Posted by Kyle James on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 @ 05:13 PM
So we were excited a month ago when an article on the NY Times linked to our little website. Today when I'm looking at the HubSpot analytics on the account I noticed a HUGE spike in referral traffic today, like thousands! Upon digging deeper I discovered that Woot linked to us in a blog article right off their homepage! Of course this is only short lived and once the blog posts is replaced by something new this huge spike in three thousand plus visitors today will go away, but long term it is a fantastic inbound link. Check out the woot blog posts that gave us our links. Click on the image below to see the full sized screenshot of the homepage.
It just goes to show you that if you build it then the links will come.
Posted by David Gallant on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 @ 03:46 PM
We are sponsoring a meetup in downtown Boston, just across the street from historic Fenway Park on July 13th.
http://4squarebadges.eventbrite.com/
Posted by David Gallant on Sun, Jun 06, 2010 @ 08:35 PM
This blog was created to prove a few points about content creation, and being able to measure a websites interactions with its readeres. Our traffic toward the end of the month of may has skyrocketed.
Here is a snapshot of our recent visits per source.
Posted by David Gallant on Sun, Apr 18, 2010 @ 07:34 PM
One problem with optimizing a website for organic search is creating unique content. If 10 of your competitors have been creating content for the least year for 10 of the 20 keywords that will make you money, than you will have a long way to go before you win the race. By creating a new concept or keyword, you will be able to optimize for this and become the go-to source for this information.
For example,
Foursquare day is something that became famous just weeks ago. We created a very powerful blog post which received a significant amount of traffic. Instead of the norm of 100 visits per day, this site received 650 total visits on Friday 4/16 which was Foursquare Day. You will see that much of this traffic is from organic search engine results. We are attributing much of this traffic to the interest of the holiday, and how it relates to the application.
How does creating new content help in the search game? You will now be optimizing for short and long tail keywords that no one else is writing about. This allows you to become the king of the land when it comes to search results for these terms. It many cases, it is impossible to win against other companies for your money-making keywords and this tactic can be a solution to the problem.
organic visits to www.4squarebadges.com
Posted by Kyle James on Wed, Apr 14, 2010 @ 08:38 AM
Yesterday I spent some time adding all the different badge names into HubSpot's powerful keyword grader tool. Because I know that ultimately these are the words that we care about ranking for. So everyone that searches for the "shorty badge" or the "yard bird badge" is our audience. Yes we also want to cover someone who searches for "how to get the shorty badge" but that is simply an even longer tail version of just "shorty badge". So basically if we can get a really high ranking on "shorty badge" then I know we will rank well for all the longer tail versions of this keyword.
Now all these keywords have very low search traffic, but because we are targeting over 100 different badges and we are building 100+ pages for each of these badges then the math works in our favor. This is the real key to winning through SEO. Already we have moved into the top ten ranking on many of these badge searches. See the HubSpot Keyword Grader chart below for a sampling of this data.
The next big challenge is continuing to get inbound links to each of these specific pages and continuing to create more content to build out the footprint size. Don't worry we have master plan of how to convert this traffic that we will be rolling out sooner than later.
Posted by David Gallant on Tue, Apr 13, 2010 @ 07:54 PM
Here is a screenshot demonstrating our organic search visits. You can see that our organic search is growing exponentially, since purchasing the domain www.4squarebadges.com on April 9th. Our highest traffic area's are specific hard-to-find badges like NY Time Olympian Badge and Cocktails While our growth is not as popular as Foursquares user growth, we are growing at a very rapid pace.
Here is a breakdown of 4 days of organic traffic to the site.
Find our list of Foursquare badges here.
Posted by Kyle James on Sat, Apr 10, 2010 @ 10:22 PM
I'm honestly surprised that we were able to rank in Google this quickly but it happened. On day three of this site we got our first organic visitor from Google! David Gallant added the site to his person website's blogroll last night and Kyle James wrote a post on my personal blog earlier today. In my post I included three links to the site and added a link to my blogroll. One of those links was how to get the Ziggy's Wagon Badge. Sure enough the anchor text of this link was related to our first organic visitor.
So this is even more proof that the anchor text of links help you rank for keywords. So in closing how about i share two pages about how to pickup certain badges and hopefully provide them with an anchor text friendly link. Because I want to prove that internal links are important too.
Posted by Kyle James on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 11:39 PM
So we just bought this domain name this morning and this blog posts will describe the first thing that anyone should do from a webmaster standpoint.
- Buy Domain Name through GoDaddy - Personally I'm a big fan of purchasing domain names through GoDaddy. It's easy to point the DNS to hosting in other locations and they actually have a pretty good domain manager system. I manage about two dozen domains in their interface even now. One tip I will say is that whenever buying ANYTHING through GoDaddy always be sure to do a Google search for "godaddy promo code" because you can almost always save some money in purchasing your domain names this way.
- Setup a Content Management System (CMS) through HubSpot - Let's be honest I work at HubSpot so getting access to a portal is a nice employee perk. HubSpot has an easy to use, powerful CMS along with a collection of other Inbound Marketing Tools.
- Setup Webmaster Tools - There are multiple tools for a webmaster to help them manage their website, but in this specific case I'm talking about setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account. This tells Google that you own the domain and it notifies them to start crawling the website. Also be sure to turn on your sitemap.xml file so Google knows all the pages on your website. HubSpot has this funcationality built right in, but for any other system you should really checkout xml-sitemaps.com for more information.
- Install Google Analytics - Once again being on HubSpot we have instant access to their analytic tools so we don't necessarily need to install Google Analytics. There is one very important SEO reason for installing this though. Because Google gets access to the Google Analytics data believe it or not, but installing this also helps yoru site get better indexed and crawled by Google. So there is a nice perk in there.
- Setup Feedburner for Blogs - Feedburner is a defacto standard for any RSS feed that you have on your website. Google bought Feedburner a few years ago and once again this is another plus to help you get indexed faster and crawl more of your website. Whenever a new post is written the RSS feed is updated and actually goes out and "pings" Google along with a host of other web crawlers.
- Start Creating Content - Now that you have all the basics ready start building out your website and creating content. Remember a website isn't a magazine so it doesn't have to be perfect when it goes to press. Now remember that design come after content. If you have the greatest looking website and no content then you will still fail, right? So start creating content and figure out the design as you go. Remember it's a brand new website so nobody is going to visit it but you to start out.
So we have done everything we can to start ranking in Google ASAP now we need to start building out the content so we don't fail those first visitors. Wish us luck!