Guest blogging as SEO tactic case study

I haven’t been writing a lot on my blog lately. But I did write a couple of guest posts on Search Engine People. In this article I’d like to share some of the results of guest blogging and how it contributed to my site’s SEO and overall online marketing.

1st guest blog post results

My first post with SEP was called 10 websites to outsource your design and marketing tasks. The post has showcased 10 websites that can help you outsource your online marketing, web design, writing and SEO routine. The bonus for this post was a website review of the 10 websites according to their website / SEO characteristics.

By today, December 2nd 2011 the post got

• 2 comments (plus 2 from me to reply to commenting users)
• 35 tweets
• 11 Facebook likes
• 8 Linkedin shares, and
• 3 Google +1
• 19 visits to my site

2nd guest blog post results

My second post was called 9 Ways To Depersonalize Your Search Results. This article was showcasing various tools and techniques to obtain objective ranking results from Google search. The point was made that Google personalizes results and in order to get the objective results you’d need to use these tools and techniques.

By today, December 2nd 2011 this article got:

• 5 comments (plus 3 from me)
• 78 tweets
• 7 Facebook likes
• 39 Linkedin shares
• 3 Google +1s
• 2 visits to my site

Guest blogging results summary

Let’s review the results summary and what I actually got from those numbers in terms of SEO and online marketing. As you’ve probably noticed by now I’m a great supporter of guest blogging and I recommend you guest blog too. These points show what you can get from guest blogging activities.

• Becoming part of the community. Guest blogging with Search Engine People allowed me to engage with like-minded people in Canada. Looking at the geo-analytics I can also say that I’ve got some readers from around the world.
• My “smiling face in a hat” brand image was presented in front of a lot engaged readers that are also part of the SEO community. So, there’s some branding advantage too.
• Speaking of SEO and link building, as a result of these two posts I got some back links too. These were the links from an industry community and I should say authority on SEO in Canada. They were relevant and very targeted.
• Social recognition. As you could see by the number of post sharing, the articles did get some social reach, especially the one on tools to depersonalize search results. These shares, although not pointing to my site, definitely expanded my reach.
• And, of course, I got traffic to my website, not a huge lot, but still. These were people who wanted to learn more about what I do and how I can help them solve their SEO and online marketing issues. Looking at analytics, people coming from these articles were way more engaged with the site and the article than most of my other traffic sources.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a guest writer at Search Engine People and I will definitely continue to do so. In fact, my next article about on-page SEO elements will be coming out in the second half of December this year. If you’re not following SEP, join my Marketing Facebook Page, which will be updated with new guest blogging articles I do.

Do you engage in guest blogging? Care to share your results? Feel free to do so in the comments to this post. I’ll also allow links to your article on the matters of guest blogging and SEO, so feel free to drop links here too.

5 reasons to SEO images on your website

Image or a picture on your website is content that’s being indexed by Google. Moreover, Google has a separate search engine for images. These are 5 reasons to use and SEO image files for search engines like Google.

Image files contribute to your on-page SEO

Any given page on your website will have a number of content types showing. For example, it’s going to be text, video, links, images. Each of those on-page SEO elements play as a team to identify the relevance of your page for Google. That is why I strongly recommend that each of your pages has an SEO optimized image.

Image files can bring you additional SEO traffic

People conduct image searches every day. Be it for their research project, client presentation or their next blog post. If your images are optimized properly, then you’ll get up on Google’s list for relevant search terms. People will follow links from those images that lead to your website.

Great image files work as a link building SEO strategy

I’m not saying people always give credit to image authors, but sometimes they  do, and that results in a link back to your website. A link to the original source, if placed, is usually left in a caption of the image or on the image itself (see the example above). That is one of the best way to get a link juice from relevant websites.

Use image files to simplify website browsing

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So use images on your website to convey your thoughts and ideas clearly, and make if fun, of course. If you’re running a blog, then you should use images more. Posts with images tend to produce more user engagement.

SEO image files to improve social media sharing

Every time your post gets shared on Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. page image is used as a thumbnail for those shared notes. If your post or page doesn’t have images, then that thumbnail spot will be empty. Make sure you have a picture in there and this picture entices people to click on your shared content.

Did I miss an important reason to SEO image files on a website? Feel free to let me know in the comments here. Share this post if you feel someone else can benefit from it. Coming up is a post on HOW to SEO image files on your website.

Let me review your website and recommend improvements

Facebook tactics to keep you on the site

Facebook has been updating things recently. Left-hand sidebar was updated with new list management features in response to Google Circles. Right-hand floating sidebar got status updates at the top. The pop bar is now following you as you scroll through the page. Another one of Facebook tactics is reducing the number of email notifications you get.

My first response to the last update was: Great! Facebook is trying to optimize things to reduce clutter in my mailbox. Then, after missing a few messages and important updates I realized that this Facebook tactic mostly benefits Facebook and its advertisers, not the users. Now I have to go to Facebook to check on things more often. This, as a result, increases my time spent on the site. Who benefits again? Advertisers.

Of course, what’s good for me may not be good for you, so you should keep to your Facebook practices. However, I intend to change things back to where they were. As Facebook suggests, I’ll review my notification settings to make sure I get the email notifications.

So what can we learn from this Facebook tactics as marketers? Here’s a few things that come to mind:

Advertising advantage

If your site sells ad space or uses AdSence. your primary goal should be to increase time on site metric. The more time people spend on your site, the more pages they’re likely to click through, the more ads they’ll see (and click on), and the more money you make.

Brand development advantage

It is important to keep users on site for better engagement with your brand. The more time a user spends on your website, the more you can learn about him / her, and the more opportunities you get to connect with your audience.

SEO advantage

Google uses your website metrics as a factor to rank your pages. Things like bounce rate, click through rate, and time on site matter when it comes to SEO rankings of your pages. So, it’s important to increase time on site for SEO purposes too.

Now that we’ve had this discussion of importance of “time on site” metric, I’ll be putting together a post on specific tactics you can use to get that metric higher. Is there anything else we can learn from Facebook tactics? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Can I help you improve your conversion rates?

3 kinds of SEO tactics: black-hat, grey-hat, white-hat

I just had a conversation with a client who brought up a few suggestions to tweak his site for better search engine rankings. As a result of our talk I decided to write this quick post… There’s generally 3 kinds of SEO tactics: white-hat, grey-hat and black-hat.

Black-hat techniques will definitely get a website unlisted from major search engines as a spam content. An example of this will be page sections invisible to users but targeted at getting higher search engine recognition (i.e. invisible text on pages). Here’s a few examples:

• Bad ideas for an on-page optimization
• Learn more about black-hat SEO at About.com
• Talk to people at Black hat SEO forum

Grey-hat techniques will likely get your site unlisted from search engine like Google as these techniques boarder with black-hat. An example of this will be stuffing image alt text with strings of keywords. There is though a certain extent to which this technique is acceptable (i.e. to write a clean and descriptive alt text for visually impaired users).

• Learn more about Grey hat SEO tactics
• Another look at Grey-hat SEO techniques

White-hat techniques are “the rules of the game”. These allow sites to play the game clean and stay listed on Google. Our main concern as SEOs should be clients’ (sites) reputation with search engines. We’ve all seen examples of sites being unlisted and it had cost a company time and money to reinstate the website with major search engines. These are a few examples of white-hat SEO techniques:

• A few white-hat SEO examples
• A few more from HowStuffWorks.com
• The best guide there is to on-page optimization by Google (PDF document)

As all three types of tactics evolve over time we follow the trends and make sure we use the right tools and techniques to reach our clients’ goals. After all, there are many other things online where we can outperform the competition and even play a bit “grey”, but on-page SEO should stay clean.