Travel Blog Advice » SEO

How Guest Posts Actually Help SEO

Anil P. — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:00:46 +0000

This is a guest post by Shannon O’Donnell who uses freelance SEO as a way to fund continued travels.

Some of the top advice you read all over the Internet for good SEO practice is the idea of guest posting on other sites. This advice is solid at every level and works not only for SEO and Google link juice, but also for your site’s visibility within your community. New bloggers don’t traditionally come with a built-in audience unless you’ve been active on social media before your site launched, so with that in mind, you need people to see your name, your message, and your brand.

That’s one of the more obvious strengths to guest posting, you build your brand and funnel new and relevant SEO to your website.

On the other side of this equation though, is that Google juice I mentioned–this is where a lot of people begin to go a bit gray in their understanding. Everyone tells you links help your website’s Page Rank. But what about search engine rankings? How do we go from Page Rank (PR) to relevant search engine traffic?

What you Need to Know about the Google Algorithm

Knowing which sites consistently provide value is the core magic of the Google search algorithm, and to properly understand how you should be leveraging your guest posts, let’s start at the Google algorithm. Google returns some of the most relevant and accurate search results of any of the search engines out there and the company hands-down dominates the search market. Bing is the runner up (and Bing’s search algorithm fully powers Yahoo too), so that’s really the only other game in town.

Google’s algorithm is complex and no one outside of Google (and likely only a few people there) know the exact components. The algorithm is a formula that takes into consideration dozens of factors about your website, gives them different weights within the formula, and then combines those components to form the basis of search results.

These are a handful of the things Google considers when evaluating a website or blog post:

The age of your domain
Frequent keywords used within the site and those keywords other sites use to reference the site.
The freshness of the content on the website and relevancy (is there enough content, are people staying on the page when they click onto your site from the search results?
Page Rank: i.e. a numeric value assigned to your site ranking its value to the world wide web, mostly based on incoming links from other websites.

Those are the core basic components of the Google search algorithm and should give you a general understanding of how your site is found and placed within the search engine pages by Google.

How Incoming Links Effect Your Page Rank

We’ve analyzed the algorithm, now let’s look at the incoming link your guest blog post will be sending to your website from the website you’re guest posting on.

Your site’s PR is nearly entirely dependent on a variety of incoming links from websites with a higher PR than yours (to find a site’s PR, a quick and easy option is Page Rank Checker). Websites with a PR 4 and higher (sometimes arguably PR 5 and higher is optimal) are great target guest posting sites. These websites with higher PR will lend you some of their PR juice through Google when they link to you.

Basically, when a website links to you it is giving you a vote of confidence from their domain – they are giving you some of the Google trust they’ve earned over time. Get enough of these votes, from a variety of sites and sources, and you’ll see your PR increase over time. Be forewarned though, Google only updates PR a couple times a year, so it may take time for incoming links to effect your officially shown PR.

How Incoming Links Effect Your Search Engine Results

Now we’ve come to the meat of the SEO reasons for guest posting, the keyword link juice (remember it’s about sharing audiences and spreading your message as much or more than for SEO). When you’re guest posting, you nearly always have the opportunity to include a personal bio either at the beginning or the end of the post. This bio is where you link back to your website, your projects, and your social media information. It’s also your main chance to send yourself a targeted, keyword link.

Traditionally, you’d link to your site with your blog’s name. That is one option, particularly if your site has a great keyword within the name. If it doesn’t though, consider alternative descriptions that target your site’s niche keyword.

Another option is to link to your site with its name, but then also build backlinks to a specific cornerstone piece of content on your site. If there is one invaluable resource you’ve put a lot of work into, include it! Add that to the bio, if you’re doing an honest bio and you’re writing related to your niche the site your guest posting for won’t mind a link back to your site that includes specific keywords.

As an example, let’s consider this fake bio as a perfect way to use guest posting to raise your site’s profile:

ìSuzie Q blogs about deep-sea trout fishing and wrote a wonderful, free resource for fish-loving travelers, the ultimate list of trout fishing travel tips. If you love trout fishing too, why not follow her on Twitter and Facebook?!î

In this bio example, Suzie Q is ensuring she now has relevant incoming links for keywords related to her niche. The link itself will help her siteís PR and the keywords within the link tell Google what her siteís about when itís calculating her place in the search engine results pages.

Interested in learning more about SEO and how to use it to build a better travel blog? Get Traffic Now is a free resource I co-authored with Andy Hayes that breaks down the complexities of SEO into a do-it-yourself handbook ideal for both new and established travel bloggers!

Shannon travels around the world using freelance SEO as a way to fund continued travels. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter for travel stories and advice, and feel free to ping her if you have any SEO travel questions!

[photos by: Nicolay Corboy (shaking hands), Daniel Morris (Google speaker), YAIAGIFT (authority sweatshirt)]

How To Ensure Google Indexes Your Travel Blog Posts Quickly

Anil P. — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 08:00:04 +0000

The search engine Google is fairly adept at indexing most travel blogs whether they are search-engine optimized (SEO) or not. You can however help the Google bot along so that it discovers new content you post quickly, which is especially important when publishing articles that are time-sensitive.

Having A Clear Code Road

Much of Google’s indexing is based on link-jumping, that is to say that the Google bot follows the path of links on your site to new content. The higher the Pagerank of a given site, the more value Google places on following links from it. If your new posts appear on your homepage, which likely will have some Pagerank after a few months, that’s a vote of confidence.

Having A Ranked Blog Or Category Page Can Help – Now, let’s say your new posts pop up on a ranked “blog” page as well, for example, http://yoursite.com/blog, then you’ve got two votes which can result in speedier indexing.

The theme you’re running is also very important to how quickly your site is indexed. Google favors Blogspot users of course, but if you’re self-hosted on WordPress, look for themes that were designed with SEO in mind (e.g. Thesis). Your travel blog may look pretty to humans, but it’s the code that Google cares about.

Increase Your Interlinks – Make sure you’re linking back to relevant content on your blog pages and posts. It makes your site more readable by both search engines and humans as well.
Avoid Ugly URLs – Another instance where what looks good to Google is also appealing to people. (e.g. http://travelblogadvice.com/guest-post/gaining-links-to-your-blog/ vs. http://travelblogadvice.com/?p=1000)

Links are the road map to your travel blog and what Google uses to navigate your site. Sometimes though you might want to give Google a nudge, especially if it seems to be particularly neglecting your newer posts.

Google XML Sitemaps – One of 13 recommended WordPress plugins, it, and those like it can create easily search-engine digestible sitemaps and automatically submit them to Google. Sitemaps can also be manually generated and submitted using this plugin, which can help speed up the indexing process and notify Google of a new post.

Finally, to find out if Google has already indexed a particular page on your site, just Google your site in this format: “site:yoursite.com” or “site:yoursite.com/blog”.

Have Links Ready

Although increasing Pagerank, site age, and good code will help improve how fast your travel blog is indexed over time, you can give particular help to time-sensitive posts by pre-linking to them. Incoming external links (i.e. links from other websites) to a particular post cue Google to how quickly it should index a given post.

Ask Blogging Buddies – Get in touch with other travel bloggers you have a rapport with and see if they might be interested in linking to that particular post of yours. Don’t forget to return the favor!
Link Out – When your posts seem to be a bit stale or slow in Google’s eyes, you might need to link out to external sites more. Only linking inward can ding your reputation with the giant search engine.
Watch The Keywords – Be sure that you’re not stuffing your posts (or image alt tags) with an over-abundant amount of keywords.
Increase Crawl Rate – Google’s Webmaster Tools is extremely versatile and gives you a number of Google-centric options, including increasing the frequency at which your site is crawled.

Using the Google Webmaster Tools, you can also create a “www” preference for your links. When possible, it’s good practice to be consistent when interlinking and to let Google know if you’re a with-www linker (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com) or not (e.g. http://yoursite.com).

No Guarantee, Only Guidance

Unfortunately, you can only build the path for Google but not take them down the road. Crawl time and indexing are based primarily on automated algorithms and while it helps to provide a good map, ultimately it’s up to Google as to when they’ll decide to take a look. Try posting articles that are time-sensitive (around holidays for example) a few hours earlier than you might otherwise, stay within Google’s guidelines, and occasionally check your site for crawl errors to get under the clock.

[photos by: delphaber (ticking clock), gsbrown99 (steel links), rustybrick (Google Lego logo)]

Google Is The Godfather Of The Linking Mafia: Understanding Pagerank

How To Optimally Configure All-In-One SEO Pack For Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:00:54 +0000

One of 13 recommended WordPress plugins, the All In One SEO Pack is a powerful tool that can help your blog and individual posts become much more visible to search engines. Its power, and conversely weakness, is in All In One SEO Pack’s complexity. Many people who first install the plugin focus on adding descriptions to individual posts when you can more efficiently harness the SEO effectiveness on the general configuration page.

Setting Up All In One SEO Pack From Scratch

Installation of All In One SEO goes much like most other WordPress plugins and is a realtively straightforward affair. Once you’ve uploaded the plugin (download here) and activate it, the first order of business is to head over to the “Options” page. All In One SEO Pack is kind enough to direct you there when you first activate the plugin, otherwise in your WordPress backend head to Settings > All In One SEO.

The rest of these default settings are fine for most travel blogs. I wouldn’t recommend changing them unless you want your post title and blog title to appear differently at the top of a browser window.

Settings To Consider Deviating From The Default – Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are a elements of HTML that were originally designed to provide other computers (and search engines) with information about a given web page. The importance of meta keywords has significantly diminished in recent years and their effectiveness is often disputed. You can however use All In One SEO to convert your travel blog categories (e.g. time management) into meta tags.

This is a good setting to consider in the first 3 months of your travel blog when you don’t have many ‘post tags’ yet established.

After that, you should check the “Use Tags For Meta Keywords” instead; but not both. (This assumes you are adding post tags to your individual blog posts.) Checking both could earn you a small penalty from the search engines; they typically don’t like when you have too many similar ‘follow’ links on a given page. While meta keywords might have negligible SEO benefits, ignoring them won’t gain you anything.

The Misunderstood Dynamically Generate Keywords Setting

If you’ve set your WordPress blog to appear on a page other than the homepage (e.g. http://foxnomad.com/blog vs. http://foxnomad.com), then checking this setting tells All In One SEO pack to use the keywords you’ve set for posts on that [blog] page to act as the keywords for the entire page. The alternative is to set the keywords for a given page specifically, using the All In One SEO Pack configuration box at the bottom of the page-edit screen.

This configuration box can be used to define specific keywords and descriptions for any and all of your travel blog’s posts and pages. If you don’t set them individually or won’t on a regular basis, you can have All In One SEO do it for you by checking the “Autogenerate Descriptions”. All In One SEO will then use the first 160 characters of a given post to automatically create the description field for it.

Using Noindex

All In One SEO Pack will, by default, “noindex” your category, tag, and archive links. Those “noindex” links are the equivalent of “no-follow” links which tell search engines to ignore them. Again, to avoid duplicate links and content from being indexed (and subsequently penalized by the search engines), choose only one of these to un-check. Those of you who are diligent about tagging your posts with keywords can enable indexing of tags, while very new blogs or small static sites can enable indexing on categories to expand the number of overall pages being read by Google and other search engines.

It’s important however not to un-check more than one of these boxes in general so as not to have duplicate links being indexed more than once.

That Configuration Box Below Each Post – Do I Need To Fill It In Every Time?

At the bottom of every one of your post and page drafts is a small All In One SEO configuration box. You can fill in keywords, specific descriptions, and modify your post titles just for the search engines. Most people don’t bother filling these in or lose enthusiasm for doing so after time. Filling each configuration box out can really help you focus your travel blog on a few specific keywords but the truth of the matter is most travel blogs aren’t keyword-oriented.

Most of the large (and SEO-oriented) travel blogs optimize their homepages and individual travel blog pages (using All In One SEO) and leave the posts up to the automatic functions of the plugin.

You can see what others are targeting by checking out the “Page Source” using your web browser. Look for what’s between the lines “” and you’ll see the description and specific keywords being targeted on a given page.

Expanding Your SEO-Reach

All In One SEO is a vital organization tool for your travel blog and does a lot of the SEO dirty work for you. In addition to the All In One SEO Pack you should change your permalink settings and use the alt attribute so your photos can be indexed as well. The search engines rely on boring text to sort through and map out your travel blog and All In One SEO gives them much more to read and feed on.

[photos by: jackbouma (magnifying glass), crystaljingsr (question mark)]

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Are Blog Ranking Widgets Worth Displaying On Your Site?

Anil P. — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:00:51 +0000

Scroll down the sidebar of many a travel blog and you’re likely to see a number of 80 pixel blog widgets hanging out in a small cluster. You may also have some on your travel blog, wonder what they’re for, and ask yourself are blog ranking widgets worth displaying on your site. Blog ranking widgets are a trade off between traffic, Pagerank, loading times and a decision you’ll have to weigh carefully to get the right balance.

What Are Blog Ranking Widgets?

Blog ranking widgets, which look a lot like the images above, are visual links back to ranking lists. Many of them often include your site’s rank in the widget as well, announcing your clout to the world. They also typically have “follow” links (here’s how external links work) going back to the front page of the list.

The Ranking Pagerank Cycle

All of those incoming links back to the list from the front pages of travel blogs gives many ranking sites a very high Google Pagerank. The front page of many of the ranking sites usually have the top 10, 20, or 50 sites (as many as possible without hurting Pagerank) so scoring a spot is good for your travel blog. How these sites actually rank their lists varies, although many of them base your score on your Pagerank itself, creating a little loop of reciprocal ranked links.

Disadvantages Of Blog Ranking Widgets

One of the main drawbacks of these widgets is that you don’t get to control the code of the widget itself. (Of course you can modify it but doing so hurts you blog rank.) That can slow down how fast your site loads as the widget calls out to the ranking site to update you numbers and serve up that little widget image. With one or two widgets you won’t notice this effect much but that more you add the bigger a problem it becomes. Now you’re sacrificing loading time, a key factor in determining Pagerank for Google, and one of the most important metrics for keeping readers.

A Balancing Act

Initially, when your travel blog is on the new side, you can display these widgets in hopes of increasing your Pagerank. Once they begin to affect your loading time negatively though it’s time to remove them. Using tools like Pingdom, Website Optimization, or UpTrends it will be easy to determine the specific load time of each widget. Remember, each time your page loads, the longer it takes (i.e. more than 5 seconds) the exponentially greater chance that you’ll miss out on a reader sticking around long enough to discover your travel blog.

In fact gaining links for your blog, finding a niche, and fast load times are infinitely much more effective ways of developing an audience and establishing Pagerank on a successful travel blog.

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Why People Leave Spam Comments On Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 08:00:22 +0000

Last week, guest poster Ant Stone shared how to gain (legitimate) links for your travel blog. During the course of conversation in the comments, Heather asked why people continue to leave spam comments, if links in comments are by default “no follow”. There are actually a few reasons these comments still appear on your blog posts despite the apparent futility of doing so.

Meet The Bots

Most spam comments on you travel blog, or any blog for that matter, are not left by human beings but rather “bots”. Short for “robot”, a bot is a computer program that performs a function in place of a person. In this case those bots are programmed to leave comments on blogs…and not just one or two blogs.

Thousands upon thousands of them – a number much higher than even a team of humans could (or want) to do in a single day. Setting up a bot, or several machines running bots to leave spam comments is a trivial matter for even an amateur programmer. Once up and running those bots can run day and night leaving comments wherever they’re programmed to do so.

Low Cost High Yield

Spamming is a cheap business to get into. Sending out thousands of spam comments via a bot is relatively inexpensive and can be done with no more equipment than the average Internet user has at their disposal. Sure, more of their efforts are for naught, most people filter, block, and delete spam messages. It’s the small percentage that don’t which make the difference. In small quantities, that tiny percentage (e.g. 0.5%) means nothing, but if you’re sending out hundreds of thousands of spam comments – now you’ve got something.

What The Annoying-Commenting-Bot-Spammers Are After

There is some debate about whether or not Google actually makes use of “no follow” links, and while they’re not used in determining Pagerank, they aren’t completely ignored. No follow links are part of Google’s method of mapping out the Internet and even spam comments can help build a solid road back to questionable sites.

Many spam comments also have affiliate links within them.
Commercial spam sites and booking engines may profit in sales to visitors from your travel blog.
Spam links can often contain malicious links, leading to viruses or password leaks.

You may be thinking, who would fall for spam in 2010? The vast majority of web users don’t but all it takes is a single person to make the minimal cost of spamming worth it. Nothing to lose and everything to gain is why comment and email spam persists, despite the incredibly low success rate.

How To Handle And Reduce Comment Spam

One of my 13 recommended WordPress plugins for travel blogs, Spam Karma, does a good job of identifying spam. Spam Karma needs a little extra attention when you first start using it as it learns what spam is and isn’t. After the initial few days and weeks Spam Karma is quite adept and I use it on all of my blogs as does Chris The Aussie Nomad.

Spam Karma works best when you clear out moderated comments soon after their caught by the filter.

Askimet, a plugin that comes built-in to each new WordPress install, is a spam filter that uses a sort of social network to accept or reject comments. Blog comments are submitted back to the Askimet web service which runs comparative tests against them, ultimately approving or denying the comment. It’s called a must-have plugin by Gourmantic and does an excellent job of filtering spam with little user interaction.

More Ways To Combat Spam

Depending on the amount of spam you get (or at least the level of headache it creates for you) it may be time to consider putting up more hoops for the bots to jump through on each comment. These tactics will at least filter out the less intelligent ones but keep in mind spam is always evolving.

CAPTCHA – There are several plugins for WordPress that can add CAPTCHAs to your comment forms like Simple CAPTCHA and SI CAPTCHA.
WP Captcha Free – Using computer hashes is an effective way to automatically filter out most comment spam.

Of course the more barriers you implement against comment spam, the more you increase your chances of discouraging legitimate commenters. There is also the matter or determining what is actually comment spam. Many messages themselves can be difficult to discern, especially when the commenter name is linked back to Mary From Cheap Tickets. One thing is for sure though, comment spam – and spam in general – isn’t going anywhere. In all likelihood the spammers will keep modifying their techniques so they can annoy, scam, and spam us for virtually free.

[photos by: janetgalore (can of SPAM), Warm n' Fuzzy (blue robots), jbcurio (one can of SPAM), Thomas Hawk (riot police)]

How To Generate More Discussion and Comments On Your Travel Blog

Google Is The Godfather Of The Linking Mafia: Understanding Pagerank

Anil P. — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:00:02 +0000

You can boil down Google’s Pagerank system into an analogy of the Italian mafia and use it to increase your standing in the eyes of the ultimate boss – Google itself. Many travel bloggers complicate what Pagerank is, which can cause frustration and delay your page’s move up the ranks. Understanding the system makes it much easier to become a part of the network and a “friend of ours”.

Meet Don Google

Think of Google as the “Godfather” of an online mafia, which uses a vouching system to determine who it can trust and who it can’t. Your links are vouches, a travel blog’s displays of trust, visible back up to the boss.

A big part of how external links work are “follow” and “no follow” links.
“Follow” links are the only ones Google uses to create it’s map of the Internet – “no follow” links are ignored.
Sure there are other search engines out there, but Google controls more than 70% of the global search market.

Almost all links are “follow” by default so anyone you link out to is used by the search engine to develop its trust map. Keep in mind that the vouches are specific, in the sense that rank is is given to individual pages based on keywords like “traveling with teenagers.”

Higher Rank, More Trust

Not all links are created equal. Much like the movie mafia, the more trusted you are, the more weight your words of assurance will have. That’s the basic principal, the more rank a page has, the greater impact a link from that page will have on the other site.

Importance Of Relevance – Linking out to completely unrelated niches or using a pattern of unusual keywords like “playing poker online” stands out and reduces your site’s value in the eyes of Godfather Google.
Pagerank Isn’t Everything – The placement of incoming links (whether in text or on a sidebar) are part of Google’s algorithm and the reason corporate guest posts are so interested in contextual links.

It takes time to move up the ranks and older sites tend to be more trusted by Google. Ideally you want quality incoming links from sites with higher Pagerank to your homepage and any keywords you may be targeting. That said, any links have some value for your site.

Vouching For Everyone – Why Links Pages Don’t Typically Rank

Links pages are good ways to get links for your travel blog, since they announce to the world you’re keen for exchanges. These pages don’t typically earn any Pagerank however since they give out too much trust. In the mafia you can’t trust the person who trusts everyone and that’s a bit how links pages are. They give out trust to everyone, which is why Google doesn’t give them much clout.

Homepages Are Valuable – Many companies try to work their way up in the system by muscling their way on to your homepage, where typically your highest Pagerank is. Limit the number of external links coming out from your homepage and be choosy as to who you add there.
Make The Most Out Of Your Link Page – There are ways to have ranked links pages.

While you can have many associates (i.e. your links page) be selective about whom you want to recommend to the boss. You can accomplish this by limiting the number of outgoing (follow) links on a given page. It’s easy to give out a link and say you trust someone, but what are you willing to do for them? Would you add a description, link to them in a post, or perhaps make them one of a few on a travel links page?

Trust Goes Both Ways

Money talks and there are a number of companies who try to gain Google’s trust by buying your good word. Selling text links is against Google’s code and you should be careful who you link out to no matter how much they may pay you.

Getting Whacked – Link out to spammy sites or try to overtly manipulate the system and Google can reduce your Pagerank or worse – completely de-index you.
Don’t Forget Your Followers Too – As Gourmantic notes, people generally hate vague links. Use descriptive links to build trust with your audience too.

Linking to spam or irrelevant sites is akin to introducing an FBI informant to a mafia family. You’re now vouching for that link which isn’t worth a dime and making the Godfather look bad. If that happens, guess who’s going to be penalized?

What Pagerank Gets You

Pagerank doesn’t necessarily mean your travel blog or blog posts will always be the first result of a given search. Nor does my mafia analogy mean it’s a bad, corrupt, or unscrupulous system. It’s just an easy way to understand what’s at work and how Google tries to build and rank trust with all of the sites on the Internet (most of whom it doesn’t know personally!)

Higher Pagerank means (in basic terms) that Google trusts your site and places more value on the recommendations (aka. links) you give out. Sites with higher Pagerank also tend to get indexed frequently and scrutinized under a closer lens by the big boss. Don’t obsess over Pagerank, understand that it’s a trust and value system. By making your travel blog a useful website within your niche you’ll naturally gain authority, moving up the Google (Page)ranks.

[photos by: shaun wong (Don Corleone), Nfoka (men talking), vasta (Sopranos photo exhibit), Steve Wampler (money grab)]

How To Create And Use The Alt Attribute So Your Pictures Can Be Indexed By Search Engines

Anil P. — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:00:39 +0000

Text is the way that computers and search engines currently see the world. When you write a travel blog post you’ve got the advantage of speaking the language of SEO, at least in the sense that your words will be indexed in some form or another by Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. The same isn’t true however for pictures unless you describe them using the alt attribute and give them a written description the search engines can understand.

Manipulating the “alt” attribute field (also commonly called “alt tag”) is a very simple process in WordPress, other blogging platforms, or in HTML for those of you who like to get down with code. It may add a moment or two before your posts are ready for publishing, but will significantly expand your site’s reach and readability.

What Is Alt?

Basically, the “alt attribute” or specifically the “img alt attribute” is, in HTML, used to describe pictures in text. Technically the “alt” attribute is to be used to describe anything that cannot be rendered as text and there are several more varieties outside of this post’s scope.

In HTML, the image alt attribute looks like this: alt=”stumbleupon logo” />

Without the added description, search engines have no idea what that JPEG image on your travel blog post is showing…and is therefore ignored.

When To Add Image Descriptions

You should always add descriptions to any pictures in your posts. Your descriptions should be detailed and describe what is actually in the image rather than being vague or generic. For this picture, instead of writing “woman”, “woman at airport check in” is more detailed. Or, don’t just write “statue” for a picture like this but describe it by using something like “Ataturk statue Tasucu, Turkey”.

Making the file name of the image descriptive will also help the search engines index your photos.
Your competition for image keywords is about 10% of text keywords.

Don’t neglect adding descriptions to your photos when you’re rushing to get a post published. Images are an important portal to your travel blog and filling in the alt attribute should become second nature.

The Easy Ways To Add A Descriptive Alt Attribute

Those of you using WordPress can add the alt text when uploading or linking to any of your images using the “Add An Image” function.

Most other blogging platforms have the alt attribute built into their graphic interfaces and make it just about this simple to add alt text. You can also however add alt text directly using HTML by manipulating this snippet of code:

Over time you’ll find more people coming to your travel blog via photo searches as Google has now incorporated them into their standard search. Just Google a search term, like “Paris France” and look at all the pictures that pop up. These pictures have an equal, and often higher, click-through rate than even the number one search result on a given page. By using the alt attribute your images too will be picked up over time by the search engines making your photos a nice welcome mat to your travel blog.

[photos by: DiaTM (girl taking Polaroid pictures), hombertho (black and white picture Germany), Owls Flight Photography (people in text)]

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How External Links Work And What They Do For Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:00:30 +0000

Links are what form the social map of your website for both your readers and for search engines. Internal links help search engines and your readers connect as many points from different parts of your travel blog as possible. It’s easy to increase the number of interlinks on each of your travel blog posts if you keep it in mind when you edit your posts and the same is true of external links as well.

How External Links Work

An external link is a link to your travel blog or one of your travel blog posts or pages from another website. External links are strong indicators for Google to whom has authority on the Internet and can greatly increase your search engine results. The basic external link components consist of the following:

Keyword: This is the actual text that is linked. For example Sewri Fort, Mumbai or overnight stay in Papeete, Tahiti. (You’ll notice that the second link isn’t the name of the specific post but my own text.)

In terms of external linking, it’s better SEO practice to use very descriptive keywords when linking out from your website. Keywords like, this is so cool, are much less effective. That’s because the keywords and URL of the linked text are associated with each other by search engines so when giving out link love, using descriptive keywords adds more “punch” or impact.

Follow vs. NoFollow - When linking (externally or internally), you can make the links either “follow” or “nofollow”. The difference is that search engines will ignore “nofollow” links. You can specify the HTML code like this: KEYWORD
HTML that doesn’t specify links as nofollow will by default be regarded as follow links. When linking to other travel blogs or articles you like, it’s standard to give follow links in most cases.

For those of you considering selling text links, Google doesn’t approve of text link ads that are “follow”. To find out why, here’s a post on how to manage text link ads on your travel blog.

Big Fish, Little Fish

One of the easiest ways to understand how search engines (and Google especially) use and evaluate external links in their algorithms is to look at it as a vouching system. While there are many factors, for the sake of simplicity, let’s look at Google Pagerank.

An external link from one site to another is like you vouching for a friend you recommend for a job to a prospective employer. External links work the same way – your link is saying, “hey this is the site to go to if you want to lead people to information on 10 train travel tips.” The higher that Pagerank, the more clout the “vouch” counts for (again, an oversimplification but the basic principle).

The more (follow) external links you have with a specific keyword pointing to your site from other authority sites, the higher your travel blog or post will come up in the search results. This is why people are willing to pay for text link ads and also why Google doesn’t like it.

Giving Is A Good Way To Get

External links to your travel blog or specific posts won’t come out of the blue at first. You’ll need to proactively go after them and one of the best places to start is on your own blog.

Get good links for your travel blog now.
Add your blog to the T-Bag Travel Directory.

It is also important to be generous. Keep in mind of, when typing a post, related posts on other travel blogs or websites you might have come across. If the link is relevant and natural, work a link back into your post. On most blogs (WordPress does it by default) a notification will be send to the site you linked to after the post has gone live. That person might come back to visit your site or even link back to a post of yours in the future.

Search engines also take notice of how much you link out as well as link in. A blog that links out frequently is much more engaged in the eyes of the search engines and can add to your site’s SEO clout.

While typing up a post, you can also leverage social media like Twitter to ask if anyone else might have a related post about the topic you’re writing about. You can use those links to add to your post and potentially make a new online buddy as well.

Be Natural And Useful

It’s not good to link to things for the sake of linking. Make sure that your external links are relevant and useful but also fit naturally into the text. It makes for a much smoother read than by writing: “here is a post about this. Here is a post about that. This is a post that’s similar.” Instead just work the keywords into your sentences or use another way to work them seamlessly into your content. Also, for both your readers and a good SEO, use descriptive keywords. Most people get annoyed with vague links, leading to less clicks from both new and regular readers.

Giving external links is good for your travel blog and the other sites you link to. There’s no need to go overboard or to “catch up” with posts full of links if you forget after a few days. Add a few minutes after editing each post and pull some of your favorites from memory, ask around online, or do a few simple Google searches to find useful external links for your readers.

[photos by: greyloch (little spider-girl), lammikrb (over here), urlgirl (goldfish), MarcinMoga/Lolek (red gift box), alles-schlumpf (linked paperclips)]

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How To Manage And Make More Money From Text Link Ads On Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:00:34 +0000

You may be seeing more requests and inquiries about text link ads on your travel blog, and now that you know how to handle requests and sales, you can dive into the nitty-gritty details of putting it all together. Text link ad requests come in different forms and advertisers are always looking for a leg up on bloggers who might not know what “normal” is.

There are several guidelines you can follow to make the most out of each text link ad you sell (if you sell them) and standardize how you process each request.

How Much To Charge?

You should have a set list of prices for your pages based on a combination of Google Pagerank, monthly page views, and unique traffic. You’ll save much time and be consistent with every advertiser by doing this.

There is a great guide of rates in Nomadic Matt‘s popular eBook, How To Make Money With Your Travel Blog. I’ve reviewed it several times across my blogs and think it’s well worth the $17 price.
Your rates should be monthly or yearly since you don’t benefit at all from selling permanent links.

Matt’s eBook breaks down prices by Pagerank and is a great guide to follow. Most advertisers will pay those rates – don’t be discouraged by the ones that walk. Become accustomed to many advertising options falling through. There are quality advertisers willing to pay for room on quality travel blogs so don’t low ball yourself for just any sale.

Add Incentives – Along with a rate sheet and pricing structure, it’s a good idea to build in a series of discounts for multiple link sales as well as long term sales as well. I’ve found that this helps those people who aren’t as comfortable with bargaining and also saves some time with much of the back and forth that goes on in negotiating.

Remember, don’t give away advertising for too little – you’ll get many more offers than sales in the long term and you can bet for each email you get, the same message has gone out to other blogs of similar size. Many advertisers are simply trying to get whatever they can for any price, whereas the quality companies will pay for quality sites.

Don’t Sell Too Many Ads Per Page

Many bloggers chase money so much that they over-sell on their blogs blatantly and don’t diversify ad placement. This hurts your travel blog and monetizing efforts in several ways.

You Jeopardize Your Pagerank – The higher the Pagerank on your homepage, individual pages, or posts, the more leverage you have with advertisers. Selling excessive links for next to nothing when your site is a common Pagerank 1, 2, or 3 hurts you in the long run.
Harder To Negotiate – As I mentioned above, when your Pagerank and traffic numbers are low, you’ve got more competition. There’s always some other travel blog that will sell links for less than you – so instead of chasing people down, think up. Less competition and higher rates if you are practice good SEO (I highly recommend DIY SEO Guide to learn a lot about search engine optimization).

You might not be aware though just how much space on your travel blog there is to sell text links. There is a lot of space to sell and advertisers will try and get more out of every sale unless you know how to leverage your site.

How To Diversify Your Selling Space

Let me be clear – selling links can violate Google’s policy on the matter, but if you do sell them you’ve got more space than you think. Using the plugin Widget Logic or Widget Context you can have your sidebar widgets appear only on specific pages or posts. This can not only help clean up your site but also lets you sell text links on your homepage without them appearing elsewhere.

Many of your blog posts and individual pages (i.e. category or blog pages) may have Pagerank. (You can check using the Search Status Firefox plugin.)

By having widgets for individual pages you can sell more total ads without having them clutter up any given page. Keep in mind that advertisers are generally concerned with Pagerank, so a spot on a single page is a single sale – you can still tack on additional pages though – a good way make use of your discount program and get more compound sales.

Understanding Contextual Links

These are links that sit within existing posts or can be hidden in new posts. Advertises go after these links for a number of SEO reasons and while you can’t charge much for them (depends on the Pagerank of that page) you’ve got many posts and pages to sell on. Contextual links are basically placed inconspicuously into posts and look natural in the text.

Sponsored Posts - Before you read on, be sure you’re not giving away free advertising by reading the post, Dealing With Corporate Guest Posts. Many bloggers earn quite a bit of money by using services like ReviewMe or allowing advertisers to submit posts with several links in the body. The pay is usually much higher than for traditional text link ads but sponsored posts aren’t usually the best written or very interesting to your readers. On top of that, the advertiser typically inserts 3-4 links in a post for a one-time fee (which amounts to selling a few permanent links). Personally, I don’t think the trade is worth it for these primary reasons but a decision many are happy with.
Contextual Option - You can always offer to sell contextual links in place of sponsored posts. The advertiser gets the same “link juice” and pays less (but by month or year). Start with your ranked pages and give advertisers the option of non-ranked (but much cheaper) contextual spots.

Part of the way your travel blog will build an audience and Pagerank is by having people read and link back to your stories. Most people won’t read or link back to sponsored posts so it can hurt your site if you overdo it.

Keep Track Of It All

One mistake people make in the beginning is focusing on the monetary numbers but not tracking where they place ads – and more importantly don’t note when they expire! Keep a spreadsheet or use a calendar program that will email you 10 days before an ad is to expire. Then you can email the advertiser to see if they’re interested in renewing and update your rates based on any new traffic or higher Pagerank.

Much of this post had text link ads in mind but a lot of it can apply to banner ads as well. It’s important to be firm and standardize your rates and policies – updating them internally if you feel something isn’t working. Don’t change how much you charge based on one lost advertiser, but rather stick to something for at least 3 months and connect with your peers to evaluate your policies from time to time. You can also supplement your private sales with these 4 simple ways to earn and make money with your travel blog.

[photos by: padraic (man juggling), Hkkuchera (text), jimmiehomesschoolmom (unfolding book), Steve Kay (camouflage), duncan (phew)]

How To Increase Interlinks On Each Of Your Travel Blog Posts

Anil P. — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:00:30 +0000

Internal links, or linking back to your travel blog, is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) and makes your site more navigable for your readers. It creates a web of interlinks throughout your travel blog that search engines find easy to follow and allows your readers to make the most out of your site. There are many reasons to increase the number of internal links in each of your blog posts, yet most travel bloggers do so sparingly or just go after external links. Much of this might be attributed to passivity, a lack of understanding of the value, but often you might not know exactly what to link to.

There are a few rules of thumb you can go by to easily increase the number of internal links in each of your posts and make your travel blog even more useful than before.

Why Internal Links Are Important

When search engines visit your travel blog, they’ll try to crawl, or follow the links weaving through your site. This creates a ‘map’ of your travel blog by the search engine, opening up more of your site to search traffic. Each of your internal links makes your map that much more robust and readable by the search engines.

Stickiness

In addition to SEO, internal links are even more valuable to your readers. When you link well and put useful references for people to use, they’ll hop around your site. It’s more page views and really what makes a blog interactive and engaging. Your readers want to consume information as easily and quickly as they can but unless you provide a path for them, the road stops on your link-less post.

You also want to be able and “catch” new readers who may arrive from search engines, social networks, or randomly in other ways.

Remember, internal links are like roads and people will only go as far as the paths you create to lead them.

Easy Interlinks To Remember – Categories

These are built in to your blog already and all you need to do is remember the are there. For example when if you have a category called travel blogging, be sure to link to it if you use that term in a post. Also, look into some of your best or latest posts from that particular category and work it in to the sentence or paragraph if relevant.

Use Your Cornerstone Posts

As your travel blog grows, you should keep track of your cornerstone posts, those most popular posts your readers (and you) keep coming back to time after time. You’ll also begin to have cornerstone posts in each of your categories and can use these as references for interlinking as well.

The time to think about internal links is during the editing process.
Do searches of your blog with the keywords or topic you’re writing about (i.e. “trip to Thailand” or “ways to keep your travel blog interesting“) to find good pages to link back to.
Use the YARPP WordPress plugin, one 13 recommended WordPress plugins for your travel blog.

Be consistent and don’t overuse internal links where they don’t make sense or have entire sentences that are just one long link. Spread out your internal links and forget about SEO when you do it – think about your readers. If they enjoy your post about South Africa, they’ll want to read more about it or related topics, so give them the link to do so.

Interlinks Help Your Writing

When you go back to your related, older posts, during the process of writing a new one you’ll open yourself to past ideas and catch on themes that run across your writing. This can lead to a more consistent voice and direction for your travel blog, which is very important if you want to build an audience and keep your travel blog going.

Internal linking brings each of your travel blog posts and pages to life and why reading on the Internet is so vastly different than other mediums. Internal links also keep your previous posts alive long after they’ve been published so new readers don’t miss them. They’ll also give you added material in the form of sneeze pages, blog series, and all sorts of other creative ways. Simply keep them in mind during those last few minutes of editing your posts and your readers, humans and web crawlers alike, will go deeper into your blog with each article.

[photos by: BotheredByBees (spiderwebs), Tiago Ribeiro (sticky man), Lomo-Cam (arrow on wall), happeningfish (writing in notepad)]