Posts Tagged ‘todd-malicoat’
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…)
Linkbaiting on social networks like MyBlogLog, MySpace and BumpZEE is common, especially when Internet Marketers use pictures of bikini-clad women as their avatar.
While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.
If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.
The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.
At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.
But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.
Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.
Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you (more…)
Newer Internet Marketers continue to be confounded, bewildered and frustrated by RSS.
Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.
But what does it all mean?
And is it a new technology.
Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.
RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.
While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.
The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.
Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.
Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.
My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.
Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.
If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining (more…)
Tino Buntic, known for his What Do Bloggers Look Like? project, announced his new project, 2000 Bloggers.
Top row: Spot the guy who traded the giant red paperclip for a house?
That’s me in the top row, 2nd from the right.
In Tino’s own words:
There are dozens of social networks that bring the blogosphere together (more…)
2007 looks like it’s shaping up to have a whole lot more memes.
Some will obviously be interesting, fun and insightful. The bulk, unfortunately, will have…lots of room for improvement on being interesting, fun and insightful.
The more interesting (and slightly voyeuristic ones like the ‘5 Things About Me’) ones will tend to generate more social traffic, and attract longer term longevity and reader stickiness, especially if you come across as personable and likeable.
Sticky content is one of the foundations of sustainable and credible social traffic generation.
Yes, memes may seem to contain (more…)
