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This is one of those posts where I umm and ahh to myself before writing it. Do I really want to share this with the world? A little while back I didn’t and that’s why this has been sat in my drafts for so long, but I figure what the hell, the internet is a very big place and there are plenty of niches and traffic to go around. What I’m about to tell you about is in my opinion FAR AND AWAY the best link building tool I have ever used – a system that can change your fortunes online – it goes by the name of ConnectContent.

Project TRAFFIC is well and truly under way. I’m working hard like a hard working thing trying to build new sources of traffic for my existing web real estate. One of the biggest new sources for me is social bookmarking and as far as I’m concerned the daddy of social bookmarking sites is StumbleUpon.

Having never really had much to do with social bookmarking in the past it was quite new to me and I’m still learning, however one of the first things I wanted to do was built up some friends to share stumbles with. FaceBook is a social networking website, I’ve got quite a few friends on there so I figured they’d be reasonably tech savvy so I invited them along for the ride. The responses I got were a little surprising “What the hell is StumbleUpon?”, “What does it do?”, “Never heard of it?”. Out of over 100 invites only 3 people had ever heard of StumbleUpon never mind used it.

The Difference Between StumbleUpon And FaceBook
What I find strange is that so many FaceBook users, people who are aware of social networking have never heard of StumbleUpon, social bookmarking. Then again why should I be surprised, it’s very easy to drift into your own world online and assume that everybody has the same knowledge as you. I remember the first time I guided my mum through buying cheaper books on Amazon and the look of amazement on her face. Surely everybody knows about Amazon? Apparently not. The same is very much true for StumbleUpon, whilst social networking is now mainstream (thanks to the media), social bookmarking is not and is still very much confined to the world of techies, webmasters and internet nerds. It’s a shame, because once you get started with StumbleUpon it can open up a whole world of more interesting websites to you.

My Beginners Guide To Using StumbleUpon
So if you’ve never heard of StumbleUpon then this is the place to start. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking service, it allows you to vote for websites (positive or negative) and bookmark them, just like what you would normally do with your browser. However by keeping your list of bookmarked websites online you can access them wherever you are using the internet. As well as simply bookmarking StumbleUpon allows you to share bookmarks with your friends and even more interesting, by using the “Stumble” button to be taken to a random website that other people have voted for. It is this stumbling that allows you to discover new and interesting areas of the internet.

Getting Started With StumbleUpon

1. Create yourself a StumbleUpon account by signing up at this page, it’s a very simple process and to date I’ve never received any spam from signing up – StumbleUpon Sign Up. The categories you choose will be the categories from which random websites will be chosen when you hit the Stumble button.

2. Download the StumbleUpon toolbar available from the link (A Firefox and Internet Explorer version is available). I’m the first to say that I hate browser tool bars but the Stumble bar is clean, simple to use and very much to the point. I’ve been using it for over a week now with a packet sniffer and it doesn’t seem to do anything “naughty”.

3. Once you have your toolbar installed you can start stumbling. The left most button on the toolbar is the “Stumble” button, this will take you to a random website depending on your category choices. Even in the short time I’ve used it I’ve found more interesting pages than in the last 2 months of general surfing.

4. To vote for a page you can use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons next to the stumble button. If you are the first person to stumble a page you will be invited to write a short review about what you have found. If you’re not the first then you vote will simply be added to the other people who have voted for it. If you do want to write an extra review then you can do so by using the speech bubble icon (2 over to the right).

5. The favourites button takes you to your list of bookmarked (voted you like it) web pages. By default this only shows pages that you have written a review for but it also possible to view all of your bookmarked pages. Of course if you’re using a computer that doesn’t have the toolbar installed you can access this same list by logging in to your account on the StumbleUpon website.

6. The final think to look at is the friends button. This takes you to your list of bookmarking buddies. When you first start there is the option of inviting friends from several contact lists including Outlook, GMail and FaceBook. Users with more friends will get more from the whole StumbleUpon experience.

So from now on you vote for pages as and when you come across them, any pages with positive votes will be included in the list of pages that can be displayed when somebody hits the random Stumble button. In order for your votes to carry more weight you need to participate actively in the community, this means voting (positive and negative) on lots of pages not and not just your own. It’s also worth noting that you can never have too many friends! As I said in the first place this is all a little new to me as well, but so far my StumbleUpon experience has been a positive one.

Now you know how to do it your first job is to give a positive vote for this post!

The Aviva Directory is one of the very few directories that I would recommend you bother to list your website in. I wasn’t a big fan at first but after a number of months in the directory I started to see some benefits of using Aviva. Since then things have carried on in much the same manor and it’s now right up there when I start link building for a new website.

I’ve got some good news, to celebrate their 3rd birthday the Aviva Directory are offering $20 of all regular and featured listings (now only $29.95 per year for a regular listing and $54.95 for a featured listing). To take advantage of this offer just use the coupon code:- birthday3 when creating your listing. This special offer is only valid up until the end of this month.

Who would ever have thought that Entrecard would have become so big so quickly? Not me, that’s for sure. Whilst I thought it would be big news amongst small/medium size bloggers there is no way I predicted that it would have such a large affect on blogging in general. I see Entrecard widgets on almost all of the blogs I visit now. The cool thing is that it does bring traffic so why not?

The Danger Of Entrecard
I was recently asked by somebody to explain the benefits of “free”, he just didn’t get it. Entrecard is a great example of how free can help, there is no way that it would have grown to this size if you had a sign up fee. It just wouldn’t. Nor would it have had the huge amounts of exposure across some of the biggest names in the world of blogging. However, free comes at a price. That price is usually quality. In Entrecards case it’s not the quality of the service itself (it’s as professional a setup as anything paid out there) but it’s in the quality of the members. As the word spread the quality of many of the members blogs was “dodgy” at best, then came the start of the abuse of the messaging system to spam fellow bloggers. Of course everybody is already aware as well of what appears to be huge discrepancies in advertising prices, unless you go for a named blog it’s pretty much a lottery as to how much traffic your ad spot will generate.

All of the above factors are down to Entrecard being a free network and are out of your control. However the biggest danger of using Entrecard is completely in your hands and it’s something I think is going to become a big issue down the line. Bloggers are starting to become obsessive about Entrecard. Spending hours dropping hundreds of cards, boosting not only their own advertising prices but also those of the random blogs they choose to drop on. It’s very easy for people to treat Entrecard as their only source of link building just because it’s so damn easy to drop a card. Rather than spending hours dropping you could be writing new content, commenting on other people’s blogs, creating forum posts, sourcing directories, using Stumble and any number of other ways of link building.

I’m not anti-Entrecard, I use it and will continue to, however I don’t spend much time dropping my card. In fact the only card drops I do are when I visit a blog (usually found through a link on another site or search) and like it. I certainly don’t spend hours on the Entrecard dashboard random dropping. Entrecard can be a good source of visitors to your website but over use it at the expense of your other link building techniques and I think you’ll be sorry in the long run.

So unless you’re very new here I guess you know that I’m not a big fan of directories, I have used them in the past for a link source and the amount of traffic they have delivered has been very poor at best. However there are 1 or 2 out there that are known to have ranking benefits, Yahoo and DMOZ namely.

However gaining 1 way links appears to be getting harder all the time so I thought it was time to have a look at some of the directory options again. This might surprise you but it’s actually much easier to spot if a directory is high quality or not (in terms of the search engines anyway) now. Ever since Google slapped link sellers and reduced the page rank of many directories it had the adverse affect of leaving webmasters without any doubt of where it was worth getting a link from. As thousands of rubbish directories were hit hard, losing page rank and being removed from the index others were left to stand out like a beacon of quality amongst the sea of shit.

www.abilogic.com – Was once a PR5, now a 4. One of the very few directories I’ve used that had a positive effect on SERPs (all be it with Yahoo rather than Google). They offer free listings or to spped things up you can buy 5 deep links for $14.95.

www.octopedia.com – This is one of those very rare directories that has actually gained PR in recent times. By paying a one time membership fee of $25 you get 2 submissions (each of which can contain up to 8 links). A flat structure really helps this directory benefit their customers.

www.platinax.co.uk/directory/ – Holding on to their PR5 you can buy a lifetime link in this directory for £14.95. This one seems to have ducked under Google’s radar for now.

www.sezza.com – Having a home PR5 you have to pay a 1 time review fee of $14.95 to get a listing here. Look carefully before buying though as some categories pass PR much better than others.

www.yeandi.com – A little gem this one. Expect to wait 6-8 weeks for a review of your free submission, alternatively you can speed things up by paying $20. Even better PR seems to flow freely through this PR4 directory.

There you have it, 5 directories that are worth adding to your link building strategy.

Yesterday managed to finish on a bit of a high, I was very excited to see my first amount of real traffic from one of the popular social bookmarking websites, StumbleUpon in this case. Nearly 200 visitors and I can’t think what I wrote to deserve it. I must admit that I really should start doing more with Digg, Stumble and the rest as so many people rave about the amount of exposure they can give. I don’t even submit my own content so what are the chances of a random stranger being the first to submit something I’ve wrote, not very high I would guess.

So today I’ve decided that from now on whenever I think I’ve wrote something interested I’ll go through the whole process of submitting to as many social bookmarking websites as possible. This is where I discovered the fatal flaw. It looks like my Stumble button on this blog doesn’t work, bugger! I can only assume that it’s always been that way and that I’ve no doubt lost thousands of visitors because my regular readers haven’t been able to stumble me

There is something a bit strange about this in that I use one of the most common social sharing plug-ins for WordPress (Sociable by Peter Harkins), surely somebody else must have this problem as well (The problem being that StumpleUpon reports a bad URL when you try and use it).

Anyway I’ll get on with fixing it today so from now on if anybody spots anything interesting in the garbage I spew out can you please add a stumble for me?

Update: All fixed now, for anyone interested changing the StumbleUpon url in sociable.php to

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=PERMALINK&title=TITLE

does the trick

I sort of feel like I’m coming out of the closet here, although to be fair I think being homosexual would be accepted by more people than the confession I’m about to make…..I’m an ODP editor. Actually that should read…. I was an ODP editor, I’ve just quit.

To those of you not in the know the ODP (Open Directory Project) is located over at www.dmoz.org and it is widely regarded as being the most influential directory of websites on the internet. One example is that even Google base their directory on the work of the ODP. The premise is great, a giant directory of manually reviewed websites, take all the best bits of the world wide web and leave the spammy rubbish for the search engines to battle with via algorithms.

I first applied to become an ODP editor for 1 reason, where I live is dominated by financial services. However because of the high value of these services it’s a website spammers paradise, SPLOGS are 2 a penny and the legitimate businesses struggle to stand any chance in the search results. It’s a small place and a close webmaster community, in the many years I’ve worked here I’d heard the same complaints over and over about local websites struggling to rank for even very local terms. An entry in the ODP can really help with this (from my own personal experience I knew that the 3 web sites I had listed in the ODP accounted for 90% of all my visitors and all my top 1 search positions). At the very least it would ensure that they could rank for their own company name! So I applied to become a regional editor for the local business community and was quickly accepted. My first job was to remove the spam entries (whoever was editing previously obviously had an ulterior motive) and create some order, which I spent a large part of my own time doing, for free. What I ended up with was the correct structure for the ODP and more importantly something that local businesses were happy to submit to (At first the only people submitting to my area were spammy website designers who insisted on submitting every half arsed/half finished client creation). Part of the problem before I started was that big legitimate businesses were not prepared to have an entry for their high quality business website alongside Mr Adsense SpamSite or even Mr Dodgy Plumber. I know this, cos I asked them! This was why I had to create the correct categories for companies to submit to and I was happy with what I’d done.

What pissed me off and what finally led to me quitting the ODP was “expert” opinions of other editors. I read the huge amount of bumf that goes with being an editor and I knew what I was doing but during my clean up exercise no less than 3 other editors felt the need to chip in with opinions on what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I don’t mind taking on other peoples opinions but I’m not kidding here, each one of these “experts” came back with totally different advice. In the end I felt like I was the ball in a game of 3 way tennis. For some reason they all wanted to chat to me via MSN as well, I couldn’t decide whether these were just people desperate to show off with their knowledge of if the were just desperate for a friend, I’m not being funny but my weirdo alarm was going off big time. The biggest complaint about the ODP is that it takes so long for a website to get listed (I know, I’m on a 2 year wait for 1 website myself) but I think the real problem here isn’t so much the number of websites as it’s the egos of the editors, it’s like 1 huge pissing contest. All I wanted for my region was to have a directory within a directory that the webmasters of quality websites were happy to have a listing in and that any people who actually do use the ODP to find a website* could find websites in my area easily. The added bonus to all this being that these legitimate companies/websites would also get any boost in search rankings that an entry in the ODP would give. It was starting to work as well, in the last few months the types of website submitted had gone from spam to real brick and mortar businesses, including some of the very big financial institutes. My section was small but the number of changes that other editors wanted to where websites should be listed could have easily taken up all my time, I can only imagine the wrangles that go on over the larger areas of the ODP, no wonder no new websites ever appear to be added!

I spent a large part of my own free time editing the ODP, unlike many other editors I was never corrupt (yes, lots of editors are only there for personal gain) and my motives were always to create a great directory of high quality websites for my region. In the end though the thing that makes the ODP different is also the biggest problem with it, the editors.

*This is something that the editors at the ODP should remember, very few of the people looking at the ODP are surfers, they are actually webmasters looking for a free link.

Getting links to your website is essential if you want to have a good position in the search results, certainly with Google the overall linking picture is the biggest influence on where your pages end up showing, or so they say. The trouble is that over time it has become harder and harder to attract links that Google will value, or so the story goes. With this in mind when it comes to my clients I am very strict on the types of links I build, for some appearance and reputation are perhaps even more important than SERPS positions and with these I am extra careful.

One good example is a company I’ve been working for a year now, because of the sums of money involved (per transaction) it is more important for them be completely above board than to rank number 1 for everything. But why should these 2 things be mutually exclusive? In that year I have build over 400 natural links to their website, all of them on target and related via personal communication with other webmasters. The results although not spectacular are good, from PR1 to PR3 and from no natural search traffic to several thousand visitors. On average they rank about position 20 for each of their main keywords and in the top 10 for all long tail targets. More importantly to the client the traffic converts and all metrics are on a steady upward rise.

I was a bit miffed though this week to receive a link request from a competitor who although only being going several months is already ranking above us. A little bit of checking shows that they’ve done it by gaining tens of thousands of spammy links in a very short amount of time. Thanks Google. As far as I’m concerned their spam site shouldn’t be there but obviously Google doesn’t agree. It seems that all links are good, no matter how bad. I suppose this makes sense, if a link could negatively affect your ranking then what’s to stop people scuppering their competitors efforts by paying for links from a bad neighbourhood? Although Google claim that these links will be of NO benefit I have the feeling that they do provide some tiny tiny amount of benefit in Google’s algorithm. Enough of these and hey ho you’re jumping above legitimate competition. My belief is at some point they will eventually start slipping back down the results, but that is only based on blind faith in Google.

So here’s the question, when it comes to linking does slow and steady legitimate linking really win the day or do you see better results by having huge amounts of non relevant links?