SEO best practises, especially linkbuilding (off-site SEO) has come to the forefront since social networks have built critical mass in the last couple of years. Some ambiguous/enigmatic practices with regards to giving backlinks to users has left SEO specialists like Aaron Wall, Rae Hoffman, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Dave Naylor amused, puzzled, frustrated and at times outright indignant.
[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]
So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.
Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?
Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.
So some human intervention is needed to review content.
And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are (more…)
Michael Gray AKA Graywolf has been twittering about Blackhole SEO posts from the likes of Aaron Wall and Quadzilla recently. Although he hasn’t published his own post yet, it’ll be something to look forward to.
What is Blackhole SEO anyway?
As described by BlueHat SEO Eli, it’s where link authority AKA ‘link juice’ is trapped (more…)
At the recent Affiliate Summit, Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds and SEO veteran presented some of his latest techniques in optimizing your website rankings in the search engines.
Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.
From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.
Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.
Knol pages have ranked prominently (more…)
As top affiliate marketer Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project moves into week 3, there’ve been a number of great guests who’ve presented and will be presented in the series.
First off, the site has undergone a design revamp:
Looking very sharp.
Yesterday (Monday), my buddy Amit Mehta presented his series of Pay-Per-Click strategies – the slides and recorded presentation are available for download.
Today, SEO specialist Aaron Wall will be presenting SEO and linking strategies.
It looks like the Black Ink Project will get many new affiliates off to a flying start.
On Friday, I’ll be presenting a session on social marketing strategies and building your online brand.
If you don’t already have access to this quality training, you should register at:
–> The Black Ink Project
If you use SEO (search engine optimization), you’d know that off-site optimization ranks higher in importance than on-site optimization. Being able to measure the number and quality of inbound links will give you an idea of the type of traffic your efforts generate.
Going from the social marketing angle, rather than looking at it from the search engine’s point of view, I’d look for links from high trustrank sites – these would typically be authoritative blogs and websites in your niche, and the traffic will send over will be higher quality too.
One indispensable tool I have installed in my Firefox browser is the SEO Quake extension. (extension = Firefox plugin).
SEO Quake is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
When I’m at a search engine result page, SEO Quake will gather various analytics data and domain data.
For example, when combining Google Blog Search with SEO Quake:
It’s a little small, but below each search result is (more…)
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I go into 5 important considerations if you’re serious about building your web business this year.
Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.
Enjoy!
Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:Â 4.5 mb
Notes:
I get many questions about the tactical aspects of internet marketing, like what’s the best webhost, which is the best CPA network, how to configure a xml datafeed, how to use an autoresponder, which is the best ebook.
If you’re interested, I mention a number of these in the course of my blogging and i’ve listed a couple in my recommendations tabs.
But here’s the kicker, although these ‘technical’ questions represent about 90% of the questions that get asked, it’s the 10% of other questions that will help you grow your business and explode your profits!
The other questions deal with building your business, and positioning it for long term growth.
At the root of it,
Succeeding in internet marketing is simple and fundamental
1) Find a need.
2) Match it with a solution (could be a product/service)
Macro Issues in Internet Marketing
Most important than the ‘how do i learn HTML’ type questions are the macro or higher level considerations of your business strategy.
Your business strategy works as a business plan or blueprint to help you identify what you should or should not be doing.
It also goes into how you should be doing it.
If done correctly, your business plan will give you the answers to the questions you might be wondering about – like how do I select a partner, how much should i budget for my expenses and how much you should charge for your products, which offers or products should i promote.
Your business blueprint will drive what you do and when you’re stuck or you’re wondering about the next action you should take, it determines which of the tiny pieces of blog or affiliate or seo or ppc tools and software you will need.
I want to give you 5 important factors to take note of as you’re building your business this year.
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1) TRUST
If you’ve dealt with a bank, insurance provider, realtor or another service provider who’s serious about building a long term relationship, you’ll notice that they will spend time to get to know you and what you’re about. If they were to try to force you to buy something the first time you met, it would seriously damage or even kill the relationship.
A significant part of the success I experienced in my business last year was due to the network i built up and the relationships and contacts i had made.
Spend a moment to think about the people you consider your good friends, and the people you do business with.
what is it that makes you trust them?
How would you bring those values and attitudes into your business?
Consciously or unconsciously, we buy from people we like and we trust.
As an internet marketer and as an affiliate,
promotion doesn’t always need to be something that you’re an affiliate or something you own. Might be a free resource.
You may not benefit from it, but your audience could stand to benefit greatly from.
Take a look at the products that prominent marketers like Wil Reynolds, Shawn Collins, Geordie Carswell, Sam Harrelson talk about and mention on their blogs.
Aaron Wall provides a number of free equivalents for products which other marketers are charging hundreds of dollars for, in a list of resources in his SEO Book. His intention is to help you grow your business and that builds trust.
Build trust.
You might recommend something free today, but if you build up your social goodwill bank (refer to blog post), you will reap the rewards later.
*** on a strong, reliable and trusted recommendation, conversions can be higher than 50%.
(more…)
