I emailed my new VA, Jemelo, to ask him a few questions and here’s his response:

I’m sure you already know my name, the following are the answers to youre questions sir.

1. i am available through email and chat only.
2. i can’t do phone calls to someone in north america.
3. The SEO software that we have is SENUKE.
4. yes sir i am working 20 hours perm week.

what kind od SEO task i will be doing for you sir?

I am looking forward for your responce.

Since I’m looking for someone who can do a bit of article writing, and content editing, I decided his English wasn’t quite up to par.   Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrible…heck I’ve seen much, much worse from outsourcers…it’s just not good enough for my needs.

So I emailed First Page Web Search and told them about my dilemma.  They were completely cool with it and offered to assign me a replacement VA that had better English.

A day later, enter “Gerlyn”.  She seems better from my initial conversation with her.

For her first task, I wanted her to use SENuke with one of my client’s sites.  Since I’ve never used this software myself, I asked her what it could do as she wanted some direction.

SEnuke can make automated backlinking, social bookmarking, linkwheel, article submission, rss feeds submission, video submission and keyword research. This can make the work fast as it is automated.

Perfect.  So I gave her a list of page/keyword combinations via a shared Google Doc as well as 5 articles I had saved from a previous campaign.  Gerlyn said she’d get to work ASAP.

For my next update I’ll talk about how Gerlyn did on her first task with SENuke.

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.