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?компютриSo 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

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.

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’m going to keep this simple and will get more complicated in later posts. There are a few basic and simple things that you can do to help the Spiders and Bots Crawl your site and get the best information from it.

These are the areas I’m going to talk about in this session:

<title> tag
<Keyword> tag
<Description> tag
<h1> tag
alt text

<TITLE>
The <title> tag should include your keyword or keywords that your are optimizing for. I was lisenting to a pod cast the other day by a very good SEO and he suggest that if your keywords are “Pink Hats” and “Blue Hats” that your title tag look like this:

<title>Pink Hats | Blue Hats</title>

the reason is if the surfer typed in Pink Hats then the title is an exact match. Also the Search Engine see’s a relevant keyword in the title so the page must be about “Pink Hats” and “Blue Hats”
 If you choose not to do it this way then make sure that you don’t include any Stop words in the title like: is, a, no, the, at these word are very common and the search engine filters them out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Great articel  over on Pink Hat SEO about buying Comments on blogs. Very good read. 

 My take on this:

First- of all the aritcle calls out a SEO person whos name i will not mention in my post ( no reason to add juice to his name).

Second- Business is about time, money and what your good at. I implied in my comment to the post over on Pink Hat that i have not bought any Blog Comments. But im not so sure that it is not a viable way to generate traffic and links if done right.

Third- We tend to do what we are good at and pay someone else to do those things that we are not good at. So if you have an SEO that is a master at getting rated in the top 10 of Digg with Articles and Comments is it bad to pay that person to through some comments your way.

My  answer is— Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Boykin Just put up a new post on Internal link structure and gave some very good tips as to how it works. To include the use of the nofollow tag to pages that are not as important to your site such as the “Copyright” page or the “About” page. Even though Page Rank is not as important as it use to be this is a must read for those of us that don’t understand Page Ranks use.

If you want to know how link bait works Go and check out this post on Jim Boykin’s Blog.
This is a classic way to generate links he just got one from me.

Now this brings up a good point in that when your new to SEO and your reading the blogs they don’t always come right out and say “Step 1. Click here. Step 2 Type this in” You have to look at what is being done as well as what is being said.

So this morning i decided to just go out and try an experiment with an auto email link generator. The one im using is in the Free version of Web CEO. I customized the first contact template so it was a little more natural in its read. I’m having it send out 73 request to barter for links ie. I get a link and in return I promote there site with a blog post or article on a relevant site.  

I’m playing with a site that I have that only gets about 25 avg hits a day and only has about 20 pages on it. It’s highest ranking on Google for a relevant keyword is 21.  

I want to find out at least 2 things: 

1. What is the capture rate from these sites.
2. What if any is the negative effect.

I did pick the sites that it is sending to and I did weed out my competitors as not to have them report me to Google. I also turned of the feature that auto sends a second and third email. I don’t like spam.  But if it’s a valid business request is it SPAM? That sounds like another subject for later. 

Stand by for the results. 

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