Why did I make this blog in the first place then? Well, I do plan to expand into a English speaking country in the near future. Hopefully Australia first, so it’s a good thing to get started as soon as possible.

Anyway, feel free to subscribe to my feed if you would like to get noticed when I start kicking things in the English devision again!

1. Find out who your competitors are. Then do a search for their domain name and a link:competitordomain.com to see where they’ve been linked and talked about. Is there any of these sites you might be able to get your link into?
2. Find blogs, forums and other places in your niche where you can leave your links trough comments. Check if they are nofollowed or not.
3. Go to digg.com and search for keywords related to your niche. See if you can find any good linkbait ideas to submit other places than dig (you would of course want to try digg to, just incase they forgot about the original one).
4. Run a competition. Have bloggers write posts containing links with relevant anchor text to your site. Make it something easy, so as many people as possible will go for it.
5. Donate time/money/product to someone else, in return for a link on their site or a review.
6. Create a blog where you trade reviews with other. Make sure they mention your sites in their reviews.
7. If you like a product, write a review about it. Then email the seller of the product and say that they can use your text as a testimonial.
8. Keep an eye on expiring domains. If someone related to your niche expires, buy them, go to archive.org and find it’s old content, get it up again (on a different host than your main site). If you don’t want to steal the old content, just write of garbage pages and put it up. Make sure to link to your main site.
9. Find out if any of your competitors have any 404 sites being linked to. Notify whoever links them that it’s a 404 link and tell them that there is an replacement on your site.
10. If you’re a university student, try getting a page on the university domain. Tell them you want to make an info page about your studies.
11. Become a DMOZ editor. Start out with a small category no one really cares about and work your way up to the relevant ones.
12. Upload the pictures you use in your site to flickr. Make sure to link to your site (deep links preferred) in the description area on flickr.
13. If you have a old site that you’ve built before you’ve learned about SEO and link building, go through your old pages and archives. Start making some internal links around your site.
14. A good way to get links for blogs is to link to others. People do actually very often link you back.
15. Find places like Yahoo Answers where people ask questions about your industry. Answer them!
16. Some of the big and trusted sites have a page where they list press releases. Find out what press releases they like and write one to put on your site.
17. Be the very first to comment something going on. This works especially great for smaller niches or local sites. Comment things happening in the news and politics and make comments about it on blogs, forums etc. That might make other people making comments about it after you link to your site.
18. They advantage of the holidays. Make something funny out of it. If it’s 1th of April, make a really good April fools. People tend to link to the best April fools jokes on the 2th of April.
19. Be a guest poster. Write for other blogs and magazines.
20. If someone tries to link bait you, go for it. A lot of the link baiters often make posts linking to those who fell for their little tricks.
21. Take advantage of blogs with threaded comments. Always comment the first comments.
22. Try getting into Wikipedia. Yeah, I know its nofollow, but do you have any idea how many people copy and scrape the Wikipedia content around the world?
23. If you’re in a retail business, try asking your provider for some links on their sites.
24. Again, if you’re in the business of selling things online, try sending some free stuff to bloggers for them to review. Require a link.

Some of the more sneaky tricks

1. Find a site you want a link from. Shout them an email about whatever (don’t ask for a link). When you get a reply, snatch their IP address and serve up a special site that only serves to their IP. This is of course a site containing a very good link to their site or maybe even an article. Then ask for a link back.
2. Make a new page and put up a link on your site to someone you would like a link from. Autos generate heaps of traffic going from the link on your site to their site. Then request a link back saying that you’ve already had their link up for a while. When they then check their stats they think they’ve received lots of hits from you and are more likely to link you back. Remember to ask for a link to the main site, not just the site created to scam them.

And most importantly

It doesn’t matter how good you are with building links and traffic to your site, the very best link building strategy will always be building good content to your site.

Group 1: Unique content, many pages.

In Group 1 both sites had unique content, but many sites with various changes. The first site had only 200+ pages and the other had 2000+ pages. The content on all the pages didn’t vary that much, mostly just keywords in the title, h1 tag and a few places in the main text.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but only the front page. Both sites seem to get new sites indexed in the same speed. Google took one level a time in the hiarchive.

Conclusion: Google does not punish you for having up to thousands of pages with few changes in the content. The sites even ranked well.

Group 2: Copied content

In group to I did two tests where I copied content from the top sites on the keyword I was trying to rank for. One the first site I only had copied content on the front page and on the second I added a few paragraphs of content I had written myself.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but neither one of them showed up in the search results.

Solution and Conclusion: I edited both sites with unique content and it took less than 24 hours before both sites showed up in the rankings. The conclusion is that you cannot copy content from already existing sites.

Conclusion

There have been a lot of talking about what kind of duplicated content will get you punished, but I yet seen anyone put their finger on what kind of duplicate content will get you put in the box by Google. Well, like you can see in my report you won’t get punished for using a script that auto generates thousands of pages with few changes in the content. But you will get punished if you copy content from someone else.

So what did we learn from this? Produce your own content and don’t steal. Simple as that.

People seem to confuse this tag with the rel=”nofollow” tag, which is meant for to not pass any Pagerank (or Google Juice) to the sites you link to. Well, let me start with saying that the rel=”external” tag has nothing to do with the rel=”nofollow” tag.

So what is rel=”external” then?

rel=”external” does nothing except notifying the browser to open the link in a new window (or tab). It does the very same as target=”_blank”, except that rel=”external” is xhtml valid while target=”_blank” is not. In conclusion, rel=”external” will pass Pagerank.

Tips:

If you want it to don’t pass any Pagerank, you could just use rel=”external nofollow”.

1. Not optimizing your title tag. This is the main reason why most of my clients don’t rank on the keywords they want to rank on when they come to me. Some of them even use the same title tag across the entire site. Write good titles and include your keywords.
2. Keyword density. It’s either too high or too low. I’ve had a client ask me why I didn’t show up in the rankings for a keyword and when I had a look at his site I couldn’t find the keyword once on his site.
3. Unique and good content. This is the single most important factor for a successfully site. You will never make it in the long run unless your site is good. You can rank good with a site containing crappy content, but trust me – it won’t last for long.
4. Old school blackhat tricks. White background and white text, Hidden text and similar tricks like this. It won’t keep you ranking in the long run. Google is getting smarter “everyday”, so don’t kid yourself trying to outsmart then. What would you rather do? Spend your time working out new schemes on how to avoid getting caught by Google or spent time working on quality content? The answer should be simple.
5. Bad internal linking. Is it easy to navigate around your site? Have you made sure all your most important sites have a link with a good anchor text from the front page of your domain? Is your menu build up in a good way? Make sure it’s easy to navigate around your site both for the users and crawlers. This also brings me to the next point in my list.
6. Not adding sitemap. Have a sitemap on your site. Its done wonders on all the site I’ve ever added it to. Link to the sitemap from the front site. (PS: Google doesn’t support more than 50 000 url’s per sitemap. If you have more than that, make several sitemaps).
7. Flash. It’s not really good for usability and most search engines won’t be able to read or index your content. You don’t want that happening (PS: There are no problems using flash for smaller parts of your site, like advertising etc).
8. Watch who you associate with. You don’t want to associate with bad neighbourhoods. Don’t get involved in link farming, buy links from crappy site, trade links with crappy sites or anything like that. Try to make sure the sites that are linking to you are relevant to the content of your site.
9. Frames. This is 2008. You should not be using frames anymore. Don’t even get my started on why!
10. Choosing the wrong SEO Company. Be careful what company you choose to take care of your SEO campaign. I’ve seen a company take out their whole client list just because they used techniques that didn’t apply with Google’s guidelines.

Now like I said in the beginning of the post. This list is based on my experience. I know there is a lot of talk about selling links and other stuff, but truth being told – I haven’t been punished for this stuff yet and neither has my clients. Some other of the more advanced blackhat stuff like cloaking is also probably pretty bad for your site, but I’ve never done it and neither have any of my clients, so it’s not in my list of bad SEO strategies. And obviously, blackhat SEO is bad for you.
Do you have any good or bad experiences to share?

You run an internet marketing company, who has a client that advertises for apartments in Perth city, Australia. To make things simple, their only advertising for 1 keyword - “apartments perth”. They’ve been a client with you for a year or so and you have a good connection with the company.

Then you get a call from a bigger company. This company also advertises for selling apartments in Perth, but they want to include more in their campaign and would be willing to spend more money. What do you do?

Do you say no to the new client who’s ready to spent more money (meaning you would make more money)?

I just moved to Australia. Perth Australia, to be more exact. I’ve also started my studies at Curtin University of Technology and so far I’m pretty happy with things. I’ve got an unit in Como, which is a pretty good neighborhood. For the last 6 weeks I haven’t really done much work, which is the main reason why I havn’t been blogging. There haven’t been anything to blog about. This week I’ll start working for real again. I will also start builing some more english sites, which I’ll of course blog about in this blog. I was told that there was no point in blogging about my Norwegian sites on an english blog, so I better start builiding some english sites, or what?

Anyway, if anyone here is into internet marketing in Perth and want to meet up for a chat, feel free to contact me!

Optimization Tips from Adwords Team

Adwords 101 : Part 1

Adwords Optimization Part 1

Adwords Optimization - Assesing your Website

Adwords Optimization - Account Structure

Adwords Optimization - Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Beyond Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Ad Text Optimization

Generating New Keywords

Managing and Optimizing Bids

Landing Page quality Update

Website Optimizer Strategy

ROI Matters - Part 1 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 2 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 3 of 3

If your a large advertiser, Google’s help on Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a must read.

If your studing or plan to study for the GAP (Google Adwords Professionals) exam, the Adwords Learning Center is a must.

A few posts from my bookmarks talking about adwords

Optimizing your ads

18 Tips For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads A list containing 18 tips on how you can make better PPC ads. This is great for getting a better CTR and more relevant users.

The AdWords Ad Optimization Process - Little Changes Have a Big Effect Some great tips on how to optimize your ads by randfish on Seomoz.

Landing pages

Ten tips for lead generation landing pages 10 really great tips on how to make a good landingpage.

Improve your sites landing pages For those of you who really want to digg into “how to make a good landing page” material, this post lists some great posts for you.

Quality Score

How to master the Google Landing Page Quality Score A good post summarizing what Quality Score is and how to rock it.

Improve your quality score Don’t the title say it all? A post on how to improve your quality score.

Other must-read Adwords posts

Our top 10 of 2007 The Adwords team summarize their top 10 blog moments of 2007. Good reading for those of you who are new in the game.

Using video ads in Adwords The Adwords team explaining the video ad usage.

Other Adwords related stuff

Adwords Keyword Tool Can’t make a post without this useful research tool.

Adwords Powerpoint Presentations A great summary of Adwords presentations. Industry news from the inside.

DP’s Adwords Section Probally the best forum out there regarding Adwords.

So these are some of the bookmarks I’ve used in my process of learning about Google Adwords. It’s heavy inspired by Praveen Kodur’s list, which I also suggest you to read.

Goals for 2008

Yes, I do have some goals for 2008. Who doesn’t?

Move to Australia. I will hopefully be moving to Australia next month with my girlfriend. The flight goes 21st of january, with a changing plains in Paris and Signapore. Moving to the other end of the world, that’s a big step. Any Perth based readers out there?
Work out more and live a more healty and active life. If you go a few years back I was a health freak. Worked out 5 days a week for several hours a day. Well, that might be a bit to much if I want to get some work done too, but a 1-hour workout session 3 days a week shouldn’t be that hard.  I also want to eat more healty and maybe find some kind of outdoor activity. Maybe surfing when I get to Australia.

Get modelbulletin.com running. This is my latest and first big project in English. It’s a social community site for models and photographers. I’m working on in with Robert and hopefully it will rock the industry.

Get my Norwegian travelsite running. I’ve sold pretty much all my moneymaking Norwegian sites, except this one. I hoping to dominate the norwegian travel industry online with this site within a few years. Crossing fingers.

Becoming an Adwords Professional. The last couple of weeks I’ve been studying adwords. I don’t want to rush things, so I’m taking the exam in 1-3 months from now.

Anyways, I’ll try being a bit more active on the blog next year. HAPPY NEW YEARS EVERYONE! 

Who is PPC best fittet for?

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is quick and you can get started in just a few minutes. PPC can guarantee you traffic and it can be highly optimized to fit your needs. You can change keyword strategy, edit text in your sponsored ads and change landing pages in just a few seconds. The downside is that PPC will always be costing you money, so it’s always up to how well you plan and organize your PPC strategy. Also you can find yourself in a position where you spend so much money on bad PPC marketing that you just break even with your income. That’s why it’s a pretty clever thing to either learn adwords yourself or hire and adwords professional.

Another great usage of PPC marketing is if your doing a temporary campaign. If your planing to run a promotion or something else that will only be around for a week or so, it’s a waste of time spending time to get on top of the organic search results. PPC marketing will be way better for this need.

Summaries of PPC:

• Instant results.
• Time limited campaigns.
• If you choose to change your strategy, it’s quicker with PPC.
• Small keyword niches that just won’t be worth the time optimizing for.
• Big keyword niches that you would never make it to the top in, in the organic results.

Who is SEO best fittet for?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is long-term and it can take you months (or forever) to make in the search engines. SEO doesn’t cost any money (unless you hire someone, which I recommend), but it will cost you countless amounts of time if you don’t know SEO.  One of the major pros about SEO is that if you manage to make it in the organic search results, all the traffic is free and it can last for a long time. Another thing is that people tend to trust more on the natural search results than on the sponsored ones.

One of the biggest cons with SEO is the flexibilty. You got to be careful with even making the smallest change to your website, since it might drop your rankings. Everything has to be done carefully.

Summaries of SEO:

• Long term results
• Rankings can last for a long time
• It’s free (unless you hire, which is recommended).
• You can be in more than one search engine (not just Google)
• Big niche keywords can send you huge amounts of traffic and save you a lot in PPC marketing

I’ll take both, please!

When I advice clients on this question, I always advice them to do both. SEO and PPC goes hand in hand. You can use PPC to find keywords for your SEO campaigns, test landingpages and much more. Also it will get you started right away. In the long run, you can also depend on the SEO traffic, which will bring you lot’s of more clients and a strong position than your competitions.

Even if you rank top for your keywords in SEO, don’t quit PPC marketing. If you rank top both in the organic free search on the left side and the sponsored on the right, you have a pretty strong stand and chances are way bigger the users will click their way into your site.