SEO and Marketing

Have you heard about Qassia? Nor did i until a few hours ago. I must say it looks very promising. Finally i see something based around fresh and unique content. Here is what its all about:

Qassia is a credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory. What exactly does this mean? It means that Qassia will change your life.
Good stuff your websites will like
At Qassia, you can add your websites for free, and without having to add reciprocal backlinks. You’ll get unlimited quality backlinks (as opposed to “no-follow” backlinks). You can also add intel. Short for “intelligence”, intel is a tidbit of information. Qassia rewards users who add intel in three ways.

1. Backlinks You get one backlink for every piece of intel you add. Every intel will carry a direct backlink to one of your sites. So the more intel you add, the more backlinks you get.

2. Credit When you add intel, you also get credit, in the form of Qassia dollars. Your net worth in Qassia dollars determines how well your websites rank in our directory.

3. Revenue When your intel is displayed, you get 100% of the advertising revenue generated by that page. That is not a typo, by the way: we give you ALL of the gross ad revenue.

This means that website owners have triple incentive to contribute intel. The contributed intel will allow Qassia to become a vast repository of intelligence, with unrivalled original content. And a vast amount of original content draws traffic like honey draws ants.

I don’t know how well it works but it is definitely worth submitting your site into. The only downside is that Qassia is still on beta stages and you need an invite to join. Good job i have one here http://exposedseo.qassia.com

Next on there is http://www.mixx.com which actually worked a treat for me. It is an increasingly popular Digg clone-ish where you actually stand a chance of hitting the front page. It gives you quite a bit of link juice too.

Finally there is seo friendly http://news.ycombinator.com. It reminds me of reddit. If you have tech related stories you can expect to get some very nice traffic as well as a home page backlink. (Got this resource from mixedmarket arts)

Tags: pr, serps, backlinks, promotion, pagerank, link development

So how many social bookmarking sites do you know? There are a few big ones most webmasters should be able to name like delicious (With dots). There are however a lot more that not many people know about. Yes, these sites are less popular but this also means they are less saturated. You can get some great backlinks from them. The best thing about bookmarking websites is that they let you submit multiple pages. This is excellent for deep links. Fair enough, some of these might have nofollow attributes but in my upcoming blog i will prove to you that even nofollow links still work. Anyways, back to business… Here are a few hundred bookmarking sites to get you started. When you are done don’t forget to submit to over 500 or so Digg clones. And finally to help you automate your submission process use this tool. After taking some time to register with all the sites on social marker you will be able to submit your page to around 50 social bookmarks in 15 or so minutes.

Are you wondering how well this technique works? I used to promote my adult site using this method and generated over one million unique visitors/month. But yet again sex sells and that was before the spam crackdown. However this method should still be very effective.

Every now and then i would bump into a very talented designer who knows nothing about marketing nor seo. Ironically half the time they would be sitting on a PR7 website with bucket loads of organic traffic. How is this possible? Basically everyone wants a piece of their design. Every time they release a free template tons of people download it and because each template contains a backlink in the footer, designer gets some nice linky goodness back. Now there is a reason why so many people use their designs. Because these designers can produce amazing templates. So how could an average (Not so talented) person like me and you could get a piece of the action? You may think its impossible… But you would be wrong.

Me for example. I’m a very average designer (You can have a look at some of my work in progress at Impera Victoria). There are tons of people who are much better than me. How am i suppose to compete?

1) Find an open source script that lacks free templates. For example Pligg. When there is little choice of templates your design does not have to be great to get popular. You can then either design a template yourself or hire someone to do this for you. Try here. There are tons of people you can hire to design you a quick theme. (You might want to make sure that the footer in encrypted, making it harder to remove your link)

2) Share your template on script home forum and related sites.

3) Sit back and enjoy a stream of backlinks.

Case-study:

This is exactly what i did. I found a free template i liked. I then contacted a guy who designed it and asked if i could port it for Pligg. When he gave me green light i spent a few hours porting that theme. I then started a new thread on Pligg giving away the final product. This template has only been up for grabs for 2 weeks until a new version of Pligg came out making it out of date. During that time i have managed to accumulate over 1000 backlinks (Sitewide)

So remember… When people don’t have much choice, your themes don’t have to be amazingly good.

If you don’t know already Pligg is a an open source CMS similar to Digg. Even though the script is still in beta it has become very popular. Simply look up inurl:upcoming.php + your keywords to find a whole bunch of websites running on Pligg. Pligg is Do follow and search engine friendly. However because it is still in Beta there are a few problems that make things easier for us (Actually, because i run a few Pligg sites myself it makes my life slightly harder). Most Pligg websites take a few seconds to join and don’t require email validation. It also does not seem like there is anything in place to stop you from creating multiple accounts and voting for your own story over and over again.

Depending on your ethics you can:

a) Find quality, related Pligg sites and submit a few pages from your website for some great, deep backlinks.
b) Find quality, related Pligg sites. Create a bunch of fake accounts and vote for your story until it ends up on the front page.

1) There is a nice little PR5 (Or not so little) website called Listible. It is basically a web 2.0 directory of various resources arranged in lists. These lists pretty much cover most subjects so I’m sure you can find one or two for your site and even if you don’t you can always start your own. What you do is simply find a related list and add your site to it. Easy as that! You now have a strong, related link on a (hopefully) high PR page. The good thing is that the site is actually quite popular and a good listing can also bring you a bit of traffic. Don’t stop there! Find more lists that relate to your site and plug some more of your links. Even though you should not spam (too much) it does not look like there is much stopping you on Listible.

PS: Some pages can go up to PR7. Its up to you to find them

2) Have you got a web 2.0 site? I assume most webmasters would now days… Well plug it in this web 2.0 list

3) Some of you might know what its like having your story featured on Digg’s front page. Because Digg is such a big site there are a lot of smaller sites (Especially blogs) using its feeds or content found directly on Digg. For example when a good article appears on the front page of Digg it usually gets picked up by hundreds of bloggers. As a result the featured material soon acquires a whole bunch of backlinks from around the net. Instead of targeting Digg itself try and plug your link on recently featured sites. Its could be a funny video or a blog… or even a picture from flickr. In most cases you should be able to drop a quick comment with your link in it. For example this flickr picture on the front page of Digg at the moment. I simply went on flickr and commented on this picture “Im about to blog about this picture on www.exposedseo.com” (I should have used anchor, i know). My comment is visible to a lot of people right now. Over time that flickr picture will get more people linking to it therefore giving me more linking juice.

Right then guys. It seems like i have some sort of writers block because i spent like 2 hours typing up this post. I’m having problem formulating my sentences at the moment. I think i will go to bed and continue with more tips tomorrow.

Update: That little link i posted on flickr brought me over 240 uniques within 18 hours.