increase blog traffic

Do you know many SEO advices from “gurus” are completely craps? They might not be getting any traffic from Google and merely copying what others had said. I’ve been in Internet Marketing around 3 years and have been listening to these lousy advices for long time. These advices do no good but getting my site slapped by Google over and over again.

I’m going to reveal these lousy SEO advices to you. It actually takes me days to finally get it done (phew…) Hope you enjoy reading:

1. “Submit lots of articles to EzineArticles, Squidoo Lens and Hubpages with backlinks to your blog.”

If you are trying to rank for a keyword which is very new and the competitors on the first page are at PR0, this method might work. You can use the seoQuake addons to analyze the competition level.

However, websites that are harvesting free traffic on the first page are mostly the ones with hundreds or thousands of backlinks. These advices are mostly from Internet Marketers who want to sell you their article marketing concept or they didn’t reveal the whole truth.

Besides not being to be at the first page, most of your effort and wasted. If you have lots of backlinks from Squidoo, Hubpages and EzineArticles, Google will not give lots of weight for those backlinks because they all came from the same site.

2. “Comment on dofollow blogs and you will rank higher and faster!”

If you are using dofollow blogs to rank for your keywords most of the time, that might be a big mistake. Dofollow blogs will increase the backlinks for your blog. It will help to increase pagerank but not helping much in getting higher rank for your keywords. I used to depend on dofollow blog to get my blog to PR3 but hardly any traffic coming in.

Just imagine the backlinks from these dofollow blogs: I will get “Alex Liu” as my backlink if I use “Alex Liu” to comment on dofollow blogs. This might help me to rank #1 for Alex Liu but not the keywords I want to rank for.

Giving too much comments on dofollow blog will also cause sudden increases in backlinks. Some blogs have “Top commentor” or “Recent comment” on their sidebars. When you happen to be the top commentor or recent comment that shows on the sidebar, all of the pages on that blog will have a link to your blog. You might get an instant 20 or 30 backlinks from this blog. This will get your penalized by Google real fast. I’ve gone into that trap before.

3. “Spend all your time submitting your blog to Web directories and your ranking will increase!”

There are around 3,000 web directories on the internet. If you submit your blog to all of them and have your keyword as a link to your blog, will you be on the first page of Google for sure?

Big mistake! Not all web directories will approve your link even you submit to them. Not all of your submission will be indexed by Google and count that link as a backlink to your blog. I know someone who is selling a software which is able to submit your blog to 2,000 over web directories. It just won’t work. I got less than hundred of backlinks after submitting my blog to 600 directories.

4. “Use Article Submission Software or services to submit your articles to hundreds of article directories and get hundreds of backlinks!”

Oh… Probably another guy was trying to sell you his Article Auto Submission software. Same as web directories. Article Directories are better than Web Directories because the probability of your article being approved is higher. But not all of the page that contains your article will be indexed because:

(a) More than 50% of the article directories have low PR. It takes time for the Google Bots to crawl and index those pages.

(b) When you submit a same article to hundreds of places, Google will only index few of them because they are considered as duplicated content. I got less than 30 backlinks after submitting the same article to thousands of article directories.

5. “Use keywords in all your links instead of your blog name. You’ll rank faster for your keywords!”

If you have ALL your keywords in your backlink like this “keyword”, you have a higher chance of being penalized than ranking on the first page. The reason is simple- The links are too artificial and obvious that someone is trying to manipulate search results.

Google used many factors to rank sites and “backlinks” is one of the most important factor because people link to your website only when they think this website is good or have something to refer. If the words that are used as a link contains the word “blogging”, the site must be something related to blogging. If it’s “traffic”, the site might be good at traffic contents. If all the links have the same keyword with it, doesn’t it look unnatural with some purpose behind it.

Try to mix your backlinks with other keywords. You might choose a second keyword you want to rank for and comment on a couple of dofollow blogs (not too many) to make it look natural.

6. “The faster and more backlinks you built, the faster you’ll reach the first page of Google.”

Sometimes building lots of links very fast get your blog penalized faster. For a brand new domain name which is less than one year old, try to build less than 10 backlinks per day. Google thinks that it is not very possible for a “New Site” to become popular and recommended by lots of people in a short period of time.

If your domain name is more than one year old, don’t rush for hundred backlinks per day. Start with 10 per day for the first month, then 15 link per day and 20 per day. You need to get your backlinks grow slowly. This natural growth of backlinks will make Google think that more people get to know your blog and recommend to others slowly.

7. “Ignore the nofollow blogs. Focus more time to comment on dofollow blogs to get more dofollow backlinks!”

If you are having all your backlinks dofollow mode, Google will think that your backlinks aren’t natural too. Nowadays, more people are using nofollow link to keep their pagerank high. Google also has a system that could track nofollow links. Although nofollow backlinks aren’t as effective as dofollow links, there are still going to help your ranking.

8. “Don’t link to other websites or blogs. Your blog will rank lower because you are giving away your SEO benefits!”

This is true in a way but not 100% truth. If each of your page are linking to many websites, your website might rank lower. I’ve seen websites that have more than 10,000 backlinks and it’s only PR3. However, linking to high authority sites will actually give you a higher ranking. Although this is not proven, many bloggers such as Darren Rowse, Mark Widawer and me believe in it.

9. “The quality of the content is not important than having more keywords on your blog!”

This is not true too. Some Internet Marketers just put a couple of sentence on their blog with keywords all over their blog. Do you think this will make their blog higher than the one with high quality content?

The winner is always the one with high quality content. Although Google Bots still aren’t able to read contents, they have a very complicated system to judge a blog’s content quality. They used LSI, social bookmarking sites, FeedBurner, Google Analytics and even Gmail to judge the quality of the content. Do you know Google know how many RSS readers you have and how high your blog’s bounce rate is?

These are important factors that Google use to judge a website’s content quality and rank sites.

10. “Exchange more links with other bloggers and you’ll rank higher!”

Google just changed their algorithm to give reciprocal links or 2 way links lower weight. Few years back, Internet Marketers used to exchange links with hundreds and thousands of websites. Just imagine that you exchange links with 1,000 websites, you will have 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different websites.

Google found out and decided to give lower weight to 2 way links. These links are kinda like “I vote for your site and you vote for mine”. However, there are websites that link to each other accidentally. So instead of penalizing or ignoring 2 way links, Google give lower weight to these backlinks.

Alright! There are more lousy SEO advices and SEO lies. I’m going to stop here. Hope this post save you from getting cheated and help you to increase blog traffic with Blog SEO.



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