photo credit: Scintt

Arguably one of the most important ways of obtaining high search engine placement is through obtaining of links, and scouring places such as Digital Pointless you can find people willing to buy, steal or borrow links. Often they judge first on Pagerank, a little green bar within Google’s toolbar which gives every page a score out of 10. If you don’t have large pagerank, then you don’t get your link.

Often new bloggers or SEOers will take links from anywhere & occasionally they will chase unrelated, yet high page rank sites that they can put their links on. Whilst obtaining links from large sites is well worth going for, they can harm your site in the long run if you’re not careful.

My (Friends) Story

A friend of mine did his fair share of affiliate marketing, though he stayed in industries that he knew things about, one of which was football – he ran an affiliate site for football kits – shirts & shorts mainly. He did okay but he wanted to do better, and as such read up on SEO & link building. He heard that good quality links improved your site in search engines. He asked his friend, who worked in the local council to put a link to his site from a council’s page – the one in particular was the local fire safety news page, which had high page rank (around 5 or 6).

Sure enough the site had improved rankings, and improved traffic, but most of the new traffic were searching for fire safety keywords, not good. His football kit site was still new, so my only thought is that Google thought “this site appears to be about football kits, but this authority site thinks it’s about fire safety, so I’m going to say that it’s that”.

This traffic was nigh on useless, furthermore the poor chap had trouble ranking for keywords he actually did want to rank for. In the end, he gave up, the council removed the link when his friend moved on, and in the end the site was sold on.

My Thought Process

The story above happened a few years ago, I think before even the Florida update, either way I am fairly confident such a unrelated update in the search engine rankings cannot happen with one link now (ever since Googlebombs were removed), but I think that it still teaches an important lesson.

When doing link building, I will rarely search for pages with “high page rank”, instead focus on building links & connections with people I view as authoritative within niches. Often they don’t run huge pagerank of 6 or 7 blogs, instead write on sites that are around the 2 or 3 pagerank (most don’t have a clue what “page rank” is even if it hit them in the face – but they produce good content), if it’s similar area to my site, then I will try and contact them to form some sort of alliance (guest post usually), and go from there.

By all means don’t limit yourself just to your niche, and if you’re a blogger you should post outside it, but focussing on the links you’d like to attract does have a benefit SEO wise, and debatably it’s better than a high ranked, unrelated link.

The Other Benefit

Links not only can improve your standing in the search engine, but also can get you more interested individuals reading your work or viewing your site. This can help achieve what those SEOers, linkbuilders & affiliate marketers dream of – natural link building & your site going viral.

After drawing the result at random the winner is…Mike CJ of Mike’s Life!

Justifiably so though, as his story was quite frankly b3ta.com worthy.

“I was working with a car manufacturer at the time, and a supplier decided to give me a fresh turkey on Christmas. (No longer ethical, but in those days a common and accepted practice).

As my car was being cleaned at the time, and I didn’t want the turkey sitting in the office, I got someone to put it in the boot for me.

Later that day, the first version of a top secret new model arrived, and I got the OK to take it home for the Christmas break and check it out. I made sure my own car was safely locked in the secure garage, put the keys in my pocket and headed to my new ride.

In my excitement at the new car, I forgot all about my turkey, and when I came back from a ten day holiday, I was met by a security guy at the car park entrance.

Apparently, he had been alerted to by a foul smell coming from the boot of my car between Christmas and new year, and investigated.

He found blood dripping from the boot floor and immediately called the police.

The parking area was immediately turned into a crime scene and taped off, while forensic specialists were called to get access to the car.

Not wishing to contaminate the boot area, they entered the car by breaking a front side window, then spent some time removing the rear seats to gain access to the boot that way.

When they found the turkey, they weren’t impressed.

It was the worst gift I have ever been given.”

So congratulations Mike, I’ll drop you an email with what you want to do with the prizes, which are:-

• 2 Free Months on the Problogger.com Forums (from Erica Mueller)
• 1 Hours Private Comedy Coaching for Bloggers (from Jordan Cooper)
• 3 Months Advertising on The Gospel According To Rhys (from me)

Prizes from myself & Jordan can be kept or regifted, but to enter Jordan’s competition to win $500, you must regift the prize from Erica Mueller.

Thank you for everybody who entered!

photo credit: Ray52

Happy St David’s Day everybody! Today it is the national day of Wales. Which means that us Welshies are being proud & wearing Daffodils, eating Leeks & drinking Brains SA Gold.

Fact is, Wales is horrendously short of spammers, so if you want to be a “Black Hat” (or “het ddu”) Search Engine Optimizer (Chwilia Beiriant optimeiddio), taking advantage of some huge markets in Wales, here are some highly profitable keywords that you can effectively spam Welsh Speakers to make a fortune, and retire tomorrow:-

• Acai Berry – Aeron Acai
• Lose twenty kilograms in six weeks – colli ugain cilogram mewn chwe wythnos
• Teeth Whiten – Dannedd Gwyn
• Cheap Payday Loans – dalu benthyciadau rhad diwrnod
• online casino with two hundred pound bonus – casino ar-lein gyda dau gant bunt bonws
• Make Money Online – gwneud arian ar-lein
• Adult videos & dating – fideos oedolion a dyddio
• Viagra – Tabledi glas sy’n gwneud eich pidyn caled

Happy St David’s Day people!

Disclaimer – My Welsh is okay, but not great, and some of these were created using Google Translate, so they’re possibly a bit wrong. Feel free to put me in my place in the comment box – Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus!

Sponsor: Get Ads for Your Feed via text link ads

From a BBC article about the service, it says this:-

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

So where you see Digg & Tweetmeme buttons now, you may see Flattr buttons appearing. But instead of sharing content, every click you make donates some money to the creator. You choose how much you pay for the service per month, and then 90% of your cash gets split between the number of buttons you click. (so say if you have 10 clicks & you pay $10 a month, each individual click recipient gets $1).

It’s a fascinating idea, as it does seem in principle to sort out the problem when it comes to people donating (people often say they will, but the effort in doing so often puts a lot of people off), also, with this micropayments platform, if somebody knocks a doozy of a blog post out, then giving them something for it is as easy as Digging it or tweeting it.

However, a service like this needs members, which begs the question – would you sign up to receive payments? More importantly, would you sign up to give them?

Sponsor: Your Ad Here?

Inspired by a tweet by NicholaStott, it takes tweets people tweet in to the service & then plots them based on a postcode within it. For example, if you tweet “#ukseohere M1 Hello World!”. You’ll be tweeted as being in the centre of Manchester. It’s designed to be used by SEO’ers to meet, network, go for a beer or just share what they are upto.

It’s really fascinating how well it’s done, and how people are using it (that includes me). The idea was originally for SEOers to meet up (or how Han so eloquently put it – “You just want to find people to buy you drinks”), but in it’s early stages it’s turned out to be great at finding interesting SEOs for Twitter. I am planning on adding some more functionality to it (the map is getting pretty full & I’d also like to piggyback on events as well), and everybody seems to have their own ideas for icons. There’s plenty of room for development.

Side Point – Google Real Time Search – Not Exactly Real Time?

One thing that Peter Handley noticed was the erraticness of the updates of #ukseohere in Google’s real time search. It makes sense in principle. Google does index regularly updated sites quicker than irregularly updated ones (so a story posted on the BBC News website is likely to be indexed within the day). The same looks to be true for tweets & hashtags. However, what I can’t seem to work it out myself. You see – when I checked the Google real time results for writing this story, it listed two of my tweets, one from recently, and one from a number of hours ago. I know from the search feed that people have tweeted the hashtag in between. This suggests that people who tweet regularly (such as myself) get indexed quicker than those who don’t. But then what about huge events in the public eye where everybody’s tweeting them? Is there two crawlers (one crawling tweeters, one crawling topics) that gets switched if there’s a saturation point in the number of times a topic is mentioned? Or is Google Real Time Search invariably rubbish & unpredictable?

photo credit: Arbron

The title was a comment left on a blog post in the whole “make money blogging” niche that seems to value what I say. The post? The guy in question wrote 4 blog posts that day & somehow that added value to his blog.

It’s something that whole community believes, that somehow churning out posts makes you an A-List blogger. Not really, it only takes one post of high value to push you over the top. Here’s a classic example:-

September 24th 2006, and a certain Vancouver resident - John Chow – was a fairly terrible blogger who knew a little bit about monetization (okay, a lot about monetization), his post on September 25th 2006 – The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores – received a shed load of diggs (largely because the submitter mentioned Kevin Rose), and today John Chow is still an terrible blogger, but as he’s rolling in it, he probably doesn’t care.

I’m a firm believer in great posts always rising to the top eventually. It’s been 12 years since I studied Macbeth at school, and the picture above I know exactly the part in Macbeth where it’s from, and I can quote the entire scene. I’m not saying John Chow is William Shakespeare, but the point is that his post is a classic piece of linkbait (it ticks many of the tickboxes another classic piece of linkbait suggests) optimized to have a memorable title (so old gits like me can remember it years on) & get the most from social media sites such a Digg. Certainly you cannot write great posts if you writing 4 or 5 a day. I started this post on Feburary 6th, it’s been through 3 iterations since then, with editing & rewording. I’m probably going to promote this post in a few pages as well.

Furthermore, I’m probably not going to read your blog if you post 4 times a day. I’m a busy man with a fulltime job & a part time social life, and trust me, I don’t care that much about what you have to say. I haven’t linked to the blog post in question where I left the comment with good reason – I can’t remember for the life of me where I read it.

That’s bullshit, and here’s why.

Lets assume we want to rank for a one word keyword, say the word “Yesterday”. And lets use an article, say for example, the lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday”. The song has 98 words in it. Within those 98 words “Yesterday” appears 9 times, giving it a keyword density of 9.2%. Much higher than the 2-6% SEO Gurus quote. So lets reduce the keyword density of the article to the touted 2-6%, and change the first three verses to this:-

All my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,
Oh, I believe in.

Suddenly,
I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, came suddenly.

Why she
Had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said,
Something wrong, now I long for.

Giving a keyword density of the whole song of 5.3%. Perfect for ranking in Google!

Also making it completely and utterly fucking pointless to rank for, as it doesn’t make sense.

Look at it this way, if I search for “Yesterday” in Google, chances are I could be interested in receiving Beatles lyrics. Those words above – whilst “keyword optimized” – don’t give the reader what they want. I know this, Google knows this, as a search for “yesterday” in Google includes lyrics at the top of page 2.

Okay it’s a very simple point & it’s a little exaggerated, but the fact remains the same – to rank in Google, write for readers, not for search engines. By all means include your keywords in the title, description, header, bold & link text, but really by doing that, you’re not being a good SEO’er in helping Google, you’re being a good webmaster helping readers.

Jordan Cooper ran a competition on his (hilarious) Not A Pro Blog blog, the competition was “Regift & Win $500“, where to win you had to come up with the best joke relating to technology. Mine was simple, really unfunny, yet I won.

The prize – 2 Months Paid Subscription to Problogger.com forums. A prize that was won by Jordan on a competition on Erica Mueller’s blog. As well as an hour’s comedy coaching with Jordan. However, if I was to regift it, I could win $500.

So here we are, a Gospel According To Rhys Competition!

Rules

The rules are simple – simply write a comment below to enter. You get 5 further entries if you are a registered member the Gospel According To Rhys Newsletter. However, the comment must be an answer to this question:-

“What has been the worst gift you’ve ever given or received?”

The winners will be announced on my Birthday post (March 4th) in a contest organised by random.org.

The Prizes

The prizes for this contest are long & numerous:-

• 2 Free Months on the Problogger.com Forums (from Erica Mueller)
• 1 Hours Private Comedy Coaching for Bloggers (from Jordan Cooper)
• 3 Months Advertising on The Gospel According To Rhys (from me)

The Regift Element

With a massive disregard of duplicate content rules, I’ve copied this verbatim from Not a Pro Blog’s original post:-

Now, this is where the fun stuff starts happening. The contest isn’t over yet. The person that wins the above joke contest has a choice of two options:

1. Accept the prize of two months paid membership at the ProBlogger forums.
2. Regift the prize in their own blog contest and get entered into a drawing for $500 cash.

What’s the catch, you might ask? Well, here are the ground rules if you choose #2.

• You must regift the prize on your own blog within two weeks of winning.
• The winner of your contest must be given the same choice: Accept or Regift.
• That blogger must continue under these same guidelines as laid out here.

Every regifted prize winner will get one entry into a random drawing for $500 cash.
If the “chain” is broken and anyone accepts the prize outright without regifting it…
The contest is over and no one wins anything!

I will be keeping track of the prize transfers from blog to blog on the bottom of this page.
Everyone can then “play along from home” and see what happens in the course of this year.

This process of regifting will continue until December 17, 2010 (which just happens to be National Regifting Day) where all the bloggers who have participated in the regifting will have their names put into a bucket. The $500 winner will be chosen at random live on UStream that day by yours truly.

Suggested protocols for regifting participants:

On your blog contest, please include a link to this post so others entering will know the rules.

Also, please include a link of the blog you received the prize to regift. (if possible, all of them!)

Support all blogs this prize appears on. Remember, if they don’t regift it, you lose out!

Finally

Both my prize & Jordan’s Prize can be accepted or regifted if you want, it’s only the membership prize that you must regift to keep the $500 prize going.

Good luck! Any questions please leave a comment below.

Using Social Media Can Help Your Writing

Aside from connecting with others and “building your brand,” social media offers an interesting side benefit: It can improve your writing.

Writing, like many other skills, is something you can get better at with practice. When you use social media to interact with people, you are practicing (and likely improving over time) your ability to write in a conversational way.

Social media gives you an easy and informal test ground to hone your communication skills.

Winston Churchill is said to have practiced the best bits for his speeches multiple times on family members and guests. He’d try out various lines and anecdotes and practice delivery.

You can do the same thing!

Next time you’re sending a Tweet or doing a Facebook post, see if you can tweak the idea in your head a bit before you are posting it. Think about what you wanted to write, then see if you can alter it slightly to make it even better.

Watch. Your “real world” writing will start to improve as you work on these “mini-writing” pieces.

I have now given you the power to feel virtuous about spending time on social media. You’re welcome.

“But Rebecca,” you ask. “Do you have any pointers about HOW I might tweak my social media quips to make them more interesting?”

Why yes. Yes I do. This brings us to . . .

One Copywriting Principle Can Help You Be More Interesting On Social Media Sites

Let me tell you about writing headlines.

Have you ever seen those Twitter accounts that seem to post nothing BUT headlines? The ones I’ve seen seem to fall into two categories: (a) Spam or (b) News services.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you keep a social media account that is at least somewhat personalized (or that you are a spammer who wants to make his social media accounts more conversational).

So you probably post updates about your life, your plans, etc. and seldom make use of the “headline” tone of voice or sales blurb-style of socializing online.

But there is something we can learn from the headline-only accounts. The sole goal of those accounts is . . . to get you to click through. They want to grab your interest.

And isn’t your goal in social media to attract interest and build up your personal brand?

To that end, let me introduce you to “The Four U’s” of headline writing. These serve to draw the reader in and make him want to read more. Incorporate one or more of these into your social media activities, and see how it affects your posts.

1. URGENCY. In copywriting, this means we try to get people to take action. In social media, you might substitute “urgency” for “immediacy.”Write vividly of your present moment. How to do this? Use details that add color and draw our attention to you. Help us focus on you, now. Remember that guy that tweeted his wedding vows? He is an example of this.
2. UNIQUENESS. Uniqueness is a great one-word synopsis of the already brief mantra “be yourself.” How can you play up your uniqueness?Talk about the things that make you YOU—hobbies, interests, things you mull over in your brain. The guy that tweets stuff his 70+ year-old dad says is pretty unique.(Side Note From Rhys: This is key if you’re retweeting articles! By offering your own spin on what you Retweet (such as making the headline funnier, or more urgency, or a quick opinion, you’re being unique!)
3. ULTRA-SPECIFICITY. Want an easy way to create subtle humor? Be very specific. “Saw 4 geckos on the train today” is more interesting than “Noticed wildlife during commute.”
4. USEFULNESS. Tell the reader useful things you’ve learned. Share links to things you find interesting or helpful, or give a synopsis if you can write it briefly enough.Share how to solve a problem. Whether a new movie is enjoyable with a date. Or even how to write great quips for social media sites using copywriting principles.

Rebecca Kellogg is a copywriter based out of Southern California. She writes copy for businesses and also writes magazine articles. Visit her blog at www.rebeccakellogg.com.

Sponsor: Get Ads for Your Feed via text link ads

One such area of plugins is ad management, with thousands of ad manager plugins available. Whilst I had one installed for the age longest time (Ad Rotator), it wasn’t perfect, requiring constant setup & maintenance. With the relaunch of this site in July, I wanted something that offered me plenty of functionality, but little or no maintenance.

Asking around, I was recommended OIO Publisher, a premium wordpress plugin.

OIO Publisher is a wordpress plugin that allows you to set up zones of advertising on your blog. These areas can then be sold independently of each other or in groups. Adverts can be targeted also on a per page or by a per IP address basis (which is stupidly complicated, something which I’ve not yet needed, but it’s there).

One thing that annoyed me with Ad Rotator was just the lack of automation, it annoyed both myself & one of my advertisers when I was away for an extended period & the advertiser couldn’t get the advertising live on the site. Not such a problem with this, from an advertisers perspective they click on the “Advertise Now” link, fill in details, upload a banner, pay with paypal and that’s it. The blog owner approves it from the wordpress dashboard, the advert then goes live for the length of time specified by the advertiser.

The advertiser can also set up a subscription, so that they’ll get the advert automatically renewed at the current rate – this is something which is great, as very few “free” add ons out there that manage this. If they’re not subscribed, then they  get a warning email that there advert is expiring – in fact emails are sent out quite a lot for this, making sure you don’t miss anything. If they choose not to subscribe then the advert is removed.

Being the site owner, you can also add your own adverts for a period of time (good for contests or banner exchange), as well as set up default advertisers should nothing be sold. Furthermore, the amount of different types of ad creatives you can have is huge – you can even manage paid posts & text links through this, and because you are separate from any advert network, you keep 100% of the income.

Purchasing the plugin also gives you access to the OIO Publisher marketplace, allowing you to list your blog as accepting advertising. This again is a nice feature, allowing you to sell advertising to companies that wouldn’t have seen your blog otherwise. The plugin author has stated he’s building up a network of advertisers for this marketplace, and there’s not much activity. Nevertheless, from that site alone, I’ve paid for the plugin a few times over.

It’s not perfect, one problem I have found is that have problems setting up advertisers for times not specified by the site owner (I’ve 1 & 4 week plans, I wanted to give a contest winner a prize of 8 weeks, and I’ve been unable to), and the default banner for “Advertise Here” is ugly, very ugly (it’s a text link), but other than that it’s a great plugin, as well as an ad server – you can use the plugin from within wordpress on Non Wordpress sites, and affiliate manager (you could earn money selling my ad space, but I’ve not set that up yet!).

OIO Publisher is available for $47, however if you use the coupon code given to you on any of the links on this post, you can get a discount of between $5-$15. I would thoroughly recommend it to manage your site’s advertising revenue. To purchase, please click the banner below.

(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links)