This blog is a DO FOLLOW comment blog. Why? Because we believe Google should ban spam not blogs linking to each other for legitimate reasons. Also, commenters should be rewarded for good comments by pimping their sites a little bit. Good for direct traffic and good for SEO.
Here’s the graphic of our official position:
Of course, we don’t want our site to be infested by spamtastic links next to crappy comments so we make sure to upgrade to the latest versions of WP, we have Akismet turned on, and we heavily moderate for quality comments. What are the quality comments we are looking for? Anything that engages conversation–questions, suggestions, offering tidbits.
The difference between Spam and Content
Spam, by itself, is too salty. To make it taste better, Hawaiians wrap it in nori (dried seaweed wrapper), put in some rice dabbed with a swig of some rice vinegar, and some egg. From SPAM to Hawaiian spam musubi. From a salty piece of pork to a Polynesian delicacy. Use that same philosophy when making backlinks. Use real content. Participate.
Everyone’s got their own guess as to how Bing works. Current speculation centers on whether Bing copies Google’s recent devaluation of certain link strategies like link scupting and Google’s crackdown on paid links. One thing’s for sure, based on our recent experiment on the effect of DO FOLLOW social bookmark linkbuilding, Bing is not very discriminating. Notice the nice bump in the traffic chart below.
We’re continuing our tests and also looking at other tests for Bing–duplicate content tolerance, meta tag impact, and other key SEO variables. Check this blog often for updates
Watch out for these all too common link directory scam and spam tactics. You are sure to lose time, effort, and/or link juice because of these bullshit shenanigans.
Warning No. 1: Link Directory Sucker Method
If you frequent webmaster forums at all, you’re probably well aware of link directory owners recruiting webmasters to register with their PR 5 or (even) PR 6 directories. Be very careful before you even waste time on these. Many buy dropped domains with Page Rank. After some time, due to the difference in niches and other factors, the Page Rank resets to a lower figure. Sometimes even PR 0.
Why do they do it?
Guys who run this scam trick you into populating their link directory quickly so they can then sell spots later. The more aggressive ones require that you link back. You would think: Page Rank 5 backlink in exchange for my Page Rank 1 backlink, what’s not to love? Sounds good at first but later you discover that your page rank is actually higher than theirs. You end up holding the (empty) bag.
How to avoid this scam
In order to not waste your time on a crappy directory or WORSE, propping up a scummy directly with your hard earned Page Rank link juice, run a whois.sc check on the domain. See if it’s been dropped. Run the page rank through several page rank checkers available via google search to see if there’s a discrepancy or anomaly in PR.
Warning No. 2: Paid Blog Post Scam
It’s a fact of life that many website publishers buy links to get a leg up on the SEO competition. Scammers are on to this so, in addition to selling links on sites with fake page rank, they have turned to buying expired domains that have Page Rank. They build a blog and hit Smorty, Pay Per Post, and other “get paid to blog” programs that pay publishers money to post entries with links to advertisers (no no follow tag–this violates Google’s rules on paid links). They fleece these publishers until the Page Rank drops to zero. Rinse and repeat.
To add insult to injury, the scammers sometimes use scraped content to include your link. Not only is their page rank worthless, they raped someone else’s content to do it. Two victims for the price of one scam.
Warning No. 3: Fake Directory Flood Spam Scam
This scam involves buying a ton of new domains and installing a generic directory building script on all of them. Registering the domains with many automated directory submission software companies and publicizing the directory on webmaster forums. Once the submissions come in, the system automatically sends out an email requiring “confirmation”. The confirmation is suspect since it doesn’t include the account details–oftentimes it is just a standard .html page. No PHP generated code. No tracking code. Nothing. Just a flat page.
You go to the ‘confirmation’ page and you are hit with a message thanking you for registering and urging you to come back in a few days to check your listings. Beneath this is spam for all sorts of link building services and “too good to be true” SEO bullshit.
Here’s a spoiler: There won’t be any listings. You just wasted your time.
How to fix the fake directory problem
Don’t submit to sites with less than PR 1. Most of these shit sites have PR 0 or N/A.
Check the confirmation link and run it through your email client. Isolate those URLs and delete them from your submission list.
One key variation of this: Email collection scams. There’s no real directory–just a way to trick you into signing up “voluntarily” to a garbage newsletter.
Time is money. Don’t let scammers and spammers steal your time.
Keyword Luv is a nifty WP plugin that allows commenters to your DO FOLLOW blog to get a backlink to their site without cheesy looking comment names. Ethical linkbuilding campaigns CAN include DO FOLLOW blog commenting.
Problem: The normal way people get backlinks from comments is through their hyperlinked names. However, unless your name is the same as your site’s name, this naming convention looks cheesy. Example: Your name is Dave and your keywords are Comfy Chairs and your site is comfychairs.com Using the normal WP protocol, it would look like this Dave – Comfy Chairs. (note: we’re just using that domain as an example. We have no affiliation with that site).
Solution: Keyword Luv formats your name so it looks less cheesy when doing backlinks. The example above looks like Dave from Comfy Chairs Looks better, less spammy, more professional.
Thanks to Jesse from Admin Daily for this plugin recommendation.
Here’s some quick tips for WordPress bloggers: Always remove the initial comment or default “about” message that comes with WordPress
I’ve seen quite a few tools that search the web specifically for these default text. These tools then either post comment spam or some other form of link spam.
If you’re using WordPress as a site page builder for SEO
Always remove any indication that your pages were generated by WP. You can always comment out items using the <! comment tag. You can also tweak your theme to make sure it doesn’t say it was generated by WP.
Set your blog feed settings to Excerpt
While there are many valid tools available online that use syndicated content for legitimate purposes, there are also others that just blindly ‘slurp’ your content and publish it elsewhere. No backlink. No attribution. Pure spam. Also, your content might get penalized for being duplicate content. Also, if they are using social media-driven blackhat methods, they even get to rank higher than you. Avoid all this drama by changing your feed settings.
Bottomline: WordPress is probably one of the most powerful online publishing tools you can use to both publish your content and get traffic from search engines. Optimize it well so it doesn’t help your competitors or spammers.
SEO link sculpting is the practice of adding “no follow” rel tags to some outbound links to maximize the flow of “link juice” to other links that aren’t tagged. Ever notice how some webmaster forums intentionally close and no follow all the links of old posts? I’ve seen this done on some resource sites as well (they probably sold links). Anyway, Google’s recent algorithm change cracks down on this practice.
Here’s how it used to work:
Page has 5 outgoing links–page’s page rank ‘juice’ is divided into five 20% parcels and sent out to the outbound links.
The page webmaster adds the “no follow” tag to 3 of the outbound links so the remaining links get 50% link juice each.
Here’s how it works now:
Page has 5 outgoing links–page’s page rank ‘juice’ is divided into five 20% parcels and sent out to the outbound links.
The page webmaster adds the “no follow” tag to 3 of the outbound links but the remaining 2 links only get 20% link juice each. No increase.
Bottomline, it’s an arms race out there when it comes to gaming Google. Instead of playing games, stick with tried and proven ‘ultra white hat’ practices? Produce quality content and build ethical links.
This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: Part 1 and Part 2.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
How it works: In exchange for showing a free link exchange network’s banners on your site, the network will give you credits to show your banner on another site’s pages. This system works on a credit system--your banner’s appearance on another site depends on how many times you show the network’s banners on your site.
Pro: Free. Some networks are sorted by category so you have SOME control over where your banner will appear.
Normally, these banner exchange networks are very flexible and they allow you to drop out anytime.
Con: Categorization is still a hit and miss affair. If your site’s niche is fairly well-known and popular, it will be easier to find banner exchange programs that can deliver targeted traffic to your site. However, if you are a longtail blogger or niche product/service marketer, this traffic generation method might be of little value because your category is not included or might not match the “closest related” category the network might put your site in. Another problem with this method is that banners, generally speaking, don’t perform as well as text ads. Text ads are direct and, with the right copywriting skills, more descriptive and persuasive than banner ads. There IS such a thing as banner ad burnout. Internet users have been ‘trained’ by saturated banner and Google Adsense adveritisng to ignore ad spaces. To fully leverage this traffic generation method and compensate for bad category targeting and bad conversion rates due to “banner blindness”, you would have to publish a whole lot of ads on your pages--this will make your blog/page look really bad and might turn off your site’s visitors.
WARNING: link exchange programs (and traffic exchange programs in general) can be cheated through the use of bots that run their fake hits through a proxy bank. The page views look like they are coming from different computers when they are actually just coming from one computer. These computers keep loading the pages where the banners are located so it registers as an “impression” in the banner network. The network then shows the bnaner at another site. Beware of this practice because you might end up just wasting your time and feeding your traffic to someone else.
22. Create a desktop application or webscript and give it away for free.
How it works: Your applications (desktop or server-based) draw users who need a one-time download or regular site visitors who repeatedly use your free webscript. Applies to firefox plugins, too.
Pro: You attract a highly specific population--people who need to use your application/webscript. This is a “self-filtering” traffic pool since only people who are interested in your software/script will come to your site to download/use it. This specificity allows you to show ads or site content that fits this target audience’s needs. One category of sites that routinely use this method to get traffic and generate ad views are “Free SEO tool” type sites. iWebtool is a very good example of a “tool traffic”-driven site. You can pair Aweber.com’s newsletter services with every giveaway of your downloadable application, firefox plugin, or “free lifetime membership” to your password-protected script to create a mailing list. The mailing list could yield sales for a long time.
Con: Scripts/software cost money. For every giveaway you plan to market, you’ll have to spend money on development fees. Another problem with this traffic method is that it assumes you know what kind of free tool people would flock to your site for. No one wants to spend thousands of dollars on tools that end up being used by very few people. One workaround to this problem would be to run surveys on your sites asking your users what online task they’d like to save time on. Build your specs based on these surveys. Another approach would be to consider your own experiences and come up with script specs that will save you time and effort.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
How it works: When people misspell the domain name of your site or your competitor’s, they end up on a page not found page. By buying mispellings you direct these searches to your site. Common “misspelling traffic” methods involve reserving names that sound alike (example: youtube.com vs. utube.com), plural vs singular, and taking out a repeated letter in a domain (example: hello vs. helo).
Pro: Relatively cheap way to, depending on your ‘target’ domain, get a lot of traffic. You are basically feeding off the established traffic/buzz of your target domain. The more traffic your target domains get, the higher your traffic load. Based on forum posts, this method works best for sites where the main domain holder also has an affiliate program like casino and adult sites.
Con: Depending on the domains you target, some domains may be protected by trademark law. ICANN regulations provide that if you register a trademarked domain and the trademark owner contests your registration, your domain (and its traffic) will be transferred over to the trademark owner after ICANN strips it from you. However, if there is NO trademark AND the domain is NOT distinctive (example: made up of commonly used words or words that are commonly used together), you have a good chance you can keep the domain. Another consideration to keep in mind--typo domains/variation domains ARE NOT free. Since they cost money, you might lose a lot of money if you register typos/variations that don’t get much traffic. There’s really no way to tell which of a domain’s variation will pass an ROI test. With the end of domain tasting (you register a domain, test it out for traffic, and ask for a refund after five days if the ROI is not there), domain buying in general has become a more costly proposition. For investment and traffic purposes, domaining used to be one of easiest ‘slam dunk’ ways to make money online. Not anymore. The barrier to entry has gone up dramatically with the death of domain tasting.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
How it works: There’s many sites (I recommend Hunting Moon and PDDW--I went to college with the guys behind these excellent services) that list domains that get traffic, have backlinks, and/or already have page rank. You buy a domain with these qualities and set up a redirect page going to your site using .htaccess
Pro: Very effective way to get highly targeted traffic. Very low effort required.
Con: Pricing is all over the place--from very cheap to very expensive. A lot of targeting is required on your part to make sure that the domain pays for itself. Always keep return on investment in mind. Also, Page Rank might be lost if you just redirect the page.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
How it works: Get cards printed with your domain name, description of what your website is all about, and hand them out.
Pro: Good way to piggyback on the impact face to face connections have in establishing credibility/rapport. More people are willing to enter into long term deals with someone they’ve met in person. Business cards also let you graphically set the tone/level of professionalism of your business’ image.
Con: Obviously not free. Not only do you spend money for printing out the business cards, design and layout and copywriting also cost money. However, the biggest problems with this traffic method are: No targeting and Bad conversion. The way the traffic method was written, you are supposed to randomly give out your cards “everywhere you go.” Bad move. Unless you’re going to a very specific business convention, giving out business cards randomly will get you very little results because the people you’re giving your cards to might not be your target audience/market. Go to a convention and you’ll have a better shot because these people ‘filtered themselves’--for example, only people interested in comics would go to Comic Con. Distributing your cards to targeted inviduals helps eliminate the second problem inherent in giving away business cards for traffic--conversion from physical card to actual site visit. For someone to type in a domain in a browser after hearing about it or reading a card or brochure, takes a lot of convincing. Just because someone knows a domain name, it doesn’t mean they automatically type it in a browser. They must have a REASON to do this. That’s why targeted card distribution works--only people with a NEED for or genuine interest in your service/product/content will type your domain in a browser.
Overall, we recommend this method for B2B (business to business) websites if the webmaster/publisher distributes the cards at a convention or some sort of industry meeting. For business to consumer websites, the ROI might not be there.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
How it works: Affiliate programs are business arrangements where you pay other webmasters/website publishers for sending you sales/leads/emails/downloads. Each individual referring account is tracked by the affiliate management script you install on your pages or, if you don’t want a custom solution, you can use affiliate marketing programs’ own proprietary tracking systems. For examples of these programs, try share a sale or Commission Junction. The webmasters post your tracked link code on their sites, pages, software, or whichever way they promote online and whatever traffic comes in is tracked by the system. You pay only for results--no sale/lead/info collection no payment. Simple as that.
Pro: You only pay for results. You piggyback on the efforts and expertise of webmasters. Whatever expertise and efficiency they possess work to benefit you. Depending on how you set your affiliate system up, payouts and accounting are a breeze since everything is automated and stored in a database. It is also easy to change advertising materials if you’re using the right platform.
Con: The biggest problem with a standalone affiliate program is recruiting the right affiliates. Not all webmasters cater to your target audience. Not all webmasters run sites that are in your niche. How do you find them? How do you recruit them? Thankfully, there’s many webmaster forums available. Just do a search for “affiliate marketing forum” and you’re bound to get a list of these sites. Create an account on these sites and, if allowed, put a banner or text ad for your affiliate program in your “signature” line (your “sig”). Make targeted forum posts that emphasize your niche. Another way to get affiliates is to get your affiliate program site listed in affiliate marketing directories--just do a search for that term and you should be able to get a lot of listings of these types of directories. Finally, another way to get your affiliate program publicized is to hire an affiliate program promoter to find forums and directories and submit/market your program aggressively.
Affiliate recruitment is not a problem if you choose to use a network-based affiliate program. These websites have a recruited base of thousands of affiliates (example: cj.com and shareasale.com), all sorted into categories. When you join their network, they send out an announcement to webmasters in your niche category.
Regardless of whether you’re using an affiliate network or you run a standalone affiliate program, you will still face the following challenges when running an affiliate program: competition from other programs, dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion, and improving your active webmasters’ conversions.
Competition from other programs: Unless you’re selling products/offering content/offering services that are truly unique, chances are there will be other programs offering the same items as you. You can compete based on price, quality guarantees, and selection. Meet this challenge head on--don’t shy away! Get nice banners designed, get effective marketing copy written, and give away FREE CONTENT to your affiliates. Give your marketers the right to distribute your free ebooks, free articles, free images, and whatever else you can put your domain or live link on. Free content establishes credibility with the target customers. Free content is also viral as it gets passed on from one circle of influence to another. With each transmission, there’s a chance that a reader will connect with the materials and click on a link to get more information.
Dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion: It’s a fact of life in online marketing--the webmaster productivity funnel. For every 100 webmasters you market to, only a few will bother signing up to your program. Of the few that you managed to sign up, only a small percentage will actually install your affiliate code and send traffic. Of the few that are sending traffic, only a few will send substantial traffic or traffic that converts. Of these, only a few will remain with your program. Each stage in this funnel needs your active intervention if your affiliate program is to become successful. Here’s what you need to do: Maximize the number of webmasters you market to--join as many forums and submit to as many affiliate marketing directories as you can. Get your base number of potential webmaster recruits as high as possible. The higher the base, the higher the number of recruits (regardless of the dismal recruitment ratio). Use effective banners and convincing text link copy to increase your recruitment ratio. Advertise that you give out free content or tools or other goodies that either minimize the webmasters’ time or costs.
Improving existing affiliates’ peformance and improving webmaster retention: Once you’ve got webmasters to sign up--make sure to personally ask them how you can help them directly. Make a webmaster resource tool page which list tools that your affiliate webmasters can use to generate sales (content, traffic tools, and conversion tools). Establish a relationship and never let up. You can outsource this affiliate management tasks to a cheap virtual assistant company. Once the webmasters are sending traffic, aggressively monitor their performance and send them optimization tips and tricks. Offer them specialized landing pages or custom materials. Once they are sending sales, continue the conversation by brainstorming with them on how they can increase their site’s conversion ratios. If you take this proactive approach, you can minimize the negative effects of the webmaster productivity funnel.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites
How it works: Many social bookmarking sites are DO FOLLOW and have PAGE RANK. Many are also highly categorized and also very tag-driven. You submit your site to these services and list out the keywords, description, and tags you want your URL to be indexed with. This combination of factors give user-submitted links is Social Bookmarking sites an SEO boost. Just how much of a boost is open to debate nowadays since Google has reportedly started downgrading the SERP boosting effectiveness of social bookmarks in general.
Here’s a quick video explanation of how social bookmarks work
Pro: Free. You also get direct traffic from the social bookmark services’ installed base of thousands if your content is compelling and viral enough. You get a lot of flexibility on which tags you can use. Great for pairing main keywords and subkeywords. Great for building backlinks to a rotating set of keywords.
Con: Very time consuming. Automated tools are prone to banning due to the fact that automation tends to miss certain “guerrilla” tactics that manual seo linkbuilding employs. Depending on the site but sometimes filing your site under the wrong categories can render your submission worthless.
How it works: Just judging by the mammoth page views that Susan Boyle’s tryout at “Britain’s Got Talent”, Youtube delivers traffic--and lots of it! To use this method, you simply upload your video, send a notification to your newsletter subscribers, socially bookmark the video, send out notices on social networking sites, post about it on forums, and otherwise get the views up. The more REAL views the video gets, the more Youtube itself will publicize it to its other members. This drives more traffic to the video and upward spiral is created. How do you get traffic? Through links in the video description and in your channel page.
Pro: Explosive traffic if the video is compelling enough. You can put links that link out of youtube in the description page for the video and in your channel page (linked to your username). You can also improve your channel’s and videos’ traffic by using an attractive profile image (that don’t run afoul Youtube’s Terms of Service and copyright laws, of course) and postinga lot of comments on highly popular videos. Click here to get more Free YouTube Traffic Tips.
Con: You have to know how to boost your video’s page views if, for some reason, your video is not compelling enough. While you can do it using real traffic, there’s also automated bots available online that are very tempting. Don’t use them unless you’re prepared to risk getting your url banned on youtube. Youtube traffic is free but the cost of producing a compelling video may NOT be free. It depends on what kind of video you plan to use--funny video, tutorial, etc. Also, general Youtube traffic may not be the way to go. Untargeted traffic produces crappy conversions, normally. Sometimes the Zen Buddhist mantra of “Less is More” applies and it might apply to this traffic generation method--better to create a highly specialized and targeted video with similarly discriminating tags and get a few but high converting clicks than a video that will appeal to everyone (like the Susan Boyle video above) but generate few sales.
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
How it works: Post a free survey on a topic that is relevant to your website’s topic/theme. Post the results. Publicize the results via Digg and press releases. People interested in the same topic/theme will come to your site to see the poll or read your analysis.
Pro: Great traffic generation method to use with the traffic method of issuing a press release. Not only do some press release sites publish categorized backlinks, they can also be used to publicize “newsworthy” events such as survey findings. Many news sites and agencies can also link to you or mention your poll in their surveys.
Con: The survey itself is free but the publication (via press releases) may not be. Also, the reason many scientific surveys and accurate polls get a lot of publicity is because of the credibility of the organizations running such polls. Also, the value of a poll depends on the sampling quality and, depending on the topic, quantity of the people taking the poll. So if your traffic pool is general in nature, their opinions on a particular specialized topic might not carry much weight with news agencies and sites.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
How it works: You find websites that already get a lot of traffic and you set up a special affiliate deal with them that gives them a larger payout or higher level of affiliate support as you would normally give to a regular affiliate. This deal might also involve a larger amount of custom content you produce for that affiliate. It can also involve a lot more customization. Generally, the discussion above regarding affiliate marketing applies to this traffic method as well. The scale just happens to be larger.
Pro: and Con: Generally, the same concerns as the affiliate marketing traffic generation method discussed above.
Many webmasters consider NO FOLLOW a curse. They think that it unnecessarily restricts their linkbuilding efforts. Indeed, many webmasters think that WordPress’ default NOFOLLOW tag on comments will not yield the intended result–cut down on comment spam. Regardless, the reality is that the vast majority of WordPress-based blogs are NO FOLLOW despite the laudable efforts of some webmasters to enable their blogs to follow comments. Which brings up the question–does it ever make sense to comment on NO FOLLOW blogs?
Commenting for backlink volume versue commenting for authority/conversation
There are two main reasons for commenting on blogs. The most common reason is that people comment for backlinks. The comment “name” is hyperlinked to a url. Accordingly, many commenters use their keywords as names. Some sites allow this, other blogs (such as ours) request that you put your real name and a – or | followed by your keyword. This naming convention makes the comments seem less spamariffic. If you’re just commenting for backlink volume, as mentioned in our earlier critique of traffic building techniques, commenting on NO FOLLOW blogs will be a waste of time. Commenting for backlink volume involves posting once or twice on as many related do follow blogs you can find. Volume and efficiency are the keys to this linkbuilding method.
The other reason people comment on blogs is to build a long-term relationship with the blog they are commenting on. This creates familiarity and rapport between the blog publisher and the commenter. This relationship is also augmented by the commenter posting longer and more detailed critiques/impressions of the blog and posting it on his/her own blog. Where does this lead to? Building a relationship with a high PR or high traffic/high value blog leads to credibility/legitimacy with that blog’s publisher. This could lead to them posting about your site or sending you shoutouts. These posts aren’t NO FOLLOWED and yield some nice link juice. Even if the target blog has little backlink value (in the case of John Chow‘s site due to his issues with Google), the direct traffic he can bring your way based on a recommendation or shoutout has tremendous value. Moreover, it establishes credibility with the blog’s other readers which you can leverage in linkexchange solicitations with their sites.
The downside to blogging for conversations/authority is that it takes time and the payoff–getting an ‘in post’ mention is not guaranteed. It also takes some valuable time from your other daily linkbuilding tasks. Here’s some tips that might make your authority commenting more efficient:
Choose no follow blogs that either have high traffic, high page rank, or both
Choose blogs that you can participate in easily and add high value comments to
Choose blogs where the owner has made shoutouts or linkouts to commenters in the past.
Choose blogs that are highly ‘personality-driven’ and the blog owner seems highly accessible
Be prepared to run a marathon and not a sprint
Always “recycle” your comments by using them as “seeds” for longer and more detailed entries on your own blog
Commenting for authority is not a slam dunk but the payoffs can be very nice. Keep on keeping on! The surest way to lose in any venture is to give up.
One of the older and still effective methods used in building backlinks to a central site is to build a network of sites hosted off free sites and free blog networks. The effectiveness of this method revolves around the following:
Keyword/subkeyword structure / keyword choice
Quality original content that is actually useful
Semi-targeted link building
Quality focus on actual readers not just Googlebot/SE Spiders
Creating Network link building support sites/pages
Step #1: Find your support keywords and Set up the sites
Get a raw dump of your target niche keywords
Segregate your target keywords from your “support” keywords
Manually create a site from each of the free blog/free page sites below
Customize each site (as much as allowed by the sites/networks). Each site must look different from the others in your network
Each site must target a separate “support” keyword
The site must not have an SEO “spammy” name of KEYWORD | KEYWORD or just “KEYWORD”. It should be a real name like KEYWORD journal or “My KEYWORD Journal”
Step #2: Create Quality Original Content for your backlink site network
List out your sites and the subkeywords that each site focuses on. This listing can roughly look like this:
Site URL – Site Name (with keyword) – subkeyword 1 / subkeyword 2 / subkeyword 3 / etc. Brainstorm and write actual useful and informative blog entries based on your keywords. If you’re running out of ideas, try entering your keywords here and get pages upon pages of questions. Take out duplicate questions. Create outlines for each question. The article should then “write itself.” If you’re still stumped or don’t have the time to create useful, high quality, original content, try using bulk content copywriting services at mere pennies per word.
Avoid “spam” saturation. For every entry that has the keyword in the title, mix things up with related articles that don’t have keywords in the title. The blogs/pages must have a “natural” mix of content.
Our most important tip: Write these sites like you would for a visitor of your main site. This content must be REAL. They must be actually useful/entertaining to human readers. They can’t just be rethreaded/rehashed/software-spun garbage. If you stuff these sites with garbage, search engines will probably treat them the same way.
Fatal mistake: Do NOT put links to your target site or adsense/affiliate links just yet. There will be plenty of time for that later. Don’t get greedy at this stage and screw up your chances with the next step.
Step #3: Create backlinks by networking with other free site/free blog network members
Categorize your support site/blog and find members of the free site/free blog network member you’re on and ask them for blogroll link exchanges. Find people that are in the same category as you. If you used original and useful content, your chances of establishing solid relationships increases. Make sure your sites are “clean”–no ads, no spam content. The more credible your content is, the higher the likelihood you’ll get backlinks from other blogs in your network.
No straight link exchange: If A is your site and B is another person’s site, do not arrange an A < > B link exchange. What this means is that site A links to B and B links to A. Search engines won’t give this link exchange much weight (unless you do one crucial thing but we’ll discuss that in a future post).
Use 3 way link exchanges instead. Since you have quite a few pages/blogs set up on many free blog/site networks, arrange linking among these properties. So instead of A < > B, the structure should be: A > B > C. You own A and C. The partner owns B. You link to B from A and he/she links to C. Map out your link relationships. Make sure to avoid any < >.
Step #4: Age your network a bit before linking to your central site
Age your network. After you build them in a ‘natural’ manner–ie., staggered creation dates, random pattern of creation, and link building/networking frequency. After a few months, slowly–repeat–slowly start linking them using subkeywords to your main site.
Here’s the list of sites frequently used by webmasters for third party free site link building. We have filtered them by PAGE RANK and DO FOLLOW. Note: We couldn’t do follow test them a couple.
blogates.com
PageRank: 6/10
(NOT DO FOLLOW TESTED)
bravenet.com
PageRank: 8/10
(NOT DO FOLLOW TESTED)
spaces.live.com
PageRank: 7/10
110mb.com
PageRank: 6/10
aeonity.com
PageRank: 5/10
blog.com
PageRank: 6/10
blogdrive.com
PageRank: 6/10
blogger.com
PageRank: 8/10
bloghi.com
PageRank: 4/10
blogr.com
PageRank: 4/10
blogskinny.com
PageRank: 5/10
blogsome.com
PageRank: 7/10
blogspirit.com
PageRank: 6/10
blogster.com
PageRank: 3/10
blogtext.org
PageRank: 4/10
blogvis.com
PageRank: 4/10
clearblogs.com
PageRank: 5/10
eblogus.com
PageRank: 4/10
flixya.com
PageRank: 5/10
homeschoolblogger.com
PageRank: 5/10
livejournal.com
PageRank: 8/10
myblogsite.com
PageRank: 4/10
Thoughts.com
PageRank: 5/10
(NOT DO FOLLOW TESTED)
vox.com
PageRank: 7/10
weebly.com
PageRank: 7/10
wordpress.com
PageRank: 9/10
blogomonster.com
PageRank: 4/10
tumblr.com
PageRank: 7/10
Parting Words
Focus on handbuilt sites win over automated sites
Quality over quantity
Focus on quality content
Leverage your network relationships to create long lasting mutual value
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the first installment of the series.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
How it works: Configure your email client’s signature system to include your hyperlinked title or your raw URL along with a text description. Wherever your email ends up, someone can see your link and click it. Specially helpful if you send email to a groupmail system or you pass along a lot of annoying chain emails. Your sig is automatically added to the bottom of your email. Your link goes wherever the email goes.
Pro: Your signature adds a certain professionalism to your emails. If you use a sig when doing link exchange solicitations, it helps in establishing your credibility and legitimacy. Groupmail and chainmail emails bearing your signature often travel the globe many times over and going through tons of inboxes--provided the chainmail is viral enough. There’s no CAN SPAM provisionsagainst that because the email is non-commercial in nature and sent only from friend to friend In the case of groupmail, group members opted to receive email from the group.
Con: This traffic generation method depends heavily on how much you use email. If you only communicate with a small group of friends or a small business circle and the nature of the emails are fairly mundane, there’s very little chance your email will “surf’ the massive interbranching networks of friends’ emails. The “viral” ability of email, just like the viral ability of web content, depends in large part on the quality and nature of the email. Even if you were to consciously pass on chainmails, many of your friends in your address book might resent you for forwarding that crap. Overall, email signatures yield low traffic and have no obvious SEO/linkbuilding value (unless it gets published on a web page). Thankfully, creating and using email signatures doesn’t involve much time and can piggyback on your daily email activities. Otherwise, the traffic produced would not be worth the time involved.
12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
How it works: When you update your site and delete pages or change file names or change directory structures, your visitors’ web browsers can’t find the page they were looking for and a 404 page appears. If you have a static website, use .htaccess to set redirect your 404 to your homepage. Here’s sample 404 redirection code.
Pro: Simple. Straightforward and easy. Great way to preserve traffic instead of wasting it on a bland/linkless 404 page.
Con: Tracking the lost/missing url the user was trying to access isn’t recorded. This information would be useful because it would tell you what page(s) you need to rebuild or at least tell you about the content your audience is looking for.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
How it works: You place a bid range for your keyword. If the user runs a search on the keyword, the search engine will show your ad based on your bid compared to other bidders and other considerations such as the quality of your landing page, etc. The 5 most popular pay per click providers are Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Overture, and the smaller players: Miava (formerly known as FindWhat.Com), 7Search.com, and Adbrite. All of them work on a similar model. However, Google Adwords has added features you may want to know about. Here’s an official Google Adwords video on how their auction works.
Pro: If you pick the right keywords, you can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site/page in a very short amount of time. You can finetune your campaign to quickly find keyword combinations that produce the best Return on Investment (ROI). Here’s a great video on how to use Google Analytics to maximize your Adwords ROI
Con: Obviously not free. Also, it can get quite pricey if your click through rate is bad and your landing page’s Quality Score is not very good. There used to be a very common business model where you buy cheap keywords at a few pennies per click from Adwords and point the traffic to a page targeting higher paying keywords with Adsense ads. The profit is the difference between the per click rate Adsense payout and the per click cost from Adwords--factoring in conversion rates. This is called Adsense Arbitrage and it used to be extremely easy and lucrative. Google’s changes to their Quality Score plus wholesale elimination of many big Adsense accounts of arbitrage player has pretty much destroyed this business model. Many of the survivors moved on to Yahoo Publisher Network--buy cheap adwords keywords and dump them on YPN pages. There’s also the IAC workaround to this. Unfortunately, it’s not as lucrative as before. Regardless of whether you’re playing the arbitrage game or not, the Google Adwords Quality score system poses a formidable hurdle to webmasters who want cheap and easy traffic. You have to have a clear understanding of your target audience and the ROI of your keywords for you to make PPC ad buys work out for you (or just to break even).
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
How it works: Add a small piece of code to your site which adds you to your users’ browsers’ bookmarks. Here’s one way to do it.
Pro: Nice and simple. Very quick to do.
Con: No real disadvantage but you may want to spice things up by using a nice looking graphic. Also, simple browser-based bookmarks just add your bookmark to the user’s browser--it isn’t public. You may want to add Sociable or other social bookmark plugins to your blog or use a standalone social bookmarking code for non-blog website. Why social bookmarks? Instead of just saving the bookmark in one person’s browser, the saved bookmark is searchable in a central site and can be accessed by other users. It also has SEO backlinkbuilding benefits. Here’s a good video on how social bookmarking works.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
How it works: Nothing works better than word of mouth. We see ads all the time but we pay more attention to ads that our friends have vouched for or recommended. Why? It takes less effort and resources than personally investigating and researching something. Someone else already did the work for us. This is human nature. This dynamic plays out not just in buying products/services but also in meeting new friends and establishing new relationships.
In the online context, “Tell a Friend” boxes consist of simple code that you add to your site and your users enter their email address and name. There’s a box underneath where they can list out the recipients who they want to know about your site. The admin/setup of these boxes allows you to specify the message that is sent to the recipients. Here’s one free tell a friend script.
Pro: Free. Very easy. Great way to maximize your traffic--you’ve spent time and effort to get a person to visit and read your site. Maximize that visit’s value by giving that person an opportunity to voluntarily recruit people in his/her circle of influence to visit your site. Doesn’t take too long to set up.
Con: Established and l337 (“elite”) webmasters think is so 1996, cheesy, and “Old School.” Not all visitors would recommend--the numbers may be very minimal. Also, it doesn’t work for certain types of sites like adult, penis enlargement, or gambling or other types of “private” content. Regardless of these “drawbacks”, every little bit of traffic helps and “Tell a Friend” is an easy, free way to leverage your existing traffic’s friend network to get more traffic to your site. Moreover, the conversion rate for refer a friend type systems depends on the quality of your website content. If you have quality content, your content has a higher chance of going ‘viral’ through referrals.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
How it works: Many ezine sites have page rank and they pass some of this along to your target site when they publish your article. The links are usually included in the “About the Author” section.
Pro: Mostly free. You control the targeting level of your article since you can massage the keyword you’re targeting in the title and in certain areas of the article body. You can put up to two links in the about the author section to target differing pages on your target site. Many ezine sites have direct traffic so you can also get direct traffic. These articles can also be configured to sell directly so you can set your links to be redirect pages for affiliate sales landing pages.
Con: If you’re doing this for linkbuilding make sure you keep in mind Page Rank and Do Follow. The sites you are submitting to must have both of the above characteristics or else you might be wasting your time trying to build backlinks there. However, if you are trying to get sales from the articles, linkbuilding is irrelevant since you’re trying to convert the readers of these article ezine sites. Make sure you categorize your article correctly. Miscategorized articles don’t do too well both for linkbuilding and direct sales. See our prior installment and read up on the article submission section to see other “Con” drawbacks to this method.
17. Hold a crazy contest and make it go viral.
How it works: Sponsor a contest on your blog/site and publicize it. The contest terms must involve having the participants visit your site to either get more information or to register. You don’t have to offer money. Depending on your target audience, digital goods like ebooks or free services or links on your site should be enough.
Pro: Relatively inexpensive way to get new site visitors. Also, you can use the contest to build your newsletter/lead sheet by requiring contestants to give their name and email address. You can use free newsletter sites for this or use professional mailing list managers.
Con: There’s too many contests taking place on the Internet already. There’s even sites that just focus on contests. Users may already be burned out from too many contests. Even if your site users are not burned out on contests, contests are NOT by definition viral. Just because you’re giving away a prize, it doesn’t mean people are automatically going to flock to you. Successful contests focus on psychological triggers in their target audience to spread the word. It will take time, effort, and a lot of user profiling to get an idea as to what these triggers may be.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
How it works: Figure out the key “secrets”, tips, methods, or special content that your users would want to PAY FOR and give it to them free. They have to sign up and register for your newsletter so they will be notified when the next installment is ready.
Pro: Low cost. You have to spend money on custom web content copywriting for the ebook/report/course materials. However, you leverage that cost by having users coming back to your site get the latest updates. You also get viral marketing benefits if your users share these ebooks with others since your ebooks will have your links in them. Remember to put links to your newsletter sign up page--let your ursers drive more users to your newsletter. This creates an exponential effect.
Con: It will take some effort to determine the content that your users would want so bad as to sign up to a newsletter to get it. This is not an easy “a priori” issue. It requires that you listen to your users’ feedback and create a real relationship with them. This is not for ‘drive by’ web publishers that just want to profit quickly from their users. Also, you have to structure your ebook distribution so that it does result in your users coming back to your site--return traffic is key. You can’t just give out the materials once and they never come back. Maybe instead of an ebook, the better approach would be to convert part of your site into a password-driven member content area. This means they will come back to your site for updates. It depends on whether you make money via site ads. If you make your money from direct links, newsletters should be good enough and there’s no need for the user to come back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
How it works: The Old School way of viewing web content is that you have to type in the address in your browser or look up your bookmarks to visit the site you want to go to. Once at the site, you read the content. You waste a lot of time if there’s no new items/updates. RSS revolutionizes this process by having the content of sites you like COME TO YOU instead of the other way around. By installing RSS on your blog or site, you leverage the power of this great way of reading and distributing website content. Here’s a great video that explains it:
Pro: Very easy to do. Use wordpress or blogger, they have RSS feeds built in. WordPress uses RSS 2.0 and other versions. Blogger.com uses the atom.xml format. Once your blog is up, submit your feeds to feed aggregation sites so your content “teasers” will be published at these sites or show up in the blogs of their subscribers. If you don’t know where to submit, you may want to use a blog RSS feed submitter service. Always ask for a report after they complete the work.
Con: Lots of scumbags will try to LEECH your feeds. There’s even wordpress plugins to put ‘blogging on autopilot.’ Why would they do this? Laziness. It takes time and effort to write quality category-relevant content. So they use RSS feed aggregators like icerocket to find niche-specific content and get the content through the feeds. They also strip out all links. What do they do with the content? One way is to post on their own blogs with their own ads--you provide the content, they make the money. Sucks, no? The other way is to post you content as updates on their sites for SEO purposes. Both of these practices HARM you because the content on your site might get dinged with duplicate content penalties and you don’t make any money/benefit from your content. How to fix this problem? Run your entries periodically through copyscape. Find where the duplicates are and investigate. Report the thieves to their hosts so their webhosting companies will close them down. Another solution is to set up your feed to produce only summaries--people will have to click on the link to go to your site and read the full entry.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
How it works: There’s many link directories on the internet that list, describe, and categorize websites. You merely just fill out a submission form and they review your site for quality. If they approve your submission, your link appears on their database--hyperlinked to your target url. Oftentimes, there’s a short description next to the link.
Pro: Relatively easy way to get backlinks. Not exactly free but cheap enough if done by a directory submission service. If you’re going to submit to only ONE directory, it must be DMOZ.
Con: Categorization is key. If you can, find directories that focus specifically on your category. These are very rare considering the tons of content categories available. Plan B is to find directories that have specific enough categories in their multi-category database. Make sure these directories have Page Rank and they allow search engine robots to FOLLOW the links to their specific listings. Submissions can be tedious. For best results, use differing descriptions for your site, rotate your titles, and submit deep links. One final note: Google and other search engines have continuously eroded the SEO value of directory-based links. However, these can be partly offset by highly targeted categorization, rotated links, and custom descriptions.
Photo Credits: KevinDooley
Here are the remaining items on the list which will be critiqued and analyzed in PARTS 3 through 5 of this 5 part series.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.wowzza.com .
This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: 
Many webmasters consider NO FOLLOW a curse. They think that it unnecessarily restricts their linkbuilding efforts. Indeed, many webmasters think that WordPress’ default NOFOLLOW tag on comments 
One of the older and still effective methods used in building backlinks to a central site is to build a network of sites hosted off free sites and free blog networks. The effectiveness of this method revolves around the following:
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the ![](http://i49.tinypic.com/ilwt4j.gif")
You comment I follow
This blog is a DO FOLLOW comment blog. Why? Because we believe Google should ban spam not blogs linking to each other for legitimate reasons. Also, commenters should be rewarded for good comments by pimping their sites a little bit. Good for direct traffic and good for SEO.
Here’s the graphic of our official position:
Of course, we don’t want our site to be infested by spamtastic links next to crappy comments so we make sure to upgrade to the latest versions of WP, we have Akismet turned on, and we heavily moderate for quality comments. What are the quality comments we are looking for? Anything that engages conversation–questions, suggestions, offering tidbits.
The difference between Spam and Content
Spam, by itself, is too salty. To make it taste better, Hawaiians wrap it in nori (dried seaweed wrapper), put in some rice dabbed with a swig of some rice vinegar, and some egg. From SPAM to Hawaiian spam musubi. From a salty piece of pork to a Polynesian delicacy. Use that same philosophy when making backlinks. Use real content. Participate.