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.