SEOEasy.org

For those of you who don’t know who Angela Edwards is, just do a Google search for the name “Angela”. She sells packets of 30 forums links each month that allow you to create a profile and leave your link there, these have became known as “Profile Links”.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I am not knocking these links especially. I personally don’t tend to use this method myself as I find it incredibly time consuming and getting these links indexed can also be an issue, basically I prefer other methods. I also wouldn’t call profile linking black hat and I think its highly unlikely that you would get punished by Google for doing it, but I’m also pretty sure that they wouldn’t class it as a legitimate way to get links. I also don’t believe that you are doing any real harm by creating these links in the scale of things, but this is why I can’t help but get annoyed at Angela’s stance:

For a start there is no doubt about it, she is spamming forums, she just won’t admit it. Sure, forum owners want you to sign up to their forum, but not in this context.  Just because its not automated with Xrumer, or because she’s not linking to pharmaceutical companies doesn’t change anything, the principal is the same. Just think of it like this, if you were a forum owner, and your forum wound up on Angela’s list, would you be cool with that? Of course you wouldn’t. Over a thousand people are going to come to your forum and create a profile which adds absolutely no value to you, and just diverts PR away from the rest of your site. This is why so many of her profile links are getting removed.

Now I really wouldn’t be that bothered about all this, but the woman actually has the audacity to complain when “spammers” and “black hats” spam and share her lists. I mean come on Angela, what the hell did you expect. You create a list that goes out to over a thousand people each month (I looked at the new users on a forum that featured on her list), who all go and create profiles on the same websites. And lets not forget, she doesn’t own these sites. She is profiting from other peoples forums that are getting spammed. If your leaching from them in the first place to make a buck, don’t go and complain when your own list gets shared. Hell, if I was a forum owner and I got spammed by Angela Edwards would I feel bad about sharing her list? No.

She has become a victim of her own success and she is now out of her depth. Taking these attacks on her business personally just makes her look naive, its about time she realised that she is on no moral high ground whatsoever to start moaning about “spammers” sharing her lists and spamming “her” forums. She is a bigger spammer than most of them. The same goes as well for all of the do-gooders on her list that try and pretend on Warrior Forum that they are the same. Constantly moaning about how many spam comments they are getting on their blog and then quite happily without a thought going and spamming someone else’s forum for their gain.

So Angela, if you ever read this. Do me a favour and stop kidding yourself. Rant over.

Technorati Tags: Blackhat, Profile Links, Spam

I’m sure your all familar with the phrase:

“Rome wasn’t built in a day”

But have you applied the lessons of this idiom to your online marketing? I think a lot of people get caught up in the alluring figures on affiliate networks and the chit-chat in forums about “how hot cpa is”, yet fail to stop and look around at income sources closer to home – start small. What I’m talking about people is – Local Search.

What the hell does this guy have to do with making money online?!

Lets just run some figures. Now a local search term like “Dentist in Your Medium Sized Town” might get around 200-300 searches a month, depending on the size of the town (try it on your town now). In affiliate marketing terms this level of traffic will never earn you that much and usually wouldn’t be worth investing your time in. But were not worried about that, because to a dentist 200-300 customers a month is a serious amount of business. How much did you spend last time you went to the dentist? Just think about this for a moment:

If you had a site that ranked on the front page of Google for a keyword that had ultra high converting traffic hitting it everyday, selling a product potentially worth thousands, how much do you think an ad slot or even the site itself would be worth?

A lot. Excited yet? You should be.

If you had a site that pulled in a mere 50 of these visitors a month, at the very least I would say 10% of that would result in business for your local business of choice. So that’s 5 customers for our dentist of your medium sized town, now given that treatments can very quickly spiral into hundreds if not thousands, let alone repeat business, you can begin to see the value of these 5 customers.

If I was a dentist I would quite happily pay several hundred dollars a month for an advertising space that had customers actively seeking a dentist in my town. Its a no brainer, a win-win.

But wait…it gets even better!

These searches are very often easy to rank for. Unlike that latest clickbank product, or the brand new iPad fail from apple, you can be pretty sure that the internet marketers have stayed cleared from “small local business in your local town” (how many dentists know SEO?!). At worst you will get a few nicely designed sites that are reasonably well set up for SEO, but still probably lack basic optimization. So all you really need to do is set-up an  exact match domain e.g. www.localdentistinyourtown.com, add some articles about your niche, submit it to a nice load of bookmarking sites, build a few quality backlinks with exact anchor text, wait a couple of months and you will more than likely have a decent ranking page ready to earn. If not just add a few more links.

That really is it as far as the technical side of things go. The hardest bit about this method is this one simple fact – we can all see the obvious value of a site like this, but sometimes your client might not.

You have to be very clear about what you are selling and why it will earn THEM money, so decide whether you want to sell advertising space or the whole site. I will leave this bit up to you, my advice is just be flexible, perhaps offer them a choice, and be prepared to negotiate.

You will need to approach them, ideally in person, on the phone or even by post (those strange paper things before email) – you will get a much better response this way. Show them the site stats, and explain that all of the traffic is coming from people actively searching for their business. No newspaper ad or shop-window postcard can compete with this. You can virtually guarantee them a constant flow or purely targeted traffic.  Hell, even work out the average cost per unique visitor for them to show them how little they will need to pay to get there business in the limelight.

Any one with any sense should see the opportunity there, if not then just move on. Some people are afraid of the web and computers and however you try to explain it to them they will just not have it. If they want to stick to putting postcards in the corner shop then let them! Just move on to the dentist down the road.

I hope this has given you a good overview on this method. Obviosuly it is not limited to dentists, you can try pretty much any local trade, or any local search for that matter. There is always a way to monetize it

CaptainSquid at his Squidoo blog is currently running a piece on using Squidoo lenses for local search so check it out.

Technorati Tags: local search, online marketing

Hey guys, since this is a new site I thought I would just declare it to the world -

MYSITE IS DOFOLLOW!

I also have installed the commentluv plugin. Now thats out in the open I will take a second to explain why I have done this and why you should to.

As a marketer myself, I know what a pain it can be to get links and the fact that most blogs these days are “nofollow” as standard doesn’t help. If your not sure what this (nofollow) means check this out.

The nofollow tag has destroyed webmasters ability to easily get useful backlinks from relevant blogs. Now, for new sites that are relatively unknown, these easy first links can be make or break. They will help you get indexed and get your site into Google so people can actually find your “great content”. Writing good quality content is obviously important, but unfortunately sometimes its just not enough. You have to promote as well.

Matt Cutts (A top Google engineer) drives me crazy when he answers questions from people asking how they can get backlinks. The same answer is churned out time and time again…”write great content and people will link to you”. Well unfortunately Matt, not all of us have prominent positions at one of the world largest companies…or the marketing budget of a multi-national corporation to get us started.

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying that you can’t succeed without backlinking yourself, but what I am saying is that just having a great article on a site doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will ever read it. Most of the time you have to take the first steps in promoting your site yourself. Essentially, you need to artificially create a buzz around your site.

Anyway to get back on track…I believe that blog commenting is a great way to get links and it doesn’t have to be spammy. I welcome and encourage comments on my blog, they provide me with free, relevant content and links to other relevant sites. The least I can do in return is link without the evil nofollow tag

James

Technorati Tags: commentluv, dofollow

Hello everyone, my name is James and I am the founder of SEOEasy.org – a blog about Internet Marketing, SEO and everyones favourite topic, making money online!

While SEOEasy is a brand new site as of April 2010, I have actually stolen a couple of posts from an old site I use to run. Anyway, I hope that now these posts have found a permanent home, and I have a new place to write/rabble and maybe even offer some advice, SEOEasy will flourish

James

If you arent aware of the term canonical URLS then you may want to Google it first, but heres a quick run down of why it is important for SEO -

Your site could be being penalized for displaying duplicate content in Google without your knowledge, and its not because someone has copied it or because you’ve had a memory lapse and started writing things twice…

In all of Googles wisdom it’s still unable to tell that:

http://yoursite.com and

http://www.yoursite.com

are in fact the same page.

So you might find that Google decides to index the same page twice and penalize you for it. Luckily this error is easily overcome with a few lines in the htaccess file. Simply add this code in the file.

To force WWW (recommended):

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^REPLACEWITHYOURSITE\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.com/$1 [R=301,L]

And thats it, et voila. Now your site will always defualt to http://www.yoursite.com whether it is typed in or not.

If your domain is what’s known as an “add-on” domain, i.e. you registered a main domain and are allowed to add extra domains to the same hosting account, then you also need to be aware of this. You can access an addon domain six ways! Let me explain with an example:

www.addondomain.co.uk

www.addondomain.the-hosting-domain.co.uk

www.the-hosting-domain.co.uk/addondomain

and then each one can be accessed with or without the WWW.

To overcome this issue simply use this code.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^REPLACEWITHYOURSITE\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.REPLACEWITHYOURSITE\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.com/$1 [R=,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.REPLACEWITHYOURSITE\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://REPLACEWITHYOURSITE.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Hope you found this useful, its a good page to bookmark!

I have been thinking a lot about this recently. And perhaps it’s a path I wouldn’t recommend anyone goes down as your ultimately never going to get an answer – unless you land a job at Google of course! Common belief is that the biggest factor is backlinks, and more importantly the PR of the sites linking to you. If you haven’t already read the wiki entry on PageRank then I recommend you do so.

However, it’s clear that there are other contributing factors. Google don’t deny this but they also won’t let on what they are. I do believe that powerful backlinks (backlinks from high PR sites) are a big factor, and are probably one of the easiest ways to acquire a decent PR, but there are definitely some other big players in their algorithm.

One of the best examples of this is a few old Squidoo lenses I have all PR 3. I looked at about 4, all of which had less than 5 backlinks, all from pages with NO PR. Theoretically this makes them fairly worthless and I do believe that backlinks from pages with no PR carry very little power. Therefore there has to be several other factors. I believe that these are (in no real order):

1. Content that matches popular keywords.
2. Traffic
3. Site optimization (eg keywords in H tags, robot file, sitemap, clean html)
4. Domain age
5. Domain PR

It’s worth remembering all this when ranking a site – backlinks are great but you can gain a good PR without any. Start with the basics before worrying too much about backlinking.