Blog Review: Five Cent Nickel
Five Cent Nickel , a personal finance blog, is celebrating their two-year anniversary by holding a contest where the prizes include free iPods. One of the ways to enter is to write a review of the blog. This gave me a great idea for The SEM Zone: blog reviews. Plus, I want to win an iPod. So it's a win-win for everyone.
Let's dig in.
What Five Cent Nickel (FCN) is doing right:
Good content. FCN's content is consistently selected for blog carnivals. Additionally, I have seen several organic links from other personal finance blogs I read. By organic, I mean the content was SO GOOD that other bloggers provided a link to their readers because the post offers so much value.
Engaging readers. The current giveaway is a prime example. Readers can enter by leaving a comment on the giveaway post (and promising to tell another person about Five Cent Nickel, consider yourselves told) and/or by blogging a 100+ word review of the FCN site. Not only does this encourage participation on the blog itself, it spurs word of mouth advertising, and keeps readers coming back to find out if they'll win the prizes.
RSS Feed. Having one deserves kudos. If you are serious about blogging, RSS is a must. FCN does a couple of key things with their feed. First of all, sponsored ads are included in the feed, which means the blog can still make moolah even when readers don't visit the site (and just read the posts in their newsreader). Secondly, a copyright notice appears at the bottom in an attempt to deter content theft.
What Five Cent Nickel could do better:
Title Tags. Title tags which feature keywords tend to help sites rank higher in the search engines. FCN's home page has the blog title first. Using Keyword Discovery, it seems that no one is searching for "fivecentnickel.com". No surprise there. "Personal finance tips" is searched for 26 times. However, Personal finance is searched over 19,000 times, so they can still get ranked for having that phrase in the title tags. But I recommend that FCN move "personal finance tips" to the beginning of the title tag. Having said that, personal finance is a very difficult term to rank for, so a little more research to find easier keywords might be a better idea. This type of research can be done for every single page on the blog. Just make sure to have unique title tags for each page or duplicate content issues can arise. Once the research is done, the SEO Title Tag Wordpress Plugin makes this task very easy!
Optimize the "Thank You" page. If you leave a comment, you have to enter a captcha password, which is put in place to deter spam. But after submitting, you're taken to a page that only has the words "Thank You" on it. FCN should offer the user the opportunity to return to the page they were on, go to the home page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or read related posts.
Design. The look of the blog is very text-y. It would be nice to see graphics and images mixed in. FCN could use the Get Custom Wordpress plugin to have a thumbnail sized graphic to go with each post. Each graphic could be assigned a category, and then every post within that category could automatically display the assigned graphic. I'm also surprised not to see any banner ads. There's a big white space in the top right corner just begging to be monetized.
Redirect duplicate pages. Wordpress essentially creates two pages for every post. One has a forward slash at the end of the URL and the other doesn't. Thankfully, there is a Wordpress plugin which fixes the whole thing for you. FCN should install the Permalink Redirect plugin to avoid duplicate content issues.
So that's my review of Five Cent Nickel. Obviously, they're not hurting for traffic. But who knows, maybe they could attract even more!
Want your blog reviewed? Drop me a line at njohnson at fortuneinteractive dot com.
By the way, I realize that the SEM Zone doesn't even employ all of these methods. However, we're hoping to switch over to Wordpress soon so we have greater control over design, title tags, etc.
Let's dig in.
What Five Cent Nickel (FCN) is doing right:
Good content. FCN's content is consistently selected for blog carnivals. Additionally, I have seen several organic links from other personal finance blogs I read. By organic, I mean the content was SO GOOD that other bloggers provided a link to their readers because the post offers so much value.
Engaging readers. The current giveaway is a prime example. Readers can enter by leaving a comment on the giveaway post (and promising to tell another person about Five Cent Nickel, consider yourselves told) and/or by blogging a 100+ word review of the FCN site. Not only does this encourage participation on the blog itself, it spurs word of mouth advertising, and keeps readers coming back to find out if they'll win the prizes.
RSS Feed. Having one deserves kudos. If you are serious about blogging, RSS is a must. FCN does a couple of key things with their feed. First of all, sponsored ads are included in the feed, which means the blog can still make moolah even when readers don't visit the site (and just read the posts in their newsreader). Secondly, a copyright notice appears at the bottom in an attempt to deter content theft.
What Five Cent Nickel could do better:
Title Tags. Title tags which feature keywords tend to help sites rank higher in the search engines. FCN's home page has the blog title first. Using Keyword Discovery, it seems that no one is searching for "fivecentnickel.com". No surprise there. "Personal finance tips" is searched for 26 times. However, Personal finance is searched over 19,000 times, so they can still get ranked for having that phrase in the title tags. But I recommend that FCN move "personal finance tips" to the beginning of the title tag. Having said that, personal finance is a very difficult term to rank for, so a little more research to find easier keywords might be a better idea. This type of research can be done for every single page on the blog. Just make sure to have unique title tags for each page or duplicate content issues can arise. Once the research is done, the SEO Title Tag Wordpress Plugin makes this task very easy!
Optimize the "Thank You" page. If you leave a comment, you have to enter a captcha password, which is put in place to deter spam. But after submitting, you're taken to a page that only has the words "Thank You" on it. FCN should offer the user the opportunity to return to the page they were on, go to the home page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or read related posts.
Design. The look of the blog is very text-y. It would be nice to see graphics and images mixed in. FCN could use the Get Custom Wordpress plugin to have a thumbnail sized graphic to go with each post. Each graphic could be assigned a category, and then every post within that category could automatically display the assigned graphic. I'm also surprised not to see any banner ads. There's a big white space in the top right corner just begging to be monetized.
Redirect duplicate pages. Wordpress essentially creates two pages for every post. One has a forward slash at the end of the URL and the other doesn't. Thankfully, there is a Wordpress plugin which fixes the whole thing for you. FCN should install the Permalink Redirect plugin to avoid duplicate content issues.
So that's my review of Five Cent Nickel. Obviously, they're not hurting for traffic. But who knows, maybe they could attract even more!
Want your blog reviewed? Drop me a line at njohnson at fortuneinteractive dot com.
By the way, I realize that the SEM Zone doesn't even employ all of these methods. However, we're hoping to switch over to Wordpress soon so we have greater control over design, title tags, etc.
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