In the end of May I made a post, where I had some SEO related plans regarding my 2 blogs - toptut.com and nowg.net. After I posted them I was a little concerned that I will not manage to make it by the end of June, especially since I had a lot of offline plans and aggressive SE Optimization just did not seem to fit in well in . But I thought - okay, maximum I will just fail.

By June 7th, the plan was already almost fulfilled.

As you can see, Alexa traffic plan for nowg.net was the only issue that was left behind, but let’s not forget, it’s only June 20th today, still 10 days to go, anything can happen. So, about 2500 extra backlinks were gathered for both blogs in 30 days, if you ask me, I’d say it’s a bad at all. I am pretty sure I won’t make it, because like I said, originally I had a different promotion plan which ended up been frozen due to lack of time, however, what I did not take into account is that people are linking to me out of free will as well, which helped greatly and I want to use this opportunity and thank all the blogs who introduce their readers to the content of my blog, thanks a bunch!

No, there is no catch or competition, and this is not even a sponsored post, but for those of you who are looking to get some “quality backlinks” (from high PageRank sites, without having to provide a reciprocal), I have good news: You just stumbled across a golden mine! I am going to show you a tricky way to get a bunch of backlinks from PR5 sites. However, before you start clicking the urls below, please take a minute to read the intro and understand how is this going to work.

Below you will find a list of blogs, which I carefully selected. All of them are PR5, and have “nofollow” ref deactivated, which means leaving a comment in their blog gives you genuine links love. I am planning to make occasional posts of this nature, every time with a batch of links to blogs that “follow”, and have a certain PR (including PR6, if I will find more than a few), so if you want to stay up-to-date with the newly released “free backlinks lists”, please consider subscribing to my feed or digging this post. Actually, consider it anyway, if you want to make the author *cough* happy.

Back to topic. I will only post a maximum of 20 links at a time, but not because I want you to come back frequently, but rather because posting too many links at once on one page, considering that this blog already has a lot of external links, may have a bad effect for me with SE’s, so I’d prefer to keep the bunches short. Remember, good things come in small packages!

Also, please don’t spam these blogs. Some of them will not be related to the topics you like, so don’t leave a useless comment just for the sake of a link, as some of these blogs belong to friends of mine and I don’t want to get slammed for advocating to spam their websites. So just for the record, you got my official warning.

Having said that, how to spam the right away? You don’t need to leave your link in the body of the comment itself, in fact don’t do it at all, because it will either be filtered as spam or disaproved by the site owner for same reason. Inputing your link in the “website” field is enough, and then enter the desired anchor text in the “name” field. That’s all, the blogging software will do the rest of the work for you, and the link will be genuine, perfectly beneficial for both PageRank and Technorati Rank. And now, let’s get the party started…

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Photo taken from Digital Free Photo © L. Kliko. The summer has just started and I already have a new review for the summer campaign, and the best part is that it comes from a good friend of mine with whom I have not been in touch for many months now! In case you did not keep track with previous events, I am referring to the “Get a link on TopTut.com blog - FREE!” links giveaway. You write a short review of my site, and get a link on TopTut.com, but please read the details before posting a review to avoid any confusions later. This is a great way to get a quality backlink, especially for new blogs, and remember - I will link to anyone who reviews my site and the review does not have to be possitive!

Also, best review of the season gets a backlink on the sidebar of toptut.com for the next season, and the “winner” of Spring reviews is slacker jack. Once again, thanks for your awesome review mate and good luck with your blog. (Link added to Featured Sites column).

Here are the bloggers who reviewed this blog from June 1st to August 31st:

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Jo wrote a review on Get a free link on TopTut.com

Jake wrote a review on www.toptut.com

A Little of Everything wrote a review on The great pr update and more

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Most people say that a blog without comments is like a forum without posts. That’s not true, at least for me as I run a few blogs and a few forums and can say with full confidence that you can keep blogging away even if no one comments or even visits, however, forum where no one posts automatically turns into a dead ground, on which no one wants to step in.

TopTut.com has a decent traffic and rather small amount of comments made weekly, some of which are even negative, nonetheless I do not implement any of the tactics I am going to reveal here, simply because I don’t care how many comments this blog gathers. I know I share useful info, I know people do read, I know visitors return, and that’s pretty much enough for me. But anyway, since most of you do want to see an annoyingly long list of comments below each post, here are a few basic tips.

1. Deactivate the “nofollow” ref. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get comments from a big amount of readers (including accidental guests) daily without any hassle. All you need to do is download the Nofollow Case by Case plug-in, install it, and put a badge or write in big letters somewhere on the most visible position, that this blog “follows” or something similar, which will let the visitors know that leaving a comment in your blog will count towards their website’s ranking. Basically, this plug-in removes the default “nofollow” ref from each external link in the comment, and therefore allow every commentators to get some links love off your blog. I implemented this technique on my other blog, Now G Net (which is PR3 and I assumed people would want to get some PR3 backlinks) and ever since the plug in installation I get a few comments daily.

The disadvantage of this tactic is that you end up with tons of irrelevant comments; for instance I happened to visit a blog that “follows” in which the admin posted how bad she felt today, describing her rather crucial health problems… with a comment bellow “Very useful info, I enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing! I bookmarked your blog for further visits”. Oh? Well, bear in mind that no matter what you will post, 50% of your comments will be of that nature (if not this exact text), be it your funeral announcement or SEO essay.
2. Give top commentators a sidewide link. This strategy requires more hassle on visitors part, and continuous participation, while the top ten commentators get a featured link on the sidebar / footer of your blog. If your blog is still small, the upside is that people can easily post a few comments and make it to the top 10, while the downside is - after a few comments they won’t bother to maintain the activity, knowing that the blog is not very popular and their comments count won’t be massively beaten any soon.
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It seems like I am slowly starting to live up to my domain name - toptut.com

If you search google for “Top Tutorials”, this blog is, evidently, result number 4, out of 63 millions. Not perfect, but not bad either. I am also 3rd result for “gloss button psd”, and some other nice keywords matches that surprise me when I look at the stats.

How can you determine if your website is, most definitely, a failure? The common belief is, if your website has no visitors, it’s a sinking ship. No, this is not true. If your website has no, or little traffic, all it means is that your site has no incoming links, no one knows about it, no one spreads the word, no one advertises it. How can you know if product ‘A’ is good, if no one tried it, and no shop sells it?
So lack of traffic is not a parameter, what is the right factor then? If you ask me, a website that has no returning visitors traffic, is what I’d call a failure. Now you gonna ask why, since everyone always measure website’s success by the number of unique visitors, rather than returning. The thing is, if I advertise now on some super popular website, I’d drive 10,000 unique visitors a day to my website, only thanks to the advert banner that looked tempting and tricked people into clicking. However, if the next day or week none of these thousands will come back, what does it say about my site? That it was so interesting so that no one bookmarked it? That it was so fascinating that no one dropped by later to check for updates? That it had so much unique content that people just left and forgot about it?
Yes, I do thinking that returning visitors is the invisible, yet powerful feedback, an indirect way to tell the site’s owns - congrats, your site is a success and is worth coming back to.

You can normally see “returning visitors” in blogs though the Feed Burner, which displays the amount of daily feed readers of the blog. The data is, however, not very accurate as it only refers to bookmarks and feed readers. Not all the feed readers go to the website, (some just read through the feed and don’t bother to drop by). Returning visitors who followed other paths do not count, so here is an example of returning visitors of this blog, compared to those that count as feed readers, the difference is not big, but it is present.
Feed Burner Readers vs. Stats returning visitors:

Just to sum up the analysis: Yesterday I had 106 returning visitors, yet only 70 subscribed readers, while on Tuesday, there were only 62 returning visitors and again, 70 readers. So if you wanna calculate the average, just sum up both and divide by two.
My site represents rather avarage stats, normally out of every 100 visitors, only a few come back later. Why is the world so cruel? Because, unless you have very very targetted traffic, and unless you provide a mind blowingly unique content that grabs the visitors by the throat and at the same time showers them with free stuff and useful downloads, they don’t really have a reason to return.

So, if you have no traffic yet, don’t panic, it does not say anything about the quality and importance of your website on the net (yet). Moreover, if you have 20-30 visitors a day and no returning visitors, don’t panic either, your website was to exposed to big enough audience (yet). But, if your website is getting more than 2k hits daily and no one ever bothers to come back… Oh well, probably it’s CRAP

I decided to set myself some plans for improving the ranking of both toptut dot com and nowg dot net, my currently running blogs. I am after improving the Technorati Rank as well as the amount of backlinks rather than trying to pull the Alexa up.

Current data for TopTut.com: Backlinks - 3,426, Technorati rank - 29,935, Links from other Technorati blogs - 311, Alexa - 191,548.

Nowg.net - Backlinks - 59 (boo!), Technorati rank - 425,069, Links from other Technorati blogs - 19, Alexa - 531,182.

• The SEO goal until the end of June:

TopTut.com: Backlinks - 4,100+, Technorati rank - 20,000, Links from other Technorati blogs - can’t really estimate it as not all the blogs appear there, Alexa - 180,000.

Nowg.net - Backlinks - 1000+, Technorati rank - 250,000, Links from other Technorati blogs - again, can’t really estimate it as not all the blogs appear there, Alexa - 430,000.

Now you’ll ask, how possible is it? Well, it’s definitely a hell of a challenge. I can honestly say that I am hoping to get there but can’t guarantee, and honestly I am not sure how exactly will I collect so many backlinks from other blogs, not forgetting that they all better have some Technorati authority and good PR, otherwise there is little point in them.

Anyway, if you, the reader, feel like reaching a helping hand, how about a links exchange? I have many sites ranging from PR5 to PR0, related to different niches and are mostly high traffic domains, hence links exchange of an equal nature would be greatly appreciated, just drop me a line to lorelei@loreleiweb.com and I will consider your request. Okay, I am off to start working on promotion, wish me luck!

Well, good question. Can you know it for sure? There are many third party tools for approximately estimating the “worth” of the blog, or rather the URL of the blog.

Google PageRank. Most popular parameter that everybody look at nowadays. PageRank indicates the number of incoming links, i.e. links that point to your URL. Most websites do get a PR with time, however, it also depends what PR websites link to you. For example, one link from PR8 is far better than 10 links from PR3 sites. Roughly speaking your PR indicates how “important” your website is on the internet. Naturally the high is the PR, the better, but don’t forget that it’s so hard to reach PR7 (not to mention PR8+). Even the most successful blogs normally fall in the category between PR4 and PR6. If you have nothing better do to, I recommend reading a good explanation of Google PageRank On WikiPedia, or, of you are less bored, just check your PR here.
Alexa Rank. Another very popular tool that estimates the traffic of the domain. It’s not endlessly accurate though, as it only gathers information from surfers who use Alexa toolbar (Do you? I don’t.) so it’s pretty approximate and is not something I’d rely on, nonetheless, if the website’s Alexa ranking is small (here, unlike Google PR, the smaller is the number, the better) it’s safe to say that the site has decent traffic. If you want to have a general idea, below 100,000 is normally “good”. Should you decide to educate yourself more on the subject, again, Wiki is the answer.
Technorati Rank. Measures the number of blogs linking to your blog. Just like with Alexa, the lower is the number, the more popular is the blog. How accurate is it? Again, not flawless. If someone placed a link to you, Technorati bot pinged the backlink, and then he removed the link, it will still remain in your Technorati profile as an incoming link. I faced it quite a few times when I just released my WordPress themes, some people uploaded my themes, and then removed the footer link with my credits, (normally by the time I dropped to visit the link was already gone, but I could recognize my theme + thanks to Technorati for heads up). Some of these website still do good to my ranking, though this does not reflect the blog backlinks in real time.
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