Naming my sources - right up
front in the text, instead of just providing a link (e.g. I found that “CNN” and
“Slate” were common additions to the content) - When I test-searched on Google,
my rank was hundreds of pages higher for searches including the source name in
addition to the content.
Using proper names - including the names of both the author and the main
subjects or experts in the stories I covered made a big difference .
Touching on all the major points - a short summary of the story I’m covering,
even if I’m only focusing on a small part of it, brings in more search engine
traffic.
Making Digg links prominent - submitting my first posts to Digg was almost
useless, because they dropped off the Upcoming page in minutes. However, the
posts that got high search engine traffic, jumped up on Digg too..”
How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are
ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help
you get started.
Update Any Scripts and Plugins - Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other
scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an
upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good
time to check and make sure.
Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? - I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told
me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with
my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall
into the same boat.
Clean up Your Sidebars - This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I
have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and
gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or
at least make them look pretty again.
Review your Terms of Service - Make sure your terms of service and
acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include
there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the
last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are
still covered.
Check and Update your Sitemaps - If you have a Google Webmaster Tools
account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t
find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web
site.
Is Your Contact Information Correct? - Check out your contact page and make sure
that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to
date and show the correct information.
Renew Your Domains - When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to
check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This
also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few
more perks.
Test Your Web Site Links - Are all your web site links working? Check your error
logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try
to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? - Checking out my own about
us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it
since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well,
this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
Spell check Your Web Site Content - How many grammar errors can you find on your
web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted - you
might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they
are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on
anybody’s bad side.
Due to the recent marketing trends
and better content delivery over e-mail, RSS is quickly gaining momentum.
Microsoft recently announced their full support for RSS in the next version of
their Internet Explorer, as well as the next version of their Windows operating
system. And Google trying to patent ads in RSS, this would be the best time to
start publishing your own RSS content and driving massive amounts of traffic to
your websites. Click
Here!
