Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

If you haven’t read Carlos Del Rio’s blog, 100 Dollar SEO, you’ve been missing some good articles on search engine optimization and related topics. Carlos is a former VT employee so I’m very familiar with his knowledge and experience. He’s knowledgeable and tenacious and seeks to provide his clients with the best service possible.

He has recently posted three articles that I feel are worthy of mention. Here they are and here is why:
List of all white hat techniques for SEO – Now, several of the points Carlos makes deserve some elaboration, so I certainly hope he follows up in the future. In looking over the list I can think of only one omission: I would include “add content frequently”.

There are some old-school techniques in Carlos’ list that many people in the SEO industry now speak out against. For example, “Use forums”. Carlos suggests you participate in forums, adding there may be a signature link privilege in many forums. But the important point is that he’s talking about participating in forums, not just doing drive-by link drops (way too many still do that).

Participating in a forum helps you build visibility to potential new partners, influencers, and customers — but you don’t want to be self-promotional about the process. Just letting people find out on their own that you sell custom made watches for a living is much, much preferable to being a self-promotional shmuck. On the other hand, if you offer a premium service with brand value but you want to reach out to people on the Internet, favoring a few forums with your presence can be a good marketing tactic. Give people a chance to see that you’re a real person with your own passions and that you place value in what others have to do and say.

Just find people whose opinions you value (even if you don’t always agree with them).

Redesigning your contact forms – Man, I’ve redesigned my contact form more times than I can recall. Contact forms are where we’re allowed to be control freaks. We can guide people gently or firmly through the processes they need to reach us. You can use contact forms to filter out a lot of the nonsense messages people want to send you (although some will still get through).

Thanks to the email spam industry it’s no longer a good idea to embed a mailto link on your Web pages. Contact forms protect your email address, although popular contact form scripts can be (and have been) compromised by email spammers and hackers. Even a custom contact form script can be compromised if it’s modeled on the common scripts. You should definitely make it challenging for hackers to inject data into your scripts (especially by restricting their execution to your own domain).

How much times does SEO take? – That’s the Hundred Dollar Question now, isn’t it? Carlos provides time estimates for how long many specific tasks should take an experienced person to execute them.

I would only add one item: Time it takes to find those links you know are out there but forgot to bookmark — 2-5 hours per link.

Hey, no system is perfect.

I’m excited to announce that Visible Technologies has just emerged in the Q1 Forrester Wave report as a “strong performer” in an evaluation of leading listening platform vendors. Specifically, Visible Technologies was heralded for its “strong technology backbone” in listening platforms.

The report, comprised by Suresh Vittal, focuses on systems devised to supply vendors with competitive analysis with emphasis on actionable strategy formulation. These systems, known as listening platforms, surpass traditional data collection and standard analysis in that they are able to actively “listen” and stimulate interaction between brands and consumers.

If you’re going to contribute content to other Web sites, the best thing you can do is NOT offer them advice on how to improve their content, on how to market themselves, and how to optimize for search.

People like Larry Page and Sergey Brin have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that anyone can become a billionaire regardless of how little they actually understand the World Wide Web (and Page and Brin didn’t have a clue when they proposed PageRank, which ranks among the Ten Most Stupid Ideas On The Internet).

In other words, you may know better than the other guy how to “market” his stuff, but his passion, ambition, connections, and just plain dumb luck may accomplish more than you can ever hope to do for him. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin had asked for and followed advice from the SEO community they would be out of business today. Everything they’ve done with Google has flown in the face of conventional search engine optimization community wisdom.

Their front page is ugly, but ugly works.

They refrained from writing actual content for several years, and instead replicated everyone else’s content.

They waited a long time to monetize their site.

They left their site and content open to clear and obvious manipulation for years (in fact, it’s still easy to manipulate Google’s search results).

If Larry Page and Sergey Brin were to be judged for their search engine optimization today, they would be considered miserable failures and excruciatingly naive spammers. In fact, Google recently achieved the distinction of ranking third on Spamhaus’s list of top spam resources.

My point here is that if you’re going to participate in someone else’s Web site by contributing content, then the best thing you can do for yourself is to keep your advice to yourself. Unless the site operator pays you money for advice, don’t share it. Why? Because he may just prove to have the next best thing and he won’t need your advice.

100% of all SEOs offer ineffective advice at least some of the time. No one escapes from the curse of Being Inconveniently Wrong in this industry. That’s just the way it is.

Free advice is usually the worst advice. It’s given on the fly, with little to no research or consideration, and no real actual knowledge of what the Web site’s goals are. Maybe the site operator doesn’t know what his goal is. All he knows is he has a hot idea that he wants to work.

You should decide whether to contribute content on the basis of whether you like his site and not for any other reason. You should not be trying to boost his brain power. He may be smart enough (most people say Page and Brin are pretty smart guys). He may also be challenging some marketing assumptions. And his approach may work better than your tried and true methods.

If you contribute to someone else’s site, just let him run with your content and see what happens. You may find he can help you more than you can help him.

Here is a tip, a technique, and a debate. Can you effectively build a keyword-based microsite and use that site to leverage a primary or “corporate” site? Some people argue against the idea. However, I have written an article on SEO Theory that says the Microsite Mistake is the mistake.

Let me ’splain.

Let’s say you create a strong domain about, oh, search engine optimization theory. And then let’s say you create a domain about … oh … BEST SEO (call it the BEST SEO BLOG).

Let’s say you want one of those domains, like SEO Theory, to rank well for a specific keyword. Let’s pick one like, oh, “microsite mistake”.

Do you need a LOT of links to get to the top or nearly to the top of search results for that keyword? Well, since that is the title of a blog post on the extremely popular SEOmoz domain, chances are pretty good that a LOT of people will link to the SEOmoz blog with the keywords in their anchor text. You can expect to see this post appear on Sphinn, StumbleUpon, maybe DIGG, and certainly a few other social media sites.

Rand Fishkin is popular enough that he could probably count on people linking to a “Please Stand By – Technical Difficulties” post (of course, knowing Rand, he’d turn the need for such a post into an opportunity for humor, information, and community building).

On the other hand, I liberally used “microsite mistake” in the copy of the article (although not as liberally as I have used other keywords in spam-topic posts). Repetition is the key to search engine optimization success. Most SEOs have been taught to offload their repetition to link anchor text, a technique popularized in 2003 by the “Googlebomb” phenomenon (people in the SEO community actually discussed the technique in 2000 and then let it drop).

But here I am creating a relevant article that links back to my SEO Theory post with the targeted keyword. Why did I do that? Because I can.

You see, Best SEO Blog is a microsite. It stands on its own brand value and successfully ranks for a variety of keywords. Technically, SEO Theory is also a microsite (the flagship site or corporate site for Visible Technologies is Visible Technologies). So here I am linking to a microsite from a microsite.

Shame on me for engaging in shameless self-promotion. It’s scandalous! It’s an outrage! It’s unbelievable! It’s shocking!

It works. It works. It works.

Now, I’m not saying you should go out and create a lot of worthless blogs for link building. In fact, before I wrote this post I checked the Google rankings for “Microsite Mistake” and SEO Theory was already ranking 2nd for the keyword. SEO Theory may never take the top position from SEOmoz (after all, a LOT of people are going to link to the SEOmoz article, if only because of the debate between me and Rand on this topic).

What I AM saying, however, is that microsites can be used very effectively for search engine optimization. SEO Theory hit the second slot in a non-competitive keyword on the basis of copy. Sure, I could have done that with the Visible Technologies site but you have no idea of how many signoffs I would have to get in order to put an article like that on Visible Technologies’ corporate site. We don’t use it for blogging (in fact, the official Visible Technologies Blog is VisInsights).

It was just easier for me to prove the point with a microsite. Some corporate visions are larger than one keyword. Any one Web site should be larger than one keyword. In fact, you can learn to make any Web page larger than one keyword.

THAT is the power of content-based search engine optimization, and it can never be equalled in power, efficiency, and effectiveness by link-based search engine optimization.

So go forth and use your microsites wisely. The only real mistake is to not learn how to do microsites right. If you want a single keyword microsite, sure, do it. But make sure it’s a darn good site, something people want to link to.

BTW — if you want to see an example of a poorly optimized single keyword microsite, check out Fantastic Four Movie. Ask yourself: why doesn’t this site (www.fantasticfourmovie.com) rank first for “Fantastic Four Movie”? Microsites can certainly fail. Many do. But that’s not because it’s better to put all your SEO into one domain.

One of the latest link-building fads is the Article Swapping Trick. When you use the Article Swapping Trick you trade articles with another site, and thereby you swap links (because your article links back to your site and your swap-partner’s article links back to his site).

Does anyone see the potential problem with this tactic? It’s just Reciprocal Linking Made More Tedious because now you have to write an article and create a page for someone else’s article.

There still seems to be some disagreement or misunderstanding in some corners of the SEO universe regarding Reciprocal Links. Some people think they don’t work, or that they will get you banned or penalized. Let me set the record straight: Reciprocal Links still work fine … until you rely too heavily on them and get your site penalized or banned.

Search engines don’t care if you occasionally swap links with other sites. But they do care if you mostly swap links with other sites. That makes you look cheap and unimportant.

So here is a suggestion: DON’T swap articles with other sites. If you want to have an occasional guest blogger or reuse someone else’s article, or just have a guest feature article — do it. But don’t ask for a damn link back. Take that bad SEO advice you’ve bought into and return it for a full refund.

If you want links from other people’s sites, just give them unique, original articles that enhance the value of their sites. Stop embedding links to your content. Instead, ask them to provide the link where they think it’s appropriate. If you’re lucky, they’ll create a bio page for you and ask you to contribute more articles. If they just add your link to a long list of other contributors’ links, well, you’ll know not to contribute to their site any more (and you should have had sense enough to check them out in the first place).

What kinds of sites are best to contribute to? New sites, low Toolbar PR sites, sites with virtually no search visibility and no search audience. Why? Because any content you provide to them will help them grow and they, in return, will help you grow.

You don’t need high Toolbar PR links to improve your search traffic referrals. You need to work with Web sites that are young, aggressive, and ambitious so that they grow up to be your friends and allies. They’ll remember people who had faith in them and gave them support in their early struggling days.

And you’ll improve your writing skills without stumbling over yourself begging for links.

Stop asking for links. Start earning them. You’ll find this not only does wonders for your self-esteem, it significantly improves the quality of your link profile.