January 11th, 2009 | 
Author: Let’s Get Going…
So, finally my European Cruise blog is up and running and has already had spider activity from google and Yahoo even before I had posted anything, bizarre but I am not complaining.
The progress so far is that I have posted 5 different articles each to different categories in the blog. I have not added any adsense yet and will not until the posts are ranked highly in google.
I have added images to some of the posts and bolded certain keywords that I am targeting but make sure that I don’t overdo this. I hate seeing blatant optimization on websites and you can bet your bottom dollar that google does to. I have also double checked all the articles for spelling and grammar.
At this point, the blog has just a section in the sidebar for categories, Archives and recent posts. I have no external links, adsense or other links. I have also added “About Us”, “Contact Us” and “Privacy” pages to the blog to comply with google’s quality guidelines.
Promotion
Now that the first 5 articles are added, here are the steps I take to start my blog promotion/off-site SEO.
- Add site to Google webmaster tools
- Upload google sitemap plugin to create google sitemaps and activate it.
- Verify sitemap in webmaster tools
- Submit RSS feed from blog to RSS directories using RSS submit
- Social Bookmark every post
- Every post should ping pingomatic
- Add google analytics to blog use plugin “Google Analytics for WordPress” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
- Start blog commenting with backlinks to articles
- Create squidoo lenses with backlinks to each category
- Submit articles to ezine, go articles and Isnare with backlinks to main category pages/some articles.
- Search top 50 pages on google for your target keywords and email them to do link exchange or ask for link inclusion (paid) back to chosen posts and/or categories.
That will do for starters to get some good spidering and hopefully indexing. Other things I will do as well will be..
- Blog commenting (NOT spamming)
- Squidoo commenting
- Do a Press Release.
I will also start frequenting forums and get chatting on there with people interested in cruises. I won’t try selling the blog until I get a bit more reputation though.
That will do for now, but the process over the coming weeks will be…
- Post articles
- Promote using techniques above
- Repeat
When I start to see some half decent traffic I will add some adsense blocks but not before. I have added a screenshot of the spider activity below after making the five posts and just social bookmarking.
[...] already getting spider activity I have started promoting it also. I have added a blog entry here The Adsense Challenge Begins… | The $100 Challenge if you want to read more detail into what I have done so far and any minor results of doing [...]
This is some awesome information. I’m keenly following along and looking forward to learning and making money with you.
Awesome!
Hey,
I’m finding Ur blog and threads on warrior very interesting and I’m learning a lot. yes i am a newbie to internet marketing and have a couple question for u about what u have mentioned first up.
1. when social bookmarking, do u just do it with one social bookmarking site or do u do it with a whole bunch? if so how many and which are the best to do it with?
2. when commenting and back linking on related blog sites, do u use a program like comment kahuna or do u just do Google searches?
thanks heaps for your help
:-0
all the best man
Good luck in your venture. I am also using your techniques to build my blog buy my goal is only $10 a day. I am really getting into blogging and reading up articles and posting. Good luck!
Ok i am trying your path but can it be done with blogspot ??
Hello Steve,
I have a question.
When you said squidoo commenting and blog commenting, do you mean leaving a link(which points back to your website) in the comments? Or just comment normally without any links in your comments?
Could you recommend any specific resources, books, or other blogs on this topic?