SEO, Traffic

It seems to be the vogue in Entrecard circles to list your top ten droppers, which spreads a little love and gives them a reason to continue visiting and maybe even make a comment or two.

So, without further ado, here are my top droppers for April ranked from most drops to least. My top three get a short blurb, the remaining seven a mention.

1. Modern Glam. Not only is Modern Glam my top dropper, she gets a special mention for having made some really nice relevant comments. She's also active at BlogCatalog so we bump into each other quite a lot. You should check out her jewelry store while you're here.
2. nofaceberg, aka Danny, a New Yorker who writes some stuff, yeah I know hardly a great review but when you read his site you'll agree with me, can be very funny.
3. MamaFlo's Place, a retired and recent convert to the non-smoking world (228 days and 1 hour as I write this). This lady does a bit of travelling and posts piccies of places she's been.
4. CK Marketing
5. Pixelated Thoughts
6. Search Engine Panel
7. Karlonia.com
8. Dot Com Mogul
9. Wooden Fish
10. Reenashwina

Next month I'm going to switch this up a bit and rank droppers by both the number of drops and the number of comments and give each an equal weighting so it will be interesting to see how many of April's droppers stay in the top ten.

While dropping in on a few bloggers this morning I came across a new social community that looks interesting, but probably not for the reasons you might imagine. Go join 3gb community www.3gb.biz is the website, to see why.

Social communities are the great rage at the moment, and I think over the next few years they'll completely take over from blogs, especially if the members have the ability to share their own thoughts in the same way as a blog with all the bells and whistles that come from being part of a community.

But the 3gb community is really interesting for two reasons, the first, and most important I think, is the radio station it has built in which allows members to listen to complete albums of their favorite stars. I'm not sure if members can upload their own albums or if 3gb have some kind of license to broadcast the music but its a really nifty idea, way better than other communities such as MySpace or Ning. Read More

I've been seeing this Entrecard thing all over the place and finally decided to give it a whirl, I'm user 10,101, Woohoo!. Other Entrecard users probably realise I'm new to the service since I don't have my own 125x125 ad yet, I'll get round to it, just not yet.

So, if you're also an Entrecard user feel free to make a drop, and I'm really keen to hear about your experiences using Entrecard from an SEO point of view. Have you noticed an increase in traffic or backlinks from using it?

Finally, yes I know this is a really short post, I'd like to thank Jillian for recommending Entrecard, feel free to visit her blog and make a drop as well. Ooh, I just had a thought. The first 5 people to comment on this post get a free mention in my next post.

You are no doubt familiar with the holy grail of SEO, the search for backlinks with relevant anchor text since they are the key to successful off-site optimization of your website or blog. Let me give you a specific example of how this works, here is a Google SERP for the keyword Carl, notice this very blog appears on the first page. I'm sure you could easily find a keyword or phrase that places your blog or site in the first page of the SERPs as well so you might wonder what the point is.

Great question, and I've struggled to answer it myself, but ultimately it comes down to this. If anyone in the world was search for "Carl" they would surely find my blog yet hardly anyone ever does, in fact it only produces one or two visitors per day, so you should assume this isn't a relevant keyword. By contrast, search engine optimization tips, which is more relevant to at least one of my chosen categories sees me in the top 10 SERP for some of Google's datacenters. On others my blog appears on the second page.

I could keep linking to other Google search results pages where my blog appears in the top ten but you might think I was showing off, so let's get down to the nitty gritty of why relevance is important and how to do something about getting more backlinks with relevant anchor text. To do this I'll explain why it is that my blog appears in the top ten for "Carl". You see when I comment on other people's blogs I use my name, and similarly when I first released templates I used the anchor text "Carl Galloway". This was back in the day when I thought any link was a good link.

The SEO ranking I have is the result of hard work, not all of it mine, and for this I really need to thank the guys who do so much hard work for me, and if you have a site you'd like to rank for certain keywords be sure to get your SEO from Paul at CR Solutions. By being more aware of anchor text I've been able to push other keyphrases into the top ten, although I've yet to have much success with single word keywords but I'm sure this is only a matter of time.

If you haven't thought too much about relevant backlinks in the past I'm sure you now feel as if you've experienced a light bulb moment, and I've got some more wonderful news. By using keywords as part of your name when you comment on another persons blog you can artificially increase the number of backlinks with relevant anchor text, for example I could use "Carl in Spain" or "Carl does SEO" when I comment on your blog and this will give me more relevant backlinks. Hope this helps, Carl the awesome Spanish SEO dude!