Archive for the 'Links' category

Do you want your blog to become visible to press people in the mainstream press media? This used to be nearly impossible, but the Internet is bringing a solution. Not perfect, but BlogBurst offers exactly that: International exposure into the small but influential world of big media (both paper press and some big Internet web sites).

Your content has to be very powerful and mere exposure does not mean that you will be immediately considered as a worldwide expert on the issue you blog about, but it could be a sort of blog-japckpot.

The Internet is based on cooperation and reciprocity. When you link to another web site, be as nice as possible:

• Mention the web site name if possible – no typos please
• Include a link not only an URL
• Keep the link in a readable position (in the post body, in normal text size)

In short: “Link as you would like to be linked.”

Technorati has quickly become the reference in blog tracking. Technorati users are exposed to blogs that have been claimed bytheir owner. Open an account on Technorati, go to the blogs tab and start the claim process. It may be as easy as getting the code, creating a claim post, informing Technorati, then removing the claim post. Mere seconds.

A sizeable part of your traffic will always come from the exterior (search engines, StumbleUpon, Digg). It is important to convince them that they arrived in a great web site. One easy way is to show them what other interesting things they could find around. Just use one of the many plugins that find and display “related posts” (posts that have the bigger chance to keep them reading and coming back later for more). Show such a list near the end of your best posts (or all of them).

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!)

photo credit: luisvilla

The Internet is a participation thing. If you want readers to leave comments on your web site, leave comments on the blogs you read. It’s not only an issue of fairness (it is), but a matter of interest: Go to your prefered blogs and leave a comment on the latest post. What will happen? Other people will have a link to your web site (even if Google does not take it into account because of the no-follow rule). This mean exposing your own web site to new visitors (including the blog author).

Don’t spam, don’t be too generic, but think about a polite comment as you would be doing in a people-to-people talk. Even if not extremely detailled, you certainly can write something about what you felt while reading the post: “Right! I did not think about ____, but it’s true because ____” or some question about a specific side of it.

Just try to be in the very first ones to comment to get more visibility (but don’t write some silly “I was first!”).

I have been amazed at the number of tutorials and how-to guides that exist on the Internet. You could drown into them… So, I decided to try and sort it out for you. Here are Photo-related How-To Guides selected for the choice they offer.

Web design (general)

• Entheos Free Website Designing Tutorials & Resources
• About.com : “How to design a web site” (introductory level)
• “How to design a website” by Gary Simon
• Net tuts+ is a treasure trove of tutorials for your web site, and it is really quality-minded
• If you blog, you need Blog Tutorials
• If you want to blog for a niche, you need Niche Blogging tutorials

WordPress

• WordPressMax is WordPress guides for the geek impaired
• Wordpress.com 2.7 How-to Guides
• WordPress Customization Guide for Newbies
• WordPress Guides, Blogging Tips And Strategies from HowToSpoter
• The top 50 WordPress tutorials according to Net Tuts+

DreamWeaver

• Entheos Dreamweaver tutorials
• Free Dreamweaver CS3 video tutorials
• CBTCafé has interesting Dreamweaver Tutorials
• PSD tuts+ is a treasure trove of tutorials for Adobe Photoshop, and it is really quality-minded

There are certainly others. Feel free to mention them in the comments; Quite often, the best ones are the unkown ones.

So, as suggested, you used Yahoo! Answers to grab the attention of Yahoo! users (and Yahoo! search engine) and of people who have questions to ask. So, you thought that this was the end of it? Of course not. Even if Yahoo! has a great legion of followers (specially in the USA and in the less-geeky public), they are not the only place where you can go and quick attention to your great new web site. There are actually plenty of other locations on the web where people go to ask questions and get answers. You will be able to use the same tactics to spread knowledge and knowledge about your site.

Top 25 Not Yahoo! Answers

1. Answerbag : Ask Questions, Share Answers.
2. eHow : How To Do Just About Everything!
3. Mahalo Answers : Share Knowledge, Learn, and Get Questions Answered
4. Howcast : How-to videos and guides
5. Fluther : Tap the collective
6. Stack Overflow : Collaboratively edited question & answer site
7. SnappyFingers : Relevant answers for your frequent questions
8. Fifty People One Question : Ask fifty people the same question
9. Answerly : All you have to do is ask!
10. Mosio : Mobile questions. Answers. People.
11. PicAnswers : Picture Question & Answer Site
12. AskMeGo : Get & Give Advices
13. ToAnswer : Get your questions answered
14. Tweet Answers : Ask Questions, Get Answers!
15. TripShake : Answers on the go
16. teksup : User Powered Live Support
17. BlabberMash : Ask questions and get advice from other people
18. Defuddle : Where Questions Go to Get Answered
19. folkstown : Get Answered by Ordinary People
20. QToro : Bite-Size Knowledge
21. Answers.com : Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and much more
22. Plinky : Create inspired content on the web
23. TwttrStrm : Ask a question of your Twitter followers and easily gather all their answers in one spot
24. Whyzz : Kids Questions & Answers

I would not suggest to spend a lot of time on each everyone of these. The important thing is to make sure that you observe the results. Google Analytics will have no difficulty allowing you to count the visits coming from these web site (referals) after you start answering a few questions. Be sure to test most of them, but also make sure that you do not spend time on these which will bring you only a couple of visits. I would even suggest creating an spreadsheet to count the questions you answer, your answers that are highlighted by the web site and the number of visits you get (raw data is needed if you attack a large list like that; Don’t count on your memory and your feelings about the quality of this one or that one).

It’s always been a bit difficult to get a good ranking at the Yahoo! search engine. One of the most difficult tasks is to ensure that your web site is even considered. Most of the times, you will find people advising you to pay the fee that Yahoo! requests. Unfortunately, this often leads to money lost (at least for the web sites which are not obviously important to their target market: Microsoft does not need to pay to be considered).

Since Yahoo! will consider the visibility of your web site first, it is usually important to start getting some visibility where Yahoo! will see you easily. One of the best and most accessibe locations for this is the My.Yahoo page. You can easily setup your own personalized home page at my.yahoo.com. It’s only a matter of going there and use your own Yahoo identifier or to create one.

My.Yahoo.com

After that, your Yahoo! home page becomes available and then you have the possibility to use one interesting feature: Adding an RSS feed to your page.

Adding an RSS feed

If you add an RSS feed of your web site, it will be read regularly by Yahoo!’s robots in order to be displayed on your page. Of course, it is important to recognize that the search engine spider is not the same software and just doing this is not enough to ensure a good ranking (if only it has some impact). But it starts getting Yahoo! some knowledge of your site and it is widely considered as one of the easiest method to initiate your communication with this important search engine.

Free Bonus: It can also serve as a way to check the validity of your RSS feed: Does a standard RSS reader recognize your feed?

Yahoo! Answers is a very nice place for the web site designer to hang out. You should try it immediately and you should use it regularly. This is a kind of super-forum where an astonishing number of subjects are handled thanks to the size of the following of Yahoo!

There you will find people asking questions, all kinds of questions and this is nearly without limits. You will encounter an incredible number of actual experts willling to answer those questions (and yours).

I consider that this is more than enough to require that you spend some time there. The advantages I see to it:

1. Looking for the right category describing your field(s) of interest, you will recognize what are the issues that people really are interested in. You may already be an expert, but you may surprised by some of the questions. Some of these may even become good sources for your inspiration.
2. You may be able to answer some of the open questions by yourself. Be sure to be precise and detailled (the best answer will be selected, you must be the best). But be sure to list your own site (possibly the right page in your own web site) as one of the sources to your answer. This becomes free links to your web sites (even though marked with rel=nofollow which will not produce direct results for Google and such), some visitors will be attracted by the quality of your answers.
3. If your answers are not selected as the best ones, you will have an occasion to learn what should have been the best answer (given by someobdy else) and, given some modesty, you will learn from your failures here.
4. You may ask your own questions. And this will come handy in order to fill out the blanks for some issues where you need a quick support from an expert.
5. There is not guarantee, but it seems that the Yahoo! search engine takes slightly into account the presence of links in Yahoo! Answers to prioritize sites in answer to some specific searches.