SEO a necessary evil?

Jason Calacanis: SEO is Crap.
Aaron: Scr*w you Man. Why did you create those empty pages with Keyword Elite Phrases as in the title and the URL?
Marshall Simmonds: You just need to write content to rank well. Just write using a template.

SEO have come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing, but has it come that far?
Truely speaking, SEO is no rocket science. White HAT SEO that is.

Black HAT can take rocket science level innovation and then throw away all of it and move on to a new innovation by the time google engineers come to learn of it.

But white hat?
Social engineering?
Digg Baiting?
Are these really SEO?

Why should I go out and pay a digg bait specialist, when I can just buy enough in content links to point to my internal pages that I want to rank.

But problem is, there are thousands of people out there who don't know hoot about the importance of inbound links, of H1 tags, duplicate contents and SILOs and such like.

Basic things that can send some traffic to a website.
Now for highly competitive niches, you need to have something of real value in order to get a link from an authority site. And an authority site won't link to you unless you have a REALLY great site, and if you have a really great site, you don't need to buy links anyway.

I mean SEO is all about links.
And links to internal pages.
From the content of another webpage.
That is releval to your site and very relevant to that page.

Link Exchange Techniques

But Link Exchange don't work anymore, or do they?
Well, it does and it doesn't.

Link exchanges have existed for as long as the birth of websites, and still is very popular among adult sites for its true purpose of traffic exchanges.

Then, Google came along, and started to rank websites and webpages based on the number of other sites or pages linking to it. And people started rampantly exchanging links beating the real purpose of google's algorithm. Because google ranked websites based on what other websites think about your site in context to the keyword being searched for, and what google was looking for are organic links or natural links. Artificial links beat the purpose of the Google Algorithm.

Link exchanges are artificial, but it can natural as well. You can link out to other related sites as a resource, and the same site could link you back as a resource naturally. And google knows this.

So, while rampant link exchanges or link farming might attract a google penalty, moderate and relevant link exchanges still work.

And link exchange is the easiest method of getting some incoming links. Forget about 3 way exchanges and stuff. Because Relevant Site "A" link to relevant "B" has the chance of being natural, but If "A" links to "B" and "B" links "C" and "C" links "A" and if there are enough repetitions, it looks like a artificial Link Love Triangle.

Link exchanges is best done by soliciting it. Find relevant sites and email them. If you have a new site and you find another new site, you will get an easy reciprocal link exchange. But since both the sites are new, it might not give you much ranking juice.

What you should find is a high ranking, established site.
But, why would an old established site link to you?

For one many established sites have a Link/Resource page.
And second, contrary to popular belief, he has more to gain by exchanging link with you than you would benefit from the exchange.
Why?
Because he is an established site, and chances are he has many other authority one way links, and reciprocal links should form just a percentage of your incoming links, and every reciprocal link becomes more beneficial if you have other forms of links.
Since you are a new site, chances are you only have low quality links, and every new reciprocal link makes your percentage of low quality links increase.

Anyway, so you may get some good established sites reciprocally linked to you.

But I would suggest that you start reciprocal exchanges only after you have submitted to a few hundred or thousand Directories to get at least a PR. Most people take you seriously if you have pagerank. I don't give much importance to PR, but many people still do.

Thirdly, when you approach a webmaster for link exchange, plan it out well.
This is the technique I am going to tell you today.

Say you have a website on Dog Training.
You want to solicit links for your site from other Dog Training sites.

1) Find your target site.

A Dog Naming site, or a Dog grooming site might be more interested in linking to you than a Dog Training site who will think you are in direct competition. Those are the easy targets. Get them first.

But a link from another dog training site would be more relevant.

2) Study the target site on Dog Training.

See what the most popular pages on the site are. See the pages on the sidebar.
Those are the key word variants he might be trying to rank.

Check how he is ranked for those keywords.
Never offer to give a link as "Dog Training" and never ask to get a link as "DOg Training"

Check some Dog Training keyword variants, and find out for which keywords he don't rank well.

EG: He only ranks at number 8 for Hunting Dog Training

Offer to link to him with the keyword "Hunting Dog Training" and ask for a keyword for which he don't seem to care. Like a poorly written article etc..
He will be happy in the offer, and he will respect you for your research.

You can subtly add if he would be willing for an in-content link exchange :)

Happy Link Building

Dealing with Image bandwidth Thieves to your Link Building Advantage

This post will help you manage people who are hotlinking to your images, to your advantage. You can actually use the bandwidth thieves to your advantage by changing the way you upload the pictures.

Are you not tired of seeing new incoming links on your dashboard only to find out that someone link to your picture without giving any credit, and it is just an image hotlink?

I have a blog with a relevant picture on every posts, and since the picture are relevant, I rank very well in google Image search. Well, and I get a new hotlink almost everyday. Sometimes more.

Earlier, I used to mail to leave a comment to at least provide an img source so that I get a link back to my site. They usually don't listen. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they just remove the picture. And I can't go around leaving comments.
Then I realised something.

Understand this:

Image bandwidth thieves are a Lazy Lot.
They could have uploaded the image to their own posts/articles, but they were too lazy to do that. Most of them are blogspot users, and have no dearth of bandwidth.

And just because they are lazy, they just copy the image link source code.

So how do you use it to your advantage?

Usually when we upload a photo on a blog, the code is like img src the image url and then the image links back to the same image using an HREF.

Something like
<br /><br /><a href="www.site.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/pic.jpg"><img alt="About the picture" src="htt://www.site.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/pic.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />

And the hotlinker usually copies the whole lot.. This is where we can use it to our advantage.

So what I have done is is I changed the href part to link back to the webpage and not the image... SO that the image links back to the webpage or blogpost url and not the image placeholder in WP-UPLOAD directory.

The above code now looks like:

<br /><br /><a href="www.site.com/my-blog-post"><img alt="About the blogpost" src="htt://www.site.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/pic.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />
The net result?

80% of my hotlinkers link back to my site, though without an anchor text.
But I use the ALT attribute wisely.

The picture are relevant to my Post or Page and usually the article that is hotlinking is also relevant to my original article, and I get some link juice..

Happy Link Building

Dealing with Image Bandwidth Thieves

Free Directory Lists for Link Building

Here are a links to lists of thousands of free directory.

1) Directory Critic.


2) Directoryrate

3) info.vilesilencer

4) Best web directories

5) web-directories.ws

6) seocompany.ca

7) directorylist.org

8) Addurl.nu

9) Digital Point Sticky on Directory lists

Niche Tasting using Blogger!

Whenever I plan start a new website, I usually start out by creating a blogger blog. I use the keywords in the URL. eg niche-keyword-one.blogspot.com .
I add lots of content. Mostly rewritten news articles.
I provide a link to that site from a few sites that I own.

If the niche is easy to rank, I start getting some google visitors.
With 3 incoming links, and about 30 blog posts, if I am getting about 50-60 visitors a day, I know that I have low maintenance niche.

I create about 4-5 similar blogs, interlink them, and just leave them there. The visitors usually stays at 50-60 levels for a long time.

What I do then, is import the posts from the first blog to a new wordpress blog hosted on own domain. I them modify the content. It is much easier to modify content or rewrite than start afresh.

Then I buy about 30-40 unique contents from content writers, not PLRs. ( you get decent articles at 5 dollars a pop). Now, I don't reply on bought content for my sites. And content is what I am good at, but I can't write 40-50 articles at a go, so I buy the initial articles. But I keep adding contents, and links. One thing I am bad at is designing, so I never try my hand at designing.

Now, once you have modified the imported contents, link all the blogger blogs you had set up to this wordpress blog.Add a few more links by doing limited link exchange..
Let it grow for 5-6 months, adding articles once in a while.Adding links once in a while. Also submit to directories manually..

And after 5-6 months, start submitting to directories in small bulks.

You should be able to earn 2-10 dollars a day depending on the niche. And how good your contents are.

Rinse and repeat!
PS:Wordpress is also good, but I can't insert adsense code for occassional adsense click, so I stick to blogger.

Directory Submissions How much is too much?

For every webmasters, specially rookies and amateurs, Directory submissions is still the easiet way to get links. And people often ask, How much is too much?

Can I submit to hundred directories in a day, 500? 1000?

You would often hear that you can submit to as many directories as you could posible submit, because acceptance wil be staggered.

But this is what I do, and this is what seems to work.

Instead of buying a 1000 directory submission, go for those 100-200 directory submissions. And stagger the submission by a month or so. From 100-200 directories, you may get accepted to 40-50, and if you had provided 5 unique titles and about 3-4 descriptions, you will have a good spread of different titles.

And usually, different directory submitters have different directory lists, and even though you stand the chance of submitting to the same directory again and again, using defferent service providers could give you dfferent directory lists, and usually the 100 directory submissions tend to be the top PR quality directories.

S0 if you get accepted at the rate of 40 each directory submission of 100-200, and you have bought 5 different services, providing each with 5 different sets of titles, you have 25 different titles in about 200 quality directories.

I would say that is good work!!

Pagerank is so irrelevant

Another nice article that demystifies Google PR from Jim Boykin.

I’m kind of suprised at how many people are still stuck in some SEO technique timewarp of what was effective in 1999. For those of you who weren’t into SEO in the 90’s, I’ll give you a brief story of why there’s the thought that links from PR4 or higher pages are ones that "count".

Traveling back to the 90’s and early 2000’s….back when there were these monthy Google Dances. Back then, about once a month, there’d be a big shuffle in rankings….and those rankings would stay pretty stable for the month, until the next dance day. On the Google Dance day, not only would rankings shift, but so too would the Google Toolbar. Pagerank would update accross the board, and the backlinks numbers would also change….and they were mostly accurate except for 1 thing.

How so true?
But if you are selling text link ads and there are buyers who loves Page ranks, why not go for it...

Where to look for Links?

Links are the bread and butter for website owners and SEOs.
More so relevant links?

We all love links, But Where do you go looking for links?
One good source for links have always been technorati.
Do a technorati/search/The_Site for highly linked blog from your niche.

Send a polite email to all the sites linking to that blog.
Target those sites with less inbound links.
Leave them comments.
Or rather, link to them and ask if they wouldn't mind a reciprocal link.
if you already have a blog or site with a good PR, they might even give you 2-3 links :)

Enjoy Link Love!!