Follow and nofollow links refer to a tag that can be placed in the linking (anchor) code of your website.  It usually comes in the form of the “rel” attribute.  It looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.jtgraphic.net” rel=”nofollow”>jtGraphicn.net</a>

Why are these attributes on links important?  They help organize the internet and give relevancy to websites that deserve it and don’t give relevancy to websites that don’t.  Google and other search engines use this information in the “rel” attribute to tabulate the score, or authority, that one website gives to another.

Getting a large number of follow links increases the relevancy of your website for the keywords relevant to the link.  Usually the “anchor text” or text between the <a>…</a> tags is what most directly contributes to keyword relevancy.  When websites build in areas where users can submit their own information, they tend to use nofollow links to reduce spam related link follows.  Simply neglecting to include a “rel” attribute makes a link a “follow” link.

You can get follow links many places, including top comments areas on blogs, guest posting, press coverage, and article submission sites.  There are a ton of other places to get follow links as well.  What do you find is the best way to get follow links?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: FAQ: What are follow and nofollow links?

Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

Search Engines and SEO

Traffic Potential

The traffic from search engines is theoretically unlimited, but it’s easy to find out the potential of specific keywords using Google’s External Keyword Tool. For instance, I know that there are 74,000 searches for the exact match phrase “keyword tools”. The potential of that keyword match is about 74,000. If you search for all of the key words you’d like to rank for you can sum them up and know your potential. Remember things like overlap between keywords though.

Building Volume

Building volume from search engines is probably the easiest way to drive traffic to your website. You just need to rank (and not necessarily that high) for your search phrases. There are two fundamental ways to build volume on your website through Search Engine Optimization. Those are: off-site optimization and on-site optimization.

On-site SEO is what most people think of when they think of SEO. That being said, I think it is the least useful. I feel like (by far) Google’s algorithm favors off-site SEO over on-site SEO. That is, of course, my opinion. You can do things, such as making sure you have relevant title tags, meta descriptions, and h1 content. You can also make sure that the linking structure on your site contributes the most link juice to the main page of your site (if that’s what you’re going for).

Off-site SEO is, for the most part, link building. You want back links to your site to give you ‘authority’ for the key words you’re trying to rank for. Each backlink you get is like a ‘vote’ for your site in the search engine.

You can get backlinks from a ton of places, like forums, blog comments, guest posts, articles, etc. The best way to determine if another website is worth putting time into is to look at the place where your link is most likely to show up, view the HTML source for those links, and check for this in the anchor tag:

rel=”nofollow”

If that’s over your head, just hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, or email and I’ll help you out. I can even look at the site for you.

The other major thing to keep an eye out for on your backlinks is the anchor text. Make sure the anchor text you’re leaving behind contains the keywords you’re trying to rank for. This means that if you’re putting them in your signature on a forum, don’t link to ‘My Website’, link to ‘Keyword Tools’ or whatever is relevant to what you’re working on.

I will be covering more on backlink building later in the ‘Referral Traffic’ section.

Referral Traffic

Traffic Potential

Referral traffic has unlimited potential (well, limited to every site on the Internet). Theoretically you can have EVERY website link to you and people would visit you through those links. Referral traffic can be pretty great, especially when it’s coming from highly trusted or niche specific sources. Something to be wary of is quantity versus quality. For example, ten visitors from a blog that converts at 50% are much more valuable than 100 visitors from a news site that converts at 1%.

Building Volume

There are really two major types of referral traffic, and those are paid sources and unpaid sources. Paid sources include ad networks like Google Adwords, or sponsored links, like the top listings on YellowPages.com. Un-paid sources are like twitter and Facebook updates, blog comment links, forum signatures, etc.

Paid Sources

Setting up ads using networks like Google Adsense or Facebook is the most common form of paid traffic, but you can also buy paid links and banners directly on other websites. Paid sources, when set up correctly can be a great source of targeted, convertible traffic. Be careful of paid linking as many of the search engines, especially Google frown upon it.

You can also outsource the generation of your traffic to physical people, or start an affiliate program. You can start paying affiliates $1 for everyone they get to sign up for your list. You can also hold a contest, giving away an iPad to the biggest source of referrals to your site over a given period of time. Always be wary of people “gaming” a system though.

Un-paid Sources

Building unpaid backlinks for referrals can be pretty easy. Unlike with SEO backlink building, you don’t need to worry about if the links are giving you ‘votes’. You’re merely trying to drive traffic to your site via other sites. Great sites include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Digg.

Un-paid sources, of course, also include everything I mentioned in the SEO section above. I find that the best ROI is usually with websites that generate both traffic and “follow” links, so always be aware of the “follow” / “nofollow” value of your links, even though that may not be specifically relevant to this type of traffic.

Direct Traffic

Traffic Potential

Direct traffic is probably the best kind of traffic you can generate. It’s also probably the hardest to track. Direct traffic is virtually unlimited and the quality of visits is really high. The reason the quality is so high is because someone is physically entering your address into their browser to visit your website, so not only is it more work than other methods, but it also requires a bit of recall. Ultimately that means they want to be on your website.

Building Volume

You can literally build volume for this an unlimited number of ways. There are really only 4 categories of how to do it though. They are: offline marketing, video/audio, word of mouth, and collateral from other online marketing. Each of those probably has another whole subset of ways to market, but we’ll probably save that for another day.

Offline Marketing

You can do print advertising, such as business cards, pens, or magazine ads. The ROI of those things can be debated endlessly. The reality is that in some niches they work, and in others they don’t. You can also make shirts and and sponsor events and things like that. All of those things will associate a brand and website with the people involved, and they will become (hopefully) direct traffic users on your site.

Video and Audio

Video and Audio include both online and offline media, so when I’m talking about making a commercial, I mean it can be used on YouTube, Hulu, or your local Fox station. Audio can be in the form of podcasts or radio advertising. You might also be able to do a special radio spot on your local radio station. ALWAYS mention your website in your video and audio recordings, no matter how small. You need to make it part of your introduction: “Hello, I’m James Thompson from jtGraphic.net.”

Word of Mouth

This can have an almost viral effect on the growth of your traffic. The trick is: you have to have something worth talking about. If you have something worth talking about, people will tell their friends, blog about it, or in some other way, spread the word. Be wary – this works with negative feedback as well.

I built my first successful business almost entirely on word of mouth advertising. Every other type of advertising I did for that business was supplemental – like business cards were just a tool for people to remember my web address and phone number.

Collateral Advertising

This is when you generate direct traffic from other advertising that fits into one of the other three categories, because the person viewing your advertising stepped outside of the channel they were supposed to follow. For instance, when you have a Google Ad, and someone notes the URL and types it into the browser, it will register as direct traffic, and not a “click”. This is good and bad.

It is good, because you don’t have to pay for it, but that’s about it. You can’t track it, which is horrible. Thankfully, the number of people that do that is so low that it will hardly register. Other instances of this collateral are situations where your advertising causes people to talk and in turn generates word of mouth. Think about those risque Evony ads. People talk about them all the time. They know how to drive traffic.

Your List

Traffic Potential

This is another one of those potentially unlimited traffic sources. Right now, the potential is the size of the list. A 75 person list will probably get something under 75 visits (I usually guess around 50%). A 7500 person list will probably get something under 7500 visits.

The ratio of conversions from a double opt-in list are amazing. People must work to be part of your list and thusly want to receive it. This means they trust you, and depending on the frequency of your mailings, will usually buy from you if it makes sense to them.

Single-opt and non-opt lists don’t convert very well at all, especially if the list was acquired through some sort gray-hat or black-hat scheme. Usually non-opt lists are considered spam and will burn you, and many times you can get flagged for spam from single-opts as well.

Building Volume

Building your list can be difficult, especially if you don’t get much traffic or are just starting out. The finer points of building a list we’ll cover later, but basically your goal is to collect as many double-opt-in email addresses as possible.

Frank Kern, whom I have mixed feelings about build something called ListControl a while back, which helps increase the growth of your list. It’s not a novel piece of software, but it’s already built and free. Basically the concept is that you give people something free. If they refer your list to “x” number of other people, then they will receive something else that’s free, but cooler. The process just repeats itself until there is a viral-like effect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you should always be building your traffic via all of these methods, all the time. Always be tracking the analytics of your website and figure out which traffic sources convert the best in terms of ROI. Remember that ROI involves both time and money. You should dedicate the bulk of your time to the sources with the best ROI, but always be trying the others in case the landscape of your niche changes.

This was meant as a stepping stone guide to building traffic, and I’ll be following up with more in-depth posts about each of these topics later.  For now, please throw your questions at me.  Feel free to email me or comment below.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

Check out this great new tool from Google: Google Image Swirl.

Basically what it does is allows you to dial in images based on how close they are to the last image you selected.  For instance, you can search for cats and keep selecting cats until you find the exact one you’re looking for.  They take image properties into account, such as color and face composition.  I could be crazy, but it also looked like it was pulling out expressions.  Here’s an image of my experiment with cats:

Zac Johnson did a great writeup on how this is relevant to you and your Facebook ad campaigns.  I think it’s also relevant to the many other ad platforms as well.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Image Swirl Makes Finding the Perfect Image Easier

I was looking for an automated way to get Google Pagerank for a few hours and came up with quite a few things, but not many of them were very elegant.  Essentially, Google doesn’t provide an API and it’s against their terms of service to hit them up in an automated way.  I found quite a few places that have come up with close algorithms and calculate PR for sites, but that’s just not accurate enough for me.  The other option is to hit their PR URL that the toolbar uses.  For example:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch=61470319184&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fforums.digitalpoint.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D164713

That returns the PR of Digital Point Forums, where I found that information, but you can’t change the reference URL, because of a checksum.  That’s the &ch= variable in the URL.  I’m working on a project that needs to look up PR on the fly though, so that just won’t work.  I ended up finding a script that I could use, but the guy didn’t put his URL in the comments, and I since can’t find it – oops.  I think he deserves a pat on the back though.  If this belongs to you, or you know who’s it is, let me know.

I tweaked the script and installed it on my Toolerific.com website.  Now you can go there and check the PR of any site without a captcha, which is nice.  The tool is here.

Now, the best automated way to check pagerank is to hit that site with cURL and take out the value of the HTML tag with the id “value”.  The reason that is the best automated way to do it is because Google may change their checksum rules and that will break the source code that I used to generate it, but that site will always be laid out like that, so you don’t have to worry about changing anything.  If you want the code I used, you can view it here.

Update: This doesn’t seem to work ALL of the time.  I suspect it has something to do with the checksum, but can’t figure it out.  Seems to be about 27% of the time, which isn’t great odds, but it works MOST of the time.  I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Automated Way to Find Google Pagerank

I was reading an article over at PPC.bz about how Google links your social contacts to its index to improve your search results.  This is the first I had heard of the service, which is called Google Social Circle.  Click this link to see what social information Google has about you. The service has been around since October of 2009, but this is the first I had heard of it.  You’d think they would announce something like this, especially amidst all of the Facebook privacy news.  You’ll need a Google account and be logged in for the link to work properly.

Barman from PPC.bz basically equates the whole thing to information rape, because they’re taking fondling your privacy.  I don’t agree with that so much, because I feel more like they’re harvesting public information, and everything I put on the web I assume will be public anyways.  That being said, I still wish they told me.

My view is more in line with Bobbi Newman, who says: “Google’s Social Circle & Social Search may not violate any privacy laws but it gives me the creeps.” This is a lot like finding out that you have a stalker – only this one isn’t human, which might be even a little more creepy.  If this technology truly does increase relevancy, I suppose I support it, but I still feel like they were shady about it’s implementation.

In reality this is a lot like XFN search engines, which will probably be the next evolution in social networks.  I’m actually amazed that people aren’t building more of them to compete with Facebook.  It will be interesting how the privacy issues and technology develop with this.

What do you think about it’s privacy implications?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google stalks you. Did you know?

Users at an internet cafe in China

The internet is a community like any other town in the world.  It has people, transportation, communication, media, and many other features of actual cities and towns.  The people that spend their time working and playing online have developed relationships with others in a way that people become friends in real life (I hate saying “in real life” too, because despite some arguments The Internet IS “real life”.  It just takes place in a different locale – anyways, I digress).

Transportation

Google is the backbone of Internet transportation, serving as the largest central hub for directing traffic.  There are other modes of transportation such as MSN, Yahoo, or the once defunct, rising once again Ask.com.  Unlike our physical world, we can transport ourselves directly to a new address.

We can also move fluidly from one website to another – each link becoming a road, moving away from where we were last.  I suppose some peoples’ goal would be to get as many roads leading to their house or place of business.  Others may even charge a toll to use their roads (subscription services).

Friends & Communication

The amazing thing about this new world is that the barrier for entry to communicate is extremely low.  Anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame by creating the next most popular viral video.  We can build relationships with people that we have never met in person before.  People even work for businesses from the other side of the world without ever setting foot in their physical offices.

We can build, maintain, and document our relationships with others on our websites, through Facebook, or through a much lesser known standard: XFN.  Sharing information with friends in our community is extremely easy – and almost overwhelming at times.  Many people blog, and those blogs can be aggregated to one place through RSS, putting so much information at our fingertips.

We talk through chat, web conferencing, and internet telephony like Skype.  Any person can stand at their podium on streaming sites like USTREAM or Justin.tv and talk to their viewers, not unlike a person standing at a podium in Central Park.  People can even get together for a quick soccer game in our virtual community.

Media

The new newspaper is Twitter and the new televisions are YouTube and Hulu.  Social media is adding new dimensions to media and news is being reported and shared at alarming speeds.  I find it amazing how quickly an Amber Alert can permeate Twitter even if it’s fake.

It’s interesting to see how traditional media is still having trouble keeping up and people that can adapt are taking advantage of that gap.  Internet performance marketers all over the world are stepping up and representing huge corporations and usurping advertising dollars from the traditional power houses.  This new media is so enticing for business, because compensation is based entirely on performance – much like 100% commission sales people.  No, it’s not like that.  It is that.  Businesses ALWAYS have an unlimited budget for positive returns on ROI.

So what other ways does the Internet seem like a small town to you?  or a big town?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: The Internet – A Small Town in Cyberspace

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could highlight weekends in Google Analytics?  I could be missing something and it’s possible, but I don’t know how to do it.  This is the layover I photoshop together for clients:

Google Analytics with a Weekend Layover

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Why can’t Google Analytics highlight weekends?

The News

I first heard about the new Google AJAX Libraries API from Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog.  He mentions using it to reduce WordPress bandwidth, but really it can be used to reduce bandwidth in most AJAX based web development environments.

The Exciting Part

I persoanlly use prototype the most, and I’m extremely excited that I can use their libraries instead of uploading my own for each site.  I’m especially excited that calling specific version numbers is possible.  This makes upgrading a code set extremely simple, especially if you call the code version as a variable at the beginning of your code.

Realistically your javascript code is probably one of the lightest weight parts of your code, but every little bit helps, especially if you’re serving a large amount of users every month.

Optional Settings

Script Compression

I think one of the greatest optional settings for all of the scripts you can load is compression.  It’s not available for all of the APIs, but it is for most.  What it does is remove all of the whitespace from the API to reduce file size for the end user – increasing speed.  If you mix that with something like the javascript compiling on Google Chrome and you’ll have lightning fast AJAX applications.

No CSS

You can optionally remove the CSS from the scripts you’re remotly loading, which allows you to do one of three things: load the default CSS, load your own CSS, or not load the CSS at all.

Resources

WordPress.org: Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin – This plugin uses the GALA whereever possible in your WordPress installation.

Google AJAX APIs Blog – This is a great place to go if this really iterests you and you’ll be using this code regularly.  They’re always adding new scripts to the API, so if you don’t see the one you want yet, keep an eye on their blog.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Saving Bandwidth with Google Ajax Libraries API

Google image search has always been a great tool for finding images of things, but it has never been great for really dialing down what you want based on the image composition.  They’ve recently added the ability to dial down your search by image type, which is great for finding specific things that you want.  For instance: I can search for line drawings of vermont.  Interestingly that search brings up a lot of maps.  Maybe in the future, they will add “maps” as a criteria.

Comparison

Google image search still isn’t as robust as something like iStockPhoto, but I think that is probably the culprit of some sort of technical difference in their systems (i.e. Google is indexing images and iStockPhoto is all user submitted images).  Because iStockPhoto has user submitted entries, they can enter meta data that Google just can’t derive from just the image.

Capabilities

Right now, you can filter image searches by news content, faces, clip art, line drawings, and photo content.  They are using photo recognition and search data to add additional meta data to the images.  For instance, the news content option checks the surrounding text around the images for meta data that pertains to news.  They can use photo recognition algorithms for recognizing facial structures in the images.

The Future?

I’m hoping maybe someday they will add features similar to iStockPhoto like color recognition and content layout.  Color layout is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now.  It’d make it really easy to pick up images that go with a specific theme in a website design or something to that effect.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Image Search Gets Upgraded

I’ve been looking for a way to sync my Google / Outlook 2007 calendar for a bit (2 ways), and the built in Outlook features allow you to add an internet calendar, but it needs to be public and doesn’t show in your calendar view on your email page. it’s also one way. I found a solution that worked, but it was sort of a hack job, so I didn’t really stand behind it.

THEN! I noticed “Sync with Microsoft Outlook™ calendarNew!” in the top right area of my calendar. It took me about 2 seconds to decide to click the link and download the application. This thing is great! If you can’t see the URL on your Google Calendar, go here:

http://www.google.com…answer.py?answer=89955

Let me know if you have any issues in the comments.  I’m interested in what they might be.

-JKT

Update: If you’re using Windows Vista and Outlook 2007, for some reason, sometimes the application cannot connect and sync for the first time if you have Outlook open. Just close Outlook and sync for the first time. Voila!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Calendar / Outlook Sync