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Examining The Internet’s Top Blogs: What We Can Learn From Their Success
Posted on July 5th, 2009 182 commentsEvery day a fiercely competitive battle takes place online over capturing the attention of millions of readers. As a result the blogosphere constantly changes shape and different players thrust forward as content kings for the day. Lately, I have been trying to find out what forces control this volatile scene. I have been looking for recurring themes and hoping to find useful correlations.
Last Friday (August 15th, 2008) I took a snapshot of the Internet’s top blogs. This freeze frame identifies the blogs that have developed the skills necessary to compete. Unlike traditional top blog lists, I did not seek to place blogs in order of perceived importance. Instead, I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse), and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool. The result is a list of blogs that have proven to be powerful in all aspects of Internet success.
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My hope is that by analyzing what all of these blogs have in common, I can learn how to become a better internet citizen and participant. Simultaneously, I want to share my findings and gain additional insight by learning from all of your unique perspectives and experiences. I have already identified some common traits and trends below and I look forward to learning more from all of you.Big Corporations Don’t Dominate, Yet…
Of the 100 proven blogs in my sample, 66% were self owned. This leads me to believe that blogging is still dictated by ability rather than budget.
This shows the consolidation of ownership for the top 50 blogs compared to the top 50 websites. Although there is a remarkable amount of popular independently owned blogs, the ownership of popular blogs overall is heavily consolidated. (Top 50 Websites Source).png)
Branding That Works
76% of the top blogs titles contain only one or two words (not including ‘The’). This reinforces the idea that when it comes to marketing it is best to keep it simple..png)
86% of the top blog TLDs were the traditional dot com. This doesn’t mean that there are not notable exceptions, but it does allude to importance of sticking with conventions.Think the Market is Over Saturated? Think Again
There are already many established paths to success. The interesting insights come from diving into the niches.
Every subject has many niches. Success can come from any one of them.Its as Much About Who One Writes for as it is About Who is Doing the Writing
Can’t do it all by yourself? Neither can the experts. 80% of the top blogs have more than one primary writer.
I interpret this as supply rather than demand. Blogs catering to women will likely find audiences much more easily than the over saturated male-oriented market.
95% of the Internet’s top blogs are based in the United States. Yet, the potential audience abroad dwarfs the current American audience. Why?It is my hope that others will be able to learn from my research. If I have learned only one thing about this industry, it is that online there is always more opportunity than one person could ever possibly need. By pooling resources and cooperating, I think we can beat the battle that takes place in the blogosphere and receive the mutual benefits that come with the victory.
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Creating Meta Tags and Adding Them into Your Web Site
Posted on May 1st, 2009 307 commentsIn my previous post I touched upon Meta Tags, what they were and how to use them. In order to get the full effect and use Meta Tags with ease I’m going to elaborate more on Meta Tags for you, and the codes associated with Meta Tags. With that said, we have already learned that Meta Tags are NOT seen by your Web site viewers or guests but they are read by some Web spiders and Search Engines.
At the top of your document source there’s a small amount of information including your title that’s located between <HEAD> and </HEAD>. This <HEAD> and </HEAD> is where you’ll be adding your new Meta Tags. You can put your Meta Tags anywhere between these two codes. An example of this is as follows:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Stacey’s Fashion Corner</TITLE>
<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=”Stacey’s Fashions Incorporated”>
<META NAME=”GENERATOR” CONTENT=”Adobe 5 “>
</HEAD>
Make sure to add your Meta Tags above the </HEAD> code so it looks something like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Stacey’s Fashion Corner</TITLE>
<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=”Stacey’s Fashions Incorporated”>
<META NAME=”GENERATOR” CONTENT=”Adobe 5 “>
<META name=”description” content=”The latest fashions and daily styling tips for the everyday person“>
<META name=”keywords” content=”Fashion, clothing, accessories, styling, Styling Tips, Trends, Latest fashions, garments“>
</HEAD>
Make sure that you are beginning and ending your tag with < >. If this isn’t done than your description and keywords will show up on your web pages.
Remember when you are choosing keywords don’t repeat them several times. Years ago webmasters used to list the same keywords over and over again in hopes of getting their site listed closer to the top of search engines. When they were doing this at the time it did work but search engines caught on so make sure you do NOT do this. Now a days most web spiders are programmed to disregard any keyword that is listed more than three times. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t able to list a word more than three times within your Web site’s content. In your content you can use the same word as many times as you’d like or need to in order to get your point across so make sure to remember that. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about:
This first example is of the old way people used to use Meta tags, and the way you should NOT use Meta Tags:
<META name=”keywords” content=” fashion, fashion, fashion, fashion, fashion, styling”>
This next example is the correct way you should use Meta Tags:
<META name=”keywords” content=” fashion, fashions, latest fashions, styling”>
By comparing the two examples above you see that in the second and correct example the word is used more than once but it’s used in different ways. You can see I put fashion for one keyword and for another I put fashions, the latest fashions for another keyword. This is the correct way to add Meta Tag keywords. Just get creative with whatever it is you’re site is about and add keywords that you know people will type into a search engine. I know that if I was doing a site about fashion there are several ways to use the word “fashion” so I had to get creative in the way I displayed it within the Meta Tag. A search that doesn’t include the word “fashion” because the spider is ignoring it, is not going to get many hits for fashion styling. The same goes for other Web sites about things such as surfing, cars, writing, or any other subject. Just remember, as it is very important, DON’T LIST THE SAME WORD MORE THAN TWICE.
There are some web spiders that are “CASE” sensitive. An example of this is that if you type in “fashion” in Altavista you may receive 15,000,000 hits, but if you type in “FASHION”, you may only receive 50,000 returns. For the most part you’ll receive returns with the word Book in the title but also sites that have “Fashion” in the Meta Tag will receive more returns. Web spiders will however consider “Fashion” and “fashion” as different words. An example of this would be:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Stacey’s Fashion Corner</TITLE>
<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=”Stacey’s Fashions Incorporated”>
<META NAME=”GENERATOR” CONTENT=”Adobe 5″>
<META name=”description” content=”The latest fashions and daily styling tips for the everyday person.“>
<META name=”keywords” content=” fashions, Fashions, fashion, Fashion, fashion styling, Fashion Styling, Trends, trends“>
</HEAD>
Web masters and some Search Engines and Directories recommend that you consider whether or not there may be a common misspelling of a specific word that is is included in your Meta Tag. If so, you may want to include a tag word that you deliberately misspell. Don’t forget that there are also multiple spelling of certain words that are the same. In this case I’d suggest putting in all of the ways to spell a specific word to your Meta Tags. If a person types in a misspelled word that you’ve included into your tag you’re almost guaranteed to be in the top or at least on the first page of a web search with a search engine. Since the English language has many ways to spell some words that are the same and many people just spell them incorrectly make sure that you include these typos into your Meta Tags. I’m a perfectionist and would hate to post something where my viewers can see my typos, but remember that these Meta Tags are NOT seen by your viewers so it’s perfectly okay to include the typos and will help you with your page ranking and ranking on a search engine. It’s a proven fact that there are hundreds of words in the English language that people misspell on a regular basis so it’d be in your best interest to include these typos, spelling errors, and multiple spellings of a word. Now that you’ve got these tools under your belt and have learned how to add Meta Tags into your sites, I’d suggest working on it and adding them in to help your site get to the top spot within the search engines. Good Luck and as always hope to see you number one in the natural or organic listing!
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Meta Tags; What They Are and How to Use Them
Posted on April 30th, 2009 303 commentsMany of you may have heard about Meta tags and are wondering what they are and how to use them. In this post I’ll explain what a meta tag is and how you can incorporate them into your site. Meta tags are used by search engines to allow them to list your site in their indexes more accurately. Let me start by saying you don’t have to use Meta tags but I suggest doing so as it helps with your page ranking within search engines. Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header, after the title, on a Web page. Your viewers or those that visit your site do not see Meta description tags and the meta keyword tags. The main purpose for Meta tags is to provide meta document data to search engines. The word Meta means information about. The purpose and creation of Meta Tags was and is to provide concise information about a Web site. A meta tag lists information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, a description, type of document, copyright, and other necessary core information. Search engines compare the words within each section in your Web site or page and ranks the site taking into consideration how well the information matches what you’ve put in your tag or keywords you’ve used within your site. It’s very important for all WordPress users to understand that a default installation of WordPress does not contain the description and keywords meta tag data. You can add meta tags manually by changing to the Themes template files or through using WordPress Plugins. Below is an example of what a meta tag description looks like:
<meta name=”description” content=”This is where the
description sentence or short paragraph about
the article or post will be shown.” />
As stated above Meta Tags are not necessary and were originally used to be more helpful in providing important information to the Internet browser, but as browsers have become more sophisticated they don’t need as much “hand holding” in order to figure out if your site is in English or Chinese. There are a few search engines that don’t even use the meta tag information any more because many people started to abuse it. In some cases meta tags may not represent the content of your site, but it won’t hurt your status with search engines if you decide to use them correctly. You want to make sure that you are not misleading and put incorrect information when using Meta Tags. Just make sure that your Meta Tags are relevant to your site or post’s content. With all of this said, keyword Meta Tags are still being used by search engines to categorize and rank your Web site. The search engines that used keyword Meta Tags compare the keywords with the content and give you “points” so to speak, for having your keywords match your content. The “points” given are where the page ranking of your site comes into play. To add a Meta Tag or Tags to your site, simply add them into the header.php template file in your WordPress Themes, in the head section near the link for the style sheet. At the top you’ll see the DOCTYPE tag and below that you’ll see a couple more tags and then the <title> tag, which looks something like this:
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title />
Below this line you can add your Meta Tags. You can add information such as the content, language, author, contact and copyright info. These are all generic throughout your site so if you want to be more specific to each post or page and add a description, keywords, and other Meta tags that are unique to each post or page you generate then you’ve got two choices. The first is to add them as generic references and the second is to use plugins. For the more sophisticated and specific you want to get for each post you can add a conditional tag query. When adding this it will ask if this is a single post view, show the post title; if this is a multi-post view, show the blog name and description. A conditional tag query looks like the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php if ( is_single() ) {
single_post_title(”, true);
} else {
bloginfo(’name’); echo ” - “; bloginfo(’description’);
}
?>” />
A conditional tag can be used in your Template file to change what content is displayed and how that content is displayed on a particular page depending on what conditions that page matches.
There are several different Plugins that will allow the blog administrator to set the keywords, description, and other Meta Tags to be unique on each particular post. These Plugins are available and used in the Custom Fields section in the Write Post Panel. To find an array of Meta Tag Plugins you can visit the Official WordPress Plugin Directory or simply Google it. By using Meta Tag Plugins you are able to customize each of your meta tags, and choose the ones you want to add, or not, on a post per post basis. By doing this it allows your meta information to better describe each page.
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Free Hit Counter For WordPress Blogs
Posted on April 25th, 2009 352 commentsOur readers have told us that they want a FREE way to track all of their blog traffic. We did the research for you and found an extraordinary program that is 100% free at www.gostats.com. What does this site do? Well for starters it’s web counter where you will get full access to reports that help you understand who is visiting your website, how they found your Web site (i.e. what search engine(s) they used), and how they are navigating through your Web site. This Web site, www.gostats.com, prides them selves on having an extremely fast service that does not go down. They have been providing a web stats counter service for nearly 10 years! They created this site in order to help you, the blogger or Web site owner understand your website better. In addition to helping you understand your site better it also gives you insight as to which search engines are being used the most to find your site which is great when you’re marketing your site and even better if you’re using Pay-Per-Click. By using Go Stats, it shows you so much information that’ll help you in marketing your Web site better and cutting costs. Say for example you’re using Pay-Per-Click advertising to get your site out there and you’re using it on several different search engines, well Go Stats is great in that it’ll tell you the most popular search engines used when searching for your site. You can take this information and cut your Pay-Per-Click costs on the search engines that people aren’t using and the ones that are the least popular.
This is definitely one great tool that can let you know what keywords and search engines people are using to find your site. As we’ve stated before keywords are very important in advertising and marketing your site so when using Go Stats it tells you the most popular keywords people type into search engines which in turn gives you more power when it comes to advertising. It also lets you know that certain keywords work while others don’t and the ones that are working well you know to add into your posts frequently. The installation is very simple and best of all it’s free. Check out their Web site and see why we use their great hit counter and find out what it can do to better your understanding of where your traffic is coming from and how your customers are finding you. If you are hosting your own WordPress blog or have a WordPress blog hosted on WordPress.com please click on this post to learn how to place a Go Stats hit counter on your blog.
1. Visit GoStats.com and click on “Sign Up” located on the left side of the page below user name and password .
2. Fill in all the fields and click “sign up” .
3. Once you’ve signed up, you will be able to add your site(s) .
4. Click on “Add new site” and fill out the fields . You can add as many sites as you want .
5. After you’ve added your site(s) return to your blog and download the following plugin file: Download the GoStats for Wordpress plugin here
6. Extract the zipped file to your plugins directory.
7. Load your plugins page from the WordPress Administration section and click “Activate” to enable the Go Stats plugin .
8. Click on the Options tab, then click on “GoStats” . If you are running a more recent version of WordPress, click on the Settings tab instead, then click on “GoStats” .
9. Enter your GoStats site ID number . You can find your site ID number in your site summary URL at GoStats.com. Simply look for the “?id=” and the number following this (“?id=”) will be your site ID number. For example, http://monster.gostats.com/summary.xml?id=3561 . Your site ID would be 3561 in this example.
10. Enter your GoStats server ID, then click on Update. Your server ID for GoStats can be found in your site summary URL. Look for the “http://”. The small word before the “.” Is the server ID. Possible ranges are monster c3 and c4.
11. Should you choose to receive weekly emails from GoStats about your hits and other information regarding your Web site or posts, please add support@gostats.com to your safe email addresses to prevent it from ending up in your Spam folder. This is important because if you don’t do this and are waiting to receive these weekly emails it’ll go straight to your Spam folder as your email account holder recognizes it as Spam and not important information. I know I automatically delete my Spam folder without even glancing at it as I’m sure most of you do as well so make sure you add their email address to your safe email addresses to prevent this from happening.
You’re now done, sit back and enjoy your GoStats counter! This plugin will be updated in the future, so please bookmark this page or subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to get updates about Go Stats, its functions, and how it all works. Feel free to leave a question and I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions and help you with Go Stats.
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