Reader Website Reviews

Now that summer is over and my travel schedule is a little less hectic (said as I leave for another 7 days in San Diego and Colorado), I’m now able to spend more time working with my Turbulence Training affiliates in my fitness business.

One new feature I started with them is a weekly website review. Both Rick Porter and I will check out there site and give a few basic, but powerful pointers to help them get more traffic.

Of course, even if you aren’t an affiliate of my program, there was still plenty of good info in the website review, and so I want to share that with you below.

NOTE: This site shall remain nameless…but the tips will probably apply to your site.

1) For your opt-in, remove the name field. Just ask for your reader’s email address. You should see an increase in your opt-in rate from this small change.

2) Minimize your use of “!”
. Use only when needed. I’ve actually stopped using them completely in my emails and copy.

Let your words do the work.

3) Reduce the size of the banner at the top of your page
in order to get more text above the fold. Check out my blog for best banner size here: www.TTFatLoss.com

Now over to Rick Porter for simple changes you can make on your blog to get more traffic. I’ve tried to translate Rick’s tech talk to simpler terms where needed.

#1 – Use proper permalink structure for each article

For example, let’s say you wrote an article on “abdominal exercises” but the link to the article on your site is:

http://www.yoursitename.com/?p=237

You need to change it to:

http://www.yoursitename.com/abdominal-exercises

The old style permalink structure is not search engine friendly, and you must make this change because Google reads the permalinks to look for keywords on your site.

****CB translated: Google likes to see ‘keywords’ in the link because it tells the Google machine what your content is about.

Inside your blog, where you add posts, there should be an area where you can ‘edit permalinks’. Just make those edits and remember to click ‘update’ to update the post.

#2 – Add a “recent articles” or “popular posts” widget in the sidebar.  Also put “popular search terms” in the side bar.

Each blog post needs something in the sidebar to help Google and readers see additional articles.

****CB note: I don’t know how to do this myself, but anyone with a bit of tech savvy will…so whoever put up your blog should be able to do it.

#3 – Put a “related contextual posts” plugin on the blog.

The quickest way to help Google crawl through all the posts would be to add the contextual related posts plugin.

****CB translated: Again, this helps the Google machine figure out what your site is all about. The more it knows, the higher your articles will show up in google search terms.

When you write future articles, if you could link back to at least one past article each time, that would help.

For example, in your Abdominal exercises post, if you used the works ‘six pack abs’, you should use those words to link to an article on your site about six pack abs.

Again, a techy person should be able to help you with this… or an 8-year old kid will too. Most likely. I believe kids born after 2000 have some type of Mac product already inserted in their central nervous system.

#4 – Pick the 3-5 top phrases you want to ‘own’ on google. For
example:

  • how to get six pack abs
  • best abdominal exercises
  • stability ball ab workouts

Then sit down and write a 1,500 word article for ‘how to get six pack abs’ (or whatever your #1 phrase is) and then within that article, link to 1000 word articles on ‘best abdominal exercises’ and ‘stability ball ab workouts’.

Make sure you use the proper permalinks as mentioned above.

I.e. – http://www.yoursitename.com/how-to-get-six-pack-abs

Read this article on my site for more details on exactly what to do for the best ‘google traffic articles’

=> http://internetindependence.com/write-articles-free-traffic

#5 – advanced tip

Put a widget up in the upper right corner then with your primary keywords, Autolink Juicer style like we have on Workoutmanuals.com

This ensures that homepage link juice is passed to the most important pages of his site, rather than Google having to crawl through dozens or hundreds of pages just to find them.

****CB Note: Honestly, I don’t even know what Rick means here …but if you have a tech guy, maybe they will understand.

This will be a good start to helping you get more traffic,

Craig Ballantyne

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson