If you have been following the series you would already have read how to boost the search engine traffic to your blog, how to get other websites to link to yours, and telling friends, family and followers about it. Now it’s time to get other people to tell their networks about your blog.

Getting strangers to spread the word about my blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just post some content on your site and then get loads of people you don’t know to tell their friends about it? Well, it’s Social Media again!…

Do you use social sharing icons on your website posts? These are the icons that visitors can click to share your article with their own followers if they like it enough. If your content really is good, and it is relevant to other people (why would you post it otherwise?), then you should allow them to easily share it. If you don’t have these on your site, there are some decent plugins (search for something like ‘social sharing plugins’ if you use platforms such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal). Ask your website designer if you’re having trouble.

Twitter is also useful here – if you tweet about something, and there is space left at the end of the the tweet, try adding something like ‘Pls RT’. A few kind souls will see it and might re-tweet it for you. There are a few things to bear in mind here, though – out of courtesy you should also extend the favour when you see one of their tweets (if you think it would be of interest to your followers), and you shouldn’t ask for everything to be re-tweeted. Here’s something radical..

If you’re actively tweeting your own interesting content, why not try re-tweeting a few Tweets that your own network have posted? You might find that they then come looking for your tweets… and re-tweet some of them!

Important — people that don’t know are only likely to share your content with their networks if there is a good reason for them to do it. As we have already discussed, this is more likely to happen if you do something for them first (such as liking or re-tweeting them). However, you will still need to make your content useful enough or interesting enough to others. So, spend time building great content! One great post is worth more than a dozen lame ones.

That’s the last of our short series helping you to get more blog visitors. Having got more visitors to read your blog, the next big challenge is getting more of them to interact with it – this means getting comments, and is the subject of a series of posts we’re working on right now…. and coming soon!

How do I get more people to read my blog? Step 4 – Getting strangers to spread the word is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

If you have been following the series you would already have read how to boost the search engine traffic to your blog and how to get other websites to link to yours. Now it’s time to let other people know about your blog.

Telling your friends, fans and followers about your site

Use social media sites to link to your content – post updates on your Facebook page and on Linked In, and Tweet from time to time, making sure you always link the update back to your website (otherwise, your followers won’t be able to discover all the other great content on your site). You should usually include a call-to-action to tell them why they need to visit. Social media is great for this – it’s generally free and easy to use. By posting regular, interesting and relevant content you will gradually build up a following. Then, hopefully, some of your followers will start to take solid actions (downloading your stuff, sharing your content, buying your goods, subscribing to other services etc).

Also to do with social media – make sure you follow other people in industries that are of interest to you. Quite often you’ll be followed back as a result.

Join some Linked In groups – look for those that are related to your interests (personal and business), and start contributing discussions and comments. Whilst on this subject – why not try answering some of the questions that Linked In members post. You might just get a few people look at your website or blog if your answers are credible.

Have you tried building up a subscriber list and sending regular newsletters to your followers? I know that all the focus seems to be on social media these days, but a lot of people do still read the stuff that arrives in their inbox. In addition, newsletters allow you to engage personally with your followers, giving them a range of different articles, hints and news items to read and at a time to suit them (rather than relying on them spotting your tweet as it zips past).

Does your blog / site have a feed subscription link? This is the (generally) orange wireless icon – it might also say ‘RSS Feed’ – and allows your website visitors to subscribe to your blog updates. So, whenever you add a new blog post it will pop up in the feed reader that your visitor is using so that they are aware of it straight away. If you’re not already giving them this possibility, why not ask your web designer to add it for you? If you aren’t already using a feed reader yourself, then I recommend you take a look at igoogle.com. This will allow you to keep an eye on all of your favourite blog content (as well as what your competitors are writing about).

How do I get more people to read my blog? Step 3 – Tell friends, fans and followers about it is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

If you have been following the series you would already have read how to boost the search engine traffic to your blog. Now it’s time to go to work on getting links from other websites.

Getting found from links on other websites

The search engine benefit that your site receives when other sites link to you should not be underestimated. This is especially true for sites that already have a good search engine reputation AND which are relevant to your content. This is how much of the search engine World finds out which sites are reputable – if the BBC website links to one of your posts, Google is likely to rank your website more highly as a result. If you really want to learn more, take a look at the Wiki definition of PageRank.

However, as well as the search engine benefit that inbound links offer, real visitors may click those links and visit your website too. So link building is really important for your website strategy. Here are a few ideas :

• Search for websites that have similar content to yours and ask for a link
• If you operate in a niche, try seeking out blogs and forums that talk about your content and then start posting your own comments. However building up a reputation will take time, so…
• Don’t make your comments too sales focused
• Do impart advice and answers to questions
• Do offer to help out (even if it means recommending somebody else or another website)
• Do make sure you include a link to your website – usually this is allowed as part of your signature
• Register on free, or low cost, niche sites – the ones that allow you to create a profile, add a bio, and, most importantly, link through to your own website. Some of these sites are very good and get a lot of traffic, so do ‘work’ them hard, add content that will appeal to the typical users of the site, and make sure you don’t skimp on the details you upload either. The content you add to the site could help your own SEO activity as well as making it more likely that real visitors will want to find out more by visiting your website
• Be wary of link exchanges – they generally don’t bring you any benefit and could end up diminishing your link value and sending people away from your site.

Tip : Use anchor text wisely – Anchor text is the visable, clickable text in a hyperlink. When adding links to your site, try to put something meaningful in the anchor text. Search engines use the anchor text to get a better idea of what is at the other end of the link and to understand what keywords your site is relevant for. So if your anchor text says ‘click here’ that really doesn’t say very much, but if it says ‘Book your next French holiday’ it gives a really big clue as to what your site is about. Real visitors will find it more useful too!

How do I get more people to read my blog? Step 2 – Get found from links on other websites is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

I know my posts aren’t the most exciting to read but wondered if something can be done to make it easy for folks to comment or even follow my blog if they so wish. Any suggestions?

I am splitting this into separate posts because there are really two different problems that need resolving :

How do I get more people to read my blog posts? 

Then, once they have read the blog post….

How do I get people to comment on, and follow, my blog posts?

So, first things first…

How do I get more people to read my blog posts?

Pretty much all the people who arrive at your website do so because :

1. They found it via a search engine
2. They found a link to it on another website
3. You told them about it
4. Somebody else told them about it
5. You paid for them to find it

So it would seem reasonable that to increase your visitor numbers you need to address each of the above points to some degree. Let’s tackle each one in turn, but bear in mind that each of these points really merits a comprehensive article in it’s own right so only the basics are discussed here…

Getting found by search engines

With so many new websites being launched, it really is getting much harder to achieve good search engine positions for your site’s main key phrases. If you operate in a fairly exclusive niche then it might be slightly easier, but mostly it is hard, hard work without guarantee of success. Paying a search optimisation expert to help you do this may get you results, but you need to be fairly sure that your return on investment will outweight the costs before you commit, and if you do engage a professional -

• make sure that you can measure the improvement as you go
• don’t pay a large amount up front

There are things that you should be doing on your website yourself BEFORE asking a professional to get involved. I’m talking about the SEO ‘low hanging fruit’ here, the kind of good practice that should really be part of every page and every blog post that you create. There are no secrets here – just good common sense.

Some of the points that will help search engines find your site, and rank it more highly, are :

• Make your site easily navigable, and make sure all of the pages that you want to be found can be found by navigating around your site. Remember that search engines cannot ‘log in’ to your site, so if you put any of your great content behind a login / registration page… it cannot be found;
• Create a sitemap for search engines AND tell the search engines about it. This is not the same as your normal html sitemap to help visitors find their way around your site, but is generally an XML sitemap specifically built for search engines;
• Finding some good phrases that people really do search for and then planting them in your website. There are various keyword tools that will help you find reasonable keywords for your site, but make sure you don’t go for the highly competitive keywords – isn’t it better to be found on page 1 of Google for a term that is searched for 50 times a month, than to be found on page 20 for a term that is searched for a million times a month? Nobody will find you on page 20. Also, bear in mind that none of the keyword tools are completely accurate!
• Making sure each of your pages has a good page title that really explains what the page is about – this could include one or several of your keywords;
• Structuring the layout of your pages so they contain appropriate heading tags (these are the h1, h2, h3 etc html tags)
• Making sure that plenty of other websites link to yours. This is really important, but I’m going to leave this for my next post (see ‘Getting found from links on other websites’ coming soon)
• Fairly frequent updates to your website and blog content. Search engines appear to be giving frequency of update a little more priority these days. It makes sense for them to do this, as an active website is more likely to be ‘current’ and the business owner ‘at home’. If you were Google, would you really want to show searchers a web page that hadn’t changed for 5 years?

How do I get more people to read my blog? Step 1 – Get found by the search engines is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

This is Referrer Spam

Have you checked your Google Analytics traffic sats recently and noticed a bit of traffic from some unlikely sources?

When checking your referrers (which sites have sent you traffic) have you spotted sites such as www.forex-ninjas.com and www.rock.to?

If so, then you have had some referrer spam. This traffic is no good at all to you, and isn’t actually the result of them visiting your site at all. Confused?

What is referrer spam?

When you add Google Analytics (or indeed any public facing analytics code) to your website you are placing a small script on your web pages. When someone visits your pages the script tells Google about the visit and Google then show it on your Analytics report.

However, as the script is visible in your page source (try navigating to your web page, then click ‘View Source’ in your web browser tools and find ‘analytics’) it can be used in a bad way too. Here’s what happens…

If I had a website whose traffic I wanted to artificially boost, I would copy the analytics code form your web page and paste it (along with the code from thousands of other websites) into my own web page. Then I would navigate to my web page. This would immediate execute all of the analytics code scripts in the page, making it appear to Google that I had visited each of these pages.

That’s rubbish, I hear you say. Why would I want to waste my time doing that?

What benefit does referrer spam have for the perpetrator?

Well. When you see these sites appear in your Google Analytics reports what do you do?

I have actually visited a few to see where my link appears on their site.

So, if I have visited their sites to have a look, then I’m sure that you have too. That’s what they are after – traffic, which delivers impressions for their advertisers, and which looks good to site owners if they have employed a rather shady web company to help build their traffic.

Can I do anything about it?

Google Analytics Profile Filter

I’m guessing that Google will eventually get on top of this and stop these referrals appearing in your analytics reports, but unfortunately as soon as one route is shut down another will open up.

You could play around with the filters on your analytics profile (excluding specific domains), but that’s probably a little too much effort – especially if you have multiple sites and lots of different spam referrers.

Is Referrer Spam a risk to me?

Probably not if you ignore it.

However, if the site was malicious in some way (for example, by automatically downloading something nasty to the computers of anyone who visited it), that might be different.

So, my recommendation is not to visit any of these sites at all – even if you have spam and virus protections running on your computer or built into your web browsers.

Can referrer spam represent real visits to my site too?

Yes. I have described a way that spammers can trick Google Analytics users into thinking that they have had a visit, but of course they can pay real visits to your site too. This may have the added complication if you display a list of referrers on your site – some people do, and this can give good search engine link juice to the spamming site!

Forex Ninjas in your Analytics? – You have Referrer Spam! is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

I was disappointed when booking our January crossing to France with Brittany Ferries, as I thought that the price (£263 for 2 adults plus a car) was a bit steep for this quiet time of the year. This price already included a £96 discount on their normal fare.

I was so disappointed, in fact, that I felt compelled to Tweet about it. Twitter is not my usual vehicle for grumbling about things, but here’s what I tweeted…

Even with club discount still paying £260 (2 adults + car return + cabin 1 way) Portsmouth-Caen in Jan. Expensive non Brittany Ferries?

Job done, I thought. Got it off my chest and perhaps gave my Twitter community the opportunity to tell me where I can get a better deal next time.

To my surprise, and to their credit, Brittany Ferries started following me on Twitter AND sent me a personal reply. Here it is…

@MartinJarvis Hello Martin, are your timings flexible? Generally afternoon sailings are cheaper southbound, and morning sailings northbound.

Now, I already had a vague idea that the price structure worked out like this, and we generally do try to get the best combination of price and convenience when booking, so the content of this reply didn’t really give me anything. However, I was struck, and impressed, by the fact that Brittany Ferries are taking social media seriously enough to be keeping an eye on what is said about them on the web, and that they respond quickly and effectively to head problems off before they cause real damage.

This is a very important lesson to all of us who run businesses…

Tackled correctly, bad news can be turned into something positive for your business – but you need to act quickly, you need to be honest, and you need to offer good information and advice (and an apology if necessary). Most important, though, is that you need to be aware of the things that are being said about you and your business. There are a few tools around that pro-actively alert you when your key phrases are mentioned (try Google Alerts, for example), or for Twitter you could simply search for your terms on a regular basis and deal with any that require it.”

So, well done Brittany Ferries for being on top of this… although I really would like to pay a bit less for my regular crossings.

Let us have your own views on the use of Social Media for monitoring what your (potential) customers are saying, and whether you have been affected – positively or otherwise, from something said about you.

Footnote :

I actually did a #ff (Follow Friday) for Brittany Ferries last week, linking to my blog post in the process. They [Brittany Ferries] replied to me again, thanking me for the #ff and for the blog post!

Know what people are saying about you on social media? is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

Captcha came to the fore some years ago, and seemed to offer a way of cutting down on the amount of spam by forcing all form respondants to enter a cunningly constructed series of letters and characters (which, of course, spambots couldn’t easily do). This succeeded in reducing form spam, but it also deterred some genuine website visitors from completing and submitting forms because the captcha was too difficult to read or because the captcha was ‘a field too far‘…

I also think that whilst spam is a pain for website owners it shouldn’t be a pain for your website visitors. Why offload the problem onto your potential customers?

Wouldn’t it be better to absorb that pain yourself, or better still put something in place that would not add an extra burden on your website visitors whilst at the same time reducing the amount of form spam you receive? But how?…

Honeypots

I’m gradually being converted to the idea of adding honeypots to my forms.

The basic idea is that you add one or more hidden fields to your form and then only allow the form to be submitted if those fields contain blanks (or some randomly chosen value). Your real human visitors will not see, and therefore not be bothered by, these fields, but spambots (the automated machines that hit your website and fill out your forms with spam) will try to fill these fields in, and if they do then the form submission will be rejected.

This solution won’t stop all spam on your site, but it should cut it down quite a bit. There is evidence to suggest that forms without Captcha fields to complete receive 20%-30% more conversions, so if you can live with a small increase in spam it might be worth investing in a little honeypot for your forms.

How can I add a spam honeypot to my site?

That depends on how your website has been built. There are plenty of plugins for WordPress and other content management systems, and you can generally find your solution by searching Google for it. If you would prefer us to look at it for you and recommend a solution, just get in touch using our captcha-free form below…

Spam – Whose problem is it really? is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

1. Choose credible sites – by credible, I mean sites that are already well-ranked by Google and which get some traffic;
2. Choose relevant sites – all links are generally good, but much better if the content on the site is relevant to your own content in some way;
3. Choose sites that allow their pagerank to flow to you – if you don’t know how to check, you should view the source of the page where you want the link to appear and then see whether the attribute ‘nofollow’ is applied to the links on the page. If it is, then this link won’t give you any search engine link juice (although it might still be useful if the site gets plenty of real visitors that will click on your link);

How to get people to link to your website or blog is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

Banks are a well established and respected Accountancy organisation in Swindon who are Professional, Successful, Efficient and Effective. In fact, they approached us to build a fresh new website for them that did away with the usual home page clutter, opting instead for a clear message that focused just on those 4 mission statement words.

Additionally, Banks wanted the new site to look fresher than their existing one, and to reflect their growing social media as well as increasing on-site engagement and something they could maintain for themselves.

Our Solution

We opted for a WordPress installation, along with a premium theme that we customised to deliver the home page style that the client wanted and a custom taxonomy to represent their staff members so that they could easily manage their staff profiles.

News tabber and Twitter feed widgets, plus Social Connection icons, on non-home pages help social engagement, and a fair scattering of GravityForms throughout the site mean that visitors can contact Banks directly without extra clicks to the Contact page.

Jo Smyth, of locally-based Word Worker, worked with the client to deliver some great content to support the mission statement and the services area of the website.

Why not take a look at the finished Banks Chartered Accountants – Swindon website?

What does the client think?

Our other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. We use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

Banking on a new website for a Swindon Accountant is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

When Helen Palmer of The Social Media Sorcerer came to us for a website to sell her Twitter-Boom e-book, her problem wasn’t with content or with graphics (she already had those), nor was it a lack of website experience to get the job done. What Helen lacked was time – she really needed to get her website online as quickly as possible so that she could start earning some revenue from it.

So we were given a target of getting the site live within a week of us being given the concept, the graphics, the text and the paypal account details.

Our Solution

Helen specifically asked for the solution to be WordPress-based, as she has experience of this platform and wanted to be able to tweak the site content herself in the future. There are plenty of e-commerce plugins available for WordPress, but we wanted a really simple method of allowing a quick purchase of a single digital product (the Twitter Boom e-book) through Paypal (Helen’s chosen payment gateway) without bloating the site with unnecessary code.

The solution we came up with was to customise the standard WordPress TwentyEleven Theme to suit the format required by the client.

Originally, our thought was to incorporate GravityForms with the Paypal Add-on to capture the purchaser email, send it to paypal, take the payment, then pass the Paypal IPN back to the website to trigger an email to the purchase containing the product link. However, the solution we finally implemented resulted in a simple (graphic) Paypal buy now button on the website which sent the visitor to paypal. Then, the client used her Aweber account to set up some Paypal / Aweber integration so that, upon payment, the Paypal IPN was sent to Aweber to distribute the product via an auto-responder.

This is a neat solution to the problem of how to easily take payment for, and distribute, a single digital product, and credit goes to the client for identifying the potential of using her Aweber account to facilitate this.

Why not take a look at the finished Twitter-Boom website?

What does the client think?

Our other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. We use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

Website – from quotation to delivery in 1 week flat is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services