Link Building with RSS Feeds

Just found out about a cool Wordpress plugin that takes advantage of blog and RSS blog scrapers to build links to your site.  The plugin you’ll want to snag is RSS Footer plugin from the great Joost de Valk. (If you don’t have atleast one plugin from Joost then you are missing the boat with Wordpress SEO).

Our of the box the plugin works great, but Graywolf states that you need to do some tweaking to it to take advantage of the link building posibilities of your RSS feed.  With it you can build links to other sections of your blog, or another website for that matter.  Michael used this approach to get top-ranking for the terms [seo blog] and [seo consultant].  I’m personally going to target the phrase [sexiest man alive].  Wish me luck :)

Go ahead and read his great Wordpress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links article and start having fun.

What are Tag Clouds?

This may seem like an easily answered question to many of you in the bloggosphere, but many others are not familiar with the concept of tag clouds.  I thought it would be a good idea to give some of you quick explanation of the concept of tag clouds.

So what are tag clouds and why are they important? I want you to look at it this way:

Every bit of content added to a site, be it videos, images, blog posts, articles, can be "Tagged" with keywords. Take this for example.   I upload a photo to my "wall."  There will be a field called Description which allows me to enter the description of the photo. 

For example: I upload a picture of a red rose.  I can type in the description: "This is a hybrid red rose grown in my science class."  Also on the screen would be a field called "Tags."  It is here that I can type in short keywords "classifying" this photo.

In this case my tags would be: flowers, science experiments, hybrid

Next, I can write a blog post.  This post will have some elements tied to it.  For example, a title field which is the title of the blog post, the story field; which is the whole blog post, and the Tag field, which I can type in short keywords classifying this blog post.

For example: I write a blog post titled "How Hybrid cars can save the world"  and the story would be something about hybrid cars and how they work and how they are good for the environment. Now and can add Tags to classify this blog post.   In this case I could tag the story with "hybrid, electricity, green, cars"

Here is an screenshot from my Wordpress Add New Post screen…notice the Post Tags section to the right:

So now, with this added content, my tag cloud would display ALL of the tags  "flowers, science experiments, hybrid, electricity, green, cars." BUT since there are more tags for hybrid, the tag cloud would display all of the tags, but the tag Hybrid would display in a larger, bolder font.  The more content that is added and tagged with the keyword Hybrid, the bigger and darker the word Hybrid would get.

This gives visitors an indication of what is popular on the site…the bigger and bolder tags indicated the most popular content.  Here is the tag cloud from tonyrocks.com:

When you click on any of the tags in the tag cloud, you are presented with a list of all content associated with that tag (similar to a Google search engine result). My blog tag cloud says that Twitter and SEO are the most popular content items on my site.

cheap flights to islands – my new niche

Cheap flights to islands was an interesting term that I stumbled upon while looking for my next bum marketing experiment.  Travel pay per click terms in Google are quite expensive, so when I ran into this little gem i was amazed.  I was shocked to see that the general term for cheap flights to islands in the serps returns 14,300,000 results, but the specific term for “cheap flights to islands” only returns 8 results, but with a TON of sponsored links.

Now, according to Adwords, the term does not fetch a high bid, but still, a good niche to tap if you want to promote travel sites for cheap flights.  A few more cheap flight related terms that also peaked my interest:

• Cheap flights to Jamaica – $1.67-  942,000 general, 11,500 specific
• Cheap flights to LA – $1.92 – 18,200,000 general, 0 specific
• Cheap flights to NY – $1.96 – 20,400,00 general, 2,950 specific

So go ahead and have some fun bum marketing with these cheap flights to variations.

Thanks Tim

I’d like to thank Tim for clearing this up for me:

INPUT A 0 0 1 1  Meaning B 0 1 0 1
OUTPUT FALSE 0 0 0 0  Whatever A and B, the output is false. Contradiction.
A AND B 0 0 0 1 Output is true if and only if (iff) both A and B are true.
A  B 0 0 1 0 A doesn’t imply B. True iff A but not B.
A 0 0 1 1 True whenever A is true.
A  B 0 1 0 0 A is not implied by B. True iff not A but B.
B 0 1 0 1 True whenever B is true.
A XOR B 0 1 1 0 True iff A is not equal to B.
A OR B 0 1 1 1 True iff A is true, or B is true, or both.
A NOR B 1 0 0 0 True iff neither A nor B.
A XNOR B 1 0 0 1 True iff A is equal to B.
NOT B 1 0 1 0 True iff B is false.
A  B 1 0 1 1 A is implied by B. False if not A but B, otherwise true.
NOT A 1 1 0 0 True iff A is false.
A  B 1 1 0 1 A implies B. False if A but not B, otherwise true.
A NAND B 1 1 1 0 A and B are not both true.
TRUE 1 1 1 1 Whatever A and B, the output is true. Tautology

Logic functions can be quite useful if you understand them!

Pittsburgh G20 – I’ll have the best view in town!

The Pittsburgh G20 summit is only 8 weeks away and I am still excited to see how things turn out.  I hope the weather in Pittsburgh improves by then…but still, I will be in the Brady Communications office watching from above.  We had an incredible view for both Pittsburgh Steelers parades.  I know the summit will be held at the convention center, which is quite a walk from us, but I’m sure there will be plenty of things happening at The Point as well.

President Obama actually invited the Netherlands to the Pittsburgh G20 summit. 

Obama says “"We think that the Netherlands not only is one of the world’s largest economies and most active internationally, but (the) prime minister has very specific expertise and experience in working with a whole range of world leaders."

I think Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende will be impressed at what Pittsburgh has to offer…I’m sure he’ll agree that selecting Pittsburgh as G20 summit host was a great idea.