So I decided to dive into SEO, learning everything I can from as many sources as possible. Since then I have developed several campaigns trying to tackle the SERP in google. Many without any luck, but I am getting better at it. My recent success is getting to position #3 for my latest campaign.There is not much traffic behind the targeted keyword, but it has resulted in a couple sales reaching just under $100 in commission.

The point of this thread is that SEO is much harder then you think. I though it would be something I can tackle really quickly, but the thing with SEO is that there is lots of waiting… waiting for pages to get indexed, waiting for backlinks to get discovered, waiting for Google to update, waiting for my rankings to climb. All this waiting for things to happen makes it really slow to test ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Unlike PPC I can have test results within hour or a day at max. With SEO it seems I need about a week to see if any changes are going to take effect.

I am still determined to master this, but I have to admit at this point its harder than some people make it out to be. I have put about 3 months or so into it, created about 20 or 30 different campaigns and resulted in 3 current campaigns making money, but not much money, its under $1,000 per month in revenue. Only the recent most campaigns are making any money as well, because I just screwed up the first projects and then just left them for dead.

What makes SEO so hard? Ranking mostly. Every time I put something new up I end up between position 20 and 100, and if you have any experience with search results anything past the first page gets no action what so ever. The hard part is climbing the ranks in the search engines where people can see find you. The biggest problem is there are some many people willing to give advice on how to do SEO and how to get on the top of google, but I dont think those giving advice have any idea what they are talking about. Those who I have found that are on the top of the search results always keep their mouth shut and wont give you an ounce of advice.

Its a secret and a mystery on how to climb the ranks which nobody is willing to share. I guess they have plans on taking over the internet one keyword at a time. I guess thats my plan as well, but first got to figure out how to master climbing the ranks.

I signed up with an online marketing group called wealthy affiliate almost a year ago. I signed up because I was getting a flood of PPC questions over on digital point about PPC and wanted to try and solve the problem at the source. This post however is not about PPC, its actually about something called bum marketing.

What Is Bum Marketing

Simply put its marketing anything, a product, service or affiliate program, using methods that do not cost the marketer a Penny. I am mostly a PPC guy. I have used PPC for over 8 years, but with the recent slump in the economy makes it harder to pick up clients, and more clients want to spend less, or they are having a hard time closing sales. So I decided to to look into SEO.

I found out that i have a major resource of information that i have been paying for anyway. The information is from wealthy affiliate. This site is not dedicated to bum marketing, but more affiliate marketing as a whole, but as you can imagine many beginner Internet marketers do not have the funds to dump into PPC, or even web hosting for SEO reasons. So they came up with bum marketing.

Why Bum Marketing?

I have become slightly fascinated with this method of marketing lately. To learn and test the methods being thought I implemented some of my own bum marketing sites, and guess what… It really works. Not only for my PPC teaching, but I have also been making a small side income using these methods from CPA affiliate programs.

I am no SEO or bum marketing guru, but i have been learning a lot, and since I love to teach and educate others I think I will start adding bum marketing information onto this site. Not only that but I will start applying what i have been learning to this blog as well.

This blog will always be dedicated to my thoughts, education and things I enjoy sharing, I just hope to put in more posts to this blog and hopefully even increase its traffic…

Image you write an article and the sub directory is http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/

Well, you and other website might try linking to it in the following ways

http://mydomain.com/category/article/
http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/index.html
http://www.mydomain.com/category/article
http://mydomain.com/category/article

I recently discovered, due to googles webmaster tools, that all these different variations are actually very unique paths and many times can cause your visitors to end up on 404 error pages. I figured this out because I decided to check up on the reports in webmaster tools and I saw a little section that showed me all the pages that were resolving on 404 error pages.

After a quick glance of the 404 pages I realized, all these articles and pages did exist and that external websites were just linking to my pages incorrectly. I did some research and found out how to not only universalize my url system but a way to also fix other webmasters mistakes without having to knock on doors and asking them all to fix their links.

The answer is all in the htaccess file which uses methods like mod_rewrite and the rewriterule and rewritecondition statements. This is by far no tutoral on htaccess or mod_rewrite but just my finds of near little tricks of code that helped me universalize my urls internally and externally so visitors are never sent to 404 error pages

First up make sure you have the following turned on otherwise these neat little tricks will not work

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

Fixing Links with a missing www

Now lets say for example you want to ensure that www is always used in your url string, whether or not you or other webmasters remember to use it while linking to an article or page. Add the following lines to ensure your www naming convention always remains the same.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now I have noticed some other people use this same code but with HTTP_HOST instead of THE_REQUEST. Like I said I am no expert on this subject. but I have learned that if you use the HTTP_HOST version the url will only fix itself when linking to the home page and not sub pages. If you want your subpages to fix themselves as well then use the THE_REQUEST version

now if anyone types in

yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/article1

they domain will always end up at

www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/article1

Remove Trailing File Names

Lets say for example you use a CMS such as wordpress or drupal and you use the permalink option. If you write an article and permalinks makes the destination url www.mydomain.com/article1/ and you want to prevent accidental linling of trialing file names such as

www.mydomain.com/article1/index.html
www.mydomain.com/article1/index.php

Then try adding this code

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \/index.php\ HTTP [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \/index.html\ HTTP [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

This will remove the trailing file name on the url and redirect the visitor back to the original naming convention

Ensure Trialing Slashes on your url

How about if someone linked to that same article again, but this time forgot the last / sending their traffic to

www.mydomain.com/article1

instead of

www.mydomain.com/article1/

Try adding this code to put the forward slash back onto the end of the url string

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

A special note about this code is that its going to make sure the directory /article doesnt really exist and if it does it will not put the trailing slash on the end of the url. Also, if someone does try to access a directory that does exist it will give them a forbidden access page. This will protect all the sub files in any directories that do exist and are accidentally linked to.

Well Lets give all these are try now

This articles url is

http://www.robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

Lets mess with it a bit

Lets forget the www
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-…ricks-and-tipsmy-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

How about droping the trailing slash and forgetting the www
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips

How about forgetting the www and adding index.html to the end of the url
http://robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/index.html

all these variations should all end up on my new universal naming convention

http://www.robdogg.com/wordpress/2008/10/16/my-3-htaccess-mod-rewrite-rewriterule-rewritecondition-tricks-and-tips/

Well I hope if any of you are having any of my issues that this helps resolve some of them

I have put together a small list of blogs with high Page rank that use the nonofollow, dofollow or u comment I follow rule. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs with page rank of 0 thru 5 so I decided not to include those. This list is only blogs that have a PR of 6 or above.

My list of PR6 (page rank) blogs that pass comment love

http://randaclay.com/

http://bloggeruniversity.blogspot.com/

http://www.jangro.com/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://larholm.com/

My list of PR7 (page rank) blogs that pass comment love

http://michaelmartine.com/

Are you ready for this? I was able to find one PR8 site that passes link love. Please do not spam him!!! Do not ruin it for us. Comment wisely, otherwise I will never post this again…

http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/

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