SEO Werkt!

This guest post is by Diggy of Flawlessconfidence.com.

As a blogger or website owner you know how important traffic is—and how difficult it can be to obtain.

Traffic is especially difficult to obtain when you are a small fish in the pond, when your site is relatively new and not many people know about you. And waiting for one or two or three years to build your blog before you can get substantial traffic is something that I’m sure you’re way too impatient for. So how do you get more traffic to your website, fast? And without spending money on PPC or solo ads?

Besides SEO, blog commenting, guest posting, Youtube and social media, there is another way.

I recently launched a new blog about how to be confident and my traffic was hovering under 100 visitors per day. Then I implemented my secret strategy for a single post, and traffic surged to over 1000 visits in a matter of hours. It continued into the high hundreds of visits for the next day too!

I’m about to share with you my secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website, pretty much whenever you want. It’s a strategy that I haven’t seen many people use, but I think that will start to change soon. The few people who I have shared this strategy with love it and have started implementing it already.

Content is king

You’ve probably read that phrase a million times. Bloggers always tell you that content is king, and to a large extent that is true. But in addition to having engaging, unique and fantastic content, you need to have people who are going to read your content and share it with others. If you have no traffic, you can have the best content on the web, but nobody is going to read it and share it, and it’s not going to bring you any benefit.

However, a big part of this secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website is to create really killer content. Just one post will do, but it has to be something unique. Something that people really want to read. Like a super-long list post, or a very in-depth analysis, or a very heated debatable topic. Something that grabs people’s attention.

The post that I’m using as an example is titled 100 Ways How To Build Confidence. It’s about exactly what the title states: 100 different ways to build confidence. It’s a very long list post of just over 10,000 words and it took about eight hours to write, edit and format.

There are multiple reasons why an article like this is very effective is drawing mass traffic to your site. Not only is the title something that makes people want to click through to it, when the visitor reads the article he or she can see that it contains useful information and that someone took a long time to create it. That reader is much more likely to leave positive feedback and share the post with friends, which in turn creates even more traffic for your site.

I also used two other articles to test this strategy on separate occasions. The result was the same: mass traffic spikes to my blog within hours.

The other articles I used were Going out alone—here’s how to do it and
10 Things to say to girls.

The secret strategy

Here it is: the actual secret strategy I used to drive over 1000 visits to my blog within hours, with a single post, all while my blog was only averaging around 100 unique visits per day. And the strategy worked again and again on the two other posts I mentioned.

That strategy involves forums. A very simple promotion of a good article on a popular forum will send you boat-loads of traffic. The more related the forum is to the topic of your article, the more traffic you will get, and the better that traffic will convert.

Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who are super-bored and have no desire to work, and who spend hours on their favorite forums. These people are all eager to be entertained, learn something, or to discover something new. They are ready to click on new links to new sites, and spend a lot of time if they like what they see.

To go back to the importance of a catchy title and unique, useful content, you can see why this is so important for this secret strategy. The catchier your title, the more people will view and click your thread and through to your link. If your article is unique, members will leave feedback in the forum. This feedback does two things:

1. In most forums, when a user comments on a thread, that thread is “bumped” to the top of the forum thread topics. This means that everybody logging on to the forum at that point will see your thread first and click on it.
2. In forums, people love to look at popular threads that have lots of views or comments or high star-ratings. This is because it is assumed that when a thread in a forum has many views, comments, or ratings, that thread is valuable and needs to be clicked on.

So, with a catchy title and useful content, you’ll get people to click through to your site, leave feedback, bump the thread, and allow more users to do the same.

If you’re wondering what kind of message you need to post in your forum thread to get the ball rolling, it’s very simple. All I posted was this:

Finding popular forums

Now that you know the secret strategy, you’ll want to know how to find popular forums worth posting on. Fortunately this is very easy because all you really need to do is head over to Google and type in “[YOUR NICHE] forum”. You’ll end up with many results for forums in your niche.

A quick way to tell if a forum is popular is to check the amount of registered users and the amount of users currently online. This is usually displayed on the home page of any forum, towards the bottom of the page. The screenshot below is an example of what a popular forum’s membership would be—this is one worth promoting your post on!

Secret no more!

Let me just sum up the secret strategy in a few simple-to-follow points:

1. Create a high quality post with a catchy title.
2. Find forums related to your niche.
3. Make a simple thread with a catchy title and link to your post.

Note that there is such a thing as forum etiquette or proper conduct. You may need to post regularly in certain forums and build up a bit of a reputation before you are allowed to post links or start threads or begin self-promoting. Even then, don’t do it too often, or you’ll risk being banned.

Be sure to reply and respond to any comments or feedback that you receive in your threads, and participate in the forum generally—after all, if it’s a focal point for your niche, it’ll be a great place to engage with potential readers, build authority, make new connections, and more.

Diggy is a confident, successful young man who is his own boss, travels the world and has fantastic friends and relationships. He enjoys teaching people how to be confident and even has a section with confidence tips for women. If you want to become more confident,happier or successful, it’s highly recommended to subscribe to Diggy’s Flawless Confidence newsletter.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

My Secret Strategy to Send Surges of Traffic to Your Blog

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Video: Google Knowledge Graph Carousel, Gmail In Search Results, Advanced SEO Advice & More
  This week, Google pushed out the knowledge graph worldwide, adding a carousel feature in instant knowledge to the search box. Your Gmail emails can now show up in your search…
• Google: A/B Testing? Don’t Cloak, Use 302s & Use Rel Canonicals
  I covered this at Search Engine Land last night, but it is worth covering here as well.

  When you do any A/B testing or Multivariate testing with your web pages or web site…

• Google Translate Now Translates Pictures
  Google announced they closed the loop on features for Google Translate by adding in a Google Goggles feature to the Translate App…
• Google Death Benefit: 10 Years Of 50% Pay To Family
  Forbes has a story, which Google confirmed on Google+ of a new benefit that makes me go absolutely wow.

  If a Google employee passes away while employed at Google, Google will continue to pay the family 50% of the Googlers salary for ten years…

• Google: Do Not Force Users To A Specific Language
  Google top guy on localization and internationalization at Google Search, Christopher Semturs, spoke out on one of his pet peeves when it comes to this topic.

  He said…

• Android Neon Lamp
  I am telling you, the stuff Google makes as swag and ultimately sells at the Google Store for Android is completely whacky. For example, take a look at this Android shaped neon light. I mean, really

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Google Settles FTC Probe Into Privacy Charges With $22.5 Million, WebmasterWorld
• A Panda Protection Plan?, WebmasterWorld
• Known Issue: MCC users seeing 404 error when navig…, AdWords Community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Gmail In Search Results Test Concerns Users

  Google announced they are having an opt in field trial of including Gmail emails, contacts and flights in the right hand side bar of the Google search results…

• Google Knowledge Graph: Worldwide, Carousel & Instant
  Google announced changes to the Knowledge Graph yesterday.

  The big change is that Google’s Knowledge Graph is now available worldwide for all English language versions of Google. So now if you are in the UK…

• Google’s Internal Campaign Builder Tool
  A WebmasterWorld thread has an advertiser who is speculating based on specific referrer URLs he spotted in his analytics software that Google AdWords representatives have specialized internal tools to quickly and effectively build campaigns for AdWords advertisers…
• Google Search Pagination Bug
  A Google Web Search Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug with Google Search and the next page button.

  When you get to page three of the results, the results continue to repeat themselves…

• Google AdSense Discontinuing Payments By Check
  Google announced plans to discontinue paying AdSense publishers by check in all countries where they officially support paying by electronic funds transfer (EFT).

  Google said “EFT payments are free of charge, less error prone…

• Musical Droid
  Jason Mayes from Google shared a picture on Google+ of this life size Android figure that seems to appreciate music. A musical droid that is into all sorts of tunes? He posted this a week ago at som

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• A Thief Has taken Out "Google Authorship" over my youtube channel, Google Webmaster Help
• Send destination to Ford Sync broken since July 22nd, Google Web Search Help
• Whether or not to lie to Google in reconsideration request, WebmasterWorld

Google announced they are having an opt in field trial of including Gmail emails, contacts and flights in the right hand side bar of the Google search results.

So if you search in Google for something and Google thinks a relevant email or contact or flight is relevant to your search, Google will show a section in the top right of matching emails. Note, the emails are now shown by default.

(1) You need to opt in to the field trial (not available for Google Apps users).

(2) You need to click on view emails or results to expand the actual emails

(3) You have to have matching emails for the search

There is a tremendous panic around Google showing personal emails in your Google search results. Which is a bit crazy because you need to opt into it to see it. But I can see how people would be concerned.

Google is searching the open web and your personal email in the same query.

A HackerNews user complained saying:

I may be outside of the normal use case here, and absolutely I am giving my opinion so judge it as one voice in 255 million (or whatever gmail’s user count is now), but this isn’t ever faster for me. I always have a gmail tab open.

As to remembering the source of a piece information, I made no claim to be perfect at this. What I will claim is that for the 95% of the time that I DO know the source of a piece of information I will be annoyed by results that are not from my intended search space.

Obviously Google has a pretty good track record at returning relevant results, but I can still hope for an off/on switch.

In which, Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

At the event, they demonstrated that the same one-click toggle to disable personalized results will also disable the results from Gmail. It’s not in our enlightened self-interest to push information that’s unhelpful or jarring, because then you’re less likely to search on Google in the future.

Here are some screen shots of contacts and flights showing up:

To sign up, you need to go to the field trial and as Googler Jessica notes in a Google Web Search Help thread:

As the post mentions, this is a trial and you need to sign up here (g.co/searchtrial) to use it. Because there is so much Gmail content, this is a technical challenge thatâs difficult to scale, so this field trial has a limited number of users that can be admitted and will cap at one million users. This forum subcategory is a place for you to discuss this new feature and share your feedback. Please note that when the field trial is over, this subcategory will be deleted, but all of the posts will still be available in the overall Web Search forum.

Forum discussion at HackerNews, WebmasterWorld and Google Web Search Help.

Google announced changes to the Knowledge Graph yesterday.

The big change is that Google’s Knowledge Graph is now available worldwide for all English language versions of Google. So now if you are in the UK, you will and should get the knowledge graph results.

The second big change is that Google added a carousel to the knowledge graph results. The carousel expands up at the top of the page, and then flips through various results. Here is a picture:

In addition, the knowledge graph results show up in the search box as you type now:

Here is a video showing these features off:

I personally do not see these results yet, so I haven’t personally played with it.

Forum discussion at Google+ and WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has an advertiser who is speculating based on specific referrer URLs he spotted in his analytics software that Google AdWords representatives have specialized internal tools to quickly and effectively build campaigns for AdWords advertisers.

Meaning, the Google representatives have internal tools that may or may not give them an upper hand when creating campaigns for advertisers.

One person said:

My Google rep. is building a new AdWords Campaign for me and I noticed in my Analytics a referrer URL that looks like Google’s own internal Campaign Builder tool.

Honestly, I’d be surprised if Google representatives didn’t have specialized tools that gave them a bit more insight and details versus what they give to the public. Which may be why some are finding Google representatives pretty good at building campaigns.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for tools

A Google Web Search Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug with Google Search and the next page button.

When you get to page three of the results, the results continue to repeat themselves.

For example, you click next from page one to page two and then from page two to page three and it works fine. But when you try to go to page four, it cycles you back to page three. You can reproduce it yourself for the search phrase [MAFPS flight planning].

Here is a video:

This is not the first time we’ve seen this bug. We reported a similar issue in 2009.

Googler Sarah responded saying, “Thanks for reporting this. I could see the same thing and we are investigating now.”

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

In response to an Apple Support Communities forum thread, a report on Tuesday offers anecdotal evidence that the new OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion may be causing battery life issues for some MacBook users.