SoloSEO

Feedburner Drop? Don’t Worry, Your Subscribers Are Back

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2008

In case you were concerned with your blog, like I was, with a mass exodus of Feedburner subscribers, @AndyBeal helped me figure it out this morning through Twitter (you can follow me if you want @mdjensen), which I am coming to see its importance more and more.

It looks like Netvibes was undergoing some maintenance and so it was under reporting, and at least from this blog it was from last Wednesday (April 23rd) until yesterday. Here is what it looks like over the last few weeks:

Today is the highlighted green bar with a T (Tuesday). You can see that our overall blog subscribers count when up even higher after the Netvibes result. Maybe they are reporting more accurately now? Usually we only see dips on the weekend, so seeing a mid-week dip (from last week’s Monday and Tuesday down to Wednesday) was unusual.

Andy Beal was saying he lost 1300 subscribers from his count based on that, and for us it looks like NetVibes makes up 32% of our subscriber base.

1 comment Visited 2789 times April 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Google Helps You With Mother’s Day

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2008

I was trying to figure out for sure if Mother’s Day was this Sunday or the next, so of course I went to Google. Thankfully Google knows when holidays are, albeit they use Wikipedia. So now I know, Mother’s day is May 11th. And you know too (so get her something!).

One of Google’s more well known features is related searches, and these suggestions seem right on for helping people like me gear up for Mother’s day (for my wife and my Mom). There are mother’s day poems, mother’s day cards, mother’s day crafts, and mother’s day ideas.

Of course you could make her smile by following this Adwords ad:

Or if you really want to wow her, get her a TIGER!

Whatever you do, just don’t forget it’s Mother’s day on May 11th!

Add comment Visited 1551 times April 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Content is Forever

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 24th, 2008

Although I’ve known it all along, these three words sunk into my mind during a business meeting last night: “Content is Forever“. I thought of all the investments you can make in SEO, your site design, site organization, links, etc. Those things can change and “die”, but your content can live forever.

Content is such a personal and sensitive aspect of your interaction with your customer because IT IS your interaction. The difference between so-so content and great content is HUGE. Yes, you can write your own content. From our experience in web content writing, great content comes from talented writers. Seeing what our writers can put out in a matter of hours compared to my own writing is night and day.

With content you pay for it once and then its done. Compare that to link building, where if you are buying links you may pay every month for those links and if you don’t, they go away.

Your content is what sells your product, your service. Your content is what engages your customer, keeps their eyes and mouse on your site. Your content is what defines you and your company.

And content is one of the only SEO investments that can live forever.

1 comment Visited 2782 times April 24th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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International SEO in 1 minute

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 7th, 2008

International SEO has been a topic at recent SEO conferences, and one that we’ve discussed here before. One aspect of doing International SEO is having your content available in other languages. Hiring a translator to translate your blog is cost prohibitive for most bloggers, running $50-$250 for each language per post.

Although no automated translator is perfect, Google has come up with a great translator, perfect for translating your blog. Of course the translation won’t be as accurate as a real translator, but if you can’t afford that, this service is better than nothing at all.

Lucky for all of us, there are several Wordpress translator plugins. The best one I have found and implemented (see the flags on the right sidebar) for our own blog is the Global Translator Plugin for Wordpress by Nothing2Hide.net. Some of the advantages are:

1) Easy to install, just unzip, upload the folder, turn it on, and check the settings (under Options).

2) SEO Friendly URLs! For example, http://www.soloseo.com/blog/it/ goes to the Italian version of our blog, and http://www.soloseo.com/blog/it/2008/04/07/international-seo-1-minute/ is the URL to this post (notice just the /it is added). Your blog posts will start to show up on other versions of the search engines, and hopefully start generating some traffic, subscribers, and conversions!

3) Caching - Instead of going out to Google Translator every time the post is viewed, it will cache the translation.

Of course there is more to do than just getting content into different languages, but it is certainly a great place to start with International SEO.

So if you want to take that first step into International SEO, start with getting your existing content translated into several other languages!

Update - 403 Forbidden Errors

After posting this and letting it go overnight, it appears that Google does not like its translation service being used every hour! (we were getting 403 Forbidden Errors for all translated pages) Luckily the service has several options built-in, and so I opted for using AltaVista’s Babelfish service. The translation works fine and I don’t get the 403 Forbidden Error page instead of my translated blog pages. Hopefully Google will let us use their service more, I will probably try it again and change the interval to every 24 or 48 hours.

3 comments Visited 3251 times April 7th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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