Categories
seo

Bad Times, Bad SEO

As a bad taste SEO techniques adopter a company called Sitelynx on behalf of the The Times (UK) was spamming media sites with links. Why would a reputable publication like The Times fall for black-hat SEO techniques is another story. What is interesting is that a report on Waxy.org looks like a breakdown to bootstrapping your web site. Well, at least a part of it. Comments give an idea what was done wrong, what worked and what didn’t. Very interesting indeed.

Last week I was participating in another experiment with Freshmeat.net. A lot of pages there have PR 3 and above, so it was naturally a good idea to comment away. However, moderators appear to be quite on guard, so most of the experimental posts and accounts went down the drain couple of days after the end.

Categories
seo

Free Link Bait

Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

  1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
  2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
  3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
  4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
  5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
  6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
  7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
  8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
  9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.

Categories
blog

Blogging Away

At the earliest convenience registered myself at some other paying services such as ReviewMe, Smorty, Zookoda, TNX. Research shows that you have to have established blog with good pagerank if you really want to get any real money off of paid posts. However, links in those posts matter much more then actual content. The real problem, of course, is that Google doesn’t like paid links. So, there is a real dilemma – how to get good writing gigs without damaging your Google score (that is PageRank).

Some interesting ideas have been flowing through recently. We’re designing a software utility that will automate certain things in blog management, as well as create some unique opportunities in Search Engine Optimization. More on that later.