1. Problogger on Linkbait
   
2. Jim on Linkbait
3. Cornwall SEO on Linkbait
4. Smashing Magazine on Linkbait
5. Search Engine Journal on Linkbaiting

So once you get an idea of how to linkbait, you’ll want to start with the smaller social bookmarking sites like Mixx, Phinn, Plugg, and all of those niche little guys.

Then when you’ve got a couple of homeruns under your belt, enter into the Digg, Delicious, etc world and start really grabbing some links.

-Brad

photo credit: Phil Romans

-Take any niche you are trying to capture.  For instance, let’s say you want to get some long tail keywords in the “Acoustic Guitar with Steel Strings in Georgia” realm…

-Then what you would do is do some searches for “Guitars”, “Acoustic Guitars”, or “Georgia Guitars” or some sort of broad search that is going to come up with some pretty good results for polished sites…

-Write up the webmasters of the sites you find and see if you blog about them, or write about them, or help them out in some way, if they would link to you.

-Rinse, wash, repeat.  And make sure not to do it so fast that it is impersonal.

Then I started seeing “Ultimate Tag Warrior” on lists of Top 10 Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress over and over and over. So I decided to do a little test and see how Tags worked.

In my experience, there are a few clear benefits to using Tags on a blog (and likely regular websites also). They are:

1. I don’t know if anyone actually uses technorati to do anything other than egosurfing, but if they did, using tags would get your site listed in websites like this that syndicate content based on tags.
2. Tags help you to get a bunch more pages. It’s also really easy to optimize your site for a whole number of terms just by making them a tag. For instance, take a look at my tag page on “SEO” here. The title tag, meta-description, H1 tag, and everything is optimized for SEO. My Wordpress install automatically optimizes my tag pages for the tag I’m using and makes them each a unique landing page. So yesterday when I started using the term Engagement Optimization I also created a tag page just by making Engagement Optimization a tag on the EO post. So in markets that aren’t all that competitive, you can pick up some serious long-tail searches by being abundant with your use of tags.
3. Tags are better for User Experience. People just like tag clouds and all of that. Tag Clouds give a better impression of your subject matter than simply a list of categories.
4. Tags are future-proofing. Who knows what the next big Web 2.0 thing is going to be. Digg, Delicious, Stumble-Upon, all of these sites weren’t anything a couple of years ago. Maybe the next thing will be based on tags, and having already tagged all of your posts will give you a competitive edge.

Do you have any experiences with tagging that you would like to share? Check out our comments section.

Also, if you want help integrating Ultimate Tag Warrior into your blog, and want to have UTW hacked to boost the SEO value of your tags, I’d be happy to help with that. Just contact me here.

So this naturally got me asking, “What’s Engagement Optimization?”

The bad news is, I don’t have a great answer for ya.  It seems that the closest thing that came up on Google was “Septic Engagement Optimization” which had something to do with sewers.

The good news is, this is exactly the phrase that I’ve been looking for the explain what SEO should be about.  “Engagement Optimization”  (EO?) is a wonderful term to encompass the process of courting your traffic.  Let’s face it- the reason you are doing Search Engine Optimization is to get traffic.  But just getting the traffic to show up at your site isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of this gig.  In the end, your job is to lead people to take an action.  Hell, we can likely narrow the definition even more than that… the purpose of an SEO could be said to be…

An SEO makes solutions for searchers available more quickly, easily, and comfortably.

When you think of SEO this way, it makes the idea of Engagement Optimization all that much more interesting.  Engagement Optimization might lead you to ask questions like this about the sites you promote:

• What pieces of this site serve no purpose and detract from the user’s experience?
• Does my writing suck so bad I should hire someone to improve the user’s experience
• Who would be engaged by this site that I’m not marketing to?
• Does this site actually offer what I’m optimizing for?

I’m going to let this idea linger for a while before trying to answer any of these questions for myself… but for those of you know are into domaining, you’ll be dissapointed to know that I just snagged www.engagementoptimization.com.  It’s a good day!

-Brad 

How to Cheat Yahoo Answers:

Your answer (and your link) will get a more prominent position on the page if it is chosen as the best answer.  Most answers rarely get any votes.  So you can go in and vote your answer to be the best and usually 1 vote will win for you.

Thanks, Brad

1. Scoreboard Media - A broader perspective on developing an audience.  Awesome.
   
2. Tropical SEO - Andy Hagans.. very bright guy with some good thoughts on leveraging Social Media
3. SEO by the Sea - More technical than the others, but also very good.
4. Blue Hat SEO - Some nutty ideas (that work) with a great post about how you can make $100/day if you put in the work

Have a great Sunday…

-Brad 

As long as you don’t have any catastrophes in your code, chances are Google can get through your code and figure out what’s going on. Now that’s not to say that having good formatting on your page won’t make a difference, but most On-Page SEO Optimization is mostly ways to get all of your pages fully indexed and making sure that the SE’s know what you are talking about.

So the point of this little article is about getting your site or blog fully indexed. Cause you can’t rank for a page that Google doesn’t know about.

How To Get Site or Blog Fully Indexed:

1. First you’ve got to find out what pages ARE actually indexed. Run this little query in Google: “site:www.yourdomain.com” and take inventory of what pages are indexed already in your site.
2. If you have NO pages indexed, you might have bigger problems than the scope of this article is intended to handle. Unless your site or blog is brand new, in which case you’ll just have to be patient. If your site is more than 30 days old and still has not been indexed by google (see step 1 to see if you are indexed or not) then you prolly have a different problem that could be really easy to fix. Contant me or leave a comment in the comment box and I can take a look at your site for you.
3. Have a sitemap and link to it from every page: This is kinda the index cure-all. Read more about this here.
4. Go postal on your Splash Page: If you, heaven forbid, still have a splash page, you need to get rid of that shit ASAP. A) Nobody wants to see your flash intro and B) When people link to your main page, all that link juice is getting squandered.
5. Put links to your favorite content on the homepage: Usually a homepage has the most LinkJuice on your site, so put links to your favorite content on the homepage.
6. Have Unique Titles and Content on each page: Google won’t index all of your pages if they’re all the same. Some blogs or websites are setup so that they spitout the same title for each page. That’s no good.
7. Even after following all of these guidelines, your site might still not get fully indexed… and heres why:

Sometimes even websites or blogs with good coding and on-page optimization won’t get fully indexed. That certainly has been the case with a bunch of my sites in the past.  What was the problem?  Not enough linkjuice pointed at your site.

LinkJuice Flow Picture:

When it comes to indexing, I try to think of linkjuice as actual juice.  So in this case, each link pointing at your site is like adding a bit of juice to the funnel at the top.  The more links and linkjuice and pagerank linking TO your site, the more juice gets poured into the funnel at the top (see the image above.)

Now you take all the juice poured into your homepage for instance… then each link is going to act like a hole in the funnel.  So a little bit of juice flows out to each link, but nowhere near as much juice as went into the funnel, because now that juice is going out to 16 links ( or more like 150 links if you have a blog with tons of blogroll, recent links, etc. etc.)

So now once that juice flows down a page or two, the juice is just barely a trickle.  There isn’t much link juice flowing here, and the search engine spiders don’t find it worthwhile to index a page that is only important because it is two links away from something that was linkable.  You know what I mean?

So the trick is to get more inbound links, which in turn pours more juice into the funnel at the top, and that juice eventually makes it’s way down into all of the pages, and then they get indexed more robustly, and more often.

To make this more complex, you can also “pour linkjuice” into deep posts, and then the juice will flow from them up, over, and all around, giving all of the pages it’s linked to a nice little bump.

Sitemaps are beautiful.  Not in the “i’d like to go with them to a nude beach” kind of way, but because they’ll spread your linkjuice more evenly.  No matter how you feel about Marx and Communism, this kind of “a little bit to each” is good for you.  When you have a sitemap on your site, and a link to the sitemap from each page, then the good news is that any page on your site is never more than 2 clicks away.  So no matter which funnel your linkjuice is coming in from, chances are each page is getting a little juice from it.

More about this to come… until then get all of these fancy pictures in your email box for free by signing up below.

-Brad

See more awesome cartoons like this at Gaping Void or check out his post on How to Be Creative.  This is a SEO tip, even if it doesn’t appear to be so on the surface.

-Brad