Analyze

If you haven’t yet, install Google Analytics and track your blog in detail. Which sites refer visitors to your site? Which pieces of content that you’re putting out are garnering the most traffic so you can better plan your future content? Use Google Analytics to answer these questions and more to hone in on how to streamline your site for the most traffic.

Socialize

Connect, connect, connect. Link your blog to active Facebook and Twitter accounts to grow your follower base. Many more people have these accounts than blogs, so this will definitely allow you to reach a larger audience. As you grow these accounts, also consider opening other accounts that will expand your base like accounts on YouTube and Flickr. This will also improve the diversity of your content – see “Visualize” below.

Visualize

Including visual content on your site through photos and illustration can have a profound impact on your site traffic for several reasons. One reason is that visual content engages the viewer and makes your site more exciting. This will almost always keep visitors on your site for longer periods of time. Another reason to do this is that content from your site will appear on Google Image search result pages. This creates another avenue for people to visit your site with content they are specifically looking for.

SEO-ize

Probably the most obvious of these suggestions, making your content SEO friendly will go far in garnering traffic from search results. There are loads of strategies that will make your blog more search engine friendly and differentiate yourself from the pack. SEO Book has some great tactics here that will boost your SEO in no time.

Socialize (Part 2)

In addition to having an active presence on multiple social networks, having a social presence in real-life will also go a long way. See what events are being held in your area and meet up with other tech-savvy bloggers, entrepreneurs, developers and designers to really promote your blog to others who have a strong online presence.

What are some of your ideas for increasing traffic for your blog? Let us know in the comments! 

Want us to cover a certain topic in next week’s digest? Tell us in the comments, and we’ll get on it.

HostNine links from the past week:

How to Speed Up Your Website
[WEB DESIGNER DEPOT]

How to Safeguard Your Site with HTML5 Sandbox
[SITEPOINT]

The Noob Guide to Link Building
[SEO MOZ]

5 Steps to Fix Broken Websites
[SITEPOINT]

Plugins for a More SEO Friendly WordPress:

Check out these plugins that will boost your presence on SERPs:

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WP HTTP Compression

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Boost your search engine rankings using these tools for link building!

Raven

Raven works as a dashboard of SEO, social media, and online advertising tools that allow you to manage all of these areas in one place. The SEO division brings together Google Analytics, Google AdWords, SEOMoz, WordTracker and others to efficiently manage your SEO from a single space. Similarly, with Raven you can manage and track your social media content on a single platform. Finally, the advertising division compiles a number of online advertising tools into one space and gives you detailed information about the progress of your campaigns. Within all of these features, you can choose to collaborate with your co-workers for increased efficiency.

Plans and Pricing:

• Pro: Allows up to 2 users, let’s you integrate unlimited websites and social networking accounts, and gives you 20 social monitor searches, 1,000 keyword rankings and 50,000 managed links. A Pro account is $99.00/month.
• Agency: Allows up to 8 users, let’s you integrate unlimited websites and social networking accounts, and gives you 50 social monitor searches, 2,500 keyword rankings and 150,000 managed links. An Agency account is $249.00/month.

Contributors to distillied.com have compiled a fantastic series of tips and tricks to assist SEO professionals in using Excel to its fullest potential. This guide is a extremely helpful in organizing, analyzing and interpreting the data for your sites.

Plans and Pricing:

• The guide is free for anyone to download.

2. Open Site Explorer

“The Search Engine for Links” is a simple, yet powerful tool to discover who is linking to your site and your competitors’ sites. This search engine gives you page and domain authority rankings, as well linking root domains and total links. For those wishing to use Open Site to its fullest potential, look into getting a paid “Pro” account. This upgraded account will give you access to social media statistics, thousands of more links, run unlimited reports ,and track links over time.

Plans and pricing:

• Basic functions are free.
• Pro: Upgrade to have access to the functions listed above for $99.00/month.

Ontolo goes above and beyond the typical SEO toolset with a focus on building an arsenal of relevant information about competitors. Ontolo is unique in that it gives you a host of relavant backlinks from your competitors. Ontolo is also a fantastic tool for starting and managing multiple campaigns at once.

Plans and pricing:

All plans include prospect searching, prospect notifications, contact information, workflow management, advanced metrics and tags and notes.

• Solo: 5,000 monthly automated prospects, 5,000 daily instant prospects, 3 custom campaigns. $97.00/month.
• Professional: 15,000 monthly automated prospects, 15,000 daily instant prospects, 10 custom campaigns. $297.00/month.
• Advanced: 30,000 monthly automated prospects, 30,000 daily instant prospects, 15 custom campaigns. $497.00/month.
• Competitive:  50,000 monthly automated prospects, 50,000 daily instant prospects, 25 custom campaigns. $697.00/month.

Plans and Pricing:

• Free: Gives monthly reports and advanced backlink reports for your sites.
• Silver: Access to 60 detailed site reports per month. Advanced backlink reports for up to 5,000,000 sites. Incorporates Site explorer and the Daily Fresh Index into monthly reports for in-depth tracking. $499.90/year.
• Gold: Access to 300 detailed site reports per month. Advanced backlink reports for up to 25,000,000 sites. Incorporates Site explorer and the Daily Fresh Index into monthly reports for in-depth tracking. $1499.90/year.
• Platinum: Access to 950 detailed site reports per month. Advanced backlink reports for up to 100,000,000 sites. Incorporates Site explorer and the Daily Fresh Index into monthly reports for in-depth tracking. Also grants API access. $3999.90/year.

5. Tom Anthony’s Link Profile Tool

This free and simple tool uses innovative analysis to easily interpret link activity to a particular site vs. competitor sites. This tool is great for ballpark comparisons and getting rough estimates about how sites match up to each other.

Plans and Pricing:

• Free account with registration

Stay tuned for part 2! In the meantime, post your favorite link building tools in the comments…

Before jumping in, consider the following:

Remember: your goals are visitors and conversions.

While it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of launching something new, remember to keep the end goal in mind: total visitors and conversions. A website redesign can have serious consequences for your SEO and can have much more labor involved than it might seem like on the surface. Never redesign a site simply because you’re bored with the look or need something to do on the weekend. Always keep in mind that the only reason you should consider an overhaul is to attract more visitors and boost conversions. If you can reach this goal without a redesign, go that route.

What specifically works and doesn’t work with your current site?

So you’ve determined that you need a redesign. Now your task is to determine exactly what needs to change and what can stay the same. How user friendly are critical pages? Do you need to ramp up your content? Are you successfully linking to your social media outlets? Don’t fix things that aren’t broken, and deciding what doesn’t need to change will save you time and energy.

Come up with a detailed list of what aspects of your site should change.

Now that you have your list of things that need to change, it’s time to really start putting things under the microscope. Really spend time on your list of things to change and get picky. What changes in visuals are you looking at? If you’re using WordPress, what plugin matches your exact needs for speeding things up or managing your SEO? Come up with a detailed list of your exact needs and execute.

Plan a smooth transition.

Both sudden transitions and slow rollouts have their advantages and disadvantages. A quick launch that revamps your site’s main featured should be made known via blog posts and announcements on the home page. Additionally, you should double and triple check all of your changes and troubleshoot any potential problems. You should also have a detailed SEO strategy in place since sudden and far-reaching changes can affect your search rankings. A slow rollout with incremental changes avoids some of these problems, and allows you to handle potential problems one at a time. For more info on strategizing your transition, particularly with regards to SEO, check out this post from Ilya Pozin .

What has helped you to succeed in the website redesign process? Let us know in the comments!

Content strategy isn’t a new concept, but it is often overlooked in many organizations, especially small to medium sized businesses. In our rush to get information, any information, out to our customers we often overlook the importance of WHAT we are putting out there. This isn’t just a matter of peppering the ‘net with as much information as possible, or using the shotgun method to make sure you’re name is out there in as many places as you can get it. Content strategy is just that: a strategy.

Here are some links so that you can use to learn about the ins and outs of content strategy. Have some info that you’d like to share? Please let us know in the comments section.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content, whether it is text, graphics, audio or video. As Rachel Lovinger puts it, “The main goal of content strategy is to use words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.” 

It’s the “unambiguous content” and the “meaningful, interactive experiences” that most of us may be lacking.

How Can Content Strategy Help Your Business?

It’s all well and good to care about your content, but proper content management is a lot of work. So, what do you get out of it? Here are a few things.

Helps you produce higher quality content: If you know what your overall strategy is, you will be able to create content that fits into that supports your plan.

Better content: By knowing what topics are interesting to your customers you will be able to provide more value to them.

Improves your SEO: Good content gets shared, which increases your page rank among search engines.

Helps you identify what works and what doesn’t: With a well-defined strategy you can see what you have published, analyze how well it did, and know if it’s worth repeating…or avoiding.

Identify things that make re-purposing sense: If you have a great collection of information on one subject, you can use it for other websites, or publish it in a collective, or even create a new niche for your business.

Leads to consistency of brand: It is much easier to keep things inline with your particular brand when everyone is on the same page.

Fewer  revisions: With everything being consistent you are less likely to have to re-do things. You will be much more efficient, having everything inline at the beginning.

Knol
Knol gives an amazing amount of information on content strategy. This includes Rahel Bailie’s aspects of content lifestyle that discusses the analysis, collection, management and publishing of information.

Six Revisions
Six Revisions has their own reasons you should consider utilizing content strategy. Maybe you can think of others. If so, let us know in the comment section.

Blueglass Content Marketing [Infographic]
This infographic gives a lot of information in a great, easy to read layout. It will explain the whys and hows of content management

HubSpot Blog
HubSpot’s blog specializes in online marketing, and is a great place to find information on content-based marketing topics.

If you’re running your own online businessNothing is more important to the bottom line then your ability to convert customers. As your customer conversion represents the number of people who actually purchase your product or service, this is the statistic that will keep your company in business and your employees happy with a paycheck.

Here are a few techniques you can employ to increase your customer conversion by optimizing your conversion rate.

1. Market segmentation strategy

What market segmentation strategy means in the online universe is taking Pareto’s rule to the extreme. With all the free analytics that you can get through the major search engine companies, you have all of the statistics that you need to segment your market into the people who provide you with most of your sales versus the people who just stop by and visit without buying.

Before you get into converting the visitors, you must optimize your core audience. Do so by testing different pricing strategies and action campaigns on that particular segment. Give them the majority of the free deals and the introductory offers. If there is someone with the same demographic as your high conversion audience that has not been converted, they should be your first priority.

2. Optimize your stickiness

The longer that people stay on your website, the more likely they are to become a true customer. After 5 min., according to MarketWatch, their potential for conversion goes up 10% for every additional minute they spend.

You can optimize your stickiness by streamlining your organization straight to the sale. You can do this by offering your loss leaders quite early, especially on the mobile platform. On the mobile platform, people are 90% more likely to be in a “purchasing mood,” which means that you can get them used to purchasing your products almost immediately. Do not be afraid to put your best deal on the landing page and a link directly to your e-commerce cart.

3. Increase your search engine optimization listings

Studies have shown that not only do people click on the listings that are ranked more highly in search engine listings, but they trust them more as well. There is also another stat known as “ubiquity” which is gaining traction as a way to gain trust more quickly with your customer base, which has a direct effect on your customer conversion rate.

Ubiquity means the amount of exposure that you receive on the Internet at same time, giving you the impression of being an established brand. One instance of ubiquity would be if you had your landing page, your how-to blog and your Facebook page as the top three search results under your chosen keyword. This not only gives you a higher instance of click through rates, but also a higher instance of customer conversion.

4. Price strategy

Your problem with low customer conversion rates may be your pricing. With all of the analytics around, it is sometimes easy to overlook the old school reasons that visitors to your site may not become conversions.

Take a look at the pricing on your website versus the pricing of your competitors. Once you have this hard data in hand, you can very easily segment your audience into those who are looking for price discounts and those who are more value-oriented. If your price is higher than that of your competitor, then you want to take your development back to step one and further segment your audience.

A new strategy that many people are using online is to divide their products into different brands, with different URLs and all. Many times, people will not even know that the same company owns two websites.

This Week’s HostNine Blog Posts:

• 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress
• 6 Tools to Help You Generate Great Content
• 5 Simple Domain Name Strategies
• 5 Great Web Analytics Tools You Can Use

HostNine Social Links From The Week:

WordPress Multisite Beyond the Basics Essentials and Domain Mapping
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Determining Which Plugins are Slowing Your Site Down
WPTAVERN

Free Photoshop Alternatives for Editing Photos
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Convert Your WordPress Theme to HTML 5
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To close out, here’s some humor from Toothpaste for Dinner:

See you all next week!

All in One SEO Pack

This all-in-one SEO pack automatically optimizes your WordPress site. Some of its features include Google Analytics support and automatic optimization for titles within your site.  Since this plugin automatically optimizes your content, it’s good for people who don’t have as much SEO or WordPress experience.

SEO Rank Reporter

Another fairly self-explanatory plugin, SEO Rank Reporter tracks your Google rankings every three days. This simple plugin is a great tool for tracking the traffic flow to your site in graphs that are easy to interpret.

SEO SmartLinks

SEO SmartLinks is another plugin that automatically optimizes your WordPress site. SmartLinks does this by linking keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

SEO Ultimate

Another all-in-one SEO package allows you to manually manage title tags, autolinks, 404 errors and more. SEO Ultimate is perfect for a user who has some experience in WordPress and SEO and prefers to control asptects of their site’s SEO themselves.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Developed by a WordPress SEO consultant and WordPress developer, WordPress SEO by Yoast is a fantastic all-in-one SEO tool. While the plugin takes care of most of the technical aspects of SEO automatically, a few features are left up to your control. For example, when writing articles for your site, the plugin forces you to select key words and ensures that you focus that particular word.

Google Analytics:

Although Google Analytics is an ever-evolving tool that provides an extremely wide range of services for tracking web traffic, it’s especially useful for those diving into SEO and researching keywords.

Google Insights for Search:

Originally intended to assist in pay-per-click advertising campaigns, Google Insights for Search has evolved to meet other needs of keyword researchers. This tool tracks the volume of specific keywords and offers a tremendous volume of suggested keywords. Google Insights for Search is thus a good tool if you have time to manually sift through many keywords and apply them to your own site.

Google AdWords:

This tool gives you a list of suggested keywords based on an initial list that you construct. It also how competitive particular keywords are and the number of Google searches it receives every month. What sets Google AdWords apart is that is has three distinct “match types” for keywords: phrase matches, exact matches and broad matches.

A phrase match will match similar phrases to a given search, for example, the phrase “shop for cheap winter jackets” would be a match for the phrase “winter jackets.”   A broad match retrieves synonyms for a given phrase. For example, a broad match for the phrase “winter jackets” would be matched with the phrase “winter coats.” An exact match (as it sounds) only returns matches to the exact phrase “winter coats.”

Google Trends for Websites:

Google Trends for Websites is a rather simple tool that allows you to track the traffic of your website over time. This, however, can be a powerful resource for generating more traffic on your website in that Google Trends gives you keywords your visitors searched for, their geographical locations, and other sites that they visited. This tool can also track seasonal trends if your site is sensitive to fluctuations in seasonal-related traffic.

Alexa:

Alexa is a great resource for people using keyword research to optimize their website. The site allows you to access data about your own website and your competitors’ sites through traffic statistics and search analytics. The site also gives information on the demographics of people visiting the site, with breakdowns for age, education, gender, location, and more. Alexa also features a “Reviews” page that lets Alexa users comment on particular sites.

The best SEO practices have not changed all that much over time, and the essential points will continue to remain steadfast. In order to get your webpage to rank high, you need to deliver quality content that is optimized. There are multiple search engines, so what may work for one, may not prove effective for another. It’s imperative that you utilize proper SEO techniques if you want your webpage to succeed. Content is king, and luckily, you can control what is placed on your webpage. You need not hire a consultant; just follow these easy steps to start ranking yourself for the right reasons!

Step One: Write for the user, not the search engine.

Everyone always assumes that when you are writing for SEO, you are writing for the search engines, but in reality you should be focused on writing for your readers. Keywords should be properly tagged and utilized throughout the article. For example, if you are devoting a website to helping others buy property, you need to utilize as much information as you can that is relevant to that topic. You may choose to enlist various topics on interest rates, home buying tips, foreclosure opportunities, financing your property and so on.

Step Two: Write quality content in a focused area

Content is extremely important in implementing a killer website. Anyone can take a few minutes and set up a website in no time at all, but having the proper content is what is going to matter in the long run. You need content that is useful, informative and helpful for the readers. The content needs to be kept current through a consistent stream of updates. Having quality content and a unique voice that stands out above the rest is what is going to set your site apart from all of the others. It may not be necessary to write a new piece every day, but you should make sure that you are taking the time to gather information and allow your readers a chance to absorb what you are providing them.

Step Three: Give credit where credit is due

If you can provide links to other websites, that is a great way to showcase what others may have to say about the topic you carry on your website. A lot of people fear that having a bunch of links will essentially drive away visitors, but this is actually false. You will receive far more positive views about the subject rather than having any negative impact. Make sure that your links are directed toward trusted sites and not just anyone. Once you’re writing information that’s helpful and/or entertaining for your readers, you’re ready to move onto advanced tactics like guest blogging, link building, and social media— all vital pieces of the SEO puzzle. There is a plethora of extensive research and detailed information regarding SEO and the science of search available from reputable brands on the internet; we recommend SEOMoz and Search Engine Land, both of which are ethically conscious thought leaders who are well-known and respected in the search industry.