AdVantage SEO » Blogging

Google Makes Online Stores Incredibly Simple

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:43:56 +0000

Update: Google has now introduced a gadget wizard for the Store Gadget. The company says:

Today, we’re excited to introduce a new feature for the store gadget: a wizard that streamlines the store creation process. By automating the manual steps in the original instruction guide, the new store gadget wizard should leave you with even more time to focus on your business.

More details here.

Original Article: Google Labs has launched an interesting new gadget that allows users to create a Google Checkout store in gadget form to use on their blog or web site. According to Google the process is as simple as three easy steps:

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout account

2. Fill out a Google Docs Spreadsheet

3. Set up and insert you gadget

Sounds easy enough. Easily create an online store using a Google Docs spreadsheet. Interesting indeed. “No complicated coding or technical tasks are required,” says Google on the gadget’s homepage. “You can get your first online store up-and-running in under five minutes.”

As business owners and non-business owners alike look to sell stuff online to make some extra money in a less than ideal economy, a simple way of setting up a store can be just the ticket. With this gadget, once users sign up for Google Checkout, they can list their products in the spreadsheet and manage their inventory right in Google Docs.

The gadget itself can be embedded anywhere, which could be incredibly useful, particularly to those sellers who operate more than one site. In fact, online business owners are often encouraged to blog. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the store embedded right on the blog, for easy access? I think it would in many cases.

The gadget comes in three different sizes – large, small, and tiny. Here is how they look in comparison to one another:

When it comes to making the spreadsheet available to customers, you can do this by clicking “share” in the upper right-hand corner in Google Docs Spreadsheets. Then you choose “publish as a web page” from the drop down menu, and make sure that the “automatically re-publish when changes are made” option is checked. Then just click “start publishing”.

If you have any trouble using it, Google runs down the whole process here. They have also set up a Google Checkout store gadget forum.

It should be noted that this gadget being a project of Google Labs means that it is still in the experimental stage. Does that mean you can’t use it? Of course not. Let’s not forget that Gmail just left its “beta” status this year. But with the gadget being a lab, just know that it could have bugs.

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3 Tools That Make Posting Links to Wordpress Easy and Fun

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:21:33 +0000

Wordpress is one of the most usable and convenient platforms to run a blog. But besides actually publishing your thoughts to the web, Wordpress might have another cool use: it is a handy way to store and manage the info you come across daily – it can be turned into your personal collection (either private or public) of topical links and resources organized by tags and categories.

Here are 3 tools that make bookmarking links to Wordpress easy, fast and fun!

While the first two tools extract videos and images as well as the selected text allowing for easier and quicker blog posting, the third one looks a quicker and easier way to create and save a draft without ever going to your blog dashboard.

Clipmarks

Install Clipmarks FireFox addon and restart your browser;
Navigate to the page you want to re-blog;
Click the green Clipmarks icon, highlight places in the page you want to copy to your blog page and select “Blog”:

If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll need to set up your blog first.

Choose “Wordpress” as your blog type (there are many more blog types supported by the way).
Provide your blog dashboard login and password;
Provide your blog URL;
Before hitting “Next” be sure to configure your own blog to allow automatic posting: go to your blog wp-admin, then to Settings -> Writing, then check the “Enable XMLRPC” checkbox and save your settings.

After that you’ll be able to see your new post details ready to publication:

You can check which blogs to publish to (if there are many of them);
Add the post title and your remarks;
Customize the clipped text styles (you can remove link to the clipmarks service, customize the border, etc);
Publish to blog!

Press This

“Press This for Wordpress” is a handy way to reblog content that you’d love to share on your blog. To install:

Log-in to your Wordpress admin panel.
In your sidebar on the left, select “Tools”.
Drag the “Press This” bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar.

Now, click the “Press This” bookmarklet to quickly login and update your blog. If you’re already logged in, the bookmarklet will immediately pull up the blog editor to create a new post.

Unlike the Clipmarks tool, the “Press This” bookmarklet can only be used to update one blog (which is a disadvantage for me as I am running a number of blogs). On the other hand, the bookmarklet is quicker and easier to use, it doesn’t use any extra styles to insert the retrieved abstract and is overall a more basic (which is often better) tool.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire (installed here) is a FireFox addon that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

The blog set-up is really quick and easy. The tool does pretty much everything, all you need id to specify your blog URL and dashboard login information.

When you land on a page you feel like saving or re-blogging, click the tool icon in the status bar. A panel appears where you can create the post, save it as draft, preview, edit – pretty much everything you can do in the Wordpress editor.

What the addon doesn’t do (unlike the above two tools) is extracting the selected content and media from the page (the feature I really like to be there).

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 Tools That Make Posting Links to Wordpress Easy and Fun

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What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 2

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:46:27 +0000

Posted by chenry

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

What really makes a blog post worth linking to? In my last post, What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1, I took a look at the 3,800 blog posts on SEOmoz and did some analysis on a few different aspects of the posts and their affect on the number of in linking domains (ILDs). Some of the results were very interesting to me and it made me want to push it further.

I created a list of 40 SEO/SEM blogs that I read and feel are important to people in the industry and set those as my sample population. I first crawled each website and collected a list of over 72,330 different blog posts from the 40 different websites. Then over the course of the next few days, I crawled each post and collected the following information in my database:

Blog Post Title
Original URL
# of Links from Root Domains (Via Linkscape API)
# of ILDs (Via Linkscape API)
If The Post Had Images, Lists, Or Videos
Content of Post (No Comments or Other Text on Site)
# of Words in Post

POSTS TITLE EFFECT ON ILDs

Does the length of the post’s title affect how many domains will link to it? The data suggests that posts with a title length between 10 and 18 words are on average more linked to than those with less or more. The data also suggests there may be a “sweet” spot around 14 to 16 words in length. The chart below was created without removing stop words.

This data proves to me that a descriptive title is what the linkerati is looking for. Going overboard on the length of the title can prove to be a bad move also.

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS WITH TITLE LENGTH IN THE “SWEET SPOT”

POSTS LENGTH EFFECT ON ILDs

Post length is a long debated thing out there in the blogosphere. Most bloggers will tell you that you should keep your posts around 500 to 900 words, and that might be stretching it. When it comes to SEO/SEM blogs, longer more content filled posts are more linked to than those with limited amount of content.

From the chart below you can see there is a word range that seems to collect more ILDs than other word ranges. Based on the data, the ideal length of your posts should be around 2328 to 2618 words. In my previous post, the ideal length for only SEOmoz’s post was between 1800 and 3000 words.

The chart above shows posts only up to 2812 words, but accounts for over 99.55% of all the posts. Posts that were greater than 2812 words really had a low number of ILDs. For this reason and for the display of the chart, they were removed.

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS (BETWEEN 2328 AND 2618 WORDS)

DEPTH OF POSTS EFFECT ON ILDs

Seos know that you want to keep your key content in as few subfolders as possible but does this affect the number of ILDs you receive? The data suggests that the depth of your post doesn’t affect the number ILDs. The graph below shows that just about half of the blogs out there place their content two subfolders deep, such as seomoz.org/blog/POST-TITLE.

MEDIA’S EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does placing list, images, and/or videos in a post play on the number of ILDs? The data shows that putting any one of the media’s in your post will increase the number of ILDs you receive. Putting a list on your plain text post could double the number of ILDs you receive. The results are even more outstanding when all three types of media are used.

Do I really believe that you can take any post, slap a picture in it and you will automatically receive more links? No, but if you have decent content and media to support your post, it will appeal to more users and in turn increase the number of potential links. I find it amazing that just by adding images and lists to your post could increase the number of ILDs by a large percent. Images and lists are one of the easiest things to create and anyone can do it, so why aren’t they? See the chart below for the full specs on adding media to your post.

TOP MEDIA POST EXAMPLES

So I’m sure you are all wondering what some good examples are of the different type of post along with the media. Below are some links to some great posts that contain different types of media and have been successful. Some of these posts should be your guide when creating new content for your site.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

ONLY LISTS

ONLY VIDEOS

ONLY IMAGES

NONE

TOP DOMAINS FOR MEDIA TYPE

The data shows that there were certain domains that tended to use certain types of media in their posts. Below I’ve put together two sites for each category so if you enjoy posts of a certain type you can visit their blog.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

ONLY LISTS

ONLY VIDEOS

ONLY IMAGES

NONE

AUTHORITIES EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does a blog authority play in the number of ILDs? Seems like a simple question and the data seems to show that if your an authority in your niche, you will generate many more ILDs than someone who is not. Look at the chart below and you can see that Matt Cutt’s blog generates almost twice as many as its closest competitor, sugarrae.com!

TOP TOPIC THAT ATTRACT LINKS

Unlike SEOmoz not every blog places their post into nice categories and if they do, those categories will not match across all the sites. So how do we determine what topics are attracting the most links and are good topics to create posts about? We crawl 72,300 posts, determine the ILDs, and then extract the most used words from those posts to create a “super” group of keywords that result in link worthy blog posts.

The first thing I wanted to do was extract all the text and find the words that are most used in all blog posts, I was curious, aren’t you? After pulling out 27,658,728 million words and sorting them, five words came out on top: Search, Google, Yahoo, Site, and SEO. Was I surprised, no but it’s interesting to know and a good starting point.

Taking a look at the top 1% of all 72,330 posts, it was found that the words did change a little bit. Some of the top words used were: Search, Google, Site, Links, SEO, Content, People, and Social. This data seems very similar to what was found in part one of this study, with the SEOmoz data. Posts that are about link building are very popular but now we can conclude that they are attracting links. When we look at a much smaller percentage say only the top 50 posts, you find that you are getting very similar words such as: Google, Search, Blog, Link, Pagerank, and Site.

So what can you really take away from the content of the top 50 blog posts? Stick with the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and maybe even Bing, on a good day. The linkerati likes topics including Link Building, Pagerank, and Social Media. As my disclaimer stated above, these are not the rules but just observations from a small sampling of the blogosphere. If I knew the exact topic that the linkerati loves, I wouldn’t be writing here, I would be out making millions writing all day.

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

The data suggests that posts with title between 14 and 16 words attract more ILDs than those with longer or shorter titles.
Contrary to belief, the data suggests that posts with more than 900 words are attracting more links than those with 900 words. Shoot for post between 2328 and 2618 words.
The data suggest the location/depth of your blog post doesn’t seem to have an effect on the number of ILDs you will receive but may affect your SEO work, so be cautious.
If you’re interested in the top post with a certain type of media, check above. Also if you’re interested in the blogs that tailor to a certain type of media, check above.
Authority plays a major role in the number of ILDs that you will receive on your post. Matt Cutt’s blog receives twice as many ILDs as the next closest blog.
Hot topics that attract links include: Google, Search, Blogs, Link Building, Pagerank, SEO, and Social Media.

SUMMARY

In summary, the takeaways above are generalization about a small group of post from the blogosphere and should not be taken as rules but merely as a guide to help you create content that will have the possibility to generate links. Work on the authority in your niche and become that place people come to receive great advise. While you’re waiting for authority to grow, make sure that your posts included visual aids to help readers get the takeaways quickly.

SPECIAL THANKS

Special thanks to the SEOmoz team for the access to the Linkscape API. Without the use of the API this post would have never been possible.

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