I have been running an experiment using two different services and techniques on two different sites, obviously using different keywords. So in reality, I'm comparing apples and oranges. One set of keywords that I'm trying to rank for is considerably more difficult to rank on than the other - at least from my perspective.
With all of this in mind, it looks like there is a clear winner between my two options. I won't name them at this point because the results are not complete and it will be at least a month before I can say for certain if one was more helpful than the other. For now we'll just call them option A and B.
I saw option A not long ago and thought it was a quick and relatively cheap way to get links for my site. They would write an article and submit it to article directories. For every hundred directories submitted to, they would create a different copy of the article. One of the keyword terms I decided to use was free seo tips which is a fairly low competition term and should be relatively easy to rank on. In addition to ranking on the actual term, it included free seo and seo tips, both of which are bigger terms that I'd love to rank on.
The problem with option A is a matter of quality. If you submit the same thing to 100 different sites, they are lower quality sites. This is especially true since Google recently changed their algorithm to penalize sites that don't have much original content. In otherwords, the sites that they submit to aren't high quality.
The second problem with option A that I didn't know going in was their actual articles. Google isn't able to determine what is good writing and what isn't, so this isn't a big deal. I don't get penalized because the article looks like a student wrote it without spellcheck. However, the article that I was given looked like it had been through an article spinner. This isn't an issue in itself as spun articles aren't necessarily penalized in search engines and I already knew that I wasn't going to have my article on high quality sites that didn't accept spun content. My problem is that I was supposed to have an original article written for me. This seemed like it was a spun version of an article that has probably been sold to other people 100 times.
So those are my problems with option A. Because of the writing process, my articles were just submitted yesterday so I haven't received any rankings boost yet. Oh, and that is a third problem that I partially misunderstood and still don't understand. The site says that the duration for my 200 articles is 12 days. All 200 articles were posted on one day. I expected them to be distributed over a period of 12 days. After rereading the site, only orders of 500 and 1000 are submitted slowly, 100 per week. So I have no clue what the 12 day duration actually means. Either way, search engines may assume that you are spamming if 200 links to your site show up in one day.
Option B is a monthly service. It requires an original article for every submission and has a network of high quality sites. You can write your own articles or pay someone to write them for you. Basically, your routes are time consuming or money consuming but the end result is high quality links. During the first week I worked under a 15 day free trial period. This trial only allowed me to submit 10 links. I figured I would wait to see if I got decent results before plunging in with a monthly subscription.
What I can tell you is that at ten days in I went ahead and activated my monthly suscription because I had used my links and I was happy with my results. My only disappointment with option B so far has been the fact that it is too high quality. I had hoped to use an article spinner and pump out dozens of articles at a time and watch the links roll in. Because the service only wants original content, it does not accept my spun content. And it caught me on my test of this. I plan to try again but my hopes are not high. I will probably end up having to write all of my own articles or pay someone to do it for me. So much for generating 100 links a month. I'm now hoping for about ten a week because this is what is more realistic for my schedule.
For the moment at least, I will not be making any more purchases from option A. And even though option B has standards that are actually higher than I'd prefer, I've already seen good results. And in the end, that's all that matters.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
Trouble with Links
So...one of the most important things a webmaster can do for their site is to provide links to it. While those links will organically drive some traffic they are far more valuable in regard to search engines. Probably about 80% of my traffic on my established sites comes from search engines. So, you want links for two reasons.
Over ten years ago when I first started doing websites, quantity was king. You would try to get your site listed on as many directories as possible. Now, most of those directories are considered garbage and spam and some can even hurt your ranking.
Today, you want links from highly ranked sites. There are a couple of ways you can do this. The cheapest and most organic way to do this is to write articles and submit them to article directories. There are a huge number of quality article sites. I have a list that I may share some time but really you just need to search for article directory and you'll find what you want.
My trouble is that I want a lot of links and I want them quickly. I don't have the time to be creating websites and writing articles for these directories. This means that I have to pay for either someone to do this for me or for software that will speed the process up. I don't like paying for anything that I can do for free but in order for me to get the ranking that I want, I'll need to cough up some money in advance and hope that it pays off in the end.
So, I've made three investments. The first is pretty straightforward. I paid someone to write an article and post it on a bunch of directories. I provide the topic of the article and the keywords that I want used. The rest is not my responsibility. I'm using this service to promote my SEO site using the terms free SEO tips and learn SEO.
The downside to this approach is that the same article is used on multiple websites. Although they certainly don't mention it in their advertising, this means that the sites that they are posting to have lower page ranks. The better article directories require original content. So, basically I'm opting for quantity over quality to start.
My second experiment is to use another service. This one has a monthly subscription whereas the first was a one time deal. I can submit for up to 5 domains for one price and then it is tiered beyond that depending on how many sites you'll be promoting. So, I can create as many links as I want for one monthly fee.
The problem with this service is that it requires original content. The links back to my site are all high quality ones but I have to write a new article for each link. Or I can pay someone to write each article for me. That gets pricey though.
Ideally, I'd like post 100 links in a month. There isn't a science to this and some people speak of creating a lot more than this but I have a feeling that they are lower quality. I'm fine with 100 a month or about 3-4 a day. But this goes back to my original problem that I don't have time to write 3-4 original articles a day and if I did I wouldn't be paying a service for it.
So, enter my third purchase, an article spinner. In short, it takes an original article, randomly adds synonyms, and spits out a new article. Done right, it is a completely different article as far as search engines are concerns. The problem for me is that my submission service doesn't accept spun content. And that's not just the rule, I had my spun articles rejected on account of this.
So, here's my conundrum. I can pay for a high quantity of links with lower quality and basically no work. Or I can get higher quality links with considerably more work for me and a considerably few number. Or I can pay someone to write the articles for me which will run more money than I'm willing to pay at this point. I don't know what the best option is at this point. What I do know is that I've made a total of about $6 off my web experiments so far and I will have about $190 invested in the three things I bought if I carry my subscription past the trial period. Not a good return on my investment but I have to believe that it will eventually pay off.
Over ten years ago when I first started doing websites, quantity was king. You would try to get your site listed on as many directories as possible. Now, most of those directories are considered garbage and spam and some can even hurt your ranking.
Today, you want links from highly ranked sites. There are a couple of ways you can do this. The cheapest and most organic way to do this is to write articles and submit them to article directories. There are a huge number of quality article sites. I have a list that I may share some time but really you just need to search for article directory and you'll find what you want.
My trouble is that I want a lot of links and I want them quickly. I don't have the time to be creating websites and writing articles for these directories. This means that I have to pay for either someone to do this for me or for software that will speed the process up. I don't like paying for anything that I can do for free but in order for me to get the ranking that I want, I'll need to cough up some money in advance and hope that it pays off in the end.
So, I've made three investments. The first is pretty straightforward. I paid someone to write an article and post it on a bunch of directories. I provide the topic of the article and the keywords that I want used. The rest is not my responsibility. I'm using this service to promote my SEO site using the terms free SEO tips and learn SEO.
The downside to this approach is that the same article is used on multiple websites. Although they certainly don't mention it in their advertising, this means that the sites that they are posting to have lower page ranks. The better article directories require original content. So, basically I'm opting for quantity over quality to start.
My second experiment is to use another service. This one has a monthly subscription whereas the first was a one time deal. I can submit for up to 5 domains for one price and then it is tiered beyond that depending on how many sites you'll be promoting. So, I can create as many links as I want for one monthly fee.
The problem with this service is that it requires original content. The links back to my site are all high quality ones but I have to write a new article for each link. Or I can pay someone to write each article for me. That gets pricey though.
Ideally, I'd like post 100 links in a month. There isn't a science to this and some people speak of creating a lot more than this but I have a feeling that they are lower quality. I'm fine with 100 a month or about 3-4 a day. But this goes back to my original problem that I don't have time to write 3-4 original articles a day and if I did I wouldn't be paying a service for it.
So, enter my third purchase, an article spinner. In short, it takes an original article, randomly adds synonyms, and spits out a new article. Done right, it is a completely different article as far as search engines are concerns. The problem for me is that my submission service doesn't accept spun content. And that's not just the rule, I had my spun articles rejected on account of this.
So, here's my conundrum. I can pay for a high quantity of links with lower quality and basically no work. Or I can get higher quality links with considerably more work for me and a considerably few number. Or I can pay someone to write the articles for me which will run more money than I'm willing to pay at this point. I don't know what the best option is at this point. What I do know is that I've made a total of about $6 off my web experiments so far and I will have about $190 invested in the three things I bought if I carry my subscription past the trial period. Not a good return on my investment but I have to believe that it will eventually pay off.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Thermal Imaging
As I've mentioned before, we're on to a new project now. We're approaching this one a bit differently than last time. Before we had one guy posting all of the products while we each came up with articles to link back to the products. This has changed for two reasons.
The first is that the guy who posted the products was doing double duty because he was also writing promotional articles. This hardly seemed fair so we designated that he, or whoever was doing site work for the week, would not have to promote. The other reason we changed was the simple fact that there are a lot more products to promote than with lockpicking.
So what we decided was that we would each have an area to promote within thermal imaging. We'd do cameras, scanners, goggles, etc. I ended up posted thermal imaging scanners. In another "learn as you go" moments we discovered/decided that scanners are pretty much the same as cameras but different people call them differently. So, even though they are the same product, it doesn't hurt to promote them as both scanners and cameras.
Week 2 will be more promotion of the site, presumably. There is a possibility that we will want to add more products to the mix before we start promoting. I'm definitely interested to see how we do once we start picking up traffic.
The first is that the guy who posted the products was doing double duty because he was also writing promotional articles. This hardly seemed fair so we designated that he, or whoever was doing site work for the week, would not have to promote. The other reason we changed was the simple fact that there are a lot more products to promote than with lockpicking.
So what we decided was that we would each have an area to promote within thermal imaging. We'd do cameras, scanners, goggles, etc. I ended up posted thermal imaging scanners. In another "learn as you go" moments we discovered/decided that scanners are pretty much the same as cameras but different people call them differently. So, even though they are the same product, it doesn't hurt to promote them as both scanners and cameras.
Week 2 will be more promotion of the site, presumably. There is a possibility that we will want to add more products to the mix before we start promoting. I'm definitely interested to see how we do once we start picking up traffic.
Friday, April 1, 2011
SEO Tips
I have used this blog as the story of my personal journey into launching new websites with a group of other guys. This contains our successes as well as failures. And as riveting as that may be, you may be more interested in how we're actually doing the things that we're doing. Well, wonder no more!
I've launched a new site: Free DIY SEO Tips that explains the ins and outs of not only launching a website but getting a good search engine ranking. Why do I do this? Because I like talking about myself! Honestly, it's another experiment in SEO tactics. Hopefully I pull a meager profit from my articles with the help of Google Adsense but otherwise it's just for the experience.
Of course you may wonder why I'm giving away all of my secrets. The truth is that there are no "secrets." All of the sites that claim to have discovered the secret are full of it. I'm simply passing along what I've discovered works. And I'm not worryied about you using my SEO techniques to beat me at my own game. Frankly there are millions of opportunities out there and you're probably not going to stumble into one of mine.
So that's it. If you're interested in launching a better website, head on over to mine and learn from my experiments.
I've launched a new site: Free DIY SEO Tips that explains the ins and outs of not only launching a website but getting a good search engine ranking. Why do I do this? Because I like talking about myself! Honestly, it's another experiment in SEO tactics. Hopefully I pull a meager profit from my articles with the help of Google Adsense but otherwise it's just for the experience.
Of course you may wonder why I'm giving away all of my secrets. The truth is that there are no "secrets." All of the sites that claim to have discovered the secret are full of it. I'm simply passing along what I've discovered works. And I'm not worryied about you using my SEO techniques to beat me at my own game. Frankly there are millions of opportunities out there and you're probably not going to stumble into one of mine.
So that's it. If you're interested in launching a better website, head on over to mine and learn from my experiments.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)