Having seen a LOT of buzz over on Twitter and Friendfeed about the forthcoming N97, I feel compelled somewhat to make a point about this subject, especially as everyone seems to be missing the point badly. I should admit now that I haven’t used an N97, but then neither it seems has anyone else apart from Robert Scoble, so I feel as well placed as anyone to comment.

Killer or Filler?

The label ‘iPhone killer’ has become so hackneyed now I’m not sure anyone believes it when it’s applied to a new product, but yet again we see it slapped onto another touch screen wannabe. There’s already a lot of positive hype about this product, which I’m sure will be fairly slick in many ways, Nokia do design some great phones. However, I remain skeptical about the ability of Nokia or Symbian to turn out an OS experience as compelling and slick as the iPhone.

The most amusing thing about the comparisons I see is the way that people knock the iPhone because it doesn’t have a 5m pixel camera, or a full qwerty keyboard. Rather than take that as a negative, I take that as a positive sign that the company designing this thing have chosen to focus on a few important aspects of this device and make them really sing, rather than cramming the phone with features, a la Samsung or Nokia and not making any of it brilliant.

A touch of class

It is reminicsent of Google’s maxim – take one thing and do it well. In the case of the iPhone this is the concept of touch. What seems gimmicky turns out to be really intuitive, and breaks down the barriers between you and your objectives with the device, which is the ultimate goal of any UI designer. Interactions become as simple as ’see what you want – press it’, rather than ‘up-down-left-up-push-left-up’ which just sounds like the commands from some early 80s text-based adventure. It’s also really open, as the screen can then be made to be any type of interface, depending on the needs of the application.

As long as the OS and in particular the web browsing experience remains more fluid and simple with iPhones, nothing any of the other manufacturers do will make a difference. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a 10megapixel-Carl-Zeiss-smoothy-maker-with-added-zing attached, if your core offering – a personal computer that you can make calls with, browse the internet etc fails, what good is the rest of that rubbish?

The only thing I hold out any hope for at the moment is Android. I haven’t used it in any form, so I can’t comment directly, however the first iteration does seem to be better than people expected, and at least Google are focusing on the core of the experience on offer, i.e, the OS and the browser, and not thinking about hardware so much. This alone gives it a much better chance I feel. Another plus is the openess of it; rather than developing proprietary applications, they leave the field as open as possible for other people to demonstrate the full potential of the platform. They also seem to be making it possible to add applications on gracefully, something Symbian most certainly does not do.

So what can we learn from this? The main thing is that ‘less is more’. It hurts me to trot out such tired cliches, but I think when you’re looking at the objectives for a product, in hardware or software, then you do need to keep it simple. Simple objectives mean more resources applied in a given direction, so more can be done to tackle that objective. Then you just have to hope you’ve chosen the right objectives in the first place.

With very little knowledge you can brute force a lot of simple problems using macros, here is a quick introduction to macro semantics and some functions that PPC has called for!

1. VBA Basics

To program visual basic for excel we need to define our own functions and create buttons or define actions that initiate them.

To create a new vba function for a button-click, create a button using the ‘Control Toolbox’ / ‘Developer’-'Insert’ menu and double click it. This will automatically create an on-click sub program for you to work in.  You also need to declare some variables to work with:

Dim inty1,inty2,inty3 as Integer

For the purpose of the macros I introduce you will only need the Integer (number) and String types, this allows us to load numerical and text values from Excel cells and perform functions on them without having to re-read them into excel. If you want to know more about the different number types then check out this MSDN article (essential if you plan to use numbers in the tens of thousands).

To reference an excel cell you can call the Cells function specifying the row and column i.e.:

Cells(Row,Column)

so:

inty1 = Cells(1,2)

would reference the cell B1 and loads its contents into inty1.

You will also find it useful to loop through a range of cells, for example if you wanted to perform a function on columns A & B (such as checking them against a complex criteria) and place the result in Column C. There are several loop types but to keep things simple we can work with FOR loops, for these you need to specify what criteria you wish to loop for i.e.

For inty1 = 3 To 15
  Cells(1,Inty1)=Cells(1,Inty1)+5

Next

In the above example you see that we can use inty1 to sequentially set the value of some cells, the Next keyword clarifies the end of the For loop where the program returns to the start and increments inty1. Note that the Cells function can be used to set the value of a cell as well as read it.

2. Function: Compare Two Large Ranges For Subsets

We are designing a macro that will perform the same as the excel Find() function for each cell in a column to find if the contents of that cell are in any of the cells in an adjacent column. For small data sets, especially of the same size there are easier and quicker ways of making this comparison but as soon as you hit a few dozen rows and columns of different sizes then a macro becomes handy. This macro is very simplified and will only look for occuraces of X in Y (not Y in X) but is incredibly easy to fix and modify, for occurances of Y in X simply swap the input columns around!

Create the above layout in a new sheet [click to enlarge], 4 columns have been coloured in, a button created and 2 blank fields outlined in the centre. The first 2 columns are our inputs and the last 2 columns are our outputs, the macro will explain their function more.

Private Sub Activate_Click

  // sub = sub-phrase
  // com = comparison

  Dim subRow, listRow, hashSubRows, hashListRows, outputRow as Integer

  outputRow = 2 

  // skip over the column titles and output at row2

  hashSubRows = Cells(1, 4)+1 

  // Read in the number of sub rows and convert to Row#

  hashListRows = Cells(2, 4)+1 

  // Read in the number of list rows and convert to Row#

  For subRow = 2 To (hashSubRows)
  For comRow = 2 To (hashListRows)
  If (InStr(Cells(comRow, 2), Cells(subRow, 1)) > 0) Then

  // InStr is similar to Find(), if it returns >0
  // - that’s a positive hit!

  Cells(outputRow, 10) = Cells(subRow, 1)
  //Write column1 to output

  Cells(outputRow, 11) = Cells(comRow, 2)
  //Write column2 to output

  outputRow = outputRow + 1
  // Write to the next row next time

  End If
  Next
  Next
End Sub

A seasoned programmer will quickly realise that there is room for improvement in this macro, we could easily:

• automatically detect the end of the range and not need to enter the number of rows
• automatically remove duplicates from the output
• clear the output columns before the macro starts

I leave implementing these to you!

3. Directly Call Excel Functions Within A Macro

A whiz on Excel but lost as to which VBA function to use? Most Excel functions can be called directly within a Macro i.e.

Application.WorksheetFunction.Sum(inty1,inty2)

4. Function: Substitute Multiple Different Values Into All The Cells of a Range

Does this look familiar?

=Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(….

As far as I know Excel 2003 allowed eight substitutions if you had the patience to write them.

Let’s put point #3 into practice. As before, replicate the below template [click to enlarge] and code.

Dim subRow, comRow, outputRow As Long
  outputRow = 2
  For subRow = 2 To (Cells(1, 4) + 1)
  For comRow = 2 To (Cells(2, 4) + 1)
  If (InStr(Cells(comRow, 2), Cells(subRow, 1)) > 0) Then
    Cells(outputRow, 5) = Cells(subRow, 1)
    Cells(outputRow, 6) = Cells(comRow, 2)
    outputRow = outputRow + 1
  End If
  Next
Next

Notice how we can refer to Cells directly, although this wouldn’t be ideal for hundreds of substitutions it makes for a very short macro.

5. The Automatically Refreshing Pivot

Create your pivot and get your layout how you like it, right click the pivots sheet and click view code, from the drop down list select your worksheet and the sub “Worksheet_Activate()” which allows you to specify a function to run every time the worksheet is opened.

Private Sub Worksheet_Activate()
  PivotTables("PivotTable1").Refresh
End Sub

This works best if you play with the Pivot options to disable ‘AutoFormat’ (which resets the layout every refresh – very irritating) and enable ‘AutoSort’ on your desired field. Using this method I prefer to make “Templates” – a blank but formatted excel book with an automatically refreshing pivot on the 2nd sheet with pretty colours and large fonts which will turn your weekly input data into something fancy with minimal intervention.

A final comment on pivots: If there is only one table on your worksheet then you can let your pivot see the entire worksheet and simply filter out blanks, to do this enter $A:$Z into the range selection at the start of the pivot wizard. Remember to replace $Z with a column thats way past your last column, you can re-arrange your table and the macro/pivot will still work but inserting blank columns or renaming columns used in your pivot will cause errors.

6. Function: Create All Combinations of W&X&Y&Z

This macro will create a brute-force list for all combinations of the inputs, Create the below template [click to enlarge]:

Enter ‘1′ for blank columns and the number of rows to read for inputted columns.

Dim col1Row, col2Row, col3Row, col4Row, noCol1Rows, noCol2Rows, noCol3Rows, noCol4Rows, outputRow As Integer
  outputRow = 6

  noCol1Rows = Cells(1, 2)
  noCol2Rows = Cells(2, 2)
  noCol3Rows = Cells(3, 2)
  noCol4Rows = Cells(4, 2)

  For col1Row = 6 To (noCol1Rows + 5)
  For col2Row = 6 To (noCol2Rows + 5)
  For col3Row = 6 To (noCol3Rows + 5)
  For col4Row = 6 To (noCol4Rows + 5)

  Trim(
  Cells(outputRow, 5) = Cells(col1Row, 1) & " " & Cells(col2Row, 2) & " "  &  Cells(col3Row, 3) & " " & Cells(col4Row, 4)
  )

  outputRow = outputRow + 1

  Next
  Next
  Next
  Next

You can carefully remove some of the FOR loops to reduce the comparison to just Z&Y, Z&Y&W or insert more loops to your hearts desire but remember to create all of the necessary variables and carefully change the template if you want extra loops.

7. Some Extra Information

You may find your large comparison macros take a long time to run, Excel may be refreshing the page every single time a calculation is made, to combat this toggle screen updating at the start of your sub:

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.xlCalculationManual

And then resume at the end if desired:

Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Application.xlCalculationAutomatic

Happy Macroing!

How To Create The Perfect Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

If you’ve been working in search optimisation for any length of time you’ll have heard how important it is to properly optimise your page title tag. Chances are you’ll also have heard that the meta description is also important, but on a lesser scale.

I agree wholeheartedly: getting your onpage SEO dialed in is critical. It’s much easier to rank a site that ticks all the onpage boxes, but that’s not to say it is impossible to rank a poorly optimised site through sheer brute force. However, I would rather make a job easier in the long run and so before I start trying to build links into a site I like to get the basics sorted.

Getting your titles and meta descriptions done properly is a painstaking and at times arduous task, which is something I can attest to. However, when you see the fruits of your labour, ie. ranking higher, then it can actually be a rewarding endeavour. So here we are: 18 tips to help you optimise your page title and meta description.

Gathering Data

It’s possible to create decent titles and meta descriptions from a hunch, or what you perceive to be popular search phrases based on your own knowledge and experience. But really good titles and description tags are built on one thing, and one thing only: good data.

Here’s 4 ways to gather good data that can be used to form the backbone of an optimised title tag and meta description.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool: use this tool to get the estimated volume of searches for keyphrases and uncover related phrases with high volume. It’s worth bearing in mind that some keyphrases are highly seasonal: who in their right mind searches for ‘Christmas trees’ in June?
2. Google AdWords Traffic Estimator: I like to use this tool to corroborate estimated volumes found in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
3. Analytics: there’s a world of data in your stats package, whether it be Google Analytics, Clicky or something a little more high end such as Omniture. Again, use keyword data from your analytics package to determine trends and guide you towards choosing what keyphrases to optimise for.
4. PPC Campaign Data: you can get a good idea of what people search for when you run a broadly targeted AdWords campaign for a couple of weeks.

What Keyphrases Convert Into Leads & Sales?

By now you’ll have more data than you can shake a big stick at. But now you need to quality it, and you do that by finding out what keyphrases actually generate revenue. To do this, you’ll need to have some form of goal tracking integrated between your web analytics package of choice and your website.

First of all, let me go slightly off topic for a brief moment to reiterate something you’ll probably already know. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of ranking for vanity phrases, the highly searched for two word keyphrases that your competitors are probably targeting. My point is this: it is very rarely the case that these vanity phrases actually pay for themselves. And there’s little point deluding yourself that if you can rank first for a given range of vanity phrases then you’ll make bank: there’s a big glass ceiling waiting for you in that case.

Here’s a couple of tips to help you find keyphrases that will pay you to rank.

1. Consider the effect of PPC traffic: while PPC is really useful for keyword research bear in mind that broadmatch keyphrases can really confuse the issue.
2. Per visit value: track down phrases where there is good search volume and you earn a decent amount per visit. Don’t rule out keyphrases with below average per visit values: it may be that the data is skewed because you don’t rank very high.

Compiling Your Optimised Title Tag

Once you have researched the data on what people actually search for and buy, then you can work on the title itself. When writing title tags I like to have some structure with the most important keyphrase at the start, backed up with a longer variation.

1. Structure: put your main keyphrase at the start of the title, eg. Blue Widgets
2. Variety, it’s the spice of life (and titles): try and fit in a longer variation in the title with more keywords (note the singular variation), eg. Find The Cheapest Sky Blue Widget Deal Online Today!
3. Break it up: use a non alphanumeric character between your main keyphrase and before your longer variation to break them up. You can use anything such as a pipe, hyphen, colon or an arrow.
4. Include a call to action: real people actually read SERPs and are scanning down that list to see something that appeals to them. So why not include a call to action in your title? Not only will it help differentiate you from your competition, but it also increases your CTR.
5. Don’t go over 65 – 68 characters max: if your title is long and unwieldy it gets cut off in the SERPs and looks crap. Use this tool to check how many characters are in your title.
6. Meld it all together: Blue Widgets | Find The Cheapest Sky Blue Widget Deal Online Today!

Customising The Meta Description

The meta description has been widely ignored in SEO circles. In fact, good onpage optimisation is arguably missing from the toolbox of many search marketers now because we rightly or wrongly focus almost entirely on building backlinks.

However, in my own tests in various competitive niches I have seen excellent ROI from optimised meta descriptions. They should read well, like an advertisement designed to appeal to searchers looking for the product or service you offer.

1. Re-examine data: take another look at the data you gathered earlier and identify variations on your main keyphrase and secondary keyphrases.
2. Sprinkle in your long tail keyhrases: the meta description is an ideal place to drop in those long tail keyphrases that actually generate revenue.
3. Work in singular and plural variations: lots of people in the buying cycle search using a singular keyword, eg. unique blue widget for women. In fact in some verticals, like hotels, the majority of searches are singular. I also think that someone searching with a singular keyphrase is further along in the buying cycle: they know what they want, now they just want to find a place to buy it. So don’t miss out on the traffic!
4. Use the description to sell the sizzle: appeal to prospects in the buying cycle by mentioning your USP: free home delivery, 1 year guarantee, industry leading warranty, 24hr telephone support etc.
5. Aim for 165 – 170 characters: this is a contentious one, but I’ve seen great results when you treat the meta description like an advertisement with a set number of characters available. Maybe SEOs should start using Twitter more to help get into this mindset of limited character usage! ;)
6. Put it all together: Find great deals on a cheap small light blue widget for women @ your site. Buy low cost small sized blue widgets with purple accessories today & get free home delivery!

Ideally you would optimise each page on your site in this way, but that’s difficult when you’re working with thousands of products in hundreds of categories. Choose what to optimise for first based on what would give the highest ROI for your business.

“Why would you do this?” you may ask. Well quite simply I am in a team building a new data management system to sit on top of a legacy system with its legacy database. All the new code is new, shiny and streamlined and the old code is… well… crap but we have to keep both systems running concurrently so we have various tables in the legacy database we need to access from the new system. As it happens we need to access the legacy users table in a ‘has_many through’ from the new ‘orders’ table.

Set Up Your Secondary Database Connection

You can quite happily set up a model to connect do a database other then the default by setting the connection up in your ‘config/database.yml’ as follows:

legacy:
  adapter: <adapter>
  database: <database>
  username: <username>
  password: <password>

And then in any model you want to use with your secondary database:

<model>.establish_connection configurations['legacy']

Create Your ‘Through’ Model

Now a normal ‘has_many through’ just plain won’t work between models attached to two different databases but a normal has_many will. So we can create ‘has_many through’ functionality in the following way:

Set up your ‘through’ model on either database. It really doesn’t matter which and set it to ‘belong_to’ your two main models.

Set both main models to ‘has_many’ of your ‘through’ model.

Create Your ‘Through’ Relationship

Use the following code in each of your main models to mimic the ‘has_many through’ association. In this example I’m using ‘orders’ and ‘users’ and my ‘through’ table is ‘order_users’:

In ‘order’

def users
  user = []
  order_users.each do |ou|
    user << ou.user
  end
  user
end

In ‘user’

def orders
  order = []
  order_users.each do |ou|
    order << ou.user
  end
  order
end

And you’re done. Now the relationship will work just like any other ‘has_many through’.

Let it be known: building links is not easy. Therefore, it makes sense to invest your time and effort in something that just works. And for me, that means guest posting.

So why guest posting? Well for a start I think that Google places weight on semantically relevant links from relevant sites in your niche. I don’t think there are many who would argue against that logic. I also think that there’s something to be said about building a clean backlink portfolio containing links from authorities and powerful sites rather than spammy links from paid posts and forum signatures.

If you want to make a few quick bucks on some Made For AdSense site then you’ll probably not care too much about who links to you. But if you actually care about building a brand that will stand a chance of weathering the algorithmic shuffles we’ll see in the years to come, then building link equity from other similarly strong sites is what you need to do. And here’s why.

1. Sheer Power

Buy a sitewide link in the footer or sidebar of some average blog or get a link from a niche authority? I know what one I’d go for, and I know what one will count more in Google’s authority-skewed algorithm.

2. Semantic Relevance

Ideally I like to guest post on a site in the same or highly relevant niche. In an ideal world you would guest post ‘10 Ways To Improve Your Surfing Skills’ on a site about surfing, but it would also work on a site about bodyboarding or windsurfing. Always try and keep your guest post as relevant as possible both to the blog where it will be placed and also to who you are linking to.

3. Links From Within Content

What do you think looks more natural? If you were drawing up the specification for a search ranking algorithm, what type of link would score higher? In my opinion there’s no choice between a link to your site from the footer of a site in your niche surrounded by no text with links on either side to, at best, vaguely related sites with overtly commercial anchor text and a link from within contextually relevant text. There’s just no comparison. At all.

4. Control Of Anchor Text

Of course there’s more to building link equity than getting as many links as you can: matching up anchor text with the target URL is also very important. If you are buying in links either directly from a publisher or through a link brokerage then you’ll have almost complete control over your choice of anchor text. There are some brokerages with a much higher editorial standard who require you to use modifiers, but by and large the average brokerage is in it for the money and won’t stand in your way no matter what you want for anchor text.

Guest posting tends to operate differently and much depends on how much trust there is between you and the site owner. Nevertheless, you should be able to get a solid targeted link from your guest post with good anchor text.

5. Good Neighbourhood Association

One of the best things about guest posting, in my opinion, is the ability to associate your site with others in a neighborhood. Most people doing SEO now will be aware of the benefits of being in a ‘good neighbourhood’ and how it can affect your organic rankings. Guest posting is one of the best techniques to build links from authority sites and also place your link alongside links to other niche authorities.

Say you were writing a guest post on ‘10 Tips For Enjoying A Trip Though Peru’ to be placed on some blog on Peru or South America, make sure you link to other posts on that domain but also throw in some links to relevant Wikipedia and WikiTravel entries as well as content on government sites and other authorities in the niche.

Compare this to buying links through an unscrupulous link brokerage. In my small mind this technique hands down beats having your link placed beside contextually irrelevant links to sites of potentially dubious quality and trust who may even be in a completely different niche.

6. Secondary Linkage Means More Juice

Guest posts do not have to become orphaned. If you create a piece of useful content on a site in your niche that has a large readership, then that guest post stands a good chance of building secondary links. As with any blog your guest post will eventually be pushed off the front page and down the archives by fresher content. Nobody ever links to your typical paid post, but high quality guest posts on powerful sites often pick up links from other sites which means they aren’t orphaned and actually pass on power and authority.

One of the best ways to get links to your content is to give the publisher a guest post or linkbait that can be pushed on social media sites. That way the publisher may get a lot of traffic, more search traffic and an increase in readership, which, let’s face it, will make it more likely you get asked to guest post in the future.

7. Surviving Manual Inspection

One of the greatest fears of any SEO is having their site manually reviewed. If it’s easy for your competitors to reverse engineer your backlink portfolio, then you can be sure than the staff of any major search engine are adequately equipped to spot unnatural and obviously paid-for links. Integrating your link into a guest post makes it much more difficult for a search engine to devalue the power of that link.

If we take a typical e-commerce store as an example, up to 35% of sales can be taken over the telephone. Accurately attributing these sales can make a big difference to how you optimise your PPC campaigns, and have an effect on the overall ROI from paid search marketing.

Most web analytics solutions do a great job of tracking where sales come from, be it from organic search traffic, direct type-in traffic or PPC traffic. However, the source of telephone orders is one area that site owners often choose to ignore because it’s difficult to track.

Here’s a few ways to track PPC traffic that generates orders over the phone.

1. Use Unique Promo Codes On PPC Landing Pages

This can be achieved by tagging your urls with a CGI parameter, such as “?land=adwords”. With a bit of code you can get this code printed on the page, as “Promo:adwords” in the footer will work fine. When customers call and place an order make sure everyone is trained to ask them for their “promo” code, which gets stored with an order placed over the phone.

Furthermore, you could be a little more cryptic with your promo codes if you want to hide what you’re doing from your customers. Using custom promotional codes works well if you are running large PPC campaigns with hundreds of keywords and landing pages.

2. Use A Unique Telephone Number On Landing Pages

This is a very simple but effective technique: switch the telephone number based on the referring site. If you wanted to be thorough you could get a telephone number for MSN, Yahoo or AdWords. This method is more suitable for sites offering a limited product range and bid on a small range of keywords.

3. Use A Pay Per Call Service

Set up a new telephone number and then put that number on your landing page. Pay Per Call services come with powerful stats so you can measure just how many calls you have received. Also using a service such as Ingenio means you only pay for phone call leads from new customers calling your business.

4. Track Sales With Specialist Telephone Call Conversion Software

Choose a solution such as that provided by ClickPath to track all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and tie them back to the exact keyword or ad source.

5. Use An IVR Phone System

Harnessing the power of an IVR phone system can take the headaches out of getting your staff to record the lead source. You could add an extra menu on your phone system asking people for a promo code that is unique to the referring site.

I suppose in one way it is our own fault for perpetuating this fallacy of marketing. Reading through the plethora of posts about linkbait makes this particular technique seem like some crazy next-generational solution to marketing any site. The reality is, however, very different. You’ve got to work incredibly hard to make linkbait on a commercial store work and be prepared to sustain your efforts even though many of your baits get no traction and go precisely nowhere.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Digg et al have moderators and systems in place to identify commercially motivated linkbait, and even if they don’t, the community itself definitely doesn’t want to see our ’spam’. The good old days of pushing ‘10 Cooking Tips From Holywood’s Hottest Celebs’ to help promote some recipe book store are long gone.

Don’t get me wrong: linkbait is here to stay, but we must progress. The broader SEO community may have only recently caught on and crowned linkbait as the white-hatted linkbuilding prince, but we’re only getting started down the road of punchy titles, angles and hooks compared to our friends in the traditional mainstream media.

So if you are responsible for marketing an e-commerce store and want to try linkbait, be prepared to work harder than you have before to create unique, interesting, timely and resourceful content that real people actually care about and want to read.

Here at Setfire Media we specialise in building online stores. So as ‘Head of Search’ I’ve been in the trenches for long enough to hone the process of linkbaiting an e-commerce store and can say with surety that there are things you can do to help improve your success rate on social media sites – a checklist if you will.

Here are a few things I’ve learned that you can apply and hopefully find more success.

Preparing Your Online Store For Linkbait

Whether you are linkbaiting a blog or online store, the key is to always keep the target demographic in mind from the start. There’s a world of difference between linkbaiting an informational blog and a commercial site that sells a product: what works on a popular blog will probably fail on your store. Don’t forget that because it will give some context to your linkbait strategy.

1. Setup A Blog Where You Can Place Linkbait

The first step in improving your chances at scoring a front page is to setup somewhere to place your linkbait. One tactic used by many stores is to simply create a plain page with no company styling so that it appears some user found a ‘hidden secret’. This is something I wouldn’t recommend doing for various reasons, but primarily because linkbait shouldn’t be looked at as something you do only once. It sounds seriously simple, and it is. Just do it.

2. Choosing Where Your Blog Is Located

This point is particularly relevant to Digg. You’ll notice under a story headline that the domain is listed, but there’s only enough space for about 30 characters. Let’s say you have an online store called ‘cheapbrandxyz.com’ and you want to linkbait it. Where you choose to locate your blog will have an affect on how successful you are. Why? It’s all in the domain. Diggers don’t like anything commercial in nature, least of all some store trying to get onto the front page.

By locating your blog at ‘cheapbrandxyz.com/blog’ you expose more of your ‘not supposed to be on Digg’ domain, which means there is more chance of being buried. Place your blog in a subdirectory and give it a longer name like ‘dailymusings.cheapbrandxyz.com’ and much of your domain will be cut off, improving your chances of not getting buried.

3. Brand Your Blog

It is essential that you brand your blog to fit the demographic. I would personally recommend you choose a different name for it with a tagline that has a strong personality. Remember who your target audience is and let that dictate your branding.

4. Avoid Integration With Your E-commerce Site

Let me just clarify that statement a bit. I’m assuming that your e-commerce site will have the typical 3-coloumn setup, company logo, links to checkout, a toll-free phone number placed in the header and links to products in the navigation etc. If you want your linkbait to get traction, especially on Digg, then this has got to go. The idea is to make your blog appear distinct from the rest of your store, a repository of useful and interesting content tailored to a specific demographic.

5. Cloaking To Visitors From Social Media Sites

In some cases it may not be possible to change the default theme for your blog: perhaps the company’s board of directors would rather have the same layout across the site to reinforce branding. If you are in this situation, you do have an option.

Cloak to visitors from a set list of referrers (digg.com, delicious.com, propeller.com, buzz.stumbleupon.com / www.stumbleupon.com, reddit.com etc.) and show them a less commercial layout to appease their anti-establishment worldview. It’s slightly grey hat, but it does get around this particular issue.

6. Consider Who You Link To

There’s very little doubt that one of the most overlooked elements in modern SEO is the outbound link. Simply put, you can use the outbound link to associate your site with others in your niche who have more authority than you such as topical magazines and forums. It is, however, important to analyse who you are linking out to: it could be a big mistake linking to a competitor, a site in your competitor’s network or even a site that regularly links out a competitor.

7. To Nofollow, Or Not?

It may be attractive, at first, to nofollow any outbound link from your linkbaits, but upon closer inspection I don’t think the argument stands up. Nofollowing your outbound links will stop you from placing your site in a neighbourhood of authorities. Linking to a relevant industry-specific wiki or blog will help you.

8. Setup A Separate Analytics Profile

I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to do this from the start. When you run an e-commerce store you will rely heavily on tracking conversion rates, per visit values and bounce rates etc. This data is essential to your business and contaminating it with 100,000 visitors from Digg or some other social media site is going to radically, and negatively, skew your data.

The problem is further compounded should you be running any PPC campaigns or email marketing where you need good data to see how effective your marketing initiatives have been. Do the easy thing and protect your data from the beginning by splitting out tracking between your store and your blog.

9. Avoid Sidebar Links To Your Products

I’m of the opinion that links from a sidebar don’t count anywhere near as much as those from within relevant content. If you are linking to products in your catalog try and do so from within the main body of content in your linkbait where it is surrounded by relevant text. Linking internally in this manner means you can pass on juice to products, brand pages and categories that need it most.

Creating Relevant Topical Linkbait

When linkbaiting a commercial site you’ve got to be relevant and present your content as best as you can. You’ll see small blogs getting to the front page with poor grammar, atrocious design and a terrible headline. Let me dispel any hope you may have that a quickly thrown together linkbait will cut it on your store: it will not.

It is possible to linkbait a store, but there are some basics you need to apply first.

10. Keep It Timely

One of the most effective ways to successfully linkbait a commercial site is to tie in with current events. For example, if you have a site selling car parts, then create a bait with an angle that ties in with climate change and the broader green movement.

Another way to stay current is to keep an eye on the latest internet memes, circular emails and acronyms: I’m thinking of Digg’s recent viral adoption of ‘FTW’ in this instance. Adopting the language of your intended audience, particularly in your headline, really does help. A word of warning though: be selective because many of these fleeting internet phenomena are complete and utter trash aimed at a demographic completely different to that of a predominantly male social media site.

11. Relevancy Is Key

You’ll often see sites like Wired on the front pages of social media sites covering issues as diverse as the latest Apple rumours to the race to dig the deepest hole on Earth during the Cold War. This is fine for news outlets, where offbeat news can intermingle with commentary on current events, but not for a site selling a niche selection of products.

There is an argument that in the past irrelevant linkbait was beneficial, based on the assumption that if it went viral you still got lots of links from authority sites. I personally do not believe this to be true now: if you do push irrelevant linkbait on your e-commerce store you actually risk doing more damage than good by altering the theme of your site through links with completely unrelated anchor text from non-relevant sites outside your niche.

12. Regurgitating News Is Not A Valid Strategy

Don’t even allow yourself to get tempted into regurgitating news in the hope that it will get links: it simply will not happen. When discussing news and current affairs people tend to link to mainstream media and high profile blogs, not mom and pop’s store. Unless you are actually a very well known brand, forget about it.

13. Use Multiple Hooks

Old school linkbait might use just one hook, which may or may not be enough. I tend to apply a combination of hooks to initially grab attention, appeal to the reader and then draw them in. Combining the attack hook with the news hook can form the basis of an extremely viral linkbait, but its lifespan tends to be short because the focus of current affairs coverage always moves on.

Creating a linkbait with a view to the long term may mean that it gets off to a slow burn start, but its evergreen nature means it will attract links for much longer. As you can see below, combining the green hook with fear is particularly effective.

14. Differentiate Your Linkbait

Before you start writing up a bait, have a look to see what has already been tried. In an ideal world every linkbait will break new ground but, in fairness, there’s very little that hasn’t been done before. It’s a good idea to find out what has been attempted previously and didn’t quite make it. Even if your idea didn’t work for someone else, it may be worth doing again, only better! A word of warning: don’t try and repeat too soon.

15. Avoid Aggressive Linking To Your Products

The whole idea of linkbait is to help your store rank higher, but to get the more benefit you need to avoid temptation to drop too many obvious links to products. One easy way round this problem is to strip out any internal links while you are pushing the bait, then add them back in after you’ve finished and hopefull for a few good links.

Be Persistent!

There’s very few people who’ll tell you that linkbaiting an online store is easy, but as you can see below, it is possible!

Would you like to get more quality backlinks to your online store? Get in touch today for a free consultation!

Here are some tips to help you plan to stay online and available.

1. Use static page cacheing

Use a plugin such as WP-Cache for Wordpress. For for a custom coded site, use mod_rewrite to replace your dynamically generated page with a statically built one for the period of the spike, then switch back to dynamic when traffic returns to normal.

2. Use Memcache

Memcache gives you a super-fast alternative to pulling everything out of a database. This is particularly useful on sites which have mostly database reads, and few database writes such as CMS, blogs etc.

3. Keep the page light

If the traffic is going to hit a single page, keep it light. Use a tool like Firebug to check the HTML size and image sizes. Ensure the images are compressed properly, and consider temporarily removing weighty layout blocks or switching to a lightweight template for a while.

4. Split your content over multiple pages

Rather than one large page (which everyone tries to load once, at the same time), split your content over multiple, sequential pages. This will reduce the load into more smaller requests over a longer period.

5. Have a code-tidy

Use this review as an opportunity to reduce the weight of your pages. Look at the code of your pages. Do you still have tables and font tags?  Switch to a div-based layout and CSS. Abstract any in-line CSS and JavaScript into separate files.

6. Host your images/media off-site

If you think you are going to have bandwidth issues, put your images somewhere else – with a different host, on a different network. If you need to choose the host, use tools such as traceroute to ensure they are actually in a different place and network path. Put your video on a sharing service such as Youtube and then embed it in your page.

7. Check your hosting plan for hard limits

You might have been through all the tips above, and the site is performing fine … right up until your host switches your site to a page telling everyone you just exceeded your bandwidth limit! Check what you are paying for and make sure this is enough. Talk to your host to see if the limit can be temporarily removed.

8. Find out about the infrastructure of your host

This is less important if you are with a big, well-known host, but then these people are likely to publish information about their infrastructure and internet pipes anyway. This becomes important is when you are with ‘Bob’s hosting’, and he is hosting you on his rented box with 1,000 other low-bandwidth sites and a throttled internet connection. Is the server capable of supporting a high traffic spike? Does it have a 100M/Gigabit path to the internet?

9. Go dedicated/clustered/grid

You might think you are already paying a handsome price for your hosting, but what is it actually worth to you to stay up? If you were down for an hour at what should be a busy time, what would you stand to loose? In the case of an e-commerce site this should be pretty easy to calculate and you may actually be surprised at what you stand to loose! Look at your hosting cost from this perspective, and it may be that the upgrade to the next level of hosting suddenly looks cheap.

The key to successful email marketing is building up your list of newsletter recipients. The equation is simple, the more people you email the more sales, and response you’re going to get. Every subscriber counts, and if you’ve got your analytics rockin’, and measure the sales you get from email marketing, you can attribute a per subscriber value to your list.

Here are 15 ways you can increase the number of people signing up to your mailing list:

1. Put your email newsletter sign up form in a prominent place. Preferably get it above the fold.
2. Put the sign up form on EVERY page of your website. Only a small percentage of people will land on your home page.
3. Offer a money-off incentive. This is very powerful. For example you could email people a coupon when they sign-up.
4. Enter them in a prize draw when they sign-up. Make sure you pick something that fits your customer demographic.
5. Let people know they can unsubscribe at any time. Why not add a link to your unsubscribe page right underneath your sign-up box?
6. Put a link to your privacy policy next to the email sign-up box. People want to know what you are going to do with their data.
7. Push the benefits of signing up. What will people get? How often will they get your emails. Let people know what to expect.
8. Tell people what they won’t get. Inform them that you wont share, swap or sell their email address. People hate spam and will be wary.
9. Put a “refer a friend” link in your emails. You could use a message like “If you enjoyed this, why not forward it to a friend”. Make it easy for people to forward your email on.
10. Promote email sign-ups offline. If you have a traditional store make sure you are capturing your customer’s email addresses either at point of purchase or by running an incentive such as a prize draw.
11. Write an ebook or special report and give it away to subscribers. Every one’s a sucker for a freebie. Write something useful for your audience and they will download it.
12. Make sure you get relevant information. Just an email address is great. But getting their first name and last name makes it possible for you to personalise the emails you send them, which in turn can increase open rates. Remember not to ask for too much information as this can put people off filling in the form.
13. Use PPC campaigns to drive traffic. Make sure you create a compelling landing page with a really good incentive. This one can work surprisingly well, especially if the clicks are cheap and you can convert them.
14. Be proactive, passive list building does not work. Make sure you are actively employing some of the techniques mentioned here. If you are not your email subscriber numbers could be shrinking due to your lists natural attrition rate.
15. Use some social proofing. Advertise how many many people are on your list. Use a message such as “Join the 120 thousand people already signed up”.

Interested in increasing your email newsletter signups? Contact Setfire Media today and find out how we can improve your Email Marketing campaigns.

Linkbait is widely regarded by many SEOs as the premier weapon in their quiver of marketing and promotional tools, and justifiably so. When linkbait is successful it can be incredibly powerful, driving an initial spike in (arguably entirely useless) traffic and links, followed by a long and steady stream of backlinks.

That’s the best case scenario. But what happens when your linkbait just doesn’t cut it? Digg, which is the granddaddy of social media sites, is where most linkbait gets peddled. Digg is also subject to random system maintenance and drastic algorithmic changes. Other popular social media sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon can also be hit and miss: what works one day might have no hope the next.

Of course, it isn’t all dependent on where you distribute your linkbait. It may well be the case that your ‘101 Reasons For Choosing Acme Exhaust Manifolds’ just doesn’t appeal to the crowd and is destined to fail, even if it does get 275 diggs and all manner of thumbs up.

So what if this is where you find yourself? What should you do if your linkbait, on which your client has spent good money and you’ve invested copious amounts of time, goes nowhere? Well, for what it’s worth, here’s what I would do.

Don’t Get Angry
It’s very tempting to lose it when you’ve been pimping every living person in your sphere of influence for the past day only to be greeted by that all-too-familiar ‘Out Of Service’ screen. It is infuriating that after 300 diggs, some of which may even be natural, to get buried. However, this is not the time to start ranting and raving. Instead, take a break from pushing your linkbait and do something else. You’re a link ninja, and ninja’s think laterally around problems.

Diversify
All too often marketers pin all their hopes and aspirations for a linkbait on a single site: Digg. This is not prudent. If your linkbait has failed on Digg, then learn this lesson and learn it well! Believe it or not there are other social media sites where you can spam push your quality and relevant content. Check out this handy list of 10 alternatives. ;)

Hit Up Your Contacts
If you’ve been pushing linkbait then you probably have quite a few people on IM, some of which own blogs that may be relevant. If this is the case then it is well worth taking the time to introduce them to your linkbait and beg for a link, even if it’s in a link roundup.

Contact Relevant Blogs
You should really be doing this anyway as part of a diversified link building campaign. Start searching for blogs relevant to your linkbait and tipping them off about it. For larger blogs it may be worth getting a colleague or friend to also email them to make this seem like a more popular article.

Make Sure You Email Companies & People Cited In Your Linkbait!
This is often completely ignored, but can score you some really good links. If you have a linkbait that, for example, compares 10 companies in your niche, then get in touch with their marketing department and inform them about it. Of course there will be companies who just will not link out, but on the other hand there are many big brands who will.

Consult Your Log Files
There’s gold in them there logs! It’s easy to bury your head in Google Analytics studying charts and miss out on the real good stuff. Take a look at referring sites over the last few months and see who has historically been sending you traffic, then contact them.

Create A List Of Distribution Nodes
Linkbait is a tricky thing to master, and even the best social marketers go through dry spells. I maintain a list of sites that I like to call ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’. These are sites with large followings that send traffic and also generate backlinks. In drawing up your list it is a good idea to classify what each site covers, how much traffic they send and whether they provide a direct link or not. Sometimes you’ll come across sites that will link to you via a redirect, but that won’t matter because simply being featured means others in your niche can see your content and link to it.

Critical to creating and maintaining a good list, in my opinion, is teaming up with other trusted friends. You may have a definitive list of ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’ in the sports niche, but your friends may be able to contribute to the list by providing details on highly popular sites in other niches. You can then use this to create linkbait with a hook specific to a niche, then push it on a wider range of ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’.

Start Forum Discussions
Blogs aren’t the only place where you can get good oneway links, build authority and increase brand awareness. For some reason we as a community seem to have turned our backs on the forum, which are still a thriving way to discuss events, products and current affairs in many niches. If you have admin access at a relevant forum, or know an admin, then it may be possible to create a sticky thread and reference your linkbait to drive traffic and links.

Promotion Via Guest Posts
They’re a little overlooked but can be immensely powerful. The humble guest post is another way to build authority through oneway links with highly targeted anchor text, which, crucially, you can control.

Inclusion In Newsletters
Email marketing is massively powerful. There have been instances in the past where I’ve had a linkbait mentioned in a newsletter that sent tens of thousands of visitors and generated more links than you could shake a big stick at. Don’t pass it up!

Resubmission
This should be your last resort: resubmission, especially to Digg, is a risky endeavour and you may get your domain flagged for spam. To resubmit, you could change the URL of the linkbait or add a suffix to an existing URL such as ‘&ref=RSS’. With Reddit you can delete a submission and then resubmit at a later date, giving you another throw of the dice.

As you can see, just because a linkbait falls at the first hurdle doesn’t mean it is dead in the water. There are many, many ways that you can build links to a linkbait. All it takes is some time and effort!