We would like to thank Merchant Circle for publishing our guest post How to Turn More Visitors into Buyers. We would love to assist more small businesses to grow and hope that Merchant Circle members will become regular readers here. If you don’t already have your business listing at Merchant Circle you may be interested in our post How to Add Your Business to Merchant Circle.
We have also posted about The Importance of Online Reviews and How to Add Reviews at Merchant Circle. We will be adding to our posts about how to get the most out of your Merchant Circle listing. Each post will be placed in the Merchant Circle sub-category under Local Search (categories can be found in the right column).
We will also share success stories found elsewhere. Once you see the benefits you’ll invest more time and reap the benefits. For those who aren’t sure yet, we invite you to read the true experience of one Merchant Circle user who wrote How I Made $15,000 with a Free Merchant Circle Business Profile. Do listen to his video explaining how Merchant Circle works, how his blog there landed his best keywords on the first page in the search engines, and how that free listing generates sales for his $2000+ product.
While you’re here why not take a look around, skim the right column for our Most Popular posts, Recent Posts, and Categories or use the search box to hone in on whatever you most wish to know. GrowMap is a dofollow blog so any comments you make here provide quality incoming links for your Web site. Questions are always welcome and we encourage bloggers to leave related links in either the Website field or within comments. (Akismet may grab those but we will rescue them.)
Welcome to GrowMap. We hope you’ll become a regular visitor here.
Gail Gardner
Every one is debating about removing the date option from the post, but i am just wondering that, from SEO point of view, is it going to make any sense?
Hi Tina,
Unless someone is searching by date or using a blog search that considers recency I don’t know why it affects SEO; however, movers saw that it had a negative effect so it may not be the best advice to remove it.
I can tell you that many people discriminate against older posts even when the topic is not really time-sensitive and that is probably even more true on Social Networking and voting sites.
Personally I prefer to be able to find out how dated a post is quickly and easily so I wish all posts were dated. Often the only way to tell is by checking the date stamps on comments if there are any.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..Local Search Directory Taps the Power of Television =-.
I have a similar situation as Tracy. One of my websites is an informative blog in which the information is not time-sensitive. Thinking that it would work to my advantage I took out the datestamps on my pages. Within days I noticed that my organic rankings had dropped significantly for my top keywords. I re-activated the datestamps and my rankings went back up to where they were before (6-16th positions, depending on keyword.)
Just an interesting tidbit I thought I would share from my experience. I think it goes to show that there is not always a right answer when it comes to driving traffic. In my case, my site shows up better in search engines when I have a datestamp, but since my readers might perceive the content to be outdated I have to keep coming up with more content so as to have a fresher datestamp.
Hello,
Removing dates and times on posts is a very common tip for blogs (one which I normally dislike because I want to know when something was written without searching all over for it). I only recommended it this time because her last post was written in 2007.
Many people would be highly interested to know about what you experienced. I’ll look into it further and I hope Tracy sees your reply. As you note, a better solution is to add newer content.
While it is known that search engines favor longevity and hence older content I am surprised that they would use the dates and times in the posts as a determining factor.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How to Add Your Free Business Listing to infoUSA =-.
I would love to make my website grow more but I am just in need of more kids to come along. Will you be doing posts on raising traffic in general? Since I am a free site for kids to use I have no products to sell.
.-= tracy@science for kids´s last blog ..What’s inside the earth? =-.
Hi Tracy,
Many visitors to blogs discriminate against any that don’t have recent posts so you may want to remove the dates from your blog posts. Since they aren’t really date sensitive doing that won’t make visitors think the site is inactive.
If you have a physical address you can use, listing your blog as a business in Local Search sites can bring you valuable incoming links that will move your site up in the search engines.
Check out our post about Selecting Keywords because understanding how that works makes a huge difference in getting organic traffic.
Then look in the right column (also called the right sidebar in a blog) under Online Growing Strategies and you’ll see posts on other Free Ways to Get Traffic. We do regular post other tips including ideas on how to use Social Networking to increase visitors to your site.
One more thing. Check out Commenting Strategy Increased Our Traffic 54.87% and consider using the DoFollow Tools and Lists to locate blogs visited by Moms and Dads. Their readers would be interested in your blog.
I happen to know of two brand new blogs you may want to frequent: Screaming Moms and Atypical Dad. Both will be launching soon and I’ll be doing my part to send them traffic from Social Networking sites.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..Add a Twitter Field to Your Comments =-.
I used to be a big fan of Merchant Circle, until they were bought by IAC (City Search). Its still a useful site, although better places have sprung up on the net…..like Yelp.
Hi Matt,
I encourage businesses to take advantage of all the high quality incoming traffic they can locate. I know Yelp is working really well for you and still recommend making sure you are listed in all the other free Local Search Directories too.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How to Write a Review at Merchant Circle =-.