Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

Lyndon Antcliff

How Ally McBeal paid for a two year holiday

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Ally McBeal popped my cherry. Myself and others put together a celebrity stock market game website, it was pretty sweet, and I threw up a few celeb biogs, pics and stuff. Pretty much forgot about it. This was back in 1999 and I didn’t even know you could get into search engines then, I thought it was all very weird, it took a while to get my head around it all. I’m not really techy, more a word geek than a gadget geek.

I was living in London at the time, a place called Notting Hill which used to be a cool, working-class, riot-torn, arty-farty place, now it’s all trust fund brats and arsewipe media types. I thought I would take a break. I nipped over to San Diego for a month to hang with Barbara who was doing her PHD at SDSU at the time. I would go sit in the University computer room and go online checking stats and then.

Bang!

Ally Mcbeal hit number one, wow, how the hell did I do that.

I was all excited, so after a month with Barb, I nipped back to London and implemented a strategy which now has a name, “the long tail”. You take a celebs name and stick bikini after it, you make another page and stick “hair” after the celebs name. Rinse and repeat. Pretty soon I had a few thousand pages, 30k uniques a day and a lot of wonga. I had a weird affiliate set up at the time which I won’t go into. It was all legal, just weird. Those days it was like the Wild West.

I decided that ten years in London was enough and Notting Hill no longer had the downbeat, scruffy attraction after all the pubs had been turned into trendy wine bars and Starbucks had moved in. So I went to live in San Fransico for two years, a place called Nob hill, which of course everyone back in blighty thought hilarious. I made the mistake of not building on success and instead of nose to the grindstone I had one hell of a time. So thanks, Google and Ally.

The Tao of Linkbait Method

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The Tao of Linkbait Method

The art of hitting your target audience by aiming at a completely different audience.

Have you ever seen a great little movie called The Tao of Steve? It?s a gem of a movie, low budget, independent flick that presents the art of chasing girls in philosophical terms.

The Steve being referenced is:

* Steve McQueen (Bullit)
* Steve Austin (Bionic man)
* Steve McGarrett (Hawaii Five-0)

They have a certain cool, a quality about them that seems to attract people without really trying.

The film goes on to describe a philosophy of how men can attract women, but I think it’s applicable to attracting links.

* Eliminate your desires.
* Do something excellent in her presence, thereby proving your sexual worthiness.
* Retreat, for as Heidegger said, “We pursue that which retreats from us”.

Recreating that cool quality will attract links.

There is another off beat movie from the same era called Swingers and it suggests you only get a girl back when you no longer want her. But I don?t want to stretch the movie metaphor too much.

When creating a piece of linkbait, lateral thinking can be very useful. Our target market when creating the linkbait may not be the regular readers. Our readers may not be linkers, it?s the linkers which we need to seduce into handing over that golden link. SEO blogs are the exception.

Example. Your client sells cashmere products. Difficult to get links from other Cashmere sites and the customer base tends to be people who wish to buy and wear cashmere rather than write and link about it.

So we craft an article that is irresistible to another target market which is sympathetic to the product. We target Knitting blogs. Knitters have an interest in cashmere as it?s a product they use. Therefore they will be interested in numerous aspects of cashmere, although it’s unlikely any will become customers they benefit in linking to useful information about cashmere.

After an article has been created which excites the target market they are contacted for their opinion on the article. By not directly asking for a link it is more likely the article will be read and its potential is realised and a link given.

Knitting blogs may have their own social media sites where they hang out, if not the direct method of emailing and commenting on their blogs can be used.

Once the link is given, link juice is passed, SERPS improve, job done.

People say Linkbait when they really mean Linkbait

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Brian Clarke has an informed post about Linkbait. The term is considered sleazy by some people, which is a misunderstanding of how the technique is used generally. The problem I have is how people use it to encapsulate a number of supporting techniques. I find the term limiting, it’s not yet ground it’s way into everyone’s brain to be able to use it without everyone having their own interpretation. [Read more…] about People say Linkbait when they really mean Linkbait

What has General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord got to do with each other?

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General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord said,

“I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the high staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately.”

[Read more…] about What has General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord got to do with each other?

Traffic as a Metric is less important than Comments

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When I look at my stats, the most important one to me is my comment stats
Having a lot of comments means I have been successful in my goal. It’s not that I don’t care about traffic, it’s just as a metric it does not give me the vital information I need.

As a metric in social media optimisation, web traffic is the least important metric. [Read more…] about Traffic as a Metric is less important than Comments