Submitting articles for SEO

7 Jun

I’m busy using article submission sites to build some links. FreeArticleSubmission.org seems to have the most comprehensive list of submissions sites that I’ve found, and they even have an online app to track all your submissions. Only thing is that you have to link to a site of their choice in order to be allowed to use the app. Pretty scummy. So here is the link they gave me: Learn internet marketing — don’t click it. I don’t endorse them. I’ll report back on whether FreeArticleSubmission.org is worth it.

UPDATE 14 JUN 2010: Upon signing up to the site they emailed me a PDF about how to use articles to build links that seem natural. Basically the principal is to submit your keyword-rich, unique articles to 5 really good article-sites and link them all to the page that you want to optimize. 3 articles should link with the anchor text that you want to rank for, and the other 2 should use different, but closely related, anchor text.

The trick is that you then build around 6 incoming links to each of these 5 main articles – 4 with the main anchor text and 2 with variations. Then add 6 to 10 more articles that link directly to the page you are optimizing (without building incoming links to these articles).

Bottom line: This technique is no magic quick-fix, and its a lot of work, but it seems to work. So far, the page I’m optimizing has gone from 17th (page 2) on Google for the term I want to rank for, to 9 (page 1) in only 10 days. All by spreading quality content and articles to people who want it! And I’m hoping the movement will continue! I’ll keep you posted.

Less is more

5 Jun

Read Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals. Go.

Google motivates you to create spam

27 Mar

If you have AdSense on your site then you want people to click your ads, right? That’s how you make money. So you think to yourself, “I need good content about X so that I can reach number one in Google. Then I’ll have lots of people click to my page and then they will click my ads. I’ll be rich!“

Um… no.

If you’re lucky, your great page will get you links, and you will get to the top of Google for your query, and you will get tons of traffic… but Ad revenue?

No.

The problem is that if your page has perfectly satisfied what the user was looking for then they do not need to click your ads! Its only if your article is tangentially related to what the user wanted, or if your page is out-right crappy and uninformative, that the user will need to click past your page.

Sure, there are cases where if you are searching for a Review of X, then an ad to buy X may get clicked based on your informative review. But the unfortunate truth is that this is the exception, not the rule.

Crap… so the best way to make money of ads is by ranking in Google for spammy pages?

Afraid so. Even more frightening — the only way Google can make money is by sending users to crappy pages where they need to click through to good ads. As the owner of a site that relies heavily on traffic obtained by CPC ads, I can deal with this! I need traffic, and Google sends me oodles (for a price), but as a searcher I am concerned.

To read about how Google is willing to compromise search to maximise the ad-revenue read SEObook’s Excuse me, but where did Google’s organic search results go? and check out the image below. Frightening.

Where did Google's organic results go?

Where did Google's organic results go?

Setting up WordPress on my Linode server

12 Mar

Setting up this blog has been a steep learning curve for me. I work at a tech-heavy South African online start-up, but I am basically the non-tech component of the team. To set-up my own blog and learn how to manage a Linux server, I bought myself a Linode Virtual Dedicated Server in London. I got the bottom of the range Linode 360, and I chose London because it has a lower latency from South Africa (where I live) than machines in th US.

The long way round – LAMP

First I deployed a copy of Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS onto my server, which takes under a minute using the awesome Linode back-end. I chose 8.04 over 9.10 because I take myself way too seriously and therefore went for the latest ‘Long Term Support’ version.

Next I had to learn how the hell all of this server stuff works…

To get started, I found a fantastic article on setting up Ubuntu on a Linode server. I skipped over many of the steps like adding a new user (I just used ‘root’) and restoring an old MySQL database (I don’t have any old backups), but the one real gem that I found here and nowhere else was this command:

apt-get install lamp-server^

Every other tutorial on getting a LAMP stack going requires a ton of steps to get it going, and each component needs to be dealt with one by one. There is probably some comprehensive reasoning behind why this is better, and I would definitely browse those tutorials for a better understanding of how the various components interact, but I will choose the easy way out every time!

WordPress

Next I wanted to get a blog going. Ultimately I would like to learn PHP properly and create my own comprehensive and customisable sites, but, currently, installing a WordPress blog is enough of an achievement.

With a little Googling I managed to find what looked like the easy way out. A way to apt-get WordPress, and have the whole thing set itself up automatically. Wonderful! Or not…

I turns out that this will leave you with an ancient and incompatible version or WordPress. Actually the best method involves simply downloading the latest version of WordPress direct to your server (wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip)  and unzipping it (once you have installed the unzip command using apt-get install). From there WordPress pretty much guides you through the installation process.

Wordpress guides you through set-up really nicely

The only minor issues I ran into after that were learning ‘chmod’ to allow WordPress write-access to its own files, and making sure that the rewrite engine was enabled so that my WordPress URLs would look pretty.

The short-cut

As it turns out, not much of the above was necessary (although I learned TONS!). After re-formatting my Linode several times and going through various versions of the above process, a much more experienced friend and colleague pointed out that one of the best features of Linode is their StackScripts.

I reformatted my server and deployed a new server using Ubuntu 8.04 with the Worpress Stackscript. BOOM! My blog had arrived. Man — that was eeeeeeasy!

Luckily the script wasn’t perfect, so I still needed some of my newly acquired server-set-up skills. But not too many of them… All I had to do was change my ServerName in Apache2′s Sites-Available to blog.link-t0-me.com, move the blog from /wordpress to the site’s root, chmod the directory to give WordPress write-permissions, and enable Apache’s rewrite engine.

Sorted!

UPDATE 05 Jun 2010: I’ve recently moved my blog hosting to WordPress.com, and moved it from blog.link-to-me.com to link-to-me.com. I found that I wasn’t using my Linode server for anything besides this blog, and that meant that I just could justify the monthly fees. Especially when WordPress.com is only costing me $10 per year!