Thanks for the entries guys, not an overwhelming response by any means but thanks for the guys that took the time out to offer a seo tip for 2008. Some really nice tips that shouldn’t be ignored for the coming year. The Top 3 tips each won $10.00 from Seounique to spend on coffee, beer or your website! Please remember to email me at mridout@epictunes.com with your paypal ID’s so I can send over the huge wad!

Tip 1 (Winner) - Join your local Chamber of Commerce, you can get a link from them, plus you meet real people. Remember person to person networking rather than online networking. You may pick up more links from other members and possibly some consulting work. Don’t ignore what’s in your back yard. – Tip by - Lyndon

Tip 2 (Winner) - My tip for 2008. Do a bit of research, and publish posts showing the results and implications of the research. People love #s and stats. It doesn’t have to be complicated … often something simple. EG. Avatar experiment (http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-avatar-experiment-stunning-vs-cute-vs-guy.html) already performed. Tip by Jeff Quipp

Tip 3 (Winner) - Seriously, my tip would be to get a blog implemented and to take its upkeep seriously. Carve yourself a unique voice within your niche that people will happily return to. This can bring an enormous amount of traffic to your site, and more importantly for the purpose of SEO, if your content is good it will get you loads of naturally formed backlinks. - Tip by – Nick James

Tip 4 - Make all your SEM people build social media profiles for the company while they have down time - When they leave, you get to keep the profiles that can send a lot of traffic/new links to your clients with a couple clicks. Endgame 2008 SEO is going to be about Social Media and link baiting. - Tip by Wignut

Tip 5 - 2008 way of linking besides social and link bait is to find great articles on authority sites. Once you’ve found a great article that is relevant to you/your customer send them a small revision of that article that incorporates your link. Use your savvy persuasion ways and your in. You’ll be surprised how many people don’t mind a little tweaking for a free goodie bag. Good luck SEO’s in 2008! - Tip by Ashley Graham

Tip 6 - My tip for 2008. Make sure your site (or clients site) has plenty of ways for your visitors to promote the site via social media (Digg This! buttons, Add to del.icio.us etc.etc.) and then create “share-able” content. Link-able content and Linkbait is very good, but share-able is going to be better in 2008. – Tip by - John Carcutt

Tip 7 - Don’t waste your time with directory submissions and article submissions. Use link bait and good content to generate natural backlinks. – John Trumbii

Tip 8 - When creating the Title tags for your site make sure your primary targeted keyword is at the beginning of the description for each page, obviously make the page content relevant – By Me!

Firmly a few weeks into the new year I’ve decided to hold a small contest. I would like to make a “2008 SEO tips list”, obviously I could just write the list myself but am feeling generous and creative. I will be holding the contest for 14 days from today and will accept entries up to the 23th January 2008.

Rules:

1. You must post an SEO tip that you think will be valid for 2008

2. It can be any SEO tip you personally think will be true

3. Only one entry per person

4. Entries must be posted as a comment

Winners:

I will use any tip submitted for the final list if I think it’s valid for 2008. The top 3 tips will each receive a $10.00 Paypal payment as a prize. All tips that make it too the list will receive a link to their web page or blog as a point of reference. I thought maybe a small cash offering to buy a few cups of coffee or to help with your sites sever cost might be a nice incentive, you can of course spend it how you see fit!

Why should you bother?

It would be nice to get some feedback from the SEO community as a whole as to what they think will be happening in 2008 and the possible trends we might start to see. It’s also a bit of fun!

Good luck with your entries and please read the rules before entering!

A bit premature at the moment as it is still technically 2007 still. Anyway I would just like to say thanks to everyone for making me personally feel so welcome in the SEO community. As mentioned before this blog has only been around for 6 months and in this competitive industry it’s hard for the “new kid on the block” so to speak.

To keep my faithful readers updated with what to expect in 2008 in regards to this blog I will let you in to a few of my side projects which I hope to keep people up to date with. These include:

1. An SEO awards website, all voting will be user based and include many different SEO categories to look in. This site will be live at the end of January I hope (still bug testing and creating a new design)

2. I recently created my very own Social Bookmarking website called VoteItFly - I will be documenting the joys and struggles of managing such a site and marketing it online, hopefully bringing a bit of useful insight for a few others!

A lso I would just like to thank a few individuals that have encouraged me to continue writing and investigating aspects of SEO:

Wayne Smallman
Jeff Quipp
Nick
Impavid
Technical-Itch

Don’t drink too much tonight everyone!

SeoUnique’s StumbleUpon guide

Welcome to my unofficial Stumbleupon guide from an SEO point of view. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to write this for those of you that want it. Feel free to use any of the material and screen grabs I have created for your own use but please remember to give me a little mention.

What is StumbleUpon?

First I will show you the extract taken from the StumbleUpon homepage:

“Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.”

Now what exactly is StumbleUpon? Well for a start I’m going to tell you that an abbreviation for StumbleUpon is “SU” you will see this being used a lot in the SEO industry so don’t be confused by it.

Essentially what SU lets you do is bookmark your favourite sites on the web, write reviews about them and share these with your online friends. Its that simple. SU is different from older sites like www.digg.com or www.reddit.com as SU first thought up the idea of a “thumbs up” and a “thumbs down” idea. This is the method that lets your online friends know whether you liked or disliked a webpage.

Every page that you like or dislike is displayed on your very own profile page, which contains other contact and personal information.

How do I create a useful profile?

There are a few sections that should be considered when creating a profile, doing this well will gain you more or fewer overall page visits and its very simple.

1. Profile Picture – It depends what you want to get out of SU, if you want to be part of the overall community and build up a list of personal sites – put your own photo up and let people know its you – its good to put a photo to a name. If you are looking to be included in an industry community i.e. “Cars” – put a nice image of a kick ass car up there, something that will attract like minded people to your profile.

2. Profile Layout – If you click on “preferences” on your profile this will bring up a preferences page that includes sub pages; Personal information, My interests, Public profile. Click on “Public Profile” this will allow you to enter any websites you may have and let you change your background colour – white is a big no no.

3. Profile Information – Part of the whole learning process with SU is that you have to realise it is mainly reputation and community based and the people on SU respect the laws. It’s not like digg and the attitude of its users are certainly more mature. So take this opportunity to tell as much as possible about yourself, your goals and your business ideas, this is vital!

How do I create Targeted Traffic?

A lot of people have told me that the only way SU produces traffic is through the small “Stumble” button on the downloaded toolbar. For those of you that don’t know what I mean, download the toolbar and press the “Stumble!” button, see what happens, I dare you! Anyway, there are different methods to ensure the traffic you receive on sites you SU are target for that industry.

It’s really quite simple, if you start stumbling pages about cars, paint jobs, Top Gear etc you will attract like minded people to your page, connections are then made through friends or fans. I would not say just stumble one category or industry, if you are generally interested in a few topics, like myself I always look for people that have stumbled the same pages as myself.

Make sure when you submit your stories that you assign appropriate tags to the stories, this way when other stumblers look for certain topics your stumble will be listed, the more you assign, the better the results. Doing this will also categorise your stumbles and put them in your tag cloud on the right side of your profile, this lets you identify like minded people quickly, bigger the word, the more topics in that category they stumble.

What do Friends and Fans Really do?

I see a lot of people sometimes with only 50 pages stumbled and 500+ fans – to me this is an obvious attempt to try and cheat the system, well sorry boss it aint gunna work! I know for a fact a lot of people either setup up multiple accounts or add random people in the hope that they accept to be friends – it won’t work because people have to be genuinely interested in what you stumble!

You can become anyone’s fan by clicking on the “Add him/her as fan” by doing this you are stating that you like what this person stumbles. From now on, every time that person stumbles a page and reviews it, the story will appear on your “What’s new page”. If they accept you as a friend back it means that they are a like minded person because of the stories you stumble. So people who do it themselves will not benefit anything from this, certainly not in the long run of things.

What and where are Buzz pages?

If you look at the top of any stumble page and click on the tab “Websites” it will bring up this page: http://buzz.stumbleupon.com from this page you can see the most popular stumbles of the day. This can be broken down into categories on the right in the “tag cloud”. Having a story linked on this page often opens up opportunities on websites that feed from the results. So this creates natural backlinks and additional traffic to the original page.

Donate to Stumbleupon why exactly?

Many of you are probably not any wiser that this option even exists but I does here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/sponsors.php.

The point and reason people do this, which is completely voluntary by the way – is because of the community vibe of SU. You can donate anything from $1 to $$$ and this gives you a few little extras that normal SU members don’t get.

· Pages We Both Like feature to see what you have in common with other stumblers
· Unlimited stumbling within favorites of your friends
· See People We Both Like when visiting other stumblers
· Ability to Create New Groups (see the Group Directory)
· Have copies of all your messages emailed to you (both sent & received messages)
· Longer message history on your inbox and contact tabs
· Ability to Turn off Sponsored Stumbles

You also get a nifty little icon next to your name which is personally my favorite, when I did this I got an extra 10 fans in a day because you get your profile avatar posted on the donate page.

Where does the stumble traffic come from?

If you have a page you want to promote on SU then it’s a good idea to understand exactly where the traffic is coming from. I have seen a lot of posts and discussions (mainly from Digg lovers) remarking on the fact SU traffic is not targeted and people leave as soon as they visit the page. This is not the case.

1. You will get traffic from the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar that you download, this is the least desirable of all the traffic, its random as far as I can tell so people that come across your page will not be looking for anything in particular, if it’s a good subject you may receive a few additional “thumbs up” but that’s it.

2. The good traffic comes from your friends and fans. When you stumble a new page and review it and you have a good reputation and a genuine fan base you will get targeted traffic from your friends and fans and almost certainly get the page reviewed and thumbed up – this will in turn make your fans fans see the same story and so on. You can see on the diagram below how the traffic works. This was also posted on a previous post.

3. The SU buzz pages list the most popular stumbles per day, other websites, as mentioned before link to these and use them as content, traffic can be high from this if you’re lucky!

Is StumbleUpon traffic maintainable?

The simple answer is yes! The majority of my traffic originates from SU and is maintained. This is because of the following reasons:

1. My friends are all genuine stumblers and share the same principles of StumbleUpon that I do, this means everyone who looks at pages I submit will be interested in the topic to a degree.
2. If you get a good reception when you initially submit a page you know your content is of good quality, therefore next time a like minded person gives you a thumbs up, the process will start again. I often get peaks in stories 2-3 weeks after I Stumble them.
3. You get lucky and a “Stumble Whale” - before you ask a “SW” is a person who has been on SU for a long time and played by the rules every day. They keep their friends a respected crowd, many of them other whales. One “thumbs up” from them and you’re laughing!
4. If you want to keep the traffic constant over the months it’s important that you keep people interested in your profile, if you have one of your websites pages stumbled and then not another for a few months you may not see the kind of traffic you would get if you received new stumbles every week. The traffic from the new stumbles give people the opportunity to look at your profile and look at related stumbles.

What about the sites which charge me for stumbles?

It’s money down the drain I’m afraid. As mentioned before you will only succeed in SU if you are genuine and make the effort. Paying $5 for 200 stumbles will get you 200 page views and nothing else, don’t do it please!

An interesting debate broke out on Digital point last week that seems
to have continued gathering interest as it moves on. Someone provided a “tip” for “seo newbies” to help build up links for free using appropriate anchor text descriptions.

The tip was, to quote:

“When you’re commenting on other people’s blogs it will usually ask you for 4 things, your name, email, URL and a comment. Be sure to use your keyword anchor text as your name. When your comment is posted, the url you enter will be attached to whatever text you entered in the “Name” field. So instead of putting John in the name field, put My Widgets Rule, or whatever your site’s keywords are. Oh, and try to say something that’s somewhat useful in the comment section, so it doesn’t look like 100% blatant spam.”

Now I must own up and say in the past I have used such techniques but this was before starting this SeoUnique blog. Since then my opinion on this subject has changed. Because the blog world relies so heavily on the community “vibe” I don’t think it’s ethical to use such methods. Of course a lot of blogs carry the NoFollow tag which renders such methods useless anyway but my point is that at the end of the day it’s just rude. Unless a comment that I regard to be of epic standards I will not approve messages from people that use anchor text in their posts.

I’m not a spoil sport and I want everyone to do well in life but if you want to make a comment about a good/bad article you should not expect anything in return.

I have setup a poll to get your opinion on the subject to whether or not you consider this kind of technique ethically right? The results will be interesting, remember be honest!