Thanks to all of you that participated in our comments contest. I know, we didn’t really give you many new articles to comment on during the contest, and we never had an official announcement that it had started, but we wanted to see how it would go. I think it did well.

The winners are as follows:

1st place: Dennis Edell ($50)

2nd place: Ron Leyba ($30)

3rd place: Olusegun ($20)

Winners, please leave your send us a contact form confirming your paypal address. Otherwise, we will send the money to your email address associated with your commenting account.

Thanks!

Sometimes I wonder who is my audience? I mean I write my blog posts, and get my traffic, and some comments. But everybody knows that the comments are a very small percentage of the actual amount of readers. I looked at my Google analytics results from all of the visitors on mastersofseo ever, and they averaged 1M and 41 S on my blog. Now that’s not very good but it’s not awful either. A minute and 40 seconds is a long time to look at one page. And also each visit averages 1.72 pages per visit. Then I totaled up my amount of visitors and using that information I used an online calculator and figured out what percentage of my visitors commented. It was pretty depressing number, only 0.06521739130434782% or rounding up 7% of my visitors comment. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important parts of any blog, is turning casual viewers, into dedicated readers. The vast majority of visitors to your site, will not return. No matter how many visitors your site averages a day, the ratio of return visits, to new visits, is typically at least 5:1 and often much higher. If there was someway to get this 5:1 ratio lower, even to 4:1 or 3:1, the difference in traffic would be enormous!

Dedicated readers will return multiple times a week, often every day if you post that much. If you post frequently (3-5 times a week) then your traffic could easily triple! So the question is, how do you hook these new visitors so that they come back. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve compiled a list, of the different characteristics, attributes, and skills, that I think are the essentials for a  blogger to be successful. I hope you find this list enjoyable and helpful, but most of all, inspiring. Feel free to comment below with any suggestions, and I’ll add your idea with a link like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

The dreaded 404 or 403 redirect page. Or the, “this link is broken page.” Now many people debate what exactly are the effects of broken links, for your SEO. You can relax somewhat, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. However, it does have some effect, and if you can fix it, then why not?

It’s really hard to avoid broken links completely, especially if you’ve ever made a large list of something. Or if you are changing your site around, and the links get messed up. Now despite what people tell you, having a broken link is not a sign of sloppiness and being unprofessional. Broken links will happen, however, it is a sign of laziness not to fix them. They will occur, but now it is quite easy to be notified about it, and to get them fixed. Nothing is more frustrating, then when you’re reading a post, and they say click here for more information, and “here” is a broken link. So I’ve compiled a list of free sources, that allow you to easily check your links, to make sure they are all legit.

*Note* I haven’t tried all of these yet, so some may be easier to use then others, but they should all do the job.

First, check out this site. It has a bunch of free downloadable programs, that allow you do do fun stuff like link popularity, checking backlinks, but mainly to check for broken links.

Second, there’s a great program called linktiger. That sends you an email with how many broken links you have. I use this one, and it’s pretty useful. You can just login and see which links are broken. It sends you weekly updates, of all new broken links.

Third, there’s a wordpress plugin that you can install, that will show up in your dashboard, every time you have a bad link. You can always trust wordpress, and so this one I would highly recommend. Unless you don’t use wordpress this is a great free option, and you should be checking your dashboard regularly anyway, so you’ll be able to fix the problem immediately.

And Fourth, Firefox has created an addon called linkchecker. Firefox has lots of great plugins and so if you aren’t using it already, you need to switch. But this is another great free option, that can help you as well.

So now that I’ve showed you all of these free, easy, options, you have No Excuse! You Are being unprofessional and lazy, if you have broken links on your site. So install the plugin, and addon, and start fixing all of your broken links today.

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