The Lord

Just read this great article from Eric Ward on the future of link building, it’s an excellent read.

I really like the way Eric thinks and how he’s happy to share, but only to a point. Too many other seo/sem/2.0 consultants over promise and under deliver. It’s almost like they have nothing to loose by sharing their techniques.

The best techniques are often right in front of you, yet out of view. This is why a professional SEO consultant’s advice is worth that of 15 amateur consultants still learning how to make money.

One thing is for certain, there are a lot of ‘followers’ online, just looking for a recipie on how to make money. Hard and very smart work is the only way. At some stage you need to relax your ongoing thirst for a silver bullet and finally get comfortable with your skillset and learn how to make money (for yourself). Doesn’t mean you need to scarifice your research, just means you need to focus on the parts that make money.

The parts that make’s the most money are often simple and require multiplication, or a scaled growth. It’s far too easy to be distracted by other things. Focus on these metrics:

1/ Traffic
2/ CTR/Conversion
3/ Building lot’s of evergreen sites
4/ Add useful content to projects that are succeeding
5/ Consolidate into 2.0, only where it makes sense, or money

Build some site networks & experiment

Building out a network of 2.0 type sites and expecting your site to automatically hit a tipping point is useless. Build out the 1.0 real estate beneath it, then filter the traffic and interest through to your 2.0 world. This way you can filter real search traffic through, get some traction in Google, make some money to keep building out your dream 2.0 projects.

If you don’t have a revolutionary 2.0 idea, or something to start one from, you’d better get building. If you build smart you are only increasing the amount of real estate at your disposal to link from. Smart seo’s already have vast networks of websites and/or techniques that work. Techniques that work will stay underground and the only way to uncover them for yourself is to get busy and start building lot’s of pages and sites. Test everything, but stick to the metrics that make money or you will loose too much time.

Also when testing, don’t change your current site all the time, build more and make the changes there. You need lot’s of sites to get rich, very make it with one or two sites alone. You don’t learn by reading what other people are writing (sometimes you get ideas), you learn by *doing*.

Relevant Inspirational Quotes

“When you get right down to the root of the meaning of the word “succeed,” you find that it simply means to follow through.” - F. W. Nichol

“Go as far as you can see and when you get there, you will always be able to see farther.” - Zig Ziglar

With the advent of social networks, xHTML, XFN, FOAF arrises a whole new realm of link assessment possibilities. However when I see sites like this being set-up, I wonder what Google’s true intentions are regarding their support for.. Do they really want to help the web? or perhaps they just need more link relationship data for their algorithm? Afterall Google’s PPC business model depends upon the integrity of their natural search results.

I had been wondering when xfn (4 years old now) would crop up again and it’s very interesting to see Google support it, but not suprising!

Now I would think that most of my readers would be white hat (if you are BH, sorry to disappoint!), I am going to assume the white hat position (sidenote/would it not be slightly bent over?) that you want to be really careful about what Google and others think of your website. But.. how are you to rank without buying links? Believe it or not there are flaws in the Google ‘don’t buy links’ FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) that you could drive a fleet of Mack trucks through sideways. It’s just such a stupid statement!

1/ Can you detect a good ontopic paid link?
2/ How do you pass web traffic without links?
3/ How can Google monitor this activity?

Above is a simple set of questions that throw most of the Google FUD into a small tail spin. #1 unless you saw money exchange hands you’d be hard pressed to assume anything ontopic was paid. #2 how can you increase a websites exposure without buying more web traffic at some stage? It’s common practice to buy links (aka Web Traffic) - good luck doing this without *not* buying some form of link (you own/webmaster the site, not Google) #3 Google have NO scalable means of detacting Paid Links via automated methods for ontopic links that would survive even a human review. (Nor are they about to develop one, short of pay a network of snitches that would know less than a Google engineer doing hand reviews).

The #1 rule is don’t make Google look stupid. Only buy paid links that garner real visitors that become customers or users of your products. Keep it Ontopic. The #2 rule would be that you are not going to rank without links! All the content in the world will not get you the rankings you’d want!

Next linking post: I will do a beginners guide to buying links and not blowing your (or client’s) a$$ off. Might help a lot of people.