Blogger: Social Bookmarking Widget – Link Baiting
I promised Hong Yi’s mum that I would write a social bookmarking widget for her blog on Google‘s Blogger so I’ve spent part of my valentine’s day writing this widget for her.
The purpose of utilising social bookmarking widgets is to allow you to expand your reach of readership to literally hundred and thousands to millions of readers on these social bookmarking websites. Therefore, you are not limited to your normal direct traffic, existing referrals traffic and organic traffic but if I may use a SEO term, using ‘link baiting’ to bait readers in an ocean of readers to your website in the hopes of driving traffic, increasing visibility and branding, and ultimately getting links to your website.
One of the most important SEO aspects is link building or in other words, to increase the amount of links to your website. It creates authority, trust and relevancy to your website, thus improving your organic rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also read my post on how to optimise your page.
Of course it is important to remember that before you submit your own articles, make sure that you write well, have a very attractive and optimised title, and a great first paragraph. In addition, write about what people would love to read about, things that are useful, relevant and informative to them. Never submit articles that are too “salesy” in nature and obviously useless information to the general public (i.e. how you’re emo-ing about the rainy weather).
Include pictures, videos and space out your paragraphs. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a screen full of words bunched up together.
Social Bookmarking Widget
I’ve only created this widget to include some of my favourite social bookmarking websites. Feel free to modify the code and stylesheet to your preference.
Here’s a screenshot of what the widget should look like once implemented (highlighted in yellow). You can visit my old blog to see how it looks like (make sure you turn off javascript or else you’ll be redirected back here).
Before you do anything to the Blogger template, please make sure you that save a backup before making any changes!
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Google’s Opinion on Crawling Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs
In my line of work, there has been a widespread belief that Google is unable to crawl “unoptimised” URLs and that ideally all URLs should be in a directory structure. This is totally untrue as mentioned by Google’s blog post.
In fact, Google actually says that they might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URL if you try to change it to look like a static URL.
However, this post will give you my opinion on why URL optimisation should be considered and to what extent should we optimise it to.
Limitations of Client-Side Javascript Redirect – Blogger to WordPress
You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to WordPress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new WordPress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.
First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.
- Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
- Strengths of my script are:
- It works.
- You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
- It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.
That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.
The 80/20 SEO Rule in Web Page Optimisation
The 80/20 Rule
You may have heard of the common business principle of the 80/20 rule, such as 20% of employees do 80% of an organisation’s work, or 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. The list goes on.
Well, this post is meant to address the issue of “when is too much, too much”? How can we spend 20% of our SEO/Search Engine Optimisation efforts to achieve 80% of the result from a purely page optimisation perspective?
Why Organic Rankings and Traffic?
There are a lot of theories and ideas from various people on how to optimise a page to rank organically for search phrases and drive organic traffic on search engine results page (SERP). The value of organic rankings and traffic is that it does not cost you money as opposed to spending money on advertising to drive traffic and be seen for what user’s search for (such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing).
So what does that mean? Imagine if your website is listed on the first page of Google‘s SERP for the phrase “buy digital camera”, your traffic would be sky rocketing with an estimate average search volume of 135,000 (as reported by Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and thus, driving digital camera sales since the phrase shows the intent of the user, which is to “buy”.
And it hasn’t costed you anything in advertising.
Keyword Optimisation Really Works!
I’ve had this domain for less than 3 months now and I’ve been testing how fast I can get in the 1st page of Google and Yahoo’s search engine results page (SERP) for the term “danny ng”.
As of today, my blog is ranked #7 on Google AU and #5 on Google US. On Yahoo AU and Yahoo US, I’m ranked #1. Not bad ay?
Next step is trying to get my PageRank up. It remains 0 at the moment. I should blog more but I’ve been a lazy bum hehe.
There’s a lot of things I want to do with javascript, but haven’t found time yet juggling a job, a girlfriend, a social life and so on.
I will probably write a post on where do you draw the line between search engine optimisation (seo) and usability in the future. Frustrates me when deciding whether to neglect usability for the sake of seo.
Google US
Yahoo US
Google AU
Yahoo AU
