29 May
Guest blogging could be the new way of link building, but what is it for and more significantly, what are the pitfalls to stay away from? We take a quick look here.First, when it all goes well, it is a possibility for you to expose your best work to potentially thousands of new readers on on someone else's weblog. Assuming you are picking a good website that deals with the same general topics as you do, these can be ripe to pop more than to your blog and join your RSS readership.
Of course, for the publishing website, it is a free source of alternative thoughts and ideas. We always say that content is king - through having a load of original article you generate more opportunities of the search engines sending your traffic. And at times it could be difficult finding new material to write about. Plus, as the publisher, you might only learn something new as well or be inspired to write about a new thought from what you read.
Also, guest blogging is spreading your writing not merely on other people's websites, but also onto whatever social media they use, which can be different to yours. For instance, a lot of bloggers will automatically post the new posts to blogger, facebook or their favourite social media network. So your posts are being exposed to these networks of followers. Not only this, but you are getting links from other web-sites, for free! And this is a wonderful search engine benefit that you will want to take advantage of!
So guest blogging sounds tremendous! Are there any problems with it?
Yes, you have to plan and submit your very best of writing when you are asking someone else to publish it for you. It has to be outstanding! If must be interesting enough to tempt the other blogger to allow you to guest on their website whilst also interesting and saying something new so that their readers take note of what you are writing and then take an interest in your blog and visit it.
This means that there might be a couple of iterations of writing each post, as the site owner asks you to make improvements. It can take quite a while to actually go from first writing the post to seeing it live. Plus, during this time you are being subjected to a few what could feel to be quite harsh comments around your writing, either the style of the writing or the article or the way that you handle the subject. I have seen site owners on forums complaining and naming guest bloggers that have written something that they do not agree with 100%.
And then, obviously, there is always the chance of the blogger doing the dirty on you by rewriting it, taking away your links and publishing it to other sources, without your links. Or even just removing your links after a couple of days or weeks and you never seeing the search engine benefits nor the extra traffic.
It is well worth guest blogging, only be certain that that you select your sites carefully.
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29 May
You may have decided that you need to get a Technorati Authority for your weblog, but how do you go around it?First, I used to consider that pinging Technorati works. Don't bother, they ignore pings now! You may as well get rid of the ping from your website and save the processing time. So what do you do? Here are the things we have used to swiftly get a ranking.
1. Go technorati.com and sign up for an account. Straightforward. You will need to validate it as normal by clicking an email link, but on the whole, nothing clever!
2. Find the claim a website button. Follow the form for instructions here - enter your website URL and press next, then type in the particulars you find. Don't submit it merely yet!
If you don't know your RSS feed address, it should be shown on your blog somewhere. Only right click and then
copy link location to copy it and paste it where it is asked for. If it isn't shown somewhere, you are absent a trick!
3. One of the optional fields is for websites linking back to you. If you have been using FTS or article sites, then you should have some of these. Go to Yahoo and search link:www.yourblog.com and find several websites linking back to you (forget Google, unless you have stacks of links). Copy and paste three of these into the form. I have no idea if it really helps, but the question is there, so in case it does...
4. think up a few suitable tags and enter them, plus choose the three categories that match your blog the best. Now, check the details and press submit.
Now, they will email you a claim code that you have to put into your blog. This seems to be the biggest sticking point for getting listed - positioning this claim token. The problem is here that Technorati seems to do a double check.
First, they spider the website to check the claim token exists and second they look for it in your RSS feed. The second makes sense, as I will explain in a moment. But why then do the first? If both checks used the RSS feed then an error message can be generated. I imagine that this is the reason that loads of claims are failing and why numerous sites are not getting listed. Let me explain more!
The reason to use the RSS feed rather than merely spidering the site is because anyone could place a comment in a blog, which might include the claim token. You have to be able to update the posts to be able to get it onto the RSS feed.
So what causes the claim problem? Well, lots of bloggers set the RSS feed to only display a summary, rather than the full post. If the claim token is too far down the post, then it won't be read by Technorati. Therefore, your site doesn't get listed properly.
So, when you receive your claim token, create a new post and put the token in the first sentence. I would recommend within the first 30 words at the most. Also, (in WordPress), go to settings, reading and ensure the RSS feed is giving the entire post. A belt and braces job, but better to be sure. Once you start to see a Authority appearing, you might reset your feed to summary only if you prefer.
After that, you should be ready to get listed. You just need to get other bloggers to mention you in their posts!
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27 May
I have noticed the some SEO experts seem to be using a clever trick for their link building. It is a trick that hides the immediate effects and risks of artificial link building and seems a great, but very simple, idea that we can all use now!On some of my blogs I accept paid posts as a way of making an extra income. This also lets me see what other SEO experts, who are sometimes paying me to write the posts, are up to. And I have noticed that a few different experts are trying a variation of the same basic trick.
It is nothing complicated, but at a stroke, it mitigates any chance there is that the site you are link building for could be found out and punished, whilst being extremely effective. And here is the secret that they do not want you to know -
do not build links direct to your own website.
So, how do you link build then? Well, I have seen it done in two ways. The first and more complex was to pay some bloggers to write posts about the target site followed by a round of paid posts, through the same bloggers, pointing to the original posts. Too complicated for me!
The easier way around this is to submit articles to an article directory and to build links to those articles, which in turn link back to you.
What benefits would this have?Well, should the search engines detect that you are building incoming links, the damage isn't to all of the incoming links, but only to the links to one of the articles. Plus, if those incoming links are a little off topic they still help to build the page rank of the article page. You then have a high page rank article page pointing at your site using your choice of incoming anchor text.
But, do you still get page rank?Yes, if you are careful! If you link to a link directory page with yours and 50 other links on then you are wasting your time. But, if you link to a third party post that just links to your website or to an article that just links to your website, then it can work.
Without going into boring details as to the entire Google Page Rank algorithm as it was first published, basically 85% of the Page Rank of that page is shared out between the websites that it links to. So, if that page points to 3 websites and yours is one of them, then you get a third of 85% of the page rank. But, if yours is the only external link on that page, you win a full 85% of the page rank of that page.
Better still, you have controlled the content of that page and exactly what the link anchor text is. Because of this high level of control over the content of the page, I think that this more than compensates for that little bit of lost Page Rank. It is far better to have 1 on theme Page Rank 4 page pointing at you than a whole host of off topic other pages.
So something to think about - build links to your articles, not to your websites. Feel free to leave a comment or two about the idea!
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26 May
If you are interested in blogging for an revenue, what are you going to need to do? Well, there is more than you may think. Here is our simple plan to make an revenue through blogging.
First, two popular misconceptions:
1) It is simple to set up and anyone can do it and start making heaps of straightforward cash tomorrow.
2) You need a high page rank web site with a lot of traffic to make the best revenue.
In fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle. And I will explain why and where it is during this article.
Through my experience, you need a bit of everything. A blog with a low, or no, page rank is just going to attract low value offers. Probably $1.50 per 100 word article. At the same time, a high page rank blog may attract offers of $30 per article, but there will be stacks less offers.
Numerous advertisers believe that the best value comes from ample of cheap adverts, whilst others prefer several expensive offers. I won't go into which I think is best here.
But this means that if you merely have 1 low page rank blog you are going to need stacks of work to make an revenue, whilst a better ranking website might not need so much work, but there is not as much out there.
So, to earn an income through blogging, you need not one but plenty of websites. You need to set-up and create a handful of them and again, spread more than some niches to attract most interest. Whilst lots of advertisers do not care round matching themes, you may as a blogger with a well ranked site. By having different themes, not only does it make the work more interesting, but you are increasing your chances of attracting work all of the time and spreading the workload.
What are the steps then to a successful blogging revenue?
First, set-up several sites. Think through a few niches that you are interested in and could write round. Again, this is not the place for discussing how to set them up!
Next, start writing. To attract advertisers you should really aim to write at least one, maybe even two or three, non paid posts for every paid post you write. Also, it is a requirement of some systems that the website has been live for 90 days and has 20 posts before you could join anyway.
Now, start submitting a few articles to article sites and as guest websites. This increases the number of links into your website, something that a lot of advertisers will judge you on before going for websites.
When you are writing and especially when you are submitting articles, favour at first several of your sites. Concentrate on one or two of them so that these blogs start to gain more of a page rank than the others. These become your high ranking sites. As the ranking on these websites improves, bring in more new websites and concentrate a few writing on these.
Your aim is a spread of websites through niches and ranking. That is the best preparation for lots of income through blogging.
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25 May
I have been experimenting recently with site wide links to see if the horror stories are correct, whether they maybe help or whether they are just a waste of space.So, I picked a random phrase on a PR0 blog and searched Google on this term. The term was actually a claim sentence for a paid blogging system, so it us used on plenty of blogs, but none of them are probably optimised for it. At first, my PR0 blog was 35th on Google for it. Then, I linked from the home page of a PR3 blog to the post page with this phrase and watched the results.
Once the PR3 site was visited by Google, it itself appeared on page 2 of Google's results, around about position 13. A day or two later and the PR0 blog jumped to 15th and then slowly up to 10th position, overtaking the PR3 site.
Now, I cannot explain why it continued to climb up after the initial jump, but it did. But the effect of the single link is not what I am trying to look out.
I left the sites alone for a week whilst I monitored the movements, watching them balance out. Then, I put the same link onto the rest of the PR3 site in exactly the same position.
Now suddenly thousands of pages of the site had a link to the PR0 blog, using the random phrase as an anchor text. This really was a site wide link if ever there was one. Not much happened, for all of 2 days! Then suddenly the position of the PR0 site started to crash off.
Within three days the site was down to 39th on the search engine listings, even though only 2 dozen of the pages on the PR3 blog were reported on Google as containing the link.
So, this points to a few things.
First, by introducing a site wide link the effects of the single link are knocked out. A single link on 1 page can give a benefit, but put the link across the site and there are no benefits.
What about it dropping to 39th, from the original 35th? Does this mean a site wide link is damaging? I think not. Out of those sites above it in the listings, 2 of them, are the pages from the PR3 site, plus a couple of new high ranking blogs have also displayed the claim sentence. So that explains why it fell further than it climbed.
The second point to notice is that a site wide link is anything but a link on every page. Only about 23 pages are cached with the link out of a few thousand pages across that site. So, it looks as though if you get more than about 5 - 10 links from any one site in a short time period then the links are totally ignored.
This means that if you are writing WordPress templates in the hope of getting lots of links in, you are probably wasting your time! The same for a lot of other tricks. Whether further site wide links when they are built up over time on an older website have the same effect, I cannot say. That experiment will take a lot longer!
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