Million Dollar Portfolio

This is part 1 of several parts where I am going to discuss SEO strategies and how link campaigns can benefit or hinder a blog or website.

Part 1: Link Campaigns

A couple months ago this blog participated in a massive link campaign started by the Cows over at John Cow.com and I figured it would be a good time to check on the statistics generated by this campaign. But first, lets talk about some basics, mainly the components of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Are Link backs Important?

It’s generally agreed by most SEO experts and most successful bloggers that yes, link backs are important. Link backs, or in other words, sites that link back to your site either in posts or as permanent links help search engines decide how important your site is. Google’s PageRank tool relies not only on incoming links but also the quality of those incoming links. What are quality links? Quality links come from sites that aren’t full of junk links or created just to get someone to come to the site only to find out there’s nothing there worth looking at. Some people refer to this trick as “BlackHat SEO”. These sites typically use keywords that are a big buzz in the news or use big celebrity names just to draw traffic. Google is pretty good about catching this trick so I wouldn’t suggest doing it yourself.

Why is PageRank Important?

Google’s PageRank is probably the single most important factor when looking at your SEO campaign. You want to have higher PR sites than yours linking back to you. Higher PR means more credibility and likely more traffic. More traffic means more eyeballs and if those eyeballs are looking at your link, they may just come to your site as a result in which case your traffic then increases. The only problem with PageRank is you never know when Google is going to spider your site again and update the PR. This blog still has a PR of 0 even though it has quite a bit of traffic and a low Alexa ranking (considering how long the blog has been up…only 4 months).

Does Alexa Still Matter?

In a word, yes. Though this will be disputed among many SEO experts, the fact of the matter is there are affiliate programs such as Text-Link-Ads that still use Alexa, Technorati and PR as a means of figuring a blog or web site’s worth. Alexa rankings are determined by overall traffic and how many people are using the alexa toolbar that view your site with the toolbar active. A good link campaign can raise your Alexa rank very quickly. This blog for example jumped from just over 4 million to the current #927,452 ranked blog according to the Alexa Firefox plugin I have installed. The link campaign started July 19th. That being said, the Alexa rank probably doesn’t mean a whole heck of alot until you are under 10,000.

Technorati Authority

Technorati is another story altogether. Technorati relies on the freshness of one’s content but also on popularity. Much like Digg or Stumbleupon, the more people save your site as their favorites, the more popular your blog becomes, the higher your authority goes. That being said, currently the Technorati authority for this blog is 42 which if you compare to a site like TechCrunch (Authority 22,648) doesn’t even break the top 100 blogs…number 100 having an authority 3,852.

Putting it all together

Link campaigns are a great way to get a new blog on the map. You can start out like I did by participating in one, or if you already have a fair amount of traffic you can start your own and hope others follow suit. However, this is not the end-all-be-all of SEO or of building traffic. Content is still king. Even with the best SEO experts behind your site, if you aren’t writing quality content you can kiss your blog goodbye. It doesn’t mean every post has to be brilliant, but they should be well thought out and check for grammar and spelling. My biggest pet peeve is reading blog posts with spelling and grammar errors all over the place…it makes reading nearly unbearable.

So before you jump on the SEO wagon, make sure you are writing well. I don’t suggest doing any marketing until you have at least a couple dozen posts under your belt also. The more focused the posts, the better. Again, not every post is going to be detailed like this one but it should have the same passion and clarity as a longer post. Once you have some blogging experience you can embark on a good SEO campaign. Of course you could start out with SEO in mind and from the outset use an optimized theme made specifically for SEO. This includes using the right plugins and SEO beneficial layouts.

Overall, your efforts campaigning for SEO and traffic are going to help. It’s an ongoing process and as a blogger you have keep up with the changes in all of these techniques. Google is always changing their code and optimizing so you want to stay one step ahead of the game. Just remember, if you create it, they will come. Quality content is always going to trump the best SEO efforts.

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