I just saw a very interesting video post on SEOmoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/correlation-data-for-seo-and-social-media-analysis-part-2-whiteboard-friday

One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO.  I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings.  This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.

Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

Thoughts?

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!