A Little More Money and A Little More Alexa

Alexa
I have been wondering about this Alexa rank business. For two reasons: One was that I wondered if it helped with traffic or rankings or something, and two, I use the Web Rank tool bar, and it shows the Alexa rank for my page everytime I look at it. That made me curious. And also, I am competitive, I didnt like NOT ranking for something where others were ranking.

Anyway... I read that some said that that your site has to be visited by someone running the Alexa toolbar to be ranked (which seems pretty dumb to me). Others said absolutely not, Alexa, owned by Amazon, did not use their toolbar to measure rankings. Well, I HATE toolbars, anyway, so I tended to believe the latter. But, finally, curiosity got the best of me, and I installed the Alexa toolbar. That was last Friday. Today, three days later, niche site I, aka GPT, has an Alexa rank. You will be glad to know that GPT is now ranked 21.5 million. Which, I assume, is dead last.

Does this benefit me in some way? Probably not. But, and here is what I found interesting, the Web Rank toolbar also shows backlinks by G, Bing and Alexa. And suddenly, Alexa seems to know about a backlink to GPT. This backlink, apparently the only one that anyone can find anywhere on the internet, was from a blog post comment that I left on a related website back in February. Odd how it suddenly showed up.

Speaking of backlinks, there is also one showing up for one of my blogs that supports GPT. That one was found by Bing, and is from my efforts on SocialADR. I have found SocialADR interesting thus far, and a far easier way to generate links than mass article marketing. At this point, I have no way of knowing which is more effective.

MMO with InfoBarrel
I have neglected to write another InfoBarrel  article, but last night I logged on just to check out my account (no real reason) and I saw that my article had managed to make 2 cents. Great! I think I will write another article... and maybe I will actually put a link in this one!

Rank Check
Every Friday, I check my main keyphrases and see where I am ranking. GPT has dropped onto page 20 for one keyphrase, and is still unranked for the other two. Last week, it was ranked 28th. Nich Site II is now on page 5 for one of its keyphrases, but remains unranked for the other two (I do three keyphrases for each site). This is somewhat disturbing... I have done a linkwheel for GPT, and a SocialADR campaign, only to see it drop. I am unsure what is happening there.

Meanwhile... I have created only one blog that points to Niche Site II, yet it has risen on its own. Better on-page SEO? Better targeted text? Not sure.

At this time, my plan is to run one more SocialADR campaign on GPT, create the linkwheel for Niche Site II, and then run a SocialADR campaign on it as well, and hold off on mass article marketing until I see what happens with its page rank. And, while this is happening, I am going to churn out a couple of InfoBarrel articles, and link one of them to Niche Site II and one to GPT.

My internet marketing business, tentatively dubbed Two Dollar Monkey, has now made a grand total of $0.05. I really need to turn this around RSN (real soon, now) and make some headway.

Backlinking Thus Far

After some interruptions (life, you know) and a couple of outright mistakes, I have completed the first round of backlinks using the "link wheel" that everyone loves. I took an article that I had written for my page, and carefully spun it, mostly by hand, using AMR. Although much of AMR is clunky (it being a clearly utilitarian tool and not a smoothly polished "app", if you will) it gets the job done, and the spinner part works quite goodly. So lets break this down.

Article
I wrote this article for the GPT web site and decided that, as an experiment, I would use it to do this first round of links.

Spun
I took the article and spun it using AMR. With the spintax in place, AMR can post the article an infinite number of times (although, infinity will hardly be needed). I also exported 10 spins to use on blogs and whatnot.

Blogs
I created 5 new blogs using things like Tumblr, Wordpress, LiveJournal, etc. I made five of these. On each one, I posted a spun version (one of the ten that I had saved to the hard drive) of the original article. Each article has two links, one to the GPT homepage and another link to one of the pages deeper in, like, for example, the job board. Note: I did not do a blogger one. Anyone care to guess why?

Mass Submission
After I had the five blogs ready to go, I did a mass article submission using AMR. Of course, article submissions are not what they used to be, and so instead of thousands of possibilities, the list only included about 600 possibles. Of those, it managed to submit only 120 successfully. Instead of setting up a submission for each blog (as perhaps I should do) I opted to spin the links so that of the 120 articles, only about 24 point to each blog site. It seems to me that there are alot fewer article sites these days, probably because they were devalued by the evil G, they simply started going away. The days of being able to even do a mass submission may be numbered.

Each of these mass articles has 2 links in the "resource" box, not in the article itself. Again, the links randomly rotate between the 5 blogs.

SocialADR
I created an account on SocialADR, and began using it to drive links to both the main page and the blog sites. There is conflicting advice from internet marketing types on this, so I decided to mix it up. Since I am using the free version, it doesnt seem that very many links will be generated all at once. In any case, all I have to do now is log on each day, share 5 links that I like that were submitted by other folks, and then the links I have ready to share will be posted. It does not mean that my link will only be shared 5 times. Instead, for example, one of my links was submitted 18 times in a matter of seconds. So, that seems to be a good thing. Of course... assuming that these links actually help.

Rank
Since I was out of town on Friday, I was unable to do a rank check for my keywords (using LTP) to see where I am. After refocussing my keywords (I would prefer to say keyphrases, really) last week, I determined that I was off the page (in a bad way... i.e., not SERPed at all)  for all of my keywords. As of Monday night, I am ranking 28th for one of my keyphrases, but still zero on the other two.

Note: I have both the niche sites focused on three key words each.

Traffic has increased... which is to say, that I am now getting 1 or 2 people a week, and all of those on long tails associated with the military paralegals page.  Not sure if I should do something about this or not.

I will update the ranks after Friday when I see how they went.

Out!

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.

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!