The author replied to say he would exchange, but wanted to conduct the exchange via his new link exchange system, Lavalinx.

I was pretty skeptical about another link exchange system, having found others overrun with really low quality sites.

What is interesting about Lavalinx is its ability to triangulate link exchanges between different pages.

Furthermore you can automate link exchanges by inserting some PHP code into your site / blog, so that when you approve your link exchanges (via the Lavalinx control panel) they are automatically inserted into your site.

You can also configure multiple pages for your link exchanges making it easy for site owners to exchange contextual links, i.e. you are not trading links of spammy “Links” or “Friends” pages.

To get their ball rolling Lavalinx are offering 500 free account’s on their system, after which they will move to paid subscriptions.

I have already traded 5 links with this system and have probably declined another 5-10. That may not sound a lot, but they currently only have 100 members, when they get up to 500++ a lot more exchanges will take place.

Furthermore, I did not have do do anything to get those link exchanges… just signed up and waited for the requests to come in, so even this small number has made it worth while joining.

Also, they were decent exchanges… relevant sites of a reasonable quality, and the fact that it is to become a subscription based service will hopefully keep it that way.

I hope Lavalinx works out, partly because I got a free account, but mainly because it would be a really convenient service, particularly if you want to launch and back-link few small sites for SEO purposes.

The person I was speaking to at Lavalinx also mentioned that they have secured further investment for their product, and plan to develop their system further, something Ill have to keep an eye out for…

They still have some free accounts available if you want to try Lavalinx for yourself.

Content Solution can read in content from a range of sources, scraping content from Search Engines, Article Engines /sites, RSS feeds and text articles:

The scrapes are separated by article or search and can be individually edited as required. Once an article is ready, it can be passed to either a re-writer using sysnonyms, or the Markov Generator.

The re-writer replaces text in the article using a thesaurus. The more this is done, the less sense the article makes, however, articles largely remain readible. These newly re-written articles can be put out to an rss feed which will change every time it is loaded (a spinner) and can be used many times to create multiple variants of a single article.

Using the Markov Generator it is possible to spin many articles together to create new and unique content, which although meaningless to the human reader appears to maintain the structure of a genuine document, and remains readable (though it makes no sense).

The spun content can be output to different formats, creating RSS feeds and ‘spinners’. The spinners are particularly fun to play with, they are plain text web pages which, when refreshed re-generate, or re-spin content.

It is really interesting to see this program at work, and although spam is much maligned within the blog-sphere, it has me wondering how many sites already use this kind of software to pad out sites. It is relatively easy to hide content from readers without using black hat techniques.

At around 50+ posts Google usually indexes an entire blog, not just posts, but all comments pages, author pages etc, and I can certainly see this software being used by the impatient! I can also see it being used by people who run multiple blog’s.

One reason I became interested in this software is because I have seen it work on other sites. These were splogs pointed at a ReviewMe I wrote a while back. For the brief time these splogs linked to my site, traffic doubled and my SERPS jumped dramatically.

If this stuff did not work, people would not do it… that said, it can get you into trouble, particularly if you try and run adsense in the spun posts!

The main reason I have been playing with it is because I think its an ingenious little program that is stable, easy to use and good at what it does…. its a real shame that its encrypted, it would have been fun to play with the source!

Considering the ‘dark’ nature of the product, the guys at halfagain.com (the company that produces the software) seem pretty cool too, and have taken the time to reply to a couple of questions I had.

If you are interested in this software you can get a free trial of Content Solution Here. For those looking to in increase revenue on their blog, the affiliate commissions are very generous too.
(links in this post are direct to their site, I am not making on aff sales here…)

Have fun,

I find the subject interesting from a technical and SEO perspective as many of the methods require serious skill as well as a complete lack of ethics!

What I am really interested in is how well this stuff actually works, and how far you can push it before getting banned by search engines.

Google and other search engines say they will never penalise a site for something they do not directly control, like spam links from other sites to yours. That said, if you spam your own site, then there can be a detrimental effect

That being the case, then is there any disadvantage in using grey hat techniques?

I began thinking about this after I did a “ReveiwMe” on one of my other sites, which resulted in a significant traffic increase. I wrote a post at the time on review me spin off’s, now a couple of weeks on I am better able to assess what actually resulted from this review.

In a nutshell, the company that ordered the review pointed a load of paid links from Splogs and add sites at my review. I leapt up the rankings on keywords and my traffic trippled.

One month on and its all worn off but, it does prove these techniques can work, in the short term, IF done properly.

The way most of these sites seem to operate is by buying old domains with a decent PR, and taking money for back links from them.

The problem with this is that it does not take Google long to ascertain links are being sold / duplicated across different sites, and within a few weeks / months strip the sites of their PR.

This means that buying links in this way can only be a short term measure. However, it is still possible to derive long term benefit from this, for example, I got genuine organic back links as a result of the traffic boost, i.e. some of my new visitors liked the site and back linked to it.

What I am now thinking is whether this is really any worse than buying PPC adds? Clearly Google don’t want you to do this, they want sites to pay for Adwords. People selling links in this way are effectively cheating Google out of revenue, which is why their sites / Splogs get banned.

All that said, from a site owners perspective, these grey hat techniques can offer better value than using PPC services, IF you can find a service which works (most do not).

There are some interesting articles discussing Grey and Black Hat techniques on seoblackhat.com. Be warned this site encourages spam, discusses marketing for adult sites and lots of other nasties. They don’t give too much away (trying to sell additional content) but there are some interesting case studies posted on there!

That is easier said than done, it is a difficult balance.

If you want good SEO from your posts then you have to make sure keywords are well placed in your title, and that words are repeated or stemmed throughout the post itself.

Doing this whilst keeping readers on side is a difficult balance.

The best way to overcome this problem is to produce more and more quality content, but there will often come a time when you really need something a little more targeted than your readers will accept.

For that you can use the WordPress Category Visibility Plugin which does a nice job of hiding your categories. You can choose in which options the category will appear, like so:

A description of what these check boxes do is shown below:

So, as indicated by the first image the category I have hidden only shows in the archives.

By pre-dating the post I can put it in an obscure archive which Google will find, but, readers are unlikely to.

This has a number of uses besides hiding posts intended for search engines, for example you may want to store reference information for yourself which is not appropriate for your blog, there are many potential uses for this plug in.

Although only a Beta release, so far I have found this plug in very effective.

It does this by getting users to install a toolbar into Internet Explorer. This toolbar sends data to Alexa about which site you are visiting allowing Alexa to track how many visitors a site receives. Alexa then sends back a ranking to the toolbar, allowing the user to see how popular the site is.

As only a minority of users have the plug it, the results are considered worthless by many. Alexa have to use an algorithm to calculate the actual traffic, multiplying the number of ping’s they receive by the number of users who don’t have the toolbar installed.

For example, if one in a hundred people have the toolbar installed, they multiply each ping by 100 to estimate traffic. (in reality it is a lot more complex than this, combining stat’s from different sources).

For this reason it is considered worthless by many within the industry, for all but the largest sites (whose statistics will be more stable, and consistent with Alexa’s algorithm), for smaller sites it is very erratic.

If you have the toolbar installed you often see sites with no Alexa ranking, this is not necessarily because they do not receive visitors, but because they do not have visitors with the toolbar. Conversely, some smaller sites (like this one) have an inflated Alexa ranking, by virtue of the fact that the person that spends most time on the site (me) has the toolbar installed.

Whilst many consider the toolbar worthless, there is no real alternative, and sites such as ReviewMe (who pay site owners to publish articles) use Alexa ranking as a metric.

I myself have used it to try and assess a sites traffic when considering placing advertising on it. The toolbar cannot confirm someones stats, but can help you identify a blatant liar!

A common misconception about Alexa is that only IE users add to the ranking, as the toolbar is not available for Firefox, or other browsers.

Fortunately, as firefox is an open source application, someone was able to write an Alexa Plug in for it. This plug in shows both Google and Alexa rank:

Right clicking the @ symbol reveals a number of really useful SEO tools, such the ability to highlight a keyword, in the image below the word “the” has been highlighted:

Keyword density analysis:

Backlink’s to a page:

I use this in both Windows and Linux and it works very nicely!

So if your using Firefox and want to learn more about the site you are visiting, GO GET IT!.

If you don’t have or want the toolbar you can still get Alexa stats for a site, which are fun to look at if you have a blog or a website, well, its fun as long as the traffic goes up!

Down the left hand pane of the stats screen you will also find the Wayback machine, which has snapshots of how websites looked in the past. This can be a bit embarrassing, especially if you unwittingly bought a domain previously used by someone in Larry Flints line of work.

If your using IE, try downloading Firefox, its free, you can still keep IE on your system (in fact you will find it very difficult to remove it, a common complaint), decide for yourself which is better (or I can tell you… Firefox is better).

You can learn a lot more useful stuff about Alexa on HMTK.com

Without content it is impossible to get a good rank in search engines, leaving many sites reliant on Adsense.

In order to get good search engine optimisation for your online store you need to bulk up your site.

Consider Amazon, if you use their site you will be familiar with the fact that they have book reviews, extracts from books, the titles and descriptions are keyworded, headings are used well etc.

Clearly Amazon have an advantage as they use bespoke software and have an army of people available to help generate this content.

For SME’s running E-Commerce an easy way to bulk up a site is to use a Blog.

Blogs have very good SEO properties, are easily installed under a “News” secition of an E-Commerce site and are one of the most efficient ways of creating content.

Surprisingly not many sites are doing this at the moment, but consider the possibilities:

• You can write extensive reviews of your own products
• Keyword these reviews
• Link reviews back to your E-Commerce site
• Write articles on industry news
• Write articles on the developments in your own business
• Bend any relevant content you discover to your service!

The only ‘problem’ with doing this is that the look and feel of the blog will not match that of the site.

This in itself will not stop you reaping the benefit of increased SEO, however, if you want to make it look more professional you will need to create a matching template for your blog.

This can be done cost effectively by using sites like getafreelancer.com where you can submit a project and have developers bid on it. Because there are a lot of developers in Eastern Europe and the far east prices are a lot lower than you can achieve in Western Europe.

If you do use getafreelancer or similar sites, make sure you understand the security implications of doing so, I will write a separate post on that soon!!

If you are using VirtueMart then you are at an advantage as there is already a blogging feature built into it. Unfortunately it is not a ‘proper’ blog, rather an aggregation of news postings.

Interestingly there is a WordPress plug in for VirtueMart / Joomla which ‘stuffs’ a wordpress blog into your site. This has a number of advantages over the default Joomla options, namely it is ‘proper blogging software.

Unfortunately, due to it being squeezed into VirtueMart / Joomla, WordPress it loses many of its SEO properties and you are limited in terms of what can be done with the wordpress template.

That said, if you want a free integrated solution then this is definitely worth considering.

I have to say, that although I think the JD-WordPress plug in is really good, I am inclined to suffer the lack of cohesion between E-Commerce site and Blog to get the best from both technologies.

In its own right WordPress is a very powerful SEO tool.

Blogs are considered to have a structural advantage over conventional sites in terms of SEO.

Consider the navigation of WordPress, you can find posts by:

• Date / Month of the post
• Category
• Clicking the author to view posts
• Hitting the “Feed” URL
• Posts are often linked together / cross referenced

In addition to the above, WordPress itself has near perfect SEO properties using:

• Valid XHTML markup
• Correct use of header tags
• Permalinks that ensure the page URL has keywords from the title in it
• The page title is set to the name of the post
• No JavaScript or flash in navigation

Furthermore, there are plug-ins available to automatically generate an XML sitemap which can be submitted automatically to search engines like google.

Typically:

• A post made on a blog will appear in google within a few days
• A blog will almost 100% index in google, i.e. almost, if not all pages get listed

Getting a Blog listed in google is effortless.

Also, generating content in a blog is very quick and easy. It is a very convenient means to pump out relevant, keyworded content meaning companies can write extensively about their own activities.

Strangely very few companies seem to take advantage of this, I can only think of two possible reasons for this

1. They are not aware of / do not understand the power of the technology
2. They believe it will damage their corporate image

I think the second reason is unlikely, a blog can be tucked behind a “News” link, which is a legitimate thing to do, i.e. there is nothing wrong with companies publishing information about their ongoing activities.

I think the first reason, awareness is the real reason companies are not exploiting this technology, particularly within the UK where blogging is less popular than in the US .

I anticipate a real change in attitudes toward bloggin in the next two years as companies begin using software like wordpress in an attempt to improve their SEO.

All this is bad news for bloggers who will have an increasing amount of spammy corporate sites cluttering up their community sites.

Using these Free Keyword Analysis Tools you can generate lists of relevant keywords and assess the number of searches performed against each one.

If your site is new, then you need to avoid the really popular keywords, because you simply will not be able to compete with larger, long established sites.

Instead look for keywords for which there is little competition, the more obscure searches that larger sites miss.

Then, keyword your site, stemming your keywords, for example:

• Stem
• Stemmed
• Stemming
• Stems

Try to stick to one keyword per page. Perhaps add a few pages targeting the same keyword and link them to each other, putting the keyword in the link, for example:

• Free Keyword Analysis Tool
  

as oppose to

• Free Keyword Analysis Tool Link

Notice that in the first example the link contains the text “Free Keyword Analysis Tool” whereas the second example link contains only the word “Link”.

Google takes notice of text in links, so make sure you take advantage of every link in your page.

Once you have your keyworded pages in place, sign up for the free Google Webmaster Tools and add a sitemap. Google will quickly crawl your new pages, and, with a little luck you will start to see the results

• Microsoft Adlab
• Google Keywords Tool
• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (Formely Overture)

Of these I consider the Microsoft Adlab the best Free Keyword Analysis Tool. It is the easiest to use and shows the number of searches, age and gender distributions and renders all the information in easy to interprate charts and measures.

The google keywords tool is really aimed at Adwords users and has little value for webmasters. It does not show the number of searches for keywords, merely showing the competition amongst advertisers for particular words.

The fact that advertisers compete for search terms will indicate the value of cliks per ad, but is completely irrelivant in terms of analysing the number of searches performed.

The Yahoo Keyword Selector tool is OK when it is working. Often I have found it unusable as it runs so slowly, often timing out. That said, it seems a lot better of late so may prove another useful link. The Yahoo Keyword Selector tool presents a simple list of searches along with the number of searches performed. In a sense the Yahoo Keyword Analysis is a blend of the Microsoft and Google analysis tools, presenting a list of search terms based on a keyword you enter (like Google) but also showing the number of searches performed (like Microsoft).

None of the above tools are adequate for SEO purposes in their own right, however, by using all three it is possible to generate some ideas for yourself.

A good paid keyword analyser is Wordtracker although a free trial is available from wordtracker, it is not really usable, it is meant as a teaser as opposed to adding value to your quest for the perfect keywords. It is also quite expensive to subscribe to, however, it is possible to buy the user of the keyword analyser for a single day, week or month meaning it can be used cost effectively if you can sit down for 24 hours and blitz it!

The reason I think this is a myth is that I have seen many people try permutations of this trick and none of them have ever worked.

Secondly, if you were Alexa, would you base your ranking system on a URL redirect? If you did, then why would you need the toolbar.

This brings me onto something that DOES work with alexa, the Search Status plugin for Firefox. Using this plugin has the same effect as the Alexa bar on the rank of sites you visit.

If you visit that page they tell you a little about how that plugin works:

The Alexa Rank display sends your current URL domain, your local IP address and a unique constant to Alexa Web Services

Now, can you see a “unique constant” in the URL below?

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.sitelogic.co.uk

Alexa are not the idiots some people like to portray them as. Yes their system is flawed, and yes it can be gamed, to a point, but it is not as easy as putting a redirect in your URL’s.