Earlier this week, I StumbledUpon Michelle MacPhearson’s blog (see, it works). On her blog, I noticed a weird plugin next to the PlugIM and Sphinn buttons. When I clicked it, I was quite impressed.

There are several audio tools and plugins available for blogs, but I never came across one that was 100% understandable. The one Michelle uses, Odiogo, actually is. Because of a good intonation, Odiogo offers “Near-human” quality text-to-speech.

I decided to give Odiogo a try as well. It also offers stats, so I can remove it again if nobody uses it. This means that you can listen to SEO related posts while jogging or travveling, but it also means that Wiep.net is available for the audially disabled from now on.

Push my Buttons!

I know this must be something like the 862nd way-too-positive post about StumbleUpon, but it really is one of my favourite websites. It rocks for serving me great, fun and relevant websites when I start stumbling. It especially rocks for bringing me lots and lots of visitors. Even though I received links from websites like SearchEngineLand and SEOBook this week, StumbleUpon still is my #1 referer. Some of my other websites and also a few client websites manage to receive thousands of visitors from SU monthly.

A common misconception is that StumbleUpon users are nothing but one-page surfers. While a part of the stumbling visitors only see a single page and leave, the linkerati also seem to use the nifty toolbar. One of my very first posts was only submitted to StumbleUpon, but managed to show up on several other pages, including a few very cool ones.

One of the most important things to keep in mind, is that StumbleUpon users are quite visual. Adding a single or a few cool, funny or relevant images improves the stumbleability of a page drastically.

Cameron Olthuis wrote up a great post about how to get traffic from SU recently and you can find even more StumbleUpon tips at DoshDosh, SEOptimise, BlogAnything and Del.ici.ous.
A must read is the post at SEJ, which offers a few great tips. One of these tips is that you really have to stumble posts, pages or website that link to your page or site. More traffic to their website can lead into more traffic to yours as well.

So if you haven’t checked out StumbleUpon (what I can’t imagine), go ahead and sign up.

Push my Buttons!

A colleague who’s really into Google AdWords showed me a great example of personalized Google ads. In some cases, Google shows ads that are related to your previous search queries. It even works when all cookies are deleted and you aren’t signed in to your Google account or whatever. The searches must be executed in the same window, however.

Let’s say I’m looking for the weather forecast. When I search for “weather forecast“, I’ll get these results (click to enlarge):

What if the next thing I’m looking for is a “Holiday to Spain“?

Now let’s see what happens to the ads if I enter “weather forecast” in the search box again?

Hmm, the first ad looks really targeted to me. Let’s see if we can get personalized ads on other queries as well.

(more…)

Push my Buttons!

Let’s say you’re targeting keywords with a high competion and with an extremely high spam density. Something like “Buy cheap viagra online”. The top 10 in Google is filled with a couple of .edu’s, a .gov and a few other domains. Looks really competitive to me.
Now go out and build some Google trust. A public job at Google would be extremely suitable to let your website gain enough trust. If you’re website is trustworthy, go add “Buy cheap viagra online” about 7 times to a 9,000 words page. Make sure that the page attracts a few hundred links.
Now get someone to add a link to your webpage with the anchor text “Buy cheap viagra online”. That link doesn’t even have to be an authority link by the way, a single link from a website like this should be enough.

Oh wait, a link from this website is enough. Did you spot the “Buy cheap viagra online” link in the blogroll of this website? It’s filed under “sponsored links”. It has been there for about a week and a half, Google has cached it 4 days ago. A website that wasn’t present in the top 1000 for “Buy cheap viagra online”, is now ranking 3rd for the targeted keyword. Hey, that’s our friend Matt!

This means that it’s quite easy to get some good rankings in Google, even when you’re targeting competitive terms. All you need is three things:

1) Trust
A somewhat older website (> 2 years) with lots of links (> 10k, with at least a few hundred of high quality) is a solid foundation for good rankings. This is a really important factor, if not the most important one.

2) Keywords
Ofcourse, your website needs to mention the keyword’s your targeting. On a page with around 8,000 words, a keyword density of 0,1% should be enough.

3) A link
If you succesfully implemented 1) and 2), a single link with the right anchor text can be a trigger for Google to rank your website.

Edit: I just noticed that Matt doesn’t even need the “online”, he ranks #5 for “Buy cheap viagra“.

Push my Buttons!

Personal branding is hot. Really hot. Because my personal brand value of close to zilch, I guess it’s more important to get my brand name pronounced right.

I know Wiep is only a four letter word, but I can imagine that it’s quite hard to pronounce it if you don’t know how. The Dutch language can be a bitch.
Wiep is pronounced as ‘cheap’, but without the ch. Now mix the ‘eap’ with a combination of a V and a W (like some sort of Russian V). That’s it. V/W-eap.

Do you want to know how not to pronounce my name? There are 7 ways after the jump.

(more…)

Push my Buttons!

It was about time that someone released a social news website for SEO news. Search Engine Land released Sphinn. You really did a great job, Danny & crew!

SquareOak already posted some info about how to add a Sphinn button to the Share This WP plugin. If you use Social Bookmarking Reloaded, like me, you can add Sphinn to your list like this:

Go to Plugins > Plugin Editor > and click on the social_bookmarking_reloaded.php file. Towards the top of the code is where you can add new bookmarking sites. CTRL+F for “blinklist|” and add “sphinn|” to the list.
Now open sites.xml and add the following code:

<site>
<name>Sphinn</name>
<url>http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url={link}&amp;title={title}</url>
<img>sphinn.png</img>
<key>sphinn</key>
</site>

Now save this image: and upload it to wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded. Go to “Options” in your WP-admin and select Sphinn in the Social Bookmarking Reloaded section.
Done.

Push my Buttons!