Well as we are all looking for links you might thing about jumping on the “Pay Per Post” band wagon. As we know all links are good links (some better than others) and what they write about you is not relavant because Search Engines dont have a way to tell if its a bad review or good review(yet).

So to do some research on this i went over to PayPerPost.com (not going to give them a link) and opened an account ($50 min) and created a ad to be posted. That was 3 days ago and it still has not been aproved as of the writing of this post. I also opened an account as a bloger to see what they pay out and how hard it is to get paid and to get the work. The bloger account is not active yet either.

So here is what i found:

Ad opportunities can have and set requirements like a minimum Pagerank that your blog has to meet. Also they may have an alexa requirement. Ads can set the level of these and they do. Currently there are on 155 Ad opportunities available and not many of them are available to a PR 3 blog. The minimum that you are going to pay for a post with a link is $5 plus the PayPerPost fee. For $50 that means you are going to get 6 post with about $4.50 left over in your account. I wounder what happens to that left over money?So what so bad about this? I don’t think it is the end of blog credability but I think its just a passing fad. Look you can go to Google Blog Search and search for relevent blogs to your subject and write a comment on 10 blogs an hour and get those links for free. Why pay for them.So the Short Bus SEO rule is don’t pay for what you can get for free.

I have seen a recent jump in my rankings for one of my sites and i attribute it to a couple of things. 

First is pages focused on the main subject. My pages are focused on the keyword that i want to rank for and there for i do. Because of that and some good links i now sit in the #2 position in the SERP for my main keyword. This has brought a number of goodies. More natural links because other sites will like to the top couple of sites more often than a site on page 2 of the SERP.

Second i was recently reviewed and added to DMOZ. This had a unexpected result. What i didn’t understand is that there are a lot of Scraper sites out there that take the DMOZ results and add them to their sites. So I have found links to my site on a lot of these type of sites. I do get some traffice from DMOZ but i have yet to see any traffic from any of the scraper sites that have my link on them.

The addition of my site in DMOZ is most likely what moved me from #4 in the SERP to #3. This then brough me more natural links which then moved me up to #2 which again brought more natural links.

The same might be said for Yahoo Directory also if you want to pay for the listing.

So if you havent submited your site to DMOZ you need to put it on your list of things to do. I can directly relate my increase in traffic over the last three months to this. When i say increase in traffic i mean it has doubled twice over the last three months and is still growing. It could not have happened at a better time

With the winter hollidays coming up fast its time to take advantage of all that new traffic. One of the best ways to do that is thru link baiting. For example i have a site Gumbo City that is all about Gumbo Recipes that has been slowly and naturally climbing up the SERPS and is now #2 for the keyword “Gumbo Recipes”. Its climbing because of post like this and others where i get the site out there and build natural traffic. It has arrieved at a good spot just before the hollidays where Gumbo will be in its prime search months. So now i need to start a campain to build natural links by driving more traffic to the site. Link Baiting is the way to go. If you are here its because you saw the link bait title. So follow thru and go visit my Gumbo site and do the same for your sites and go fishing with link bait to build up your holliday traffic and natural links.

Ok, lesson learned here. I have a new website that i set up and just put a few links to and let it set. Couple of weeks ago i started to get a lot of visits to the site and all i get from Google Analytics is that it is ‘Direct Trafffic’? Where is it all coming from? I got now clue because i know i was doing some postings and adding some links but i didn’t write any of it down. If i had i might beable to figure it out and repeat it. So Start a spread sheet and log what you do to every website it will come back to bit you if you don’t.

I have a simple little site called Gumbo City that is of course about gumbo recipes and was the first website that I created. I created it because a friend of mine had a simple recipe site that was making about $20 a day with only about 12 pages on it. (That site is now ranked #1 on SERP for a very good keyword and is making about $40 a day) Any way I digress, point is this. While I did follow the Google Webmaster guides for sites and a few other SEO techniques it has never been a exciting site and I don’t do much with it at this point. It has slowly and naturally been building in traffic. It has gone been going up about 10-15 hits a week for some time now. I did add a blog to it because it was just a strait html site to start with. The blog just lets me add fresh content easer. After that it did jump in ranking some. It has been on and off the first page of the SERP for 6 months. In the last 3 months it has been sitting at number #4 for the keyword “gumbo recipe”. And as expected traffic took a jump and moved up over the 100 hits a day. Now this is not a great feat realize that I do nothing to this site other than maybe add a new recipe once a week. I’m not out looking for links or marketing this site it is all natural. I got a boost in traffic by moving to the #4 position that was noticeable. About 3 weeks ago the site moved up to the #3 spot and again I got a noticeable jump in traffic. Could I get this site to #1? Yea I could with effort but the ROI is not worth it. The site is better information to me by watching it grow on its own which is the point to this post.

The last 2 days the traffic to the site doubled and I had no clue as to why till I talked to my wife last night. I made a comment that the site had doubled in traffic and that I wasn’t sure why. She got this look on her like a cat that was hiding a mouse and promptly told me that she knew something that I didn’t. I hate that. Any way she proceeded to tell me that Rachel Ray had show on of all things “Gumbo”.  I went back and looked at my stats and sure enough starting at about that time the traffic started to roll in. This is one of the Best examples that I have seen of offsite events effecting traffic.

So make a list of known events and make sure that you have content and keywords that reflect these so when these type of things happen that you are set to take advantage of them.

It’s truly refreshing when you find a site that brings something new to the world. Danielle over a Pink Hat SEO discusses Internet Marketing in an easy to read but concise way. You can learn from this site and Danielle in ways that at first you don’t realize. Take a look at her site and look at the placement of her call to action items.  I liked her site so much that Pink Hat SEO is one of only 7 links that I have in my blog roll. She has earned a spot there with the likes of Jim Boykin, Matt Cutts, and SEOMoz. Keep up the great work Danielle.

What is it worth to you to be number 1 in the search results for your keyword. AOL does a yearly release as to the click rates for the top 10 spots on the first page of search results.

Here is the way it breaks down for last year.

For Positions ranking from 1 - 10, the % of clicks for:

Rank 1: 42%
Rank 2: 12%
Rank 3: 9%
Rank4: 6%
Rank5: 5%
Rank6: 4%
Rank7: 3%
Rank 8: 3%
Rank 9: 3%
Rank 10: 3%

Yes i know it does not add up to 100% that is because i rounded the numbers and the rest of the clicks go to the lower level pages.

Now look at your visits per day for you keyword and figure out what your current percentage is and then what it could be by being number 1.

The following is a list of 18 key things that i check for each page i add to my websites. Now there are some other things that i do but its more of a web design issue like no java menus. Bots can’t read java and there for can not navigate your site. If you do have neato java menus make sure that you have a strait link menu in the footer and a site map.

The other thing that i recomend is to get the free version

of Web CEO. I used it on my first couple of sites and it servered me well. I ran the page optimization check on all of my pages and followed its advice. Those pages are all ranked well. After you do it a couple of times you will see a pattern and learn to fix them as you create new pages. Most of the items in the check list are vaildated in Web CEO

1.     Key Words
2.     Page File Name includes keyword
3.     <title>TAG includes keyword
4.     Descrition TAG includes keyword
5.     First H1 Tag is keyword
6.     At least 1 link anchor text includes keyword
7.     Key word close to beginning of the <body>tag
8.     Key word in body of content
9.     Key word near end of Content
10.   Content at least 250 words long.
11.   Graphics have Alt=keywords
12.   Original Content
13.   Use full outbound links
14.   Link to internal pages with text link in content.
15.   Validate all links are good
16.   No hidden text. i.e white text on white background.
17.   Inbound Links Get some.
18.   Update Site map

I found this post over on SeinorMag and it just goes to show you that some websters just don’t get it. There is nothing Quick about these tips, not to say that they are bad tips they just aren’s Quick tips. I just get tired of People link baiting to substandard info. Good grief if your going to spend the effort to do good link bait send me to good info.  So lets break these Quick tips down.

11 Quick Tips To Drive More Return Traffic To Your Business Website  

by: Christoph Puetz

Sometimes you need a kick start to get of the ground when promoting your new business website. Use these 11 tips to get started. A combination of several tips will most likely guarantee return visitors on your website. Return visitors most likely mean more sales.

Content is King, Basic Keyword Research, Basic Page Optimization I think that covers his first tip. This tip is for the long run meaning you want your site to grow in organic links and popularity.

1. Build a solid business foundation before starting. Create a business plan (this should be document revisited every quarter), marketing plan, client profile, and a site map for your web site.

Read the rest of this entry �

 I am looking for ways to increase my relevant traffic to my sites and one of the ways I’m trying is the Stumbleupon.com advertising. This advertising cost .05 cent per page view and brings up your entire site. I dropped $50.00 buck into it and added a couple of my sites to the campaign. I did start to see the increase in traffic once the site was registered but the capture rate is not really good enough for me to keep the ads running. Now the issue as I see it is that because the categories that you can list your site under are so general that when they hit your site it is very likely that it is not what they are really interested in. This causes them to just stumble on past it with out any capture. If you have a site that maps directly to a listed Categories you may do better than my sites. I am adding a different site to the campaign that fits the categories better to see if I get better results. As with any ad campaign that you do it is most important that when your visitor gets to your site that it is relevant to what they though they were clicking on.