Pre Sell Pages - a Better Way to Rent Sitewide Links

Not a new concept to SEO or marketing here, but it is not talked about that often as compared to other linking techniques.

Instead of buying sitewide links it may be better to buy an advertising pages hosted on other sites. Link to that page from many pages on that same site (which in a sense is like pointing a sitewide link on that site at that advertising page). Link popularity flows more naturally within a domain than it does across domains.

Write the pre sell page using appropriate page title, header, and subheaders. From the pre sell page deep link to various locations on your site with descriptive anchor text.

If you make the pre sell page well and the site you are advertising on is strong enough it gives you another opportunity to rank well. In fact, if your market is exceptionally competitive the authority of the site you are advertising on may allow that page to rank even if your site is not strong enough to rank.

By placing pre sell pages you do not need to worry about getting dinged for having too many (or too high of a percentage) of sitewide links with similar anchor text.

Some people also link off to other authoritative sites on their pre sell pages to help cluster their site in with other related resources.

It is common in affiliate marketing for affiliates to host pages on their sites which warm up prospective clients prior to selling supplies on another site. If done correctly pre sell pages can have a positive effect on both conversion and SEO.

Buying Links to Ban, Discount Directory Submission, Competition Equalizer

Buying Links to Ban a Competing Site:
Rumour has it that with the latest Google update a few people have started in on this practice...buying sitewide keyword rich links to help their competitors get blacklisted...surely SEO is going to get a bit more ugly here soon ;)

Directory Submission:
150 directories for $99. Not that long ago the price was $30 so there must be decent demand.

I tried the 50 blog for $10 package for a few sites a while ago, but something about that price makes me feel like the service quality has to be limited.

Price points also help people associate a value with the service, so even if the service is decent the person doing it should charge more to make people think they are getting something of value, which generally appears not to be the case right now.

I do a good bit of directory submissions from time to time. I usually submit to about the same number of directories as that package except I do both free and paid directories. I do not mind paying for links because it means that the directory is more likely to have a functional business model and the links will not go away as quick.

Directory registration is exceptionally effective in MSN and Yahoo! right now.

Competition Equalizer:
other than having a different name what the hell does this software do that AdWords Analyzer does not? Wouldn't it have been better to release any additional AdWords related features as an upgrade to the AdWords Analyzer program?

Google Caught Cloaking, More NYC SES Review

You say Potato, I say Cloaktato:
Google caught cloaking?

More SES Coverage:
from the man with yellow shoes.

Tim Mayer at the Indexing Summit

Tim then brings up a remarkable new tagging system that Yahoo! is proposing and would like to see the other engines support. It's a method to specify the separate content blocks of a page, so the search engines don't need to conduct block-level analysis in their algorithms. The tags look like this:

<div class="content-public"> </div> - indicating the content is publicly created and not monitored by the site owner
<div class="content-nav"> </div> - indicating that this is internal navigation content for the site
<div class="content-default"> </div> - indicating that this is the primary content area of the page
Tim notes that these tags can also be applied to link attributes.

Link Building

Matt Cutts say that just because a link is shown in the link command doesn't mean it carries any weight at all

Greg Boser on Advanced Link Building

Greg calls the sandbox, the "litter box" and suggests that websites that stick out as being over-optimized will generally fall into the trap. He says that in order to bypass it, he simply builds a subdomain on an existing and well-ranking site, then 301 re-directs to the new URL. He warns against getting too granular for subdomains and says to try to use a general domain rather than a specifically themed site.

ROI Testing is a new bid management / ROI tracker tool in beta test created by MakeMeTop.

Conferences & Consuming Media: Too Much?

So right now I am up at 8 am on a Monday from the night before. I came back from SES NYC Thursday night and just got done catching up with my 100 or so blogs and half dozen or so forums I track.

While looking through blogs I noticed that I just missed the Online Social Networks conference.

Last night I just bought my ticket and Friday I will be flying out to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest interactive festival. While surfing further I noticed an overlap with O'reilly Emerging Technology conference.

From April 11-12 there is the Search Engine Meeting

From April 25-27 there is Ad Tech

From May 27th - 29th there is ThreadWatch. While there you may want to stay by for SES London on June 1st & 2nd.

From June 21th-24th there is WebmasteWorld

From June 23-25 there is Gnomedex

From August 2nd-5th there is SES San Jose

I was joking with a friend and we figured that there were about 30 conferences you should go to each year, and it seems like soon that will be the reality.

I think some people have traded in their regular jobs to be traveling salesmen / lead generation / speakers at various conferences. I can't see myself ever trying to be too much of a salesman (or a public speaker), but the conferences sure are fun and there are a ton of them.

Someone should write an ebook about working (or optimizing the output from) the conference scene ;)

What conferences do you like?

PPC Price Bubble, New Link Exchange Network, More SEO Tools

There is no PPC pricing bubble

New link exchange network. seems like a hybrid between the Digital Point's COOP link exchange network and some other link exchange sites.
What link exchange software or programs do you find useful?

More free webmaster tools. Google Dance tool and others.

ACCOONA Search Engine Review

ACCOONA gave away a car at the NYC SES show and since then I have seen multiple forum owners complain about them spamming their forums.

Even if they were not the ones doing it, the complete lack of participation in those conversations is a bad thing for their search engine.

Not to mention that the ads are in the left rail and when I clicked an organic search result link in the right rail it went through Overture. At least I had a good laugh when I saw clicking on a link to my other site sent me to this one and cost me 50 cents.

Whether or not you actively participate in communities if you are above radar people will find a way to create hate threads about you. People tend to look much more credible when they show up than when they ignore them.

You gotta wonder if the $30,000 they spent on the car and booth would have been better spent actively participating in their marketplace. Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts do.

Yahoo! Updates

Yahoo! Directory UK now free to submit to.
The Yahoo! directory now also has RSS feeds.
Yahoo! contextual ads to come? Three ways Yahoo! can beat Google in this market are transparent revenue sharing, legitimate parner quality standards, and using XML and the like to make their ad service more publisher friendly.