WiseTEC Solutions

Cheap Viagara, Bling Bling Rolex, Lose Weight Fast, Cheaper Viagara – the emails never end.  I’ve never clicked their links, but they’re likely directed to websites completely unrelated to the super cheap products they’re advertising.

In today’s article, we’re going to talk about getting word about your site ‘out there’ without creating a bad name for yourself.  Oh yeah, and as usual, all methods will be FREE.

Our first method will be business directories.  Some SEO ‘Guru’s’ charge big bucks (I’ve seen ‘offers’ on craigslist for a limited time special price of $300) to spend hours manually doing the copy/paste thing into a list of 100 business directories.  This is not only pricey, but it’s counter productive.  The big search engines, with state of the art bot’s crawling the net in it’s accessible entirety, do not rely on business directories (paid or free) for their linking info.  In fact, posting the same or similar ad on 100 similar directories is spam in the eyes of a Search Engine Crawler and could get you arbitrarily banned or kicked down the list.

Don’t get me wrong, business directories are important.  Lists that you want your potential customers to see you on are a great way to get business in without paying high prices for ad space.  When choosing directories to list your website on consider the relevance of the site to your site and industry.  Will the people visiting this directory be interested in your product or service?  Next consider location.  Unless you’re selling ultra cheap products on EBay, my experience is PEOPLE LIKE TO DEAL LOCAL.  Whether they’ll meet you or not, knowing that if there’s a problem you’re not half a world away does big things for your credibility.  Most municipal newspapers will let you place an ad cheap or free on their website.  Sites like CanPages.ca are good to (if you’re marketing Canadians from within Canada) or other similar sites local to your area.

The funny thing about Spam posting is that it’s only considered spam when its both unsolicited and unwanted.  If the government of Nigeria was actually giving me 1 trillion dollars I would welcome the emails!  If you have a legitimate product or service that you want to offer to a legitimate audience, try starting close to home and let the word spread. 

Free social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are a great way to ‘passively post’ – in that you’re posting news and updates to YOUR OWN PAGE, if somebody in your immediate or extended network is interested they will read and pass it on (or re-tweet) as THEY see fit.  Without even asking, you’ve established word of mouth and an implied positive review from someone you might hardly know.

Combining this with CONTENT, CONTENT and MORE CONTENT (as we’ve previously covered) is how you stay fresh but also stay in peoples faces, passively. 

What does all this mean? 

How did you get to this page?  Did somebody email it to you?  Did you see it on WISETECNET’s twitter page (automated tweeting from WordPress is 1 easy step) or Re-Tweeted by somebody else?  Did someone you know tell you about it? Or did it pop up on your Google search for SEO Tips, Web Design or some other query?  Whatever the path was, you ended up here and I took minimal steps to get you here. 

Keep reading, this stuff works!

Last point of the day is link exchanging.  There are different aspects of the link exchange and types of linking sites out there. 

I have clients who get the occasional email from somebody who owns a website and is a real SEO-DIY-GO GETTER.  The request is usually pretty straight forward: “Hello, I saw your site and since you sell X and I sell Y why don’ t we link to each other!”  My customer will forward this on to me and say “hey Matt, what do you think”.  Nine times out of  Ten I’ll add the link to the links page on his website.  (The 1 out of 10 where I don’t is normally because it’s a spamming practice, low quality site or a different site adding the link than the one we’re linking to)

Websites in related industries providing a link to your site – sounds great right?  Sure it is, a customer buying a bunch of hotdogs from Site X might be interested in clicking on the link for your ketchup company.  From an SEO point of view this can rate from worthless to absolutely great.  If the link to your site is added to a jumbled up “links.html” page that is hard to navigate to, not advertised on the home page and contains links to 50 other ketchup companies (I don’t know why I’m thinking hotdogs and ketchup so don’t ask) it’s not going to do anything at all for you.  If you can get a link added which is embedded in the body text of the home page or a similarly travelled page and yours is the only advertised ketchup company (only link in that paragraph is even better) and they include your logo in a linking picture – YOU ARE GOLDEN.  Get these on as many websites as possible, your page rank will skyrocket.  In fact I really wish I could get some more of these (other webmasters/site owners wink wink).

The next side of the link exchange world I’d like to talk about is the sites that let you buy a text link on a page full of links (tag cloud sites), and exchanges with sites that you have absolutely nothing to do with or in common with other than the fact that you’ve got a real desire to get a link exchanged with somebody.  Both of these are SEO SUICIDE. 

You don’t think so? 

Google will ban the tag cloud sites (not follow the links, and penalize your page rank for being in cahoots with them).  You will not get a refund from these websites promising dazzling page rank increases and stampeding traffic to your site. 

The latter (trading my ketchup link for a light bulb company in Idaho’s link) is really more a waste of time then suicide, but will result in poor quality links and if Mr. Light bulb does this too often and creates a links page with 1000 unrelated companies and spammy link text, you just bought into a tag cloud site for the low cost of one back link.

Moral of the day:  Everything in moderation, and don’t pay for anything because it is indeed offered free someplace else.

WiseTEC Solutions offers this blog as a free service.  WiseTEC Websites, Hosting and Search Engine Optimization services are offered at great prices at www.wise-tec.net

Thanks for reading!