problogger philippines

Buying & Selling Links

Should you really buy links? This is a raging debate among professional bloggers and SEO practitioners since the act of “giving a link” used to simply be a passge of information. However, Google’s Pagerank and system itself is highly dependent on links to and from several sites across the web. The way their system works has led to the assumption that linking as a form of business is bad or at least unethical, something countered by other prominent people on the web.

Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed this issue last year on his weblog, suggesting that Google is not particularly happy with the practice of buying and selling links. Threadwatch’s Nick Wilson (now with Performancing) found it rather arrogant that google would tell publishers how to do business and operate their sites.

My take? Buying and selling text links works in a moderated situation. You should never sell links on your site to “bad neighborhoods,” or resources that are dubious or do not provide value to your reader base. Buying links on other sites is a personal call, but one I’d rather avoid if possible. In fact, I haven’t done this for my sites at all.

Business Commentary Links

Business blogging

Post author By markku
Post date June 15, 2006

These days, every business sector is busy jumping on the blogging bandwagon armed with overflowing enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some are clueless about the medium, and their excitement causes them to break some common rules on weblog ethics. Before you enter the business blogging atmosphere, remember these 10 things.

Business blogging can be very effective if done the right way.

News Optimization Traffic Building

Isulong SEOPH!

SEO Philippines last week launched a keyword ranking contest open to everyone. The keyword for the competition is “isulong seoph,” without the quotes. Whoever is on top of the google.com.ph search results on the night of September 29, 2006 wins a hefty sum, with the prizes at stake currently totalling 130 thousand pesos.

As early as minutes after the announcement of the contest, domains with the relevant keywords were selling like hotcakes. I was able to get isulongseoph.net, which is currently ranked at number one on the google SERPs. However, the next few weeks should prove to be very exciting as most of the participants are employing various strategies to grab the highly coveted top spot. Keep yourself tuned!

Commentary Links Optimization Traffic Building

Conversational traffic

Blogging can be a very daunting task especially when your efforts does not translate to visits, inbound links, and comments. Fortunately, one very effective way to build traffic is through interaction. And by interaction, it usually means through comments. And if you can’t get people to comment, might as well comment and interact with blogs of the same topic. Amy Gahran discusses this further in her article, “Strategic Commenting: No blog is an island.”

Personally, this is a tried–and–tested method to increase the visibility of your weblog, one that I employed successfully on my personal weblog. Read on.

Commentary Writing

Blogging: A Personal Touch

These days, everyone is blogging we hardly realize we have crossed all possible definitions of the term. Back in the days, we would even argue if a site is indeed a blog, or not. The past year or two has definitely changed the way we see blogs, as they have been used now for almost every conceivable purpose: music, photos, even porn.

We need to be reminded that blogging used to be synonymous with personal journals. This is exactly how they are used in livejournal, multiply, myspace, and friendster blogs.

I found two recent articles relevant to this discussion: “Why Emotion Matters” and “Being Three-Dimensional.”

The first one puts emphasis on the difference the storytelling makes. It’s not always how successful or how lucky you are, but sometimes it’s just about the journey you are taking. Tell a better story.

The second article on being three–dimensional is a discussion of how blogs are written. Many of us blogging for profit have forgotten the personal side of the practice, churning out lifeless and impersonal articles every single day. We paraphrase and comment on what others have written, or are selling, or whatever they have on their blogs, but we fail in relating it to our daily lives. Blogging should not take away the fun, and expectedly it also means including a little bit of you, the writer, in the stories that you tell. After all, it’s supposed to be your story.

Links Optimization PageRank Problogging Tools

Visual PageRank

Google’s PageRank has always been dependent on the inter–relation of sites, pages, and links. To summarize it bluntly, links to a page determine its level of authority, in an ideal world wide web.

Checking changes in your PageRank would generally show very little variation across several weeks. You need to manage links to and from your site’s pages, and know their PR values as well. Using this visual pagerank tool, the PR of your outgoing links are displayed right in your pages — very useful for seeing how valuable are the pages you’re linking to.

Links Optimization PageRank Problogging Tools

Monitor Your PageRank

Post author By markku
Post date April 20, 2006

Your site’s pagerank directly affects the relevance and readership statistics, an important metric that separates your pages from the rest of the other pages competing for the same keywords.

There are several things you can do to optimize your site for better pagerank, but you need to have an idea what your PR is across all Google data centers. With PageRank Watch, you can check for PR growth or decline from a simple form. This is an essential problogger tool.

Links Writing

The write time

Post author By markku
Post date April 14, 2006

No, that’s not a grammatical error. Some of the better entries in the blogosphere have been written without getting noticed just because of one thing — bad timing.

You cannot write a movie review a year after the movie was shown, unless maybe a sequel is upcoming or interest has been revived for some other magical reason. Write and then publish when your readers can notice what you’ve said. Publish at the right time.