you would hope to find had you entered the query yourself. Don’t assume that they know your product’s model number or name. Try to focus specific keywords on pages that are relevant to the question that is being asked by the query.

Remember that a search engine will prioritize very clinically what it determines are your best result pages for a given query, unless you tell it. Don’t overcrowd your Meta keywords with everything you can think to call your product but rather use it to reiterate what is being said by the page itself. If you identify patterns and commonalities in how your pages are being found then tweak the pages and Meta tags to address the question that is being asked. Shoot for common misspellings of your keyword such as “90-C” or “C-900” or “carpentry hamers.” A page will really speak for itself so make the page relevant to the message and make the message relevant to the query.

Think intuitively, review analytics, traffic logs and landing page statistics over the course of time. Over time is the key pint here, too many tweaks too soon may confuse your trends, traffic and search results.