Fishing Web Design & SEO
Category Archive
New: Fishing Report Syndication Service
Author: Wade Sonenberg 05 16th, 2008Post your fishing report to 12 websites with one email!
We have just launched our new fishing report syndication service, which allows fishing guides and charter services to get their fishing report posted to twelve fishing report websites by simply sending an email. Find out how it works, builds traffic, and helps establish great search engine rankings by visiting our fishing report syndication section.
read comments (0)New: Outdoor Link Exchange Message Board
Author: Wade Sonenberg 05 16th, 2008We couldn’t find a place for owners of Outdoor related websites to get together and trade links, banners, and blogrolls…. so we just created one. Everyone is welcome, and it’s of course free for all outdoor webmasters.
Trading links with relevant websites is a great way to increase your traffic and search engine rankings, so come on over and start trading links today.
Go to:
Outdoor Link Exchange Message Board
read comments (1)8 Ways to Monetize your Hunting or Fishing Website
Author: Wade Sonenberg 05 16th, 2008
Internet advertising revenue is exploding across the web, while print and traditional media advertising is losing traction. Want to be part of the party? Here’s eight ways to earn cash by advertising on your hunting, fishing, or outdoors related website.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
Google Adsense is the grandaddy, but Yahoo and Microsoft offer PPC programs as well. Pay Per Click advertising works by displaying contextually relevant ads on your site, and allowing advertisers to bid on keywords. Once a visitor clicks on an ad on your website or blog, you get a percentage of the earnings. - Direct Placement
A simple advertise here link or button where the ad will be placed can do the job. This can be easy as an agreed dollar amount per month, or more complex such as setting up an ad-server to track impressions and click-throughs. - Sponsored Posts or Reviews
Yes, you can paid to review products and services on your website or blog. Disclosure and ethics are a topic for another day, but if you’re interested check out: PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews - Text Link Ads
Surprisingly, text link ads can be a big money maker due to their value in search engine optimization. And it’s really simple to do, just insert a link into an article, page, or and get a monthly fee. See TextLinkAds and LinkWorth - Sell Products
You can now sell products through your website that you never have to see, touch, or ship. You don’t even have to handle credit cards. Popular setups include selling some of Amazon.com’s millions of products through an Astore (do a search on fishing lures, there are tons of them), or selling everything from hunting or fishing related T-shirts, coffee cups, and mouse pads from CafePress.com - Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs work by you placing affiliate links or ads on your site. If a visitor clicks on the ad and ends up buying something, you get a commission on the sale. There are many, many general affiliate programs out there, but here are some Outdoor Industry related programs:
- BassPro Shops
- Cabelas
- Associate Programs (Outdoors)
- LandBigFish.com - Donations
Doing good work, or have something really worth reading? Simply create a paypal donations button. Remember - if you don’t ask, you don’t get. - Newsletters
Got a newsletter with a good circulation? Add a sidebar or banner advertising for fishing or hunting related products. Get advertisers by sticking an “advertise here” link on your sign up page or in the newsletter itself.
How much $$$?
Traffic amounts and the competitiveness of your site’s niche will largely dictate whether you’re making beer money or enough for a new boat. But remember, there’s nothing wrong with beer money…
read comments (0)Does Your Website Look Good? Are You Sure?
Author: Wade Sonenberg 05 8th, 2008
Unfortunately, websites display differently on different computers. What may look perfect on your setup, may look horrible on others. The obvious problem with this, is that many of your customers may be running any of them. Websites layout differently due do different browsers, operating systems, as well as the actual website encoding itself. Some computers support a million colors, some support sixteen. Even valid XHTML/CSS designs will jump all over the page in Internet Explorer 6.0!
While diagnosing and fixing problems may or may not be easy, discovering a problem is very easy.
Enter BrowserShots.org to the rescue. BrowserShots allows you to check your web site’s appearance on literally dozens of browser and operating systems for free. You can then either view or download JPG images of how your site lays out in all of them. It usually takes 15-30 minutes to load them, but you can go do something else while it loads.
An example of AmericanVagabondPhotography.com in the Netscape Navigator browser on a Ubuntu Linux operating system. It’s not important that I don’t know what either of those are, what’s important is the site looks clean in whatever they are….
24 Fishing and Hunting Directories
Author: Wade Sonenberg 04 27th, 2008
Submitting your guide service or outfitter to directory websites is a good idea for two reasons:
First, because many of these sites come up in major search engines for a variety of phrases, which can lead potential clients to your website. Second, it can help build your search engine rankings by giving you high quality, relevant inbound links to your charter or guide website. Most are free, and some require you to link back to their site from yours (reciprocal linking), but all offer web links as well as contact info pointed towards your business.
Fishing Directories |
Hunting Directories |
DIY SEO: Blog Commenting
Author: Wade Sonenberg 04 16th, 2008
Another simple way to increase to increase your website or blog’s inbound links is by commenting on blogs related to your industry. It takes just a few minutes to gain high quality, one-way, relevant inbound links - and you might just learn something you can use while you do it! It’s important to stick to blogs about your particular industry, since Google and other search engines give higher priority for links coming from pages with similar topics.
Where to find relevant blogs?
- Simply Google the industry + “blog” For example, the term “fishing charter blog”
- BlogCatalog directory (there are many other directories). Browse or search
- Technorati Search your targeted keywords, and check out the top results
Add to the Conversation
Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better - it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.
How to Comment for Maximum SEO Effect
On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:
- Name
The name attribute is what’s going to make up the written text of the link. It helps (greatly) in SEO to have keywords in this text because it tells search engines what the link target (your website) is all about. Now some bloggers won’t take kindly to the name “best Florida fishing guide.” That said, if you’re business name includes some of your target keywords, then it should be OK to use that name. To simplify, entering the name “Bob” doesn’t help much unless your trying to rank well for “Bob” in Google. - URL/website/address
Called by various names, but in all cases it is the target of the aforementioned link. Usually you want to include your home page, but it’s good practice to vary them a little bit, especially when you have a page that is relevant to the blog post at hand. Also, if you have other content rich pages that you’d like to rank well for a given term, include it here. An example of this is if you operate a guide service off of a particular island or offer an “overnight” charter option.
15 Places to Post Your Fishing Report Online
Author: Wade Sonenberg 04 10th, 2008
Timely fishing reports are a valuable commodity for fishermen in unknown waters and their local playground alike. The web offers an unparalleled opportunity to share your wealth of knowledge on a particular water body or species, and in turn, it can be a highly effective strategy for increasing charter boat and fishing guide bookings. The goal here is two fold: First, to generate human traffic (potential clients) whether they are visiting your website or giving you a call. Second, it’s a great way to increase your search engine rankings by including a link to your website in the report, or in the “About” section provided by some report services.
Here’s a list of 15 17 (*see below*) websites offering free services to post fishing reports on the web. Remember, you can post last week’s report to them all if you like.
***UPDATE: Thanks to the great response, we will be continually updating this list***
If you have or know of any other fishing report sites, please comment below and we’ll make sure they are added.
- Big Fish Tackle
- Fishing Reporters
- Sportfishermen.com
- ReelReports.com
- Ultimate Bass Forum
- ReelFishingReports.com
- 2CoolFishing.com Message Boards
- CyberAngler.com
- Fish Eye Soup
- FishingWorks.com
- FishyFishing.com
- LandBigFish.com
- TheFishFinder.com
- TheFishingGuide.com
- US Angler
- Waders On
- Fishing Reports at Fintalk.com
- Fox Lake Fishing
- GoFishingForums.net
Outdoorzy.com: Social Network Business Directory
Author: Wade Sonenberg 04 9th, 2008
I’ve been involved at Outdoorzy.com for nearly a year now, and I would suggest that any serious outdoors related business join for a business account, even if you’re not into the whole social networking thing.
What is Outdoorzy?
It’s a social network, like MySpace or Facebook, for outdoors types. Forums, to-do lists, trip reports, etc. But it also has a Business Directory!
Why should I register?
You get photos or screenshots, an explanation of your business, and more, for the enormous price of $0.00 - all in front of your target audience on a growing social network. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, you’re allowed to place one-way, inbound links from your profile to your website which helps to increase your site’s standings in the search engines.
read comments (1)DIY SEO: Link Baiting
Author: Wade Sonenberg 04 4th, 2008The second pillar of DIY SEO is generating inbound links, or links that point from other websites toward yours. Link baiting is an effective strategy for generating one way, high quality inbound links for your website or blog, and especially so for genres of popular interest such as fishing, sports, or news.
Wikipedia defines Link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”
Link baiting is all about creatin the buzz, and can take many forms, but in all cases involves content that is working talking about, and therefore worth referencing via hyperlink. There are four general types of link bait, but they can contain elements of any or all.
- Linkworthy content
A tutorial that is so concise, and so well written that it becomes the de facto manual on a given subject. It could be winter bass fishing in Lake Lanier or qualifications for a great P.R. firm. Example: Spousel Conversion Kit: Video to get your wife on board for buying that new boat. - Controversy
An information peice that is so over the top, sometimes lacking all reason, that stirs up an online community or the blogoshpere at large. Something titled “President Bush Hates Puppies” is sure to draw a debate, and therefore generate links from people who agree and disagree. Example: Polar Bear Future - Political or Scientific? Global warming, conservation, politics, and those cute, rip your arms off, white bears wrapped up in six words - who doesn’t want to read that? - Killer Apps
A tool or application that is so useful, bloggers and webmasters will link to it to spread the word. It could be a tool for checking inbound links, or a lure color selector based upon weather and water conditions. Example: Georgia DoT Traffic Counts on Google Maps An easy way for retail/commercial realtors to look up traffic counts for a proposed shopping center. - Humor
Everybody wants to share a joke, especially good ones. A collection of jokes, or one especially humorous one pertaining to your niche or industry is a sure way to draw links from related sites. Example: Fishing Jokes Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day?
Embed Tide Charts into Your Website with FreeTideTables.com
Author: Wade Sonenberg 03 28th, 2008I ran across this cool tool from FreeTideTables.com that allows you to embed an auto-updating tide chart or charts in your website or blog. It’s absolutely free, and they actually give you the code - all you have to do is copy and paste!
Here’s why this tool is even cooler than it looks:
- It’s a great resource for your visitors.
- It’s a simple and free way to differentiate your website or blog from the competition.
- It builds visitor loyalty, as they need to come back to the page over and over.
- It’s great link bait, which helps your search engine rankings.
Screeshot:
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Or view a live demo on my Bonefish Demo Website
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