BoostRanks SEO Tips

One way to strengthen the community in your niche is to start a planet. A planet is an aggregation of blogs with a web page and a feed.

The idea of a planet is to join and build a community around a niche. This just happens to have SEO benefits, too.

All the bloggers who belong to the planet selflessly chip in with links and articles (the same articles as on their blog, or a subset), and the planet pays back with links and interest. The more successful the planet gets, the more it pays back to it’s bloggers, which in turn feeds back to the planet.

It’s somewhat similar to twitter, but with full blog articles, instead of short notes. What you send to the planet, subscribers of the planet receive, and if they are also a blog member of the planet, they can reply with their own blog post.

The result is a stronger community, a community others can join in or watch from a distance.
A community who gets to know each other quicker, and help each other in their niche.

It’s a common convention to call the planet, planet *niche* (where *niche* is the topic of the niche) and the domain is planet.niche.com (replace niche.com with it’s own domain name)

Leave a comment or a message if you’d like to know more, or help with setting one up. Indeed, if you have an SEO related blog and want to join a planet, drop us a line.

The more high quality sites that link you, the more authority you’ll get. The higher up in the search results you’ll be, and the more traffic you’ll get from search engines. When you’re first starting out, it’s not always easy to get links. There’s a few places that allow you to link to yourself, though.

There’s a number of social bookmark sites out there, probably the most popular being del.icio.us. Sign up for an account, and bookmark posts as you publish them with a few choice tags.

Then there’s digg, but be careful, only digg your own work occasionally, and only your highest quality, or most interesting stuff. Digg has a culture and doesn’t suffer outsiders spamming them well. Diggers are cynical of pages with advertising on them, for example. You might want to turn ads off a page when you first digg, and if it builds momentum, you can always turn them on again later.

Stumble upon can get you a few visiters, same rules apply to digg.

Traffic from delicious and search engines finds your site based on text, get the right words in the right order on your page, and you’ll get some traffic. For success on digg and stumble upon, you’ll need more of an angle. A pretty page, an interesting story, humor and a reputation doesn’t hurt. Experiment, but don’t try and force your way in. Participate from the sideline, occasionally having a go in the middle yourself.

Meta description tags can be used by search engines to show searchers what a page is about. You can leave off the tag and let the search engine create their own description, or you can provide the tag yourself. Even if you provide the tag, the search engine might not use it. If you’re going to use it, make each pages meta description unique.

I’m not too worried about them, I tend to use them because you sometimes get a better snippet from the search engines when the searched words are at the top of your page in the heading and there isn’t very interesting text near by.

The title gets used by search engines for ranking and displaying to searchers, so the title must make sense to someone that hasn’t visited your site yet. A title of “Home” is meaningless to them, it should include your site name and what the page is about. Each page should have a unique title.

The very first post is the simplest. Most URLs aren’t typed out, they’re clicked, so they can be long and descriptive. Include important keywords in them, separated by - . Don’t include every keyword under the sun, you’ll look like a desperate spammer.