Just some general rules I like to follow when running an SEO campaign.  Hopefully you find some of these helpful!

1. Keep the Content Fresh
   • At the least, a new post or page every week is great to keep the search engine bots continually crawling your site.  Plus the more pages your domain has the better.   The total Google PR for your entire domain can not exceed the # of pages.  So if you have a 1 page site you’ll never have higher than PR 1.
   • Yes I realize there’s irony in this point because I don’t update this blog nearly that often.  But I suppose that’s because this isn’t an income stream for me, I’m just doing it for fun, so I don’t really care too much about its SEO.
   • If you’re using a blogging platform, remember to use tags, as each tag creates yet another page.
2. Find Forums to Post in that have Do-Follow Signature Links
   • Be the first to respond to new threads so your sig will appear near the top of the page
   • Try to write useful, respectful comments, and not obvious spam…you know who you are…silly spammers
3. Submit your RSS Feeds to Directories
   • Search engines love RSS feeds, probably because they are great followers of Tip #1 (Keep the Content Fresh), and constantly updating
   • Two of the major ones are Feedage.com and Feedagg.com
4. Use ‘title’ and ‘alt’ HTML Tags for Images
   • This way you’ll get bonus traffic from search engine image searches, such as Google and Bing (my new favorite).
5. Social Bookmarking Rules
   • It’s powerful because each bookmark not only creates multiple backlinks (due to the tags), but also because of the “social” aspect your bookmark could appear on a “top bookmarks” page (with high PR) if other users vote or submit it as well.
   • With SocialAdr your webpages can be bookmarked (to 15 or so of the major social bookmarking services) up to 420 time per month.  And that’s just with the ‘Free’ account!
6. Keyword Research is ‘Key’
   • This is one of the (if not THE) most important parts of an effective SEO campaign.  Too many people rush through it and don’t take the time to realize either (a) there’s weak traffic for the keywords they’re targeting or (b) the competition is insane and it’s virtually impossible for them to get on Page 1 of Google.
   • I use a handy app called Micro Niche Finder – it saves a lot of time compared to using the free tools
   • The free method is simply using the Google External Keyword Tool to find how much traffic each keyword gets and Google (search for the keyword “in quotes”) to find how much competition you have.   I prefer > 1000 searches / month with less than 20,000 competition.  But there’s a lot of wiggle room in those numbers.

For the last couple months I’ve been working on this new Web 2.0 social bookmarking services community.

What is it all about?

• Rather than submitting merely your own bookmarks to the many services available (like Digg, BlinkList, Delicious, etc.), members submit each others’ bookmarks
• This makes it less likely that you’ll be considered a “spammer” for constantly promoting only your own sites
• This also gives your pages potential to be bookmarked many times with each service, rather than only once like you would do for yourself
• The bookmark submission process happens behind the scenes and is fully automated. You only need to enter your account details once.
• Members are encouraged to only submit quality pages; we don’t want to promote garbage
• The functionality is easy-to-use…it literally takes seconds to add your own bookmarks or to share other members’ bookmarks.
• No more messing around with different tag formats!  SocialAdr takes care of all that craziness for ya.

What prompted me to create this website was a few things:

• Even though SocialMarker is a very useful tool, it can be extremely time consuming because it still involves a lot of manual dragging-and-dropping.  Just to submit a single webpage to 20 services usually takes half an hour!
• I thought about “link sharing” networks which are (as far as I can tell) getting to be pretty outdated in the ever-evolving interweb.  I wanted to come up with a way to combine that philosophy with Web 2.0 social networks and social bookmarking.
• I’m a member of Traffic Drill, a forum in which members can request other members to bookmark their webpages.  But since the bookmarking process is manual and unable to be controlled in a “fair” manner, it’s entirely possible for a member to contribute WAY more to the community than they receive (I was a perfect example of this).  I think it’s a great idea, but I saw room for improvement.
• There’s many software packages out there that do social bookmarking submissions, but for each webpage you have, it’ll only be submitted once to every service.  With SocialAdr, you can potentially have your webpage submitted tens or hundreds of times to each service!  Instead of merely 1 backlink, you’ll get 10, 20, 30…50…etc.  And this all happens on auto-pilot.

I’ve had beta testers in the system for about two weeks now and they’ve been great!  Lots of bugs have been fixed and new features added.

Hopefully in a few more weeks I’ll be able to open it up to the public!

If you’re interested in helping beta test (it’s really not that difficult and you’ll get free backlinks and traffic while doing it), you can either read this WarriorForum thread, or contact me for more info.

 

Edit [Sep 12, 2009] – It’s now open to the public, so go get your FREE account now!

I recently figured out a neat trick for getting a YouTube video to show up on Page 1 of Google search results.  We all know that YouTube = Google, so that makes this technique even more powerful than if it was done with some random video site that may be shut down or Google may someday decide to ignore.

Disclaimer:

This trick used to work great before the YouTube blog was changed to a Blogger platform.  Now there’s a “NOFOLLOW” attribute on the comment hyperlinks, so it’s arguable how effective this is anymore.  But if you want to try it…give ‘er!   Report back if it seems to work.

Here’s what ya gotta do:

1. Create a YouTube profile, if you haven’t already.
2. Upload a video that’s been keyword-optimized for the Google search phrase you’re targeting.  This means the title of the video should be your long-tail keyword.  Like “make money online fast”.
3. Create a Blogger profile (Frank’s is just an example), if you haven’t already.  Add a backlink in the “About Me” section which goes to your YouTube profile URL.  Again, use the keyword you’re targetting.
4. Visit the YouTube Blog.
5. Find a story to comment on.
6. For the “Comment As” field select “Google Account”.
7. Write  a respectful, relevant comment.
8. You should be prompted to log into your Blogger account when you click “Preview” or “Post Comment”
9. Notice a few things,
   • The Blog page has PR of 9…that’s HUGE!
10. Wait for your video to appear in Google search results.
11. ?
12. ?
13. Profit

Done and done.

Lately I’ve been wondering what Google favors more – fresh, unique content or quality (PR 4 or higher) backlinks.

There’s oceans of people that are on either side of the argument.  Some say it’s best to have lots of one-way backlinks from respected, authority sites.  Others say it’s best to be constantly adding new, unique content.

Personally I think both are useful in their own way.  But the nerd inside of me wants to figure out the “magic formula”.  Should I spend 50% of my time on each, or 80% on content and 20% on backlinks?  It’s quite the quandary.

So I’ve decided to perform a test.  The parameters and execution of the test won’t be perfect, as there’s only one of me and I’m not a robot.  But nevertheless, I’m hoping it can provide some useful insight into this problem.

Here’s what I aim to do:

• Site A (CONTENT)
  
  • Niche topic to be determined
  • A subdomain of an existing generically-named domain that I own (primary keyword subdomain name, with “A” on the end)
  • WordPress template with all SEO-related plugins activated
  • Initial content will be 2 or 3 posts, keyword-rich, appropriately tagged
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one new article a day for a month
  • Each article will use the keywords that I’m targeting
• Site B (BACKLINKS)
  • Same subdomain setup as Site A, but with “B” on the end
  • Same WordPress setup
  • Same initial content, but each post rewritten to be unique
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one high-PR backlink a day for a month
  • No new posts

Sounds like fun, eh?   Does anyone have a prediction on which site will rank higher with Google at the end of the month?

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SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
   • 
9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
   • 

So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking