The Big Apple’s the Place to Be

“No one should come to live in New York unless he is willing to be lucky.”—E.B. White

I’ve been captivated by E.B. White’s 1939 classic, Here is New York since reading it many years ago for a class in journalism school. It is a portrait and a paean to “Noo Yawk City” so compelling that one is obliged to follow White non-stop through his marathon-length amble around the greatest city in the world.

If you happen to be in the city that, as White put it, brings “to a single compact area the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant,” next week, you’ll surely want a little time to wander. But few ever go to New York without a purpose. If you’re reading this blog and are planning to be in New York next week, chances are you’re going for the Search Engine Strategies New York 2007 conference, to be held Tuesday, April 10 through Friday, April 13.

While you’re strolling around the exhibit hall, you’ll definitely want to saunter up to booth #2400. Yes, that’s the Yahoo! booth, where our dedicated Yahoos will be on hand to answer your questions, hand out schwag and generally make things pleasant and informative.

In addition, you’ll want to catch these Yahoo! panels, which will be informative and get you off your feet.

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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?

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