Over the last couple of years, Google has made it substantially more difficult to game their search results and rank artificially high.  Buying loads of cheap links is more likely to get your site penalized than to increase your rankings and traffic.

These days, visitor engagement is the key to success.  Engagement ensures that visitors who arrive on your site will stay there, a positive quality signal for Google, and that they’ll be more likely to share your content with their friends, creating natural links, and indirectly increasing your rankings and traffic.

One of the best ways to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website, and the chance they’ll share your site with their friends, is to create valuable interactive content.  And it’s not as hard as you may think.  Here are four easy ways to do so:

Online Calculators

Calculators aren’t just useful for boring mathematical tasks.  If you think outside the box, there are few websites that couldn’t benefit from a fun, valuable, interactive calculator.  With financial sites, weight loss sites, and fitness sites, there are tons of obvious applications.  But what about other sites?  On this site, for example, I’ve created a custom calculator that estimates website revenue.  For a site about dogs?  Create a calculator that estimates the amount of food a dog should eat with various levels of weight, exercise, and age.  How about a travel site?  Create a calculator that provides the amount of vacation days a visitor needs to stay sane.

The calculator(s) can be useful, fun, or both, and in any case, visitors will appreciate them, they’ll stay on your site longer, and if you make a really cool one, they may link to it or share it with their friends.  If you don’t know how to make a calculator, I’ve created a very simple tutorial here, with copy-and-paste code you can use.  So you’ve got no excuse!  Come up with a cool calculator idea or two, and add one to your site today.

Online Quizzes

Quizzes are another great option for interactive content.  Again, there are few sites that wouldn’t benefit from a quiz or two.  You can choose to make your quizzes a serious test of knowledge, a fun break, or any combination in between.  It’s unlikely your competitors are using quizzes on their sites, so adding one to yours is not only a great way to increase user engagement, but will also create a point of differentiation.  If you don’t know how to make a quiz, here’s another easy tutorial, with free files you can download and use today.

Make sure you promote your quizzes (or any new content for that matter) on pages that get a lot of traffic, and to influential people in your industry that may be willing to spread them.

Free Downloads

In many industries, free electronic downloads can be valuable.  On this site for example, I’ve created a free website template and WordPress theme.  Excel files are another great option.  On a weight loss site you might offer a free excel file that helps users track their caloric intake and calories burned.  On a finance site you could offer a free financial planning worksheet.  And on many sites, a free, small downloadable e-book can work.  Again, thinking outside of the box is often most useful.

Most sites don’t offer free downloads.  By offering them on your site, assuming you do create something of value, you also increase the value of your site and the chances that others will promote it for you.

Free Videos

Lots of sites nowadays do have video, so much so that many visitors will be looking for it.  Adding videos to your site is an excellent way to keep people on it for an extended period, and if the videos are good and you add them regularly, they’ll keep returning for more.

The easiest way to add videos to your site is via YouTube.  If you use YouTube, you won’t have to bother with hosting your videos or figuring out how to integrate it on your page…which can be way more trouble than you might imagine.  Ideally, you should use a high quality camera, but depending on the type of video you’re making, even an iPhone video uploaded to YouTube and shared on your site can work.

The downside to using YouTube videos is that visitors may click off to YouTube.  So I’d recommend disabling additional videos from showing up at the end of yours.  And make sure you’ve got complimentary, interesting and engaging content near the video, so that after someone watches it they’ll be even more likely to get further engaged in your site.

Do It Now!

Making a video will likely be the most difficult of the above 4 methods, but once you get going, you’ll see that it’s actually pretty easy.  Using my free tutorials you should be able to create a cool calculator and/or quiz, and add them to your site in as little as a couple of hours.  So do it now, add links to your new interactive content to your highest traffic pages, and email a few people in your industry!

Want to increase your traffic?

How would you like to increase your traffic and conversions?

Are you really taking advantage of social networking?

Many people think they’re covering their bases by setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account.

But there’s much more (and maybe less!) you can and should be doing to maximize your traffic through social networking.

New In-Depth Articles

Today I’ve added three new pages to our site with in-depth information and tutorials. The first page, Promoting Your Site Through Social Networking, covers the best ways to get more visitors through smart social networking. The second page is a detailed tutorial on Enabling and Increasing Blog Subscriptions, with code examples you can copy and paste for use on your blog today. And the third page is another detailed tutorial, How to Build an Email List, again including code you can copy and paste to use on your site now.

New social media is the rage today, and it does have its place. But giving up on old school social networking is a mistake, as it not only creates long term value for your business and your visitors, but is also a great way to increase traffic with more engaged users. Check out the articles above to make sure you’re not missing out.

Want More Email Subscribers?

If you’re forcing potential email list subscribers to double opt-in on web form submissions, you’re losing subscribers.

Email list management companies like Aweber and MailChimp allow you to add sign up forms to your website so visitors can receive newsletters or subscription material. (See my sign up form at the top of the right sidebar as an example.)

But the default settings are not user friendly. I’ll show you what settings you need to change to make the sign up process easier and get more confirmed subscribers.

Aweber vs. Mailchimp

The default settings for both Aweber and Mailchimp are such that when a visitor enters their name and email address in your submission form, they then get a message to check their email and click a confirmation link in order to confirm or double opt-in. There are a few problems with this.

• A significant percentage of visitors will not bother to take the next step.
• The confirmation email is often a bit delayed, so the visitor abandons the process.
• The confirmation email is so badly formatted and worded, that the user thinks it’s spam.

Take a look at the Aweber confirmation email for example:

This Is Terrible

Not only does the format of the confirmation email look terrible, but many recipients are going to think it’s spam. Your visitors think they’re getting an email from you, but it’s asking them to click a strange looking URL at aweber.com.

Those of us who work on the web for a living may not have a problem with it, but we’re not the typical user. Most internet users have no idea what a URL or web browser even is! And the double opt-in email is asking them to copy and paste into a web browser if they cannot click the full URL. It miserably fails the Don’t Make Me Think test. Yet, every internet marketer and SEO I’ve submitted my email address to is using these default settings.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Unfortunately for those of you using MailChimp, they don’t offer it. With MailChimp, you cannot disable the confirm email.

Why You Don’t Need Double Opt-In

The email list management companies give several reasons why you should use double opt-in:

• People may sign up other people that don’t want to be on your list.
• People may mis-type their email address.
• People will enter fake email addresses.

So what? If someone signs up a friend who doesn’t want your emails, they can simply click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. If someone mistypes their email address…well, you wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. And if someone enters a fake email address, again, no harm to you.

And, none of the above may even happen frequently. But there is one thing that will happen frequently if you force your visitors to get and follow the poorly formated confirmation emails:

You’ll get less subscribers.

Sure, there is some chance that people will enter email addresses that are not their own, and they may occasionally get marked as spam. But if you’re sending out quality messages, I don’t see this as reason to make your visitors jump through useless hoops.

How to Disable the Double Opt-In

As I mentioned earlier, with MailChimp there is no way to disable the double opt-in emails. With Aweber there is, and it’s very easy to do.

First, click on the “List Settings” link in under the “My Lists” tab:

List Settings

Then, click on the “Confirmed Opt-In” tab:

Confirmed Opt-In

And set the “Require Opt-In On Web Forms” to “Off”:

Required Opt-In Off

That’s it. You’re done.

And here’s the cool thing. Aweber will log IP addresses of those who fill out your web forms, and they’ll send the confirmation message anyway to anyone who enters more than one email address in the form. So if someone does enter their own address and then attempts to enter another, that second person will have to opt-in. This will prevent most problems you could potentially encounter due to people entering email addresses that are not their own into your form.

Are you currently using double opt-in on your web forms? If so, let me know in the comments if you’re seeing significant numbers of visitors who are not clicking the confirmation links. I bet you are. And I bet you’ll get more subscribers by following the steps above.

Today I’ve added two in-depth WordPress tutorials to our site.  The first is on installing WordPress and the second is on making your WP installation secure.  The installation tutorial covers both one-click and manual installs, depending on what your host has available.  And the security tutorial has 7 easy-to-follow steps to stop your site from getting hacked.

While there are other tutorials on both of these subjects, most of them don’t include step by step images.  These do.  And the security section has all the best tips on one page.  Before implementing the recommended security tips, one of my WordPress sites was getting hacked about every two weeks.  It was a hack that was redirecting normal visitors (including myself) to the original versions of the site, but sending Googlebot to the hacked versions, where the hacker was inserting links to their sites.  I wouldn’t have even noticed the hack, but Google de-indexed my site due to the ton of spammy links they were seeing.  My visitors dropped down to nothing until I figured out where the hack was and filed a reconsideration request with Google.  I started using a file monitor to catch the hacks and fix the files, but until I implemented all of the steps, I kept getting hacked.  So if you haven’t made your WP site secure, I hope you’ll follow the advice and save yourself the frustration of losing all your visitors and having to figure out what happened to your site.

Here’s a simple tutorial on creating a page where your visitors can subscribe to your blog via email or feed readers, like this.

If you’ve got a WordPress site, you’ve already got RSS functionality built in.  However, it’s probably not set up so people can easily subscribe via their favorite feed reader, and definitely not set up to allow visitors to subscribe via email.  To create your own page with options, first, set up or log into your Google account on their FeedBurner page:

After you’ve added your feed URL, which with WordPress should be http://www.yoursite.com/blog/feed/, you’ll be taken to a page with tabs at the top.  Click on the Optimize tab, and then on the SmartFeed link:

Go ahead and activate that, as it will properly format your feed. Do the same for the BrowserFriendly and FeedFlare sections, adding social networking links with FeedFlare.

Now click on the Publicize tab, and Email Subscriptions in the left sidebar. This is what you’ll get:

The code you see in the box right above this text is what you’ll need to copy and paste into your new WordPress Feed page. That will create the form where visitors can enter their email address to subscribe to your feed.  Go ahead and copy that code and paste it into a Notepad or TextEdit page to use in just a moment.

Click on the Publicize tab again, and then click on the friendly graphic link in the middle of the page. Here’s where you’ll end up:

Notice I’ve got the radio button next to the Google Reader option selected.  The HTML code is displayed at the bottom of the page, so insert that image and link so visitors can subscribe with Google Reader.  Select each of the options you’d like to offer on your feed page, copy the code, and paste it below the code for the email subscribe box in your Notepad or TextEdit document.

Making Your Page

Now it’s time to make your page.  In the WordPress admin area, create a new page.  I’ve named mine “Subscribe to the Hungry Piranha Blog”.  Click on the HTML tab and paste in the code you copied from Google’s FeedBurner pages.  Add a couple of headings like I did on my page, a bit of explanation, and your page is ready to go.

Adding Your Link

Depending on where you’ve got your subscribe link, you’ll want to change it to your new page rather than the default WordPress link to YourSite.com/blog/feed/.  My link is in the header.php file, so I simply went in and changed it to the newly created page.