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Posts Tagged ‘backlinking’

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UniqueArticleWizard.com Review: How UAW Increased Traffic 40% On An Established Website

In Uncategorized on March 2, 2011 at 5:31 pm

Quick background: Unique Article Wizard, or UAW for short, is a monthly membership site that takes articles you create or pay someone to create (they now offer that service too) and distributes “unique” versions of that article to hundreds of websites based on the category of the given article.

Though some people claim to get traffic directly from the articles themselves I have seen no evidence of this in any substantial matter, certainly no more than what you would get from EzineArticles, which is meager fair enough. Instead, I have used UniqueArticleWizard as a strategy for building links to boost rank in Google’s search engine results pages (serps for short), thereby indirectly bringing in traffic.

Basically, you send out an article, and then immediately get an incoming link from every website that accepts your article, and since Google relies on link popularity it counts all of these new pages on tons of websites as “unique” pages that are linking to your content and thus indicating that it is more important for eyeballs on the web.

As I mentioned in briefly in my recent post entitled “Zeroing In On Backlinking with Unique Article Wizard,” I have recently really been going the extra mile to drop all other projects not consisting of using UAW and go “full-tilt” so to speak on backlinking with this tool to really get a feel for what kind of results can be achieved. If I’m going to pay the membership fee I might as well really get a feel for it, right?

I’ve established three different experimental backlinking scenarios, only one of which I’ll talk about in this post since I feel it is the most meaningful:

  • Backlinking an older (years), established retail website that is already experiencing a significant degree of success.
  • Backlinking a newish website that has an extraordinarily large number of pages, but very little search traffic.
  • HEAVILY (and I do mean heavily) backlinking a brand new website receiving zero traffic that is in a challenging niche in an attempt to “break through.”

The website I’ve chosen to discuss in this post is several years old, has a couple of thousand pages, and I used UAW submissions to systematically backlink the top 100 of them with varying anchor text. In total, about 30 articles were submitted on a wide variety of subjects not necessarily pertaining to the actual subject matter of the retail website.

Unique Article Wizard Search Traffic Stats
The annotations at the bottom of the graph denote the period of time I was still writing, and submitting new articles daily to UAW.

There’s a few interesting things to note here. The page that experienced this jump was already receiving well over 300 visits a day strictly from search engines. A nearly 40% change on a website receiving 10 visits a day is not that notable, however, a jump of this magnitude on a website that’s well established is.

The other experimental scenarios did reveal some interesting things as well, however, I will save that discussion for a future post. If you enjoyed this post, or are looking to use UniqueArticleWizard.com, I would like to take a moment to point out that the links in the preceding paragraphs to the UAW website are, in fact, affiliate. Despite this, I can assure you that the results in this review on uniquearticlewizard’s effectiveness are in fact, genuine, and I believe show that this service is worthwhile as a tool for traffic building via article marketing.

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Zeroing In On Backlinking with Unique Article Wizard

In Uncategorized on February 12, 2011 at 9:28 pm

Recently I’ve been really cutting out a lot of the noise. I took about a month off from facebook with a few small exceptions, completely dropped all Reddit browsing, and pretty much scaled back a lot of my normal leisure activities. I included ordinary blogging as one of those activities to be scaled back.

Despite the fact that daily blogging recently had showed me some really great results (read 1 Post A Day For 61 Days), as much as it pained me to do this, I abruptly stopped posting in preference for generating articles, and posting them on numerous article directories.

I used Unique Article Wizard, which is a monthly subscription service, to also distribute them more widely than just Ezinearticles.

I’ve had success on most sites I’ve worked with in local niches just submitting 2 or 3, but I really wanted to go full tilt on this one and submitted around 30 articles for one successful website I haven’t done any backlinking on in a few years, as well as another which is brand new and I’m trying to break into an already competitive niche.

So far I’ve seen a 15% increase in traffic on the established site (it’s been less than a month since my last article went out, and the traffic was originally pulling about 400-500 qualified visitors a day), and a larger increase with the new site (proportionally).

The cool thing is, actually, since every article I submitted could have two links, I slipped in links to every site in my possession. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve seen an increase across the board on every single site I own.

I expect to see some really compelling results in the coming months, which I’ll report back here.

Maybe.

I might just post travel pictures, instead, and leave you to infer things. By the way, that Unique Article Wizard I posted is affiliate. If you’re thinking of signing up… Give me some love.

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1 Post A Day for 61 Days = SEO Awesomeness

In Uncategorized on December 5, 2010 at 2:39 am

I’ve had a blog (not referring to this one) that’s been floating around for years. I’ve backlinked it previously to some degree, and it’s had a steady flow of traffic probably floating around 80 visitors a day for several years. Up until recently I had neglected it, mostly because I didn’t have time for it.

But recently I’ve taken to updating it again. Instead of necessarily posting very large articles, I mostly took snippets from interesting articles I had read, shove them in a blockquote, throw a “via” link on the end, and maybe a few sentences of commentary.

61 Days. 61 Posts.

Nothing big, but I basically went from posting virtually nothing on the blog and letting it coast off of it’s own steam, to suddenly a flurry of virtually daily blog posts since October 2nd. Today is December 4th, and since October 2nd I’ve posted approximately 61 short blog posts. Incidentally, it’s been 61 days (unless I miss counted). The fact that the numbers come out at exactly 1 blog post per day is simply a strange, cool coincidence that occurred entirely by accident.

In the several months prior to this 61 days I posted roughly once per month, and in the middle of the 61 day period I bumped a single, spun article out to a mass article distribution service for backlinks.

Results: A 35.86% Traffic Jump

The results are in. Basically, I compared the last week’s worth of traffic — starting at December 4th backward — (a total of 846 visits) to the traffic that was flowing in during the week prior to the beginning of the blog binge (a total of 608 visits). That’s a 35.86% increase.

It’s important to note that this traffic is traffic *exclusively* from search engines. On Google Analytics that report can be accessed via Traffic Sources > Search Engines. The reason I used this report, obviously, as opposed to the general traffic is it removes other variables like the absence or presence of a few facebook share visits. The only thing I’m interested in is what the *search engine* effects were from this result. Not unrelated viral traffic.

One of the other really cool elements of this experiment is ultimately I was really only taking a previous behavior I had — obsessively social bookmarking — and instead channeling that same energy into simply publishing it on my blog instead of delicious. So we’re not talking a lot of extra energy here: I’d definitely put this in the behavioral hack department.

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Article Marketing Increases Speed of Google Indexing

In Uncategorized on July 24, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Whenever I start doing search engine optimization work on any new website I try my best to get a few different forms of analytics setup (such as Google Analytics, and the awesome KPMRS) and start making good notes early on. This can help me refine and narrow down what techniques yield the most quickly.

Today I checked on a website I had started a drip distribution of spun articles on ~24 days ago and was surprised at the robustness of the results. Not so much that the website is pulling heavy traffic — it’s not. More so that the articles so rapidly helped the site go from getting virtually zero traffic from search engines, to at least getting some minor traffic. The graph really shows the difference! See below:

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Linkbait and the Incredibly Virality of Infographics

In Uncategorized on July 16, 2010 at 1:12 am

An interesting phenomenon in some of the popular social news aggregators like Reddit, and Digg is the appearance of infographics. Well-designed infographics are like crack to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon users. (Actually, while StumbleUpon is not my expertise — perhaps this is even more true of StumbleUpon since pictures do well over there). Basically the formula is interesting facts + visually stunning digital art = viral insanity.

To illustrate this point I’m going to share a number of infographics, which also serves to familiarize you in the overall format and common themes.

  1. A friend of mine put this infographic together – 12 facts about bottled water (PIC) – 2,190 Reddit votes. Bonus: This one has very thorough criticism by the Reddit community, despite being so successful.
  2. Striking Infographic: Tallest Mountains to Deepest Trench (Gives good sense of Deepwater Horizon drilling depth) – 1,618 Reddit votes. This one got posted and was successful, twice (with the second post getting ~280 votes)
  3. how to spot a concealed weapon. Infographic – 710 Reddit Votes.
  4. Which Health Supplements Are Backed by Science?[Infographic] – 1078 Reddit Votes. This one also, interestingly enough, had another interactive, presumably flash based version which I didn’t see on the front page — though it may have also hit. It occurs to me that the links in the comments to the other versions may have also been placed there by someone who knew the content producer.
  5. 1 Pixel = 1 Million Dollars. [Infographic] – 811 Reddit Votes.
  6. Music sales on different media types. [Infographic] – 322 Reddit Votes. This one was produced by the New York Times. Cool.
  7. Europes Web of Debt [Infographic] – 325 Reddit Votes
  8. How to predict the weather (Infographic) – 434 Reddit Votes

One of the more salient features that seem to be important that I notice is that data is represented graphically to scale at every opportunity. Another is that on many sites (the smart ones) they offer the opportunity to put the infographic on your own site, so long as you use the code they provide you, which then links to their site — hence, the term linkbait.

Anything with more than 600 votes is like… insane on fire, and almost certainly means it exploded on at least one other major site. Above 1,000 is beyond my knowledge with the exception of rumored sick level of virality (i.e. 100,000+ unique visitors — never seen this level personally). Often times things pertaining to important global events is what can rock these huge numbers. I’ve heard Twitter trending topics is another good place for ideas.

Make sure to also read my post describing the aftermath of a Digg front page hit. … and also check out The Oatmeal — a popular webcomic that launched his career largely via websites like Digg and Reddit. He’s since gone on national TV, published a comic book, and also been hired by Reddit for illustrations.

Update: I ran across this page giving infographic design tips and examples! Check it out!

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Google Maps Local Business Listings

In Uncategorized on June 17, 2010 at 5:48 pm

I’ve been reading WarriorForum posts and started noticing a common theme for suggestions on how to penetrate the top “Google Places” spots in relevant searches.

Most of them center around three main points:

  1. Getting them more customer reviews by asking customers for reviews.
  2. Adding  multiple forms of media  to them (videos, pictures, etc.)
  3. Backlinking them with appropriate keyword specific anchor text.

I have not attempted to boost a Google Places ranking before, but I bet that most people do well without getting them thoroughly backlinked — but I bet it couldn’t hurt! All three ideas sound on target, because there really aren’t many more variables to manipulate other than those, to be honest.

By the way, if you’re interested in searching internet marketing forum posts I’ve setup a special google configured to just such a task! We’ll call this the SEO Search Engine. These forums are where I go to feel out new areas of theory for SEO, and I find the best way to navigate them is by using google to search through them!

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What is Google Pagerank? Is it important?

In Uncategorized on June 5, 2010 at 6:48 am

Google Pagerank is a score ranging from 0 to 10 given by Google and can be viewed from their toolbar, or my personal favorite, with a Firefox Plugin called Quirk SearchStatus. In addition to showing Google Pagerank Quirk SearchStatus also shows Alexa rank (not that useful) and highlights nofollow links (very useful – see my backlinking tips post). Alternatively, if you’re wanting to do a quick check you can also find out Google Pagerank via this website.

Using Paid Links for PageRank Score Boosting

Some people will sell links from high Google Pagerank pages, and this can boost pagerank, but I would strongly discourage this practice. In my personal experience artificially propping up a websites google pagerank score by what is often a link derived from an otherwise unrelated webpage does not seem to offer significant advantages in search engine results pages (serps). Not only that, but it’s also inviting trouble from Google if you get caught purchasing links.

Google PageRank Score Correlative with Good Serp Listings, but Often Not Causal

That being said, I have noticed pagerank often being correlated with a sites overall health and visibility in search engines. I believe it is actually MORE valuable to have a large number of pages with a decent pagerank than a few with a very large Google Pagerank score and many with a significant drop off.

“Deep-linking” Subpages Is Key

This former configuration appears to ultimately result in more organic search rankings and ultimately traffic as a whole, and is a product of good off-site SEO or backlink building practices. This can be achieved by getting links from a number of means such as: directory submissions of various types, so-called “social bookmarking”, and going to the hot or popular section frequently on popular web2.0 social media destinations with a high pagerank.

The key here is that more than just your website’s homepage is being backlinked, but that there are many subpages, ideally each focused on their own niche keywords which they are each individually well backlinked for. This style of linking reflects what would often occur entirely “organically” or naturally on each new post on a popular site which has visitors that read, value and enjoy the content, and then link to each post as its presented to the public. If you don’t already have a popular enough blog that your visitors give your high quality posts (“linkbait”) automatically, then you can also simulate the same experience for search engines in a true fake it until you make it fashion by ensuring that each and every “linkbait” post you  produce are targetted for appropriate keywords and then backlinked. I have several good backlinking rules of thumb that can be used consistently to produce good results, and increase your Google Pagerank, and consequently actual rank in search engine results pages (serps) as well.

Read more about the Google PageRank algorithm on Wikipedia.

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