MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

Earlier today Mike Arrington announced that TechCrunch is acquiring F**kedCompany. While it’s pretty obvious now from reading all the comments that this is in fact an April Fool’s Day joke it sure did fool quite a few people at first.

What’s great about this joke is the amount of buzz its created. In the couple hours since the joke was posted the links have been rolling in. I’m sure Mike’s intention was probably not for the links and rather the buzz (plus a few good laughs) that has been generated.

Although most of us don’t have the audience or brand to create this much noise, it goes to show that if you have a clever April Fool’s Day joke you can create a lot of buzz and get some extra links.

What clever hoax will think up this April Fool’s Day?   

Are you trying the increase the popularity of your blog, but you have already tried all of the conventional methods? MyBlogLog is a great service that you can use to increase your traffic.

Here’s how in 3 simple steps:

1. Create a profile that contains your information as well as your blog’s information. You want to be as detailed as possible and make sure you fill in your contact information because you want to welcome an open channel for communication.
2. Next, you want to search MyBlogLog for competitor blogs or other blogs that may have your ideal reader base. Once you find a good amount of them create a list for your own record.
3. Once you have a list of blogs that may contain your ideal readers then you want friend MyBlogLog users that are subscribed to those blogs and could also potentially benefit from your blog. The key to this is not the spam those users, but instead just friend them because a good portion of them will friend you back and visit your blog which should increase your traffic and readership.

Leveraging social communities can be an easy and effective way to increase your traffic and readership. Just be careful when leveraging them because the last thing you want is for people to accuse you of spamming.

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has been doing a SEO site clinic which has been helping website owners increase their traffic, rankings and links. Because of this I decided to do a short interview with him:

What is Search Engine Journal’s benefit from doing a SEO site clinic?

Search Engine Journal benefits by helping the SEO community and companies which are starting their initial SEO by total transparency. We are working together, with our co-authors and guest contributors as a team to offer SEO advice to not only the sites which we have accepted into the SEO Clinic project but also the readers of our column who are working on their SEO. For example, when doing an SEO Clinic for a WordPress powered blog, our goal is that numerous WordPress bloggers will benefit from our SEO recommendations.

Our Resident SEO Pimps benefit via expanded recognition of their expertise and services to the SEO community. I think that it would be easy to charge anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 in consulting fees for such SEO oriented information and recommendation, but our ultimate mission is to help smaller sites and charities which cannot afford such SEO consultancy fees. In essence, such transparency should benefit the SEO and search marketing community as a whole.

How popular are your SEO clinics? Are they heavily linked to?

These posts have become quite popular throughout the SEO industry and the searchosphere. Many blogs and informational sites have linked to our SEO Clinic pieces, and our hope is that for each Clinic we provide, more sites which fall into the categories of our Clinic "patients" and link to the recommendations.

Do you have any recommendations for bloggers or website owners who looking to increase their links?

In each SEO Clinic, to date, we have discussed ideas for sites, such as TechSmith.com and BigOceans.com to attract links. In essence, the SEO Clinic will attract links to our patients from SEO blogs which cover the free SEO Clinic advice, but in each clinic we provide recommendations to improve links via building relationships with blogs in the niche categories our patients appeal to, and via social media marketing via Digg.com, StumbleUpon and other major traffic and inherent link building avenues.

Ranking a new site for competitive terms is next to impossible. Yes, it can be done in rare cases but most of the time it’s just not likely. Aside from the stiff competition that’s already years ahead of you in terms of links and content, you have to deal with the sandbox, among other things. About the only ways to rank for these types of terms, I can think of are if you have bottomless pockets or if you solve a major pain (like a cure for cancer).

Don’t let that discourage you though. I have a solution that could possibly work for you. Create a new profile page on an established social media site and optimize it.

The bigger social media sites already have the built up trust and authority with the search engines. So while you’re waiting for your "real site" to start ranking create a profile with branded content and optimize that to rank for a couple of those competitive keywords.

Think about how often you see MySpace, YouTube, and Technorati pages ranking on the first page of the SERPs. Combine that with a nice link building campaign for the pages you create and it’s now looking realistic for you to take one of those top 10 spots.

Keep in mind that this is a technique to be used more for the purpose of targeting a few key phrases and it’s not very effective for going after long tail traffic.

We all know that optimizing your website for search engines is a great way to increase your search traffic, but how many people actually try to go after the long tail? It may sound dumb but going after those often forgotten, highly targeted keywords can increase your search traffic by leaps and bounds. Here
are some things you can do to increase your search traffic for long tail keywords:

• Paint a picture - be as descriptive as possible (within reason) when writing your content. This could be through the use of more descriptive titles or just being more descriptive through the main content on your website. When doing this don’t forget about visitors because if this tactic will hurt their experience you should think twice about it.
• Efficiency is the key to success - you don’t want to try and figure out long tail keywords manually because this could take forever. A great way to find long tail keywords is to use analytics packages such as HitTail. One of the great things about HitTail is that it is free.
• Spy - have you ever noticed that tons of sites that use Sitemeter? The great thing about Sitemeter is that you can publicly see what keywords your competition receives traffic for. Spy on your competition and start going after the long tail terms that drives them traffic.

There are many ways to increase your search traffic by going after long tail keywords. Have you tried
going after long tail keywords yet?

There has been a lot of buzz around the word "mashup" lately. In case you’re unfamiliar with the word, Wikipedia defines it as a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. An example of a common use would be a local, region based website that combines Google Maps with local business reviews.

Mashups are a great way to improve the usability of your website because you’re ideally offering something of value to your users. But mashups are also great for link building because the good ones are highly viral.

Mashups aren’t limited to websites and don’t always require programming either. A couple of weeks ago someone mashed up Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial into a Barack Obama ad.

The video has spread like a wildfire. It has been viewed over four million times, featured on every news station in the country, and has managed to collect thousands of inbound links. Not bad for a mashup that someone created on a Sunday afternoon.

Statcounter.com is one of the most successful sites on the web when it comes to links. If you look at what they have done, they have built millions of links because of their free product.

If you look at the image above, it shows that they have well over 2 million backward links. The main reason they have this many links is because everyone using their service links to them through a noscript:

<noscript><a href="http://www.statcounter.com/" target="_blank"><img  src="http://c7.statcounter.com/counter.php?sc_project=743506&java=0&security=4bbd17e6&invisible=1" alt="invisible hit counter" border="0"></a></noscript>

What other free services do you know of that have been very effective at building links?

During Elite Retreat Aaron Wall from SEO Book showed me how he used his Firefox SEO plugin. The tool is very useful and can help you to improve your rankings.

Here are the advantages of using the tool:

1. You can easily see who links to your competitors and you can then ask those sites for links.
2. Different type of links may carry different weight. The tool lets you see if your competition has any directory, government or educational links.
3. It can be a pain to find out how old your competitor’s domain is, but with the tool you can find out with ease.
4. I personally don’t use the Google toolbar which usually means I don’t know the PageRank of my site or my competitors. I can now easily see a site’s PageRank with ease.
5. I try to get my supplemental results to 0. A lot of times things like duplicate content cause an increase in supplemental results so with the toolbar you can find out this information and fix it.

Rand Fishkin has been authoring a nice series this week on link building related topics. In the latest article, Every Site is Linkbait & Linkerati Worthy, Rand talks about how any site, no matter how boring, can attract natural links.

So how do you do it? Here are the six steps that he covers in the article.

1. Know your linkerati
2. Broaden your reach
3. Brainstorm content ideas
4. Create a site architecture that allows for inclusion of your content
5. Build a phenomenal site
6. Launch & promote

If you have a WordPress blog you need to read this Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress by Jim Westergren. Jim breaks down step-by-step instructions for everything from optimizing the code to getting links to crafting good posts and increasing user interaction.