100k Job Blogging From Home

A Lot of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Professionals are voicing their opinions and saying than directories are dead. But remember, these are the people that also say that Page Rank is dead, SEO is dead, and the latest this is dead theory.  So is directory link building no longer worthy? well only the Search Engines can tell you for sure.

I believe the real issue with directory links is that only some of them are good and worthy, while some others are junk, being able to tell this difference is the key between loosing your time and having a fruitful link building campaign.  How you can tell if a directory is good enough or that you should pass it.  Here are the 3 main criteria of identifying a good directory from a bad one.

1) The director is listed in the Search Engines and most pages are being crawled.

You can find the directory in the most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Also the category pages of the directory are cached on the search engines, if the directory offers detail pages, these should be indeed too.

2) The links are plain text, no redirects or javascript.

Check the source code of the pages of the directory. Look to see if the links are plain a href’s, without the rel=”nofollow” attribute, and no sneaky redirects are present. By validating all these you guarantee that these links are seeing and counted by Search Engines.

3) Doesn’t link to bad neighborhoods.

The directory doesn’t link to questionable websites, specially topics like gambling, casino adult, and illegal content websites. Be very wary about directory that offers sitewide likes to these type of sites.

Hopefully these guidelines will help you do more quality link building campaigns getting links from quality web directories.

You write a blog religiously every day or so. You provide informative, interesting content for your loyal readers. You’ve even got a couple of affiliate links in there, too. But is this enough to get great search engine results for your efforts?

Probably not. Sure, you’ll get listed with the search engines easily. But without a top twenty listing at one of the majors (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), you won’t have traffic, literally, banging down your door.

In order to get better search engine results you need to make sure you are using the right keywords (and know how to use them), have links pointed your way and regularly check the results of your hard work. Here’s how.

Putting Keywords in the Right Places

Once you’ve picked a keyword that applies directly to your blog, make sure to incorporate it into the following portions of one complete blog posting:

# The title;
# The first sentence;
# Each header (if you have any);
# Once a paragraph; and
# The last sentence.

If you have any links to outside sources, use the same keyword as your link text where possible. Also, for each blog posting, try and pick a different (but related) keyword to use. Feel free to reuse keywords every 30-45 postings.

Submitting to Directories

Your third step is to take these keyword optimized blog postings and post them to the article and blog directories. Most of the search engines determine the relevancy of your blog by how many outside websites link directly to you; therefore, posting your blog entries (with a link back to your site in your resource blurb) is an easy and straightforward way of doing so.

Checking Your Progress

It may take a couple of days to see any results, so try and wait a week before you take a look at StatCounter. Have your hits increased at all? Are there any new search engine referrals?

To track your blog’s ascent up the search engine rankings for any given keyword, try Digital Point’s free Keyword Tracker Tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/). It is an excellent way of ensuring your blog positioning efforts are paying off.

With all blog postings, content is key. Without useful, interesting information that cannot be found elsewhere, your visitors won’t come back for more. Incorporate these simple search engine optimization techniques into your blogging practice however, and you’ll both keep the visitors you already have and dramatically increase your readership through high ranking search engine placement in no time.

• Google heavily manipulates its Page Rank (PR) system by punishing sites/blogs for selling links, which makes it so biased and useless.

• The page rank is so easy to be forged and even Google toolbar cannot detect a forged PR.

• It could give a web site with 0 back links with a PR4, yet another web site with hundreds of back links a PR0

Carefully choose your subject titles, taking into consideration what other internet users may be searching for. I suggest subscribing to Word Tracker. Their report of the most popular searches is published each Tuesday and distributed to over 30,000 subscribers.

Technorati.com , a blog search engine that also lists the top search words. The more targeted your keywords are, the greater your return in search engines will be.

If you follow me on twitter, you probably knew that I created my first Squidoo lens a couple of days ago. The reason behind that move will be exposed here in this post. If you are using Squidoo, please share your experience here.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses—single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and advice then pointing to content on the web.

Squidoo’s content is highly ranked in Google and other search engines as it is treated as one of the authority sites. Squidoo recently changed their nofollow link rules. Once your lens is established, you get dofollow links from there. This gives Squidoo lenses more ranking power in the search engines. That’s why I’m taking advantage of it.

You can even make money from your Squidoo lens, as they share the ad revenue with the users (or lensmasters in their own term). It’s like getting paid to promote you own blog. So why not.

The following is a video demo on Squidoo:

This post credits to my twitter buddy Anthony Bulchalka and his little eBook “10 Web 2.0 Tips”. Download from his web site, you will find some very useful information there.

With the use of a SEO-All-In-One plugin or something similar, you’ll most likely never be getting involved with SEO. You don’t really need to know every definiation and term but it is still good to be well versed in SEO if you want to run a succesful blog or web site.

3-way link exchange – a link exchange agreement when there are no two sites pointing to each other

algorithm – the mathematical formula in a search engine used to rank sites

anchor text – the text that is clickable. Also known as hyperlink

backlinks – incoming links to a website

black hat seo – unethical techniques used to gain high search engine rankings that do not fall within the terms of service of search engines. Some examples are hiding written text (black letters on black background), link farming and cloaking

BLs – backlinks

cache – a storage area within a search engine’s database for copies of web pages

cgi-bin – a storage folder that contains Common Gateway Interface – Binary scripts. There is normally one cgi-bin per website.

cloaking – a black hat system of delivering custom content to an engine spider but hiding the code or content from visitors

dofollow – standard incoming links that do not have the nofollow attribute(see also “nofollow”)

doorway page – a webpage designed to draw in internet traffic and then redirect this traffic to another website. Also known as bridge, entry, gateway, jump and zebra pages [a probable engine penalty]

Firefox – a web browser developed by Mozilla that is free to download and provides an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer

frames – website design using multiple, independent sections to create a single webpage. Each frame is built as a separate HTML file, but with one “master” file to identify each selection. [unfriendly to engine crawlers]

Google Analytics – a free service offered by Google that generates detailed stats about website visitors. A benefit of using this service is to check the Page Views your site gets, to determine pay-per-click and other paid ads quality. Other benefits include tracking: Keyword popularity specific to a search engine, all other referring websites and visitors’ physical location

HTML – HyperText Markup Language. Designed for the creation of webpages with clickable text and other information to be displayed in a web browser

IBL – in bound (incoming) link

image alt tag – the alternative text that the browser displays when the website visitor does not want to or cannot see an image on a website. Placed in the image tag like this: <img src=”s.gif” alt=”SEO”>

inside pages – the non-home pages of a website, also known as internal pages

IP address – a unique identifier that has four numbers separated by dots, like this: 57.247.271.73. All computers across the internet are assigned one. They are used like street addresses.

Link farm – a group of links on a variety of pages solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity for search engines. Link farms are normally created by programs, rather than by human beings. [an engine penalty]

Matt Cutts – worker at Google, specializing in SEO issues. Known for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cutting down on link spam. The best place to see his literature is at his SEO Blog.

META tags – write-up placed within the HTML <head> </head> tags of a webpage, providing information that is not visible to browsers

nofollow – an HTML attribute used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s engine ranking. Used to cut down on irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results

one-way link – a link that has been obtained without a link exchange. A non-reciprocal link

organic SEO – techniques used for unpaid high ranking results on search engines

PR – Google PageRank: a numerical value that represents the popularity of a website. Found on the Google Toolbar

SE – search engine

SEM – search engine marketing

SEO – search engine optimization

SEOs – search engine optimizers

SERP – search engine results page. The page that users see after clicking Search at an engine

URL – Uniform Resource Locator. A world wide web address

web 2.0 – the second generation of internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. For example: social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies

web hosting service – a company that provides web server space to individuals and organizations, used to store all of a website’s files. That server hosts the website.

white hat seo – techniques for high rank that fall within the terms of service of search engines

XML – Extensible Markup Language

Public domain repositories are goldmines of free available information. The
information found there can be freely used, rewritten to suit
yourself, broken into short articles or several ebooks or
published as is. Check the laws for your own country first.
You can find almost anything you need in the public domain, like
software, pictures, movies, plays, poetry, ebooks, music, artwork or
technical works to name a few. A Google search for “public Domain”
will fill your folders with more resources than you will ever need.
Here’s a few to get you started:
In the US:
•Project Gutenberg
•Project Bartleby
•Christian Classics Ethereal Library
In the United Kingdom:
•Free Classic Literature Library
•British Library Collection
•The Morgue File
•Virtual Library
•Newspaper Archives

As I don’t get Google PR yet, so my blog will not be included in the list. This list intends to include some high PR, high Alexa Ranking DoFollow blogs which will be useful for your blog-comment link building.

1. Top of the list is BoingBoing.net. With a PR of 8, this is absolutely top priority blog to put your comment-linking on.

2. V7N SEO Blog – PR 5.

3. Can I Make Big Money Online – PR 4

4. EZ-onlinemoney.com – PR 4

5. Duckeldanny.com – PR 3

6. MyTradersJournal – PR 4 (Stock/Option Trading)

7. BigBenPatton’s Place – PR 3

8. EzyAs123 – PR 3

9. UnlockTheOnlineWorld – PR 2

There will be more I’m sure, and they will be added to the list as I see them. Please add to the list with your findings as well. If you don’t know how to detect a DoFollow blog, here is the tip. Use a Firefox browser, go to the blog post with comments on it, and right click on a commenter’s name (normally with the linking) and select “Properties”. If you can see the word “nofollow” on the properties window, it means it’s not a DoFollow blog. Otherwise, it is DoFollow.

The story about Digg is just getting bigger and bigger. This afternoon, I submitted another post (Traffic Surge – The Popular Keyword Way) to Digg and after a few hours, this Digg item jumped to 7th spot of the search term “the popular keyword”. This Google search returns a total of 19,600,000 results! See the screen shot (click on it to get the large image). Now you bet I fall in love with Digg too.

It’s an automatic blogging site (using WordPress but on a standalong hosting), one blog post generated from mySQL database everyday – fresh content.

It’s part of a mini site network of 4 sites.

It has got “all in one seo pack 1.4.6.13″ installed.

It has got 3 paid links: 2 on page rank 3 sites and one on a page rank 1 site. (who says google doesn’t like paid links?)

It also has got a few links from blog comments.

That all I can come up with. Any comments?