Blog Audit Friday: Crocodile Dundee in the Making

Personality is the key… if you know how to use it.

That’s my overall feeling about the object of this Blog Audit Friday.

Everything goes for him: personality, knowledge, drive; the only thing that’s left is wrapping it up in a beautiful package and presenting it to the readers in a way that they can’t get enough of it.

Presenting:

JymTarrant.com

January 14, 2011

From the laptop of: Ana Hoffman

Dear Jym:

I’ve enjoyed getting to know you in the past several months as an awesome member of my EIF Commenting Tribe.

Your style is definitely one of a kind, and no wonder – so are you!

Take a look at what I thought of your blog; my hope is that this will help you grow even more.

***

General Stats

URL: http://www.jymtarrant.com/

Title: Jym Tarrant.com – Jym Tarrant.com

Description: Simple MLM Tips, Internet Marketing Traffic and Lead Generation

Google PageRank: PR0

NEW: SEOMoz Domain Authority: 37 (see note below)

Alexa Rank: 175,606

Indexed pages in Google: 718

Domain Age: 8 months (not bad for a new blog, Jym!)

Note on SEOMoz Domain Authority: since Google is dragging its feet behind as far as updating their PageRank, plus due to the fact that it’s so unreliable of a measure, I decided to start including the SEOMoz Domain Authority as well. It’s calculated taking into account various ranking factors, constantly updated, plus it uses a better scale system: from 0 to 100.

I definitely recommend you install SEOmoz toolbar to keep track of that and more.

First Impression

1. What I liked about your blog

When I come to your blog, I immediately see that you are one of a kind, Jym, and that’s priceless!

I love the colors; green-orange-gray color scheme works great for me. Also, I do like your green triangle in the logo; I wonder if it means anything. Does it?

I had no problems with loading speed – 5 seconds is very respectable.

2. Design changes to consider

Your header… I do like it, but the fact that it’s “squished” makes me immediately feel “Amateur!”

Also, your header tagline “Simple MLM Tips, Internet Marketing Traffic and Lead Generation” needs to be much bigger and more prominent. Remember, nobody cares about Jym Tarrant (well, I do of course! 🙂 ); it’s all about your readers. And they need to see right away why they should stay on your blog.

One more thing: your footer opt-in form. I actually don’t mind it at all; it goes with the overall design. However, it doesn’t need to be displayed on every page and every time I refresh a page. That’s very annoying and could become quite a deterrent.

By the way, are you using MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet? If so, I wonder why your Name and Email fields don’t self-populate for each user. That’s one of the great features of the plugin and I would love to see if you can get it fixed.

3. Navigation

Usually, bloggers put too many navigational tabs and links.

In your case, I would say it’s not enough, Jym.

You need more ways for your readers to get to your content, for instance, widgets like most popular posts, recent posts, most-commented posts – you name it, your imagination is the limit.

Why it’s important: one of your goals is to keep your readers on your site as long as possible and keep them reading – naturally. So by displaying the info I mentioned above, you’ll give your readers more chances to see an intriguing title of sorts that will make them click on that.

Content/Niche Analysis

1. Are you in a good niche?

You are clearly in MLM niche, which of course is quite a huge niche as is.

Within that, you seem to want to focus on 3 things:

• MLM Tips
• internet marketing traffic
• lead generation

Hey, you are one step ahead of most MLM/Network Marketing blogs I get to read – at least, you are trying to narrow your focus, and that’s exactly what you should be doing to bring more traffic and build online recognition.

2. Niche keywords

I did a quick keyword research with my Market Samurai to see if your focus is any good.

Just as I thought, “lead generation” produces the most searches and the best returns. However, it’s also the most competitive one and you most likely don’t stand a chance bringing any search engine traffic with that keyword.

However, “MLM lead generation” is a PERFECT little niche to be in.

Nobody searches for “internet marketing traffic“; the phrase itself doesn’t make much sense. Plus, lead generation IS sort of the same as internet marketing traffic; after all, you generate traffic to generate leads. So I would simply drop that one altogether.

“MLM tips” is not a great niche from search engine perspective; it just doesn’t get many searches. HOWEVER, it’s great from a reader’s perspective, in my opinion – we all love “tips” on anything and everything. I think you should definitely stick with that one.

So….

MLM tips and MLM lead generation are the 2 things I would focus on, Jym.

SEO Analysis

1. Meta Tag Structure

This information is mostly used by search engines to determine your rankings; it’s also what you see in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now that you have your keywords, you can create your blog title (title tag) and blog description (description tag) accordingly. Those two are referred to as “meta tags” in SEO.

Needless to say, you need to use your main keywords in both the title and description.

Use them in the beginning – that’s also very important. Also, don’t overuse the word “MLM”; you can use it once and that’s enough. For instance, you can combine both keywords into one, as in “MLM lead generation tips” – that way you have all your important keywords and it still makes sense to the readers.

2. Heading Tag Structure

These are headings and subheadings you use in your posts, sidebars, etc.

Your home page has two H1 tags: “Jym Tarrant.com” and “Attract Money, Freedom, Abundance, and anything else you desire!”

The second one happens to be in one of the posts currently displayed on your home page.

Using H1 headings within your post is a definite no-no.

H1 headings should be reserved for your most important keyword-oriented phrases, like your blog post title. There should be only 1 per page and it’s highly recommended that it’s placed as the first heading on the page, i.e. don’t put H2 before H1.

Is it a HUGE deal? No. But why not take advantage of everything at our disposal – who knows, maybe that’s the one that will make a difference between your blog and your competitor’s?

Other than that little fix, your heading structure is in good shape.

Side note: if you want to check your own blog structure, just go to http://validator.w3.org/, add your URL to validate your code and make sure you check the “Show Outline” box – that’s what will give you your blog outline at the very bottom of your page, along with all HTML code errors you’d better fix!

Link Structure

1. Internal Linking

You need to add a NoFollow attribute to your feed URL – currently, this is one of your most-linked-to… well…links. 🙂 And no wonder, since it’s on every page of your blog.

I am happy to see that all your sidebar ads are NoFollow – just the way it should be.

By the way, I am surprised that your categories are NoFollow as well. Is there a particular reason for that? Unless there is one, you should probably change that.

On the other hand, pages like “Contact Me” should be NoFollow. There’s no reason to pass any link juice to that since it really doesn’t carry any particular search engine value.

2. Incoming Linking

Ahhh… Link building… It seems like we are never quite sure how to do it properly, since the “rules” seem to change so much.

However, there are some hard-core principles that most SEOers still stick to. And one of them is anchor text.

Let me take a step back and say that you’ve done quite well with link building, Jym – I was impressed to see a number of good links in my Market Samurai.

However, the anchor text you use in your link building just plain SUCKS! 🙂

Side note: by request from one of my readers, I will write an article about anchor text and how to use it – in simple terms as always, but for now, if you don’t know what I am talking about, just Google “anchor text”.

Back to you, Jym.

As of right now, your name “Jym” is your number one anchor text of choice. You used it 437 times.

You know what the second most popular one is? Jym Jym. 201 times.

I like your name too; it’s pretty unusual and all, however, it doesn’t help bring much search engine traffic to your blog. After all, isn’t that the point?

So start using your keywords as your anchor text, especially on blogs that utilize KeywordLuv plugin (mine is one of them).

And don’t forget to research keywords with Market Samurai – a little research will take you a long way!

Make sure you use my authority codes when looking for the best links:

• Treasure Island of Link Building: How to Find the Best Links Every Time

This & That

I can’t believe you haven’t fixed your canonicalization issue, Jym! Read this post WWW vs non-WWW: Why You Should Put All Your Links in One Basket and redirect everything to your non-WWW version – all your links seemed to be going that way anyway.

Marketing Takeaway:

And now, my dear readers, it’s your turn. Go to http://jymtarrant.com/ right now and let Jym know what you think of his blog in general and point out the things you would change. Jym and I are listening!