20130327

Backlinking Thus Far

The Wheel


I have followed the collective recommendation of the SEO experts, and created the inner layer of the link wheel. Some call it the 'anchor' layer, while others picture it more as a shield layer. Whatever it is called, it consists of the privileged few sites that get to link directly to your page. Today, I set up the following:

Wordpress.com
Tumblr
GoArticles
InfoBarrel
Blogspot

Info Barrel
But, not without difficulty! First, my own dumb mistake... I hit submit on the Info Barrel article (an original article, not spun) before I had put in any links. At first, I was frustrated with this, however, considering that Info Barrel is trying to discourage using their site for internet marketing links, maybe it is a good thing. I want to use Info Barrel to generate some extra income, so I will leave it unlinked. I'll need to replace this spoke in the wheel!

Tumblr
Second problem... apparently Google hates Tumblr?? And Tumblr, although home to seemingly thousands of naked pictures of people, believes itself too good to serve as a place for backlinks? Oh well... I placed a poorly spun article there, and added some humorous commentary to make swallowing it easier. I just have to keep reminding myself, that its only for the link, and will never be seen by an actual human.

GoArticles
I placed exactly two links in my GoArticle article. When it was published, they were not there. I'll need to give GoArticles a redo. BTW: unimpressed with the interface there.

Wordpress.com
The Wordpress.com blog worked well, and gave me immediate pingbacks. I iwasnt even sure that those worked! So, that was the bright spot.

Blogspot
I didnt make another blogspot blog. I already have this one, and it has the correct link in its archives. These will not show up till the blog reaches a certain age. Annoying.

So, there we go... just need to let that sit a bit, then I'll work on adding the next layer. I'd like to try to add it by hand, but we will see.

Spinny Crap
I spun five articles using both the Best Free Spinner and SpinnerChief. I would have to say that it would have been easier and quicker for me (YMMV) to just write a new article off the top of my head than do all that. And after an hour of work, the results were bizarre. You know, for many years I have thought that pages with peculiar verbiage were posted by foreigners who have either never mastered English, or learned it someplace where the vocabulary is just off by a small bit. You know... the sites with the weirdly strange word choice. Well, now I know that these are just spun articles. One of them (all of them?) was so poorly written (spun) that I had to intersperse it with commentary from the point of view of a monkey. It was the only way to make the content palatable. I think I'll mostly write my own in the future.

Rank-O-Matic
It seems that GPT has recovered somewhat from its death spiral. Currently, we are unranked for our intended keyword... however, my incidental keywords are ranking at 217 (was 138) on Google and 11th on YaBing. I should mention that I got another search hit today... someone searching for military seals. Am I the only place on the ney where the four seals are brought together?? Jeeze!

And... Rats... with no links and no nothing, Rats are at 212, 235 and 107 for my three target keyphrases. No Google numbers yet, and Bing hasnt caught up with Yahoo. Eventually Bing and Yahoo will have the same number.

Hopefully, my correction of the blank pages will have helped, along with some backlinks, of course.

Tools
As you know, I use Long Tail Pro. I also use various Firefox plugins and toolbars. I am going to try Traffic Travis as well. It only works on Windows, so I will have to boot in Gates Mode... I prefer Linux, and have used it full time for three years. But occasionally, I have need of a gates program.

Okay... I have had enough. More tomorrow.

20130320

Is There a Backlink Strategy That Works?

Backlinks


Today, I started working on the backlinks for GPT. Before Spring Break, GPT was moving up in Google (made it into the 200s) but now it is again completely unranked. I attribute this partially to the empty posts that have been generated over the last few weeks. And, of course, there was an algorithm update, too.

I should also mention that there has been no movement at all on Bing for the main key phrase. So, clearly, I am doing something wrong with my on-page SEO. I need to give this some thought. Meanwhile, I have decided to delete the blank posts that are being generated, and, at the same time, start creating some backlinks.

Where to Begin

I have been putting off dealing with backlinks, a sure sign that I am not comfortable with the information that I have read thus far. I first realized that I would need to create separate accounts for facebook, twitter and the rest of them, since I am not ready to shoot all of this information out there where people I know will see it. I would prefer to wait for success before involving others! Since I decided to start with Facebook, I went ahead and created a new email address, and used that to create accounts on FB, Twitter, My Space (I didnt even know that was still around!), LinkedIn and Google+. Then I created accounts with the various social bookmarking sites, like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

After I created all of the accounts, I tweeted out a link to GPT (of course, I have no followers, so no one saw it), I liked and shared it on Facebook, and posted it in Stumble and Reddit. The next thing it seems that I should do is take one of my articles and run it through the spinner and begin posting it at places like Ezine. This will begin creating the links I need to convince Google that the site is good and it would be a Good Thing if they would show it to people.

I think the whole thing is dubious. Who looks at Ezine? Or Reddit or Stumble for that matter? In fact, on Ezines home page, it says, post here to create backlinks for your site!

Does This Matter?

This has me thinking, though. There is a link to GPT from this blog. That has never shown up anywhere! And the experts, the Pat Flynn's of the world, say that you should create a few dummy blogs, put some content on them, and then link to your site with it. Alot of good that does... here is an actual blog and the link from here has done nothing! Oh well... the experts say do it, and they are the ones who know how this business works. I have to say, I'm pretty sick at how widespread Google's tentacles are.

Updates

I'll make a new post if these crazy backlinks do any good!

20130318

Progress

Build it and they will come?

I took a trip out of town last week... it was good to be away from the computer for a bit. During that short space of time, my paralegal site had three hits on longtail keywords. One of those hits resulted in someone clicking the Indeed jobs board... however, there was no $$$ result from that click. Meanwhile, there have been no legitimate views of eRATication, and of course, no one has seen this site, other than the occasional bored person clicking their way through the blog list at blogger.

GPT

All of this has me doubting that I am doing this right. GPT has been up and available for sometime... well, since 20 January... so, almost two months. According to LTP, it is no longer ranked at all for the main keyword I chose, "paralegal training", although it is on the first page for some unique longtails that will probably be searched only once. There are much thinner sites that do quite well, while GPT is only visited on the longest of long tails.  Perhaps the keyword I chose is just too competitive and I will never rank for that site. That means, "fail." The domain is not generic at all, so recycling it would be difficult if not impossible. Yup... I am worried that it simply is not good enough. (I put some adsense on it... not sure that is the right thing to do. It seems, judging by the current rhetoric, that it is all to easy to be banned!) On top of that, there is yet another google algorithm change... which may explain why my site had risen to page 20 and has dropped off the list again. Damn!

Random Word Generator Idea

Although I stopped production on the 50 state pages explaining local laws on paralegal training, I nevertheless have 50 blank posts posted, one for each state. This has given me an evil thought. Creating a program that generates a list of random words. If there was a post on a web page, and that post had 500 to 1000 random words, and X percent of those words were various forms of your keyword, would that be enough to fool the goog? Does it actually look at the grammar of the words? Interesting thought. Creating a simple program that gens up a list of random words with a specific percentage of keywords wouldnt really be that difficult...  although my VB and Pascal programming skills are rusty, I bet I could churn out a small app that does that. Just a thought. Not to manipulate the system and move up in rank, but rather, to pad out my blank posts and avoid a penalty for having blank pages. It would help to know what goog looks for... A Random word list padded with keywords and punctuation might look funny... but would it look any funnier than some of the poorly written third world pages I've seen? Looks like English, yes, but it makes no sense... yet Mr. Cutts clearly thinks it is worth my time.

Rats!

Meanwhile, over at eRATication, it seems no human has actually even seen my site. Beyond the person who searched for the domain name, no one has hit it from a search engine at all. Of course, the rat site is still quite young. Perhaps I should be patient. The RAT page was only launched a few weeks ago. :-\

Patience, patience.

Links

And still there are no backlinks to either site. And I am inundated with projects around the house that prevent me from working on it... it just seems that I absolutely need to take a couple of days and actually do some link work. In the end, if the pages dont rise in serp rank, they will never generate a penny.

My goal was to begin making money by the end of March... and I dont even have visitors! So, clearly, this isnt going to happen. So. I make it a goal to get some backlinks by the end of the month!

And I still need to look into this infobarrel nonsense. I like the idea of shooting out an article and having it make money.

Bah! And I still have chairs to sand and stain, and a bunch of other dumb stuff to get done! Hopefully it will rain soon, and I can stay glued to the computer instead of work in the yard.

Opinion?

What do you think? If you are reading this, you could easily be the very first person to ever comment on this blog. I know there is something to this internet marketing junk... if I can just figure it out before I run out of time!!!

20130307

Approved

Amazingly, the rat site has been approved for ads! And suddenly they just showed up. I initially did not like the placement of the ads, sandwiched in between the title of the post and the first header. I played around with it though and decided that the best way to deal with it was to eliminate the title of the post. That way, the ad strip runs right under the menu.

Of course, this means that none of my articles can have official titles as long as that ad strip is placed right there. But, at the same time, I do not intend to move it for awhile either. So, there we go. Of course, it doesnt matter, because no one is seeing the page anyway!

To maintain the integrity of the files and posts, etc, I will name the posts when I write it, and set the all-in-one-SEO to reflect the chosen name. This will also cause the file to receive the desired filename. But once it is ready, I will have to delete the name and place the name as an H1 at the top of the post. Not the perfect solution, but it will work for now.

I also saw this morning that my page had been found in Google. However, someone had search specifically for the specific domain of my rat site, they were looking for the page. Why didnt they just type it in as an address? Quite possibly they meant to! But, in any case, someone was looking for my specific page. And that someone was in England. Which is very curious indeed. A quick look at Facebook gave me a clear indication of who that person was (not many people connected with the my site name are in England at any one time.)

Funny stuff. I wonder what he made of it... and if he did a whois to learn more. Hahah.

The takeaway here is that we now have a means to generate income from the rat site... all we need now are customers! eRATication is open for business! :-)

PS: I was approved for Lending Club on the same day... lets see which one loses money the fastest! A race! A race!


20130306

Rats Go Live

Well... I have finally finished and posted my page about getting rid rats. This is the last time I will supply a link for that page!)

I also edited several of the posts to contain text that I will be keeping. I did this because the posts were dated to several months ago. Changing them in this way allows me to keep a post that was made in January, but redirect its content into the overall RAT KILLING theme! That just leaves a few more posts to get rid, specifically the one about the transformation of the site, and the one concerning beer.

I dunno... I may leave the beer... maybe it has some relevance to killing rats? But the other is going... in fact... wait here while I go delete it!

[38 seconds later]

There... that's better. Now, that page has been deleted. Now, all of the posts are either relevant to killing, catching and eradicating rats, or they are technical. One is about the theme change, and one is about the internet being down one weekend. I cleaned those up a bit, but left them in place.

Lastly... I had applied for Adsense when I first started... long before I realized I should complete the page before pulling the trigger on that. I went ahead and completed that now that the page is ready. In all likelihood, the page will be banned, which will make the task of generating revenue from it more difficult. Still, it cant be helped. Luckily, they have very little to link me personally to that site other than my IP address, which I could easily change if need be. So, if they ban me, all is not lost.

Meanwhile, I have set up Amazon Associate links on the page, very inconspicuously, of course. And, I may try some other alternatives as well. One thing is clear... I am anxious for one of the sites to generate a dollar or tow, if nothing else then as proof of concept!

Wish eRATication (and GPT) luck as they go out into the cold internet. Once they begin earning money, I'll give a monthly income report here at The Niche Blog.

Hmmm... I wonder how I could monetize this site?

20130302

Rat Page Progress

Converting an Old Site

Originally, historic rosenberg was supposed to be about the preservation of an historic downtown area, and was to serve as a front for the local visitors center. As I have discussed elsewhere, that never happened. Instead, I tried to make the site a sort of "Today in History" site... but I never did keyword research on it. I quickly realized that few would ever search for such a thing, and those who did werent looking to spend money!

Rats
So, now the site is being converted to a page about catching, killing and getting rid of rats! I started that process yesterday by creating a header image in Gimp for it, using some free pictures of rats that I got at stock.xchng. Gimp is like Photoshop for Linux.
historicrosenberg.org header image
As you can see, just two disgusting rats, spreading their filth and disease all over the internet! I named the site, "eRATication", because I thought it was cute. Yes, I know that is not how you spell, "eradication." I am a college professor, you know!

And, I created a little favicon for the page that looks like a cheese wedge. Other than that, the page is still what it was before... a few days in history. And, it is still SEOed for that topic... in fact, it ranking on page 2 for "historic rosenberg" right now! This is probably due entirely to the domain name, SEO, and the fact that the domain is 2 years old already. All of that will change. As soon as I write the main Rat page, I will post it, and begin deleting the other pages and posts.

I will also write a privacy policy, and that sort of thing, as well as a contact page and about us page. Then, the real fun begins. But, at the moment, i am buried in Rat Research. Did you know the average male rat is bitten by other rats over 9 times a day?? They look cute, but they are horrible creatures!

20130301

Let the SEO Begin

I went ahead and did some SEO on the eRATication page. All that is left is for me to actually write the static main page, then, at that point, all of the old posts will be deleted and the transformation will be complete.

Now... to get motivated to write the needed Rat Page... and the online paralegal page as well.