I'd like to ask if I am missing something simple, and what people think of my efforts so far. This is for a very normal/legit business. It is not another site for trying to make money online. We run a computer repair business. First up I started following this site about a month ago (right when it became part of my job to get traffic to our site.) I learned a lot and got to work. So here is what I have done so far or am currently doing. 1. I got a directory submission to 2000 directories in the beginning. 2. I added a blog to our site. It gets new posts daily, between 1 and 3. 3. I put up a newsletter system using Vertical Response on our website and have already put out our first newsletter to our new list. 4. Another employee and me have been writing content for the blog and for articles daily. 5. I got accounts on most article sites and got Article Post Robot. 6. The content has been hand written for inclusion in goarticles and ezinearticles. Once in there it is being spun and put out to all the others via Article Post Robot. I am using Content Boss to get the good spinner syntax. Then editing the crap out of that to get really good spinner syntax for APR to use. 7. I got article slingshot from here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1517332 . It is working great, really nice tool. 8. I got an account with transworldnews.com for putting out press releases. We are averaging 3 a week. It is actually accounting for 41% of our traffic right now, they are working really well. 9. I am using Google Analytics, Woopra, and Quantcast to track and analyze our traffic. 10. I added the All-In-One SEO Pack, WP KeywordLink, Sociable, YARPP, and XML-Sitemap plugins to the wordpress blog. 11. The main website now has all our keywords actually used on it. But the keywords meta tags are not over-stuffed. 12. Created a Facebook page, LinkedIn group, and a Twitter account for the company. Update them we we have new blog posts. 13. Using http://pingomatic.com to ping everything when stuff changes. 14. Got SocialSubmitter and have it submitting every time we have a new blog post or press release to all the social bookmarking sites. All of this means we are writing about 17 new articles/posts/press releases a week. It is becoming time consuming, and it is actually pretty hard to come up with enough topics. Backlinks to the website when I started were 8. Last week it was at 287. A few days ago 662, and now its at 1450 in google webmaster tools. So I can see it working. One of the things that I think might be missing is a blog comment and forum posting campaign. Would getting some of our employees to spend spare time posting on forums and posting blog comments with our links in their signatures and their profiles really help? I could have 2 or 3 people randomly posting on forums they like during the day if I wanted to. Is it actually worth anything? I think that pretty much covers it. I know that is a lot. But I feel like I am still missing way more.
I think you post too much to this blog.Google love fresh content ... yahoo even more but it is sure thing that you need no more that 2-3 posts a week. You could make some useful blog comments instead of writing articles and get some great articles.
I think you are doing just fine. Having daily fresh content is more than just for the spiders to slurp up every couple days. Ideally you will want actual humans to come back to your site daily due to interesting, engaging and informative content. Keep doing what you are doing for a while, this business takes time and giant sites aren't born over night.
I have noticed that 3 weeks ago we had zero comments coming to the blog. Then about 2 weeks ago we had 1 or 2 a week. Very slow. Last week we had about 1 a day that wasnt spam. So I can see it building because we are posting decent content I think.
wow I think you said it all .. you are seeing the results go have a drink and be confident ! You are doing better then a lot and at least you have some help
find some high PR auto approved blog pages and post around 200 post distributing amount one month. Protect them at least next pr update. you will get unbeliable result. be careful with link farms. Big G will catch you.
It sounds like you're doing a great job of staying on top of your game in terms of getting the backlinks to your site. Nice work. I would only suggest you're careful with your anchor text that you're using for your (many) article submissions. A while back we used an article generator to bust out a ton of articles for a certain site, but we didn't vary our anchor text enough for the articles. As a result Google slapped us pretty hard and our traffic went from close to 2,000 visits a day to about 500. Ouch. So just make sure to vary your anchor text on those automated article generators.
You need to think out of the box a little. What is the theme of the site and the blog? Do you have skills and knowledge you can give to others. Find good blogs and sites in your niche and build realtionships with them. Tell them how much you like their content and take on things. Link to them, write a blog post about their site or blog - you will start to get link love back. If you have real authority offer to write a guest blog post for them. Get them to write one for you. Research, research, research. Check the back link profiles of sites that are ranking well for your keywords. Use social mention to see where your topics are being talked about...all good so far but keep at it.
Thanks for pointing me at Social Mention. I had not actually seen that tool yet. Great tool. Guest blog posts, sounds interesting. I am gonna go hunt down some people who might let me do that. Im decent friends with a lot of people in the industry.
Pretty sure you are way beyond most others. Nice work. Very detailed. Where did you get your directory list, 2000 is pretty good. I like how you are doing everything.. So how many articles are you sending out a day or week, after spinning. Are you spinning every article or are some just going out to multiple submission sites as is. I assume in a month or two, if you keep that up your own content will start getting ranked high in the serps. So it is good to keep adding a lot of content to your site, not to just keep getting crawled but eventually your sites authority will go up and your own stuff will hit in the engines. The more you have the more keywords and long tail stuff will start getting hits directly to your site instead of your articles and press releases flowing to your site. Yes, do some forum posting and blog commenting but I would just cut back a little on the other stuff and mix them in instead of pulling other empoyees efforts from their normal job. Unless you just have that kind of money, then go for it. You are doing way more than enough yet not doing too much to get penalized because you have so much variation. Besides that, the only thing I could think of, (and its not necessary) would be create a couple other similar but different targeted main keyword sites, get them some authority and use them to target your main site even more to boost its rankings or authority even more. Sounds like you have the resources to do that if you wanted. Awesome post
That's an awesome guide. I think I should be doing something like that. I'm looking forward to hearing about your results.
Think this is a great guide to follow..I have already started working through the list and implementing some of your ideas. Keep us updated on results!
Greggh - What you are doing looks very good in my opinion. I think you could stand to reduce your content/article output somewhat though and focus on other areas of your business without affecting your search engine performance, especially if you are struggling for new ideas! I was also wondering - what is the quality of your 'spun' articles like? As a copywriter I oject to spinning articles as I genuinely want to provide informative and fresh content. I would personally rather research and submit a new article rather than rearrange and swap out content on an existing article, as you would in the 'offline' work. From a search engine point of view though it is a very effective method as you can only get your 'unspun' articles on a few sites - Google's duplicate content filter drops the rest from their main index. How are you ranking for your main keywords btw?
I am putting out 3-4 articles a week right now. And I agree, if I start doing more of the forum/blog posting then we would probably cut down the number of articles. To spread the load better.
Thanks. I was hoping that it would help some others get started to. I think I spent way to much time digging through these forums. Hours a day. Then reading various ebooks people linked to.
Right now I am moving up really quickly on my main keywords. I am nearing page one on a few of them (3 on page 2), and have broken past page 4 on the others. As for the spun content. It's actually pretty good. Content Boss's wrangler technology is pretty good. And their autojetspinner tool uses it to generate the spinner syntax. Its not perfect. I have to take the output and then run it a few times through their free spinner to see the results. Then go through and edit the spinner syntax. But from the ones I have already done I can tell you it saved me 10x the time doing it that way. Gives me a great head start. And since I test the syntax and its output, and retest, and test again it comes out really good. I make sure that every variation is perfectly human readable and sounds like a native english speaker wrote it. And so far they are coming out pretty nice.
I dont seem to have an edit button to update the original post in the thread. So I will just put the update here: Keeping up the pace since last thursday I have put out more articles(5), blog posts(8), and press releases(3). The backlinks to the site continue to grow, up from 1450 when I started the thread last week, to 2239 now. I added another two article services to the mix. So now alongside Article Slingshot and using Article Post Robot I have added in iSnare and Article Ranks. I got both of them going a couple days ago so I doubt I am seeing anything from them yet. But I will report back on how much better (hopefully) it is next week. The main website has gone up from a PR 2 to PR 4, and the blog has now gone up from no pagerank to a PR 2. Once I go a couple more weeks with all of this in place and I feel really comfortable with the flow I will start to add in more. I was thinking about coming up with a specific daily schedule. A nice seven day schedule of exactly what needs to be accomplished on that day for this project. Once I have the load spread out properly across the week I can work on a blog commenting campaign and also add forum posting to the list of daily activities. The things that I have yet to start on but know I should are: squidoo lens, hubpages, blog commenting, forum posting, promoting and using the facebook fan page, utilizing the linkedin group (and paying more attention to the groups I have joined,) more updates to twitter than 1 a day, setup a Fast Pitch! account, lengthier/expanded copy written for the main web page (the current pages are 1 or 2 paragraphs at most,) talk to similar blogs or just blogs from my industry about guest posting (in both directions,) and I am sure a lot more. Those are just whats on the list I know I need to get to soon. I am learning quickly that to have an all inclusive online web presence and generate the amount of backlinks and buzz needed is a full time job. I still of course have a full time job here that I am supposed to be doing, but I am finding ways to fit all this in during the day.
Pretty good. Is some of your backlinking include some web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo and HubPages?