My session was on Design, Development & SEO: Building Search-Friendly Websites. I thought I’d be a great top to cover after winning the Marketing Pilgrim SEM contest a few months back. If you missed that, my article 9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design won first place. As a result, I’m traveling a lot this Fall for SMX and PubCon.

For anyone wishing to catch my slides from my session, I’ve uploaded them to slide share.

I’m at SMX East in New York right now and covering some of my experiences on the P|R blog. You can also follow me on Twitter @seozombie

Where I’ve been:

• I moved from Knoxville to Nashville.
• While waiting for old lease to end, I was staying at a friend’s
• Haven’t had a desk or bed in over a month
• Just moved into a new apartment
• Took a week to get internet at apartment
• Started new job a month ago, so I had to spend free time shutting down some of my other sites
• From 6:30 am to 6:00 pm I’m either at work, getting ready for work, or traveling to and from work
• Been competing in  a SEM contest

Great News

Some amazing news, I won the SEM contest over at Marketing Pilgrim! It was nice competing in a national level contest and walking away with some amazing prizes. The two best prizes are free passes to PubCon and SMX East! I am planning to attend both! If you’re heading to either, let me know.

Will be blogging soon now that I have internet at my new place.

SEO Consulting

I haven’t been answering emails due to minimal access to the internet when out of work. I work full time as the SEO Manager at Paramore|Redd, so I will be taking on less consulting work. I will also be increasing my rates.

First, I completed my move (was waiting for lease to expire) and I am now officially back in Nashville, Tn (completely back for good). I’m looking forward to getting involved in all the web design / seo / internet marketing stuff here.

Even better news, I landed an in-house gig at the best online marketing company here in Nashville. Paramore|Redd does everything from web design, strategy, email marketing, display advertising, and PPC. I stepping in to help them commit to SEO. So I’m Paramore|Redd’s new “SEO guy”.

I like consulting and doing my own work, but I’m really excited about working with them on some higher scale projects. They have a great team of designers and programmers who can build some amazing sites. I get to help build their program, so its very appealing.

Soon I’ll be working to optimize their domain and promoting them over the next few months. I should be blogging over there too. Once I start, I’ll let you guys know. The content will be a little different than it is here (less tactical and not “make money online”). If you want to get my new blog posts, subscribe to their online marketing blog. I think we’ll be adding more to their blog too, so you guys should check it out.

What Does This Mean for SEO Zombie?

Well, I have no plans to stop this blog. There may be a bit of lag in content as I adjust to the new job. The only change in content might come from my change in experience. Currently, I have done a lot of work with affiliate sites that I build and own. A lot of my time over the next few months will be focused on teaching SEO and promoting bigger businesses with solid brands.

SEO Consulting

I’ll keep myself open for basic freelance consulting, but if you’re a business with a big project, it may go through P|R. The great news about that is they’re a full range interactive agency. They can do everything from graphic design, website design, programming, email, PPC, and SEO.

Well I’m starting this week and settling into my new place soon. Once I’m completely settled, my blogging schedule will pick up again.

Also, I’m doing a contest. I’m waiting for the results on it. You can support it by checking out my contest post about search engine friendly web design.

I entered an SEM contest by Andy Beal, which has over $10,000 in prizes! The finalists are the top 5 people who send the most traffic. I’d love to make it into the top 5 so I can have my article read by people like Rand Fishkin. I love my community of friends on this blog and everyone I have met through Court, Griz, and Vic. We have a solid group of bloggers that can really flex their power when needed (just look at SBI thing). I’d like to ask you all to help out if you can.

Ways to Help

1. Read my post 9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design.
2. Please do not bounce. Spend over two minutes on the article and try to leave a comment. Even if you do not like the article, please just leave it open and listen to a song for 2 to 3 minutes =)
3. Please give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon =)
4. Please bookmark it on Delicious.
5. And please Sphinn it on Sphinn.
6. Please tweet about
7. If you have a blog about internet marketing, make money online, seo, sem, or any type of internet marketing: please consider writing a post about it and passing it a link.

Thank you all so much for all your help!

Here are some easy to use links to bookmark my article if you’d like to help!

del.icio.us

reddit

Sphinn

StumbleUpon

I spent this afternoon putting together an email for a client explaining to them how nofollow links from blog comments is worth next to nothing when it comes to rankings. Their current SEO reported these in their SEO report as the links they built for them. I explained how these comment links, which are nofollow, are useless. This is because someone said it was inaccurate when I said nofollow link building was bad.

This is why SEO gets no respect as a profession. Companies misinform and scam clients because most people do not understand SEO.  They get to charge the thousands of dollars for their “link building” services, which consist primarily of article distribution (some of those are nofollowed) and comment links (those are all nofollow).

I’m an upfront guy. I engage in SEO that is less than ideal at times. I do this for research, testing, practice, fun, and … money. I sometimes play around in… well… “interesting” niches because the SEO in those spaces is amazing at times. I understand the difference in tactics though. Tactics I test on affiliate sites or crash and burn domains, are not the tactics I’d use to promote a business.  There are tactic I promote via this blog, that I do not recommend for a real business.

When you optimize a site for a business, you run the risk of killing thousands or millions in revenue if you destroy Google’s trust in their domain. You have a responsibility to that business.

The style of their comments*:
(not their comment, but I recreated an example)
*They actually charge for this and report it as link building.

“Hi bob, this is an amazing post on link building. I hear links really help in rankings.

If you like link building, than you should check out SEO Zombie, which provides a lot of valuable resources to help you learn SEO. Justin provides some ugly, but effective, MFA Adsene Ready Themes. If you want to learn more from this SEO Consultant, you should check out his blog”

I didn’t put a nofollow on them here, but this is the type of crap being left on people’s blogs (the links are nofollowed on people’s blogs). This SEO company (who is  well known and fairly respected) is calling this “link building”.

So I was told that I was “inaccurate” to say that type of link building is either useless or very low quality, or even borderline spam. I replied that I’m willing to stand behind my statement.

If leaving comments like that is the quality of link building someone should expect for thousands of dollars a month, someone please inform me. I could outsource this crap to someone on Digital Point.

[I’m not naïve enough to believe that nofollow never counts. I don’t believe Google has 100% accuracy and I believe that Google reserves the right to ignore nofollow. I know spam still works, I’ve done it. I simply do not see it as a high level tactic or a respectable tactic that should be sold for thousands of dollars, when it could be outsourced to a button mashing monkey]

End Rant.

Don’t get me wrong, tracking your rough link popularity over time is a solid way to see growth in your link profile, but this data is extremely limited. That fact that it’s inaccurate, varies constantly, and counts nofollow links is a topic for another day. Today I want to discuss domain diversity. A factor that seems to get heavy weight these days (correlates really well with sites that rank well). So if you want to rank higher, you need to focus a bit more on domain diversity.

Traditional View of a Link Profile

Below is a diagram that shows a very traditional view of how you achieve links to your site. The dark blue circle is your site and the light blue/gray circles are sites that link to you. The gray circles are pages on that site that link to you. Traditional link analysis looks at links on a page by page (or link by link basis). In the example below, the site has 7 links.

Domain Diversity View of a Link Profile

Next is a diagram to show the domain view of a link profile. The circles still represent the same thing, but this time we’re looking at the link graph on a domain level. Instead of saying “this site has 7 links”, we’re saying “3 domains link to this site”.

Why Is Domain Level Analysis Valuable

Domain level link analysis allows us to dampen the impact of a sitewide links from a large domain. If you’ve ever had the chance to get a sitewide link on a domain with hundreds of pages, you’ll know you do not get the value of “100’s of links”. This is diminishing returns in play. Not only does diminishing return impact sites on the same IP, but impacts fully qualified domains.

Real Life Example

I’m working with some cool people right now and may be doing some SEO work for them soon. They’re an internet marketing company that focuses on non-seo stuff. Although they are a PR 5 and have some links from some AMAZING domains, they do not rank nearly as well as my blog does. They do rank “ok” for a few terms, but do not rank well for many terms. The question many may have is “why”. Their site is older, it has a higher PR, they have “ok” anchors, and our link popularity is comparable.

Here is a quick overview of our domains from the SEOMoz Toolbar.

My Domain

Their Domain

As you can see, their site generally has more juice, authority, and trust than my domain. Here is the major difference.

Their Domain

My Domain

I have links from 273 more domains. Although my links may come from lower quality sources, I am competitive against their handful of powerful links.

If they chose to let me SEO their domain, I will be focusing on increasing the volume of domains that link to them. If they add quantity to their quality, they will have a very strong domain.

How to Do This

There are many ways to get links from many different places. Simply focus on not getting stuck on one place. If you, for example, publish 10 hubs on hubpages to promote a niche site, it will not pay as much to continue to publish more hubs for that niche site. Instead, move on to a new link source. If you get a guest blogging opportunity, and have already published 5 guest posts there, you would benefit more from making a guest post at a new domain over publishing more at the same domain.

Linkbait, resources, widgets, tools, etc are all great methods of having a broad appeal. These can earn you links from a diverse set of domains.

Homepage Links vs Internal Links

Getting links to subpages within your site is a signal of quality. When building links, you need to build links to both your home page and subpages on your site. If you’re only getting homepage links, you will see limited ranking ability on pages deep in your site.

Of course, this is not always a simple task. Building resources and creating linkbait are highly effective methods of building links to internal pages, but if you’re grasping for links to internal pages, you can do a bit of article marketing, which will help with long tail phrases.

Get Links to Important Content

In addition to simply gaining internal links, you need to focus on earning links to your important content. I consider “important content” to be pages that convert well, pages that you want traffic on, or pages that you want to rank.

Many times important content can be linkbait at the same time, but if the content is commercially focused, it may be hard to get links for it. In that case, you may want to consider setting up a mini link farm.

Trust vs High PR

PageRank and the trust of a domain are two separate factors when looking at the value of a link. Of course, a high PR link is extremely valuable. You should focus on getting links from pages with a lot of link juice (PR is a rough measure of this). In addition though, focus on getting links from trusted domains, even if it comes from a low PR page. A good example of this would be a Yahoo directory listing. Although these links pass little link juice, it is a trust signal that tells search engines your site received a human review.

I recommend obtaining a mix of high PR and high trust links (not always the same thing).

Link Volume vs Domain Volume

Link popularity is a skewed metric. My Yahoo link count makes my site appear less important, but I perform well relative to the number of links I have. The reason behind this is “domain diversity”. I don’t have a lot of links, but I have a lot of domains linking to me (relative to my link count). If I get a site wide link from a domain, that may appear as hundreds of links in Yahoo. Due to diminishing returns, these links do not push the value of hundreds of links. Usually you’re receiving the value of 2 to 5 links or so. So when I see a site with 5,000 links, but the majority of them come from blogrolls, I know their link profile is weaker than it appears. If I see a site with 5,000 links, but the majority comes from a single page on a domain with a link in the content, then I know that domain is stronger than the one with mainly site wide links.

I recommend you spend time looking at links on a domain level, not just a page level, because Google seems to be placing a fair bit of weight on domain level analysis. If you want to track how many domains are linking to a site, you should check out the SEOMoz Pro membership. They have a toolbar that feeds you this type of information from linkscape.

Topical vs Non-Topical

I believe you should focus on getting links that are on and off topic. Links from pages or sites with topical relevance give you more relevance in that niche, but off topic links spread your reach.

Not only would I want to be referenced by SEO blogs as an SEO, but I would love to be referenced by web designers, programmers, small business owners, make money online bloggers, affiliate bloggers, etc.

You want to expand your reach in both depth and breadth.

I don’t mean you should get WAY off topic links. People get in trouble with things like off topic widgets, so avoid that. Instead, expand to topics loosely related to your topic. For example, I could guest blog on a site about upstart businesses to explain why you should consider SEO when promoting your new business. That site wouldn’t be in the internet marketing niche and would expose me to a new niche, but it’s still relevant. I think this would be a stronger brand boost than simply staying in your own niche all the time.

How to Approach This

SEO rarely has a set system of “do this” and profit. The best advice I can give is “try to get a lot of high quality anchor links from as many different place as you possibly can”. I also suggest that you avoid getting stuck on one type of link. The more diversity, the more long term potential your link profile will have.

Basically, PageRank will now “evaporate”.

Nobody has cleared anything up yet, but you should take the time to read over these posts and get caught up on the issue.

• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting – By Danny Sullivan
• Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow – By Rand
• No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow – Follow up by Rand
• You&A With Matt Cutts – Live blogging from Lisa Barone

More new posts to come when I get back =)

Anchoring Keywords

You don’t want to anchor your links like a newbie. This a basic concept in SEO link building, yet it is often forgotten or misunderstood. The basic idea behind Google is that links provide votes for your site and the words used in that link describe your content to Google. So if you want Google to know you’re about “credit cards”, then people need to reference you with the keyword phrase “credit cards”. I’ve shown this before, but I think Allyn Hane does an amazing job explaining the basics of linking.

From Allyn’s post on the Basic Definition Of “Links”

It gets a bit more complicated than that though.

Anchor Text Distribution

If you site is about “credit cards”, you may be tempted to run out and  only get links for that exact phrase, but this is bad for two reasons.

1. Creates a “Google Bomb” from spamming the same anchor text, which may result in a penalty
2. Limits your optimization to one exact phrase

Too often people only worry about the Google Bomb aspect of spamming one phrase, but it is actually BAD SEO independent of the Google Bomb concept.

The success of SEO is rarely tied to the ranking for one specific phrase. Getting hung up on one phrase is a newbie mistake. Take some time to read my posts on longtail keywords and semantics for SEO.

As an SEO, I would rather rank in the top 5 for 300 different terms, than rank #1 for the best term in the niche. The first scenario would likely provide me more traffic and that traffic is more likely to be targeted.

You can relate anchor text distribution to the idea of keyword density. Instead of repeating one phrase, it is better to mix in multiple related and long tail variations of your keywords.

Examples of Anchor Variations

•    Justin’s blog about Credit Cards
•    Student credit cards
•    Compare credit cards
•    Credit cards for people with bad credit
•    Credit card guide

And yes, every single one of these phrases helps for the primary phrase “credit card”, but they have the added benefit of picking up phrases related to: student, compare, guide, bad, and bad credit. This helps us dramatically increase the number of phrases we can rank for, while also avoiding a Google bomb penalty.

A Natural Link Profile

You’ll see a lot of talk about “appearing natural” when building links. If you anchor your links in a predictable way, it becomes obvious that you have manipulated your link profile. Google hates link manipulation, so you want to stay under the radar.

A lot of people give Google too much credit and claim they have amazing detection techniques. I’ll agree that Google is great at detecting linking patterns, but there are a huge number of sites that get away with it. The problem isn’t if Google can detect it today, but if Google can detect it in two years. I see a lot of sites ranking that are obviously manipulating. The concern for them is that a Google algo update may wipe out their site. The SEO community has seen this multiple times.

To reduce your risk, it is valuable to build a profile that “appears” natural.

4 Most Common Anchors in a Natural Profile

1. Site Name
2. Site URL
3. Owner’s Name
4. Page Title

The majority of webmasters link to other sites with one of the 4 anchors above.

A Fairly Natural Link Profile

Ranked by number of anchors for each phrase

1. Justin’s Credit Card Guide
2. Credit Card Guide
3. Justin
4. Guide on Credit Cards
5. http://awesomecreditcardguide.com
6. Justin’s Credit Card Guides – Tips & Advice
7. Credit Cards
8. Credit Card Reviews
9. Student Credit Cards

A Link Profile That Is Not Natural

1. Credit Cards
2. Credit Card Reviews
3. Student Credit Cards
4. Bad Credit Credit Cards
5. Credit Card
6. Credit Card Guide
7. Compare Credit Cards
8. Justin’s Credit Card Guide
9. Justin’s Credit Card Guides – Tips & Advice
10. Justin
11. http://awesomecreditcardguide.com

So anchoring is important, but be cautious when you anchor your links, so that you do not over optimize your backlink profile.

Tips to Improve Your Anchor Distribution

1. Don’t anchor the exact match of your main keyword more than 25% of the time
2. Use your site title as the anchor periodically. (If you do your title right, this should still be a keyword anchored link)
3. Get people to keyword anchor when they reference your name.  Instead of “from Justin’s blog”, ask them to say “from Justin’s SEO blog”
4. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to identify related keywords and work through them as anchors
5. Focus on having a diverse mix of anchor text combinations instead of many links on a specific term
6. Do stuff so you actually earn real natural links (lol…gasp…). If you have natural links being produced, then you don’t have to worry as much about “appearing natural” when doing SEO because your natural links are already creating diversity for you and will mask your link building.

I hope this helps you guys when you’re getting anchored links for your site. I have many more post coming in the better backlinks series. If you’re interested in keeping up on these posts, I recommend subscribing.

The video focuses on building a business online that sells a product or service. If you’re just looking to build MFA, Adsense, or affiliate sites, then this video may not be for you. He provides great insight about building a solid income online.
(It’s also a fun video to watch)

Fairly Comprehensive SEO Plugins

Headspace2 – This is a very powerful SEO plugin with a lot of options to edit titles and meta information. I’ve tried this one, but I use All-in-One SEO more than Headspace2.

All-in-One SEO – This is a fairly comprehensive SEO plugin for SEO and a favorite of many Wordpress bloggers. It has fewer options than Headspace, but is super simple and performs the must have heavy lifting.

I am converting several blogs over to Thesis. The way Thesis is designed, removed the need for these two plugins. SEO Zombie no longer depends on All-in-One SEO, but allows Thesis to handle the titles and meta information (You can move all your All-in-One SEO information into Thesis easily).

Indexing Management Plugins

Meta Robots – This plugin gives you powerful control over the indexing of your site by giving you detailed control over the robots meta information. Not only can you block indexing, but you can disable duplicate content sections. I use this plugin on SEO Zombie. Thesis does a solid job at this, but Meta Robots gives you a lot more options.

Permalink Redirect – The plugin 301 redirects variations of your URLs to the canonical permalink. This prevents URLs with parameters from getting indexed.

Redirection – This is one of my favorite plugins and I use it regularly here at SEO Zombie. This plugin sets up simple 301 redirects for you with little effort. If I delete old content or move content to a new location, this plugin allows me to retain most of the juice in that move. This is very handy if you want to change your permalink structure and/or site heirachry.

Improve Indexing

Sitemap Generator (HTML) – You can live without it, but a sitemap can help search engines locate all the pages on your site. This is a great plugin that will manage the HTML sitemap for your blog.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator – XML sitemaps are a great way to notify engines of updates and allow them to discover URLs that may be a challenge to find through your site. Hopefully your site design is good enough to not need this, but I recommend adding one just to be sure.

Similar Posts – At the end of my posts you’ll see a list of “related posts”. This is done using this plugin. Of all the ones I have tried, this is my favorite. It requires the use of the Post-Plugin Library. This allows you to cross link related posts. This helps search engines assign topical relevance and also increases internal linking. This plugin helps reduce your site’s “depth”.

Internal Link Building – As I mentioned above, internal linking is a GOOD thing. This plugin helps you do this by identifying keywords or phrases that will always link. For example, the phrase “learn seo” is setup on my blog to automatically link. The link is automatically done when I publish this post. This helps me assign internal authority to that page for the keyword phrase “learn seo”. Also, it reduces keyword confusion by assigning a particular page as “the authority” for that phrase on my site.

One More Random Plugin

GoCodes – I use this plugin now to redirect my affiliate links. I’ve explained before how to cloak affiliate links manually, but found this plugin after that. This allows me to set up short URLs that redirect to the URL of my choice. I use it primarily to link to my affiliate links.

SEO Wordpress Plugins

Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of SEO plugins. There are plenty of those. These are the plugins I use regularly on my sites and should take care of the majority of your SEO needs. I use them all but Headspace2 , and I no longer use All-in-One SEO here because the Thesis theme manages everything this plugin use to.

I think it is a solid middle ground option for people who get CSS and PHP, but are not gurus. You can do a lot of work with just basic knowledge in both of these languages. To help you guys get started, I wanted to point you at some solid information on customizing Thesis.

Customizing Design

To customize the look of your site, you can edit any of the CSS being used by the theme. Since this custom CSS is loaded last, it will overwrite the default appearance of the theme. So you can change colors, styles, borders, background, rollovers, and widths (anything that CSS can tweak).

There are two files within the /thesis/custom folder: custom.css and custom_functions.php. The CSS file tweaks the appearance and the custom_functions file allows you to add, remove, and replace any of the “content” on the site. You can add Google ads, content after posts, banners, menus, footers, or anything you can think of; but in a much stronger way than with normal themes. Lastly, it is great that these customizations are independent of the theme files. When the Thesis theme is updated (which is free with your purchase) then you will not have to redo your tweaks.

A lot of people leave the Thesis theme with its standard design, including me for the time being. I plan to customize it more when I have time, but there are some bloggers who have done a bit more with the theme. Here is a list of bloggers using the theme who have done some tweaks via custom.css

• http://www.copyblogger.com/
• http://creepyla.com/
• http://www.mobileorchard.com/
• http://www.mindtweaks.com/wordpress/
• http://blog.tipd.com/

None of them have done anything too crazy, but Thesis allows you to replace many of the things on the site or add to it. Then you can customize it with CSS.

If you want to get started with the basics, you can check out their guide on how to change your background on Thesis.

When you buy the theme, you get access to the private forum. Here you can get help or look at the questions others have asked. There are a lot of nice customization options covered in the forums.

Thesis Hooks

The theme uses the concept of hooks for customization, which is the purpose of the custom functions file.

You’ll need to learn a little PHP, but hooks are simple.

The basic concept is that you define a chunk of code that can be a mix of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and then you instruct the theme where you want it. At the bottom of this post you can see my custom social site buttons. I wrote the HTML for these and defined them as a function in my custom functions file. I then instructed the theme to enter the code below the post. I didn’t have to hunt through the file to find the location in the code, I simply told it to insert after the post.

A blogger named Francis has a nice visual guide to the hook locations. These are the places where you can instruct Thesis to insert your code.

Source: http://www.francisraymond.com/

Adding content with hooks is super easy. Here is how I added my footer for example.

function add_custom_footer () {
?>
<p>Copyright 2009 - <a href="http://spurrmarketing.com">SEO Zombie - How to Make Money Online</a></p>
<p><a href="http://seozombie.com/sitemap/">Sitemap</a> | <a href="http://seozombie.com/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a> | <a href="http://seozombie.com/terms-and-conditions/">Terms</a></p>
<?php

This first part is just the HTML code needed and I defined it as a function called add_custom_footer. This code is put into the custom functions file.

To add the footer to the theme, you just have to add this line of code to the custom functions.

add_action('thesis_hook_footer', 'add_custom_footer');

This just tells Thesis to take what is in your function named “add_custom_footer” and add it to the hook location “thesis_hook_footer”. You can visually see these hook locations on the guide above.

This may seem challenging to the newbie coder, but I’ll post some more tutorials on how to tweak Thesis. It is simple enough that a basic coder can figure it out, but open enough that a good programmer can do some powerful stuff.

If you want your own copy, just hop over to the Thesis site to learn more.

Thesis is an amazing premium theme put together by Chris Pearson (from pearsonified.com) and Brian Clark (from Copyblogger). It does come with a price tag, but is well worth it for anyone who runs a substantial blog and wants a ton of options.

I’ll tell you why I like it in a moment, but first let me tell you who is using it. You can find the Thesis theme in action over at Danny Sullivan’s blog (the SEO / search legend). You can see it again on Matt Cutt’s new blog (the Google spam team Matt). Both Rae Hoffman (Sugar Rae) and Michael Gray (Graywolf) use it on their blogs. If you don’t know them, Rae is a solid affiliate marketer and SEO and Graywolf is an old school SEO guru. After seeing this solid list of Thesis users, I decided to take the jump and grab the Thesis theme and I am very impressed.

What I Like About Thesis

• It has a lot of options. You get two huge dashboards that give you detailed control over the theme. You can edit the layout on the fly and dictate with pixel perfect precision how large/wide the columns of your site should be. You can quickly change between 1, 2, and 3 column layouts. You can control any font quickly and easily as well. If you check out the Thesis site, you can watch the video of all the options.
• It is super easy to customize. You can change almost anything on this theme by tweaking two files. You don’t have to edit template files, but simply add the needed code to the custom CSS or custom functions file and BAM, the site has changed. My site’s design was done with just a couple of simple tweaks. Also, the custom functions can do some powerful customization, which I’ll be using on this site soon.
• It has the best SEO out of any theme I’ve used so far. Out of the box, this theme does a really solid job at SEO and even removes the need to use plugins like all-in-one SEO. (I still use it because I’m use to it, but may be switching to pure Thesis soon). They get the headings right and it just does an amazing job making your blog search friendly with a lot of detailed controls.

I really like this theme and Thesis is a product I feel comfortable standing behind, so I may end up being a bit of a fanboy. For you guys jumping in on Thesis, I’ll be providing some Thesis specific tutorials to help you guys get started using this theme.

Thesis does cost money, so it may not be for everyone. If you’re just toying with a few affiliate sites for now, then this may not be for you. If you’re making money on a site or want to invest in a theme for a new project, then this is the theme to get. The single license allows you to use it on one site for $87 and you get the whole thing (must keep footer link there). The developer license gives you a ton of freedom for $164.00, which allows you to use the theme on as many sites as you want and you can remove the attribution link. (I got the developer’s license, because I plan to use it on several of my sites).

So this is best for people who manage a large site or many sites and want a highly customizable theme with a lot of options  (and one that is very search engine friendly). The price tag is never fun, but the theme is well worth it. You get access to their community forums as well, which provides support for Thesis.

So if it sounds good to you, you should check out Thesis and pick up your own copy.

(This isn’t a paid review and I wasn’t given a copy. I actually spent the $167 myself to get the theme and I really like it)

Hubpage Concerns

1. Fear it will be spammed into the ground. I remember a time when Vic put out a call to action to create 100 .info BANS sites. I learned a lesson from that, which is to not invest into something 100’s of newbie marketers are pouring into. Court has the skills to push out 100 hubs in a profitable manner, but I worry about the army of people who will half-ass it. I’ve seen how many people optimize and it usually involves keyword density spam and bolds. I don’t want to invest and have the value of Hubpages pushed into the ground. I imagine 50 people building 100 hubs in the next 30 days. That’s 5,000 new hubs in the next 30 days. If 100 people do it, that’s 10,000 new hubs in the next month! If people are being lazy and spamming this process, it could be a very bad thing. (Maybe people will be lazy and the impact will be minimal)
2. Someone else’s domain. Google is placing a lot of emphasis right now on branding, trust, authority, and age. It is becoming an increasingly important factor. If you follow the changes in the serps, you’ll know how valuable the link equity of a domain can become. I hate investing time into someone else’s domain. It is the same reason I only use free sites for spam / farms. I’d rather put up 100 pages of content on my own domain than someone else’s. Of course, Hubpages allows you to get easier rankings due to their authority, but you do not get the long term authority boost the entire domain gets.
3. It could drop in value. Sites like Squidoo and Hubpages have seen great success and people flooded to them to benefit from their value. Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal, Squidoo, and Hubpages are all becoming free content hosting powerhouses. Well I’ve been building sites for a LONG time. I wasn’t a marketer at first, but an AOL 3.0 newbie learning about HTML/FTP/SMTP. I made sites when the MARQUEE and BLINK tags were “cool”. I searched with Lycos and Hotbot. My first site was on Tripod, my second was on Angelfire, and my 3rd was on Geocities. These were THE free hosting powerhouses of the late 90’s. The internet grew and shifted away from these domains. In June of 1997, GeoCities was the 5th most popular site on the internet!! Yahoo! Is now closing down GeoCities this year and they will no longer provide free hosting. In the 10 to 12 year I’ve been on the net, I’ve seen sites come and go. Popularity + advertising does not = long term viability. Where will Hubpages be in 5 years or 10 years?

I have no doubt there is money to be made through Hubpages, but I’ve said before that my goal online is to build a long term viable business. If I were going to use throw away pages or domains, I’d be doing blackhat.

I think Court is on to something valuable, since he’s a great marketer, but I’m uncomfortable about investing my time into creating so many Hubpages due to the three reasons listed above.

So what do you guys think? Are you going to try to make money with sites like Hubpages?
(I’m not trying to put the experiment down, but I wanted to seen what you guys are up to)