Doshy Link Attack! SEO Tips, Keywords and Several Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

It’s been a while since the last Doshy Link Attack! and things have been a little hectic around here, especially after the overwhelming response to my Technorati Favorites Experiment.

I didn’t have the chance to do some link sharing last week so I’m going to make it for it by pointing out some of the more interesting reading material from blogs I’ve visited over the past two weeks.

As always, if you have any outstanding articles on topics related to this blog, please feel free to send me an email and let me know. I’m always looking to read and share great content with everyone.

Todd Malicoat has written a very informative SEO Playbook which offers a great deal of tips on correctly developing content and site link structures which are optimized for both users and search engines. Really worth a read if you are interested in improving your search engine optimization knowledge.

SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text…It is a line of thinking that necessitates doing what is optimal: when to balance user experience with “bot experience” to create a site that will harvest any legitimate traffic without detriment to conversions, or without venturing into areas beyond the given risk threshhold for the project.

Collis has a great article about how he acquired 2000 feed subscribers in 12 days for his FreelanceSwitch blog. A lot of bloggers have linked to his blog and referenced it so I’ll just like to point out one key point that was fascinating to me.

Apparently Collis bought a StumbleUpon ads campaign which allowed him to get a fair amount of visitors to see his flagship article. This lead to a viral snowball which made the article popular in del.icio.us.

Perhaps StumbleUpon advertising is something to consider when you are having difficulty in going viral with your linkbait.

One tool that I’ve used a few times now is StumbleUpon Ads which lets you purchase stumbleupon visits at 5 cents a pop. So I created a campaign and loaded it with $50, enough to get 1000 visiors to see the URL for the 101 list.

That was what got us that initial momentum. From there the del.icio.us bookmarks flooded in taking it right to the top of the popular list and bringing in some 15,000 visitors in about a day. Naturally many of these added us to their feed readers.

Kumiko has a post on how to send traffic to your blog by writing articles which appeal to the loyal fanboys or fangirls of a specific topic, product or sub-culture (E.G. Star Trek, Apple). This strategy generally allows you to do well on most social media websites like Digg.

This is useful when you need some fresh visitors to your blog but the likelihood of gaining a long-term audience is minimized when visitors realize that the article was a stand-out piece and your blog niche is actually not something related to their interests.

However, this will no doubt lead to some new readers so no harm in trying to milk as much traffic as you can through popular topics.

So what exactly is a ‘fanboy’? Fanboys (and often ‘fangirls’) are those individuals that are so totally devoted to a topic that it has reached the point of obsession.

Their loyalty to the topic leads them to form strong opinions that can not be swayed. They disregard any differing opinions and are often hateful to those who disagree or argue with them

Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips recently held his first blog optimization clinic and revamped the Manta SEO Blog. It seems to have produced a more intense and professional look for Manta SEO solutions. There are some useful tips on blog design and SEO in his post.

The goal of this project is to optimize blogs that have potential but are not capitalizing it, either because the design is not working, because the SEO is not there or because the overall strategy needs to be tweaked.

Matt Coddington writes about how “Make Money Onlineâ€? is not the only keyword out there. While his article mainly revolves around John Chow’s SERPs manipulation, the main point is to develop a body of both competitive and less competitive keywords so that you’ll actually have a chance of getting some search traffic.

Can some of these people actually rank well for “make money online�? I’m sure they can. But be realistic. Unless your blog is getting a few thousand uniques per day at least then there’s no way you’ll rank for a competitive term (especially this one as the competition has skyrocketed now) without investing a hell of a lot of time and money. Anyone can rank for any phrase, but it costs.

Easton Ellsworth at Business Blogwire wrote about 10 ways to increase blog traffic with Youtube Videos. Most of the ways mentioned are not new to me but I liked Easton’s idea of sponsoring a YouTube video or user.

I certainly have not done so in the past and this might be an avenue to explore in the future, although the YouTube user should have a pretty impressive viewership or channel subscriber base before I would even think of doing so.

In my own experience, URL clickthrough rates for videos on YouTube are generally not impressive unless you embed the URL in the video itself or if the video is on a buzz topic and your domain URL seems to be relevant and memorable.

People like videos. Embedding a YouTube video is easy and free. Blog readers are likely to return for more if they see that you pick interesting videos for them to watch…Your YouTube username, account homepage, video groups and individual video pages can all lead YouTube users to your blog.

Reader Appreciation Project’s WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin is a pretty nifty Wordpress plugin that’s recently been released. It basically allows the commenter to edit his or her own comments after they have been made.

I installed it on Dosh Dosh and now I wish every Wordpress powered blog I visits uses it because it’s so very cool. Bloggers often make typos or grammar mistakes often and nothing sucks more than leaving a comment on a blog with an obvious error you can’t change.

By the way, please let me know if the plugin is actually working.. i.e. you can edit your own comments after leaving them.

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.1+) allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a period specified by the admin, and admins can edit all post comments. What better way to show reader appreciation than letting the readers edit their own typos?