The Gospel According To Rhys - Colwyn Bay North Wales Web blog About Sport, Wrestling, PHP, SEO, Social Media & Networking

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“Urgh!” was all I could manage on the phone at half past midnight on a Friday night. I had started drinking a little earlier than usual, so in the end I made myself tired and thought it was time for bed, it was, clearly. Though my rather spritely brother didn’t think so, he respected my decision, and he said “I’ll phone you back in the morning.”.

No use, I was awake, and my phone was on, so I did any Web 2.0 geek would do, update my twitter feed with the recent events.

Surprisingly, the brother responded, though in a less than meaningful fashion, suggested he too was inhebriated by the dizzy water.

I only know Rick follows me because I got an email informing so, he rarely posts, never broadcasts and has a basic knowledge of hashtags. He’s not alone, in terms of twitter, he’s in the majority, 90% of tweets is produced by 10% of users.

So why does he have an account? Simple, to follow people. His follower list is pretty much in tune with his interests (if I was writing a twitter guide for a social media business blog, I’d use a phrase such as “connecting with authoritative figures within his niche”), but whilst my list is often updated with conversations with people I like conversing with such as Peter Handley, Nichola Stott, Carly Wood, Jordan Cooper & “The Pope” D’Angelo Dinero. He just watches & occasionally says something. Often to me, sometimes to a celebrity or other “industry leader”.

Nevertheless, he’s achieved something that has been written about on some top industry blogs, he’s achieved a linkback to his twitter account from the BBC (which incidentally doesn’t look like it brings in followers). Not through being spammy or annoying, just by contributing every now and again (for those wanting to achieve a similar thing, best sport to go for is cricket, goes on for days, not many cricket fans on Twitter).

Of course, I want him to post more, but he uses it as an emergency line to me, like I’m the President of the USA & he’s Arnold Schwartzenegger. He understands twitter, but he doesn’t like making noise for the sake of making noise.

And I think I speak for all of us and say that’s a lesson we can all learn from him.

Does anybody else have friends with no posts on Twitter?

photo credit: Scintt

Arguably one of the most important ways of obtaining high search engine placement is through obtaining of links, and scouring places such as Digital Pointless you can find people willing to buy, steal or borrow links. Often they judge first on Pagerank, a little green bar within Google’s toolbar which gives every page a score out of 10. If you don’t have large pagerank, then you don’t get your link.

Often new bloggers or SEOers will take links from anywhere & occasionally they will chase unrelated, yet high page rank sites that they can put their links on. Whilst obtaining links from large sites is well worth going for, they can harm your site in the long run if you’re not careful.

My (Friends) Story

A friend of mine did his fair share of affiliate marketing, though he stayed in industries that he knew things about, one of which was football – he ran an affiliate site for football kits – shirts & shorts mainly. He did okay but he wanted to do better, and as such read up on SEO & link building. He heard that good quality links improved your site in search engines. He asked his friend, who worked in the local council to put a link to his site from a council’s page – the one in particular was the local fire safety news page, which had high page rank (around 5 or 6).

Sure enough the site had improved rankings, and improved traffic, but most of the new traffic were searching for fire safety keywords, not good. His football kit site was still new, so my only thought is that Google thought “this site appears to be about football kits, but this authority site thinks it’s about fire safety, so I’m going to say that it’s that”.

This traffic was nigh on useless, furthermore the poor chap had trouble ranking for keywords he actually did want to rank for. In the end, he gave up, the council removed the link when his friend moved on, and in the end the site was sold on.

My Thought Process

The story above happened a few years ago, I think before even the Florida update, either way I am fairly confident such a unrelated update in the search engine rankings cannot happen with one link now (ever since Googlebombs were removed), but I think that it still teaches an important lesson.

When doing link building, I will rarely search for pages with “high page rank”, instead focus on building links & connections with people I view as authoritative within niches. Often they don’t run huge pagerank of 6 or 7 blogs, instead write on sites that are around the 2 or 3 pagerank (most don’t have a clue what “page rank” is even if it hit them in the face – but they produce good content), if it’s similar area to my site, then I will try and contact them to form some sort of alliance (guest post usually), and go from there.

By all means don’t limit yourself just to your niche, and if you’re a blogger you should post outside it, but focussing on the links you’d like to attract does have a benefit SEO wise, and debatably it’s better than a high ranked, unrelated link.

The Other Benefit

Links not only can improve your standing in the search engine, but also can get you more interested individuals reading your work or viewing your site. This can help achieve what those SEOers, linkbuilders & affiliate marketers dream of – natural link building & your site going viral.

If I was one of those marketers with huge sales pages, highlighted text and testimonials which you couldn’t trust as far as you could kick em, I’d use a phrase such as “It’s my birthday, and I’m giving the way the presents!”. I’m not though. Instead I’ll just announce the winner of The Gospel According To Rhys Regifting Competition.

After drawing the result at random the winner is…Mike CJ of Mike’s Life!

Justifiably so though, as his story was quite frankly b3ta.com worthy.

“I was working with a car manufacturer at the time, and a supplier decided to give me a fresh turkey on Christmas. (No longer ethical, but in those days a common and accepted practice).

As my car was being cleaned at the time, and I didn’t want the turkey sitting in the office, I got someone to put it in the boot for me.

Later that day, the first version of a top secret new model arrived, and I got the OK to take it home for the Christmas break and check it out. I made sure my own car was safely locked in the secure garage, put the keys in my pocket and headed to my new ride.

In my excitement at the new car, I forgot all about my turkey, and when I came back from a ten day holiday, I was met by a security guy at the car park entrance.

Apparently, he had been alerted to by a foul smell coming from the boot of my car between Christmas and new year, and investigated.

He found blood dripping from the boot floor and immediately called the police.

The parking area was immediately turned into a crime scene and taped off, while forensic specialists were called to get access to the car.

Not wishing to contaminate the boot area, they entered the car by breaking a front side window, then spent some time removing the rear seats to gain access to the boot that way.

When they found the turkey, they weren’t impressed.

It was the worst gift I have ever been given.”

So congratulations Mike, I’ll drop you an email with what you want to do with the prizes, which are:-

• 2 Free Months on the Problogger.com Forums (from Erica Mueller)
• 1 Hours Private Comedy Coaching for Bloggers (from Jordan Cooper)
• 3 Months Advertising on The Gospel According To Rhys (from me)

Prizes from myself & Jordan can be kept or regifted, but to enter Jordan’s competition to win $500, you must regift the prize from Erica Mueller.

Thank you for everybody who entered!

photo credit: Ray52

Happy St David’s Day everybody! Today it is the national day of Wales. Which means that us Welshies are being proud & wearing Daffodils, eating Leeks & drinking Brains SA Gold.

Fact is, Wales is horrendously short of spammers, so if you want to be a “Black Hat” (or “het ddu”) Search Engine Optimizer (Chwilia Beiriant optimeiddio), taking advantage of some huge markets in Wales, here are some highly profitable keywords that you can effectively spam Welsh Speakers to make a fortune, and retire tomorrow:-

• Acai Berry – Aeron Acai
• Lose twenty kilograms in six weeks – colli ugain cilogram mewn chwe wythnos
• Teeth Whiten – Dannedd Gwyn
• Cheap Payday Loans – dalu benthyciadau rhad diwrnod
• online casino with two hundred pound bonus – casino ar-lein gyda dau gant bunt bonws
• Make Money Online – gwneud arian ar-lein
• Adult videos & dating – fideos oedolion a dyddio
• Viagra – Tabledi glas sy’n gwneud eich pidyn caled

Happy St David’s Day people!

Disclaimer – My Welsh is okay, but not great, and some of these were created using Google Translate, so they’re possibly a bit wrong. Feel free to put me in my place in the comment box – Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus!

One of the more interesting websites I discovered over the past few days was Flattr, a way in which “content providers” (bloggers, musicians, plugin developers) can be rewarded financially for the content they put out.

From a BBC article about the service, it says this:-

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

So where you see Digg & Tweetmeme buttons now, you may see Flattr buttons appearing. But instead of sharing content, every click you make donates some money to the creator. You choose how much you pay for the service per month, and then 90% of your cash gets split between the number of buttons you click. (so say if you have 10 clicks & you pay $10 a month, each individual click recipient gets $1).

It’s a fascinating idea, as it does seem in principle to sort out the problem when it comes to people donating (people often say they will, but the effort in doing so often puts a lot of people off), also, with this micropayments platform, if somebody knocks a doozy of a blog post out, then giving them something for it is as easy as Digging it or tweeting it.

However, a service like this needs members, which begs the question – would you sign up to receive payments? More importantly, would you sign up to give them?