“Blog Design For ROI: Keep On Fixing, Keep On Fixing” plus 1 more

Blog Design For ROI: Keep On Fixing, Keep On Fixing

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 11:02 AM PST

This guest post is by Gab Goldenberg, author of The Advanced SEO Book.

If you choose to redesign your whole blog in one go instead of adopting little improvements on a regular basis, the odds are that your redesign will be a brutal chore.

Instead, I’d like to encourage you to review the posts in this series on Blog Design for ROI and pick one area in which you’d like to improve. We’ve covered literally every area of the blog, from your homepage to category pages to posts, to individual elements like sidebars and social aspects like your community, so there’s bound to be something to appeal to you:

Once you’ve chosen where you’d like to improve, do the following.

Measure where you stand currently. For example:
- Use usability testing with three friends to see if they can find your email subscription, and get their feedback on how appealing it is to sign up to your newsletter.
- To simplify your sidebar, header or navigation use Feng-GUI to get an idea how visually loud they are.
- Try a tool like CrazyEgg to measure how much and where people are clicking your archive pages, as well as how far they’re scrolling.
Write down your theory of why your performance is at its current level.
Brainstorm different ways to improve and write all the ideas down (don’t reject ideas at this point, as that will discourage creativity). See which of the tactics in the above articles you can apply, and how.
Choose one option to improve and test it out.
Measure results and repeat the above.

From my own experience, I can tell you that testing numerous small things and making incremental progress is a much easier—and more effective way—of improving your blog’s design, in comparison to the traditional ‘grand redesign’ method. Similarly, the crowd at Wider Funnel make a good case for the “Evolutionary Site Redesign” process instead of the “Revolutionary Site Redesign” process.

Now it’s your turn: in the comments, tell us which area of your blog’s design are you going to focus on improving? Why did you pick that? And what changes are you thinking of making? Share your goals with us in the comments.

Gab Goldenberg and Internet Marketing Ninjas are developing a book based on this series – get your free copy at http://seoroi.com/blog-design-for-roi/ . You can also get a free chapter of Goldenberg's The Advanced SEO Book.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Design For ROI: Keep On Fixing, Keep On Fixing

How to Leverage Blog Comments to Increase Search Rank

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

This guest post is by Jonathan Solis of NutraSol Natural Center.

When the topic of getting blog comments for SEO comes up, your first thought would probably be to get links to your site by commenting on other blogs.

Well, I usually don't waste my time with that technique, because most comment links are no-follow anyway.

And I want to bring focus to the comments on my own blog.

Having user-generated content on your site has always been an easy way to gain search engine traffic from long-tail keyword queries. Comments are a good source of user-generated content containing those keyword phrases.

For the last two years, I’ve been conducting SEO experiments for all types of websites, ranging from my blogs to local business directories, and I have found that user-generated content from the comments section in my health blogs has increased my traffic tremendously.

The site that’s producing the best results for me right now is the Spanish health blog, Informe Natural. I apologize for using a site in a foreign language as an example, but this is the site I reached my conclusions from, and the idea will apply no matter what language you’re blogging in.

How it works

It all started when I began marketing Alpiste Seeds for sale online and featured an article about where to buy them on the Spanish health and nutrition blog. As people found the page, they began to ask questions in the comments section.

Without realizing it, they were adding to my on-page search engine optimization efforts.

They would ask questions with keyword phrases like, "where can I buy the alpiste seeds in Georgia?" and I would reply with another comment answering the question in a complete sentence that contained the keyword phrase.

For example, I would write "you can order the alpiste seeds by the phone and we would be happy to ship it to you in Georgia". I would continue this technique with all the comments and the results were very rewarding.

I ended up getting a high ranking for the Spanish keyword phrase of where to buy alpiste seeds and also the long tail keywords derived from the conversations in the comments section of my blogs.

This technique made that page the second-most popular page on the entire site after my home page.

How can you do it? Let’s see.

5 Ways to increase search engine rankings with blog comments

1. Provide a call to action

Some people will not comment unless you entice them to. A good technique is to write a call to action at the end of your article that tells readers to feel free to leave any questions or feedback in the comments section of your post.

2. Reply to all the comments on time

If you give a prompt response and reply to the comments, other users will see that you are involved in the conversation and they will be more likely to ask questions too.

3. Know your target keywords before writing your comment

Make sure you know what your target keyword is before you respond with your comment. This may seem obvious but it can easily be overlooked. Do keyword research to find the words that are used more often by searchers.

4. Use complete sentences in your comments

As I stated earlier, answering in complete sentences gives you a reason to use your keyword phrases more often naturally, which helps you avoid making it look like a spammy attempt to increase keyword density.

5. Reply to comments with another question

When you reply to the comments, try to reply with questions so that you will get another response and, therefore, more user-generated content.

Are you using comments for SEO?

Leveraging blog comments is an effective way to get more traffic from search engines. They are a great source of long tail keywords which account for about 85% of search engine traffic. And best of all, they are acquired from the users directly.

Do you use your blog comments to boost the search rank of your posts? Let me know in the comments.

Jonathan Solis is the owner of NutraSol Natural Center and Director of marketing for Expert Building Services, inc. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and he also has a blog where he often writes about professional business strategies – Professional Tactics.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Leverage Blog Comments to Increase Search Rank