Showing posts with label keywords. Show all posts
Showing posts with label keywords. Show all posts

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Backlinks To The Future!

We are now on Day 29 of the Thirty Day Challenge and it's all about backlinks. If you hadn't gotten it from previous posts then here's the scoop. Backlinks are one of the most important aspects to having a good page ranking in Google. Using Ed Dale's earlier analogy that Google is the bouncer and your niche is the niteclub, well backlinks (from reputable sources) are link having someone well known to the club/bouncer put in a good word for your ugly self. If I manage to get a backlink on a site that Google regards as an authority in my niche, it's like someone cool walking me up to the door of the club and saying "this guy is okay, treat him well". Obviously, the more of these cool people you have coming to the door with you, the more likely you are not only going to get in, but also you're going to get a good table near the front of the stage (equals high page ranking).

Now some people think that the more backlinks you have the better off you are, but that's not necessarily so. Quality always wins out over quantity. The best backlinks to have come from authority sites in your niche. If you're selling sausage making tips then you want to get backlinks from sites that at the very least revolve around the processing of meat. Having a backlink to your sausage making tips come from a computer game website is probably not going to do much for you in terms of gaining Google's trust and confidence. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows about sausage making and says you're okay - huge plus. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows everything there is to know about car parts, Google is not going to care so much. Don't get me wrong, almost any backlink is a help - but if you're going to take the time to submit your site for backlinks then you might as well go to relevant niche sites to do it. To see how to go about doing that you can read my previous blog post.

Now, once you've done the hard yards with authority sites in your niche you can try hitting directories for a bit more of a boost in the rankings. Directories are basically sites that will list your site in a particular category relevant to your niche. Google will take notice of these places, but only in a cursory way. Directory submission is something you should not bother doing manually, as the time it takes will not be rewarding enough. Thankfully, there is directory submission software out there that takes away alot of the time-consuming aspect. One such tool can be found at imwishlist.com - where you can also download an article submitter to place your content on other platforms such as Ezinearticles. I'm a bit skeptical about article submitters because of the duplicate content rule on Google. Basically, Google will penalize anything it sees as duplicate content, and relegate it to the "sandbox" - also known as the Supplemental Index. Basically, lost in the ether.

A great place to go to find directories to submit your sites to is addurl.nu. It has a list of over 800 directories that you can submit to, along with their page ranking (the higher the PR the more "authority"), so you can just focus on the directories that are going to mean more to Google.

One of the good and bad things about directory submissions is that they usually take quite a while to show up. Usually around 3 to 6 months for a free submission, but some work a little quicker. I say this is good because what it means is that you can submit to multiple directories at once without fear of Google thinking you are spam and sandboxing you. If you were to do the same thing with social bookmarking sites then Google would consider you a spammer and drop you like a hot potato.

If all this time and trouble and waiting is too much for you then you can also pay to have your site listed on various directories. This will generally guarantee you a quick listing. If you have plenty of money then you might as well hit the big wig directories - Yahoo and DMOZ. Yahoo submission run at around $300 a year. I'm not sure the price of DMOZ but it's not that much. Of course, in keeping with the principles of the thirty day challenge we do not want to spend any money just yet, so I'll pass on the paid submissions and stick to the free ones.

Another place to acquire backlinks for free is by answering questions relevant to your niche in Yahoo Answers. What is Yahoo Answers? Well, it quite simply a place where people post questions and other people answer them. The asker then picks the answer that suits them as the best. You can build up points for having your answer picked as the best.

When you first go to Yahoo Answers you should click on the 'Advanced' link and make sure the "open questions" is checked. This will then give you the questions that you can still post answers to (once a best answer is picked the question becomes closed for anymore answers). You then do a search for your keyword phrase and see what comes up. If you find something you can answer try and put your keyword in the answer somewhere (but not in a spammy, sales way). You are given a 'source' box that you can then enter the address of your site. If you can be bothered you can also search through the 'resolved questions' and add comments instead of answers. The advantage of Yahoo answers is that it is niche specific, which Google likes. It's worthwhile spending an hour or so every few days going through trying to answer questions and add your backlink. The most important thing here, though, is to make sure your answers are contributive. Don't just post some crap, through your URL in and expect it to be okay. Yahoo Answers is moderated and if you spam you're likely to have your answer deleted and your account suspended.

Ed's Podcast for Day 29 of the challenge talked about the various niches that he's had a look at from other thirty day challengers, and the mistakes some of them had made when trying to get ranked. I really wish I could have gotten my site looked at - but hopefully I'll network someone who knows enough of their stuff to be able to tell me if I'm doing something wrong with my site. For some reason I just can't get it off Page 4 of search results, no matter how many relevant backlinks I work up. My Squidoo lens is holding up okay, but with my next niche I'll definitely be trying a new platform other than Blogger. I thought it would be favored by Google seeing as Google own it, but maybe because it's so big Google don't consider it such a knowledge base after all.

Ed's advice when starting to add content to your platform is making sure you put your keywords in the heading of your blog, to write a decent description in the heading of your blog for Google to pick up. Don't throw too many articles up at once at the beginning. Just make one post and wait for Google to index it before you make any more. Do a little social bookmarking on that one post, but not on the first day and no more than 5 sites every other day. Make sure that whatever platform you use there isn't already a bunch of people trying the same niche on that platform. If so, use another platform. There are hundreds of viable platforms to choose from, so go out there and knock 'em dead.

There is only one more day of the Thirty Day Challenge left for me to blog about - I'll then be carrying on with my new niche idea and documenting my attempts at getting better results with that then I've had with my current two niches.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Location Location Location

Day 16 of the thirty day challenge and we are moving the content we have written up into the wide weird world of the internet, in preparation of getting it ranked and having traffic swarm to our page and hopefully our affiliate products.

The first video was Ed going over the process we are to follow. We create the blog (our content site), which is our attractive friend. We then hit it with some social bookmarking (a process that will be explained further on Day 17). That is our attention getting friend, or friends as the case may be.

So the action points are:

1. Watch the Tumblr Video - check!
2. Create a Tumblr blog account - check!
3. Write another 3 articles for each of my phrases - crap...

I am actually understanding why this content needs to be written (well I think I do). It's my understanding that we not only need to get into the practice of writing content regularly, so that it doesn't become such a chore, but also so we can learn about our chosen niches (if we didn't already know about them), and hopefully become interested in them. That has certainly happened with me, although I am still behind in the content writing. I'm okay with that, though, because I know I can pump out the good when necessary, as one of my jobs back when I was working 9 to 5 was to write copy for newsletters and shop item descriptions - and that was for an area that I didn't have a great deal of interest in, so writing about something I am interested in will be a piece of cake.

The one thing I'm a little unclear on is just how regularly are we supposed to upload new content to our blogs. After watching the videos I didn't really see that mentioned anywhere. I notice that for both Ed's and Rob's niche sites they had two blog posts already in place, but I don't recall hearing either of them mention how often after that should we be adding to it. Is it once a day? Once every two days? I might have to jump on the forum and look that one up.

Speaking of the forum, I forgot to mention earlier that with the great 30DC toolbar that we were supplied with thanks to Dan, we are able to quickly and easily search the 30DC forums through Google. We merely type into the 30DC search bar the phrase we are looking for, then when the results appear on Google we click on the Thirty Day Challenge link on Google and it narrows down the results to only those from the forum. How cool is that!

After Ed's video we got a video from Rob explaining how we set up a blog in Tumblr, and some little tricks to use to help identify our keyword phrase to Google. It's important to put our keywords in the heading of the blog, as well as trying to fit it in the first sentence (or first paragraph if first sentence doesn't work). Also, bolding that first instance and italicizing the last instance of your keyword phrase will let Google spiders know that those words are the ones to focus on. I think having a different attribute on each is important, as Google doesn't like too much repetition, so having one bold and one in italics is better than having two bold key phrases. So don't go off and bold all your key phrase instances thinking that it will give you a higher ranking. It will likely do the opposite if anything.

So I was then left to open my Tumblr account and create my blogs. I got a good tip about GMail from one of the other challengers. He mentioned that with GMail, you can alter your original email address so that the same email can be used for all your Tumblr accounts. Let me explain...

With Tumblr, it is a case of one email address per account/blog. Unlike Blogger, you can only open one blog per account in Tumblr, which I do find restrictive. Anyway, I opened a GMail account as cardsagogo@gmail.com, and the tip is that if you make your Tumblr account email address "cardsagogo+yournichephrase@gmail.com", not only will you get emails going to your GMail account, but you can make "yournichephrase" any of your niches and not have to create a new email account for each phrase. Now that saves a lot of time and hassle. So I did all that and posted just one piece of content for each niche. I was actually running a little behind so didn't get this done until Friday the 17th.

As it turns out I'm kid of glad I only put up one piece for each niche. Overnight on Saturday the 18th, the guy who runs Tumblr went on a rampage on his own site, deleting blogs and accounts indiscriminately. He rationale was that he didn't want all us 30DCers using his blog for what affiliate marketing. He called us scum and eventhough he was targeting 30DCers, he apparently deleted several blogs belonging to people who had been using Tumblr for a while. Alarm bells obviously went up for him when there was a HUGE spike of traffic to his little blog site, as thousands of 30DCers, following the words of Ed Dale, went over and signed up and posted their content. Ed blamed the mass deletion on those who were using the 30DC process to produce spam-like crap content, rather than those who had genuine, original content in place. Personally, from what I read of the guy who runs Tumblr, I don't think it mattered. It certainly didn't matter to him which accounts he deleted. But hey, it is his site and he's welcome to do what he likes with it. If he doesn't want the extra traffic then that's fine. I know a lot of people got angry and probably started using Web 2.0 techniques to try and bash Tumblr. Neither of my blogs got the chop and they may have been because I was running late with signing up (not in the midst of the thousands of others), or that my blogs were of a technical nature - apparently the guy who runs Tumblr is an ex-IT guy so is partial to techie stuff. Who knows really, but I was in a quandary as to whether I should stick with Tumblr now or take my blog elsewhere. I didn't want to continue working on it only to have this guy decide to shut me down 1 week, 2 weeks, 6 months in, and have all that work wasted. On the other hand I had started and noticed that in less than 24 hours one of my blogs had reached #34 position in Google for the phrase match, without having any social bookmarking done on it whatsoever. I was now worried that if I started again I would be competing against this Tumblr blog. If I did start again I would have to change my content enough that Google didn't see it as duplicate. That wasn't a bit deal, and in the end I figured it was better to spend a bit more time starting up somewhere more secure, so I headed to the first place I could think of that hadn't let me down. Here.

I know down the track I will use other blogging platforms to host my content for future niches, but for now I wanted to just have the ease that Blogger affords me, so I started two new blogs with my niche phrase in the URL, and posted my first blogs for each, with revised content of course. I added in one affiliate link in each blog, to products on Amazon.com. I don't really expect anyone to buy that stuff, though. I'm now off to add in some tracking code so I can see if anyone is actually visiting these blogs.

Monday, August 13, 2007

The Learning Phase

Day 10 of the challenge was about the gathering of information, and beginning to learn about our particular niches. I realise now why Ed had only wanted us to bring 2 niches into this exercise, as the work load begins to increase significantly from here on.

Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.

Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...

The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!

So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.

So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase