Search in Google for things like the following;

• previous clients
• testimonials
• portfolio 

If you do you see portfolio type pages, strong pages with few links offering services which are often affordable, how about trying out a service and getting a valuable backlink?

After using services it often pays to submit feedback in the form of a testimonial that could be used either on a portfolio page or even a homepage with your website link.

For example:
http://www.ziskadesigns.co.uk/clients.html
With products/services from £20 and a PR5 client page

In a climate where good links are hard to come by, if you seek out reputable services and give feedback & testimonials you can get great strong backlinks, for free. Even if you don’t need some of these services it almost works out pretty cost effective to try them at times.

Writing my task list the night before has increased my productivity, one of the things I wanted to do for a while was add an email subscription option to both here and CG. That was added to my list last night and done today, so if you want to receive a daily email from us containing the day’s post(s) simply fill in the form on the right hand side.

One thing I thought that would be interesting is to learn how our readers prefer to follow sites. So if you can spare 5 seconds please give us your vote here (email and RSS subscribers will have to visit the site).

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I’m after a bit of feedback on this idea, so all thoughts and suggestions are very welcome (and there’ll be a bonus for commenting).

I’m trying to get more visitors to my site from my feed, so I spent an hour over the weekend creating a plug-in for WordPress that lets me display an extra sentence or so at the end of each post but only in the feed and not on the site. I intend to put an advertising link back to the main site where I can push visitors to affiliate pages with relevant offers.

If you want to see it in action subscribe to the SMM or CG feed.

After creating the plug-in it got me thinking how it could be used in a few different ways:

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Have not seen anyone talk about this for a long time but it is incredibly important, do you want to know what difference it makes if you move up just that extra place in the rankings?

Well it may shock you to realise that you could get over 3 times more traffic just by moving up one place from 2nd to 1st.

Last year when the AOL search data was released there was a post on earnersforum where the number of searches were calculated and from that you could work out the exact difference from a data set large enough to be pretty accurate to work with. (more…)

Authority Sites & their web search
Reading a post on Acorn the other week there was a suggestion that linking to specific results in authority sites like BBC & CNN could be an easy way to get you a valuable backlink.

After a quick check it seems search results from the BBC and CNN are being indexed in Google.

Searching those pages shows that the search results do link out to external sites, for example search CNN for ‘craft’ : http://search.cnn.com/search.jsp?query=craft, now this search result page is cached in Google.

How do you get your backlinks? if you do a web search on any authority website that lists your site in it’s search results you can then link to the search page directly. (more…)

I’m currently researching the keywords I want to promote over the Christmas buying season, as my gadgets site is established and already does pretty well from the search engines my primary promotion method is going to be SEO. I’m not going to write about the products I’m promoting here (as that would be rather silly) but I will share the tools and process I use in my research.

As a working example I’m going to pretend that I’ll be promoting satellite navigation systems, which actually wouldn’t be a bad product to choose, they are a relatively high value and a potentially popular Christmas present. So first off is researching the most popular search term for these and looking to see if they have been popular for Chrimbo in the past.

Checking Trends
I always refer to my satelite navigation system as a sat nav as I expect most people do, but I want to market to a global audience so I’d like to check that. This is where Google Trends helps, it doesn’t give exact search figures but does let you compare the popularity between terms.

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of checklists and after seeing some of the comments or our recent site reviews I thought it would be a good idea to create an SEO checklist. If you have any suggestions on things that we should add to this list please let us know.

I like to break the process of SEO into 3 different parts:
On Page - This is what should be done on individual pages
On Site - These are things that can be done across your entire site to improve overall SEO
Off Page/Site - Influencing factors on other sites

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My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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Ranking for a single keyword can be very lucrative (just ask Scott and his tattoos) but ranking for any semi-competitive keyword or phrase is both difficult (especially for new sites) and may not be the most profitable of rankings. Whilst doing a bit of stat research last week I found I was getting a bit of traffic for the term inflatable water slides, after checking on Google I saw my site was currently in the #2 spot but the year old page was getting twice as much traffic as that ranking was generating, time for a bit more research.

In the past two weeks the page has been found 1,435 for the term ‘inflatable waterslide’, however Google Analytics was reporting:

This page was viewed 2,794 times via 147 keywords

So it was getting nearly the same amount of traffic again from 146 different phrases. I won’t list all the phrases here as that would get somewhat repetitive however here’s a selection of the top and bottom. (more…)

No, the title of this blog post isn’t designed to be keyword stuffing, it describes probably the most important ranking factor and single thing every webmaster has had great trouble with, more so today than at any previous point in the history of the internet.

The history
Some of us started many years ago with sites that were not monetised and like any information portal like a tourist information office that had leaflets to related attractions, events and accommodation most websites freely linked out to other sites of interest or relevance. Logical capt’n.

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