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December 6, 2006

Stu’s Xmas Avatar Takeover

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

We all hunt down ways to push our sites out infront of people and Stu McHenry has come up with the latest cool trick - get as many users as possible to use your Christmas avatar as possible on the major forums. Certainly if you look at the memberlist at DigitalPoint there has been a significant uptake (although this will change after Xmas, I guess).

Whether this translates into a reinvigorated site sift forum or more submissions at his paid directory remains to be seen but it’s certainly created a buzz and people are talking about his logo if nothing else.

An excellent viral marketing campaign so far.

November 18, 2006

Vital advice about Paid Links

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

I’m taking an unusual step here and using someone elses article - but that’s because CReed has addressed the very issue I’ve been asked about lately - Paid Links.

I’ve sold a few links on various sites, but I haven’t solicited them and I doubt there’s been more than 5. It’s not the business I’m in. But people do sell links on blogs, directories and regular websites. It’s a discreet form of advertising and can be a good way to get a high profile inbound link to your site. Some offer only SEO benefits, others offer human traffic.

So, if you’ve exhausted all the free directories and don’t want to get into link exchanges then maybe paid links will be the next step. If so, then read on. More »

November 7, 2006

Directory Contest twists it up

Posted by Sarah King in Fun and SEO Games

Mike Dammann has launched his own Directory Contest. It’s a twist on the regular SEO contests and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

I’ve got two entries

1. RealState for Real Estate has a Directory Contest page
2. Property Investment Directory has a Directory Contest page

In both cases the links aren’t visible on the directory homepage and the links are 2 or 3 clicks into the site.

More »

July 8, 2006

Testing Google Alerts

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

A couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.

In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.

Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date - the ComputerWorld example is the best - by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.

This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts - where they can direct you to a permalink - but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless.

More »

June 25, 2006

Nintendo Wii ranking dilemmas

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

A while back I mentioned how a short lived forum demo lasted months in the SERPs. Another effect I’ve found with new sites is that the sites you use for dropping links will kick butt in the SERPs for a couple of weeks until the search engines fully index and propogate the results around the data centers.

A couple of weeks is no biggie and eventually you’ll pop out on top. The thing is, you drop the links from sites you know are indexed well because they’re going to help you and quickly.

So, I was amused to see, on a forum I frequent, that one site owner was requesting link exchanges and a site review for his Nintendo Wii site. More »

May 28, 2006

Useful Sites

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

I’m working on a new project at the moment, it’s an intranet type thing so no point in linking to it, but I’m using CakePHP and thats been really interesting. Definately RAD, supposedly simple but it’s got so many really good features that while it is simple, it can be hard to discover the genius.

For instance,

1. $this->flash controls post save redirects, but doesn’t do the actual redirect if you have debugging turned on. You have to dig out the default template to know this though.

DigitalPoint remains the number one forum on the net, as far as I can see and I’ve recently been made a moderator. It actually changes the way I use the forum and it’s really very interesting.

Christian Mezei owns SEOPedia and a free directory WebXperience - and he has big plans for that. More »

May 25, 2006

More Shoemoney than the man himself!

Posted by Sarah King in Shoemoney

Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney is a hoot. He has a great blog and a series of forums and now he wants his name to be famous (watch for the trademark application ;)) because our adoration obviously wasn’t enough.

He recently sent me some shirts from his company and I’ll be having a bit of fun with them over the next few months. Watch this space. I would have done it anyway but if he wants to follow up the shirts with cold, hard, cash who am I to stop him!

Christian from SEOPedia is giving it a whirl too.