Using "NoFollow" to Sculpt Flow of Page Rank

In this article comments made by Matt Cutts are interpreted for the purposes of targeting PR away from inbound (and outbound) links where it is wasted.

clipped from searchengineland.com Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact To achieve that search engine optimal configuration of your internal linking structure, you need to think strategically about how you "spend" the link juice that has been bestowed on your site through inbound links. Rel=nofollow (which can be inserted into the HTML of the link like so: <a rel=nofollow href="http://searchengineland.com/whereever">) was originally developed by the search engines to remove the incentive for blog comment spamming, and the search engines positioned the nofollow as a way to not "vouch" for a link (i.e., not treat it as a "vote" that passes link juice). But the engines have evolved their thinking. They realize now that rel=nofollow is a much more versatile tool than when it was first conceived. Matt Cutts of Google was quoted recently as saying:

I'm Starting a New Blog

After immersing myself in SEO theory, traffic generation and Web 2.0 stuff for the last few months I've decided to refocus my marketing efforts and reorganize things a bit.

So I'm starting a new blog that will let me concentrate my marketing thoughts and experiments as well as serve as the "newsletter" for our company marketing efforts. It will be called The Linknet SEO Strategy Report (or something like that), and it will be found at an old domain I registered a couple of years ago and did nothing with, namely rickhendershot.com

As one of several case studies I'll be conducting over the next few months, we'll see how quickly I can get it up to speed and start getting traffic. I will be pulling out all the stops (time permitting of course) to make an impact quickly.

On the content side I intend to create an ongoing series of tightly themed articles and turn them into videos and audio presentations. Then I will use every distribution and bookmarking technique I am aware of to get exposure and drive traffic.

If it works (and why shouldn't it!) I will publish the step by step process we went through to get it going and make it successful.

Another Awesome Web 2.0 Marketing Tool

Yesterday I signed up for yet another internet marketing membership site - this time it was Jack Humphrey's "Social Power Linking". I just couldn't resist, and so far am glad I didn't.

For just $29/mo you get access to a ton of information about all the major social networking sites such as Digg, StumpleUpon, Clipmarks, and many others.

The initial rush of materials includes a series of .pdfs introducing you to some of the more important sites. For instance, I read the introduction to StumbleUpon and feel I have a much better idea of how it works, what to do and what not to do, how to make connections, etc., etc. I might never have gotten around to it without that intro.

And that's just one of several. Others cover Squidoo, Propeller, Digg, Delicious, and I'm sure there will be others coming as well.

The package also includes a lot of other material.

I highly recommend this package: Social Power Linking.

Auto Poster for Bookmarking Sites

Like everyone else who has delved into using Web 2.0 sites for marketing purposes, I've been a bit overwhelmed by the alternatives. One of my objectives has been to find a tool to help with the task of posting URLs to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg, technorati and many others.

A couple of days I found just such a tool called Bookmarker Demon. This little program will help you register for about 30 sites and then walks you through the quick process of submitting a URL to all of them at once. It even randomizes the information - Title, Description, and tags - so you're not submitting the same information to all the sites.

So far this seems like a really nice program and I highly recommend it.

Bookmarker Demon.

This site walks you through becoming a Web 2.0 initiate

webel.biz is a unique site that lays out a day by day (or week by week if you prefer) strategy for getting up to speed with Web 2.0. Members are encouraged to get involved with specific sites of a variety of kinds, and then share their experiences and results.

clipped from www.webel.biz clipped from www.webel.biz Are you a Webel? You should be, you can be! Webels are smart web site and blog owners. Clued up pros who know that to finesse good web rankings on the search engines these days  you need that extra magic - more, much more, than the perceived wisdom: content, meta tags and a bunch of back links. What Webels know is that to get multiple S.E. placement fast, and so dominate their niches, is that they’ve got to exploit all those lovely new Web 2.0 web sites. Oh yes! BUT Webels pace themselves too - they use the Webel Blog to find out what to do, where to go in a day by day TO DO List - Day #1 do these 5 things, Day #2 do these.... First things first though:  type in your email here to gain free access to the blog and the forum.

OK, So Digg Sucks - Now What?

This is from a post on Andrew Hansen's blog. The post is called
"19 Overlooked But Powerful Resources For Niche And Blog Marketers". The link he refers to is below. Since Digg will only generate garbage traffic (according to many), where can you post to get the kind of traffic you want?

http://tropicalseo.com/2007/top-17-niche-social-media-sites-that-actually-send-traffic/

clipped from andrewhansen.name 13. Here’s an important lesson - alot of social networks SUCK! If you’re submitting your content to Digg waiting for some ‘digg effect’ of enormous traffic, give up now! The posts that generally get dugg alot are from people highly active in the digg community, who tell all their friends to go and digg their posts. Anyway there are some niche marketers discovering that all social networks have different dynamics and that there ARE some smaller less known up and comers that can send niche sites like yours and mine some great traffic. HERE’s a great article on some different but potentially better social networks to look into for traffic:

Using Facebook to Start a Web 2.0 Posting Cycle

In this post found Ed Dale of the Thirty Day Challenge demonstrates how to use a suggestion from a Facebook "fan" to spin out a series of posts and links in various Web 2.0 sites.
Ed Dale's Web 2.0 Leverage Machine

clipped from www.thirtydaychallenge.com UPDATE - Remember the concepts are what I’m trying to get across - there will be detailed how-to steps for all of this through the challenge. So don’t worry if some of the site’s don’t mean anything to you -The idea is to give you some sense of how all this comes together. And thanks to the wag who pointed out how I missed adding the link to twitter! I’ll show you that when we get to twitter - one of the best kept secrets (until now) in Internet Marketing!

Use Narrowly Focused Sites to Optimize for Web 2.0

Dominating niches requires narrowly focused keyword phrases. This site suggests creating different web "properties" that have narrow focus and concentrate only on a specific keyword and closely related ones.

clipped from www.linknet-promotions.com Online Promotion Using Multiple Web Destinations There are at least two reasons for using multiple web properties or destinations. First, each of these three can have a slightly different keyword focus. If you want to score well for three main keywords within your keyword group, each of these three can be optimized for one of these search terms. And second, the search engines often regard different types of web properties differently. Tightly focused blogs - especially if they are part of a larger site like blogger or wordpress often get crawled more often and are given more weight. Google owns blogger, so it makes sense that they might give blogger sites a bit of a leg up. Squidoo is another story again. Squidoo lenses (focused pages) often do well in search results - perhaps simply because the good ones are so tightly focused

Using Web 2.0 Sites to Dominate Google for Keywords

These screen shots are from an article by Howie Schwartz demonstrating how he and some of his followers have "dominated" Google for various long tail keywords by using Web 2.0 sites.

clipped from www.conversationdomination.com

Web 2.0 Marketing

I've decided to shift the focus of this blog to a discussion of Web 2.0 marketing techniques.

If you are interested in online marketing, the old strategies focusing around SEO and static linking are no longer enough. Today, being an aggressive online marketer means using Web 2.0 tactics. What are these tactics? There's so many it tends to make your head spin.

In case you are not aware, Web 2.0 is about interactive media where readers (members) are also the publishers. Given the democratic and interactive nature of the web this shift (in retrospect) was inevitable.

One of the most obvious examples is Youtube.com - anybody with a free account can post videos about just about anything. Other people watch them, and comment on them. The number of times particular videos get viewed pushes the popular ones to the top of the list and so they'll get even more views.

Wikipedia is another interesting example (although not friendly to marketers at all.) Anybody can start a page on virtually anything at Wikipedia. For instance, if you consider yourself an expert on 19th century Romanian folk music, go ahead and create a page (although there may already be one there). Then anybody else can just add to or edit your work.

Craigslist is another, more marketing friendly example. Anyone can post free classified ads in major cities across North America and around the world. Your ad stays in circulation for usually about 45 days. If your ads pass the automated CL filters and if nobody else tags it as spam or inappropriate you've got your message in front of millions of potential viewers. And it doesn't cost a cent.

There are many other sites like this, and I'll try to look at and experiment with several of them - always from the online marketing perspective - as time goes by.

We will also be offering Web 2.0 online marketing services for clients serious about using these media to reach millions of people.

Online Marketing with CraigsList

In my quest to harness the power of Web 2.0 for online marketing I've started trying to figure out how to use CraigsList for online marketing purposes. If you are not familiar with Craigs List, it is a massive classified ad site where you can post ads for virtually anything in many, many cities across North America, and around the world.

You would think CL would be ideal for people trying to sell stuff online. That's what online marketing is about, right? After all, these are ads for stuff that, presumably people want to buy. So there are millions of people crawling and searching through the CL listings every day.

For some reason CL has not gotten a lot of buzz in the internet marketing community. Maybe because CL itself does not encourage the kind of rah rah overhyping and quasi-spamming that internet marketers are fond of doing.

But there are a few online marketing guys who have produced guides and helpful products for those of us interested in legitimate ways of reaching people with our messages. One of them is Jeremy Lawrence. Jeremy has done extensive testing with CL and uses it to generate signups for his newsletter and find buyers for his product called Craigs List Videos. I have links to three of his products and reports on the Advertising Opps page at the Linknet Forum.

Another product that might be helpful to automate Craigs List postings is called AdBomber. This may sound like a spammers tool. But it is not. Anyone who starts placing ads in Craigslist pretty soon starts thinking, "Hey wouldn't it be nice if I could automatically post these ads to a bunch of locations?" That's the urge Adbomber was created to address. I'm still not convinced it is the answer, but I'll let you know after I've tried it a few times.

I will be reporting back on my Craigslist success or lack of success as time goes on.

Promote Your Website with Articles

Most marketers now understand that a good article distributed to the most influential places on the web will get you loads of attention and pull traffic to your site.

Here is a source for professional article writing and distribution. For examples of informative articles see this article site.

The best advice you can get is to offload your article marketing to an article marketing service where the impact of your article marketing efforts is fully realized.

You should also make use of techniques that will help you avoid the duplicate content filter. This is a filter used by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to determine if articles are simply duplicate copies of each other. When they find hundreds of duplicates of your articles you will not get full credit for the links on most of the articles and this will severely impact the effectiveness of your article marketing.

Getting Something Out of Social Networking

Web 2.0 is about using various types of websites in order to connect and interact with what can be very large groups of people. From the marketing perspective, the advantage of social networking is that , in theory at least, you can interact with a group of people who may be interested in your products or services.

A recent article in WebProNews suggests a number of "social marketing strategies" that should be used by marketers who want to make a positive impact with this rapidly developing marketing approach. They include such things as "Fish Where the Fish Are", "Promote Yourself Not Your Product", "Get Experience In Social Media Before Trying to Use it to Market Yourself" - in all, about 10 different nuggets of wisdom from several experts in the field.

Each of these points is linked to a video interview with the tipster. For example, here is an interview with Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us where he describes how del.icio.us started and where he wants the company to go.

This is well worth looking at.

Take Link Building Up a Notch

Just about every day I receive a number of requests to trade links with other websites. These usually come from people trying to do link building for a client, and the default method they use is link exchange.

These people are building links by using link exchange. Pretty boring, right. Lots of would be experts say link exchange or "reciprocal linking" is dead, worthless, has no value.

Even though I don't completely agree, I stopped doing link exchange quite a few years ago. Why? Because exchanging links seems like a really inefficient way to spend your time.

Why is it inefficient? First because link pages have no inherent value. You can compare link building to putting up election signs. Putting links on link pages is just like putting your signs in special plots reserved just for collections of election signs. Imagine how it would go. You go down the street knocking on doors and you ask "Do you mind if I put up one of my signs on you lawn? I'd really appreciate it." People respond by saying, "Sure that would be fine. We have a special place for signs around back." And they lead you to their little fenced in area out behind the tool shed reseserved for election signs.

Of course nobody except other sign pounders ever looks at the signs in the special plot behind the tool shed. Just like nobody ever looks at your links on link pages.

So why bother doing it?

Well, you might argue that the Search Engines have made even these links worth something by making a website's inbound links one of the important factors in determining who gets to the top of the search engine rankings. Yes, that may be true. As I said earlier, I am not convinced that reciprocal links are always completely worthless.

But there are much easier ways to get links. Ways that make much more sense.

Why spend your time (or your valuable money hiring someone to spend their valuable time) approaching people to trade links when you could just be creating your own links? Yes, that's right. Creating links - actual "one way links" - the kind that virtually all the experts says are so important?

So that brings me to my second point. Trading links is incredibly labor intensive and inefficient. There are many better ways to do your link building. Take that same time (or money) and create a couple of targeted blogs, author some articles, or do some posting on high traffic forums or sites like linkedin. Place your links in these places and presto, you've got instant inbound links.

Well, maybe they're not "instant". You have to actually create posts in your blogs, write and submit your articles, visit the forums and make comments. But doesn't that seem like a better way to spread the word about your product or service than spending your time trading links?

That's what building links is all about these days.

For more ideas see our link building programs using blogs, articles and Web 2.0

We've Got New Link Building Programs

We've just overhauled our link building programs. First, we've increased the frequency of our Power Listings program - it is now called "New Power Links" and gives you ten news blog posts every month, at least three of which are syndicated on 25 different sites.

We've also added subscription plans that give clients monthly article writing and distribution to approximately 700 sites. Link Building Level 1 includes New Power Links along with a unique article each month. Level 2 Link Building includes New Power Links plus two unique articles every month. And Level 3 Link Building includes New Power Links plus two unique articles plus a number of social networking components developed and maintained especially for each client. Articles are all distributed to approximately seven hundred sites using our specialized distribution systems.

Here is a comparison of our plans for link building.

Internet Marketing for Chicago Online Business

Internet marketing involves promoting an company or organization using online media. Internet marketing is relatively easy to understand but getting the outcome you want is not usually something that happens overnight. It may often take weeks, months or years of Internet promotions before your Web site gets significant traffic.

Having said that, internet marketing is by far the fastest growing advertising method for all companies in this day and age.

Unlike most internet promotion outfits that promise a lot but deliver very disappointing results, at WOOP-i.com, we use a 4 step affordable and economical internet marketing program carried out in close partnership with our clients. The system we use is easy to comprehend and effective. Every step in our affordable internet marketing program is the basis for the next and ensures the most Internet traffic to your site.

And because our approach to affordable internet marketing results in highly qualified traffic, our track record in converting traffic into sales is very impressive.

Promote Your Site With Articles

Here is a fall article promotion you should be interested in.

Fall Link Blitz - Get hundreds of links.
Get a keyword-focused article written and distributed to more than 700 sites. Every article is a unique version. Five different anchor text / URL combinations (within the same domain.) We write the articles and distribute them. You will get hundreds of links and a lot of exposure from this service.

Get more details here.

Build a Plan Before You Build Your Website

Planning An Effective Website - by Rick Hendershot, Web Design Articles

Building your first website can be very difficult. It looks fairly easy, but usually ends up being more difficult than you expected.

One problem is, building a website requires technical skills that you can't possibly have until somebody shares the secrets with you. And technical people are often pretty bad at explaining things.

If you've ever built a website you've probably discovered that you can't do it right until you work your way through all the techno-jargon and start to understand what you are doing. Building a website is like constructing a house. You can't put the upper parts of the house on until you have the foundation in place. And you can't build the walls and foundation without knowing what the upper part is going to look like.

You need a master plan.

But you can't have a useful plan until you have an good idea...

Read the rest of this article