SEO and back links

Thanks Dougal Campbell. Some good bits in your post. Good Content is a given. As for SEO Good keys word usage does make a big difference and I agree that word press does have a good SEO all in one plug in. Tracking the difference between using it and not using it I saw a twenty percent difference in direct traffic.

I thought there might be a better more intuitive product, SEO plug ins that generate key words for you as such, it would seem there isn’t any good information out there from real users. If people using such products did notice a difference? It would be interesting to meet some using that product and hear something first hand.

As for writing meaningful comments that does work well, but not for all sites you comment on. You still need to comment on hundreds of sites which as you know is very time consuming.

As far as Guest bloggers, I don’t know what your experiences have been but I find that when dealing with guest, your lucky to find someone motivated. For my site not just anything will do, you actually need have a decent post. I prefer substance over style and most bloggers that contact me are pretty lazy. I ‘d would be interested to know how many truly successful guest you have had and if you had to lower your standards to accommodate them?

This is actual something I haven’t heard before and will try in the future:
“If there is a Meetup group, business association, club, or other group in your area related to your topic of interest, participate. Do presentations. Speak at conferences.”

The logistics and preparation for these types of events can be tedious, Would you mind sharing more about your experiences? ex. Do you have your own booth? Have you seen a visible increase in web traffic? How do you manage the expenses? What portion of your advertising budget goes into these events?

I’ve had many guest bloggers over the years and some of them now earn a living from blogging solely.

I can’t speak for everyone else but if you get your PR up, a steady flow of people will come. Obviously, to do it organically, it will take time to get your home page PR to 3 or higher. I’m not a fan of buying backlinks. There may be a hockey stick effect: nothing, nothing, nothing, and boom!

As for plugins I’ve used All in one and Platinum, both are good. You don’t use them to generate keywords for you. Go do some keyword research for what you’re trying to get SERPs for and then use those words in the plugin for the articles.

Regardless, quality content will always be the foundation, whether it’s you writing them or your guests.

BTW, if it matters to you, I’m in the over 15+ years club too.

It is nice to hear from you Gabe. This week I have been taking a hard look at the importance of back links. After all this time they still play a major roll in most rating systems. But there isn’t a real good way to collect them. You probably noticed that a lot of the above posts talk about contacting to other bloggers and joining communities, it is all hit and miss. I contacted 435 blogs this week alone I got 2 back links.

Perhaps some of those folks will wake up sometime in the future and I might get 1 or 2 more but after all of those emails and looking for contact info and web forms, you would think there would be a better way. I can see why so many people just buy links. I would buy them too if I could find a link provider that really produced high quality links. I dump 1000s of link spam out of my comments every day..I just don’t want to contribute to that..It is too annoying.

As far as Guest go, Hit or miss. The few people I have met, flaked out.

Having taken an extreme look at the SEO plug ins for word press. There isn’t much difference in quality. It all really comes down to how well you plug the keywords. It has become a thoughtful process, seeding my content with keywords for the SEO plug in. Failing that, it is about how good your key words are.

I am not sure what you mean by PR rating? Is there such a rating and if so who’s tracking it..?

PR means Page Rank, a term popularized by Google to reference your ‘standing’ for certain keywords. Like if your site is about “vegetarian dog biscuits” a high PR would put you on the first page of results for those terms.

I’d rather have a handful of amazing backlinks than a bunch of garbage ones. One of the easier ways to get them is to simply be a guest writer for same niche sites, high traffic, dofollow sites.

No need to contact 435 blogs. Just find a handful of good ones and instead of asking for backlinks, offer to write an article.

But Of course and here I was excited to hear of something new.. lol

There is often an 10 hour lag from when I write these messages and when they return, unfortunately by the end of the day I am fried. I only have time to glance things over.. But since you mentioned it never occurred to me that page rank might make a difference. btw PR is also short for Press Release… Has anyone heard of a good feed?

The importance of PageRank depends on who you ask. IMO, it’s made all the difference for me.

About the my home page PR goes up for my website is usually about the same time when guest writers and advertising offers start rolling in.