Post and Traffic Responsiveness

Paying attention to traffic and responding to it was another factor in how we increased our Google PageRank to 5. If I saw that Google was sending us a lot of traffic for a particular subject or post, we would write another post on that same subject very quickly in the hopes of increasing traffic for that keyword. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It depended on the keyword, the type of post, and the saturation for that keyword already present in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can check keywords and their saturation across the Internet with the Google Keyword Tool. We still practice this technique to this day.

Another thing we did was write posts for subjects that others did not, before they did. I spoke about this here: How my website went from 4000 Page Views to over 16,000 in a single day. Here is what I believe happens after people read the post they originally came to your site for. They are going to: 1) exit your site, 2) click on a post in your related posts section, or 3.) visit your home page to see what your newest post is. Getting visitors to your website and to your home page is a key factor in getting your site’s PageRank increased, besides back-links.

Post Unique Content

I play follow-the-leader 70% of the time because lets face it, its simple and easy. That doesn’t not set you apart from the pack though. It the other 30% that does so. I try to post articles on films and TV shows that the big boys do not. This brings in traffic and attention that they forgo. If we could not find unique content to post, I created it. One particular example of this is that I took high resolution pictures of Game of Thrones (example: Game of Thrones: Season 1, Episode 3: Lord Snow Photos) and posted them after the episode aired on HBO.

Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones

I knew from watching this HBO show that it was good and I also knew it was increasing popular. Google Image Search took notice of the pictures and forums eventually took notice of the pictures as well, sending traffic to the posts and collateral hits to our home page.

Home Page updates

We constantly updated the home page two to three times a day (everyday),  garnering traffic to it on a daily basis, pageviews which Google saw. This factor helped get us to a PageRank of 5. This consistency (written about here: Movie Content: Consistency) gave people a reason to visit the home page everyday and give that page traffic.

Post Back-links

In How to Achieve a Google Page Rank of 5: Part 1, under sub-heading “Our Road to a PageRank of 5″, I spoke of  ”getting a fellow movie website to want to back-link to you i.e. how attractive are you in that regard? Is your content that good, that compelling? What are they getting out of linking to you?”

One way I accomplished this, making our site attractive, was finding a site (a small site) whose content I liked and found informative. Next we began writing posts and used that site as the source for the post, back-linking to them within the post (when you publish a post with a link to another website within it, that link shows up on the other websites dashboard in some form or another, if they have that feature enabled. For WordPress its “Incoming Links” You can also check incoming links to your site in Google Webmaster Tools.

The webmaster noticed this.

After doing that for months (I repeat: months) plus some post comments, I sent the webmaster an email asking to be added to their blogroll or whatever they called their list of links to other movie websites on their home page. Once again, I had paid my dues before asking for something that I valued: I gave them something that they valued first.

Self Back-links

I spoke about back-links from other websites but we also back-linked to our old content within the new content.  We used and continue to use descriptive terms for these back-links. This type of back-linking helps with the spidering of old content, telling the search engines exactly what the link represents, and drives traffic to them as well (e.g. the Emilia Clarke link underneath her Game of Thrones, Lord Snow episode picture above, that accurately labeled link links back to all her posts on our movie website.)

We use the No Self Pings WordPress plugin, written about here: Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins so that self-pings do not occur and show up on our dashboard.

SEO

I worked on the SEO for post titles, the first few lines of the post, and keywords in the posts (written about here: 4 Ways to Hammer Search Engine Terms and here: Keyword Placement for High SERPs (Search Engine Result Positions)). I would post something then search for it in Google to see where it placed in SERPs. If I wasn’t on the first page (the top traffic sites are, old sites, sites that are Google News Publishers, written about here: How to Become a Google News Publisher), I would examine the sites that were and their wording (that little excerpt that showed underneath the title of the individual search results). Then I would compare it to my own. I read about SEO on various websites, spoke to a website SEO professional (details of the conversation and various tips here: A Professional Web Designer’s thoughts on Websites, SEO, SERP, HTML, and Search Engines) and  bought a text book on the subject: Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets. Search engine optimization plays a major role in how your site is found on the Internet and the frequency of this occurrence.

Google PageRank

Google Image Search

I began optimizing all of the images on the site so that they appeared and appeared higher in Google Image SERPs and as frequently as possible. It was laborious in the beginning but now it is routine.  I wrote about image search engine optimization here: Using SEO optimized Images in your Posts to Increase Pageviews and here: 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO. This is something many of the leading movie websites (Slashfilm, AintitCool, etc.) ignore maybe because they do not know about it, do not care, or find it too time consuming (and it is, believe me) to undertake. It definitely increases the preparation time of an article before you post it but to me, with the little guy, entrepreneur mentality, the end result makes it worth it.

More than 65% of the traffic our movie website receives is from search engines (web and image). That is free traffic, organic traffic and we are not even Google News Publishers yet (we are working on that).

Google Image Search is a search engine just like Google Web Search is. I began paying attention to how Google Image Search reads pictures just like I did for how Google Web Search read posts. The result: increased traffic to posts. When a person views a post containing a searched for picture, many will exit through that page (check your Google Analytics for exit pages on specific posts) but like I said previously, some will click and go to your home page. That is a pageview for your post and then your home page.

Site Design and Page Loading Speed

Google sees how fast your site and your pages load. They want to send people to sites that load fast versus sites that load slowly. The old WordPress themes for our movie website were freebies and were not bloated with excess code, nor is the newest version of our movie website (more on that in future posts). They were easily readable, spidered, and loaded relatively fast. Whether these were factors in us eventually being raised to a PageRank of 5, they surely were not hinderances. You can check the code of your website for problems and errors here: Validator.W3 and see how fast the site and its pages load here: Tools.Pingdom and here: WebPageTest. If there is a problem, a page loading issue with your site, these free services will point them out. Eliminating them will work in your site’s favor.

Conclusion

It is a long road to a PageRank of 5 but you can make it there if you put the effort in with your posts, their content/frequency, SEO, and your site. You can check the current Google PageRank of your website here: PRChecker.

Source: Wikipedia

What is PageRank?

Before we discuss methodology, lets discuss what PageRank is first so that you get an idea how it effects your website.

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. Sergey Brin had the idea that information on the web could be ordered in a hierarchy by “link popularity”: a page is ranked higher as there are more links to it. It was co-authored by Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd. The first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, was published in 1998: shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors that determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Google PageRank Graph

A page’s PageRank, in other words, is a nod in its favor from all the pertinent back-links it receives.

PageRank as a quality indicator, for and against:

PageRank could be a good quality indicator assuming that most people link to valuable content and nobody links to useless pages. However paid links, mandatory links for providing software or services, link spamming and other means can persuade or force webmasters to link, at least temporarily, to any content. Spam filtering that is applied as a countermeasure is not directly tied to the website value that only human expert can estimate. As a result, PageRank is not necessarily a good indicator of the quality or value of the website. Along with the PageRank, Google uses over 200 other methods to optimize the search results.

How Google currently describes PageRank

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

How PageRank is calculated

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation ‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

“share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

As you learned from above, a “vote” or a back-link is as important as how many other back-links are on that page linking to you.

Our Road to a PageRank of 5

When I first started out I read about back-links and went about trying to collect some.

Remember when I spoke of Getting Movie Studios to Pay to Advertise on your Website. Apply some of that information to getting a fellow movie website to want to back-link to you i.e. how attractive are you in that regard? Is your content that good, that compelling? What are they getting out of back-linking to you?

I did get a few though, mostly from movie websites that were just starting out as well but I figured “a back-link is better than no back-link. At least it is from a site in the same field.”

The Mistakes

I added our movie website to multiple movie website directories and added their badges to our website, mostly in the footer. Adding our movie website to movie website directories was done in an effort to generate home page traffic. It was a worthless endeavor. Little to no traffic was received from them.

I began commenting on sites with a far greater pagerank than my own that I saw with blogrolls (the use of blogrolls is written about here: A BlogRoll: Should You have One?) and would eventually ask to be added to theirs. This was hit or miss as well.

When I read that home page back-links were the most valuable (that is why some advertisers pay for home page text links), I began asking for links on that page as well. I made some mistakes in that regard. Without even introducing myself through fervent post comments or through other means, I just emailed them and asked. Most didn’t even respond to my email. I was a stranger asking for a hand-out.

The Constant Gardener

With that in mind I did it the long, hard way. Having a PageRank of 3 I cultivated the favor of movie webmasters with a PageRank of 5 through constant, elongated comments and commentary on their posts, quickly garnering their attention. I got more than a few “Wow”s from the authors at the size/length of my comments. Basically, I paid my dues BEFORE asking for a back-link plus I liked the content of those sites. The comments were laborious but talking about my thoughts on film was not. It paid off. They added my site to their home page blogroll with no qualms.

I was also constantly reading about search engine optimization (SEO) and how to optimize my posts and site for spidering, ranking, and search engine visibility and applied what I learned to my site and the posts housed within it. All of these factors contributed to our movie website being upped from a PageRank of 3 to 4 over a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago and then to 5 two months ago.

The Method Breakdown

A break down of the individual methodology I used will be shared in How to Increase Your Google PageRank to 5: Part 2.

Until then, a question for discussion:

• What PageRank is your website currently at and how did you get it there?

Please feel free to share this information below.

Source: Google-success, Webworkshop

Carla Gugino, Elektra Luxx

Be Consistent

Marcello: One thing I hope you have noticed about Japan Cinema is we update every single weekday, without fail. We even throw in some Top 10 lists on Saturdays. Now before I present this point, I know most blog sites are only ran by one person and you cant possible watch and review a film everyday. That is fine, but then I hope traffic isn’t a major concern for you. The best advice I can offer for people who want to increase traffic is to build up your brand by updating EVERYDAY (preferbly at the same time everyday). This builds up a reputation that people can go to your site and see new content everyday. Your audience doesn’t have to guess or hope that you wrote something on a given day. Nothing beats a reliable blog schedule. Nothing. Olivia: Marcello is a connoisseur of task masters and time tables. He updates the blog every single day, sometimes twice. Readers of JapanCinema will get an in-depth 500 word review on whatever film happens to be slated and a freebie on Saturdays. Don’t hate him, hate the game. It creates a faithful following (thank you!!) because people like to barrage themselves with new and exciting information and pictures preferably done at the same time every day. Meals and film reviews should always be on schedule. Do this consistently and they will love you for it.

My Take: Writing movie content consistently is indeed of paramount importance. Remember the 5-11-4 Rule for posting content on a website? In essence, Marcello and Olivia feel the same way. The 5-11-4 Rule is all about consistency which is a central belief of Marcello and Olivia’s. “Now before I present this point, I know most blog sites are only r[u]n by one person and you can[']t possible watch and review a film everyday. That is fine, but then I hope traffic isn’t a major concern for you.” That is hilarious and very true. If you do not care about website traffic (home page hits and certain search engine traffic), you need pay no heed to consistency or time tables. “The best advice I can offer for people who want to increase traffic is to build up your brand by updating EVERYDAY”. True and updating your website consistently also has the benefit of getting your website spidered more frequently by search engines, which will effect how some of your stories appear in SERPs and possibly their rank in them.

Always Evolve the Site

Olivia: Do you like to spend time talking to yourself? Well, a little bit for sure, but hours upon hours? We didn’t think so. That’s why commenting and building a community is so important. We want to hear from you – we think what you have to say is blindly fascinating because you are communicating to us from space! If you don’t create a following or at least a small readership, it’s almost like you’re talking to yourself the whole time. And while that may be fascinating for some, we are people persons. Answer your commenters. Boring? If it is you’re doing it wrong. Marcello: A great way to increase readership and gain comments is to keep chipping away at your site and add features. Comments are valuable, and without those, it starts to feel like your just talking to yourself. Now we aren’t big on commenting other peoples blogs but we know the value and importance of doing so. This BLOG, has evolved more into a website and that really isn’t our niche, nor do we have the time to check out fellow sites. What we do instead, is evolve the site. Starting with just reviews of Japanese films, we now review films from over 10 countries, present interviews with actors and artists, discussion forums, and feature Top 10 lists. A year from now, your site should not look or feel anything like it does presently. A blog that doesn’t evolve is a stagnant and boring blog.

My Take:  A film website, any website for that matter, should evolve its site design over time or it might be left in the dust but there are exceptions. Look at AintitCool. That site has looked the same for what, the last seven years, maybe longer, and it probably receives more traffic and readers now than it did back then. Like Marcello says, evolving your film site doesn’t just mean its design but its coverage as well. I use my interests, my gut, and tracked incoming traffic from search engines to determine what to post. If it interests me or I think its cool, I post it. If Google is sending me a good amount of hits on a particular topic or search term, I will replicate that in a new post with new content and post it. Regarding Olivia’s statement: “commenting and building a community is so important”, I agree. People comment to express themselves to the writer of the article and the world. Responding to that person can only be beneficial to the both of you. You want that person to respond, come back, and comment more don’t you? Engage them in meaningful conversation via your website’s comments or even Twitter and watch what happens.

Pick a Good Name

Marcello: I’ve seen a lot of blog names that try to use a humorous approach and name their blog a bunch of wacky things. The thing with this approach is not everyone has your brand of humor. Modern Family is a popular comedy show on ABC that a lot of people watch, but the show doesn’t do anything for me. In fact, lots of popular comedy shows get cancelled, because not everyone shares the same sense of humor. The same rules apply here. I have never chuckled, giggled or even smirked at ANYONEs blog name no matter how funny you think it is. If you want people to take you serious, unless you work at Schlotskys, name your blog appropriately. Olivia: Was unrequitedpassionsofcinema.blogspot.com taken? Aww too bad! Think so? Think again. Not every person who is reading your blog may want to type all that in or even owns a keyboard. Short, pithy film blog names, probably no more than 12 characters, are good. Engaging in the overly self-referential or ubiquitously obtuse (Hermione’sMineLoveHEr4Eva.com) will only serve to alienate your readers as to having to remember this grandiose blog name, and you will be relegated to the dusts and corners of fandom pages only. Not to say that you don’t love Hermione…or the girls from Bleach or those little monsters jumping around Naruto, but you have to remember your target audience if you are looking to build a good size following. If you are writing earth shatteringly dramatic film reviews for French hipster bourgeois you are most certainly not going to name your blog KuchiKuchiKuchiki.com.

My Take: Long website names are hard to remember, which is why the bookmark and history buttons in a web browser are beneficial. Regardless of length or humor,  I would choose a website name that possesses a keyword or multiple keywords within it. That is one of the first things you should be thinking about when you choose or formulate your website name. If you would like for your website to be more easily found in a relevant search in a search engines, that approach is one of your best bets as that name will appear in ALL of the URLs from your website. I spoke about this in more depth within this post: Starting a Movie Website: Choosing and Registering a Domain Name.

Design

Marcello: I know not everyone can be a graphic artist like myself, but you can take steps to make you blog stand out from the crowd. The L.A.M.B. hosts their blog awards every year and I am always shocked at the blogs that nominate themselves for best design. The biggest thing that can make your blog stand out is to buy a PREMIUM template. You know, ones that cost money? While finding free themes is fairly easy in the world of WordPress, the challenge is that just about all free themes are garbage (obvious exceptions of course). After hours of searching, they not only all start to look the same, but they offer severe limitation in functionality. You want a unique, impressive look that conveys professionalism and passion about your craft. You spend hours and hours of your life writing great content, why not make the presentation appealing as well. If the problem is you have no design sense, that is not a valid excuse. I see many blogs with distorted images, black copy on dark images, outdated fonts, dead links etc. Believe it or not, and speaking as a designer, most of what we do is common sense. Do you think McDonalds picked Yellow & Red on accident? Yellow and red are the colors that make us most hungry. Everything you do should be an ingredient in what makes up your site. Don’t just pick a template and throw in your homemade graphics you made in MS Paint. Browse the web for ideas, color schemes, and more! There are more than two blogs created each second of each day. If there isn’t anything special about your blog it will get swallowed up by the blogosphere. Olivia: You’re an artist. You’re just oooh sooo expressive!! You know that what people want to see is lots of flashing things! Like cats! We can’t stay away from it. But here’s the thing: your flashing lights may destroy me. They may wreck my dreams and give me a seizure. Bad design is as distasteful as asking for your boyfriend’s friend’s number. Tacky. Good design principles can be found at the old adage “less is more”. Luckily here at JapanCinema our founder Marcello has a preternatural gift for commercial design and graphics. It’s HIS JOB though. Not everyone will be so lucky. We get to have custom graphics for each film every single day because we are lucky street urchins who fell under his gaze. We have a PREMIUM web design. For the rest of you, think about presentation and find graphics that are both unique and high quality. Brevity is the word of the day and you can have the most kick ass of sites if it is well balanced, un-littered with hyper flashing lights, black backgrounds and that twinkle star dust. We aren’t 12 anymore. Also chose your fonts carefully and stick with a certain palette and color palette as well. Your sites readability will greatly affect the numbers you pull in.

My Take” Like Marcello said, many of the free templates are indeed garbage. Ggg-ggggarbage. I should know. I have probably looked through thousands of them while trying to choose one for myself. Free templates also “offer severe limitation in functionality. You want a unique, impressive look that conveys professionalism and passion about your craft.” Agreed. There are a few jewels out there but you have to dig far and wide, through untold buckets of HTML excrement to find them. That equals a lot of wasted time, time taken away from posting new content to your website. I’ve paid for a premium template in the past and I am currently have a custom theme built. I got sick and tired of the free theme search amongst other things. I am not a web designer so I can not do it myself like Marcello, more’s-the-pity. In case you missed my previous eloquence on the quality of the majority of free templates, they are ggg-gggg-ggggg…okay that’s enough.

Buy a URL

Marcello: This should be a no brainer. Sadly, 95% of the movie blogs i visit have a [name].wordpress or blogspot in their URL. So, let me get this straight, you pour hours and hours of work into your blog to show it off to the world yet you cant throw down $15 to buy a URL? NEWSFLASH: Nobody will take anything you write seriously if you have a URL with a wordpress or blogger name attached to it. That just tells me that you are voicing your amateur ramblings on a free template and you don’t care. It is like taking the training wheels off your tricycle. It is the cheapest, easiest, most effective way to be taken more serious and increase readership for your blog.

My Take: I both agree and disagree Marcello. What I agree on: movie blogs with a [name].wordpress or blogspot in their URL initially seem amateurish but that is only a cursory evaluation of the site. “It is like taking the training wheels off your tricycle. It is the cheapest, easiest, most effective way to be taken more serious and increase readership for your blog.”  I have suggested to people in this series: Start a Movie Website that purchasing a URL is the way to go over Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, etc. I am on movie websites everyday of the week and 99% of the professional movie websites (or so they call themselves) do not have a .wordpress or blogspot in this title. Blogger now lets their users buy a URL and then use it as the address for their blog. I will be writing about it soon in my Start a Movie Website (Blogger Edition) series. What I disagree with: “That just tells me that you are voicing your amateur ramblings on a free template and you don’t care.” The real evaluation of movie blogs with a [name].wordpress or blogspot in their URL is their content. I have been on dozens of .blogspot sites where the content is in depth and well-written, better in some cases than the sites that are high-end and that purchased their URL. Quality has to do with the writer or writers and their content not the configuration of their URL. An example of this was the movie blog The Playlist (that’s theplaylist.blogspot.com) before indieWIRE acquired it. They would have never been acquired if their writing and article presentation were not good.

Stop Copying

Marcello: I see a lot of movie blogs that usually sit on the shoulder of their favorite big time blog, wait for them to post a news article, and then repeat. They usually don’t really understand what they are blogging about, and they have nothing new or interesting to offer, but if you don’t know any better you might get fooled into paying attention. If Slashfilm has reported that Jet Li is in talks to star in a movie with The Rock, do you really think someone is going to go over to read the SAME article over at ‘Jimmy’s Movie Blog’ (.blogspot.com)? Original content is king. Stop piggybacking other blogs.

My Take: Agreed. Expanding on what Marcello said: Your movie reviews, editorials, opinions are king. Your voice is what separates you from everyone else. Use it.

Review New Films Early

Marcello: This is one that most people are unaware of, but Google is your blogs friend. If you want to increase traffic to your movie site, a big movie opening a great opportunity to increase traffic. For instance, at the time of this posting, a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is opening up in American cinemas. The earlier you post a movie review, the better spot it gets on Google, which in turn makes your blog more searchable and increases viewership. If you go to watch the movie opening weekend, on a Saturday and post it on a Sunday or Monday, sorry you waited to long. Catch the midnight showing on Thursday, go home and POST your review. Like I said, there are two blogs being created every second on the internet. There are thousands of movie blogs, and if you don’t put the extra effort into your blog, it will reflect in the numbers. Olivia: Easy. No brainer right? Make it your mission in life the way you stood out in line to get your PS2..remember that time? It was raining and your Avatar patch was going to wash away off your carefully tagged backpack! Sad face. Well that’s the kind of dedication you will need to review films. You will need to become a hunter and persistently go TO THE MOVIES to get to the review first. This kind of serious dedication will be noticed. It may not be as endearing as standing in line hours in the rain to play Pokemon II, but it’s a start.

My Take: “The earlier you post a movie review, the better spot it gets on Google, which in turn makes your blog more searchable and increases viewership.” Agreed. Early film critic screenings help with this. Getting on those lists is the hard part so learning how to contact film public relations (pr) firms is essential. “If you go to watch the movie opening weekend, on a Saturday and post it on a Sunday or Monday, sorry you waited to long. Catch the midnight showing on Thursday, go home and POST your review.” Excellent advise, I have nothing to add except to make the titles of your movie reviews search engine attractive, ensuring that your early movie review posting is not in vain e.g. lost in the SERP shuffle (it ends up on page 2000 of Google search results). I wrote about post titles here: Tips on Title Tags, Post Tags, and Movie Review Posting Strategies, here: Post Title Importance to Search Engine Optimization, here: 4 Ways to Hammer Search Engine Terms, here: Keyword Placement for High SERPs (Search Engine Result Positions), and here: Movie Review Writing Strategies. If you want your movie review tweets to so show more than the nominal return and be a film review that is retweeted, read how to Advertise your Movie Review aggressively on Twitter.

Relate To Your Readers

Marcello: Last but not least. Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean your opinion is better then the next guys nor does it give you a platform to tell the whole world how much a elitest film snob you are. You know the type. They post film reviews you’ve never heard of, and talk about it like it’s Star Wars or something. Then they give your favorite film a 3/10. You hate them, but with their slick talk, they usually win. They’ll make you feel like since Inception wasn’t directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, it automatically sucks and films like Amelie or Citizen Kane are the best. Listen, Japan Cinema covers Asian influenced films, it is an acquired taste and most people don’t actually like the films we talk about within the blogs post, but they try really, really hard to understand why it has value. Because it must have value if it’s posted. Our readers know that, and so should yours. Olivia: It’s good to create a heightened awareness and selectivism but it’s bad business to bore the readers just because you’ve seen every post-modern Russian “masterpiece” and your review is topping 2300 words. Painful. Don’t do it. Unless your blog is this specific, you are the Criterion Collection or you have an overabundant literary gift for creating humor out of slime and fog, stay away from the dense blow by blow of minutiae that prevails over long, scholastic reviews. Few can even sit through some of these films, let alone read about them.

My Take: To relate to your readers first you must find your readers. They also have to find you. This is where search engine optimizing your website and its posts come into play. Regarding what Marcello and Olivia had to say about film review writing, I happen to like lengthy film reviews (if they are informative, well-thought out, thought-provoking), so do most film critic associations but boring film reviews are a waste of time to write and very few people will actually finish reading them because they are boring to read. Lack of passion in writing always comes through on the page. Write from your gut, what interests you, what you like in film or the things in the movie world that get you excited. This is why I only review films that interest me in some way, whether in a good way or a bad way. If the film is merely okay, I do not review it. My review will be lackluster because I have no real feelings on it either way. One film critic (currently inactive) whom I read,  his film reviews range from 2000 to 5000+ words per review and I read every single word. The problem (not really) is that he sends the reader to the dictionary like fifteen times because he uses words the reader will probably be unfamiliar with. I model my film review writing after  his now in certain ways e.g. my Black Swan (2010) Film Review: I break the film down into its components, cross reference the film with other films, cross reference the director and actors to their other work if appropriate, etc. This person writes on a blog that ends in .blogspot.com. This guy is no amateur like Marcello might have you believe. He is top-tier and many know it. Wow, that was a big digression, sorry but one of the reasons why ProMovieblogger was created was so I could fully express myself when it comes to the mechanics of all things film website. Movie review writing is an intregral part of that.

Hugo Weaving, V for Vendetta

In Conclusion

I really enjoyed reading Marcello article and seeing another webmaster’s thoughts on the game and hope you enjoyed and were informed by this one. Passion is the key. If your not passionate all your efforts will fall flat. …End of Line.

Source: JapanCinema

WordPress SEO

Much like All-in-One SEO (written about here: Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins), WordPress SEO incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

The question you might be asking yourself is: What is the difference between WordPress SEO and All In One SEO Pack and which one is better?

It’s not a secret that the author of this plugin, Joost de Valk, aka Yoast, doesn’t really like All In One SEO Pack. The main reason is that All in One SEO pack has a default option for auto generating meta descriptions that is actually making it harder for people to rank well in a lot of cases, giving them a false sense of security.

Once you’ll start using this plugin, you won’t ask that question anymore, you’ll just ask yourself “why does anyone still use All In One SEO”? There’s several things this plugin does better: it has a snippet preview in the write post screen that’ll help you optimize your titles, meta descriptions and copy instantly while working on your posts and pages.

Also, other than All In One SEO Pack, this plugin has a completely working canonical implementation for all pages within your site, whereas the one in All In One SEO pack is broken, it was originally written by the author of this plugin, so he knows. It comes with XML Sitemaps, an XML News sitemap module, loads and loads of robots meta options and other options to improve your SEO.

More “sauce for the goose” – Spock, Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country

Post titles and meta description can be customized on a per post basis (with WordPress SEO). The plugin offers full support for Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) titles as well as meta descriptions. It also gives Google search result snippet previews

WordPress SEO Post Screenshot

You get to see what your post will look like in a Google SERP while writing it in WordPress’s Add/Edit Post page. That’s insane and V.E.R.Y. useful.

More details can be found here: WordPress SEO: The New All-in-One SEO Solution for WordPress Sites

Google Analytics for WordPress

Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

At first I thought this plugin was just a way to add the Google Analytics read-out and charts to your WordPress site but once I watched this video I discovered that it offers a plethora of useful options I had no idea could exist or be tracked. After you watch the video I’m sure you will feel the same.

WP Smush.it

Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colours from indexed images. Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

WP Smush. It allows you to take an image like this, condense and clean it.

Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Sucker Punch

I personally reduce images manually (written about here: 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO) if necessary (i.e. 4000 x 2000 pictures take far too long to load and slow your website down. I usually scale them down then save them at the new size). Big images are good for Google Image Search since generally larger images and the ones that must closely match the search criteria appear at the top of the search results. Another reason I manually manipulate images is because sometimes the photographer’s data (if its present) can be useful in your post i.e. if the photographer of the picture put in the location where the image was taken in the picture Description area, I might use that in my post. The reader might care where the image was snapped and other data the photographer or movie studio placed in the Description or Alternative Text area.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

A contact form makes your site look more professional but be careful. Some contact forms do not display properly in the mobile version of your website. After you install one, check it in the mobile version to make sure it is displaying properly on an Android phone and an iPhone. There are mobile emulators that let you check easily, which can be found here: Mobilize Your Website for Mobile Web Users through Design, Plugins, Validators, and Emulators.

Source: Cssreflex

Here are the main highlights of the conversation:

• If he were building a site, he would do so in raw HTML, not WordPress (much to my chagrin). That way he could create whatever he wanted. He said there are subtleties that can not be exploited without creating something from scratch inside HTML.

• He would tailor file names for SEO.

• He would tailor file paths and folder names for SEO.

• He would use keywords for category titles. I already have but I will refine them more. He suggested instead of Film Review as a category for all your movie reviews, segment them by type. For a horror movie use something like Horror Film Review or Horror Movie Review. Ex. If I am writing a movie review for a film that could be categorized as Scifi, he suggests posting it in a category like Scifi Movie Review. This helps with Google, telling its spiders exactly what type of film review it is looking at.

• He said the naming of pictures is important if you employ them. He have said so numerous times in these posts: Using SEO optimized Images in your Posts to Increase Pageviews and 5 Ways to Optimize Images for Increased Pageviews and SEO.

• He said meta tags are not important, that description tags are still important, and that Google ignores keyword tags. He went on to say that meta keywords help with these search engines: Yahoo and Bing.

• He said the meta name description is a summary of the website in a search engine result. Its your sales’ pitch so make it good, a potent marketing description convincing the viewer to click through to your site.

• He said this is the search engine split: 80% Google, 14% Yahoo, 6% The Other search engines. He said your default efforts should be focused on Google and Yahoo.

• He concurred with my checklist item about limiting the use of Flash. Actually, my checklist says not to use it at all but he was a little more liberal than I am about its use.

• He mentioned when you send your specs to a web designer, ask for non-disclosure or send a non-disclosure letter/form to them to sign and send back to you. This protects your intellectual property. You didn’t want your ideas going out the window for others to use.

• He advised having an SEO professional do the initial SEO setup of your website then to read up on SEO yourself and do the continuous tweaking yourself. Ask to see the SEO professionals previous work and/or his portfolio. Ask how many heavily trafficked keywords he has been able to bring a new site onto the front page for in a search result.

• He told me he has read many books of SEO, attended numerous seminars, and told me a few website horror stories e.g. one evolving a site built for $8K where the person didn’t know what to ask for and the designer was inept. He told me that the one SEO book I should read was Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew B. King. Most of tips he gave me, that I reiterated to you above,  were generated from this book he told me. I am picking up a copy for myself. Just the info on SEO for file path names, something I never even thought of before, makes this book worth it. Check out what purchasers of the book had to say. You should read this book before starting a movie website and definitely read it before you pay to have one built. Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets will help you figure out what to ask for from the web designer, how to weed out the good ones from the bad ones (through these questions), and what you want included in your website’s back-end.

Did you find this list useful, insightful? What have been you experiences with website designers? Leave your thoughts below.