SEO, Traffic

A recent article I wrote was about backlinks, specifically crafting great anchor text, but now I want to take the entire process forward another step and talk about blog links that work for me.

I love when people comment on my sites, the more comments I get the more I feel like I'm connecting with people and sharing something worthwhile. If you blog on any subject it's good to get comments and boost your ego. Of course I never get as many comments as the a-list bloggers, but I'm not chasing huge traffic like they are so it's understandable.

The second reason I love comments is that they actually increase the amount of content on my page, every person who comments and leaves a paragraph or two gets approved, and their comment increases my page length by another couple of paragraphs. This is why I also try to answer every good comment with a couple of paragraphs myself.

It doesn't take very long to get a 1000 word article converted into a 2500 word page when you include 10 comments, and it doesn't matter if half the comments are yours, why? Because it's more content. The only thing you should try to do is keep your comments on topic. Read More

I've talked in another article about the importance of anchor text in backlinks, actually looking at that article from early 2008 I'm feeling a little awkward even admitting I wrote it, but in the world of SEO a lot of things change, and so have I.

Yup, in two years I've gone from mega SEO fanboy, to really not caring a heck of a lot, let me tell you why. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is more about common sense than anything, and you can optimize the crap out of your pages, but in the end if the other site has more backlinks than you, they're going to beat you in the SERPs.

Sure there are other factors at play like authority, age etc, but in the cold hard light of reality, he who has more and better backlinks wins. This is why it is so important to get those backlinks, and why it is so important to make sure they are phrased in a way that appeals to search engines - coincidentally, this also helps human readers so it's a win/win for everyone. We call that crafting your anchor text. Read More

A lot of people get really hung up on getting traffic to their websites or blogs, so they use a variety of different methods to attract traffic, from StumbleUpon, to Digg, Facebook, Twitter, [insert name of favorite social networking site]. But these don't work if earnings are your goal, let me tell you why.

Most desperate webmasters, and lets face it we know who they are, these are the people who have this sudden idea of making millions of dollars online and becoming rich with very little effort. Or, they're from some Asian nation and have a very low standard of living in their home country and are desperate to start earning online.

I don't have a problem with desperate IMers, but I know a lot of the information they read just isn't correct so they do a lot of stupid things. Namely, chasing social media traffic in the hope their visitors will buy something or click an ad.

Now this is where the difference between traffic and backlinks becomes critical. In the past I've talked about getting keyword rich anchor text in your backlinks, now I'm telling you why getting backlinks is more important than traffic. Read More