5 tactics you’ve probably missed to increase your traffic

There are a number of things that you should check when you are about to launch a new site. Some of these are search engine related, some – not so much. So I’ve decided to revisit this post, and concentrate solely on all of the things that make a difference for search visibility for small business websites, that are sometimes missed.

1) Google News Considered

In order to get your site into Google news, firstly you need to submit to Google for direct review. I’ve heard that you are more likely to get included here if you have multiple authors, and update more regularly i.e. once a day- which makes sense, but many sites don’t even take the time to have a go at getting listed! I have however heard of quality blogs making their way in here as well. Getting listed in Google News has a number of benefits, firstly it increases your traffic, and secondly it revs up the crawler activity (Newsbot is different from Googlebot) on your site in search of fresh content, getting you into the index faster, and into the news results for keywords when they occur in real time.

2) Sitemaps Created

There are a couple of different types of sitemaps for websites. Whilst many folk get the ordinary plain and simple navigational sitemap, and this is generally what people talk about when they say they’ve created one – there are a couple of other more specialised sitemap that webmasters miss out on.

In particular, on Google - there are sitemaps for the following:

News Sitemaps – for use on Google news, these follow a specialised format which you can find out more about here. If you are running on the WordPress platform, thankfully there is also a plugin which handles the creation of this for you.

Video Sitemaps – video sitemaps are important to bring your video’s into the SERP’s. Surprise surprise, that video sitemaps associate an individual URL with an individual video, which can aid in the creation of thumbnails of a video in a search result. This can significantly increasing clickthrough’s from the SERP’s when it occurs. Yahoo are using an alternative format that Google also support – it’s called Media RSS and is also worth exposing your content through. If you have multimedia content such as video, that is traditionally difficult to both discover and categorise, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of these glaringly obvious wins. Bing are also supporting Media RSS.

Mobile Sitemaps – Mobile sitemaps work in much the same way as traditional navigational sitemaps, but allow deeper indexing for mobile crawlers. If you have mobile content on your site, that is either no followed or hidden to prevent duplicate content problems, mobile sitemaps are the perfect solution.

Code Search – If alot of the content you create on your website is code related, you could benefit from exposing content in a code sitemap. You may, for example run a code search engine of your own, or indeed a forum which allows code to be submitted. This helps categorise both language and license, making it more easily discoverable by Google’s crawler.

Geo Sitemaps (KML) – If you are providing alot of locale relevant content, including addresses, then supplying a geo sitemap can help your content reach that bit further, for example within Google maps, and within Google earth. Essential a KML sitemap will associate content with an exact location, and helps to get additional local traffic. With more and more location aware applications making their way onto the web, it makes sense to provide this information in a machine readable format.

3) Rich Snippets Present

Search is getting smarter. More and more engines are now pushing for information to be marked up in more elaborate ways, both to help them understand context, and to deliver superior experiences in what is a VERY competitive market. Rich Snippets are one such way that the search engines are doing this, and you need to know about it.

To display Rich Snippets, Google and some of the other search engines look for additional markup formats (microformats and RDFa) to determine if they can be used. In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. The following blog post from the Google Webmaster Central blog explains more in detailed analysis of what is going on. Google isn’t the only search engine asking for web pages to contain additional markup however – both Bing and Yahoo are also using it, so again it is both best practise and worthwhile doing it. Again, this is something that (if / when) you supply, will drastically increase your clickthrough rate.

There are also WordPress plugins out there to help you in that pursuit, assuming you are running on that platform. For other sites, you should look after it manually.

To test that your rich snippets are showing up ok, you can test them here.

To learn more about RDFa, this site has a pretty good breakdown of attributes that you can use etc.

4) Open Graph Protocol Implemented

Its getting pretty hard to ignore Facebook, and as it gets bigger and bigger you’d be mad to not tap into the wave of traffic that is out there for the taking. They have implemented the ‘Open graph protocol’ to help integrate existing webpages into Facebook’s architecture, making it easier to ‘like’ content. Thankfully all that most bloggers need to worry about is the fact there are WordPress plugins out there to help you do so.

Open Graph Protocol Plugin for WordPress – My own personal favourite, this plugin properly implements the full scope of the open graph plugin, providing meta data in the header of your page so image thumbnails etc makes its way into Facebook when someone shares your post.
Like – This plugin supports multiple languages, gives a number of display options and can be shown at the top or bottom of a post, on pages and on the front page, all based on what settings you select.
Facebook Like Button – There is a settings panel to shape how the like button appears with this plugin
Facebook Like Button Plugin – You can use a shortcode to insert this easily into posts.

5) Meta Tags Present

Whilst meta tags are becoming less and less important, they are still worthy of a mention, not least because they influence clickthrough rates, in particular the meta description tag.This could make the difference between you getting the clickthrough, or your competitor getting it.

Other meta tags that should absolutely make it into your site, are the verification meta tags for each of the relevant Webmaster Tool logins. You should be paying attention to what is going on within webmaster tools, for Google, Yahoo and Bing – to help pick up on any information that they provide, and to better understand how well your site is performing.

SEO for Blogging – How To Build & Promote Your Blog Effectively

When you learn affiliate marketing, you will inevitably come across niche blogging as a business model and the need for seo for blogging. (SEO = search engine optimization).
This also happens to be one of the topics that I get the most questions about from readers of this blog… (along with the topic of free traffic generation, which goes pretty much hand-in-hand).
So today I’ll start a new series on SEO for blogging (both on-and-off page optimization), and how to promote your blog(s) effectively.
Let me just start with a warning of sorts, there’s a lot of contradictory information when it comes to this stuff out there, and what I’m sharing with you here will be “best practices” as suggested by many Search Optimizers out there.
Alright… with that out of the way…
Let me first address what SEO stands for (just in case you don’t know)…
In a nutshell, search engine optimization is the work we put into a blog (website) to make it rank high in the search engines (like Google) in order to receive traffic “for free” (people often refer to this sort of traffic as “organic traffic”).
And in order to implement it, you will need your own blog (website), current content as well as on-going content (preferably).
There are some ‘best practices’ when it comes to adding content. For one, you should always have a primary keyword phrase in mind for that particular piece of content you’re writing and design it to be as relevant to that keyword as possible.
This by the way does NOT mean that you repeat the keyword unnecessarily throughout the content (where it starts reading weird), which can be seen as “keyword stuffing” (and can have a negative impact on rankings).
Instead, the focus should be on creating premium content that adds value to the blogosphere (or the interwebz… or what not), not just some mass distributed PLR (private label rights) articles offer little to no value.
When this is done while following the proper parameters in terms of SEO, you create a “win-win” situation for yourself.
In the next segment (the first ‘official’ post on SEO for Blogging), I will cover some terms you must get familiar with when starting your journey online..

5 Tools You Need to Run Your Online Business from Your Laptop

Running your online business while on vacation? Managing your manpower while you’re on the daily transport to and from your workstation? Sorting out your small company’s projects as you board on the next flight to Paris?

A few years ago, hardcore, career-oriented individuals would shudder at the thought of running your online business from anywhere but home.

That’s not the case anymore. Technology has again given us another reason to celebrate. After all, running your online business is now entirely possible anywhere you are, as long as you bring your laptop – be it a powerful notebook or an ultra-portable netbook.

Let me give you five tools that will help make your efforts at online business administration a breeze. Some of these are free, some are paid; in one way or another, one thing is sure: these are among the best tools that can help you increase your efficiency (and your profits, of course!) as you work away from your laptop.

Online Accounting: Intuit’s Quickbooks
Intuit’s Quickbooks provides a convenient solution to a problem you would pay somebody thousands just to solve: accounting. Even without any accounting experience, you can make accurate records of where every penny in your business goes, track the inventory of your products and payments made, and create and send invoices (There’s no need to create sheets and sheets of documents that can easily be misplaced).



Quickbooks is a portal that can contain all financial information about your small business. With its fast billing system, you can even create purchase orders and send them with its automatic tracking system. Other notable features include the Customer Center, where you can see customer trends, billing information and Industry Trends.

Time Tracking: Replicon’s Web Timesheet
Here’s a time tracking software that you can try for 30 days. With Replicon’s Web Timesheet, you can effectively track the attendance of your employees in your online business. This is especially important if you’re employees are working remotely from their own computers as well.



Replicon’s Web Timesheet integrates the different departments and create a user-friendly system sensitive to your corporate policies. There are also graphical reports that you can generate to get a quick overview of how your employees are performing.

You can also send e-mail notifications that will remind you of what you need to accomplish in your timesheet as-well-as what each employee has to accomplish for the day and how its progress can be tracked. Convenient, isn’t it?

Project Management: Wrike
Wrike is an award-winning project management software for many reasons. One of the top reasons is the capacity to manage multiple projects all in one workspace. In fact, there’s no limit to how many projects you can manage in Wrike.



Another reason is its Intelligent Email Engine, where you can easily seamlessly integrate your email communications among your members and make sure that every email is well received. The email system will also update concerned members whenever there are changes in certain projects.

Wrike’s Dynamic Timeline feature will also allow you to have a clear, bird’s eye view of what you need to accomplish – with all your current projects shown. (Its timeline feature also allows you to drag and drop tasks and fit it in a schedule).

Another unique feature is its real time integration with Wrike.com. This will allows users to create tasks and set deadlines by simply creating a Wave in Google.

Lastly, it will create tasks without requiring you to log in. Its smart system works automatically once a task is made. This will save you hours of time that you will otherwise spend on administrative tasks like sending reminders.

Another project management software that will allow you to control your finances, manage time sheets, and create projects is CreativePro Office. Because it’s completely free, you will save a lot without compromising project management.

Website Planning: Jumpchart
Creating your company website for your online business can be long, taxing, and unnerving. Believe me, I’ve been there! Thankfully, there’s an application that can help you communicate with your website designer to achieve the exact look you want for your website. That’s exactly what Jumpchart is for.



As a website planning tool, it will help you plan the look of your website. You can freely navigate, format, drag, drop, add pages and text, and play around with the best color schemes available. With the ease of control, you can always work on your website on your own and save on what you’re going to pay for a freelance website designer.

If you’re still going for the freelance web designing route, you can also place comments on each website page and plan the tasks ahead. You can even ask for multiple mockup pages and pick the best one that your freelancer has done. Once you are satisfied with how the website looks like, you can always export the website into CSS files and have it ready for the Internet. Its free version will offer you 1MB of storage.

Wiki/FTP: PBwiki
As you run your online business from your laptop, you are going to need a reliable file sharing system that will not only allow you to collaborate with other users but also transfer files from one employee to another. This is where PBwiki, a free wiki, will demonstrate its genius.



With this wiki, you can set access controls for each user. This will make sure that employees will only share and access as much as you allow them to. It’s also good for creating and updating versions of a certain project of your client.

Probably the most important part is its intuitiveness. If you and your employees are going to use it in the long term, they better understand exactly how it works. Once they log in to PBwiki, it will take no more than a few minutes to be familiar with its interface. Before you know it, they’re using this wiki system like a pro!

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