Posted: 19 Feb 2010 03:56 AM PST

questions and answers This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Mathew asks:

Do you spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and getting some quality/relevant backlinks to them right away, or are they mostly organic links from people linking to them?

Also, what’s the best ways to get backlinks to my inner pages with older posts on them?

I was wondering because I’ve noticed almost all of your older posts have very good page rank.

I used to spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and on getting quality/relevant backlinks a couple of years ago. That is because the blog was new and had a small audience, so publishing outstanding content alone wouldn’t do the trick. How did I go about attracting backlinks? Doing three things mainly:

1. Submitting my posts to social bookmarking sites. There are plenty of do-follow social bookmarking sites out there that will send you link juice even if you are the only one voting for your story. On top of that I also tried to promote my killer articles on Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and whenever I managed to score a front page a big influx of organic links would come.

2. Networking with fellow bloggers. Building a relationship with bloggers inside your niche is essential. This means that I would link to them often, and many times they would return the favor. I am not talking about link exchanges but rather about natural links to quality content that your fellow bloggers post.

3. Guest blogging. As you probably know I am a big fan of guest blogging. Back in the day I used to do it a lot, which sent both new readers and backlinks my way. Sometimes instead of using the byline link to my homepage I would point it to a related post I had published on my blog, and that can help a lot with search rankings.

Over time, however, I started to spend less and less time trying to get backlinks, because as my audience increased so did the organic backlinks. That is, every time I publish a normal post these days I get 5-10 backlinks on it. When I post a killer article I get 50-100 backlinks. So I just focus on producing content these days, because the promotion side pretty much walks alone.

There are two other things you can do to maximize the link juice of your single posts, however. They are:

1. Having an HTML sitemap. This is basically a page within your blog that you’ll link to all posts you have ever published. You could make this by having an “Archives” section, as I do. This is a very efficient way to distribute your link equity because all pages of your blog will link there, and it will link back to all pages of your blog.

2. Cross linking between your posts. Linking to older and relevant posts is another practice that can increase your PageRank and search rankings, apart from adding more value to your readers. Whenever you are writing a new post, therefore, think about what you have published in the past and trying to find something relevant to link to.

Finally, notice that having lots of backlinks pointing to each of your single posts is not necessary to make sure they will have a good PageRank. If you have a good amount of backlinks pointing to your homepage, and use the two methods I mentioned above, your link equity will naturally spread all over your website, and even single posts will no backlinks at all will gain some PageRank.

Original Post: How Do I Get Backlinks to My Posts, Making Sure They Will Get a Good PageRank?

The Affiliate Marketing Report Card

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 01:27 PM PST

Browsing through the web today I came across report compiled by AceAffiliates, called Affiliate Marketing Report Card. It basically summarizes a bunch of data from different affiliate programs to help you choose the best one.

affiliate-marketing-report-card

Here are some of the fields included:

commissions
earnings per click
order size
conversion rate
payment threshold
payment methods

They also classified the affiliate programs by niche, including dating, web hosting, software, medical, insurance and so on. Overall it is a nice resource if you are trying to find some affiliate offers to promote.

Original Post: The Affiliate Marketing Report Card

This Is Why I Don’t Believe In Optimizing for Mobile Devices

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:47 AM PST

A couple of years ago we saw the trend of “mobile optimization” emerge. People started urging us about the importance of optimizing our sites for mobile devices, about creating versions for the iPhone and other mobile phones and so on. There were even companies that created a business model around this idea.

I wrote about it, but I never really bought into it. In fact early in 2009 I had already written a post titled Do We Really Need to Optimize Our Sites for Mobile Phones?.

One year later I still defend the position that optimizing for mobile devices is not really necessary. Not because people are not using these devices to access the web. They are. But most mobile and smart phones these days work pretty much like portable computers, with fully compatible browsers. The resolution is not great yet, but we are getting there.

no-mobile-web

I got inspired to talk about this issue again after my little brother came hope with an iPod touch. Once I grabbed it to play a little I connected to our wifi spot and opened Daily Blog Tips. To my surprise the website was loading fine, and it was perfectly possible to navigate around and read all the posts. And that is an iPod touch. Imagine what you’ll be able to do with the iPad or the coming smart phones.

In other words, I don’t believe we’ll see the rise of a “mobile web”, with separate protocols and websites. I believe we’ll continue using the “traditional web,” even though we’ll certainly start using new and mobile devices to access it. Sure there will be new applications and features that mobile connectivity makes possible (e.g., Foursquare), but overall the good ol’ web will remain as the core network.

Thoughts?

Original Post: This Is Why I Don’t Believe In Optimizing for Mobile Devices