Just been looking at my statistics tonight and I am pleased to report that according to Google Analytics Sphinn has sent 286 unique visitors to my last article Linking To The BBC Will Boost Your Google Ranking.
When I wrote the traffic estimate article on the 19th of February I said that on average it would send between 50-200 unique visitors to a popular story, but to be honest with you I had never seen anything above 120 or so, someone else persuaded me to raise it to 200.
Is this a normal amount of frontpage traffic for Sphinn now? Or was I just lucky? Should I update the traffic estimate article? Or not?
May 10th, 2008
O.K. I am going to pick on The Times because it is funny. On Sunday they published an article entitled Searching to get to the top of Google.
Most of the article is O.K. and it is nice to see SEO getting mentioned in a major newspaper, however some of their facts are a little off.
On the 3rd page of the article it says the following:
“As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.”
There is a common mis-conception that linking to authoritative websites can boost a website’s rankings in the search engines and I have spoken to many people who have thought this before. This is of course not true, linking to a website can improve it’s rankings, linking out from one cannot.
This has got to be great linkbait for the BBC and the all of the National newspapers, I can just see all the Sunday Times readers going out and linking them now. Who knows, maybe they made the mistake on purpose.
Posted in Google By David Eaves
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May 6th, 2008
I have given article submission a good bashing in the past mainly because of the way most people approach it. However recently with the web directories not working the way they used to and stuff I have been trying everything to compete with paid links.
The way I saw it was if I was going to do article submissions I was going to do them right. I had one article wrote for each of the directories I was going to submit to, if someone else decided to publish it fine but I wasn’t going to let them take the rankings of the original articles.
On Ezine Articles I worked out that if I could get so many page views on an article it would get massive internal linkage from the entire category. With this one fairly lengthy article about choosing engagement rings I needed about 1,000 page views or so. I did it and to my surprise the article now has 6,900 mainly internal links, a Google PageRank of 4/10 and good juice with Yahoo!
Here’s how you do it:
1/ Create one good quality original article (at least 250 words long).
2/ Create an Ezine member profile, try to make it look as professional as possible, add a picture etc. and submit your article.
3/ Try and find a couple of friends to help you to promote the article on some of the social networks, plead with your Stumble friends etc. With the one that I did I tried making a joke about how boring it was to get some of my friends to vote it.
4/ Get your page views up to a high enough score to make sure that you are going to be safely in the most viewed in the last 90 day category for a long time and pick up a few do follow links a long the way.
5/ Wait for the next PageRank update and you are done.
The article marketing has been fairly successful, the ones I did on Ezine and Ezilon both got a PageRank 4/10, rank fairly well and send regular traffic which is an added bonus.
I apologise to any Stumblers etc. who had to look at any of the articles. If you really want to see the Ezine article here is the link. Try not to fall asleep.
Posted in Link Building By David Eaves
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April 30th, 2008
I have been experimenting with linkbaiting for my clients for that 8 months or so now and so far the ROI has been fairly poor. Some of the linkbaits that I have done gained links from many of the top blogs on the net and still I have seen no marked improvements in rankings on any of the websites. Here are 3 of the most successful baits:
1. Messy Desks Failing the Tidy Test
I sorted out this article for Calibre Office Furniture around about 6 months ago now, it has had tons of trackbacks and it is still getting links now. As far as I can tell this linkbait has had no over all impact on Calibre’s search engine rankings.
2. How Much Social Media Traffic
I did this article about 2 months or so ago now and it has received quite a few decent links. Over all I have seen no general improvements in rankings.
3. Unfinished or Abandoned Structures in Florida
I sorted out this article for Direct Villas Florida about 3 weeks or so ago now and as far as linkbait goes it doesn’t get much more successful then this. The article has had 82,000 page views and it has been linked to by some amazing blogs. The article itself ranks reasonably well on Google but overall there have been no signs of improvement.
For blogs trying to get page views I absolutely and 100% recommend linkbaiting but for e-commerce websites even IF you get it right it could be a bad investment and there could be more effective link building strategies out there.
Posted in Link Building By David Eaves
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April 10th, 2008
Image Credit: copyright
The following post has been written by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, more of his articles can be found at his blog.
There are a number of ways to protect your blog from piracy, but there is a tangible cost no matter what you do, and sometimes letting them steal it actually helps you in the long-run.
The first method of protection is filing DMCA requests with Google, other search engines, and perhaps the host of the site scraping your content. But honestly this can be tough to keep up with if it happens over and over again, and is probably a poor strategy given that the internet is truly global.
An easier method of protecting copyright is to simply publish partial feeds instead of whole RSS feeds. This means that while an RSS scraper may steal your content, they will not be getting much of it from you, and what they get should not be able to harm your rankings.
The third strategy is to use their content theft as an SEO & link building strategy. If you frequently reference your older blog posts in your current blog posts (using absolute links - not relative links) that means that the scraper sites will be providing free links to your content. Over time as you build up a real audience and your authority you should *usually* outrank the scrappers for your own content. A friend of mine named Joost de Valk created a Wordpress extension which automatically adds links to your site in the footer of your RSS. If you have pages that are hard to build links to and hundreds or thousands of scrappers are linking to them that could help boost your rankings for related keywords. If you use an extension like RSS Footer make sure you mix up your anchor text and footer occasionally in case anyone trained their bot to strip it out AND to help keep your anchor text profile a bit more natural.
Copyright is increasingly irrelevant each day, and being unknown is a bigger risk for most bloggers than getting outranked is. If you really push eventually you should get credit for most (if not all) of your content. In the next year or two if they have not yet solved the RSS scrapper issue I believe the major search engines may launch tools to help you register your content by submitting it to them before publishing it so they know the source.
Many people copied my ebook and distributed it across the web widely without my permission. My three solutions to that were to either encrypt it with DRM software, stop selling information, or break information into smaller pieces and keep adding premium content and sell it as a membership site basis. Instead of giving up or crippling my product I decided to launch an online training program and back it up with a community forum that turns it into more of an experience rather than just a commodity piece of information.
Posted in SEO By Aaron Wall
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March 21st, 2008
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