Joe Whyte - Digital Marketer » Rockyfied Guides

Mybloglog community positioning tactics

joe.whyte — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:00:57 +0000

Despite the Mybloglog Boycott I still love the idea and the widgets created by mybloglog. Its a great way for bloggers to get to know each other and to promote and FIND new and interesting blogs. Being an active member at mybloglog can help drive traffic to your site over and over again. Similarly, if you view many blogs a day like I do that also happen to have the mybloglog widget on them you are opening yourself to more exposure.

Here are some tips and tricks I have used and seen people using to gain traction and community positioning on mybloglog.com:

The Hot Babe Avatar:
Sex is not a tactic just used on TV, Books, Magazines, Movies and Radio. The Internet uses it TOO! So why would you put a sexy photo up on your avatar. The basic idea is to attract the clicks and traffic to your mybloglog account. Once you have the visitor then we open them to the possibility of joining your community, leaving a comment, leaving a message or even visiting your site.

The Branding Avatar:
One of the most effective ways to market yourself, your blog or a product is through brand recognition. Something I have done and seen done is adding your branding onto your mybloglog.com avatar. This has the same effects as the hot babe avatar but can be less effective if your brands reputation does not supersede yourself.

Offer Free Stuff:
Try giving away something free like an IPOD or FREE HOSTING for a year or a free t-shirt for people who JOIN your community. This can help entice people to actually join your community after visiting your community page.

Message Blast (not spam):
Lets say you have a blog about music. Do a search on mybloglog for sites about music. Check out their community pages, Check out their sites and leave a nice comment. Be interactive and DO NOT spam. NO ONE likes that. The idea here is to basically be active in your community and use the tools set forth by mybloglog to do this.

Visit Blogs:
This is a tactic I feel many marketers DO NOT USE. So hearing this will give you an advantage. If you have a site that is related to cooking. Find as many blogs as you can that have to do with cooking or a field roughly related to yours and add them to a bookmark folder in your browser. Get as big of a list as you can for this and make sure these sites utilize the mybloglog widget that shows your avatar when you visit it. Now, daily you will want to open all tabs in your bookmark folder for these sites. What this will do is place your avatar/branding across all of your competitors/authority sites putting your community page in front of thousands of people. Use this with caution .

Invite:
Do you have a ton of friends? Do you have a large email list? Do you know people interested in or willing to join your community? Utilize the invite function on mybloglog here. It only lets you do 5 at a time BUT if you are a large corporation I am sure you can task someone out on this. The possibilities are endless with this really.

Respond to Messages:
When you get a message from a user, try to respond quickly and politely. This is a chance to let users know that this site is ran by an individual and not automated or unattended and gives a sense of community to your space. This will help with unique visitors, viral marketing and return visitors.

Spaming mybloglog stinks but here is what I have seen.

Co-Author Spam:
In my opinion I believe people have probably built a shell app around mybloglog to do this quickly (against tos) but what this does is basically send requests to a mass amount of users on mybloglog asking them to CO-author a blog community. This is like asking someone to become a community member but as a co-author instead. In some cases I have heard of these people sending emails to eric and asking them to change their co-authors to members and play innocent like it was an accident they have 200 co-authors in order to have them change the co-authors to members. LOL riiight.

Message Spam:
Message spam is the same message over and over and over again on many peoples community sites. Usually this message says something like “woe your blog rocks make sure you buy my product, check out my site and become a member”. I hate this.

Shoemoney has put together some great posts on mybloglog exploits that have been done but just to let everyone know these post basically set himself up for getting banned on mybloglog and then re-included after the mybloglog boycott. I wanted to include these into this post just to give a quality overview on all mybloglog marketing tactics although some are best practice, some are spam and some are exploits.

MyBlogLog Showing Communities I did not Join

How are people getting free targeted keyword links on MyBlogLog

How to surf as someone else

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Utilizing YOUMoz to gain traction and authority for your SEO company

joe.whyte — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:16:20 +0000

Around the time that I developed Rockyfied Rand had created and developed a system called YOUmoz. Youmoz is a hybrid version of the seomoz.org blog. Over the last 2 years Rand Fishkin and his blogtastic cohorts have been laying down highly informative and education posts on SEO, SEM, Internet Marketing and much more.

Recently, SEOmoz has released its new design and along with the new design comes a new bursting opportunity for social media. In the last 2 years seomoz.org has gown from obscurity to the high traffic powerhouse it is today which is why YOUmoz is a perfect chance to implement a new version of Social Media.

Recently Rand has been inserting YOUmoz posts into seomoz.orgs main blog. Getting your post on YOUmoz over to seomoz main blog can result in as big of a spike in traffic as digg, del.icio.us and stumble upon. The only difference is that it is a Social Media Niche for SEO and Internet Marketing. Recently I read a post done by Daniel Tynski about ” a comprehensive guide to going viral on digg”. It was a pretty good post on digg and how to be successful on it.

Let me show you how getting a post from YOUmoz to SEOmoz can effect your traffic as much as getting an article on digg.

Mr. Tynski recently just put his site online and has released 2 posts utilizing Youmoz has a social media jump off to gain traction for his SEO company. See the Graph below which indicates when his blog first started gaining traction.

His first post on the “anatomy of a super digg” was moved over from YOUmoz to SEOmoz and created his first push in traffic as you can see represented from theFeb 19 to the 22. The next time he created a post which resulted in a move from YOUmoz to SEOmoz was around March 3rd called ” A comprehensive guide to going viral on digg” which landed him an enormous amount of SEOmoz traffic.

What daniel has done is utilize YOUmoz to gain traction and traffic to his own SEO firm. I am pretty impressed with his leveraging and I have a feeling many other companies will follow him in his footsteps.

Now that you know the power behind YOUmoz lets digg into some factors to consider to get your YOUmoz post over to SEOmoz.

How informative is your YOUmoz piece:
Depending on how informative your post is will have a strong influence on weather rand or someone from the SEOMoz team brings your post over. Give as much proof, examples and tips as you can . Don’t be shy to link to informative articles and or sites.

How Accurate are you:
In order to have your YOUmoz post make it to SEOmoz blog you will need to be accurate. Obviously, anything that contains errors or is claiming a fact that is at best considered an opinion.

Are you utilizing your SMO:
Link Bait and title bait are very important. These are key considerations when writing for the public. Is your title attractive, are you utilizing lists or do you target hot subjects in the industry? The more attractive your story is the better chance you will make it from YOUmoz to SEOmoz.

How in depth is your post:
Most likely a small post will not get from YOUmoz to SEOmoz unless its something that is extra special. Make your posts in depth but not LONG. There is a difference. Informative posts are long because they are full of education , tips and tricks. Long posts can be full of nothing.

What is the objective of the post:
Are you using YOUmoz to just self promote? Is your only motive for posting at YOUmoz self gain? Are you trying to game YOUmoz for self gratification? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you probably won’t make it into SEOmoz from YOUmoz.

Are you offering something new and fresh to the community:
So you have created a post that is indepth, articulate, thoughtful and you are utilizing your SMO. Great, but is your post topic outdated or regurgitated material? From what I have seen, YOUmoz posts make it to SEOmoz blog because they put an interesting spin on a widely talked about and virally hot subject.

Are you an active user on SEOmoz:
Honestly I really doubte that this is to big of a concern. I think the powers at SEOmoz would appreciate it but I think they know how to spot real potential and really great posts and what it comes down to is basically, is your post worthy?

Watch your popular posts:
Something that I like to do is take a look at the most popular YOUmoz posts going on. This portion of SEOmoz reminds me a lot of the popular user list on digg before it was taken down. Take a look at your YOUmoz most popular posts here.

I know Rand had mentioned to me that he would be putting together a post on outlining a posting guide for YOUmoz but I thought it would be fun to put together a post on how you might get a YOUmoz post over to SEOmoz. I am really impressed with the idea of YOUmoz and I knew the first day it was released that it would be a big success. Something that I did not think of is that it would be a new form of social media. I expect in the future for many other highly trafficed sites to follow suit. Who know, we might even see newspaper’s doing something like YOUnews Orange County .

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18 PPC secrets to help you improve your efforts and maximize your ROI

joe.whyte — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:23:18 +0000

I cannot tell you how many companies and individual’s I have seen over-paying for keyword terms, getting no conversions, low ctr and bidding their way into ad depletion. When I find companies or individuals in this situation I am honestly not shocked. It’s not easy to know how to create a succesfful PPC campaign so that is why it is important to either do your research before jumping into a PPC campaign or hire someone with experience.

PPC can seem easy to the”do it yourselfer”, I mean all you have to do is just bid on words that you think are the most trafficed, right? WRONG!! This is where a lot of people get into trouble. If they have a bussiness about “home appliances” a common mistake is to go after search terms that are to broad like “home appliances”, “kitchen appliances” or “ovens”. Yes these terms get a lot of traffic BUT how good is the CTR, how much are you spending per click and what is your cost per sale if you even get sales off of this ad?

I am going to give you some secrets that many industry professionals already know but the majority of PPC campaigns do NOT use. Hopefully this advice will help start-up businesses, people who are new to PPC and maybe even more experienced PPC vets.

Are you ready for the secrets?

1) Focus on long tail keywords (they are less expensive, less trafficed but MUCH more targeted)
2) Build landing pages for these terms
3) Develop your ads with creativity – see what your competition is doing and capitalize on their weeknesses, be interesting and eye catching.
4) Vary your ad placement – Range from being #1 to #6 on given ads sometimes it might be worth it to show up sometimes for a keyword like “home appliances” but you do not need to spend an arm and a leg on it. Bid the lowest amount.
5) Do not get into bidding wars
6) Use negative words so your ad does not show up for unwanted phrases or words
7) Test, Test, Test and Test some more varying your keywords and bid prices. Usually a day is sufficient for testing. Use tools like Keyword Compete – This program is one of the best services online for competitor analysis and implementation
9) Expand PAST Google Adwords – Google can comprise of over 50% of search traffic – What about the other 50? Do MSN ad center (low cost per click) and Yahoo!s new Search Marketing.
10) Go after commonly misspelled words and phrases using this ontology tool
11) If your business is specific to an area then GEO Target your search terms with geographical specifications
12) Advertise on Foriegn search engines like Google.es and Google.co.uk etc (make sure your ads read like a native tongue)
13) Manually research sites you can place your adwords on. Digg and slashdot are popular and highly traffic for the computer and internet industry. Find popular sites in YOUR industry as well.
14) Put PPC ads up for your competitors search terms and for their branding. (this is worth a shot and I have been able to do this and I have seen this being done…. Some engines do not allow this and from my experience it depends strongly on the company who is seeing ads placed for their own brand name who speak up. The sqeeky wheel gets the oil as they say)
15) evaluate your market and see what people are searching for using MSN Ad labs
16) Maximize your ROI by disecting your highest margin and optimizing your PPC around your highest margin of profit.
17) Track Google Trend, demographics and competitor keywords
18) Think outside of the box as much as possible – If you can find search terms that are highly traffic in a keyword or industry roughly related to yours you can pay little to nothing for a very high conversion.

I have been very successful using and implementing these secrets. If you are new to a company, new to PPC, or recently responsible for evaulating and improving a companies pay per click ad campaign then you are facing a big task. Without the right HOW TO guide you are most likely going to fail unless your company is selling “eternal salvation” you are going to need this guide.

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Deep linking, when to do it and is it illegal?

joe.whyte — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:35:45 +0000

Deep linking has been a topic of interest for the longest time. There have been many litigations and court cases challenging free speach and copyright infringment associated with linking to internal pages. Read my article about Deep Linking at search marketing standard.

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10 Easy Steps for Evaluating Directory Submissions | How to choose the right directories

joe.whyte — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:06:24 +0000

While I was in the real estate industry doing SEO my manager gave me a list of directories that my clients site’s should be submitted to. The list contained a various number of real estate related directories and withouth knowing it I had submitted some of these clients sites into a deeper whole then they started in.

The problem was three tiered.

1.) I did not have enough experience in SEO to understand why the list I was given was wrong.
2.) I put trust into an SEO I did not know.
3.) We submitted our sites to way to many directories at one time.

Now the first rule when looking into “linking” is going to be relevancy. Although a directory submission is a link I would consider the relevancy of a directory not as important then other areas like trust rank or age of domain. The pitfall for some of this companies clients was that we where putting up a link to their site on a directory that falls into one or all of these catagories.

1) Low PageRank
2) Low TrustRank
3) Low Domain Name Age
4) Poor url structure
5) Poor Page Indexing
6) Poor Page Caching

Some but not all of the sites on my managers list contained sites that had just been created, had dynamic url’s for poor indexing, no deep linking to help internal pages get PageRank and be indexed etc. thus causing our clients to have their SEO budget depleted and see very low ROI.

The real estate company I worked for clearly did not understand what to look for in a PFI program. Once I did a little bit of research and some testing on my personal sites I noticed a huge difference in search ranking when I mixed up my directory submissions with some older more trust worthy directories along with some relevant well trusted directories.

When doing directory submissions it is important to look at the this checklist.

1) Evaluate TrustRank based on TrustRank Factors
2) Is the page you are submitting your site to cached
3) Is the page you are submitting your site to indexed
4) Check the backlinks to the directory to make sure you don’t see casino, porno or little to know backlinks
5) Check to see how many pages are indexed to make sure you see many pages indexed and NOT just the home page
6) Submit one site to 3-5 directories per month by hand
7) How old is the site you are submitting to Is there a catagory “relevant” to your sites keyword theme
9) How expensive is the cost of the link vs the quality of the link
10) Do they offer featured links and are they static

Now that you know what to look for you need to know what tools to use. You have Search Status firefox plugin which will allow you to highlight nofollow links, check pages indexed, check pages cached, check backlinks, PageRank and Alexa rating and more. Also you have the Way Back Machine, Aviva Strongest Directories List, Strongest Direcvtories List. If your niche is real estate try submitting to top real estate directories but also include sites like dmoz, botw.org and etc. Make sure you mix it up. Another must read is going to be a recent post over at search engine journal by Loren Baker. Loren did a post on link buying and did a quick overview on some popular directories that are worth submitting to. Really smart guy worth listening to and I read his blog all the time. Also Aaron Walls put out a good video on directory submissions.

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Google Filters, how to get around them and exploit their loop holes

joe.whyte — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 02:18:20 +0000

I have been doing SEO for some time now and I have been witness to many a strange occurrence regarding serps. Most of these weird occurrence I would have to say are directly attributed to a Google Filter or Google penalty. So I have been inspired by a post over at webmasterworld and as far as I know there is not a current list out online that list’s all of the potential Google penalties so I have decided to put together an arbitrary list of potential Google Penalties. Please note that there is no proof i.e. press release from Google stating these exist but rather these are ideas, theories and assumptions from SEO’s experiences.

Google Sandbox: The Sandbox Filter is usually applied to brand new websites but has been seen to be applied to domains that have been around for a while. Since most websites do not make it past a year Google implemented a filter that will prevent a new site from getting decent rankings for competitive keyword terms. Usually brand new sites can still rank for non competitive keyword terms though.

How to work around the Sandbox: Google uses a system called trust rank. The idea behind trust rank is if authority sites link to your new site then you must be an authority site as well and since Google trust’s these older more respected sites it will trust your’s as well. Hence getting you out of the sandbox right away. That is not an easy thing to do so if you are not able to get these links then try expanding your content to rank for many more less competitive keywords and keyword phrases (long tail keywords).

Google -30: This Google filter is applied to site’s who use spammy seo tactics. When Google find you using doorway pages, java redirects etc then they will drop your rankings by 30 spots.

How to get around this: If you find yourself a victim of the Google -30 filter then usually just removing the spam elements on your site will get you back in. You can always fill out a request for re-inclusion is worse comes to worse. Here are some resources for the Google -30. Arelis, Threadwatch, SERoundtable.

Google Bombing: Google Bombing is a filter applied to sites who gain a large number of inbound links with the same anchor text. This raises a red flag to Google as it is extremely unnatural for an inbound linking structure to all have the exact same anchor text.

How to work around this: If your site actually has this filter applied then most likely you have been banned from the search engines and a re-inclusion request is probably your best bet. If the filter is not applied but through your monitoring you see this potential then you might want to go back and request people change your anchor text, buy some links with varying anchor text etc. Here are some resources for Google Bombing. Search Engine Watch, NYTimes, Google Blogspot.

Google Bowling: This is not really a filter as much as it is a series of black hat techniques that will get you banned. Usually people use this term in reference to competition or a page/site they want OUT of the serps. Google bowling is usually only effective to site’s that are much new with lower trust rank. Trying to do this to a large site with high trust rank is going to be virtually impossible.

How to get around this: Google says that there is nothing a competitor can do to drop YOUR rankings. Many seo’s do not believe this and if you seoblackhat sells services for something like this. Re-inclusion request is basically your only option. Here are some resources for Google Bowling. Web Pro News, ThreadWatch and SEroundtable.

Google Duplicate Content Filter: A duplicate content filter is applied to sites who take content that has already been created, cached and indexed on other sites. News sites are usually exempt from the duplicate content filter via a hand job. Usually the pages that have this applied are not ranked very well in the serps. Page Rank can be devalued and if a page does not have inbound links you could see your results being put into omitted search results and supplemental results.

How to get through this: If you find yourself in this filter then your first step can be trying to remedy the duplicate content. Contact the person stealing your content and ask them to remove it. You can contact the persons web host to see if they will take down there site and the last resort is “trying” to contact Google and alert them of what is going on. Keep on top of your content by using copyscape to check for duplicate content.

Google Supplemental Results: Google supplemental results take pages on your site that have been indexed and put them into a sub database in Google. Supplemental results do not rank well but rather Google uses its supplemental DB to populate its results when they don’t have enough results to show in a given query. This means pages on your site in Google’s supplemental DB will not help you in the serps.

How to get through this: Its pretty simple actually. Just get some inbound links to your pages. Check this post out to find out more about the Google Poo (supplemental results).

Google Domain name Age Filter: The Google domain name age filter is closely related to trust rank and the sandbox but it is possible to be out of the sandbox and have trust rank and still be in this filter. The idea behind this filter is that older sites and domain names are more likely to rank well for keyword terms then newer sites. If you are in this filter you will most likely not rank well for terms that are competitive until your site grows older.

How to work around this: Quality links from authority sites with high trust rank will help you do much better in the serps.

Google’s Omitted Results Filter: Pages within your website that are in omitted search results will not show up in a Google search unless a user specifically says to show all omitted results. Usually users do not even get to the last page to do this which makes any page of yours that is omitted completely out of a Google search result. The reason this happens is lack on inbound links, duplicate content, duplicate meta title, duplicate meta description and poor internal linking.

How to get out of this: In order to get pages are omitted out of this filter simply alter the meta tags and fix duplicate content and get some quality inbound links.

Google’s Trust Rank Filter: Like the PageRank algorithm the trust rank algorithm has many factors that determine a sites trust rank. Some of the known factors are the age of a site, the amount of quality authority links pointing to it, how many outbound links it has, the quality of its inbound linking structure, internal linking structure and overall SEO best practices on meta and url structure. All sites go through this filter and if your Trust Rank is low so will your rankings in the serps.

How to get work with this: An old site and a new site can both have high trust rank or low trust rank. It is basically determined by the amount of quality authority links pointing to it, how many outbound links it has, the quality of its inbound linking structure, internal linking structure and overall SEO best practices on meta and url structure. Optimize these and you will have quality Trust rank.

links.htm page filter: This filter penalizes a sites ranking determined by the use of a links.html page. Using reciprocal linking is a old technique that is not promoted by Google anymore. This filter effects your ranking in the serps.

How to work with this filter: Instead of using “links” as your page title and name try using something like “mynewbuddies” or “coolsites” as this will help get around this filter. Reciprocal links are old seo techniques and Google devalues reciprocal linking structures.Here is someone discussing this at SEOChat.

Reciprocal Link Filter: Google is very open about reciprocal linking and clearly states that their algorithm can detect reciprocal link campaigns. Usually sites that only participate in reciprocal linking will have a hard time ranking in the search engines but depending on what you are using your site for a reciprocal links campaign might be exactly what you need. For example if you are building an adsense site then you do not want to spend to much time building a site up and a reciprocal linking campaign will help your sites inbound links grow over time.

How to work with this filter: When it comes to building an inbound linking structure try to utilize some or all of the 15 types of links and how to get them post I did a ways back. Here are some resources about this filter. Matt Cutts here and here, Search engine guide and Webmasterworld.

Link Farming Filter: Link farms are sites/pages that have a mass amount of unrelated links grouped together arbitrarily. Link farms can also be related links but most commonly they are unrelated. IP farms and bad link neighborhoods are all part of link farming. Being a part of a link farm can get your rankings dropped in Google and possibly get you banned.

How to get around this: Currently the only way to get around this is to NOT participate in link farming. Here are some resources on link farming:

CO-citation Linking Filter: This popular filter by Google watches your inbound link structure. If your link is on a site who’s outbound links are related to casino’s and porn sites and your automotive site is an outbound link on this site then google will think your site is related to porn and casinos. Poorly constructed co-citation will damage your ranking and make it hard for you to rank well for the terms you are targeting.

How to work with this: When considering a link partner, paid link or monitoring your inbound links be sure to follow this linking quaility guidline page that was derived from Patrick Gavin over at text link ads.

To many links at once Filter: This filter is applied when to many inbound links are acquired by a site to fast. The result can lead to a ban across all search engines. How these links are obtained, how many and over what period of time are factors for this filter.

How to get around this: Simply do not participate in black hat linking schemes and link spaming and you should never have a problem with this. Here is some information concerning this filter over at Aaron Walls at SEObook.com,

To many Pages at once filter: Google is keen on natural site development. Anything that look “unnatural” is going to be flaged by the search engines. Having to many pages to fast will raise this flag/filter. Some people believe that 5000 is the max for pages in a month but this number in my opinion can fluctuate depending on other factors and filters your site might be going through at any given time. The effect of this filter can result in pages being omitted, pages in supplemental results and in the extreme case a Google ban.

How to get through this filter: If you have a system that pulls content in or are using a dynamic content generator be sure to limit it per week and I would stay under 5000 pages per month just to be on the safe side. Depending on how large or well known your site is then the limit will be adjusted.

Broken Link Filter: Broken internal links can cause pages from not being crawled, cached and indexed. If pages like your home page do not have a link back to it on all pages this can count against you in the serps and your overall quality score for things like PR. This is not just bad seo and bad site design but this is bad for your users and can cause poor traffic and poor serp ranking.

How to get through this: Make sure you have a quality footer, a sitemap that covers all of your pages in one central hub and make sure you test your site for broken links. (be sure to use full url’s in your linking via source code).

Page Load Time Filter: The page load filter is very simple. If your website takes to long to load then a spider will time out and move past your site or page. This will result in NEVER being cached and indexed. Ultimately this means your site or page will not be present in Googles SERPS.

How to work with this: Make sure your pages are optimized for load time. Make sure if you are using flash or many images you use java pre-load coding. Make sure you limit the file size of your page’s as much as possible to make sure the spiders can read the entire document and be sure to use web 2.0 and css best practices.

Over Optimization Filter: Over optimization can cause a Google ban or hardship in rankings. Over optimization could be considered keyword stuffing, to much keyword density and keyword proximity optimization, meta tag stuffing etc. Stay away from over optimization.

How to get around this: Don’t over optimize!!!!

There are some filter’s I have not mentioned but I thought I would give a smaller list of other filters that could be attributed to Google:

Keyword Stuffing Filter:
Meta Tag Stuffing Filter:
Automated Google Query Filter:
IP Class Filter:
Google Toolbar Filter:
Click through Filter in serps:
Traffic Filter:
Google -950 Filter:
I would like to hear what other SEO professionals have to say about my list as I have seen a lot of these and I have heard other’s speak of these and since Google has not come out and told all of use which filters exists and do not exists please consider this an excersize of knowledge expansion for all .

P.S. Mark Blair put together a very nice printable pdf file version of this post for your downloadable and printable pleasure . Thanks Mark!

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Optimizing your social media | Digg, Reddit, Netscape and MYspace

joe.whyte — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:37:42 +0000

In the last 6-12 months social media optimization has been a very highly talked about and discussed venue for traffic. Although social media sites like myspace have been around much longer then a year over the last year many internet marketers and SEO’s have been focusing their attention on marketing and gaming these sites. With the emergence of proper SMO the need to have top rankings in the SERP’s has decreased and the need to optimze content for sites like digg, myspace, redditt, newsvine etc. has become a very indemand skill.

Anyone who is an SEO/SEM should definitly know about SMO and if they are serious SEO’s they should learn how to be a SMO.

Lets take a quick look at SMO results over at shoemoney.com. Jeremy released a blog post about 10 reasons why Microsoft will aquire Yahoo! in 2007 and soon after that released his traffic stats which shows almost a 100% boost in his traffic from reaching the first page of digg. These results are being seen all over the web but the problem I see is that the boost of immediate traffic is extremely fast BUT the drop in traffic is also fast. Darren Rowse posted a pretty interesting article on how to cultivate your digg traffic into long term traffic which is a great resource for anyone looking to become successful as an SMO.

Here is a quick break down of what Darren mentioned.
-Style of Writing
-Topic of Writing
-Become a Digg User
-Comment on other key sites and blogs
-Drive Traffic to Diggable posts
-Make it easy to digg your work
-Titles and first lines are important
-Digg own stories with caution
-Celebrate Digging subtly
-Quality Content

I think this is a great list but I would like to add onto it if I may and since its my own blog I MAY!!!

-Utilize your My #1
-Notify people of a diggable story (do this with caution as to not spam people but if you have a report with some diggers it is perfectly ok to let them know of a diggable digg)
-DO NOT ask top diggers to digg for you in exchange for cash
-Becoming a member is not enough you need to become VERY active within digg.
-Comment First before you digg an article
-Get involved in community forums NOT JUST blog sites and leave comments and informative posts regarding your posts (do not spam)
-Comment back on people who leave you comments from digg.
-Comment back on comments left on your dugg articles ON DIGG.
-Be concious of the digg community as they are VERY fickle.

There are tons of social media sites out there and the first thing an SMO should do is figure out a sites algorithm. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org put together a great list of ranking factors that Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and Shoutwire might use. Todd malicoat came out with a great post about how DIGG will be the next google and gave some great suggestions about how to improve digg. He also did a really great interview with web pro news with neil patel and I will post that now. Its kinda long but I loved this interview as todd and neil really gives us a play by play on how to become a SMO.

WARNING: DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LEARN!!!

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By the way if you are looking to create a site like this you can use PLIGG which is a content management system for digg like sites. I put together a test one over at youhypeit.com.

Myspace marketing – everyone is doing it but is the traffic really there?
If you have been on myspace recently you have noticed a HUGE increase on how many profiles have been created that are 100% marketing profiles like the boost mobile profile or the personal marketing profiles like the Tera Patrick Profile.These profiles are pure marekting tools that have been created with the sole purpose of marketing a product or a person. I am sure you get the email and bulletins that are complete spam and you just over look them. This is pretty much the attitude of your myspace community. Here is a list of some things that myspace members are pretty aware of and usually look over and why it seems like the marketer is marketing to other marketers.

-Bulletin spam: the same bulletin over and over again or bulletin’s that are specifically selling a product or service.
-Email spam: Myspace spam emails can get pretty out of hand and since myspace has not truely implemented any kind of spam protection these emails are easily spotted and overlooked.
-Comment spam: comment spam is usally the same message over and over again and not specific to a person or their life so sometimes these comments are actually posted but a click through is usually far from ever happening.
-The myspace community is there for friends, family and networking NOT purchasing a product through your profile. The digg community is kinda like the myspace community.
-Over the last 6 months I have seen real people’s profiles with thousands of friends get knocked down to just there immediate friends and new networking aquantances. The myspace community is pushing away from fake profiles and more towards real people.
-The myspace community finds these spam profiles misleading, bothersome upsetting.

How to tell if you are marketing to other marketers?
-When you mass friend request usualy the people who add you back are other marketers.
-You find a large amount of comments on your site are from other marketers
-Most of your emails are from marketers and not real people inquiring about your product/service
-Your bulletin’s are complete spam

How can you make myspace marketing work?
-Make your profile an attractive womens profile.
-Right your page copy as a real person.
-Do not oversell or over push a product or service. If you are going to mention something be subtle.
-When doing timed bulletins vary the text and make them hours apart.
-Interact with people on myspace so you do not come off spammy.
-DO NOT email market but subtly talk to people and see if you can get them to advertise for you and promote you or your service for you.
-Purchase banner ads on myspace
-Purchase new sponsored links
-Remove spam comments from your profile
-Use a template and spice up your site with music and photos
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person

NOTE: Somthing I think most social media marketers will agree on is that people need to trust your profile in order for you to be successful.

Todd Malicoat listed some great other resources for myspace marketing and I will repost them here.

I would like to add a few resources as well

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15 types of links and how to get them

joe.whyte — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:39:17 +0000

I was currently thinking of how to setup an appropriate linking structure for a site I was working on. I had to sit down and really think of all the different ways and types of links I could go after and how effective they are and where to get them. So instead of just keeping this to myself I decided to post it on my blog and share it with everyone. It was a pretty quick post because it was kinda late and I’m tired but I hope this is enough.

Authority Links
How to get them: Google search, Google and Yahoo directory http://directory.google.com/ , Arelis,
what to look for: Sites that rank for top level keywords, Notability, alexa rank and age of domain name
Examples: motortrend.com, lunarpages.com,
Notes: Most likely you will be able to purchase links from these sites or you can utilize linkbait, or content bait to get them to link back to you. Authority links are an absolutly must have in order to build a websites trust rank!

Directory Links
How to get them: Aaron walls has a great list of powerful directories, Strongest directory links
what to look for: You should submit slowly to directories. About 3-5 a month per website. Keep it slow and natural. The best directories will be relevant/related content directories or niche directories.
Examples: www.real-estate-ims-directory.com or site-sift.com, dmoz.org, botw, yahoo directory etc.
Notes: Directory links are not as strong as some SEO’s might think. Keep these to a minimum and stick with relevant one way links.

Reciprocal Links
How to get them: Probably one of the easiest to get but not the most effective. You can try link metro, link market, webmaster forums and Arelis.
what to look for: Its always hard trying to negotiate a reciprocal link that will be in your favor but the majority of link exchanges will be pretty equal to what you are offering yourself. Make sure the page is cached, indexed and no black hat techniques are being used.
Examples: Link market, link metro.
Notes: Reciprocal links are out dated and old seo technology. They can serve a purpose though. Lets say you just need a few links to start getting your site crawled then reciprocals are great. Maybe you have a black hat campaign then reciprocal links could work well.

SiteWide Links
How to get them: Usually you can purchase these through sites like textlinkbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com. Asking around in forums like digital point and sitepoint are great ways to do this as well.
what to look for: You are going to want to find sites that have a large number of indexed pages with quality content, relevant and have PR.
Notes: Site wide links are not something you want or need a lot of. If a few sites out of hundreds do this for you then you are looking at a good inbound linking structure. To many sitewide links will raise a red flag with google and could penelize you in the serps. Usually having to many inbound links from one IP and domain can hurt you so make sure you do not go over board with these types of links but they absolutly have there place and google does like these in regards to PR.

One way links
How to get them: Contextual advertising, forums,
what to look for: Look for relevant sites that have a low amount of outbound links with decent rankings. Stay away from area’s that say “sponsored links, friends, advertisements”. The higher on the page you are placed the better.
Notes: One way links are going to be one of the more effective ways to gain rankings in the SERP’s. Many quality sites have MORE one way links then any other type of links because of link bait and quality content.
Examples: Blogrolls

3-way Links
How to get them: three-way-links.com, forums, arelis
what to look for: You will always want relevant links with quality content but 3-way links can be considered a little grey hat so be careful on how many you do. Depending on the type of site you have you may want more or less or none of these.
Examples: site 1 links to site b and site b links to site c
Notes: Considered more of a grey hat technique so use with caution.

4-way links (coined by joe whyte)
How to get them: forums, arelis
what to look for: a new way to fool the search engines but you need enough sites to do this. Its the same idea as a 3 way link but 2 out of the 4 sites are getting a one way and the other to are giving a link. Stay with relevant sites with quality content.
Examples: Site 1 links to site 2 and site 3 links to site 4
Notes: This is a good idea for people who are used to reciprocal linking. If a webmaster has more then one site then they can start building there one way links much more effectively instead of doing reciprocals.

.Edu and .Gov Links
How to get them: Use yahoo query inurl:.edu or .gov search query, Arelis.
what to look for: There are a ton of ways to get these. Look for resource .edu libraries, email students directly who have a webspace through there educational institution and offer them something in return for there webspace or a link on there webspace.
Notes: TLD’s like .edu’s and .gov’s are not neccesarily BETTER then a .com but usually have much more trust rank as they have been around a lot longer and they have quality content which is updated frequently. Basically the trust rank on these sites is very high and will help your sites tremendously.

Radio station, Television, Magazine or Newspaper links
How to get them: Usually contextual advertising.
what to look for: duh look for radio, television, magazine or newspaper links duh!
Examples: http://www.50states.com/news/, http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/ etc
Notes: These are most likely not going to be relevant to your sites content but usually these site have good trust rank, are trafficked heavily and are good resource links for your site.

Press Release Links
How to get them: Search for press release submission services and or sites that allow press releases which are normally your newspaper sites.. HINT HINT.
what to look for: Look for industry leaders and stay away from the mom and pop press release sites.
Examples: PR.com and PRWeb.com are some great press release sites
Notes: Press releases are usually not a GREAT way to get inbound links but can be a good source of traffic and any little bit helps when building a white hat inbound link campaign.

Article Bio Links
How to get them: Creating an article and then syndicating it amoung hundreds of article submission sites.
what to look for: Look for any sites that are article syndication sites.
Examples: Ezine.com, articledashboard.com, etc.
Tools: If you can you might want to pick up a article syndication spammer. I use them and it works pretty well. This is a faster way to submit an article to many sites which is not black hat related unless you go to fast and to many.
Notes: Article syndication has not really improved a large sites rankings dramatically but works pretty well for lower competitive keywords. The more sites that have content pointing back to you or refrencing your site will overall increase how many pages are indexed for a given term. In my experience I have seen rankings for lower competitive terms when doing article syndication. Works great for SEV (search engine vanity).

RSS/Blog syndicated links
How to get them: This is so easy. Start a blog and put some quality content up and most importantly offer RSS, Atom or xml so your reader’s can syndicate your feed.
What to look for: Look for blog directories, blog syndication sites etc
Tools: http://www.sphere.com/, feedburner.com, technorati,
Notes: Highly debated in the industry but syndication can help in many ways in my opinion. From traffic to inbound links and branding. Syndication is syndication in my opinion and from my experience blog syndication works well.

Comments and Profile Links
How to get them: Find related popular blogs and comment on them and provide a link back to your site.
what to look for: popular blogs in your industry that allow tags
Notes: Since most blogs utilize a rel=nofollow tag these are not going to count towrads your seo efforts as mush as you would hope but they still show up in your backlinks and can help increase branding, traffic and could help in crawling, indexing and ranking.

Presell Page Links
How to get them: Presall pages are pretty hard to find. You can do google searches, arelis, forums and webmasters
what to look for: You want to find a reputable site that is a quality relevant site with high PR and traffic.
Notes:If you just contact webmasters and ask to purchase a full page on there site they will give you a price if you provide the content. Usually this is something that can be done with ease but you might have to do some digging. These type’s of links are great for seo as the whole page is going to be content you provide which will be relevant content and inbound links.

Social Media Links
How to get them: Submit to them, search for them, create accounts and pimp them OUUUUT
what to look for: any sites that have to do with people getting together for a common goal
Examples: myspace, tickme.com, digg, stumbleupon
Tools:This is a great opportunity to create spam programs unless you want to go white hat then you can optimize this with tact like me
Notes:Links on social media do help. Not only is digg submissions actually ranking for results much like wikipedia does not but it also draw’s a ton of traffic to your site. Leverage social media to your favore and you seo efforts will come full circle!

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Pre-production SEO and Googles Crawl Cycle

joe.whyte — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:04:10 +0000

When attempting to launch a site it is always a good plan to come out of the gates fast. Launching a site at the right time can mean the difference between monetizing your site now or in a couple months. To many SEO’s and Webmaster’s this might not even be an issue but for an SEO professional who has time constraints and deadlines these are must have tools. Out of the majority of major search engines Google is one of the fastest for inclusion. As expected, there are risk’s and potential concerns that we need to face regarding pre-production. Below I will be addressing how to catch the googlebot, how the Google cycle works and what this means to you.

Google “dance” cycle:

The Google update cycle is more then simple termonlogy regarding the update and shift Googles Serps go through during periodical updates but most recently google has incorporated a “Google Dance” at their conventions quite literally. Over the last few years pin pointing this dance has turned out to be more of a shot in the dark then an educated guess which is due to many algorithm updates.

The process of the google crawl is as follows:
Crawl one: Google sends out spiders or (Googlebot) out to spider the sites in its current database and to spider new websites. Sometime around 2 weeks Google will show these new results within a secondary and third level serp at www2.google.com and www3.google.com. User’s of Google will most likely see shifting in results as sometimes Google moves results from its second and third database to its primary database. Another problem I have encountered is that results can be different depending on what Google server your results are being pulled from again allowing many variations of potential search results until the smoke clears.

Crawl two: Once the new results are being shifted in the Google serps googlebot will again be sent out to start crawling new sites along with the current sites within its own index. This process continues and has been the case ever since Google has been around.
Note: It is important to watch the your PR update list as well to help you gage when Google’s PR updates are coming along with the cycling.

How to catch the Googlebot:

From what experts and user’s have found is that there is an update usually at the beginning of the month and then immediately during and after the first crawl so you will want to do your pre-production accordingly.

If you are looking to have a new site included into a certain months update then will either of these crawls get you into the database? Studies show that putting your site up at the beginning of the month might possibly NOT bring your site into the index within that months update. If your new site is crawled in the second phase then you could have a better chance of seeing your site in the revised results following the next month’s first crawl. In other circumstances you will see that Googlebot only grabs your homepage and your robots.txt which is a good indicator that your site will be revisited in the next update.

Here are some helpful tips: If your site is crawled after the first crawl then you are looking at most likely having your site included in the next update which should show new rankings within a month or a month and a half. Now to plan for the exact moment to launch your site and get a few inbound links would be best planed out rather then a random guess. You can do this by watching some of your other sites crawl and update patterns and time it accordingly. This should give you the key to increasing your update schedule for your new sites.

There is no 100% sure fire way to pinpoint these updates but you can use these steps and tools to help you make the best of your efforts.

-Obtain links from relevant sites with decent PR
-Submit your site to the add url page on google and other search engines
-Install the Google toolbar and visit your own site using the toolbar

How does this relate to your SEO Campaign

The information provided to SEO professionals can undoubtedly help with any pre production site launch and SEO campaign planning. This information can help with a tight production schedule and monetizing your site as quickly as possible.