Sense of Adsense: April 2010

Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors April 2010

Posted: 30 Apr 2010 08:00 AM PDT

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.

Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!

Brick Marketing – Sign up for the SEO Newsletter

Directory Journal – Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.

Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for Wordpress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review.

Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors April 2010

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Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket

Posted: 29 Apr 2010 07:12 AM PDT

While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others. I see this happening withTwitter to a certain extent and now, with increasing frequency, with Facebook.

Facebook should be a tool in your marketing toolbox … just not the only tool.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with websites like Twitter or Facebook–as long they are part of an overall strategy. However, when Facebook represents all of your marketing activity, you are taking a huge risk. I’ve seen this done with small brands, but I think that, by picking a well-known, national brand, I can drive the point home much more effectively. Let’s take a look at the website for Vitamin Water at VitaminWater.com.

At the time this post was written, VitaminWater.com 301 redirects to a Facebook page for Vitamin Water. I’m all for trying new things, thinking out of the box, and experimenting. After all, I was one of the few people who liked the skittles redirect stunt. But it was temporary. When you redirect your website to a twitter page, facebook page, wikipedia page or any other page not under your absolute complete control, you are no longer your own master. A lot of web 2.0 companies have a spotty track record and have been known to make some really bad decisions in the past, and I’d put Facebook near the top of the bad decision makers list. Anyone remember the beacon fiasco, holocaust denial incident, or recent privacy kerfufle? When you put all your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket you put the fate of your company under the guidance, regulations, and terms of service of a company that has shown increasingly poor decision making with alarming regularity.

Let’s be clear: Facebook wants to rule the web. If you don’t think the deactivation of several high profile Google engineers facebook accounts wasn’t a warning shot across the bow, you really need to open your eyes. Facebook and Google will be at war for the web very soon, and you don’t want to be collateral damage in that war.

Facebook should be a tool in your marketing toolbox … just not the only tool.

Facebook and Google will be at war for the web very soon, and you don’t want to be collateral damage in that war.

In the coming year, expect Facebook to make a concerted effort to bring business onto Facebook. In fact I would expect them to do everything they could to incentivize people to make Facebook their main or only web presence. If I was Facebook, I’d have a team of developers and programmers working on making Facebook pages easier for less technical people to use and update. Don’t fall for the trap.

If you are looking for information on how to get more out of Facebook, check out this presentation from Brian Carter at Pubcon 2010. It’s really good.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket

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Latest From Blogigs

The Wordpress Blogging Process

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 09:46 PM PDT

If ever there is a person whom you should learn about WordPress and blogging from, this person has to be Lorelle. A die-hard Wordpress and blog lover, Lorelle blogs from the free Wordpress platform through her blog, aptly titled, Lorelle on WordPress. Some might question her doing so, but by doing and keeping on doing so exhibits her genuine love for this blogging platform in the purest form.

Lorelle is also the author of the book, Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging. Check it out when publications resumes.

For those who wants to start a Wordpress blog or improve on their blog, make a one minute date with Lorelle as she takes you through the process creating a good and well planned blog with her one minute per video series. It will be minutes well spent. And Lorelle does have a sweet and pleasant voice which is a pleasure to the ears.

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cPanel Webhosting – Introduction To The cPanel

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 10:49 PM PDT

The first thing you come face to face with when you host your own site is the cPanel. In this video series which runs into 12 parts, we shall look at how different parts of the cPanel works. If fully utilized, the cPanel is a very powerful tool for those hosting their own sites or blogs.

This first video introduces what will be discussed in the following 11 videos. Subscribe to this blog to keep updated so as not to miss out on the following videos.

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Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

No More Link Begging: 4 Engagement Methods for Content-Based Link Building

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 09:00 AM PDT

Link begging is the practice of identifying link prospects, usually through competitor backlink analysis, and then contacting each one of those sites and begging for a link. Link begging typically ignores the original context of the link, as well as the probable motivation of the linker. Not only that, it’s potentially destructive to an organization’s industry relationships and the link builder’s will to live.

Engaging the experts and bloggers in your space can lead to far greater returns on your time and effort. Engagement will also make you happier – it emphasizes community, participation and recognizing the good work of others. Here are four content models and outreach suggestions for engagement-based link building.

These are listed in a rough order of progression that should help to grow your publisher relationships.

1) Aggregate and Curate Great Content
What are the best blog posts, articles, PDFs, Videos, discussion threads, twitter feeds, conferences, news sites and social networking sites in your niche? Research ALL the resources in your space and then organize them into meaningful categories. Focus on the categories that contain people you’d like to engage with in the group interview phase.

Simply listing the resources is not ideal, though it’s certainly far easier. It’s better to spend some time thinking about how to best present your resource aggregation in a way that makes it easier for your readers to make decisions about what links to click on. Here’s an excellent example: Link Building Master Class

Once you’ve created your resource aggregation – ideally with 100+ resources from 100+ different sources – email these folks and let them know that they were mentioned in your round up. Ask them, if they think it’s worthy, to share it with their audience.

Most importantly, while mentioning the resource, ask them if they want to participate in your group interview…

2) The Group Interview
The group interview can be a powerful way to build links, reciprocity and high-value content. As noted above, we recommend that you request that people answer group interview questions AS you outreach to let them know that you included their resource in your roundup. This warms them up and increases the likelihood that they will link to your resource. Further it indicates that you genuinely believe they add value to the space.

Once you start to get some affirmative responses begin to work on your questions. Generate your interview questions by reviewing previous expert interviews in your space. Aggregate questions and look for angles that haven’t been touched on before. You could also hit controversial topics, or get reactions to some of the latest news. Our recommendation is to keep your questions to about about 5 or so.

Here is an example of a group interview we did recently, and here is one we admire that takes the group interview to a whole new level. If you have design resources available we highly recommend the second course.

Once you have completed and published your work, reach out to the participants to let them know their interview is live. It’s a good idea to ask them to mention it to their readers and Twitter followers as well, though this is not always necessary

3) Solo Interviews
Solo interviews work best – in terms of link generation – when they’re interviews with notable experts in your industry. Another way to generate a list of solo interview subjects is to crack open your analytics and see which of your experts drove the most traffic to your site through their promotion efforts. Which of your experts’ tweets about the group interview got retweeted the most? Which experts linked directly from their blogs?

These folks would all make excellent candidates for follow up solo interviews. Make sure that you’re asking new questions that probe into genuine areas of passion for your experts. Treat these solo interview questions with the utmost concern and attention to the subject’s background and history. Learn as much as you can about each specific subject and use what you learn to guide your line of questioning.

Outreach for solo interviews is a little less intensive. You should primarily let the subject know the interview is up. If this subject has been interviewed before, consider making a list of the sites that link directly to these interviews and letting folks there know there’s a new interview up. You could also comment the previous interviews, as a further interview is highly-relevant.

4) Create Interesting “Writing Assignments”
In creating a writing assignment or prompt for your space you first come up with an intriguing concept or question – perhaps one left over from your interview questions. Then you answer this question yourself and implore your readers to do the same. The goal is to make it something that others would genuinely have the urge to write about in their next blogging session.

Another along the writing assignment lines is to just send the question to a number of folks and ask them to answer it on their blog. This “distributed group interview” can often result in links when the authors mention who prompted them to write in the first place. Consider aggregating their answers on your blog, and even highlighting the best paragraphs from each person.

In closing, don’t put yourself through the agony of link begging. Get creative, get engaging and use your questions to generate links, relationships and targeted traffic to your website.

Garrett French is the co-founder of Ontolo, Inc., and co-creator of the Ontolo Link Building Toolset, which uses your target keywords to find and grade link prospects. The Link Building Toolset reduces link prospecting and qualification time, letting you focus on the most important part of link building: relationships.

Advertisement: Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services #1

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

No More Link Begging: 4 Engagement Methods for Content-Based Link Building