I thought I'd suggest some of the obvious yet effective ways to make sure your blog or social sharing website is on the way to a good start. Many of us forget the little yet essential stuff related to promoting and optimizing. Here's a breakdown: Good Page Titles Make sure each and every page has a suitable title to match the content, you'd be surprised how much difference it can make to search engines. Google may not rank you first for the keywords but your more than likely to appear within the first 5 pages of a search - that's about 5-10 people per page per day. Also don't bother adding the unnecessary things such as the name of your website or date, category of the post etc. Good Title: Learn 5 easy ways to promote your website Bad Title: DP Blog.com- Learn 5 easy ways to promote your website - Aug 2007 - Internet/Marketing Make it Relevant! A page should have relevant links to other pages (on you website). This is a basic concept that most of us fail to follow. For instance, we tend to place a "Most Popular Today" section or a "5 Random Games" box. This is a bad idea and many times it is ignored by the end user. You can place these content on the main page, no problem, however when you're talking about inside pages then you need other relevant links to go in it. On YouTube, Google, and many others, you will view one video and have related videos as links. You won't see a "random 5 videos" box anywhere. Also, put relevant links after the article or beside it. After they've read or viewed the content, they'll swiftly move to the next related page (which makes more impressions for you ). Give the option to share A general user doesn't always look to share a particular article or video, however if you clearly give ways to share the page, it will give the user a little kick towards sharing; It Helps. Add a small Tell a Friend button, I recommend freetellafriend.com or a Add to Digg, or Stumbleupon etc. In fact, displaying the URL of the page to share in a text box will have great affects, you'd be surprised. Put these links, buttons to share the page after the article, not before it like some of you do . Make it look Popular You're website may not be popular, we all have that problem. As an alternative, just make it appear to be popular. No one wants to visit a blog, social network website that has no members/visitors. Some ways to appear popular; If you have no comments on a particular video, make it say "View Comments" instead of "No Comments Here". Hide figures which may reveal how small you are, if you have ratings on a video/blog post, remove the "out of 3 votes" text and just leave the rating. There are many ways to make your website look popular than it really is, you just need to think of ideas. A faster simple page is better than a slow handsome page Many of us are design fanatics, especially those that deal with photoshop. If you realize your taking too much time on design, you may wanna consider a simpler layout. A good design isn't the key, its the quality of it. You don't believe me? Have a look at Google, delicious, Youtube; simple and straight to the point. The page size and speed also has an affect on your search engine performance. If Google notices the slowness on your website, they may not crawl your pages as often and possibly lower your rankings, many SEO know about this. Well erm, that's it for now. I've mentioned the stuff that mostly bug me. If I come across anything else, I'll be sure to update you. Have fun with your websites and best of luck
Interesting... Make it appear popular & A faster simple page is better than a slow handsome page are great tips.
One more thing i think can be added is always add quality posts to your blogs rather than going for maximum numbers of posts in a day. Regular posting in Blog with quality content will attract user more to your blog
great post... when i first came across googles website years back i wondered why it looked so plain and dull compared to a lot of others... but i guess it worked out