Today's Meetup was very unstructured. We covered a lot of ground on a lot of topics, from social media, Alexa, twitter, backlinks, SEO, and aweber and email marketing.
Archive for 'backlinks'
Meetup June 17, 2011
Friday, June 17th, 2011 at
8:30 am
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Want 25 Free Backlinks a Day?
Monday, February 7th, 2011 at
10:02 am
As you know, I'm a huge proponent of backlinking. Getting backlinks is the most important and valuable offpage SEO activity you can do for your website.
There are tons of methods to get backlinks, like forum profiles, blog commenting, directory submission, link exchanges, blogging on 3rd-party websites (like blogger.com), etc.
If you've been here a while (if not, subscribe here), you also know that I don't employ just one method. I use them all! I call it Backlink Diversity (future product alert!)
Anyway, I just was notified of this neat little Firefox plugin called Social Monkee that gets you 25 backlinks a day, free, from different Class-C IP addresses (this is good because all of the backlinks come from very diverse websites).
Of course, Social Monkee works even if you don't use the Firefox browser. It's just a tad tedious if you don't. Fair warning.
Plus, of course, there is an option to upgrade for $47. I'll be honest with you–I'm trying the free version first. If I like it–and it brings results–I'll consider taking the plunge.
But for now, it's the free Social Monkee for me. You should check it out. You really have nothing to lose.
How to Get Dozens of High-Quality Backlinks from a Single Blog Post
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at
7:08 am
In An Introduction to Social Media Using Ping.fm and Hootsuite, I told you that I would be giving you a method using Ping.fm and Hootsuite that would give you dozens of backlinks all from a single blog post.
Today, you're in for a treat. I reveal exactly, step-by-step, how to create a backlinking bonanza that is easy to set up and even easier to maintain. And you will get literally dozens of backlinks from a single piece of content, automatically.
This is a long post. Get yourself a nice beverage and sit down in a comfy chair.
The Preliminaries
First of all, let's lay the groundwork. For maximum benefit, you will want to register. Go ahead and do that. Just click on the link; another browser window or tab will open. Just fill out the form, check your email, and click on the confirmation link. Then come back here.
What You Need
I'm a tool junkie. I use power tools so that I can get things done more effectively and efficiently. However, there is nothing wrong with doing things manually. In fact, doing things manually offers two benefits: One, you will really understand the process and Two, you will really appreciate the tools once you use them!
These are what I consider the Essentials:
- A Ping.fm account. Sign up here. Then come back.
- RoboForm. Of course, this one is optional, but once you use it, you will find that it cuts down your account set up time by half–or more. Plus, it's an awesome password manager.
- A good clipboard manager. I use Spartan Multi Clipboard
Laying the Foundation
You really should use Roboform for this, but I will just give you the method and a video will follow later to registered subscribers on how to set it up.
Essentially, once you're all set up on Ping.fm, you will be presented with the following page:
Pick the networks you want (I will share a list in a moment) by clicking the "Add Network" links. Do one at a time. Just follow the prompts.
If you're not using Roboform, I'll see you back here in 3 hours or so. It does take a long time to fill out all the forms and get them connected to Ping. (Using Roboform, I can set up an entire group of accounts in less than an hour. I typically charge customers $100 to set up a group of accounts for this very purpose, so it makes double-sense for me to streamline this process as much as possible.)
First, I don't set up Twitter, Facebook, or Facebook Pages to work with Ping. I simply haven't seen consistent results. I use Hootsuite for that; it works much better and the posts come out as expected.
Here's the list of social media sites I typically sign up for and use with Ping:
* These are critical accounts to set up and use with Ping.
Now, go set up Hootsuite. (Video tutorial to follow to registered subscribers).
Find the RSS feed for your main blog and add that feed to Hootsuite. Set up Hootsuite so that every time you create a blog post, Hootsuite picks up the feed and sends it to the following:
Now, the magic happens. Each time you make a blog post, that post gets syndicated to your twitter page, facebook wall, facebook fanpage (if you have one), and Ping. All of those sites you connected to ping get your content, too!
Plus, a little extra icing on the cake: Set up the social media networks that Posterous works with, and you get another "downline" of links (when your blog gets picked up by Hootsuite, the content gets posted by ping to posterous to all of its associated websites, giving you backlinks to your backlinks)!
For even more icing, integrate RSS feeds into the mix, like so: All of those sites you set up have RSS feeds. Submit those feeds to RSS aggregators and you get dozens–if not hundreds–of backlinks, all from one blog post!
Whoa.
I'll show you how to do that in a subsequent post. The trick is in a WordPress plugin called Web Traffic Genius.
An Introduction to Social Media Using Ping.fm and Hootsuite
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at
11:18 am
This is really just a preview of something exciting to come, where you can automate posting your website feeds (yes, multiple) to social media networks (think Web 2.0 and blogging platforms like wordpress.com and blogger.com).
It uses Ping.fm, Hootsuite, and your RSS feed. It offers the following benefits:
- Once set up, it's completely automatic
- Gives your websites exposure to multiple social media outlets and blogging platforms, which gives you dozens of backlinks all at once, driving your websites up the search engine ranks
- Builds backlinks not only to your "money" website but also gives authority to your "tier 2" websites via "backlinking the backlinks" (think linkwheel without any complexity or models to follow)
- Can be easily "supercharged" using multiple RSS feeds to exponentially ratchet up your website search engine results
There is NOTHING "blackhat" about the method. You simply set up several (okay, A LOT) of social media profiles, manually, and then set up the process in a specific way. The key player in the process is Ping.fm.
Hootsuite makes it capable of supporting multiple feeds. More on that later.
I cannot emphasize enough how awesome this is going to be. I'll outline the entire project in a subsequent post and I most likely will sell the detailed project in a little ebook (for less than $10) if you want the nitty gritty details (which you will–trust me on this).
Look for a complete post in the next few days.
How-To Get Backlinks: Comment on Blogs (Part 1 of 24)
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at
1:49 pm
A while back I wrote Two Dozen Ways to Get Backlinks where I simply listed 24 ways to get backlinks. As you may know, especially if you've spent any time here at all, there are just a few ways to get organic traffic to your site. One of the biggest ways is to get a lot of links back to your site.
One of the best (easiest, most effective, and free) ways to get backlinks is through making comments on blogs. Now, these aren't just any comments, and if you do this right, not only will you get more backlinks, but you'll get some direct traffic, too!
In a perfect world (we'll call it "Bill's World"), you would browse websites and blogs and make comments whenever you felt you could add to the conversation. Ideally, when you did make a comment that the site owner approved, you would get a link back to your site so that people reading the original blog could visit your site if they liked — or were intrigued — by your comment.
It's sort of a "comment club," where people making intelligent comments are recognized for their contributions and people just looking for a backlink or — worse yet — making silly comments that are inflammatory, offensive, or just plain stupid, don't.
Commenting on blogs is really a win-win-win. The publisher/owner gets a conversation going, which serves to bring more people in the conversation as well as getting return visits to see how/where the discussion has gone; the commenter gets people to visit his site and know more about him (plus, he gets the link), and the readers get to soak it all in and maybe even enjoy the experience.
A few years ago, Google muddied the comment waters by making up this attribute called "nofollow," which caused a tissy in the blogging community as well as the SEO community. It was Google's intention, I think, of making the commenting system less SPAMMY (there was — and still is — a lot of that). The idea was that Google's search bots and algorithm would not follow the comment link and would give it little to no weight in its ranking.
(This is highly convoluted stuff. Bottom line is Google caused a lot of confusion with this and WordPress and other blogging systems took Google's lead and made the "nofollow" attribute the default.)
Lots of folks will tell you that it's not worthwhile to comment on "nofollow" blogs, as they're called. I disagree: Your comments will still "count" as a backlink.
You may ask, "Huh?" And my answer would be, "Uh huh."
The evidence shows that some of this "link juice" still passes, even on a "nofollow" blog. Not that it really matters.
You still get the link. You still get the direct traffic that comes as a result of somebody clicking on your name in the comments. All is well and good.
There also is the notion that you ought to pick roughly equal numbers of "no follow" and "do follow" blogs to comment on, as this practice looks far more natural to the search engines than just going for backlinks from "do follow" blogs.
How Comments Work
The standard commenting system, employed by default by WordPress, is one where you, as the commenter, type in your name, email address, website URL, and text for your comment, like so:
When your comment is approved and published, your name will be the anchor text to your site, as such:
See the blue text up there? The anchor text, billspaced, contains a link back to my site.
Now, you can get a little fancy and rather than typing in just a name, you could type "Joe the Plumber" which will set your backlink to use your keyword (if you're a plumber, of course) or you could go a bit farther with "Joe the Columbus, Ohio Plumber."
These tactics, if used judiciously, can result in a better backlink than your standard name. However, this tactic could also backfire because the website owner could decline your comment submission or — worse yet — mark it as SPAM if he uses one of the anti-SPAM comment plugins in WordPress (Akismet is the one I use and I highly recommend it if you have a WP blog).
There are some other neat plugins that blog owners may use. CommentLuv is one that is fantastic and one day I may actually install it here. I really like it and it's one of the blog attributes I seek when I want to get some backlinks from blog comments. There's also an extension of that one called KeywordLuv that lets you — even encourages you — include keywords in the name field (as in the examples of Joe the Plumber above).
There is one other WP plugin that site owners employ, and that is one of the many variants of "top comments."
Ways to Find Great Blogs On Which To Comment
{{{4.95}}}I don't necessarily use these methods often, but they are definitely effective. I generally just browse around for whatever topic I'm currently writing about — or have just written about — and contribute to the conversation and I use the URL of the article I just wrote (CommentLuv makes this easy because, by default, it picks your last post as your URL for your backlink).
I am going to show you several ways to find good blogs to comment on. Basically, we will be looking for "footprints" that these commenting systems/plugin leave and once you know them, you can simply use Google (in the examples below) or another search engine to find them.
(Remember — I cannot say this enough — make value-added comments. Add to the conversation. Say something intelligent. Please.)
Method 1 — CommentLuv
In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:
”CommentLuv Enabled” + dog training
If you want to find all the CommentLuv enabled sites, just leave out the keyword. If you want to look for these types of blogs with "internet marketing tools" as the keyword, it would look like so:
”CommentLuv Enabled” + internet marketing tools
Method 2 — KeywordLuv
In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:
dog training "enter yourname@yourkeywords in the name field to take advantage."
Method 3 — Top Comments
In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:
"top commenters" "powered by wordpress" dog training
As always, there are numerous variants on these methods — feel free to modify them as you like; share them here in the comments if you find something especially worthwhile / effective.
Method 4 — Comment Kahuna
One final method I use to find good blogs on which to comment is actually a tool. It's called Comment Kahuna (just click the link and you can download it), which is free.
One Final Thing
When I do make a comment that I find is later approved and is "do follow" I bookmark the site. These are sites that I go back to when I set up another of my own sites for which I need to build backlinks quickly.
Once you know the "footprint" of the various commenting systems, you will be able to easily make comments to get valuable backlinks.
Please, however, make relevant backlinks that add to the conversation. Do it for the blog owner, but do it for yourself, too (no need to get tagged as a SPAMMER).
Tying It All Together
When I start a new site, I always employ this system: 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks
It's my "proprietary" system (big deal, nothing earth-shattering here) that I use to get my site's content indexed quickly, get it ranked highly as quickly as possible, and get traffic flowing to it in a matter of days rather than months.
Next up: Article Submission
Connect with Bill
Six Figures in 6 Months
