Visual Clutter at Your Website

Does your website suffer from visual clutter?

This gas pump sure does. There are so many options here that the user has to stand and stare to figure out what to do. There are a lot of things that look as though they might be things to press in order to pump gas. There are lots of written notices in random places. There are instructions, including a big red eye catching “SMILE,” which turns out to be not an instruction but a warning that the user is being filmed on a security camera.

There are all sorts of colors, different fonts, words going vertically and horizontally, stickers covering up words, keypads, levers, and even photos. While it is conceivable that the goal here is to distract the user from the actual price of the gas, few of us will be in the mood to read all the various notices, warnings, and threats.

In the picture below right you can see that there are actually instructions on how to use the machine. On the left, there are directions for starting the process: “TO START PUMP 1. Select ‘Payment Method’. 2. THEN FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS ON DISPLAY SCREEN.”

If you aren’t too distracted by the bizarre punctuation, you can then stare around in search of a display screen, and find three more steps, shown at the right hand side of the image here: “Slide Card      Lift Lever    Select Grade.”

If your version of a common machine requires instructions like these, you have a design problem.The owners of this machine should remove all the junk and start over.

If your website looks anything at all like this, you should remove all the junk and start over. If you feel that you need instructions on your website, if in testing you find that people aren’t using your site correctly, if you have multiple colors and sizes of words in a vain attempt to show people what the important things are — then you have visual clutter problems.

Remove all that junk and start over.

 

 

SEO Tip #6

Paid Links?

Never pay for links that look like unpaid links. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Having said that, there are plenty of times when paying for a link in the form of a display ad, paid directory listing, or sponsorship is a great plan.

Our basic process is this:

1. Identify the best sites for linkbuilding.
2. Attempt to get free links.
3. If necessary, pay for links from the most valuable sites.
4. Upgrade to paid links from the sites that send the most traffic.

So what kind of site is valuable enough for paid links?

Our Sydney painters have a listing with an Australian directory. The directory is well targeted for them, it’s a good quality site with a PageRank of 7, it allows us to furnish text and images, it includes a link to the company website and social media, and it sends traffic.

It’s worth paying for the upgrade.

A directory with global reach (this client is a housepainter; they need local search), a cluttered ad-heavy page, a site that doesn’t send traffic from free links, a modest footer link, an upgrade that doesn’t significantly improve placement or the amount of information, or a listing that doesn’t give you control over the content of the listing — that wouldn’t be worth paying for.

There are plenty of valuable directories that require a fee, either annual or a one-time editorial fee, for inclusion. While none of them is worthwhile for every single business or website, it’s worth exploring them to see whether they’ll benefit you before you decide against making that payment.

Note that this will vary from one industry to another. Jewelers usually have to pay for listings in strong directories, while musicians often don’t. Some directories will give you a free listing in exchange for an article or for a reciprocal link. Compare these options with the cost and decide which is the best option for you.

A display ad at a popular, high quality blog that serves your target population can be valuable, too. Quite a few of our clients have had good results with this strategy. Targeting is key here. A steampunk artist got excellent traffic from a steampunk blog and an ecommerce site selling men’s underwear did well with a display ad at a blog about men’s underwear. Look for that level of specificity.

Expect to pay $50 to $100 per month for display ads at blogs. Compared with print ads, this is a bargain, and it has the advantage of being trackable. Just be sure to watch the conversion rate as well as the traffic to make sure that the link is valuable enough to pay for.

Websites that aren’t blogs are likely to be more costly, but they may also reach a wider audience and have higher rankings. You might pay hundreds a month for ads at such sites. Measure the results carefully. In general, the more highly targeted, the better. Local sites or sites targeted toward some very specific audience can do extremely well with this kind of link.

Specialized SEO

We’re building a website for Vertz and Company, a local firm that represents valves to industrial markets like paper manufacturers and oil refineries. They present some special challenges from the point of view of SEO.

First, does it matter? It’s not as though I’m going to be surfing the web one day, happen upon a fascinating article on flow control for corrosive materials, and decide to pick up a few butterfly valves on impulse.

These guys have exclusive territories with manufacturers. If I have a refinery in Texas (except El Paso) and I contact Mueller in search of a valve or two, they’ll direct me to Vertz.

That doesn’t mean that SEO, or marketing in general, is of no value to this company. There are quite a few groups of people who might be reached through online marketing:

• Uncommitted consumers Sure, if I go to Mueller I’ll get Vertz, but if I go to the competing Watts, I’ll get somebody else. If I don’t currently have a preferred manufacturer for valves and I’m simply looking for valves, it would be great if my search turned up our client’s website.
• Manufacturers If I’m a manufacturer of valves and I don’t yet have representation in the region, I may choose the company that presents products like mine well to consumers — and I can see that online by searching for such products.
• Online shoppers I can buy those mammoth valves in the picture on the internet if I feel like it. I can buy smaller ones from Amazon. However, I might prefer to deal with a rep who knows the field and can advise me on the best valve for my needs. If that rep shows up in my search engine results.
• Retailers While we don’t tend to think of industrial valves as a retail item, there are oilfield supply services and retailers supplying the construction industry. If I sell valves in this way, I’d often prefer to have a rep than to deal directly with the manufacturer.

Any of these groups of people might begin their shopping online. I check Google Insights for Search and discover that “butterfly valve actuator” is a breakout search term — a keyword phrase that is rising sharply in popularity — in the United States, for searches identified as industrial. Furthermore, the phrase is especially popular in the region our client serves. Time to start thinking about how to add some good paragraphs about butterfly valve actuators.

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If your website has only a list of products or services and a competitor’s site has that list, but also some useful information on the subject, or a tool for choosing the best product for your needs, or an article that other sites find worth linking to, your site will be considered less valuable by the search engines than your competitor’s site. The competing site will therefore be offered more often and higher in the rankings than yours.

In a case like this, a little creativity may be in order. Our client’s current website has information about the company and a list of products and that’s all. We’ll be doing some research and discovery and getting creative about what we can offer that the competition doesn’t. If your website is lacking in oomph, even if your field is one that doesn’t specialize in oomph, it’s worth making that effort.

Duplicate Content

If there are two pages on the web with essentially the same content, search engines will only show the original. This is completely reasonable: searchers want to be able to choose from among alternatives, not a whole bunch of identical content at different pages.

Google’s official explanation gives clear instructions about what to do when you have duplicate content for a good reason. That link will also give you details about the use of syndicated content. Here’s Bing’s word on canonical tags.

There are also sites that are created by scraping other sites and repackaging the content. This is deliberate misbehavior. But sometimes people buy a site that has been created in this way. There are also affiliate sites and e-commerce sites that are sold to unsuspecting buyers who don’t understand that the sellers are peddling identical sites to lots of people. This is sort of like buying a Rolex on a street corner. I’m sorry if it has happened to you, but there’s nothing you can do about it but toss the bad timepiece out and be more careful next time.

Having gotten the excuses out of the way, let’s talk about the reasons people usually end up with duplicate content.

First, they never really grasped the idea of plagiarism. I teach writing at a local college, and every semester I have papers that have content copied directly from websites. After they fail my class, these students presumably go on to write their company websites by pulling content from their competitors’ sites and sticking it onto their pages. Most of the students with this problem seem quite sincerely not to understand that plagiarism is wrong, and clients with this problem seem equally innocent. If this applies to you and your website, just accept that search engines prefer original content and give up using other people’s stuff, whether it seems wrong to you or not.

Second, they can’t write their own content. Not everyone has that skill. You sometimes see this in blogs where the blog’s author has written, “Here’s a great article I saw at thus and so.” Here, there is no attempt to trick human visitors into thinking that the material is original, so it isn’t plagiarism. However, it also isn’t new content. The right thing to do, from an SEO standpoint, is to link to the other site instead of duplicating their stuff.

Third, they’re writing about someone else’s content. If you’re analyzing a poem (and I have no idea why you’d be doing that at your business site, but bear with me), then you might need to reproduce the poem in order to be able to discuss it. You might quote extensively from someone else’s blog post in order to respond to it at your own blog. You might use a manufacturer’s description at your site, and then add your own thoughts — I don’t advocate that, personally, but I’ve been asked to do it before by retail site owners. In these cases, you’re quoting someone. Do it with proper attribution and make sure that most of the content is original, and you’re probably fine.

I actually have duplicate content issues myself because I moved this blog from its old home to this one and haven’t yet gotten around to moving all the images and shutting the old one down. This affects my PageRank and probably affects my search rankings, too. This true confession is just to say that I have compassion for people who have sites filled with duplicate content and feel daunted by the work involved in fixing the problem.  It’s worth doing, though. And if you don’t yet have the problem, don’t create it for yourself.

How Do You Get Ideas for Your Blog?

Has Someone Hacked Your Website?

I’m late posting today because we had an adventure with a client’s site. This is a site that we built, and fortunately we continue to manage the site owner’s online presence, because a few days ago someone got into the site and maliciously… well, uploaded a bunch of files.

The files were pages of information about famous historical personages, and I don’t know what benefit the abuser expected to get from these pages. I don’t keep up with this stuff. I feel confident, though, that the object was not to help passersby with their schoolwork.

I’ve since discovered other people in the same industry who seem to have had the same thing done to their sites. I began emailing them, and then I realized that my emails sounded like weird threatening spam: “Sir, I’ve noticed that your website seems to have been hacked…” At least I ended with “Please have your webmaster check this for you” instead of suggesting that they send me money.

In any case, I decided to write this instead. So you might want to have a look at your website and see whether you are the innocent victim of this exploitation. (If you want to know what industry seems to be targeted, you can email me and I’ll tell you.)

In our client’s case, there was a folder labeled “Callan” stuck into the site. The site owners use a cpanel dashboard with their local hosting company, and this is the most likely source of the problem — or the way the miscreant got in, at least.

It was probably done automatically by a computer program, not by the site owner’s secretary, so don’t let it become a human resources issue if this happens to you. There are programs that seek out weak passwords and insert malicious code into the openings they find in the site’s security. If no one is taking care of the website — and you’re busy, so your website might be in that category — then the problem can stay at the innocent site for quite a long time.

How can you know if your site has been compromised?

Google Webmaster Tools will alert you to suspicious behavior at your site. Set them up. You need to have access to the root or code of your site to do this; if you don’t know what that means, contact your webmaster and ask for help. If you do have access, then you can do it yourself:

1. Sign into your Google account (set one up if you don’t have one)
2. Open Webmaster Tools.
3. Type the URL of the site (its web address) into the box and agree to verify that you are the site owner.
4. You have several options for verifying your ownership. Mostly, you’ll need to upload a file or paste a line of code into the site.
5. Click the “verify” button. Once Google verifies that you have access to the site by seeing that you added the code, you’ll be sent to the Webmaster Tools page for your website.

Webmaster Tools has a diagnostics option for checking to be sure your site isn’t infected with anything. It will also alert you if it notices any suspicious activity.

You can also see a notice saying, “This site may be compromised” at the Google search engine results page if the problem has already been caught by Google. You might also notice strange things going on in the site’s analytics — in this case, visits to pages that didn’t belong on the site.

What should you do if your site has been compromised?

Remove all the stuff that was introduced. If you can’t do this immediately, take your site down until you can so it doesn’t do any harm online and restore it from a clean backup. Run the diagnostics at Webmaster Tools to make sure that everything is as it should be.

Change your passwords and think carefully about who should have access before you give out the new password. Hint: the slip of paper taped on the wall by your store computer with all the passwords on it? Take that down.

Let your web host know what happened. If one site on the server has been attacked, then it’s possible that the rest of the sites hosted on that server also are.

Then resubmit your website to Google. In our client’s case, the site is completely aboveboard. There has never been any gray hat or black hat activity on its behalf, it has no ads or affiliate links, and we’re confident that there won’t be any problem. If you run a site that makes money by getting traffic — a site supported by Adwords or affiliate links, for example — then Google may require you to “show good faith” before reinstating your site.

If you have a history of black hat behavior, you may be out of luck. This, in case you didn’t notice it yourself, is a really good reason not to develop a history of black hat behavior.

 

The Value of Blogging

A new Hubspot report claims that websites with blogs have as much as 88% more leads than sites that don’t. This is for regularly updated B2C blogs. However, blogs in general result in a 55% increase in traffic, and B2B companies with blogs see 67% more leads than those without blogs. The number of leads increases dramatically with both frequency and number of blog posts.

What kind of return on investment can your blog give you? First, you need to determine what a higher number of leads and a larger amount of traffic can do for you. If you currently have 100 leads a month and you begin blogging daily, then by the time you reach 51 blog posts (about 10 weeks), you could expect to see 170 or so leads in a month if your results match those that Hubspot saw on the conservative end. If you have a 10% conversion rate among your leads, that would bring you 17 new customers rather than 10, or 84 more customers a year. If your typical customer brings you $1000 over the course of a year, then your additional revenue will be $84,000.

If you typically have 10 leads a month, convert only 2% of your leads to customers, and expect $300 a year from new customers, your additional revenue will be about $5,000 a year.

Your figures might be larger or smaller, but lets consider these examples of a large result and a small result. Now you need to determine the cost of blogging. This also can vary quite a bit. If you have a junior staff member writing your blog, and he spends a couple of hours a day crafting great blog posts, his $10 an hour counting benefits will set you back $5,200 a year — not a good ROI for the small result but a fantastic ROI for the large result.Your costs increase if your staff blogger is paid more, and decrease if he’s faster, if he blogs less frequently, or if the blogging is done during otherwise wasted time. Your results are likely to decrease if the quality is poor, so the benefits of having your cheapest time-waster write the blog may not be as great as they appear at first glance.

If you hire a professional blogger or buy blog posts from a service or from your web firm, you can expect to pay somewhere between $4k and $10k a year depending on quality and frequency. Again, this won’t give the desired ROI if your result is small, but is an amazing bargain if you attain the large result.

Haul out your calculator, and you can tell whether it’s worth blogging or not.

Stop, though. This only works, as the saying goes, with a spherical chicken. Here are some other factors you have to consider:

• According to Hubspot’s research, results continue to improve as you have more blog posts on your site. More indexed pages means more points of entry and better search engine rankings. Therefore, the value of your blogging increases as time goes on.
• If the benefits continue over time, the later months of the year would see larger numbers of leads (67-88% of an ever-increasing number of leads). Future years would see even larger improvements.
• Your conversion rate might increase, too, as your blogging leads to increased authority and visibility. This could improve your results significantly.

If any of these factors affects your numbers, the overall value would be greater — enough so that even the small result would be a sufficient ROI.

What Pages Does Your Website Need?

Today I have a couple of websites to write drafts for, both starting from scratch. It made me think of the dilemma a lot of people face when planning a new website: how many pages should you have, what should the pages be, and what order should they be in?

Let me offer you three ways to approach the question.

#1: go classic

The simple, obvious plan for a website’s structure is this:

1. Homepage
2. Products
3. Services
4. Blog
5. About Us
6. Contact

This gives you a nice left to right progression for your readers. They have the homepage, where most visitors begin, and then they can see your products and/or services, they have your blog for more information, your About Us page to reassure them of your qualifications and integrity, and then they can contact you. If this suits your business, there’s nothing wrong with it. It meets the expectations of your visitors, covers the bases, and works just fine for thousands of websites.

The problem is when this structure doesn’t work and you try to force it. That’s when you see a Services button that leads to an FAQ page, an About Us page with a primer on the site’s industry, or a Contact page that’s really a store.

If this almost works for you but not quite, you can use it as a starting point and change out pages. For example, one of the sites I’m working on is for a public speaker. She doesn’t exactly offer products or services, so we can replace Products and Services with credibility pages, pages that establish her authority in her field. Examples of credibility pages could be testimonials, FAQs, or pages with basic (or advanced) information on your subject.

Our site for Rocky Grove Sun Company includes a section called “Solar 101″ that tells you more than you probably want to know about voltage and currents and inverters and arrays. It brings search traffic to the site, and it demonstrates to prospective clients that these guys really know their stuff.

The classic structure might work for you with a bit of lateral thinking, too. For example, our public speaker’s presentations aren’t exactly products, but she does want descriptions of what she offers so people can choose — which is a lot like a product page. We can call it “Presentations”  and put it in the same place as a products page. We also often put a Gallery in this spot.

#2: list and sort

One of the best ways to approach your site structure is to list all the things you want to include, and then sort them into groups. You can do this physically and literally with index cards or you can just think about it if you don’t have too many items to consider. Our educational website, FreshPlans, has hundreds of lesson plans. It makes sense to sort them into math, science, technology, music, and so on. When we ended up with too many categories, we sorted them into higher level divisions.

A tech support site we worked on has this type of division: they’ve sorted their services into three main groups. Along with their Home, About Us, and Contact pages, these three groups of services create a sensible site plan.

#3: think of users

We should always think of our users, of course, but sometimes that’s the best way to plan your site architecture, too. Our site for Northwest Arkansas Bride immediately sorts the brides from the vendors, since their needs are different. Our site for Trout Fishing in America has a page for kids and a page for educators, and those two groups can find their paths from the main navigation.

Imagining (or researching) the various ways your customers are likely to reach you can show you the best paths for each, and those paths then can guide your site plan.

The other site I’m working on today is for a company that reps industrial valves. Their website should work for companies that plan to sell valves at a retail level, for end users of valves wanting to buy in bulk, and for manufacturers of valves seeking representation. These three groups have overlapping needs and interests, so we don’t necessarily want to sort them as we did the brides and florists. If I manufacture valves, I’ll want to see which other manufacturers these guys already serve, and if I need some valves for my petrochemical plant I want to see a good selection of butterfly valves; all three of the company’s primary markets can be served by product pages, but we should have sorting both by manufacturer and by specific products.

Order the pages.

Now that you’ve made your plan — and it should probably include a Home page, About Us and Contact pages, and two to four other main pages that can lead your visitors to all the useful stuff your site has to offer — you need to decide on the order.

More and more sites now are not including the homepage in the navigation. Modern web users know to click on the logo in the upper left hand corner to find the homepage, so any site that a) is designed to attract only up to date visitors and b) has a logo in the upper left hand corner can leave the homepage out of the main navigation. Make sure your audience can handle this by testing it with people in your target demographics.

Your contact page should be toward the end (the right or the bottom, as the case may be) of your navigation. Put contact information in the upper right hand corner where people expect to see it, and those who arrive at your site ready to contact you will be set. The rest of your visitors need to get to know you a little, through your products and services and credibility pages and possibly even your About Us page, before they can be expected to make the commitment to contact you. We sometimes put things like a blog or resources page to the right of the contact page, if we want folks to come back repeatedly and find those things quickly, but usually Contact Us belongs on the right.

The About Us page is for reassurance, so you might choose to place it toward the beginning if your clients are likely to need reassurance. The site we built for a roofer has About Us at the top, because choosing someone to fix your roof is all about trust. Usually, though, customers go to the About Us page right before contacting or purchasing, so it should be toward the end.

The middle of the navigation bar probably matters less, in terms of order. I like to have a logical left to right progression if possible, and some of the designers we work with make the decision strictly on the basis of the attractiveness of the words on the labels in varying orders. You could test different arrangements and see which gives you the highest conversion rate.  However, your inner tabs will probably be different from other sites’ inner tabs, so there’s no hard and fast rule.

Excellence, SEO, and SEED Analysis

We don’t specialize in any particular field; we’ve worked for everyone from hypnotists to drug rehabilitation systems, musicians to liquid backhaul specialists, churches to purveyors of freeze dried rabbit brains. We like big companies, small companies, nonprofits, for profits, and all manner of organizations.

What we really like to specialize in is excellence. My personal philosophy of marketing is that you should be really good at what you do, and let people know that. So I like to write websites for organizations that are really good at what they do. There’s enormous satisfaction in creating a really good website for a really good company. And a really good website will always get better results with off-site SEO than a poor one.

In fact, one of the most common issues we tackle for people is the situation in which they have an excellent, highly respected company with a site that says, “We’re amateurs. Don’t trust us.”

So one of the first questions a company ought to ask when planning work on their website might be, “What are we great at that we should let people know about?”  Maybe even, “What should we improve so we can highlight it at our website?” And, “What are we not so great at, which a highly functional website could improve?”

So when I read Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto by Adam Werbach, I immediately noticed the way his business strategy analysis tools could help with that step. He suggests using an approach like the classic SWOT analysis, but looking instead at the four types of sustainability:

• Social (“acting as if other people mattered”)
• Economic (“operating profitably”)
• Environmental
• Cultural (“valuing cultural diversity”)

It strikes me that changing “Cultural” to the equally sensible “Diversity” will give a much better acronym. We use “diversity” as an adjective nowadays, in phrases like “diversity training” and “diversity initiatives,” so I propose that a SEED analysis be added to the SWOT analysis.  Click on those links to find handy forms for the purpose. A little time spent with these two analyses should make your company’s areas of excellence clear.

Then when we ask you, “So why should people come to you instead of your competitors?” you’ll have a good answer for us to use in your website.

Tools for Twitter

I’ll be doing a presentation on social media for business for the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce on June 2 at noon. When they asked me to do this, they asked if I’d include Twitter tools like Hoot Suite. I only have an hour, and there’s no way to cover Twitter tools and also have time to discuss how to use social media well for business and also be thorough about Twitter tools, so this is my compromise: I’ll do a presentation on using Twitter well, and this blog post on Twitter tools.

Twitter management tools:

• Twuffer is a simple tool for scheduling tweets so that, as Twuffer points out, you can appear never to sleep. Or you can schedule all your announcements out on the calendar so you don’t forget.
• Hoot Suite is a social media dashboard that lets you do far more than just schedule your tweets. You can use it with a team, delegating social media tasks to various team members, you can monitor tweets about your company or other topics, create reports on your social media activity, and do it all from your iPhone or iPad. There’s a free version that does a couple of these things, but it mostly just taunts you with all the things you could do if you had the paid version. When we’re tweeting for a lot of different clients, the functionality of Hoot Suite is useful, but if you just tweet for yourself, it’s probably overkill.
• Tweetdeck is the one Rosamond and Josepha use. It has a simple interface that’s great for mobile devices and lets you manage everything from one spot. It doesn’t have as many features as the paid version of Hoot Suite but it lets the busy tweeter keep up with multiple social media sites with minimal fuss.
• See some more options at Social Media Management Tools: 2012.

The following tools aren’t dashboards, but they are useful tools for extending Twitter’s value:

• Twitterfeed sends your RSS feed to Twitter. It’s an easy way to push your blog to Twitter (other social media sites, too).
• Tweetbeep alerts you by email whenever anyone twitters about you, your company, or any other subject you want to keep track of.
• Twitwall gives you a space for videos and stuff.
• SocialBro is a download that lets you analyze your Twitter network. You can see how many of your followers are active, where they come from, and a bunch more stuff.

When choosing among Twitter tools, you naturally want to to consider cost and compatibility with your hardware. You should also make sure that you get all the functions you’ll actually use, but not more than you need — these tools are supposed to simplify your life, not make things more complicated.

BE the Directory

Gathering backlinks or inlinks, links to your site from other sites, is an important part of search engine optimization.

Links to your site are votes for your site’s value from the sites that link to you, so they increase your trustworthiness in the view of the search engines. Links to your site are built into search engine’s algorithms because Google and bing know that their robots can’t make good judgements about the quality of your design or content; counting backlinks lets the algorithms include human judgements as well. Search engines notice the anchor text used for links to your site, and consider it when determining what keywords your site should be offered for. Links from other sites can bring you traffic, too, increasing your chances of getting more backlinks from visitors.

But what about outlinks, the links you give to other websites? Certainly, you’ll link to other sites when they have information you think is valuable to your readers. And you might create resource pages with links to hold (and perhaps disguise) reciprocal links with directories.

You may not have thought, however, about having a directory at your site. A page or series of pages, that is, with a compendium of links to other sites. Consider the benefits:

• Your site can be the go-to place for people who want to find a list of all the solar energy companies in the nation, all the Civil Ware reenactment forum sites, or all the project management software. If you have an exhaustive, up to date list of something that people would otherwise have to spend a lot of time searching for, then you have a useful resource. A list like this can be linkbait, for sure — other people don’t want to go to the amount of trouble you went to, after all.
• Your readers can get in the habit of visiting you for the information, rather than going elsewhere. You can be a portal for them. We like to do this with travel, sports, and hobby sites: knitters will be grateful to have a nice long list of yarn shops to browse through, and people planning a vacation will tell their friends about your treasure trove of information.
• Your useful page can benefit from user-generated content if you ask readers to tell you about other resources. All the linkbuilders will send you emails pointing out their virtues of their sites, thus adding to your page with little effort from you.

This only works if you actually have a useful page. Here’s how to make it useful:

• Make your directory a tightly focused one: all the best zoos or skydiving venues or places to take kids in NYC, not a random list of stuff you’ve noticed in your travels.
• Include only high quality sites in your list. Better for your readers and better for your site’s SEO.
• Add information about the sites — ideally, a unique and well-thought-out review of each site so your visitors can easily find the sites that will be most valuable to them without having to click back and forth.
• Keep the links up to date.

Once you have a good page like this, you can contact all the people you’ve linked to and suggest that they might like to share this list with their readers, thus giving you a slew of backlinks from sites you’ve already identified as relevant, quality sites.

 

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