Who is that SEO guy?

Oudam Em is a web entrepreneur who has been making a living online since 1996. He owns and operates over 50 sites and is using this site to share tips, tools and articles related to SEO and internet marketing.

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Buy and sell links through TNX.net

January 8th, 2008 by that SEO guy

There is a great way of reaching a target audience and adding relevant advertising to your Web site. It’s all about TNX.net. Let me give you a bit more detail.

TNX.net is a relatively new but awesome text link ads system that combines benefits of contextual ad system, text link brokers and is profitable for both advertisers and publishers.

Over 31.900.00 text link ads per month and more than 38.000 webmasters involved- these numbers speak for themselves. And TNX.net is completely free to join.

Benefits of Publishers

Site owners can sell links on every page of the site, but not just the home page.
You’ll receive TNX-Points when a link is sold. To avoid irrelevant text link ads on your site -you are the one to have full control to block link ads purchase. After gaining a certain amount of TNX-Points, you have some alternatives:

· you can transfer points to another user
· you can use points to advertise your own site by purchasing links from other websites
· you can cash in points for money

The points system will probably take some time to get used to. Current price of 1,000 (one thousand) TNX-points is $0.68 - 1.36 depending on the quantity you buy (basic price is $1.36), and every week it grows by 2.8 %. If you have some referrers, you’ll gain 13.3 % commission of all TNX-points that are generated by webmaster’s websites, and 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser.

TNX.net has a low $ 5 payout that is rather convenient. And it takes only three days to process a payout. Checks, Wire, PayPal, MoneyBookers, and WebMoney are used as payment processors.

Note: Unlike other text link brokers, offering 50%, with TNX.net you will receive 75% of the sales of the ads on your site.

Benefits of Advertiser

TNX.net allows advertisers purchasing non-reciprocal links from thousands of relevant websites and gives the ability to promote hundreds of keywords with just few clicks.

You can select single page to locate your ads at. Or you just need to select the sum of text link ads. These will be placed on websites (with selected PageRank, number of Yahoo backlinks, etc) on selected category automatically. The 1000 inbound links will cost you as much as $ 1.14 that is a best buy.

You can select the category your ads will appear. Geo-targeting is also offered.

If some questions occur, they have a multi-language (English, German and Russian) live chat for support.

TNX.net
it’s worth a shot. I’ll try this system in a couple of weeks on a few of my sites to see what happens. Paying just $ 10 I’ll get my ads appearing on TNX.net’s huge network of publishers.
I like their offer for newbies so much. TNX.net network is now offering 2,000 TNX – Points on every new account. And they will credit 5,000 TNX-Points more free of charge after your website is approved.
The user interface is very user friendly. It’s possible to easily manage both advertiser and publisher accounts on one single account. And also, they say there is no more than 4 text link ads placed on each page by default, so it does not look like a link farm, thus there is no risk to get banned or penalized by search engines.

Visit TNX.net

Posted in Text Links, Website Revenues, Website Promotion | No Comments »

Thinking of setting up an affiliate program?

June 19th, 2007 by that SEO guy

Running an affiliate program can be a very cost-effective way to sell your product and service. Unlike pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing lets you pay on a per-sale or per-lead basis, eliminating click fraud and other issued associated with per-click or per-impression models. You only pay the publisher when they actually sell your product.

Here is a great piece of software to help you set up and manage your own affiliate program:

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Website Promotion | 1 Comment »

Top Ten Link Building Strategies Ver. 1.1.0

June 6th, 2007 by that SEO guy

I’m using this post to keep a running list of the top ten methods which I feel are the best strategies for building links to a website. This list is based on my own experience of building links to my sites throughout the years. It’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO, nothing is set in stone. SEO is a cat-and-mouse game, so I will revise this list from time to time as the field continues to evolve.

Please note that the order in which these methods are listed do not necessarily reflect their order of effectiveness. Some methods may work better than others for certain sites.

1. Submit to web directories

Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building campaign. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

It’s important to note that not all directory listings are equal. Listings from trusted, established directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ are more valuable than those from the thousands of others on the net. All else being equal, a link from a directory focused on your site’s niche is worth more than one from a general directories.

Submit to both free and paid directories. Free directories provide one-way links to your site with no strings attached, but they can take forever to review your link. Paid listings can be a good investment if the fees are reasonable and the pages on which your link will reside have decent PRs. Your sites will be listed with fewer competing links on paid directories.

2. Write articles and press releases

Submitting your article to directories is a highly effective way to build one-way links to your site. First, you write a thoughtful and informative article on an topic in your area of expertise. Then you submit it to article directories to be read by the general public and reprinted on other web sites. Appended to the end of your article is a “resource box” which contain links to your site and email address.

While there are hundreds or even thousands of article directories on the web, you should focus on writing a high quality article and submitting to a handful of the more popular ones. Having your article published on a top directory can be worth more than a hundred less reputable ones. If you write something that people find useful, they may pick it up and reprint it on their blogs, newsletters, etc. This is how a quality article propagates virally in cyberspace– it virtually distributes itself without your having to manually submit to a thousand article directories.

3. Exchange links with related sites

Online forums like Digitalpoint are an excellent place to find reciprocal linking partners. Avoid sending out spammy e-mail solicitations like those generated by many SEO software programs. I get dozens of these everyday.

4. Make use of social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites help bring together internet users from every corner of the world into a virtual global village. Submitting content to sites like Digg.com, YouTube.com and Del.icio.us can bring lots of visitors in a hurry.

It’s important to understand that sites like Digg and YouTube are not necessarily shock sites. Although there is some publicity to be gained from the shock value of an article or video, one must not resort to tasteless and offensive materials to gain attention. There is only so much value in the attention gotten by being the village idiot.

5. Buy text links on other sites

Although link buying is somewhat an unnatural way to build links, it may be the only way to increase your link popularity if your site is not unique or interesting enough to get people to link to you on their own. Most commercial sites fall into this category.

You should buy links in a way that simulates natural linking as much as possible. Buy text links from sites that are related to yours. Vary anchor texts and descriptions. Buy links from internal as well as home pages. Buy links from both high- and low-PR sites (which can be gotten at a bargain prices).

6. Participate in online forums

Sharing knowledge can be a very powerful way to establish your online presence and credibility. If you check your backlinks on search engines like Google and Yahoo!, you may notice that a number of them come from the signatures of forum posts– that is, if you post in forums. Most forums allow signature links. I don’t participate in forums that don’t as allowing them is the least the forums can do to compensate me for contributing to their contents.

7. Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours

This often overlooked strategy can be a great source of “natural” one-way inbound links. I have gotten many of my links this way. The days are long gone when all you had to do to get people to link to you was to have a decent website out there. Nowadays you have to be more proactive by approaching other webmasters and asking them to link to you.

Do a search on Google on the keywords that you want to target. Visit the sites on the first few pages of the search results to see if they link to other sites (look for “links” or “resources” pages). Then write to the ones that you think might be interested in linking to your site. If your site is seen as a complement rather than a direct competitor to the site you want to be linked from, you stand a higher chance of getting a positive response.

8. Ask vendors and clients to link to your site

I once bought a $350 script package and asked my vendor if they could feature my site as site made with their script. They obliged and gave me a PR7 text link from their site. Since the link is worth at least $40 a month, my initial investement for the script has paid for itself many times over. Besides the SEO benefits, it is responsible for thousands of visitors to my site a month through direct clicks. The moral of the story: don’t be afraid to ask. The worse that could happen is that they say “no”.

9. Blogging

Setting up a blog is a no-brainer. Even if you’ve no web designing experience whatsoever, you have a blog up and running in no time. Blogs allows for a more informal setting to get your words across. So, it’s much easier to write a blog entry than an article to submit to article directories. Use your blog to share knowledge, voice opinions, connect with others with similar interests, and of course, to link to your other sites.

Avoid spamming blog networks like Blogger and MySpace. These spam blogs (”splogs”) are a waste of time as they will not get much attention from people and will yield little, if any, SEO benefits. Write about something you know and have a genuine interest in. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

10. Content is king

Yes, content is still king. In fact, content is by far the most important of the ten strategies I’ve mentioned. Having fresh, unique, engaging content is an excellent way to attract natural linking from other sites. This is the type of links that search engines like.

You may have heard of the buzz phrase, link-baiting, that is being tossed around in the SEO community nowadays. The idea is to get others to link to you voluntarily, perhaps by causing some type of sensation or controversy on YouTube, Digg, the message boards, or whatever. Link-baiting, in my opinion, is no more than a new play on the old “content is king” mantra.

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Honorable Mentions:

(These are the strategies that didn’t quite make the Top Ten list but are nevertheless deserving of consideration. Some of them may at one point have been in the top ten but had since been removed to make room for a new one.)

Write testimonials and reviews

Writing a glowing review about a product or service and submitting to your vendor or service provider can give you a very high quality link back to your site. But this strategy can prove time-consuming as many vendors publish only a handful of testimonials from their customers. Don’t waste your time by sending a testimonial to a vendor who does not have a “Testimonials” page on their site. When submitting a review or testimonial, don’t forget to mention to your vendor that they should be feel free to publish your comments on their site (along with a link to your site).

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Top Ten List Change Log:

v.1.0.1 (07/05/11) Minor edit

v.1.0.5 (07/05/16) Moderate edit

v.1.1.0 (07/06/06) Strategy #7, “Write testimonials and reviews” replaced with “Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours”. “Testimonials” moved to “Honorable Mentions”.

Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging/RSS, Website Promotion, SEO | No Comments »

Bid Directories: An Exciting New Way to Buy Text Links

May 31st, 2007 by that SEO guy

Bid-for-position web directories, or simply “bid directories”, are an exciting new way to buy text links. As the name suggests these directories allow site owners and visitors to bid for a higher position in the listings. Traditional web directories, by contrast, list links by some predetermined criterion, such as alphabetical order, Google PageRank, listing date, and so on. Bid directories allow people not only to bid for a top position but also to increase their bids as needed to maintain the position.

Why buy text links? A site without links is like a business in the middle of nowhere. Links are the electronic roads that connects your site with the rest of the world. If “location, location, location” is the mantra for a building a successful brick-and-mortar business, then “links, links, links” should be one for a successful website. Besides being a source for direct traffic, text links help drive traffic to a site indirectly by increasing a site’s rankings in search engine results.

Although natural links, i.e. links placed voluntarily by other webmasters to your site, are preferable to purchased ones, it may not be practical to rely on natural links alone, especially for commercial sites competing countless others offering similar products and services. Unless your site is truly unique and useful to people, a category to which most sites do not belong, buying links may be your best option to increase your link popularity.

The rules for buying text links on bid directories are similar to those on other sites. Simply put, you should buy links in a way that simulates natural linking. Your link profile looks more natural when your inbound links come from directories with a range of Google PageRanks (PR). Although there is natural tendency to target only high-PR directories, a link on a promising new bid directory, which may or may not have a PageRank, can be a good investment down the line. Besides, PR means nothing to other search engines, including Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL.

Perhaps the most important factor for deciding whether or not to buy a link on a certain bid directory is how aggressively it is marketed. The first question to ask is, how many other sites link to the directory in question? But marketing goes beyond the sheer number of inbound links. The next question to ask is, where are the links are coming from? You can get an idea of a site’s link profile by querying “link:www.domainofinterest.com” (without the quotes) on Yahoo!. While inbound links from competing bid directories is certainly one way to build links to the directory, it should not be the only way. The directory’s links look more natural when they come from diverse sources, including article directories, social bookmarking sites, blogs, and forums.

The Google PageRank of a directory is often a good indicator of how aggressively it is marketed, but PR could also be one of deception. For instance, an unscrupulous webmaster might replace the content of an existing PR-7 site with a potentially more lucrative bid directory and market it as a “PR-7 bid directory”. A tell-tale sign that this has occured is when the domain name of the directory has nothing to do with web directories or search engines. Another good sign is when its category subpages are PR-0 or do not have PRs at all. That is not even to mention the many ways bogus PRs might be obtained.

Most bid directories are made from commercially available scripts customized to the siteowners’ tastes. The level of customization is indicative of the directory owner’s effort to stand out from the crowd and often their commitment to do whatever it takes to make their site succeed. So, all else being equal, it’s better to go with a bid directory with a highly customized design than one that looks like a hundred others.

Many bid directories categorize links alphabetically by the first letters of their titles, as a telephone book lists people’s names. These directories are not particularly useful to visitors looking for sites on a particular topic, say gardening. Visitors should not have to click on every letter from A through Z to find sites pertaining to gardening. Considerable time would be saved if the sites were categorized by topic, e.g. “Home and Garden”, rather than the first letter of their titles. More importantly, links that are grouped with others of similar content are viewed as more relevant by the search engines than those grouped with unrelated sites. As an advertiser, you’ll get more for your money from a directory that sifts sites into topical categories than one that uses alphabetical categories– all else being equal.

Let me end this article with a word of caution. While bid directories should be a part of your link building campaign, don’t put all your eggs in one basket by relying too heavily on them. There is a bit of a novelty factor in bid directories, and no one knows whether they will set a new trend in advertising or eventually die down as another fad.

About the Author:
Oudam is the webmaster of www.Top15Links.com, a bid-for-position web directory that allow site owners and visitors to bid for one of the top 15 position in each category. The top 15 links of all categories are prominently displayed on the home page. Top15Links.com employs a winning marketing strategy whereby 80% of all revenues generated from the site is put back into promoting it.

Posted in Website Promotion, SEO | No Comments »

Internet Marketing - 5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Site

February 21st, 2007 by that SEO guy

Internet marketing involves more than getting traffic to your site. Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest impact. The following five actions you can take to improve your Internet marketing and Web site are simple and often over looked when creating or marketing a site.

1) Create a unique 404 error page.

What is a 404 error page? It’s the page you see when someone clicks on a broken link or a page that has been renamed. When that happens the site visitor will see a standard page that simply tells you the page is no longer available. It has no thrills, no other links, no branding and above all, very little helpful information.

The page usually starts off with these words:

The page cannot be found.
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Internet Marketing, Website Promotion | No Comments »

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