Article Surfing Archive

It is now two months since we started to regroup our efforts in contemporary SEO strategies. A real estate start-up was taken as the guinea pig for the exploration of our new SEO techniques - and with staggering early results. As one can imagine, a huge uplift in the site hits of a property company is worth a awful lot of money.

The site is still only four months old and therefore in the pending tray of Google's, and to some extent Yahoo's 'sandbox'. Still, the strategies we have employed this year has seen site traffic quintupled, after taking advice garnered from a raft of sources, especially SitePro News and ProBlogger.

The days of organic submissions are still with us but those of reciprocals, unless of specific benefit, are moribund - thankfully. Our latest methods have been passed on to our partners in the UK, Strategy Consulting, and they have been integrated into their new year's marketing efforts.

What we did was to install WordPress as a seamless addition to the website, fill it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, register all of its pages with Google Sitemap and ping a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogcrawler now dominates the referrers list.

Alongside the on-site blogs, we saw that a certain blogspot was appearing above many of the established estate agents in Bangkok. We therefore researched (via Overture) all the property-related keywords and set up blogs with Blogspot for each, slightly amending the on-site copy - so as not to get blacklisted - and optimised the selected keywords, linked them all together with them all pointing to the website. Now, when searching for 'tenancy management bangkok' the site completely dominates the stage: the website plus blogs are #1-14 on MSN. As the site does not reciprocate, they now have twenty quality inbounds, helping the site's real keywords to succeed.

Another helpful addition is article writing for sites having high PR. They seem to burn and fade very quickly from the search engine's perspective, but very still a valuable part of our strategy.

So, in 2006, we can now offer our clients a five-pronged assault on the majors: quality, well-researched SEO on url, title, metas, alts, content and outbounds; relevant one-way, high PR link building; on-site blogging, thus elevating PR, building relevant content and auto-pinging RSS feeds; intelligent registration of keywords on Blogspot with specifically-crafted copy, with headline and alt tagging key phrases, linking them all together with links into the main site; last but not least, writing atricles for sites such as this to get feedback from experts to further enhance the strength of these strategies.

Now, we can also offer small companies templated but effective CMS solutions through WordPress for $250.

But how to relate this information to clients outside of demonstrating results?