Entries Tagged as 'Search Engine Optimization (SEO)'

Black Hat and Social Networks

Social Networking

Jesse Stay posted on Guy Kawasaki’s blog entitled 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook. I was surprised to find out how much I didn’t know about one of the biggest social networking sites out there. I certainly made sure to import my RSS feed to my Facebook.com account. I don’t know that will make my headlines fall under duplicate content, but as far as I’m concerned you can never propagate your post titles too much.

WordPress Security

Thanks to a great tip entitled “Turn Off Directory Browsing to Protect Your Content” posted by Gobala Krishnan, my content is a little bit safer (not that anybody is interested in stealing it) today. I had always assumed that Directory Browsing was disabled by default, and found out how wrong I was today.

Black Hat

SEO Black Hat tipped me off to the article “Messing With Digg” from David Naylor. If you’re using the Digg angle in your marketing efforts, these tricks might come in handy.

Black Hat Mashups

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.

Set AdWords Times to Save Some Dimes

Affiliate Marketing

Looking to save to some money on your Google AdWords? According to Online Money Dot.com your bids may actually be cheaper at night.

Jay at Online Opportunity has a pretty good tutorial on how to split test ads.

Y! Store Tutorials has a “dummies” guide to building landing pages. If you can’t build a landing page after reading this, then abandon all hope.

Blogging / Writing

If you’ve been writing an ebook, or just thinking about it, Hendry Chang has a laundry list of 18 reasons to give it away. If you’ve been waffling about the fate of your ebook, then this might just push you over the edge on pricing.

Traffic / Search Engine Optimization

The eBusiness Banter Blog has posted a three part tutorial on building traffic to your blog.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Software Marketing Secrets has a good article explaining why you should be building brands for your products.

Email Subject Success, Blog Traffic Attraction

Blogging

Aseem Kishore from Online Tech Tips guest posted this week on Pro Blogger. His article on why in order to survive, mimicry is key was quite spot-on.

Cash Marble reveals how to generate traffic as you surf.

E-Mailing

The Marketing Tips Blog keys us in on four proven subject lines to use in email.

Computer Geek Stuff

If you’re interested in tunneling through SSH, I ran across an awesome tutorial. Although it seems to be directed at Internet Explorer, I don’t see why it couldn’t be adapted to any web browser. I’m also totally in love with his WordPress Theme.

Affiliate Marketing, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization: Sunday Morning Free For All

Tools

Icon Interactive has Four Free Tools for your use: Link Popularity, Search Engine Submitter, Keyword Suggestion, and Word Cloud. Of them, I found the Link Popularity to be the most informative, whereas the Search Engine Submitter and Keyword Suggestion tools kept breaking on me. I guess you get what you pay for.

Wordpress

Via Weblog Tools Collection: Blueprint Design Studio graces us with a list of their Top 10 Essential Plugins for Wordpress. I’ve used a lot of the plugins on this list, but TinyMCE always was a pain in the arse to get working properly. Subscribe2 is what all of the big boys use on their sites, but for some reason PlugInstaller breaks it, so I’m out of the loop on that one too. Finally, CFormsII seems to be powerful in the right hands, which are obviously not mine - I’ve never had any joy in getting it to work.

Performancing has a great article on using WordPress to build a web directory which is centered around two plugins; Alex Tang’s Link Directory plugin, and Links Back’s plugin WP Directory. I’m interested in trying this out, but according to Mr. Dash they’re both broken in WordPress 2.3.2, which means they’re probably just going to frustrate me. Still, something I’m going to keep on the back burner.

Search Engine Optimization / Link Building

Blogging Mix has a two part tutorial on how to get Google to crawl your website. They’re full of great ideas, and you’re probably already doing them, but a refresher course never hurts. The one tip that I always do that isn’t on this list, is adding your website feed to iGoogle. I remember reading somewhere that if you add your RSS to iGoogle it helps bump up your place in the queue. If your feed is provided by FeedBurner (a division of Google) then you should be doubly covered, right? Part 1 | Part 2

Build a Blog asks the question “To promote using blog directories, or not?”

Thanks to the post above, I was introduced to Skelliwag’s tutorial on Hansel and Gretel Link Building which is a straight forward guide to getting quality incoming sites.

Do Follow Directory is a directory of sites that have “do follow” enabled.

Info Doorway has a large list of “do follow” sites and forums arranged by Page Rank.

Eric Mitz tells us how he uses forums for backlinks.

Courtney Tuttle has a list of 102 ways to make your site a backlink superstar.

Micro Persuasion opines that we’re like a million monkeys on treadmills. Odd title aside, it’s a thought provoking discussion on channels and internet trends of the past few years.

Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo Lens on using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing

My Web 2.0 has 5 tips for creating powerful text ads.

AffiliateSeeking.com is a directory of the various programs by which you can become an affiliate marketer.

Paul updated his Affiliate Marketing Guide. Awesome advice from somebody who is making 6 figures a month.

This post has been a week in the making, so I hope it’s not a total deluge. I plan on adding a lot of these links to the main site as time permits this week.

Tuesday I go see a specialist for my hernia and see when they want to perform surgery. I’m praying that it won’t be until after my wife returns to work. I’ve been dealing with this for several months now, another one shouldn’t hurt as long as I take it easy. A little Alieve generally keeps me on my feet, and that’s all I need. If I do have to go in fo surgery, expect posting to pick up dramatically.

I’m currently hatching several mini e-books, and when I finally hatch them, you’ll be the first to know.

Bikinis and SEO

What Sells Online: SEO With Long Tail Keywords.

Download “The Long Tail” ebook for free courtesy of Change This.

LongTail.com is the homepage of Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” and is filled to the gills with lots of good ideas and observations on ‘free.’

Lawrence Lessig’s novel The Future of Ideas has been released under a Creative Commons license.

SeoQuake is a Firefox extention that will show you Google PageRank, the amount of pages indexed by Google/Yahoo/MSN, the age of the page, and many, many more amazing features. It’s an amazing free plugin that will help you spy on the competition.

Media Viper’s list of negative ppc keywords.

WHDB.com has a very thorough list of free alternatives to commercial software.

If you’re doing any kind of video marketing, DeskPing has a list of 5 royalty free music sites.

If you’re looking to finance your next business venture, Mind of a Hustler suggest you try the stone soup method.

Dustin Brewer shares his thoughts about creating interesting content for social networks.

Saturday Morning Sweeties - NSFW!

This last bit is just for the guys. Egotastic was kind enough to bless us with Olivia Munn’s Complex Magazine photo shoot. If you have basic cable, and have ever stumbled across G4 (formerly TechTV), you’ll recognize her as the hostess of Attack of the Show. Honestly, she’s the primary reason I tune into the show, although Layla Kayleigh and Kristen Holt don’t hurt the eyes either.

Anyway, enjoy the eye candy, and I have a couple of big announcements coming down the pike this weekend. Stay Tuned!

Friday Freebies

Affiliate Avalanche: Network Your Way to Success

Hack WordPress: The Ultimate Guide to Pwning Your Software

Daily Moolah: 6 Social Media Optimization Plugins for Wordpress

The Dead One: Turn Your WordPress Into a Fully Functioning Forum via ReviewOn

From Zen Cart Optimization: 200 Words That Make Money, and 14 Words That Lose Money

Affiliate District: Lay Out a Good Affiliate Marketing Plan

Viral King’s Viral Marketing Tips

7 Steps to Creating Your Own Product

Moms Prosperity Network: Law of Attraction, Good Things Happen to Bad People

Comment Sniper Software Guarantees you first post bragging rights!

Best Free Autoresponder Roundup

Super Blogging Tips: 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic

And to cap it all off, 15 Reflexology Healing Techniques. Skip the Kinoki pads and use your hands!

Free Ebooks, Psychology, and SEO

Online Opportunity: The Psychology of Monetization
Free Blog Monetization Strategies E-Book via Ruck
Colnel Kaizen: 5 Ways to Get Free Advertising For Your Site
Mark Flavin: Triple Your Conversions Report (.pdf)
My EProfits: Winning the Keyword War
Scribbles and Words: 3,413 Resources for Creative, Intelligent People

Sorry for the light posting, but during the week, I only have about 90 minutes of online time per evening, if I’m really lucky, and the actual writing process takes me longer than that.

I <3 blogsweluv!

Welcome everybody who is visiting here from my intervew at blogsweluv. Stick around and enjoy the scenery today, because the repo men are taking it back on Thurday.

CopyBlogger: Keyword Research For Bloggers
Online Money Tip: Adsense - Get More Bucks For Your Clicks
Ad Moolah: Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites
The Medici Effect E-Book (.pdf)
Low Cost Techniques to Drive Tsunami Traffic to Your Site
Sephyroth: Securing Firefox
Joseph Ratliff: The Product Launch Secret Weapon
Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress
DotCoMoney: Benefits of Joint Ventures
Rachael Ray and the 30 Minute Myth

That’s all for now. I may have enough for another post later.

Saturday Morning Moneymaking

Saturday Morning Funnies: Only in Russia

3 Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Pages. Pretty common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how rare ‘common’ sense is.

6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Offer. How to make your squeeze pages sing like the big boys’.

50 Directories to Submit Your Site To. Another Directory List. All have high pagerank and don’t require reciprocal links.

Free Backlinks on Squidoo. Free is free, and backlinks are backlinks.

Backlink Creation Guide lens located on Squidoo.

Increase Technorati Authority with this link exchange program.

Top 100 Social Video Sites. There’s also a sister post Top 100 Social Networking Sites

34 Sites that Pay You to Blog.

Making Money With Youtube. Similar to this post on Cash Tactics from a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike I guess.

20 Ways to Get Massive Traffic.

DotCom Mogul has a pretty exhaustive list on CPA Networks.

Two thoughts on affiliate marketing:

Amit at Super Affiliate Mindset posts his tips on how to get started as an affiliate

Paul disagrees quite strongly.

Right now I’m doing Amit’s system, although I’ve been pressed for time and haven’t setup the backend tracking, which I realize is a mistake that I plan to rectify shortly. I definitely see Paul’s point, and understand where he’s coming from. I’ve always been happy to spend money to make money. I’m not making big bucks, but I am making sales every couple of days, and that helps me feel that I’m not wasting my time.

I’m lucky enough that I have the HTML/web design background so I’m not starting from scratch, but my copywriting skills are sorely needing to be developed.

In site news, I’ve added CommentLuv which will append the last post you make on your website underneath your comments here. So comment away!

This post has been about three hours in the making, so I’m drawing the line now. Off to enjoy some kid-free Saturday action!