Sugarcaned

I've talked a lot about becoming active in forums. It's a great way to get some inbound links, promote your services and gain some traffic. Here's a way to get some great free links from forums with some decent PageRank.

Firstly, you need to find some vBulletin forums. Head on over to Google and enter the following:

"Powered by vBulletin"

This will bring up a list of good ranking forums. Now I know I've mentioned this a million times before, but I can't stress this enough: RELEVANCY! So let's suppose you're niche is used cars. So we could add the following to narrow our search down:

"Powered by vBulletin" + "used cars"

We should have a shorter but more specific list now. Our first hit is www.carforums.net.

Now what we're looking for here are threads within this forum that have a higher than usual PageRank. To do this you'll need to first install a FireFox add on like SEOQuake or something similar. SEOQuake is great because it offers more than just PageRank.

Now with this installed we can quickly see PageRank alongside our SERPs. So what we're going to do is search within the forum for threads with a high PR and focus on those.

In Google, search through a site by using the "site:" modifier like so:

site:www.carforums.net

As we can see, the site has a PR of 3 and if we scoot through the SERPs we can see that the majority of threads have not been assigned PR, but we can also see lots with a PR of 2. Join the forums and comment on these particular threads. Remember to keep it on topic and make it a useful addition to the forum, please don't spam. It's pointless anyway as you'll most likely get removed if you do.

Easy peasy.

Repeat the process for all the forums you can find and all the threads you can add something to. If you've nothing to say, don't bother saying it. Only comment if you can genuinely add to the topic.

I've started working on the SEO plan for James Inside Out Health Magazine website, I'll begin posting tomorrow!

In the meantime, Happy SEOing.

Before I crack on with the site analysis of James's site I just wanted to write a little about the "NoFollow" link tag. For those unfamiliar with it, it's an invention from Google, designed to give webmasters the option of not leaking PR to every person that comments on their blog. The reason was to try and tackle comment spam and automatic commenting systems. Webmasters just had to add a "NoFollow" tag to links and Google wouldn't pass any PageRank onto the spamming sites.

It really didn't work. What it's done is make people very untrusting, lowered the traffic and commenting on blogs (let's face it, most blog readers are reading and commenting to promote their own site) and unfairly penalised legitimate SEO efforts.

So Google created a "DoFollow" tag to do the opposite. Generous webmasters could use this, and let people comment on their blog for SEO purposes. Any SEOer worth his salt would never spam, so comments from them are normally on topic and relevant to the blog. And it creates an active community of bloggers and commentators. And it goes back to one of the original ideas of the internet - linking.

The current situation with NoFollow has changed a little. Google does count "NoFollow" links. Whether or not they leak any PR is up for debate, but I think they do. I always use Wikipedia as a good example. Wikipedia have a strict NoFollow policy, but I've had pages jump up the rankings upon having a wikipedia entry added.

I think with the devaluing of PageRank that seemed to occur last year, the DoFollow / NoFollow debate matters less and less. Commenting on all blogs is useful and recommended. But if you really want to just stick with blogs that have a DoFollow, how do you find them?

Try this DoFollow blog search engine and type in your keywords and find blogs that have a DoFollow policy.

Happy SEOing!

Starting out a link building campaign can be daunting for a novice, but it really needn't be. I'm splitting it here into 2 sections. Today we look at section one, which is building a base of solid links from common link sources. This is the easiest bit, but requires daily attention, so it's good to get rolling straight away.

So let's look at these sources of links:

• Directories
  
• Forums
  
• Blogs
  
• Portals
  

These are going to be the mainstay of your campaign. Ideally you're looking for on-topic websites, but this isn't always possible. It's doubtful you'll be lucky enough to have a directory specifically for your field, but this does happen now and again. There are tons of directories out there, here's a good list: SEO Directory List. Stick to directories with a PageRank of 3 or more, anything less, don't bother. Try and submit to 100 or so. This can take a while, but the benefits of a directory are that the link is permanent and these places can actually bring in a little traffic. I don't rate directories particularly highly, I don't bother with them myself anymore, but for beginners they're essential.

Ok, so head off to Google again and search once more for your chosen keywords. Now we're looking for forums. Find the top few and sign up. Most forums allow you to put links in your signature, so do so, so you might have something like this:

Billy Bloggs
Weightloss Advice - Lose weight permanently!

Also remember to fill out your profile, put your link on it, upload a picture and then get involved. Join in the debates, start threads, make friends and post as many posts as is humanly possible. But remember - DO NOT SPAM. Stay on topic, become a valued and active member of the forum. These places are great places to socialise and learn, so take advantage of that whilst you're there. Visit back to them daily and spend an hour wading through the discussions and throwing in your pennies worth. Choose a slightly different keyphrase for every forum, don't just re-use the same one. Mix it up, and Google will be happier with you. PLEASE REMEMBER to follow the rules of every forum you post to; they all have slightly different criteria. You don't want to get yourself banned, so follow them.

Back to Google again. Now we're looking for the top ranking blogs in our chosen field. Find them, bookmark them. If they don't allow comments, don't bother. We're looking for the ones that do. Most allow you to put your website link in there, which will appear where your name is, so put your keyphrase as your name. Start commenting. Don't bother with the "Nice site webmaster!" type of comment. More often than not these get removed as SPAM. Read the posts and write something relating to them. If they are using a social networking feature, such as disqus.com, then join, make a profile, put your link on it. Again, vary your keyphrase from blog to blog, but aim to be reading at least 5 blogs a day, and commenting whenever possible.

Then, we are looking for portals. Portals don't exist for every subject matter. If you do find one, investigate. They can be tricky to figure out sometimes, but they normally have a directory feature where you can drop a link in. Sometimes they feature blogs, comment on them. Sometimes they let you add content like articles or images. Do this. And link whenever possible. You normally just need to visit these the once.

These are your basic link sources. Blogs and Forums require daily visits and lots of attention, but it's possible to get fast results. Plan your day carefully, spend an hour in the forums every morning, then whizz through the blogs. Revisit the forums later that day and respond to replies and such. Be organised - have your logins stored to speed the process up. Keep a list of your blogs and forums and check them off after every visit. And keep looking for more - you should be aiming for 10 forums and 10 blogs before long. Before you know it, you'll have 1000 inbound links to your site, which should give you a PR of 3 or 4, depending on the quality of the forums, etc.

Tomorrow, or later today if I have time, we're going to look at more advanced link building techniques, and how to get your links in the prime positions that are going to really count.

In the meantime, Happy Link building!

Ok, this is a weird, but exciting one.

I've been here now for 3 weeks, and slowly building links as part of our SEO strategy for the past two. Due to the large nature of our company it took a while for the IT department to have Google Analytics installed, this only happened last week actually. Anyway, progress so far is 117 inbound links (though Google is yet to list much of the links I've gained over the past fortnight). Googlebot is starting to see the right things:

1. home business opportunity
2. http www personaltravelgroup com
3. home gif
4. visit sugarcane's homepage
5. proffesional iv solucio sl
6. home travel business
7. home work newbie

So we're moving in the right direction. Anyway, I noticed that in our top search queries we've already got a great result for the term "personal travel business" - we rank #2 on google.com! Damn, I knew I was good at my job, but even I'm blown away by that!

This may very well be a Google Dance of some description, and we may settle back down the SERPs shortly, but I'm chuffed with this early result

Anyway, it's just one search term so far, the rest will follow soon. Enough bragging for the day.

Happy SEOing!

Blendtec – Will it Blend? A Successful Viral Campaign.

At work recently I've been working mainly on getting a good solid base of inbound links by joining forums and commenting on relevent blogs. This has proved a good way to start so far as it's really given me an idea of the Work from Home market. It's helped me find our competitors and see what they're doing and how they're doing it.

So we've been building a viral marketing strategy to both promote our product and for possible SEO. We've got to run by our bosses, who may be a little skeptical about the concept so I've ben researching precedents and thought I'd put one here for you to read about. You may have already seen the Will it Blend videos on YouTube. Absolute genius if you ask me, a very simple idea which has proved hugely successful.

Making food blenders a trendy consumable would appear to be a very difficult task. In 2006 Blendtec launched a viral campaign call ‘will it blend’ via YouTube and a new website made specifically for the campaign. The campaign consisted of short viral videos in which Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson poses the question “will it blend” to everyday items from golf balls and pens to remote controls and iPods and uses a Blendtec blender to answer the question. By the end of 2006, sales of Blendtec’s Total Blender were up 43%.

The clips are humorous, sometimes quite dangerous and often tap into current affairs, with the most recent clip asking if the “stimulus” bailout package from the US Government will blend.

The campaign has proved hugely successful. Between the willitblend.com website and the Will it Blend Youtube channel, the videos have exceeded 100 million views worldwide.

The YouTube channel has become incredibly popular: they have 181,789 subscribers, have received 3.5 million channel views and have achieved a staggering Page Rank of 6. This page contains a link to the Blendtec website.

The willitblend.com website also has a PR of 6 and an Alexa ranking of 84,846.

The blendtec.com website has a Google Page Rank of 5, has an impressive Alexa traffic rank of 147,972 and Alexa tracks some 381 inbound linking sites, though Google tracks over 4,500.

The man behind the campaign, George Wright, advises viral campaigners to make their videos fun; if they’re good enough, the buzz will spread by word of mouth online and off.

However, Blendtec have really not fully utilized this exposure for SEO purposes – their site is poorly designed (it's a table-based design for a start!) and badly optimised and they don’t rank particularly well for search terms you would expect them to, such as “buy blender” or “blender sales” or “blender shop”. However, they do appear on page 1 for the highly competitive term “blender”, which one would assume is largely due to the passing of page rank from both the YouTube channel and the willitblend.com website direct to Blendtec.

A brilliant idea that has clearly helped their business, and given their site a healthy PageRank. Difficult to replicate, but that kind of thing is what we're aiming for.