Optimising and performing SEO from Cornwall

When you have every social media marketing blog loaded in your RSS reader, you soon come to identify a problem within the space. The problem is the term Linkbait, it is overused, misused and stretched to cover almost all content ever published on the web.

Different definitions of linkbait I have heard:

• A top ten list
• Anything that is submitted to digg
• Anything I create
• Any strong opinion
• Anything Shoemoneysays
• Anything Jason Calacanis says
• Anything Michael Gray says

[Read more…]

How much time do you spend working on your Web 2.0-cross voting network? Don’t get me wrong, a network is vital, the right network can propel you into social media marketing heaven. But, there comes a point where watching your story rise on digg and constantly plundering your IM contacts becomes notworking, not networking.

You become so desperate you ping the weird stalker you hoped would go away, but you are so desperate to squeeze those extra votes out of the tube you are willing to dance with the devil.

The law of diminishing return kicks in at some point, where you would get more out of working on your content than doing the ping-tango with your IM crowd. [Read more…]

In my comments from digg is Not Social Media Marketing someone asked me, what is a linkerati?

In my arrogance and blinkered vision I expected everyone to know who the linkerati are. But not everyone spends most of their waking day immersed in the murky world of getting eyeballs to websites. Obviously I have to as I am a blogger whose goal is to teach and coach my readers to social media marketing nirvana.

But not everyone knows the jargon and as this is a pretty new industry there are a lot of fresh new faces. So lets get down to basics. [Read more…]

A recent IM chat session went like this,

“btw, digg is broken. i didnt get front with like 215 diggs, 107 comments”

It’s a shame isn’t it. is the party really over?

But what’s that I hear?

Music?

You mean the party is still going?

Digg used to be so easy to get to the front page, easy in the sense of after studying it for a year and spending more time devoted to it than trying to figure out what “Lost” is all about.

But it looks like those easy days by the pool are over. [Read more…]

OK, something has been bothering me.

When a piece of web content, be it a blog post, a picture, a pdf, gets called linkbait simply because it gets a bunch of links.

Is the term “linkbait” overused?

Yes.

But why is it important, I mean, who cares? [Read more…]

When should you not have a digg button on your blog?

Definitely when you are an seo blog of top UK seo company, as witnessed here. Actually I have heard a lot of good things about Fresh Egg, but they write a painfully boring blog. If you ever find you can’t sleep at night, head over there and you will be stacking zeds in no time.

OK, so after ruining my chances of working with them or ever getting a link from them, back to the point. [Read more…]

I stumbled across a post about two Internet marketing blogs at IttyBiz regarding two bloggers who live at doshdosh, Maki and Entrepreneurs Journey, Yaro.

I’m not going into what the post said, merely pointing it out as the kick start to this post.

Two blogs, both quite different in style, some shared objectives and some different objectives. But both are successful. Yaro has a subscription-only-see-it-if-you-pay forum/blog where he teaches how to blog. Maki on the other hand has a few adverts to pay the bills and a few other sites dotted around the place. [Read more…]

So my site was hacked and Google supported me by blocking my blog from their search engine. Which I totally understand, searchers must be protected. But why make the process of trying to get back so long and painful and with zero feedback. I guess the answer to that is, “because we can.”

I don’t jive to the “google is evil”, mambo, in fact you should never jive to a mambo, but anyway…. I know it’s fashionable to rant about google in the SEO industry. I never have, unless you are trying to attract fellow moaners to your blog, what’s the point?

But, I have had two weeks without Google traffic, and you know what? I hardly noticed. Sure, it pulls in a few hundred people a day, but most of those are tire kickers. I don’t do advertising, the blog is purely set up as a lead generator, to feed leads into my linkbait creation machine. Clients tend to come to the site and read, bookmark, come back, read some more and then slap a big wadge of bills on the table and get me to come up with some cool linkbait.

Most clients tend to have found me through Sphinn, or through many of the other blogs which link to me. If you have become a regular reader of this blog and did come through google then let me know.

Of course if I had a site loaded with m-adsense, then targeted google traffic would be what I want. Whilst I would never suggest to block all your google traffic, it is quite liberating. I could now sell links till the cows come home, the pages still have page rank for what it’s worth.

I know Andy Beard and Michael Gray have railed against google in the past. Come on guys, come in, the water’s lovely. Block that big bad google and rejoice.

But know one thing, as soon as google decides I am no longer infected, I will be back in the warm, moist bosom of the beast from Mountain View, CA.