Dot-Dash.NET

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

I hate submitting sites and blogs to directories, it’s incredibly boring, tedious and laborious. I don’t really trust submission software and services to do to properly either.

So after this morning’s round of RSS feed submissions I decided to keep a record of all the sites that did not:

• Demand a reciprocal link
• Require an account sign up and email confirmation
• Masquerade as free directories then send me to a paypal sign up after filling in my details

As of today – 02/05/2010 (English date format) this is a list I ended up with of RSS directories where you can submit your feed quickly and relatively painlessly:

http://www.feedzie.com/submit.php

http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php

http://www.xmeta.net/users/

http://www.solarwarp.net/submitrss.php

http://www.leighrss.com/rss-add.html

http://www.postami.com/rss_submit_service.php

http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html

http://en.newsxs.com/Suggest/

http://www.search4rss.com/addfeed.php

http://www.feedplex.com/add-url.php

http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp

http://www.jordomedia.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html

http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx

http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web

http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_eater.php

This is by no means complete so if you can think of any more please do so in a comment.

“Could there BE any more keywords in that post title?”….is what I would say if I was Chandler Bing from Friends.

And I’d have a point too. Trying to rank highly for terms like “SEO” and “Website traffic” is – for me – the wrong side of the 80/20. It will take a lot more than on page factors to get ranked for such competitve phrases these days. Even with a huge budget, lots of (outsourcer) time and all the latest technical tricks it would still be a long slog and a short lived result (if any) at that.

So why not just approach your SEO and website traffic (did you see what i did there?) efforts as Google intended and just make your site worth linking too/tweeting/bookmarking/digging etc. Your time and budget can be put to so much better use creatively. You know your target market, you know what they want, you know your industry and how you can help your customers and prospects achieve their goals.

Anyway – off the soapbox and on to my SEO and website traffic (sorry I just can’t help myself, it’s like a tick!) experiment:

The SEO and Website Traffic Experiment

My trading site is in one of the most competitve fields there is – forex and commodity trading. It’s right up there with weight loss and making money online, it is rediculously oversaturated. But I don’t care because I’m writing about something I love and am gaining some excellent knowledge and experience in.

And that puts me ahead of probably 90% or so of the competition who don’t really know much about it but are “in this niche” due to it’s popularity and lucrative affiliate marketing and contextual advertising opportunities. This isn’t restricted to the investing/trading niche either. You’ll find that if your business has a lot of targeted searches and the potential to reach your market through selling information products – much of your competition will be internet marketers trying their hand at making money from your customers and website visitors.

These will be people who don’t specialise (some of them will but a lot won’t) in your field of expertise but have gone to great lengths to become ‘percieved as an authority’ (yes there are courses on how to do this), research your website visitors just to sell them someone else’s ebook/course/product/whatever. Or worse still – just click an add.

This is who you’re up against and they know all the tricks about SEO and website traffic (oops, sorry did it again!).

So How Will You Beat Them to the Top?

Your edge which you can use is to just actually be an authority, simple as that. But you need to let people know about it as well so a good social media campaign can be enough of a lift to start a viral campaign to put your site where it deserves to be.

That’s what I’m doing with my trading site. I’m not even going to bother with any link building or SEO. The experiment is simply to do the following:

• Actually be a successful trader
• Write about it
• Publicise it through social media

It’s currently in it’s infancy but growing just through the above. Yahoo site explorer shows 5 backlinks, 4 of which are image links from charts I have posted on popular trading forums and 1 other. I’ve linked to it from this site for navigation purposes as well. Other than that I have done nothing to promote this site through any directories, articles or anything else other than social media.

Let’s see how it fares against all the genuine competition and the ‘make money online’ crowd. Watch this space…

I get asked this a lot. What is the optimal frequency and how often should one blog?

The answer depends on who you’re blogging for and why. If it’s for the search engines then probably about once a a day.

If it’s for your target market, prospects and customers it should be when you’ve got something to say.

Too many people feel that they should be blogging for the sake of blogging and end up diluting their sites with second hand not very good content that doesn’t ultimately do their business any favours. I’m a  firm believer in quality over quantity and I think the search engines are now as well.

A few years ago producing ‘fresh unique content’ on a very regular basis (at least once a day) was a great way to get your site spidered and indexed with the help of an RSS feed. Unfortunately like all other SEO ‘tricks’ this got abused and isn’t as effective anymore.

Which I think is a good thing – because there’s too much spammy rubbish out there put out by people desperately trying to drive traffic to ‘nothing’ blogs full of ads and affiliate links. This is good for the genuine business owner with a real passion and knowledge for their subject.

Stand out from the rest and make it a point to only post quality unique content – and only blog when you have something to say.