Archive for April, 2009

There are plenty of plugins to display the names of those whose participation is highest on a period of time. This is a fairly good incentive fo more.

Just make sure you don’t allow empty, useless comments made just to push the score up.

Essentially, here is a very interesting target for anybody willing to create a successful web site using very little text content. The answer is really in TWIPPHOTO:

The most important:

Here are some things to avoid if you want to attract buyers and editors:

1. Flash
2. Video
3. Music
4. Ads
5. Too Many Slideshows
6. Slideshows as intros

Here are some things to do if you want to attract buyers and editors:

1. Concentrate on speed.
2. Spend your energy on providing content not style.
3. Enable keyword search.
4. Have all your contact info readily available from anywhere on the site.
5. E-commerce.
6. Consistent design and interface with easy navigation.

It’s plain and simple. It couldn’t be more exact.

LinkVoodo has a very useful tool to evaluate the visibility of your web site and (maybe) understand why it is so well or so badly recognized by search engines. The Quality Score Analyzer or Quality Rank Tool tries to judge the quality of your web site as it is seen by the other web sites. It not only give a not-very-informative score (a single figure will not sum it up), but detailled informations showing what it is really expecting. A few examples:

• Visibility in terms of Social Bookmarking (Digg, Reddit)
• Presence in the Web Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!)

I tend to think that image galleries are difficult to make good. It’s so hard to ensure that Google and the search engines will like them.

Le blogueur masqué has a download of 10 scripts. Not bad. And the blog also uses a great WordPress template you’d want to check.

Let’s not be modest. For too many reasons to list, your comments have intrisically more value because they come from the author. So, it should be useful if they were easy to find and highlighted in some form: different font, different color or background color.

Matt Cutts explains how to do this.

photo credit: srqpix

If your blog is still young you may not have a lot of spam… yet. But inevitably, it will reach a point were you will feel overwhelmed by comment approval or removal. Do yourself a favor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, make sure that the Akismet plugin is activated and provide the API key as requested. If your WordPress version is older, just install the Akismet plugin, activate it and provide the API key as requested.

Once done, you will have a button to recheck older comments for spam. Use it.

I recently did a real world experiment about Google News Sitemap that I think would be interesting to share. You may remember about Google Sitemaps. These are XML documents that you create to describe your web site to search engines. The main advantage is that Google or Yahoo! no longer need to be spidering all the links of your web site to find all of its pages: You point at each page individually, you ease their job. This is important for web sites with very obscure and/or deep links where some pages may be missed. If your web site is not too badly written, it’s interesting but not critical. It helps things done…

Google News Sitemap is an entirely different thing. It’s a way to submit news articles to Google News. Since this is becoming an excellent source of information for many users, it may be critical to meet the expectations of Google in order to collect a significant amount of highly targetted visits from this search engine.

And, this is relatively easy. You have to publish a sitemap which is following a stricter set of rules (compared to the more usual sitemaps). Two solutions: Either you build it manually (I would not recommend this), or you use one of the good plugins available.

I recently started using Google News Sitemap Generator by Chris Jinks and David Stansbury on several of my WordPress-based web sites. They rank from obscure to relatively well visited (up to several thousands visits per day). And I wondered what the effect would be.

Google Analytics shows visits increase on www.YLoveBigCats.com

I can easily recommend using Google News Sitemaps: A few days after starting publishing it, I got a very noticeable visit increase on all of these web sites. It was fully simultaneous (on the day Google starting using them less than a week after initial publication) and was producing +10% to +40% increase. I never had a single operation of that kind, done in so small amount of work leading to so many more visits.

Merely answering to your visitors will increase a lot the number of comments for two reasons:

1. A comment is not less interesting if you wrote it. I often add a later information this way, rather than modifying the original post.


2. When you answer, you open a talk where there was first only a remark from a visitor.

Remember that the easiest and safest way to disseminate the sitemap you just created for your web site: Include it in the robots.txt file of your site. Very simple! Add a line like:

Sitemap: http://ywantvisits.com/en/sitemap.xml.gz

You may have noticed it, if (and only if) you have an old Internet Explorer v5 or v6: I started promoting an upgrade from this outdated version to a more recent one. It’s part of a campaign to get rid of the oldest and dumbest and less secure browsers. The campaign is led by Google Sevenup and staringispolite.

Essentially, it is a matter of installing a small Javascript and ensuring that it tests the browser of each visitor.

You can do it after visiting Sevenup.