This one is from experience. Sometimes, when I come across that blog I never saw, I tend to dig up it’s metrics. You know when you are on a successful blog right? Within just a few seconds of your visit, you can identify if this is an MFA, a passion blog or a high value traffic one. And believe me digging into the metrics can really help and appearances can be deceptive too. I think one problem we all (I’m guessing) have is that we have these “Pre conceived ideas”.

So what are the factors common to high traffic blogs?

Please break out of the idea that I’m going to talk about quality blogs. No. I’m going to talk about blogs, good or bad, but are generating hell lot of traffic and of course revenue meanwhile.

Hell lot of content - food for spiders

Yea, more or less every high traffic blog I come across, which has good Alexa stats, can boast of at least a thousand good articles. Thousand is probably the least I’ve found. Forget SEO, forget usability, you provide whole lot of food for the spiders to chew on in text format and I’m sure there’s going to be massive long tail traffic. You may not rank number one consistently for a term but the amount of traffic you get from the many keyword combinations is awesome. Good enough to keep you at XXXX mark on AdSense revenues each month.

Simple Design with a focus on textual content

This is yet another fact. While most of us spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing themes that are ranked high for usability and creativity, there are a bunch of websites that scores just average but does well with the traffic. I can’t even possibly say that they are doing good because they have a screwed up design, but there is a hidden truth that they focus heavily on the textual content. I believe so long as the textual content is searchable/indexable more than anything else with the standards in place, then that gives you that edge others miss.

Frequency of posting

I can bet on this one. Pick any favorite blog of yours, or any high traffic blog you know and find out their posting frequency. They sure will fall into the “at least one, if possible 5 per day” category. With a regular posting frequency, I think there’s a lot of credibility attached with. Regular readers can look up to you for at least a post daily and I think that’s a commendable effort. But the best blogs are the ones that has at least a few couple of articles published daily – no doubt on that.

The “awe” factor USP

So I stumble on this blog on Mac freeware applications and on my first visit I’m excited ! The sheer number of applications reviewed there delights me. “Why the hell didn’t I come across this blog earlier?” is what goes through my mind. I think this is a characteristic feature of a successful blog. So, even if these blogs don’t have a PR, or a Social Media campaign or even the author is not into any of the social medias, still we tend to link to them, talk about them and subscribe to them. It’s all because of that one awe factor that could be one’s USP.

The value. Let me call it “Information as Service”

I would love to subscribe to any blog that will give me free valuable information. You see, information is everywhere, but only the ones who gives you that extra bit of “un told tip” would be the one you remember. And I don’t think anyone will disagree. This is more or less like the open source project , where the mass tend to stick to ONLY valuable and free information. All the high traffic blogs stick to this agenda of delivering free information in their domains, constantly with the same quality time and again – and that’s something one can resist.

Essentially, if you’ve been wondering why your AdSense revenue is not improving try the above points, just ape them and see if makes any positive impact on your blog. I’m sure it will.

Google have been suggesting time and again that providing a sitemap with the proper information is probably the best method to ensure that all the pages in your site are indexed on Google. There are many ways to create a sitemap too. Here is a collection of al the sitemap generators we could find on the internet.

Gsite Crawler

Gsite Crawler Features
Capture URLs for your site using

• a normal website crawl - emulating a Googlebot, looking for all links and pages within your website
• an import of an existing Google Sitemap file
• an import of a server log file
• an import of any text file with URLs in it

DOWNLOAD Gsite Crawler 

Tipue Sitemap Generator

It can create an index of your site as XML, JSON, JavaScript, CSV or build a Google sitemap.

DOWNLOAD Tipue sitemap generator

Google Sitemap Tools

 
Google Sitemap Tools features

• Load and Save google XML sitemap files
• Load and Save sitemap filter files
• Select and filter files off from sitemap
• Upload sitemap to your website through FTP
• Submit sitemap file to google

DOWNLOAD Google Sitemap Tools

Vigos Sitemap Generator

VIGOS Gsitemap is a 100% FREE, easy-to-use but versatile Windows sitemap generator tool to help webmasters and website owners to create, edit and submit sitemap information in adherence to the Google Sitemaps protocol.

DOWNLOAD Vigos Sitemap Generator Tool

Keylimetie Sitemap Generator

Keylimetie Sitemap generator features

Just logged off from the Google Webmasters Tricks and Treats event and it was fun and tiring !

The session started off with presentations from Googlers on various topics such as “Myths in SEO” and ended with a vibrant question answer session on the Google Moderator tool. The panel was awesome with Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik in the lead, and some 400 plus SEO’s and Webmasters in the chat !

It was exciting to be a part of the discussion because this time around, we got to listen the “real stuff” from the horse’s mouth. And what more can we get ?

Here are some of the interesting questions and their answers.

Keyword density is not something you should be keen on

Adam reinforced this once again that there is NO particular percentage keyword density that webmasters need to follow on their pages to “artificially” highlight keywords. The focus is more on relevancy of the page as a whole and just by increasing the keyword density and using variations of it, one cannot force search engines to get “ideas” off a page.

Shared IPs and Penalizations

There is no such thing as “ill effects” of being on a shared IP. Google understands that exclusive IPs are not within everyone’s reach and it is not a webmasters fault that he is on a shared IP. In fact,what’s more important is the content of your website and who links to you, than who shares your IP. It is very possible that you are the only non-porn guy on a shared IP, which is shared with 99 of the porn/poker/pharma guys. That does not mean that you are going to be penalized. But as usual, if you don’t have any valuable backlinks or popularity, you should not blame it on the ip for not enjoying the positions on SERPs, It’s probably a problem with your content.

Good quality servers are preferred to cheap ones

Google also suggested that quality servers are better than cheap ones as cheap ones prefer to accommodate a lot more websites than the normal rate and tend to give more down times and glitches. This may not help the user and in turn the search engines. Try to stick to a reliable host with decent uptimes and less crashes.

Does W3C validation score affect the ranks?

Apparently, no. W3C validation is again more a technical thing that not all would be aware of. Imagine a yoga teacher designing a page himself with valuable information. If his page does not validate, that does not mean that his information is bad. So google gives more importance to the relevancy factors of a site than the W3C validation issues.

A lot more SEO stuff was discussed at the event, that it was overwhelming. There were as usual lot of questions on penalizations and “I lost my PR F*&%^ you Google” kind of questions on chat, but I think the folks at Google made it clear again that those are the things you should ignore, and focus more on the user experience.

Make a site for the users, give them access to more valuable information, and let your SEO side take the backseat. If you are good stuff, the crowd will vote you up and we trust the crowd – was the ideology Matt Cutts and his team was trying to propagate. And I think that makes sense.

Why you ask ? Well….as a thanks may be. I know trackbacks does the same job but we need something more flexible and “configurable” I thought.

This is a wordpress plugin that lists down all the blogs that are linking to the current posts in a neat list below the post. It basically uses the Google backlinks feature on Blog Search.

I like this plugin for the following features.

• It has a more clean list displayed, more like the official Google blogs here.
• It’s not messy like the trackbacks where you might get all those spam sites listed. (Sometimes they do..)
• It lists the “filtered” results from Google Blogsearch, so I kinda prefer that to a trackback.
• It’s a way to acknowledge the backlinks, in a different way of course.

The plugin is in the first stage, so there might be glitches but I like the concept.

Get the plugin here.

Please keep the number of 404 errors and broken links on your site to the minimum, or none if possible, says Google. The basic idea is to help the robots index content more efficiently from websites and help index relevant information.

Both you and me would have number of 404 errors on your blogs and websites, now in order to align yourself more towards the league of good guys who follow the standard guidelines, let’s see how we can detect and avoid the number of broken links on a website.

1. Making use of Google Webmasters
   Google Webmasters is a wonderful tool that can help you in detecting and getting rid of broken links (or all those errors) from your site.
   Join in using your Google ID at Webmasters and add your site to the account.
   For this you have to,
   i) Add your website by providing the URL
   ii) Verify that you are the webmaster by uploading a file or adding a meta tag to the files.
   iii) Submit the XML sitemap
   After submitting the XML sitemap, you have to wait for the nest successful indexing to happen. This depends on your crawling frequency.
2. Finding out the errors
   Soon after the next successful indexing is done, while you visit the Webmasters dashboard, you will be greeted with all the errors possibly found on your website. And this includes broken links, http errors, 404 errors, broken sitemap files etc.
   
3. Trace the broken link
   Click on the “Linked from” page to get a popup that will give you the URL that carries the broken link.
    
4. Find out the URL from your website and delete it.
   It might be from one of those articles you linked to, which is no longer existing or a dead link. Most of the time Google will tell you the exact URL that’s suggesting the broken link. So just get rid of it.
5. Now, rebuild your sitemap and resubmit to Google through Webmasters
   Wait for a fresh new indexing. If you have successfully deleted all broken links you should not see that yellow, annoying icon in your dashboard !

Keeping your site clean off broken links and http errors are a sign that you are a “good guy” to search engines. It’s just a simple ignorable thing but technically, will pass lot of value to you.

The Google webmasters folks have put up a good video giving us information on the right way to get a brand new site indexed on Google. According to Google, here are the steps you have to go through to ensure a brand new site is getting indexed on Google.

1. Submit to Google at www.google.com/addurl.html
2. Acquire relevant links from other sites that are already established
3. Submit an XML sitemap
4. Use a robots.txt or noindex meta tags to exclude pages from being indexed by Google.

And here’s my two cents to explain this in detail.

• Submitting to Google through www.google.com/addurl.html
  Although this is technically, the best way to get indexed by Google, there are possible problems here. First off, if you are submitting a relatively unknown website, it might take ages to get indexed on Google this way, as Google does all the “calculations” before evaluating your submitted site. A better method is to acquire an incoming link from an already established website. Doing so, Google can probably bypass/shorten the “evaluation” process and get straight to indexing your website. I have a detail article on this here.
• Sitemaps
  Brand new website with few content or many pages, it is always good to submit a sitemap to Google. We are not talking about HTML sitemaps here, those are for users, but XML sitemaps are what the bots need.
  Sitemaps helps the bots to index the content faster and more efficiently.
  Details on creating a XML sitemap for small and large websites.
• Using the robots exclusion protocol
  I think it’s equally important to keep Google away from indexing the wrong pages. Pages that are under construction, or pages that have broken links with unfinished data. In order to make sure that Google indexes only relevant information from your website, make sure you give the directions to the bots to keep away from the wrong pages. You can do this by using a Robots.txt or Nofollow Meta tags.

I mean it. Really.

Vanessa Fox (ex-googler) explains why there are two Page Ranks, and why the real page rank is not what you see on the toolbar, and why the toolbar PR is irrelevant at least when calculating your SERPs positions.

The two pageranks are -
1 – The toolbar PR (what you and me are allowed to see) and
2 – The internal Google PR (which seems to be more a mystery)

Okay, I know that both you and me knew about this, but let’s discuss this now.
Because as we get more explanations from googlers and ex-googlers on this, things are only getting more intriguing.

Image courtesy - Hongkiat

Question – If there are two page ranks and the toolbar page rank is not the real page rank, why is it there out in public, in the first place?

Possible answer from Google – Because we have a algorithm in place which calculates the authority and link value of a website purely based on the number of inlinks it has.

My reply (possibly) - Fine – But why don’t you simply put the “real pagerank” on the toolbar ? Wouldn’t that help the webmasters and public both equally in “grading” websites? And since the real pagerank isn’t completely based on links, there is no question of SEO’s becoming successful in manipulating it, even if they try.

I’m inclined to believe that the “real pagerank” is non-existent. Of course, we all know that Google has it’s n-number of factors that helps it in “grading” a website, but that isn’t anything close to page rank, it’s an algo more complex.

Google pagerank, if I’m not mistaken is best described as below.

PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

So…..I don’t think there should be even be a case of internal/toolbar pagerank.

If there is at all a Page Rank, why can’t it be public ?

Note: I’m not implying that Google Page Rank is the sole reason for a websites SERPs rank, but trying to clear the ambiguity here between the different versions of Page Ranks and the reasons to why they exist.

High traffic keywords are always an addiction. Write a good, optimized copy targeting the high traffic keywords and sit back enjoy the traffic coming in.

But it’s also a fact that many of us don’t prefer to write content for the spiders, rather write for the users. I mean, how often can you write copies calculating the keyword density metrics (although they are irrelevant these days) ? It’s so boring.

But there is a work around to this. Write genuine articles for the users, but at the same time target the search engines and the high traffic keywords. Here’s how.

How to target high traffic keywords, without affecting the readers

Step 1 -  First off, using the Google Adwords keyword tool, find out the top traffic generating keywords related to your niche.

Step 2 – Go to your older posts, sorting them by the following criteria.
a) Page Rank – Find out the ones that have comparatively higher page rank, pick those first.
b) Text and Images – Select those articles that has lot of text and images used.

Step 3 – Go to the post and edit it either using “All in One SEO plugin” options OR the normal edit mode.(See screenshot)

Step 4 – Now replace all the image alt tags and title tags with relevant keywords related to that article and which are more inclined to the high traffic generating keywords.
Ex:- If “Tourist help” is the high traffic keyword related to tourism, you might want to select an article related to tourism and add the keywords in it.

Step 5 – Reformat the page title (Noted 1 in screenshot) and optimize it for the keyword.
Ex:- If your older title was “My traveling experiences”, you might want to change it to “Tourist help – tips and advice from a veteran traveler”

Step 6 – Additionally, you might want to change or add relevant keyword specific title tags to all the links in the article.

Step 7 – Also, it might be a good idea to add the relevant keywords and meta description. (Don’t spam, make it very relevant to the content you have)

I’ve found that if you do this to older posts that have gained some page rank and link juice already, they are likely to give you some search engine traffic.

And the advantages are that -

- Since your regular readers might have already read the article, the title change won’t really bother them.

- The older articles are probably getting traffic ONLY from referrals and search engines, so this is the best way to cash in on it.

While doing the editing just make sure that, you don’t edit the permalinks. Careful.

It’s always good to brush up your basics, even if you know it all, check it just for fun, and sometimes you may discover something new, if not, it’s just that – a cross check.

Today, the folks at Google have gathered up some information for us on what are technically – incoming links/inbound links – internal links and – outbound/external links.

Very clear information put up there.

Hey still thinking this is not for you ? Okay, what is an “inbound link?” If you are taking more than half of a second to answer, you should check out the article.

And it’s a guarantee. You have three months time (assumption), implement these and get ready to shed those green points.

(Caution: This is for the adventurous at heart, and the steps suggested are “implement-able” at your own risk.)

1. Copy paste content from other blogs and websites.
   Edit words like is, was and the, with suitable replacements and re publish the “refurbished” contents.
2. Buy links from text link brokers. Not many, a few will do.
3. Go to a public forum and advertise for “link spots” available on your blog.
4. Place a “links available for sale” note on your blog.
5. Buy a directory submission service from Digital Point
   Get 1000 link submissions for $10.
6. Add the text-link-ads widget on your blog.
7. Make all the outbound links on your blog “nofollow”
8. Sell the Russian guy a few ad spots on your blog.
9. Write reviews on Text link ads and TNX, if un successful, try again.

Any experienced guys out there, please share your thoughts and add in your valuable points. Please mask your identity while doing so.