2007 Publisher Plans
What you told us about your plans for the year, Part II
Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher. In Part 1 of this post, we talked about what you told us regarding your plans for 2007. Since a majority of you told us you are focusing on driving traffic, we followed up to ask you specifically about that.
How do you plan to drive traffic to your site(s) in 2007?
| Answer | Response (%) |
|
Paid advertising (e.g. sponsored search, contextual or graphical advertising) |
17 |
| Actively getting links to your site on other sites | 26 |
| Outbound emails | 1 |
| Viral efforts (e.g. Tell A Friend, bookmarking) | 10 |
| Organic search engine optimization (SEO) | 33 |
| Offline activities (e.g. mailers, PR, local ads, etc.) | 4 |
| Other | 9 |
| Total | 100% |
A third of you are focusing on SEO to improve your organic performance, and a quarter are getting your links out there one way or another.
We had a lot of free-form responses on this one, including:
“Internally built member programs.”
“E-zines.”
“Create new sections.”
“Traffic trading agreements.”
“Partnership with Fortune 500’s.”
“Provide free services.”
“B2B.”
“Content Development from a better understanding of our readers desires from users comments, suggestions, and log file analysis.”
“All of the above.”
Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager, recommends following a methodical process when focusing on driving traffic to your sites:
1. Stay up to date on SEO best practices, such as those discussed on Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch Blog, SEO Book, SEOMoz, Stuntdubl and Jensense. Check out the forums at WebmasterWorld and Digital Point. And let the community be your guide. You can check out popular items tagged “SEO” on del.icio.us, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed as well.
2. Get out in your (online) community. Nothing beats a new reader discovering your site after seeing your MyBlogLog profile on a site of similar interest. And, MyBlogLog also has an analytics package that shows you “Where Readers Came From” (how people found your site) and “What Readers Clicked” (how people left your site). These can help you with future content development decisions.
3. If you follow the SEO advice of blogs, and you rearrange your content according to user patterns, make sure that you check, check, and re-check your search engine ranking to see what changes are having a positive vs. negative effect. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is one way to see indexed pages, in-links and popularity rankings.
4. If you blog, there are a number of plugins to WordPress and MovableType that make it easy to make your site more discoverable. You can automatically add related articles from your archive to your current article, quickly organize tags, or build a sitemap. Graywolf, offers a list of top SEO-related WordPress plugins, and WebProNews has a list of MovableType plugins. We’ll have more on this topic in a future post.
We will continue to ask you questions and share the results to hear what you have to say, and to help you improve your publishing experience. Please let us know what you’d like to learn more about in a future poll!
—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insights Manager
Read Comments (5) | Post Comment | categories:: Features, How-to's
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Since we told YPN what our plans are, will YPN tell us what their plans are for 2007?
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpttodd mt wilson What you told us about your plans for the year, Part II. Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as … [...]
April 4th, 2007 at 8:11 am
“Stay up to date on SEO best practices”
I have a blog about SEO Best Practices at: http://www.seopractices.com , I’m in the process of moving my free blog:
http://seopractices.wordpress.com to my own hosting .
November 28th, 2008 at 2:12 am
If you wondered if a professional SEO company finds it any easier to get found then the answer is no. There are no quick fixes but there are some basics.
I promote through articles (3 per week)
The articles go on my website and are available via RSS
I visit SEO forums (like this) and try to help people. In return I get backlinks.
I use software such as g-lock to find the most active forums
Don’t just promote your home page
Try to send out a press release at leats once a week
I build bulk backlinks personally and I pay a contractor in india to get me high PR links.
With all this, it still takes time.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:15 am
If you wondered if a professional SEO company finds it any easier to get found then the answer is no. There are no quick fixes but there are some basics.
I promote through articles (3 per week)
The articles go on my website and are available via RSS
I visit SEO forums (like this) and try to help people. In return I get backlinks.
I use software such as g-lock to find the most active forums
Don’t just promote your home page
Try to send out a press release at leats once a week
I build bulk backlinks personally and I pay a contractor in india to get me high PR links.
With all this, it still takes time.
http://www.your-seo-services.co.uk/seo-services.php