Design

Think that design doesn’t matter to your website? Wrong. There are millions of other sites out there already, so what makes you any different?

Well you could differentiate your content, but when you are starting a new site out, the design will be what separates you from the crowd, because your content will be light or non existant. Hire a good freelance designer if you can. It will pay off for you in the long run rather than having a cobbled together DIY approach to your site.

So what has that got to do with website traffic? As it turns out quite a bit. A good design will get you off to a flying start, by gaining numerous backlinks from the CSS galleries. Running on Wordpress? Loren Baker has a couple of resources to submit your Wordpress blog to gain backlinks.

People also love to link to visual bits and bobs. The CSS gallery article that I wrote has virtually no images in it. I wrote it way back when I was starting to promote my site, but on reflection I should go back and take a screenshot for every one of the galleries listed. Doing so would bulk it out, and make it high impact. So think about the design of your post before you hit that publish button, it may be the difference between getting a backlink or not.

Photos

Are you a Flickr user? Alot of people hoard their photos and don’t upload them in case someone steals the photo - I prefer to put my images up there under creative common’s licensing, and hope that other blogger use them with attribution. Editing the photo description, and including a link back to my site, may help to pass some link juice back.

So whilst I don’t have a great load of photos up there, it makes sense to properly tag them so they’ll be found in searches, and to go through and add my website domain name to each description.

Directories

Directories have fallen out of favour with many, simply because alot of them are rubbish. However it still makes sense to get listed in directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo.These are syndicated across the web, and this can give you a small boost in website rankings.

It’s worth mentioning social media directories which have recently popped up. Kevin Rose has launched WeFollow for categorizing Twitter users, and Twellow works in the same sort of way. Listing yourself in these sort of directories can increase the exposure of your brand, and in a round about way, this will promote your website as people clickthrough from your Twitter profile.

Promoting other people

You’ll notice that I promote some of my social profiles on this site - and I do my best when I see an opportunity to drop these profiles around the web.  Increasing page rank to these, will pass link juice through to your own.

If you gain a backlink on someone else’s website - it makes sense to promote their work. You will gain the exposure as the result. I’ve recently has some nice traffic from DesignRiviver - I was the first to submit to Digg and Delicious, (which went popular) - and I benefitted as a result. I also submitted it to my twitter stream, which got a viral retweet, and further increased my followers.

Win win, share the love with the people who link to you.

Twitter

The bigger your twitter following, the more traffic you can push towards your site on demand, when people are online. If you work at providing value to your followers, then your twitter following will grow. Simple.

There are plenty of “experts” out there who claim to know how to get more twitter followers at the drop of a hat. (40,000 articles and counting). You can go and Google those if you so desire.  I prefer to just provide value, keep it real and connect with people. Everything else will follow.

Another useful tip is to setup keywords and terms for each of your posts than can be twitter searched. Use something like my brand monitoring post to monitor these. For example, I’ve written posts before on content management systems, so I twitter search for “looking for cms” - then Tweet my link at the people who are interested. I think this would be a great Wordpress plugin, which allows you to define your blog posts as a series of questions, then lets Twitter users know you have a post on that topic.

Content

As Justin has pointed out, the mantra of content is king is getting a bit tired. But it still plays a pivotal role in social promotion of content.

There are a variety of strategies you can use with content to promote a website. You can go down the volume method, and pump out loads of posts per week - probably not an option for one author sites, or you can go down the quality over quantity method and gain authority.

The other alternative is to use list bait, which works for sites such as Speckyboy. I guess there’s nothing wrong with this as it works (these posts gain loads of links when properly promoted), however you have to ask whether the world really needs another 25 Inspirational photos or 3 million firefox plugins post.  I’ve bitched about this before.

My own method is to try a combination of all of these, and see what my visitors want. This is your opportunity to speak up now in the comments.

Blog comments

If you are a blogger or even if you are not, blog comments are a great way of building authority around a chosen subject area.  Effectively everytime you comment on a blog post, you are providing additional search engine exposure to the author - i.e. New content. So make it count, and it stands a much better chance of not being assigned to the great big Akismet in the Sky.

If you are just going after links - think again. The majority of Wordpress blogs are no-followed, so they aren’t going to count. Every time your avatar appears on someone else’s site, your reputation is at stake.

Guest posts

Sometimes, writing for yourself isn’t as rewarding as giving back to others through guest posts. Especially if you manage to land a guest posting slot for a large brand or authority in that space.

A well formed idea, for a site with existing traffic is much more likely to go viral around the web - and as it does so, your reputation travels with it. Whilst you may not get the traffic directly, the benefits far outweigh the cons, as people will start googling your name and brand, and see you as a more versatile writer.

Don’t forget that you can always let your existing readership know that you’ve guest posted, and link off to the destination in a small post of your own. That way your still providing people with content regularly, just via an alternative site that isn’t your own.

If you do decide to try a few guest posts, remember to write a landing page post that compliments the original article, and serves as an additional hook for the influx of potential new visitors to your site.

Forum signatures

Forum signatures are an old school method of driving traffic, but one that still has its benefits. If you are going to use this to promote your site, dont be a dick.

Spam on any level, is not cool, and not alot of fun for other webmasters to deal with. It’s hard enough keeping the automated spam bots at a manageable level, without human spammers / webmasters coming along posting one forum introduction with a forum signature then leaving. Many forums only allow links to be posted after a certain number of posts, which helps to kerb this anyway.

Key thing to remember here, as with blog comments - provide value, contribute to the community and you stand half a chance at people following the links that you point back to your own site.  Karma.

Word of Mouth / Social Interaction

One of the best ways to get traffic to a site is via word of mouth, or personal recommendations. I’ve had loads of people suggest sites like Mashable, or Freelance switch - just through word of mouth. Obviously the bigger you are, the easier this is.

Creating brand ambassadors around your website, or loyal visitors that you reward, is a great way to start. Talking to people about your site, in the pub, and at conferences is another place to start.  This is a great post on Word of mouth marketing that is well worth a read.

Youtube Videos

Video in general is the place to be in 2009, tv is dying and the abudance of other industries being affected by the web is all too apparent. If you are working with an idea for video, get it out there. Video will gain importance on the web as a whole, as content becomes easier to create, and whenever Google figures out how to work out what content is inside them. Which they are doing effectively to a degree with Youtube advertising.

There are two schools of thought on using Video promotion to promote your site- you can disperse the video you’ve created with a service such as TubeMogul - benefit being maximum exposure. The problem with this is that your incoming links are dispersed across the web, to a multitude of video hosting and syndicated sites. The alternative, depending on how strong and viral your video is, is to host it yourself, and gain all of the incoming link juice on your own site.

Social Bookmarking

Once you’ve created your kick ass content or video, its time to expose it to other people to bookmark. I’ve already mentioned some of these in my beginners social media marketing post.  The main gist of promotion via social bookmarking is to create content along the lines of the below

1. Something that no one else has written about
2. Something that is useful to others
3. Something that is research based or scientific in its approach
4. Something that extracts, combines and organises similar websites
5. Something that provides reference material all in one place
6. Something that educates or teaches (think tutorial material)
7. Something new (a service say)
8. Something relevant to the time of year

That is the essence of the material you see on the delicious home page every day. If you bookmark it yourself to give it a head start, then you are well on your way to gaining numerous links from around the web.

Anyone think of anything else that I’ve missed?

If you ask me - I’ll tell you how to make a great website. Ten things every usable website should strive for.

1). Design for the common denominator

Ever notice how the major corporates online have some things in common? We expect certain things when we browse websites, they have become commonplace design conventions.

For example - position of logos. Most if not all sites position their logos in the top left of the site. And they are linked to the home page. Take Amazon.co.uk for example - it links to the homepage on EVERY page. Where is the search box - its on the right hand, just like it is on the Microsoft.com home page, or on Ebay.co.uk. There are a number of elements within a page that should be in certain place, the following are a list of what should go where:

a). Contact Us
Should appear on every page. A link to this should be on every page. After all, if you are selling online, this is what people are looking for at the end of the sale process.

b). Logo - Top Left of the page

Users expect to find the company brand quickly, top left of the page is the first place they will look. Remember people read left to right, starting at the top and working your way down to the bottom.

c). Search - Top Right

The majority of users expect to find your search box in the top right of the screen, assuming that you have one. Searches are generally only applicable for large sites, but once your site gets big enough, they are essential. Their operation needs to be extremely accurate, because search is generally a last ditch attempt to find something on your site. Remember that monitoring what people are search for on your website may be extremely important to your business and should be monitored to help with marketing.

2). Keep it Sticky

What brings you back to any of the websites you visit on a regular basis? Generally, you will come back for a few reasons, primarily content. Teach me something and I’ll come back for more. Entertain me, make me laugh, and I’ll come back for more. Stir any of my emotions, and I’ll come back for more. Show me something new and I’ll come back because I’m nosey. Plant ideas in my head, and I’ll feel empowered. Fail to keep your website fresh, with fresh content and neither search engines or visitors will come back for more.

3). Keep it Simple

I dont want to think when I’m viewing your webpage, I want the answers to the questions I’m asking. Is this company reputable, who else have they worked with, what is the standard of their work like, will I get value for money, are they professional. Answer these questions and you’ll get a sale. Fail to do so, and I’m off laughing on a camel. K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid.

4). Common Sense Tactics

Contrary to popular belief, people are easily scared online. It’s the fear of the unknown. Therefore dont surprise your visitors with links that say click here - unless you’ve told them in the copy what they can expect to find. Don’t think that the latest flash, spinning logo is going to impress them either - if they wanted flashing lights they’d go to a disco, keep the fancy stuff classy. People have become accustomed to things that flash being advertisements online.

5). Make it sexy. But not too revealing.

Please hire a professional designer. They are worth their weight in gold. Unless your brand is plain Jane Jacob Nielson, make sure your website looks sexy, but doesn’t go for the extreme. Sometimes there is such a thing as too much graphics. Dont make your Website like the Madame Tussauds, impressive the first time you see it, but you don’t go back for years, because there’s nothing new, and nothing of substance.

6). Make it lightweight. Cache me while you can.

Web users expect an experience when they visit your site. Make sure that its not a slow one, by using lightweight XHTML code, CSS style sheets, server side caching, external javascripts, images in style sheets, and valid standards compliant code, you can give your visitors the content they want at speed. Browser Caching provides a great way of delivering content faster to your visitors.

7). Give users control

Dont take away visitor preferences, allow users to change text size by using ems, rather than pixel width sizes. You dont know whether a potential visitor is potentially poor of sight. Therefore forcing them to view your site in a particular font size is going to annoy them. The same goes with browser size. Dont force a user to view your website at a certain resolution, long gone are the days that state that you need certain browsers or monitor sizes to view a website. Again look at the major corporates for a good indicator on this.

8). Leaves out the gimmicks

Please dont ask us to create Flash intros for your website. There are a number of reasons why these are bad news. Flash intros show a lack of understanding of your website visitors. They dont want marketing bumfph shoved down their necks the minute they visit your site, they want the information THEY want. Flash intros are slow to load, and provide nothing more than a barrier to the real information on your website. The skip intro button has got to be the most clicked on button on the Internet. Flash intros are also bad news for search engine robots, who cant get to the real content on your site because they can’t read the flash file. Don’t use flash for the sake of using flash, and as Jacob says, everything has it’s place, but Flash is 99% bad.

9) Maintain Consistency

Maintaining Website consistency is key in keeping visitors. This goes hand in hand with common sense tactics. A user will quickly become disconcerted with a website changing its navigation methods half way through browsing, and may leave the website as a result.

10) Clean Layout

A website with a clean layout style, coupled with legible font colours has the edge over a graphically heavy website, with poor legibility. Remember that content is always king, give users what they want as quickly as possible. The message you portray is your brand, and as such is a reflection of the service you offer to visitors in the real world.

So what’s the secret to getting to the top of Google’s search engine? Nothing. There is no secret and there’s no reason to pay an SEO firm or consultant to get you there, honestly … you can do it yourself if you have the time to learn and implement the basic advice of people who know what they’re talking about.

First, let’s establish that one simple fact … there are no secrets. In fact, everything you need to know is online at the Webmaster Guidelines at Google and for those of you  need even more help, there is plenty of places here on my site to read about what Google wants.

Now, I should point out that I’m not a Google expert or even an SEO specialist (although I do offer similar services). I’m an organic marketing specialist if that title even exists … in order to do that I believe a website must meet three basic guidelines:

Technical

A web page is a computer document, much the same as a document produced by Microsoft Word and just like word processing documents it has to be opened and read by other computers. Now, we’ve all tried opening a WordPerfect document in Word or an OpenOffice resume in Pages and it always ends the same right? …. it doesn’t work. Why not?

The reason it doesn’t work is simple, the basic structure of how the documents are written are not compatible with the software trying to open them. The web works the exact same way. Web browsers from Lynx to Internet Explorer open your web page documents and read the content. If they can’t read the content, they can’t display the document … makes sense right? OK so here’s the kicker … Google uses a tool called a web spider to crawl your website in order to read the content and add it to their index. If your web page is poorly written, Google can’t open it and has to move onto another website.

So rule number one to getting to the top of Google? Make sure that Google can read your website.

Design

There’s a catch-22 when it comes to Google, Google doesn’t care about design but Google cares how your web content is designed. Technically, it couldn’t care less about your websites looks but it does care about how your website is structured, how the content is organized and how the overall site appears to both spiders and people visiting your web page.

In order to make sure that your website ranks well with Google, you’ll have to ensure that your documents are properly structures, the content is readable and that it appears the same to search engines as it does to people. Often times, I have clients ask if they can upload Flash version of their website but hide Google friendly text in a hidden layer somewhere on the page … sure you can but that’s not being very honest is it?

Rule number two to getting your website at the top of Google? Design content for people, not robots.

Content

Rule number three, have great content.

Honestly, I can’t make it more clear than what I’ve written here. Take a moment to stop thinking about Google as a company or a website to beat and start thinking about it as a group of people who are working towards a common goal, as I’ve written before … they’re very smart people and they spend a lot of time trying to make the Internet a better place, so when they catch people trying to scam them by breaking these simple rules … don’t be surprised to find your website banned.

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About the author
Christopher Ross

First, let me tell you what a backlink is … it’s a link from a website to your website, that’s it. Pretty technical right? The link serves a few purposes:

It provides Google with the ability to find you on the Internet by allowing it to follow preexisting websites to yours.
It allows Google to assign a PageRank to your website based on who else is willing to link to you.
It allows people to find you by following hyperlinks from one website to another.
So a backlink is a link from one website to another which drives traffic and increases the value of the second (target) website.

Backlinks to Avoid

The old marketing adage is that all publicity is good publicity but in the case of backlinks, that’s not entirely true. There are some type of backlinks which serve either no purpose or end up damaging your websites reputation. For example:

Paid Links. It’s possible to pay companies to link to you and usually it’s pretty cheap to do so but it’s proven to be fatal for websites. Major search engines such as Google look very poorly on websites which provide this service or try to benefit from it. Here are two great blog posts written to help you understand how Google punishes people for paid links:

• Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update
• Can Google Find and Spank your Paid Links?

Link Farms. A link farm is a series of websites all linking to each other with the hopes of transferring PageRank between themselves. Self contained ecosystems, be it economies or websites are bound to fail. Google is a very, very smart company with some exceedingly talents minds at work … in my opinion using the computer power of the big G would make detecting Link Farms fairly easy and they’ve made no secret about punishing offenders.

What are good backlinks?

The best, and strongest links to generate between websites are the honest ones. I don’t know if I’ve made that clear enough throughout my website so I’ll restate it. The best backlinks to generate are the ones which are completely and without fail genuine. I give Google (and other search engines) a lot of credit for being run by pretty smart people for a reason, they won’t hire me … so when people ask me about SEO services, I generally tell them the same things:

Write quality content.
Promote quality content.
Support quality content.
Contribute to the Internet.
In real world terms, it’s fairly easy to do all three of these.

1. Write Quality Content

I write a half dozen posts a week that get published but about another two dozen get started and never finished. Writing for my blog is a 20 hour a week job, it’s how I relax and practice my writing skills. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve a very good writer but it gives me a chance to improve by receiving feedback from much better writers.

2. Promote quality content

When I write good content I try to include a few links to other better content as well, so my readers can find out where I received my information, sort of like a bibliography. This serves two purposes:

It provides you, the reader with the ability to follow those links and learn more about the subject being covered and;
It provides the original authors with credit for providing great content
Strangely there’s a third, link building reason for website owners to credit others in our writings. When I include a link to another article in my post, my website (powered by WordPress) automatically sends a message to the other authors website informing them that I’ve cited their article in mine. This PingBack is an automated notification system designed to help blog authors communicate and one startling benefit is that many blog owners will in turn link back to your original article (if it’s valuable), creating a free backlink to your website.

3. Support quality content

Every morning I fetch articles from 700 different quality news sources and skim through the headlines to find at least a dozen articles which will help me or my clients be more successful on the web, then I read the articles and if I have anything valuable to contribute to the article I add a comment for the blog author to consider adding.

Blog comments (such as what you will find at the bottom of this article) are powerful marketing tools. Every day I comment on two or three articles and I try to make those comments as relevant and useful as possible, this drives endless traffic to my website as clicks (in fact, more than purchased advertising) but it also tells major search engines that my content is valuable and my contributions are respected by the website author.

4. Contribute to the Internet

Possibly the easiest way to build massive backlinks in a short period of time … contribute something useful to the Internet. It doesn’t have to be Earth shattering, my article Creating a Splash Screen in Torque Game Builder generates five unique page visits per day because it’s helpful and free. I have backlinks located in key locations throughout the Internet for this article but more importantly? It’s useful. Take the time to write quality how-to articles, build a plugin for your favorite software or make an animation that puts a smile on your face, contribute to the Internet in a useful manner and you’ll build significant traffic.

Conclusions

Building quality links from other websites will take time, it’s would be faster and easier to cheat but the people you’re trying to cheat are very clever and very dedicated to catching you. I once heard a comment by a visiting police officer to a grade six class, he said that criminals by-and-large forgot one simple fact … being a criminal was hard work, one minor mistake could get you caught and the police had a lot of very smart people dedicated to catching criminals. I think that’s very true for black hat SEO as well, tricking Google is easy … but getting caught is also very easy and in the end if you want to benefit from the services they offer, the best way to build a strong online business is to be honest, support the community and build a better web for all mankind.

Christopher Ross

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