On Tuesday we had our monthly Affiliate Summit meetup and we started talking about backlinks. We usually talk about this topic all the time but this time around we talked about checking backlinks. Actually I was glad to see people are looking at backlinks since Google uses them in part to rank their websites in the search engine.

Someone brought up that he noticed that one of his keyword rankings had some funny things going on. The top website ranking for the keyword had under 10 backlinks but the second site had about 1008.  I think he said the 3rd site had like 5 or so. We are not talking about a very competitive niche so it didn’t take a lot of keywords to rank well.

His question was how does a site with 10 backlinks beat out a site with 1008 backlinks. The answer to me was obvious but to someone new I could see why it would be confusing. Without knowing the exact details I blurted out that it was because the second site bought 1000 backlinks from someone and they really only had 8 real backlinks.

I bet if we went to look at that websites backlinks you would see some websites that ended in .info, some .blogspots  and some squidoo pages. Google isn’t stupid and they know what sites are really doing. I was surprised that the site wasn’t placed on page 10 of the search results. Maybe Google didn’t find it yet? Who knows, without knowing what site it was I can only guess.

If Google looks at a site like one of the ones listed in the graphic on Wil Reynolds post on SEOMoz Google can then look at all the sites that have a backlink from them and figure out rather quickly that the backlinks are probably paid for and eventually worthless. In this case I bet Google just hasn’t found it yet but they will. The person selling the 1000 backlinks is probably using the same sites to give backlinks from so there are many sites that have the same EXACT backlinks. When Google figures this out and starts to wonder why sites across many different niches all have backlinks from the same sites do you think they are going to count those links. I don’t, it might work for a little while but it isn’t a good long term strategy.

Now depending on what color SEO hat you think you are wearing at the time you do have choices. You can leave it alone (which I usually do), or you can report it to Google as spam. Since it isn’t my job to clean up Google results.  I will be making my site better for the end user and I suggest you do the same.

One of the questions I am asked on a persistent basis is about website or blog content. People want to know how they can come come up with topic ideas and where to get good content. While I am at the point where I just figure out the content phrases and hand them off to a writer that isn’t the way I started.

Whenever I make up a website the first thing I do is take my keyword list and set up about 10-20 Google alerts. Google alerts is a pretty cool way to get content ideas and also a good way to find websites that will exchange links and content with you. Take your keyword phrase’s with “quotes” around it and enter them into Google alerts and you will have content ideas delivered into your email box the next day.

Every morning I will get 10-20 emails with 2 or 3 links in each that mention the keyword phrase and if the topic is hot you will get more. It only takes a few minutes to give a quick glance over the emails and look to see if they are a good match. You can get some good ideas for content this way. I will look over the emails and end up with a topic that will allow me to create a whole page and maybe two. If you don’t want to be overwhelmed with looking through all the emails just choose one keyword to work that day and let the others sit in your inbox for another day. By the time you are ready for the next subject you will have more emails to work with.

If the story is hot at the moment I will create the page myself and then alert the other pages that I found in the alerts. This is done either through commenting on their site and include my link as a reference or I will send an email to the website owner and tell them that their piece was great and that I have a similar article. Maybe hint at a future guest post or to trade links back and forth. Something will usually come from it, if not during this exchange the ice has been broken for future stuff. They may even know another webmaster in the niche that would also like to work together.

Outsourcing Your Content Writing

If I am in no hurry to get the content up I will usually hire a writer. I will get together a bunch of keyword phrases and put up a job on Elance.com or more recently I have been using IWriter.com. While both are good services I am happy using ELance for larger jobs but that is only because I have used them more frequently. After you use either of these services you get to know some writers that are good and you make sure you invite them to do the next job. It is also not a good idea to settle for the cheapest writer as odds are you will get lousy content back. You want to plan your job with as many details as possible. I always choose writers from the USA and pay a little more than have articles written by someone that their first language is not English. It never works out and saving a few bucks on content that is going to be on your website for years just is not worth it.

Get Your Words Transcribed

If it is a topic that you are knowledgeable about and you don’t feel like typing out the information you can always use a voice transcription service. It may sound dumb but if you are lazy like me and you type slow you can do a voice recording. Hook up a headphone and mic to your computer and peak the content for your pages. I know I can talk 10 times faster than I can type. I load up a program called Audacity (Free) and make some audio files. After I am done I upload the files to speechpad.com and get them transcribed. It is cheaper than hiring a writer and I know the content isn’t some plagiarized copy that has been spun ten times to Sunday.

You will end up with some pretty good content this way. Odds are you will surprise yourself with the results, I know that every time I get the content back I am amazed at how accurate the content is and since you talk faster than you can type (and think at the same time) you end up with twice as much quality content than if you had hired a writer.

One thing that I am asked about all the time is how you get traffic to a website.

I tell people that there is no quick way and that it is a series of things that get me traffic. Most of the time a website actually hurts itself and gets penalized. I more or less find the reason why the site is not ranking well and I fix that problem first. Sometimes websites don’t do basic SEO and that will hurt them. Sometimes website owners don’t know what they should rank for or track what is working and what isn’t. If a website owner doesn’t know these answers they are missing opportunities to get traffic and money from that traffic. Getting a few links to a website and doing some social media work can come a long way when it comes to improving a website ranking and actually get traffic.

Your website needs two things, a way to track your website visitors and a way to find out what people are searching for. For tracking visitors I use Google analytics and for seeing what people are looking for I use a combination of things like the Google adwords tool and/or SEM Rush. The thing that you want to do is make really good pages that people are searching for and solve their problem. This may be by linking to your product or an affiliate site that sells it.

My goal is to make a good page that builds trust and have the user sign up for my email newsletter. Repeat traffic is easier to convert since you have built trust already. In the process I also want to build a loyal following that will come back to my site and tell their friends about it. Every website needs a few pages like about us, contact, privacy policy etc.

The about us page should be about how you are going to help the user and then some personal stuff about you. I find that making the page personal helps a lot. It shows your readers that you are real.

I will make videos for YouTube and have my website url in the description so people watching the video come to my site. I will use Twitter and Facebook also to build a following. All these things add up to traffic.

Most website owners need to get links to their website. Most have no idea how or why they need this. What I suggest is writing articles about your niche and finding other website owners to give that content to put it on their site with a link or two back to your site within the article.

You can also get links back to your site by making the best article ever and putting it on your own site and alerting the media to it. Try to get to know your local newspaper reporter and when you have news let him know. It is a good two way street to be living on.

Tweets about Austin Fire

Last week during the fires in Austin Texas I decided to help out my friend Shawn Collins with a link to the Austin Fire department so he could hear what was happening with the fires since his house was very near to the fires and he had to be evacuated. I am a geek when it comes to listening to fires online. Guess it is my old volunteer fireman days in me that makes me want to know exactly what is happening when I hear fire trucks. When I hear fire trucks in the neighborhood I am on the New York City FD frequency listening in and when they give an address I am usually looking at a street view of the fire building before the fire trucks are even there.

So I get the channel for the Austin Fire Department and put it out on twitter figuring if anyone else was in the same situation they could listen also. The fire department speaks in codes but they do give out addresses and such so I figured it may be useful to others.

I was not doing this to get traffic but to help people out. Seriously it wasn’t a good traffic builder anyway since it wasn’t a tweet leading to my website in the first place. Well this morning I check my twitter stats and I see this huge number of tweets clicked on. At first I was surprised at it and was wondering what did I tweet that could have that much traction. I had forgotten all about the tweet and sure enough 141 people clicked on the link.

I was thinking it would be smart to use a hashtag #austin so I did that in my next tweet which didn’t get as much traction but since it was only a few minutes after tweeting out the first link people were already listening. I also tweeted out pictures to the fire map and the pictures from the air. All of these getting a little traction.

Who knew that trying to be helpful could get traction like this. I am sure there is a way to use this to drive traffic back to your sites if you wanted to. I got enough just trying to be helpful.

I was up late watching tv when I saw a commercial for the Oreck air purifier and since I didn’t want to sit there for a half hour to learn the price I went to Google to see what they are going for. I was surprised to see the amount of clicks the advertisers has mixed in with the PPC ads on the results page. Knowing this can’t be a normal thing I took a screen shot of it. Click on the image to see it in full size. I am not sure Google wants to put out this info to everyone. I did a few more searches and it was on a few other searches but not many.  It does help people doing ppc to see what their competition is actually doing.
UPDATE: 6/19/2011 4:25am – I just added a video screenshot to the bottom of this post. It is best viewed in full screen.

Google clicks on search results page

Google Search For Hand Bags

A few weeks ago I was at BlogWorld in New York City and I got to talking with a few people about transcribing videos. I always wanted to have this done since I have a lot of videos from car shows where they have car show reps talking about new cars. The information they have at the shows is much better then any magazine or website can give you as these reps are very knowledgeable about their cars and the features.

Besides the video content being great I always wanted to get a transcript so I can put that on my car site for SEO reasons. The natural flowing content that comes with this is invaluable. So someone mentioned Subply.com to me at Blogworld and I tried it out and I was amazed at the results. For about $1 a minute you can get a video transcribed and have amazing content to go along with your video.

I had a 5 minute video transcribed for about $5 and it came back to me in 4 hours with only one or two minor mistakes. It was almost perfect, 591 words of content which I placed on my page next to the video and I didn’t have to write a thing.

Who would have thought that going to BlogWorld would improve my writing without me having to type a thing. So now the video is on the page with great SEO content and my readers are happy because I am giving them a better website. I am happy with the increase of traffic and my website also became easier to work on in the process. I love Win-Win-Win situations like that.

If you have an old short video laying around I suggest that you give SubPly a try. You can either upload a video to them or you can just point to your video on Youtube and they will find it. I did this at 1130pm and the transcription was in my inbox at 4am. In a little over 4 hours which I think is incredible turnaround time.

I am not being paid by Subply for this post, I just think it is a great service and want to help spread the word.

UPDATE 2/4/2012 – I have found a better service called Speechpad that does the same service but cheaper especially if you are buying in bulk.

I was just watching a special on Warren Buffett on CNBC and it showed him driving around Omaha Nebraska where he lives. I was shocked when the reporter asked him why he didn’t live in New York where Wall Street is and he had a simple answer. When he said it it hit me like a ton of bricks. He said he doesn’t live in New York because when he is in New York he gets 500 tips about companies to buy before noon whenever he is there.

He went on to explain that he has to do his own thinking and not rely on what others thought. He said he only needed one idea a year to make money and having too many ideas all at once would make anyone lose focus. It was then that I realized why I didn’t make money on the internet when I first started out with affiliate marketing.

I was trying to be everything to everyone so to speak. I found out that car parts were sold online so I started a car parts site. Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it? Yes it did until I didn’t sell anything. The reason I didn’t sell car parts was I got the idea from someone else and I didn’t know the first thing about car parts. There was a few other reasons but that was the main one.

While I had about 25 pages up selling car parts someone said to me that since I liked boats I should start a site about selling boat motor parts. Next thing I knew I had a boat motor parts website. This kept happening over and over until I reached about 30 sites that had no focus at all. No focus = no money!

When asked why he didn’t lose money in the tech stock bubble Warren had a simple answer. “Stick to what you know and what you like doing”. Sounds really simple but he didn’t know anything about tech stocks so he stayed away from them. Sounds great in hindsight but he lived it and he went on to make money during the bubble bust.

When I am online I am constantly distracted by email and instant messenger and visiting forums. This time could be spent improving on what I know and what I like doing. Not spent on making another site about something I knew nothing about.

When IPods first came out I wanted an IPod website but I held myself back. I already had two websites about cell phones and I hated making pages on the latest cell phones since that took a lot of  work to research and there was a lot of competition. I practically had to sit on my hands not to register an IPod site url but I didn’t do it. Everyday I am happy that I didn’t as the site would just sit and spin as I call it and get no traffic. Why is that, because I don’t know anything about IPods.

Do what you love and do it well. When I started shutting down websites I felt relieved that I didn’t have to cover a topic I hated. You know what happened my income started to go up. I like sports so making a sports site was a no brainer and when I did that it was a success almost overnight. I can write about sports all day long and if someone pops up on instant messenger they have to wait until I am done writing the web pages before I answer them.

If Warren Buffett had to make a website what would he do. He would have one website about what he knew or liked and that’s it. Focus on a topic that you like and focus only on that one topic.

Yes Your Title Tags Suck

Yesterday Google changed the game for webmasters, and I think it was a great change that will improve a lot of websites. Of course there will also be webmasters screaming but such is life on the web.

Yesterday Google let webmasters know what pages get impressions and more important the amount of clicks on those pages. You may be saying what’s the big deal about this. Well lets do a little digging, say you have a page on blue widget that is showing 5000 impressions a day (I know most people would love that) but the end user only clicks on the results 5 times. A very low percentage that I don’t even feel like doing the math for. This tells me that the user either wasn’t looking for your type of widget or your title tags and meta descriptions suck.

Odds are your page title says blue widgets and nothing else. Your meta description tag is probably non existant and search engines are grabbing any content from your page and it looks jumbled and uninviting to the end user. Sorry but odds are this is the cold hard truth.

Now lets see, what do you think is gonna happen to this page that only gets 5 clicks out of 5000 impressions. I would bet that page gets a lower spot in organic search results since users are not finding that page as relevant over and over again.

I admit I only spent a hour looking at one of my sites that rank well and I was amazed at what I was looking at. I found about 25 things that I could change ASAP and make my site much better for the end user. Although the search engine guru’s may tell you meta tags are dead I will be using and have been using them on my sites. It only takes a few seconds to include them so why not include them.

Now this is also good news for people not creating spammy pages. Those spammy pages and sites will naturally disapear as webmasters improve their websites based on info found in the new Google webmasters tool section. I will be interested on reading up on this more. Do yourself a favor and log in to webmaster tools and look at your best site and then your worst site you will see why your worst site is ranking badly.

Come back and let me know what you found.

I bet you can find at least five things that your website should be doing or doing better. Odds are you have built a site and you are getting some traffic but things are not exactly how you thought they would go. Well lets take a look at five things that may help you get better results. Some are so simple it may surprise you that you haven’t thought of them on your own.

1) Does your site help the user solve a problem? This is either a yes or no. In this day and age the consumer is looking for an answer for their problem, if your product does that then explain it any way you can. This may be a video or a white paper or something of the sort. Give away the information so that the user remembers how helpful you were, they will end up telling people through word of mouth.

2) Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? Odds are you think you do but you could be wrong. You need to get some sort of analytics set up and see how a user is navigating through your site. You may not even know what your most popular pages are,or even what your worst pages are. You may be focusing on the wrong things and wasting time.You also need to know how people are finding your site. Get a neighbor to sit down in front of a computer and put them on your site and see how they navigate it, it will not be what you thought. get a pen and paper and tell them to give you the honest truth.

3) Do you have an email newsletter? Getting traffic is hard enough so once you get a customer you should try and make them a returning customer. This saves you the worry of trying to rank in search engines and also decreases your advertising cost as you already have that customer. A lifetime customer is the best investment you can make for your site.

4) Do you have a FAQ page? Whenever you get an email asking questions about your site or product make that question into a line on your FAQ page as it will be looked for again on your site. Your answer will help others find you and use your services. It will also end up being keyword rich content that will attract the search engines and get you good long tail keywords.

5) Do you have trust pages? Every website needs to develop trust with the potential customer. Your site needs a page for privacy policy, contact us, terms of use, disclaimer, and let the customer know what you are doing with their information and what they can expect from your site.

I bet if you are not doing these things your site is not doing what you want it to do.

Just had to delete someone from my Twitterstream as they decided to use sponsored tweets. As much as the next guy I like to monetize what I am doing but sponsored tweets will not be happening in my neck of the woods. Here is why.

By sponsoring tweets I feel that you are using your twitter stream as a way of making yourself look spammy. All you want to do is get my followers to see your sponsored tweet. I will not let that happen, my twitterstream is as important as my opt-in email newsletter list and I will not subject the people that follow me to think that you are someone I would think is follow worthy. (thanks Seinfeld)

Here is the real kicker when it comes to unfollowing you for having sponsored tweets. I will no longer buy any product you are pitching on your website, you have become a spammer in my mind. Not worth my time to see what you are up to since you violated the confidence that I had in you to follow smart people that I could actually learn from or have my twitter stream learn from.

There is also no way I would sign up for any newsletter that you run as how do I know you wouldn’t sell that list to someone, heck if you sold out your Twitter odds are you would sell your opt-in list also.

My Time Is Valuable

You are only on this planet for a little bit of time and if I have to look at your twitter sponsored tweets it is time I could be doing something else, like follow someone that will add to the conversation and not be running adds in my face and the people that follow me.

Most of the time I use my cell phone to receive text messages from people I follow. Not only does your tweet become useless as I cannot click on a link from a text message on my phone but you have wasted my time tweeting about some product odds are you don’t use in the first place.

So you are making pennies on your sponsored tweet but if you were ever to put out an actual product that I may be interested in telling my twitter follows about it is not going to happen. So is it really worth the peanuts you are going to make when you use a service like that.  I also like to spread the word about good people and their products if someone ask me for a referral odds are your name is not going to come up, odds are it isn’t going to come to my mind anyway as I am not following you any longer.

The big picture far outweighs any money you could make by running sponsored tweets. I have stopped following a few people I had respect for in the online world and I am sure some friends will be mad but they chose to make the choice to become an unfollow.