Yesterday, I ran into a post over at The NetFool than ran down a few Black Hat SEO Techniques. Black Hat techniques always get me thinking. Using the term "Black Hat", automatically assumes the existence of White, Gray and theoretically "No Hat" techniques.

No Hat SEO

Techniques listed under this category are about the only ones that won’t have someone calling you a spammer, black hat, or anything of the sort. It is involves using an "if you build it, they will come" technique. Sending one email to your sister about your new site would automatically eject you from this group. Play around a little and you can make specific posts come up first in your site’s own search engine. Give yourself a damn cookie.

The Upside: You are the nicest, unspammiest person on the internet. Congrats, you succeeded in pissing off no one.
The Downside: You are your only visitor to your site. But if you use proxy, you can trick yourself. But that would be black hat.

White Hat SEO

Techniques under this category involve a lot of manual typing in forms and changing the structure and content of your site. You may type the same information into each form, but as long as you are using your fingers instead of software, you are alright with most people. If you start ranking higher for another company for their product’s name, you will be called a black hat. If you can type real fast, Google will assume you are a black hat and put you in the sandbox for being aggressive.

The Upside: You are a god to the no hat’s. It’s like being the only kid on the block with a moped. Don’t fool yourself.
The Downside: You are instantly suspicious to anyone who is not an SEO.

Gray Hat SEO

Now we’re talking. Now this is where you start getting traffic and making money. And this is the best place to be. After all, black is the absence of all light. One step toward white makes you gray. There are a lot of techniques milling around in here.

The Upside: You are way past the damn labels. You don’t care about being "god" any more. In fact, with the results going into your pocket book, you would rather turn the volume down on your accomplishments a bit.
The Downside: You don’t get to scare pimpled teenagers in forums with your ominous dark fedora.

Black Hat SEO

Continuing with the definition that black is the absence of all light, you have succeeded in setting everyone’s homepage to your website, all search engine queries redirect to a page on your site, and you can retire in exactly 5 minutes.

The Upside: You are now the most sought after person on the net because you made it that way.
The Downside: Your site just crashed and everyone is getting a little spinning icon, so you can forget the retiring part.

Ass Hat SEO

You hang out at conferences. You know all the techniques. You use them to trounce newbies in forums. But you are little more than a no hat. Results. You don’t need no stinking results.

The Upside: If you can trick yourself into believing your own facade, you can boost your ego a bit.
The Downside: Look at the name, for god sakes. Your the only one who doesn’t know you’ve been labeled.

What is simply comes down to is this: if your site ranks for anything, you or your readers have used SEO with or without knowing it. Stop your bitching. Stop your labels. Just get off your ass and do what everyone else has done to build a well trafficked site. Work, move forward, do what needs to be done and let the whining babies whine. They will always find something new to cry about.

Time is money. It may be something we all agree on, but what does it really mean.

Fixed costs are nice. One of my fixed costs is hosting. When I make $4000 in a month, my hosting is $125. If I triple that, it will still cost me the same and the ROI triples.

On the other hand, PPC advertising moves with the income. If I make more through PPC this month, chances are I spent more too. Yes, I can increase ROI. But for the most part, I have to spend more money to make more. And it doesn’t help that the amount of money I spend on ads is limited by my credit.

Now there are a few campaigns that I currently have running that have not been tweaked for months. But for the most part, I have to babysit. Not much now. But if I were to increase my Adwords spending to the point it replaced all the other sources of income, I would have no time to do anything else and I would be stuck in the same rat race I am trying to remove myself from.

I ran into a similar problem with the direction my blogging was going. A post a day may be recommended for a lot of bloggers. It isn’t going to work for me any more. Don’t get me wrong, I most likely write a post or more a day, but not on every blog. And this blog, which is mainly a journal of my journey makes no real money. And I like it that way for now. I am not looking for money here yet.

Building links is like hosting and social media marketing is like PPC advertising. Both have their place, but my time is limited, so I had to work out a balance.

A link I get to a site today will most likely be there tomorrow, next month, and next year and since I know a little SEO, the traffic results of that link may be less volume than I would expect from a Stumble but the quality of that traffic will be much greater.

Don’t get me wrong. You can’t just build some links and then go take a nap for the rest of the year. But here is what I know. I made $25,000 in the last 12 months from the results of links that were already there. Not John Chow money but it beats being a 24/7 internet hustler.

And all links are not created the same. Some take more time to build. A directory links takes a minute. If you want to release software to promote a site, it’s going to take some time but that time will come back to you once the ball is rolling.

I am writing this post to beat something into my head. I have a weird relationship with money. I spend in the range of $100 in Adwords a day and have to pry my wallet open to buy software and hire people to speed up the link building process. Money spent there will free up time and possibly lower the need for so much advertising. It is basically a fixed cost. Spend the money and see the results for months or even years. You cannot say that for PPC advertising.

This has also forced a weird relationship with time. If I am doing my own grunt work because I refuse to hire someone than I am basically paying myself what I would pay the other guy to do it for me. So if I refuse to pay $10/hour, that is what I am paying myself. If I buy software that speeds up a process, than I am effectively raising my hourly rate. If a job that took 3 hours now only needs my guidance for 20 minutes, I just gave myself a 900% raise for that time period.

It’s a way to look at things and a way to start putting money and time in balance. Hopefully it works.

I lay awake at night thinking of things like this. Not long. A few minutes or so. Sometimes I get an idea when I am driving. Sometimes I write the ideas down. Sometimes I see if they will pop back up on their own. The ones that do get focus. But I always give them a little freedom. That way they can tell their friends that I am a good home. And then I wait on the friends.

Here are some random ones on SEO in general and WordPress in particular. My blog seems to have focus bands like the power band in a dirt bike, following the hats I constantly change to keep this internet machine going. Welcome to an SEO focus band. It took a few months of dealing with WordPress, but I think I’m on a roll now. I am the type of person who tears a car apart piece by piece to see how it works, puts it back together, and then goes to the manual for the technical terms to explain what I found. It takes a while, but it is well worth it and only makes your mind stronger.

Once I can write a post that covers everything blogging and fits my vision, it’s time for me to start my other blogs up, because that means all the bits and pieces of ideas came together into a blueprint. A very adaptable blueprint, because change is the only common denominator in progress, but a blueprint nonetheless. This isn’t a blueprint but it’s signs of one to come and that makes me happy.

Get a WordPress SEO Theme

Get One

• SEO WordPress Theme
• Prosense

Build One

• How to SEO Your WordPress Theme

Some WordPress SEO Plugins

• All in One SEO Pack – Set Titles and Meta Tags in your posts.
• HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many other goodies
• Dagon Sitemap Generator – Generate sitemaps for your blog
• Simple Tags – I hated the whole switchover to integrated WordPress tags. The plugin developers did a better job. Then I finally found this plugin. Sweet
• Related Posts – There are so many versions of this one that I am not even sure which I have active on my blog. But the Simple Tags plugin above has this fucntionality built it.
• Landing Sites – Not sure if this would qualify as an SEO plugin, but it takes the query from search engine hits and presents the visitor with a list of posts they may be interested in, based on that.
• Homepage Excerpts – It depends on how paranoid you are about the duplicate content penalty. It allows you to set the length of each post on your home page. On my blog, I have the whole content of the last post on the front page and excerpts of all the rest.
• One Click Installer – Not an SEO plugin, but it makes installing plugins easier.
• Permalink Redirect – Makes sure all links to a post go to the same place.
• Alinks – Helps a lot with internal linking. Automatically links keywords and phrases in  your post
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a better navigation menu (not just next and previous). Allows for deeper linking to older posts.

Random Widget Links for Varied Anchor Text

This could work for a Featured Post plugin or a Blogroll.

I looked at my blog as if it were the whole of the internet. My own little private internet here has 450 or so pages indexed by Google. That means that the links in my Featured Posts widget (which is really a Blogroll to begin with) link to the same pages with the same anchor 450 times.

Anchor text should vary. For one, it will help you rank for a bigger variety of key phrases. For another, if you don’t vary your anchor text, you could end up like John Chow.

Whether or not I have to worry about the second reason, I’m not sure. The first is good enough to have me take a look at things. I figured out two options, still using a Blogroll category as Featured Posts.

• Have a bunch of featured links. I am not sure if I have enough to do this yet. But have about 50 featured links and only display 10 at a time, using the random function and the PHP executable widget or by using this widget.
• Or if the variety of featured posts you have is limited, you could recreate the same blogroll in seperate blogroll categories but use different anchor text each time. Then, using the PHP executable widget, randomly pick one of these category sets programmatically when the page loads.
• Or do both. Mix up your anchor variety. Have random posts to prevent sitewide link issues. It should help keep visitors on your site too if you featured posts are different every time they come to your blog.

Random Anything for Longtail Phrases

I didn’t have this section in the original draft. But I thought of it while I was researching the last section. I ran into this post on random WordPress widgets. I like a little bit of randomness. I don’t think you can have everything so planned that a random seed thrown in every once and a while will totally mess things up.

A percentage of my search engine hits on every site that I have dealt with have been on subject matter I have never covered. They are the result of the different elements on the page blending together. For example, Google will pick up one word from a title on my widget and one word from a comment and one word from the title of the post itself and I will get hits for the phrase built from those three words. I get a lot of hits daily that work like this.

Can I do anything with those hits? Not when they are occurring. But I could get an idea for another post, especially since I ranked high for the phrase without trying. You can never really guess every longtail key phrase. Let randomness do it for you. You’d be amazed.

Encourage Comments

Comments add content. Content that you could not have created yourself. Encourage them in any way you can.

Use Your Google History

If you used a phrase to find something, someone else will. But this doesn’t mean you found the answer you were looking for the first try. I have received a steady stream of hits based on posts I geared around the phrases in my Google history, especially after long research session. I get a lot of "newbie" geek hits because I use less than technical language. So not knowing the correct terminology does pay off. People that do use the correct terminology probably already know about the stuff you are writing.

Conditional NoFollow for Sculpting Pagerank

Some pages on my site have higher Pagerank than others. If I wanted to funnel the Pagerank of that page and direct it like a laser to another page, I could use WordPress conditionals to nofollow almost everything on that page except the link I am funneling the Pagerank to while leaving the rest of the site dofollow. On a blog, the pages that rank high are not necessarily the ones you want to rank high. I am not sure of the feasibility of doing this on WordPress, but it’s an idea. And it works. I have used this tactic on non-Wordpress sites.

CommentLuv and "query" for Super Targeted Backlinks

If you haven’t learned this one you should. I am not talking about spamming. If you write a post on "Google Adsense", wouldn’t it be great to get a backlink with anchor text from a page that focuses on "Google Adsense". By searching Google Adsense "CommentLuv", you can find these pages. You will be getting a link back plus adding a related link to the blog you are commenting on, thus adding to the conversation.

Infrequently Updated Blogs and the Top Commenter Plugin

This I found out by accident and it probably does skate over the line a bit. If a blog gets few comments and is barely updated, it may still have some Pagerank because high Pagerank doesn’t necessarily indicate high traffic. One comment will get you a sitewide link for a while depending on how they have the plugin setup. Some change monthly. Some use "all time" top commenters. Like I said, it was an accident. I am not hunting for these blogs specifically and probably not worth the effort anyway but it’s grist for the mill.

DoFollow

I don’t really look specifically for DoFollow blogs much any more. I did at one time. But the lists and custom search engines for DoFollow blogs are not updated enough and I spent more time looking than commenting. But if I am reading a post and notice the comments are DoFollow, I do dig deeper and look for ways I can add to the material presented.

Find the flagship articles on your blog. Do a Google search using terms you think someone would be using to find your article. Find other blog posts that show for the  terms you used. Leave useful comments at these blogs. Instead of linking to your home page, link to that article.

Find the keyphrases you rank high for through your stats software. Replicate the search. See what position you are in. If it is less than #1, check if there are other blogs in the results. If so, do the same as in the paragraph above.

Keeping Your Archives Page Open While Writing

Remind yourself to link to your other posts. Just keep your archives page open in another tab. When you are done with your post, browse through your post for phrases and keywords that you can link to other posts. When I write posts in longhand, I circle the phrases because I know I have covered the subject matter before.

Silo Sites

This I have yet to look into enough to write about it, so I will direct you elsewhere. The basic concept in to break your site up into vertical topics so that post in each topic benefit from being around like posts. Great if you have a blog that covers a wide spectrum of ideas.

Silo Website Design

Silo Structure SEO and WordPress

Silo Web Design

Trackbacking Top Google Results

Okay, so you can’t rank high for the post you are going to write. But you can piggyback off of other posts. And since you just wrote something related, you should be able to contribute. So pick blogs with top Google results for the keywords you are targeting every once and while and link them from your post. Bloggers travel the blogosphere. Regular people use Google.

Optimizing Through Images

Yes, you can go this far, but you don’t have to. If you get a change, name your images with keywords related to your post. Also, do the same with the Alt tag. It takes less than a minute and could help you out.

Excerpts Instead of NoFollow for Duplicate Content Issues

Your category pages and the like duplicate the content of your blog. Google doesn’t like this. And of course, since Google owns the internet, we have to change this or else they will act like a five year old and take their search engine home. I call it an information delivery monopoly similar to what the church had before the printing press. Some say to use nofollow tags on links to these pages. Some say use excerpts of posts on these pages. I go with the second option.

NoFollow Unimportant Pages

Pages like "About Me", "Privacy Policy", and "Advertise" usually get a link from every page on your blog. They don’t need any search engine ranking. Don’t give it to them. Nofollow the suckers.

Use BloggingZoom

Not sure when this one is going to go in the Google crapper, but for now, one submission to BloggingZoom equals a backlink for each tag you use from a highly targeted page based on that tag. You can’t beat that. Now I only pick and choose. I don’t submit everything. In fact, only about 4 or 5 posts so far.  I don’t want to create a lopsided link profile that will take part of my site down when another one goes down. Time spent getting links is best spent a little a time in as many places as you can. Know of other sites like this, leave me a comment.

Don’t Try to Reinvent the Wheel

Just get to know it better. Search engine algorithms are based on sound ideas. On page, search engine algorithms are based on the way emphasis is given in a written work and off page, search engine algorithms are based on the way ideas spread through society. SEO is reverse engineering the search engines algorithm. But the algorithm itself was reverse engineered from the way we process information. Why not go to the source?

Think of your post as an article in a magazine. The main heading or title states the main idea of the article. Heading below that state the main ideas of each section. Search engines put a premium on the keywords in your H1 tags with a lowered premium on headings that are smaller. Just creating a good structure for your post is good SEO.

More WordPress SEO Tips

These were just random thoughts. Here are some more posts to take you further:

On my blog:

• Looking At Links
• Spread Your Feed
• Tools for Commenting
• Looking At Links Again
• Old School Marketing Can Help Low Traffic Bloggers

On other blogs:

• WordPress Master Class for Competitive Niches
• A Blogger’s Guide to SEO
• Optimizing WordPress Page Titles, Post Titles, and Page Slugs
• WordPress SEO

SEO as an Afterthought

I never write a post specifically for the search engines. I write without them in mind. After I am done, I go back and see how I can pump up the rankings for the post. That was just the disclaimer for any claims of me being a robot.

Some of these are utopian based on the fact you actually have the time. For me, the post is most important. After that, I use the time I have to do what I can. But it’s good to have the tools available. That was just the disclaimer for "But you didn’t do that here."

Many of these tactics can be use wrongly or artificially. That is not the point of this post. Guns don’t kill people. People do. Use your ammunition correctly and none of this could be even construed as Gray Hat. That was just the disclaimer for the fact that I didn’t used to care what hat I was wearing, but I do now.

A few of these ideas I haven’t used yet and were doomed to the notebook. I figured a post would put them to better use. That was just the disclaimer for "That won’t work."

And I am well aware that each one of these sections could have been a post. They just seemed to fit together quite nicely. And sometimes fleshing something out with filler until it’s the size of a post is not good. That was just the disclaimer for "God damn, the scroll wheel doesn’t work on my mouse." I have one at home like that.

Why final? Because I don’t think it adds much any more. This is the sixth one since I started focusing on getting traffic to this blog and I haven’t added too many new tactics, although I need to. Showing numbers is getting old.

The numbers:

The most drastic change so far. I am also #89 on the top 100 Money Making Blogs and it seems within the last week or so my Google pagerank went up from 3 to 4.

Like I said, I haven’t changed what I have been doing that much. In fact, if anything in the last couple of weeks, I haven’t been as hard lined about getting a certain amount of comments in on other blogs and my other normal daily to do list items. I think I am seeing a cumulative effect. And that is what I like about doing anything online.

There seems to be this invisible barrier you have to break through before you get to the point where you actually feel the results you get are worth the time put in. When I build affiliate sites, it seems like this too. Get links to it. Write good pages. Get more links to it. No sales yet. Keep doing the same.

Then somewhere along the way, I see results. Shortly after that point, I started getting more results than I can explain from the time put in. And then finally it is almost automated.

Of course, the parallels with blogging stop at the automated part. About as close as I can get to that is dictating posts. But I like blogging. I think it has made all of my thoughts clearer and since I have started, my affiliate income has picked up too, even though I spend less time doing it. I think it just makes me more balanced.

Some more interesting things about this update if that for months, I have been beating the search engine hits with my social and commenting activities. In other words, I was getting more hits from referring sites than from actual search engines. No so any more. I can’t beat it. My search engine hits are quickly increasing to the point that they will soon bypass everything I can do through comments and social networks. And that is a good thing. That is traffic I no longer have to hustle for.

The Last Month	The Month Before That

And I guess that is about all. Most of the techniques I have used can be seen in other traffic updates.

I had a surprise in my Entrecard dashboard today. The inbox has a feed of the last 50 people to drop a card at my site. I quickly added it to my bookmark toolbar, chose that folder and saw how long it would take Firefox to open 50 tabs by choosing "Open All in Tabs."

I have yet to write an Entrecard focused article yet, but I have noticed a few ways to speed up the process of dropping cards.

Let me say this first. Some sites I just drop cards on because I don’t have much feedback to give on any of the current posts. But a lot, I leave open, continue dropping cards and then come back and comment. I have easily been covering my quota of commenting on about ten blogs a day.

Now for the quick methods:

• Sitehoppin – An auto browser site. Jumps from one site to the next. Not sure about this one. There is an automatic mode that jumps every five seconds or so. Not really conducive to leaving comments.
• Chain Dropping – I use this most often. Open the last 10 people in your inbox, drop cards, click on their current advertisers, drop cards and repeat until you have no sites left.
• Mass site opening – I just did it with them method above. I might try again with a faster loading browser. My Firefox installation has a lot of addons.
• Use a fast loading browser – I went back to Internet Explorer or Opera a few times just for Entrecard, because, like I said, Firefox can get really slow with a lot of addons.

Blog Traffic Made Easy | SiteFever.com

John Robinson over at SiteFever has free ebook on blogging to download. You guys have got to stop releasing these things so quick. I am still in John Chow’s book. But I read things slow, so I can remember everything and do every step when its in front of me.