SoloSEO

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 7th, 2007

I love a challenge. In fact, if I don’t take on a challenge it drives me nuts. So when Darren Rowse came out with his group writing contest (project) with the topic of “Top 5″, I had to come up with an entry. I thought I would get creative and make a top 5 list of top posts from top experts in SEO.

Obviously I couldn’t cover more than 5 industry experts, as they are many more than 5. Also, if you don’t have a “Top Posts” page on your blog I couldn’t include you. Stuntdubl highly recommends you do that.

1) Michael Gray (GrayWolf) has a remarkable series on local search, but one of his top 100 posts on local search is titled 13 Ways to Promote Your Local Business for Free. He gives a comprehensive list of local search techniques and websites that anyone can make use of, no matter their budget. (Interestingly, GrayWolf’s review of SoloSEO is found on his top 100 posts page…neat!).

2) Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl) has a wealth of posts at his top posts page. One of the top posts that I will never forget is on The Link Building Cycle – 6 Steps of the Link Building Process. He goes through the entire process of building links, a great primer for anyone interested in SEO. I couldn’t leave out The SEO Playbook too, which will go down as a classic in Todd’s blog posts and SEO history.

3) In Lee Odden’s (Online Marketing Blog) most popular posts page he includes the top 10 posts in terms of traffic received. One that stood out to me is one of Lee’s signature topics, The Lowdown on Press Release Optimization. Lee was part of an excellent panel at PubCon last year on Press Releases. From his top blog post on press releases:

Other than press releases, another way to get into sites like Google news is to write articles and submit them to publication web sites and also blogs that are already getting picked up by Google newsbot. Perform a search on Google News for relevant keywords and note the sites that are getting picked up. Find out if they accept articles and press releases and submit.

4) Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz, which I prefer to pronounce as sea-moss just for fun) has a most popular ever page but you can also break it down to the past day, week, month, etc.. The top post ever related to SEO (first is his proposal) is Ranking Factors Version 2, which actually points to the actual article, but discusses its overall findings. This Ranking Factors gets help from industry experts to decide on what is important, what is not, and to what degree, in terms of ranking factors for search engine optimization. It is a must read (and must study) for everyone in SEO.

5) Brian Clark (CopyBlogger) is one of the blogs that really made a significant impact in our content business, and is a staple blog for anyone in Internet Marketing. In the sidebar of his blog he lists popular posts, and one that I love is How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. He links out to an incredible list of resources that combat the topic of attracting links and increasing traffic. Refer to this list often, and you will find your SEO starts improving quickly.

These experts and others have provided a wealth of information for SEOs. Without much formal instruction in search engine optimization, this is where we can dive in and learn everything we can about optimizing for both users and search engines. This is one amazing facet of SEO, that SEO experts that charge thousands and thousands for this information will share it freely on their blog. It’s a fantastic community, and I have certainly grown in my knowledge by leaps and bounds just from learning from the experts.

67 comments Visited 15788 times May 7th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Doing Good as Link Bait

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2007

I was reading an article (here too) just the other day about how National Amusements, a company that owns 1500+ theaters, gave away free movie tickets (and popcorn and drinks!) for the US armed forces and their families to “offer enjoyment and relaxation, and to keep families together” for the whole month of July. Starting in May (and going on forever it sounds like) any armed forces personnel (and family) will get a discounted admission. (Whether or not you agree with the current conflict, our troops certainly deserve our respect and appreciation for putting their lives on the line.) As I read this it made me want to blog about it and tell other people how neat it was they would do such a thing.

As I continued to think about it, I wondered about how “doing good”, acts of service and charity by organizations that are truly genuine (not just tax deductible), could be the means of really good link bait. National Amusements did not seem to benefit greatly from it in terms of traffic, but hopefully the public considers their image when patronizing theaters. I tried to digg the article last week, but it didn’t have any legs. Perhaps its the wrong audience for such an article, or maybe the title wasn’t quite right, but I really think there could be some great link bait juice out of a “doing good” act.

I searched through the year’s top diggs and could only really find one that was “doing good”, a plea for help/attention for a man whose house was demolished by the city, but even then it was more of a “can you believe this, get this guy some attention” kind of “doing good”.

I glanced through Reddit and a few other social news sites but couldn’t find much in the few minutes I took there, but I thought I’d open it up to our readers, do you remember much “link bait” coming from a “doing good” act by businesses or individuals?

1 comment Visited 5374 times April 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 16th, 2007

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.

My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.

Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:

Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.

And now, for what you all have been waiting for…

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.

To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):

SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE

How to implement Paid Link Disclosure

Step 1

Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).

a:hover.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a:hover.linky {}

Step 2

Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.

Step 3

Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.

Step 4

Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.

Step 5

Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.

Step 6

Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.

This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.

If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):

a.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a.linky {}

If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.

UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.

13 comments Visited 7501 times April 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO vs. Paid Search Marketing Clash

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 13th, 2007

If you have not gone over and read about the tussle between Dave Pasternack and SEO pros, you must take a minute to review it, it has been quite entertaining. Our friend Michael Gray has jumped in with both feet, and his post called Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com – How to Fix Your Problem is an excellent place to get a good overview of the feud. Essentially Dave Pasternack has come out saying SEO isn’t “rocket science,” and it has caused a bit of a stir among the SEO ranks. Pasternack claims he gave up SEO years ago, and now considers himself a PPC expert, and co-founded a company that consults and assists firms with their paid search campaigns. It is his opinion that SEO is a “Fix-it-Once” Task, not an Ongoing Service. It is this statement where Mr. Pasternack loses credibility. It would be nice for all of us small business owners if SEO really was a quick, one-time fix, but instead it is an ongoing and unrelenting pursuit. Not only to keep our sites optimized to do well in SERPs, but also to stay ahead of our competitors, competing for the same keywords in the same marketplace. I think this point gets glossed over by many discussing SEO. As a business person first, I personally don’t care if I show up as #1 on a SERP, I just want to show up above my nearest competitor for the same or similar products and services. Some markets will be more volatile than others, but keeping an eye on competitors, and their movements in the SERPs will always be important, and most likely a moving target. The importance of competitor watchdogging will continue to increase as more firms figure out the benefits of online marketing, and begin to implement SEO and Paid Search techniques.

So personally, I have no problem with the use of well researched, and wisely created PPC campaigns, and well managed SEO techniques; there is a place for both practices, and using one without the other doesn’t make much sense. The first step however is to SEO your site and get it optimized for the traffic which the PPC ads will hopefully drive to it. I have noticed Paid Search only gurus occasionally suggest SEO pros use “scare tactics” to encourage long-term service contracts, but unfortunately the Paid Search guys do the same thing, making site owners nervous about doing PPC campaigns themselves, and perhaps blowing their opportunity to do well. PPC isn’t too tough either, don’t let either of the two groups scare you, just realize both take some expertise, and some patience to LEARN. The main reason there is demand for these two services is they both can be overwhelming if you don’t understand them, and they are both work.

As an example, 5 years ago I use to sit down and do my business and personal taxes myself, I even used TurboTax a few times. Even with all the Turbo Tax tools it took quite a bit of time, it wasn’t rocket science, and I got the job done, but frankly I did not enjoy it, even though a sizable refund was my eventual reward. Now with a dozen different business running, and less time, and no patience for our screwed-up tax system, I love the fact I can pay someone, an expert, to do all that work for me. I could do it, but I don’t want to, I have other pressing matters more important to me. There is the SEO and Paid Search services in a nutshell. The tools, advice to do both are out there to learn, but whether someone has the time or desire to learn and do them on their own, is completely another issue. I will also admit there is some increasing art to the SEO process when we consider link baiting, creating a buzz and social marketing aspects into the online equation.

Finally, there will be times when all the SEO and Paid Search in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere, as marketing results will depend on the industry you are marketing within. One of our companies has a very nice site, it is SEOed well, and we have been running solid PPC campaigns for the most appropriate keywords in the industry, but we have gained little traffic and only a few leads a month. We know the industry well, we know our service is widely sought after, we know we are priced nicely, but we still don’t have the business we know we could have. So last week we headed Orlando to exhibit at a large trade show in this industry. The results were amazing, our service was highly sought after and well received. We heard comments like “where have you guys been?” or “we have been looking for something like this for years,” from booth visitors. So the golden question… where were our potential clients looking when they couldn’t find us? The answer… obviously not online. Make sure you know your potential clients, and where they are most likely to be searching to find you, if it isn’t online, then adjust to help them find you some other way.

The world continues to move online, and will continue to do so in an ever increasing pace, but not everyone is there yet. Marketing is the art of getting the firm’s message to potential clients, wherever they may be, even if it is offline. So getting your site’s SEO in line now will pay dividends in the future, but it may not be the end-all, be-all marketing home run you want it to be right now, especially if your future clients just aren’t online yet.

Add comment Visited 5646 times February 13th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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5 Minute SEO for Your Blog

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 29th, 2007

Your blog is an important part of your business, so why not optimize it with the rest of your site? You’d be surprised by how many people, even big names in SEO, don’t fully optimize their blogs. I’m obviously not the first to write on this topic, but I have some of my own ideas for quickly optimizing your blog, in 5 minutes or less. These are all WordPress Plugins, but certainly applying this to your own blog type would be great for your SEO.

1) Alinks
Lee Odden suggests using a keyword glossary for your blog, and this plugin takes that one step further and combines it with intralinks. Intralinks is an SEO strategy that shows emphasis on important content of your site by “intralinking” to those pages more often (and with related anchor text). This plugin does it automatically for you. Not only does it help with SEO, but your readers may find more articles in your blog that way. Alinks does have one limitation: it is only intra-blog. If anyone knows of another plugin that lets you put in a keyword and be able to choose your own URL, let me know!

2) Increase Blog Comments: Show Top Commentators
By showing top commentators, you can motivate people to post on your blog because they can get/stay in the top commentators list and have a link to their site. One of the great things about Web 2.0 is “user-generated content”. Web 2.0 sites wouldn’t survive without it, because all they are really doing is providing a platform to let the world speak in different ways. Your blog gets content from you, but also from your commentators. Think of the amount of content that Matt Cutts gets on his blog, even after just posting 54 words. His 54 words turned into over 10,000 words on one page…now that’s user-generated content. I’ve seen search engine snippets pull directly from comments even.

3) Increase Blog Comments: Subscribe to Comments
Although this plugin doesn’t directly affect your SEO, it can keep readers coming back and contributing to ongoing discussions within your comments. Like the top commentators blog, your users can help create content along with you. Of course, you’ll need to kick it off with some really good content.

4) Ultimate Tag Warrior
This plugin extends the ability of the categories part of your blog. You can do a lot of things with the tagging, such as tag clouds and go out to technorati and de.licio.us. I haven’t played much with it, but I know there are a lot of blogs that use it.

5) Related Entries
This is a very traditional one, but one that I don’t see nearly enough on blogs. I love being able to see entries that are related to what I am reading, and I like it right after a post because that’s where my eyes are. We saw a huge increase in the number of people reading more entries in our blog as soon as we added this feaure.

6) Add meta tags
So meta tags have a bad rap, but certainly they’re not something to just disregard completely. Even Vanessa Fox of Google has said you should have description meta tags. This module makes it super easy. There are other plugins for meta tags that even let you write your own custom description for each post, which is the best way to do it, in my opinion.

In 5 minutes or less you can download and install these plugins, and be one step closer to better SEO for your blog and website. If you have other plugins you like, use, or recommend, please comment on them and we can grow a list together.

11 comments Visited 10385 times January 29th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Building the Perfect Link, the Ultimate Guide

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 23rd, 2007

Small Business SEM has an excellent post titled Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link. This is a great read for anyone considering or getting into links. The guide walks you through all the various aspects and things to consider when link building. A snippet from the guide…

Fact #1: The competition for links is tough for any business, big or small. Confusing the issue is “link lingo” — inbound links, reciprocal links, sitewide links, paid links, text links, deep links … the list goes on and on. How’s a business owner to keep track of it all?

Fact #2: When you’re looking for links, quantity is one thing — but quality is better. Not all links are created equal. How can you tell which links are better than others?

That’s the idea behind this guide — to help you understand which links will help the most. To help you … Build the Perfect Link.

Look at the ultimate guide to building perfect links for more helpa and info. And good job building natural links with worthwhile content on building natural links!

1 comment Visited 5797 times January 23rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Free Links from MyBlogLog!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 22nd, 2007

Everyone’s always out looking for good quality backlinks (inbound links) at a great price, and what’s better than free? Hopefully MyBlogLog will patch this up quickly, but I just noticed that you can easily insert links into messages and rel=”nofollow” is not even added. Don’t try this, it’s spamming…get natural links. To do this (please don’t), just leave a message for Rafer (sorry man), or any other MyBlogLog member. Notice the spam already in there from the DJ guy.

For all the help we’re giving MyBlogLog (mybloglog flaw, missing mybloglog tools), you’d think we were getting paid (we’re not), or at least getting a free trip to Yahoo! HQ (not yet…).

UPDATE: Rafer just let me know they are already planning to fill this gap. No use trying it out, I’m sure old links will be updated because it’s all dynamic.

UPDATE: nofollow is now active, all sealed up. Good job MBL, very fast work. That is what we like!

4 comments Visited 6857 times January 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Purchase Links… Is it Moral or Ethical? Is it Legal?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 18th, 2007

I was led to a post by Jordan McCollum on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim today. It was there I read, to my horror, that V7, Inc, a hosting company (voted best hosting company in 2003, which is interesting) is now going to sell contextual links (links contained in the text of a web page), which they claim will be undetectable by Google. Based on the blog post and the resulting comments, I think a very important the point is being completely overlooked. There is a good discussion of whether buying links is ethical or moral, and whether we should care what Google suggests we do and don’t put on our sites so they will rank well. But the discussion must go a bit deeper than this. I personally believe buying links is illegal, which then makes the ethical and moral discussions moot. Especially in the moment the FTC gives you a call and asks if they can come over for a short visit tomorrow.

In a comment reply I made to my post entitled Fools Gold – The Risk of Buying Links I wrote the following:

“Ads (can be a link, copy or graphic) are bought for placement on another web page, with the intention of using the host site to drive traffic back to your site. Hopefully these ads are clearly marked as paid for by a sponsor, or clearly identifiable as an ad to the consumer. If a link is paid for, and is not clearly marked, and obviously an ad, it is deceptive behavior at best. But I also believe it is illegal, not to mention frowned upon by Google. Let me refer to the Federal Trade Commission’s Truth In Advertising Policy. The FTC clearly states that “an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement – OR OMITS INFORMATION – that is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and is “material” – that is important to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product.”

And if you paid for it, no matter the format, it is an ad. The reply continues:

“The point is clear, if you are attempting to pass a link off as organic, to drive traffic from a trusted site, it is deceptive. Also, it could be argued that the site hosting the bought link has used their influence or reputation to assist in the effort. I would suggest this site’s influence is material in a consumer’s decision to visit and perhaps buy from the referred site, and the truth-in-adversiting guidelines have been broken.

Some might disagree, and may consider link buying/selling a “gray area,” open for interpretation, but in my experience mucking around in gray areas leads to red numbers in your buisness’ bottom-line eventually.”

So the question on whether buying links is ethical, or moral is a good one, however the answer might simply be, it is legal?

3 comments Visited 11535 times January 18th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Fools Gold – The Risk of Buying Links

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 13th, 2007

Get away from the edge, just calm down, back away, there is a better way. Just don’t buy a link, work for them. I am not talking about paid ads, I am talking about the sneaky practice of making a paid link appear to be a naturally occurring link. There is some confusion in the industry concerning the practice, but it is clear to me. If you have paid for another site to link to you, then you better consider it an ad, and the ad better be clearly positioned and marked on the page as an ad, then there is no problem. A fine example are the sponsor sections you see in many blog sites, with graphics of a company name or image, or even the Google Ads down the right side and top of a Google results page, these are obviously ads, we all know a sponsor has paid to be there. But if you have paid another site to place a link on a page, and they are attempting to make it appear to be a natural link to the search engines or site visitors, then it is questionable SEO at best, and it should be avoided.

The reason this practice still goes on is simple… it’s fairly simple, and it still works at driving traffic in the short term, but at what cost? The other day I read post by Jim Boykin which brought to mind another post from back in December by Rand Fishkin. Both were discussing the purchasing link process, Jim’s was about the value of links, and Rand’s about purchasing, and his disagreement with Google’s stance on the practice. Both posts are worth the read.

I personally find it odd that in an industry as beleaguered as SEO for questionable ranking tactics, buying/selling links is still considered viable, and is even endorsed by top SEOs. The very concept flies in the face of what search engines are attempting to provide, and hopefully what most of us desire when we search, organic (without manipulation) search results based on relevance. It is also important to note that Google has more or less condemned the practice in a statement here, and whether you like it or not, they have the resources, technology and will to do something about it. So is it really worth the potential harm? When is comes to link buying, I think it is best to just stay away, avoid the confusion, just get the whole so called “opportunity” out of your mind. If we are so desperate for a site traffic spike, we are willing to pay for links to either keep our business afloat or help it become more profitable more quickly, then perhaps the original business plan wasn’t as well conceived as it should have been in the first place. All traffic is not alike, don’t be fooled.

Back in September I decided my perfect 10, former Miss Utah, wife was going to find “other companionship arrangements” if I didn’t do something about my 5′ 11″ (I am 6′0″ with my big shoes on), 235 mound of round physique. What did I do? I started hitting the weights 3 times a week, doing an hour of cardio every other day, and cut out my daily intake of the cheesy french fries (oh the good ole days). The positive results haven’t been overnight, I knew they wouldn’t be, sometimes it is miserable, but the progress has been good, and I am pleased with the slow, steady improvement. That is what we are looking for in SEO practices, steady improvements over time.

On the contrary, I have a couple of just plain lazy acquaintances, who have chosen to not change their lifestyles, but have instead visited the plastic surgeon to have their fat sucked right out of them, via some sort of lipo-suction procedure. Yuck, we now have overnight weight loss options, with the accompanying potential health hazards. Plus, this “bought” weight loss result, just plain sounds unhealthy and wrong? I see buying links in the same vein, a quick fix, with serious potential risks. Add now Google is out to stop this behavior, which would be like the plastic surgeons just deciding to stop performing the fat sucking process anymore? Not good for those who are depending on the fast results. So the question must be… do we want our sites to be fit for the future, or just short-term suckers?

Another point, talk of buying and selling links inevitably includes discussions concerning the chance the search engines discovering the money for link exchange and punishing the participants. This discussion not only confirms the risk is real, but raises questions on the ethics of those accepting of the practice. It is akin to perhaps deciding to take steroids as a player in the NFL… any comments Mr. Merriman? That lapse in judgement cost Merriman the NFL Defensive Player of the Year honor, 4 games of pay, not to mention his reputation. Was it worth it? With buying links… you may not get caught, you might get lots of traffic, but why would you take the risk with your business? The potential harm to your site is real, even if we don’t fully understand the full extent quite yet.

The point is this… if you want good links to your site, then work for them. Create awesome content, think, post cool blog entries, write with passion, and let the creative juices flow. If you don’t have passion for your site topic, why are you involved in the first place? Money? Okay fine, then find something you are passionate about, and build the site the right way, and the money will come if you have what people want. It won’t be tomorrow perhaps, but this isn’t supposed to be the lottery (which is another thing that makes my blood boil). At PubCon we heard panel members who created unique Widgets as link bait; great idea, great concept, essentially giving the public something to be excited about, and the links and traffic will come NATURALLY. It can be widgets, information, insight, whatever, you create the buzz, you take charge, you give the public what they want, and you will grow. With a bit of ingenuity and dash of brilliance, you might even hit the big one and get a link you hadn’t considered possible.

Case in point… Wouldn’t it be nice to have a link from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com? TechCrunch is ranked as the 481st most popular website on the web, with some 139,000 subscribers. In fact Rand Fiskin himself ranked Arrington number 2 on his list of the top 10 most influential search marketing experts this week. So in the field of search marketing, TechCrunch would be an excellent link to pick up. Well, my esteemed partner, Michael Jensen, put a little experiment together earlier this week, using MyBlogLog, Opera, and TechCrunch.com he was able to exploit a potential spamming problem within the MyBlogLog system. He ran the test using TechCrunch.com and about 20 other sites, then revealed the experiment results in a post here. The result? Michael Arrington himself wrote about the experiment in his post entitled MyBlogLog Got Spammed (and so did we). Michael Jensen is a person with a real passion for learning, discovering, and sharing things, he values MyBlogLog, and he saw something that caught his eye, so he ran a few tests and logged his findings. His post turned out to be pretty interesting to many, and the traffic, and natural links, have followed throughout the week.

In short, the hocus pocus needs to be out of your SEO strategy; there isn’t an easy way to do it fast and big. Good SEO is something we need to think about, we work at, we improve, then when the higher ranking comes, it is legit. When the SEO industry finally quits attempting to buck the system, the cries of SEOs everywhere to be taken seriously by the mainstream tech world might be heard. Until then SEO will continue to be the target of Diggish disdain.

Ultimately, when SEO finally rids itself of non-natural, banned practices, then search will finally reach its full potential and become a more efficient tool, delivering to visitors the most relevant, best managed sites on a level playing field, no longer manipulated by deep pockets and sleight of hand SEO tactics.

3 comments Visited 7859 times January 13th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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New SEO Tool – Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 8th, 2007

Last week we announced a new tool every day (except New Year’s), and we thought we’d kick off this week with one more tool announcement. We just finished the “Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer”, and are excited for you to start using it. This tool checks the backlinks for your site (or any site), and then displays the actual link text (anchor text) used for the links.

Why is knowing the link text helpful?
The link text, or anchor text, is an important aspect of the “link vote”. When someone links to you, the search engines see it as a vote of approval of sorts. In order for the search engines to understand your page better, they consider the text that a user would actually click on, and extract any semantic value. They also consider the text of the URL, at least to a small extent. This text is then used, along with the content found on the page being linked to, to help the search engine consider you for placement for that keyword.

Googlebombing uses this same principle. If a lot of links use the same or similar keywords as the anchor text, that is an indication to the search engines that the page is related to that topic or keyword.

It’s cool and all, but how can I use it to help my SEO?
When you are link building, you are trying to obtain links to your site from others. If you are requesting links, it is best to have a pre-formed link to help the webmaster giving you the link to install it properly with the right word and spelling. If you find links that have spelling problems or perhaps are off-topic or just too general in the link text, then there may be opportunities to request the site owner to change the link text.

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8 comments Visited 8235 times January 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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