Vital Pixel

Black hat Tips Used by Google to Get Big: Revealed!!!

Ok, so how could any site get big like google without using some sort of black hat tips?  One possibility is link-baiting, using titles which suggest the content contains more information than it actually does.  Like for example, a title that enthralls the reader, and aggressively persuades them to read on.  So no, i don’t have any real black hat tips that Google Used to Get Big.  I doubt anyone could tell you what google really did to get big.

Unless they tell you the truth, like;

• Google Invested a lot from the beginning
• They have good products
• They have Good Service
• They have their own building IRL!

Ok, to continue the lesson… here’s a quick comic:

In order to get really popular articles, you have to write titles that attract the reader.  If your title is as boring as mine usually are, then nobody will go on to read the rest of your post.  So whether you’re tricking someone or not, you might want to try Link-Bait!

Tags: black, black hat, black hat trick, comic, google, hat, link bait, seo, tip, tips, trick, tricks, vitalpixel, webmaster

Don’t Pay For Traffic!

Traffic that you pay for can never really be good traffic.  When I first started off in the webmaster business, I wanted to find ways to get visitors really quick, and without a lot of work.  The truth is, you’re never going to find quality visitors that way.  What you want, is people that are going to go to your site because they want to, not because they’re being paid to.

Some of you may have been to traffic exchange sites, where you leave the window open for 30 seconds, and then move on to the next website.  When you pay for traffic, you are paying for visitors to come to your site just like that!  There are also other ways that people can send you traffic, and whether they’re bots or real members, it never works out the way you want it to.  Unless you’re one of those sites that brings all of it’s visitors in from top sites, then the traffic you get to begin with doesn’t mean a thing.

One other downside to buying traffic is… google doesn’t condone it!  You could get your publisher’s account banned just for purchasing traffic.  You could lose multiple clicks, or be smart-priced… (no bueno, I’ve been there).

For quality traffic, build up your content and let SEO do its work.  A few other ways to get good traffic is to post in show off threads in forums, submit articles to digg, stumble your sites (trust me, social networking is good).  Even linking and embedding youtube videos on your site can get you some quality traffic from the linked by section underneath the video on youtube’s site.

Here’s my comic for this lesson~

Tags: account, ban, buying, google, quality, seo, traffic, visitors

DoFollow Blogs

Many people expect any blog they comment to give them a high-pr back link. The truth is, not all blogs have DoFollow activated, and that means that the link back won’t do anything for your page rank. You can find a directory of blogs that have DoFollow enabled Here. As long as the blog you’re posting on has DoFollow enabled, your link will be tracked by google, and will help to boost your SEO ratings.

There is a mozilla firefox plugin called Searchstatus which allows you to see if a blog is ‘dofollow‘ or ‘nofollow‘. The search status plugin shows much more than just if the blog you’re reading is ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’. The plugin also shows the pagerank, meta tags, link status, whois, and other stuff.

The most important feature of Search Status, is that it highlights the nofollow links in light bright pink. If the blog is DoFollow, the links won’t be highlighted.

I always leave my plugin on, because if I find any blogs that have Dofollow turned on, I can leave a comment and get a useful backlink or two. Most popular blogs have DoFollow enabled because they’ve realized the importance to other bloggers.

To Make Your Blog DoFollow:

Making your blog a DoFollow blog is probably the easiest thing you could do on your blog. All you have to do is go to semiologic and download the plugin. Once you have it downloaded you just upload it to your blog like any other and activate it from the admin control panel.

Now your links will be worth something to other bloggers!

In case anyone was wondering, I have DoFollow enabled as well.

Tags: backlinks, blog, blogging, building, dofollow, links, pagerank, PR, seo

Yahoo Buzz

What is Yahoo Buzz?:

The Web’s most remarkable stories, determined by people like you. Stories are ranked based on your votes, emails, and searches.

Yahoo Buzz is yahoo’s new social bookmarking sort of website.  Where popular articles are voted on, and publishers can get loads of burst traffic.  Unfortunately the traffic possibilities of Yahoo Buzz are very similar to that off Digg.  You must be on the front page to get a lot of hits, and the flow of traffic is cut short once your article leaves the front.  Fortunately if you wrote a good post people would be bookmarking your blog and coming back to it later.  Also, if you continue to write good posts you could be on the front page of yahoo buzz for quite a while.

The problem with yahoo buzz, is that smaller blogs don’t really have a chance to get their articles popular.  Users can either vote for an article directly from the blog the article came from, or they can find the article on yahoo buzz and vote for it there.  Usually this would mean that the smaller blogs would never get any of the traffic, but their is a possibility that a great article could be spotted and made popular.

Yahoo Buzz pulls in content from publisher partners across the Web.

You must be a partner with Yahoo Buzz in order to get your content pulled, but they don’t accept everybody.  In fact, I gave them my email adress hoping to be invited to join, but I haven’t been yet.  Maybe I won’t, do too… crappy blog posts?

Yahoo buzz also has a widget, you can put on the side of your blog.  The widget contains all of the most popular articles, so users reading your blog can click some link and go to a different blog with the popular post on it.  Not exactly something I would use on one of my blogs, but it’s nice if your article is currently featured on the widget.

Tags: blog, burst, buzz, content, digg, effect, link building, publisher, seo, traffic, yahoo, yahoo buzz

Useful Forums

Alright, I’m going to list some great forums, and what they’re useful for. (Usually pertaining to webmaster’s unless it’s one of my forums). I’ll try to list the forums in order of PR, and help you to determine which ones are good for signature links.

Signature Links are a great way to build up backlinks, and add pagerank to your websites. The higher the pr of the forum you have signature links on, and the more posts you make, the better the boost your sig link will give you. Hence you will become higher ranked in search engines, and ultimatize your SEO awesomeness.

DigitalPoint Forums: PR7
Digital point has been the most useful forum for me in my webmaster-ing career. Atleast so far that is. They have a huge member base, and all the better for receiving help. You can find tons of guides on there, searching the forums will usually give you better results than google. I definitely recommend you sign up for digitalpoint forums if you are an aspiring webmaster.

V7N: The forums are ranked at PR5
V7N is somewhat of a dying forum, but it used to be equal to digitalpoint’s greatness. It has a lot of members, but few are very active now. You are allowed to have signature links once you get 50 posts… which is somewhat of a crappy deal. Despite V7N being a dying forum, there is still quite a bit of useful information on there.

SitePoint: PR 4 (forums)
Many people use sitepoint to auction off their sites, and seek advise. Sitepoint is also a webhosting company (which i advise against).

Direct Advertisement: PR 0
Direct Advertisement is a forum built to help owners of websites, and forums (more specifically). It includes many free services for advertising websites. The more members direct advertisement has, the more potential members you get when you advertise your site there. Anyways, despite being PR0, the forum is more active than all the other sites I have listed here, other than Digitalpoint.

SEOChat: PR 4
A great forum for finding information on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), although there isn’t many people to talk to any more. Again, a good place for putting links in your signature.

I’ll probably update this list of useful forums later, if you have one that is either high PR, or high on traffic and users, or contains lots and lots of useful information. Feel free to comment on this post and I can add you to the list.

Tags: awesomeness, backlinks, forum, google, list, page, pagerank, PR, rank, resource, seo

Search Engine Traffic ~Trendy~

Ok, so my last post was basically just a test for methods of bringing in search engine traffic. I read off of some blog, that if you post about things that are being searched for a lot, you’ll get more hits. Which is actually pretty obvious if you think about it for a second.

You can go to site’s like google.com/trends and find one of the top searched terms on google for the day. After you find the top searched term, you do a bit of research about what you’ll be writing about (which takes maybe 10 minutes). Then you whip up a quick post and call it quits for the day. Searching for popular terms can usually bring you to something really easy to write about. After all, its popular for a reason right? Most likely, you’re already going to know about what you’re writing about. Maybe the horrible earthquake in China, with 900 students trapped in the rubble of a school. Or News on Yahoo turning down Microsoft, and Microsoft eventually giving up.

What your writing on will always depend on the niche of your blog though. If own a site/blog that has content on breakfast cereals, you aren’t going to want to suddenly create an article on how Britney Spears Vagina was got on camera when she got out of her car. (sorry for that reference, it was the only thing that came to mind at the moment).

Anyways, My previous post was about American Idol, clearly.. or not clearly. My blog is not about American Idol, so I’m not going to pull in a bunch of traffic from the post, and it was by no means an act of SEO genius. Alas, being the writer of a blog that just blogs about everything, I could care less what kind of genius I was showing when I made that post a few moments ago. But it spurred my mind into creating this maybe-useful guide on trendy posting.

With that tongue twister of a good-read, good as I would classify it. I do say, good night.

Good Night

Tags: adsense, american, blogging, idol, money, search, seo, terms, trendy