Happy Hanukkah and an early Merry (Happy) Christmas to all!

One of the best parts about the holiday season are the decorations.  Indoors and out, the world is transformed with glowing lights, candles in the windows, yard decorations and more.  In the spirit of the season, why not share photos of your decorations with the rest of the community?

I am looking for a volunteer to plant a new Seed.

1. Start a new article about Holiday decorations and post a picture that you have taken.

2. Plant the Seed and encourage everyone to Buzz the Seed with a picture of their own.

3. As new Buzzes come in, update your article linking to the first Buzz with the text “See next photo.”

For the community, Buzz as follows:

1. If you are the first person to Buzz the Seed, start a new article and link to the See with the text “See prior photo.”

2. If you are not the first person, start a new article and link to the most recent Buzz with the text “See prior photo.”

3. As new Buzzes come in, update your article linking to the Buzz that follows yours with the text “See next photo.”

If done properly, a reader of your website should be able to “flip” through this “virtual photo album” that the community has put together.  By participating, hopefully you will see an increase in traffic, and might even pick up new readers.  That is a community link-building gift worth giving (and receiving).

Merry (Happy) Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the SeededBuzz Community

Google made a ‘buzz’ in June with the release of their new service Google+ (or Google Plus, if you wish). This direct competitor to social media giant Facebook was released in Beta form to existing Google members, with only a few accounts made available. If you weren’t one of the few to receive access to the site directly from Google, you could gain access by an invite. Even with this limited access, Google+ (Beta) membership spiked to 20 Million within three weeks.

Google+ is the second attempt by the internet search engine giant to break into the social media world (currently dominated by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook). Their first attempt (Google Wave) was met with initial interest, but soon died off – Google eventually transferred control of Wave over to Apache Software Foundation – and their second attempt (Google Buzz) failed to make a buzz. Both services had promise, but neither lived up to their expectations. Will Google+ succeed with the others failed? Let’s take a moment to explore the major features available in the Beta version of Google+.

Circles: Circles is a way for you to manage your contacts. You can easily create groups for friends, family, business, and more by simply using your mouse to “drag” your contacts into the different categories. Why would you want to organize your contacts in such a fashion? When you go to post a new message, link, or other media on your Stream (Google’s version of the Wall), Google+ requires you to identify who is able to see the post. In the field below your message, you will see default text reading “+Add circles or people to share with.” Clicking on that text will bring up a menu listing all of your circles for you to identify by whom you want your post to be shared.

Images: Photos are a way for us to communicate to viewers in a way that words sometimes can’t. How can you describe a particular sunset in a way to create a clear image in the minds of your audience? Google+, like other social media sites, solves this problem for you by allowing you to upload and organize your photos into albums. Just like in posting text, you can choose who can and cannot view your images as you upload them to your profile. However, unlike other sites, Google allows you to add effects to your images without needing to process your photo initially through a secondary graphic-editing program.

Hangouts: This is an area where Google can take on Skype. With Hangouts, you can identify that you are online to chat (or “hang out”) with your friends in a video chat. When a session is established, up to 10 of your friends in your circles can log in and join in the fun. The interface has one large video screen and 9 smaller video screens below it – all live. As the participants talk, the software recognizes who is talking and displays their video in the large video screen area. When the next person talks, the prior speaker has his or her video moved to the bottom bar, and the new speaker is elevated to the large viewing area.
Sparks: To me, this is one of the more interesting features within Google+. With Sparks, any article or subject that you “like” is received by Google and returns articles or websites that contain related content for your viewing. So, if you were to like a site like SeededBuzz, Sparks might return to you other sites about social networking, blogging, or writing (for example).

There are other differences between Google+ and Facebook as well. For example, Google+ is an “overlay” on the existing Google platform. Once you have a Google+ account and are logged in, a black navigation bar appears at the top of any Google page notifying you if you have any new messages, as well as provides you quick access to your account. However, unlike Facebook, Google+ lacks the private messaging functions as well as the “page” concept that existing Facebook users enjoy.

For SeededBuzz users, I feel that you can benefit from using Google+ for a few reasons. IF (and I say “if” because of Google’s past record) Google+ continues to grow in popularity:

1)  It is safe to say that Google will weigh articles and websites linked within Google+ higher than those from Facebook. So while you are informing your viewers and your friends about your latest article, you are also giving your site that additional bump in popularity within Google’s algorithm.
2)  With the “+1” option built into Google/Google+, the more pluses your articles and website receives, the higher your articles and site will rank in Google search results. By sharing those articles within Google+, the odds are your readers and followers will be more likely to plus up your content.
3)  By creating Circles for your targeted audience, you can better inform your readers and viewers about your latest articles or website updates.
4)  When sharing links to your own site through Google+, your odds increase that your content will be shared with others through Sparks. Also, you can track who is commenting or referencing your brand name by searching for it through Sparks as well.

I encourage any of you who have started using Google+ to share your experiences with others within the community. Any tips you can provide to help your fellow bloggers to maximize their viewership will be appreciated. I do have an account with the site if you are interested in being invited so you can explore the features listed above. Simply leave a comment below and I will use your provided e-mail address to send you an invite.

To expand on the article two weeks ago by Melissa, inbound links for your website are quite important. Inbound links (also known as “backlinks”) are a sign of popularity for your website. The more inbound links, the more credit the search engines will give your site. While more inbound links are important, the quality of those links are even more important.

Quality inbound links are relevant links from other websites. For example, if your site primarily deals with personal health, quality links will come from sites that deal with exercising, nutrition, clean living, and other sites related to health. Search engines will give these links more credit than links coming from any other site. So how does SeededBuzz help you in this regard?

When you plant a Seed, you can choose up to five categories that represent the content of your article. Just by planting the Seed, you have created an inbound link to your site. When a SeededBuzz member comes across your article, a second inbound link is created if the member chooses to Buzz your Seed on their website. If that site deals with the content on your own site, the quality of the link increases because of the relevance.

Through this natural link building between relevant sites, the search engines will grade your site accordingly and elevate it in the search result listings. This is a big task often tackled by those involved with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Fortunately for you, this practice is simplified by your involvement with SeededBuzz.

Clicky is, after Google Analytics, probably the biggest Web Analytics tools catering for everyone from the hobbyist up to 100K+ views a day sites. I did use Clicky for a site several years ago, and was very interested to see how they had grown and whether they are a serious alternative to Google Analytics which I currently use for my sites. Google is free and Clicky charges $4.99/month for the basic version, $9.99 for the pro version and then increasing amounts depending on the daily traffic. The question is, is it worth it, and to put that to the test I have been using Clicky on SeededBuzz for the last few weeks.
Firstly – Clicky has a much easier interface to use, it is cleaner, better laid out with double top navigation, and it is obvious what information/options are available. One of the main criticisms of Google is that it powerful but difficult to configure and navigate.

In terms of features, Clicky has nearly everything the beginner up to a serious users will want, including Goals and Campaigns. The only feature from Google which I would immediately miss was the segmentation of visitors by new or returning – Clicky does give segmentation by country and other parameters such as browser but in my experience they iare less useful in terms of getting and keeping visitors.

It is difficult to compare the data given by both system – they always give different figures but which is right/wrong is very hard to tell. I did see that Clicky have introduced a different definition of bounce – a bounce is a one page visit that lasts less than 30s, and anything more than 30s is a real visit. It is a debatable point and will depend on the type of site you have – if you have a very low pages/visit count it should give a more accurate/real measure of bounce.

Clicky does have several features missing from Google, the obligatory Twitter integration which is flexible in the different terms to can search and track; a URL shortener, but what that has to do with Web Analytics I will leave it to others to work out; and finally Spy. Spy is probably the most voyeuristic part and quite addictive – it gives you a real time feed of users on your sites, what pages they are looking at, and what external links they exit through. I even spotted a colleague at SeededBuzz checking a page I had sent them and saw that they followed the external link correctly. Remember Big Brother is watching you.

Overall, Google is still more powerful in the number of features and functions it offers, but in reality do most people use them? Clicky is much cleaner and easier to use for the beginners, but it is up to you to decide if it is worth paying for the convenience. I think like a lot of things in life, if you start using one the inertia to move to another system is quite large, and for me I will be sticking to Google. I would be interested to hear from anyone who is long term Clicky user who would want do a test run on Google and post their results.

It’s a common question that I hear all the time, and the truth is there isn’t one simple reason people aren’t linking to you. Your link building efforts could be failing for any number of reasons. Thankfully, I’ve worked on enough blogs to know the most common link building mistakes bloggers make, and I’m going to share them with you today. If you can identify with any of these mistakes, start correcting them now so you can turn your blog into a link magnet.

• You’re a “me too” blogger—There are hundreds of millions of blogs online. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to be different. This means sharing your unique insight, and creating an easily identifiable voice readers can connect with. You can do this by writing like you talk. Above all else, be authentic.
• You’re ignoring proven linkbait formats—Did you know there are certain ways you can format your blog posts to give them a better chance of attracting links? That’s right: You need to stick to the proven linkbait templates that get results. List-style posts (e.g. 10 Funny Pictures of Cats) and how-to posts (e.g. How to be a better blogger) are two examples of proven linkbait formats. One way to come up with good ideas is to use the Linkbait Generator tool. Simply enter your subject, and generate dozens of linkbait ideas. It’s a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
• Your social media marketing skills are limited—Just because you write great content doesn’t mean you’ll automatically gets tons of traffic and a lot of back links. If you build it, they won’t come. You need to promote it as well. The best way to promote your blog is through the various social media outlets available at your disposal. This includes everything from Twitter to Digg. The key to being successful is to connect with power users on the different social networks who can help you push your content further. To do this, you have to actually spend time on these sites getting to know people, building relationships with top influencers, and doing favors for them before you ask for your own favors.
• You aren’t linking out—You’ve heard the saying “You have to give if you want to receive”, right? Same concept applies to link building. By linking out, you catch the attention of other bloggers with trackbacks. This helps you build name recognition, and it increases the chances of earning more links in the future.

What are some other reasons bloggers have trouble getting more links? Share your best tips by leaving a comment.

Ooophs  – it nearly 4 months since I last posted to this blog – things have been very busy with SeededBuzz and a few other projects, but that is no excuse as all you bloggers know – so I promise to do better in future.

So when I left off, I was starting to look at PluginSEO as a tool to help drive organic traffic. Once you have installed the tracking code and setup the configuration (see my first PluginSEO post), you leave it for a few weeks and then start to get suggestions on how to improve your SEO.

The dashboard is split into several sections, first is the activity and results from your site for new links found and any movement in your keywords, but more interestingly for me is the link activity of your ‘competitors’, which give a good insight into how active they are and where they are getting links from.

The site then processes all this information to make specific, actionable suggestions on how to improve your SEO. Some are fairly obvious such as blog about a certain keyword, but some are more interesting in terms of identifying Social Media conversations which you should join as they involve your keywords. Other areas find sites you could/should get links from but from what I could tell they are only going a couple of steps away from your competitors to find sites and so it does seem quite limited – there are a lot more sites out there that have relevance, influence and you are more likely to get links from. In a similar way, they also suggest keywords you should be using or at least tracking.

So overall, I think if you are very new to SEO and want something to help direct your activity it is a start. If you are more serious about SEO and can identify a good list of competitors or similar sites, it might be worth it just for the activity tracking which will save you a lot of time on following other sites.

Final note, they have just changed their charges so there is no completely free version for small sites, but there is a trial and a promise that if your organic traffic does not increase month on month, you pay nothing.

I would love to get comments from anyone who has used PluginSEO or knows of other entry level SEO advice/management tools.

And next week I am going to look at the web analytic site/tool Clicky which we have installed on SeededBuzz and how it compares to Google Analytics.

Have you ever thought to consider how different searches either go hot for a short period of time and then die down or are seasonal and only used at specific times of the year?

I know bloggers who make small fortunes from identifying new unique trending topics and either creating new blogs for them or pages within their own blogs for those keywords.

They target them for one reason only. They are often easy to rank for than established terms as there is no established search competition.

So where can you find which keywords are trending?

For the purpose of this post I am going to avoid talking about recurring seasonal keywords like “Christmas presents” and focus on new trends.

Here are some great resources that can used to identify trends and inspire new blog posts and Seeds:

Using Twitter To See Trends – What’s the Trend does a weekly roundup
Using Wikipedia To See Trends – Trending Topics does a great job of helping you see what’s hot and going to get hotter
Google’s View On What Is Trending – A search related list would not be complete without mentioning one of or in this case, two of their tools so for those of you who may not be aware of Google Trends and Google Insights, they are awesome!

You’ve written your post and now what?

You need to make sure you’re post is optimized. Here’s a useful checklist:

• Is the meta page title formatted to include your trending keywords?
• Does the post title contain your trending keywords?
• Does the first paragraph contain the trending keywords?
• If you’ve added an image does the alt tag contain the trending keyword?
• Have you linked to your post internally from either part of your navigation or other posts?
• Have you managed to get links from other websites to your post using your keyword or post title?
• Have you managed to use Twitter, Digg, Stumble or other social networking / bookmarking sites to link to your post?

If you can say yes to all of these you’re in the game and you’ve got a good chance of ranking for your target terms. However you’ll need to be aware that your ability to rank highly is affected by your general domain authority as well as specific optimized pages, which is why creating ongoing Buzz is so important.

If you would like to write a guest post here we’d love to hear your idea for a post so please contact us.

We gearing up to market our community of blog post ideas that we call Seeds and we’ve been doing our keyword research using Google Adwords Keyword Tool and we’ve noticed at 1,600 people a month search for ‘blog post ideas’.

Although not a huge volume of searches when compared to terms like ‘blog promotion’ with 8,100 searches and blog marketing with 110,000 searches it’s not a hugely competitive term and it’s in our sweet spot. If we’re not a good result for bloggers looking for a great blog post idea then I don’t know who is. So why am I telling you all this?

I have decided I want to rank for it in the natural search results and have written this post to illustrate what I have done and to allow you to see the results over the coming months.  The plan is to show you how keyword research combined with targeted content, page optimization and a few external links can create free traffic.

So what’s the plan?

Stage 1 – You’re reading it

• I have tried to write a post that is interesting and useful and worth reading and linking to
• The meta page title (on the browser) contains the target keyword
• The h1 heading contains the target keyword
• The first paragraph contains the target keyword and it has been emphasized using bold text to tell spiders the word is more important than standard text
• The post is tagged with the keyword

Stage 2 – Votes and context

• I need votes from other websites in the form of links and ideally the anchor of the link will contain the keywords ‘blog post ideas’
• So the Plan A is to plant a Seed and see if we can attract some Buzz
• I have a Plan B but I am not going to go there yet as I hope I don’t need it and want to save it for when I have a go at ranking top for ‘blog promotion’

Stage 3 – Day 0

Our ranking on Wednesday 17 February 2010 is outside the top 500.

Let’s see what happens.

Any guesses how long it will take to get to # 1?

I read this post about struggling to make blogging make money with great interest. It raises some really great discussion points some of which I’d like to pick up on in this post.

The first area for discussion is which Seeds are getting Buzzed. Looking down the list we have a mix which I have categorized as:

Like Minded Friends

Here’s a link to a popular Seed called The Top and Bottom 3 worries of this parent It has been Buzzed 3 Times because:

1) It’s got an audience – we have a growing number of parenting bloggers
2) It’s a good Seed – It asks a question, appropriate to nearly everyone and set-up further debate

It’s therefore no surprise that other parenting Seeds have also attracted Buzz.

This then begs the question – what are we doing about populating every category with sufficient members to get all good Seeds Buzzed?

The good news is there is a great plan, the question is when, and we could do with your help to help us finalize our thinking.

We’ve been impressed with Seed numbers and had hoped for more Buzz. The question that remains unanswered is why aren’t members Buzzing more? To help us we have created a Poll. Would you take 30 seconds to answer the questions.

Whilst waiting for the answers to the Poll we’re also creating email alerts to tell members when Seeds worth Buzzing have been planted. We hope everyone finds this useful.

When we’ve made the Buzzing process as efficient as we can we’ll throw everything we have at finding as many members as we can to make this the best blog marketing community around.

At the moment we have a few hundred bloggers kicking the tyres of our new community. Imagine 20,000 + bloggers taking part and you can see how great Seeds may be able to attract serious amounts of Buzz.

Please click here to view the Poll.

It’s All About Timing

Another Seed type that appears to work well is the date sensitive Seed. Here’s some examples:

How to make her Valentines unforgettable and What’s the point of the iPad

Contentious

Then there are Seeds written on subjects best described as contentious like Censorship? It just so easy to carry on conversations that incite opinions like this.

Interesting

Then there’s Seeds that ask genuinely interesting questions like ‘Can internet friends ever be as good as real-life friends?‘  Once again, this is a Seed that has been written to inspire further debate and be written about.

The next area of discussion is how to make money blogging. I don’t intend to go through all of the possible ways here, but am happy to link to sites like Probogger, that offer great advice on revenue generation. Instead I’d like to focus on the ingredient that makes all potential blog revenue streams possible – traffic!

I have reviewed over 1,000 blogs in order to select the first few hundred founding members. What made me chose one blog over another were the same ingredients that enable blogs to grow their traffic. They were:

Great content

If you don’t invest in great editorial, people won’t come back – you can learn a lot about the styles and subjects that make one blog more popular than another by checking out the top blogs on Technorati. You’ll also learn a lot about what makes successful blog posts from discovering the formula to writing popular Seeds. I strongly believe they are the same.

SEO

Google provides all top blogs with a massive amount of free traffic. It does this because in Google’s eyes the blog is influential and relevant to the keyword being searched for.

You become influential by having other blogger link to you – Buzz! You acquire relevant traffic by doing keyword research and writing about topics that get searched for – check out this post to see what I mean.

Together the ingredients can be a recipe for huge increases in traffic.

Sociable

Part of the DNA of a great blog is it’s desire not to just talk at people, but to talk about people and be inclusive. To be sociable. Blogs that just publish posts at people and aren’t making friends by linking to other website aren’t really behaving like blogs and aren’t likely to be very successful. So if you’re not Buzzing and making friends, I hope you’re being Sociable with other bloggers in other ways.

Finally, by writing a great Seed that asked a great question, you made me sit at my desk for an hour and write a Buzz post. You have a new fan and have earned a link to your blog that Google will take notice of, and the bonus is I am promoting this Blog as well, proving it works! So well done and thank you!

WooRank is a new site just launch by a team in Belgium which does an SEO audit on your site and gives it a WooRank – not sure what it means but the higher the better.

So no messing about I went straight in for an SEO analysis of SeededBuzz – we came out with a rank of 46.9 which is a tad under the current average of 48.7 but not too bad given the age of our site and we are just building links and content. However, there were a few embarassing spots – who forgot to put the meta description on the home page

So in case of full disclosure our WooRank SEO analysis is here.

The challenge now is who out of the SeededBuzz community has the best rank – go on take the Woo test and leave your rank/link below