Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

I’ve gotten a couple requests asking me to keep the Link Laundering, Madlib Sites, and Power Indexing Tips series going. I think that’s a great Fuckin’ idea. Let’s not only do that but throw in a related Blue Hat Technique at the same time. This is a little technique I learned back in my warez and mp3 site days. You’ve probably seen it used before, but if you’re like most marketers you’ve probably just skipped right by it without ever giving it a second thought. It’s called Keyword Fluffing. It’s fairly simple and works pretty damn well, especially if you have a large site(eg. A Madlib Site).

Objective
We’re going to fluff all of our individual pages’ keywords with additional targeted long tailed phrases. We’re going to do this by creating a search box with static results and inner link within the appropriate pages. This in a sense will attempt to triple or quadruple your long tailed search traffic. This of course is an unrealistic performance result, but it will work and help quite a bit. Worthy of mention, there is an extremely blackhat version of this technique called Keyword Drafting, but for this post we’ll keep it very white hat and by the books. Yes, many major sites use this technique and it’s well within the rules.
The Process
1) Create a search feature on your site. Using Mod-Rewrite have it print the results to a separate subdirectory. For instance the results for the search “My Keyword” will result in a static page of the results located at www.myexample.com/search/mykeyword.html.

2) Pick up to five keywords related to your site’s niche to fluff. These will need to be common keywords that people looking for your site may tack on to their search. As an example, many software directories and crackz sites use the terms, download, crack, keygen, & serial to fluff. So when they have a page targeting “Adobe Photoshop” that page will also fluff for the terms, “Adobe Photoshop Download”, “Adobe Photoshop Crack” and “Adobe Photoshop Keygen.” Many of whom are common phrases people might add on to their search terms in the engines.

3) On each individual page on your site at the bottom put a little Div that says “Related Searches” or something similar. Then put in a link to the search results for each of those long tailed phrases. For instance the Adobe Photoshop page will have a link to www.mydomain.com/search/adobephotoshopserial.html with the anchor text “Adobe Photoshop Serial.” Be sure to make these links crawlable and pass PR. You will want them to get crawled and indexed so they can start ranking for those individual terms.

4) Make your site’s search box record the most recent searches. For added value, on your main page put up a link to the “Recent Searches.” Be sure to filter out unwanted html tags and inappropriate words. You don’t want people abusing this feature. You do however want to start gaining some extra targeted phrases you may not have thought of in the indeces.

The real trick to this technique is to scale it according to your sites’ current indexing power. I’d recommend you don’t just immediately implement this off the get go. A rule of thumb I use is to wait till my site has reached at least 60% saturation in at least 2 major engines.

For this technique I used an example that I thought people may have openly noticed. You have probably heard the recent news that Youtube has announced that they have quit using this technique, not because it’s against the Google TOS but because it was “unfair to the integrity of their results.” Meaning it worked too damn well, and other more relevant sites couldn’t compete against their saturation levels. There are of course other more prominent examples I could use, but for the sake of exercise I encourage you to reread my Madlib Sites post and think about the advanced version of this post, Keyword Fluffing with Replacement. I’ll give you an example directly. In the madlib post we targeted the phrase “Dating in ___.” The blank represented a targeted geolocation(ie. New York). Consider replacing the “Dating In” with “Single Women In” or “Single Men in.” That way you not only target the several thousand phrases related to the actual dating terms but you also got the substitution for people using different versions of the searches.

There you go! You just over tripled your saturation and keyword targeting. With any luck and time this will bring in quite a bit more organic search traffic. Hell, who needs luck.

Alrighty I’m moving this post up a bit to answer a few questions. In my Real Life SEO Example post I talked a bit about the technique of Log Link Matching. It’s an awesome technique that deserves a bit of attention. So here we go.

Description
The reality of the search engines are that they only have a certain percentage of the documents on the web indexed. This is apparent by looking at your own saturation levels with your own sites. Often you’re very lucky if you get 80% of a large site indexed. Unfortunately this means that tons upon tons of the natural links out there aren’t counting and giving proper credit to you and their respective targets. This is a two edged sword. This means your competitors actually have quite a bit more links than it appears, and more than likely so do you. Naturally you can guess what has to be done.

Objective
Saturation usually refers to how many pages you have in the index in comparison to the total number of actual pages on your site. For instance if you have a 100 page site and 44 pages are indexed than you have 44% saturation. Since this is a topic that never really gets talked about, for the sake of making it easy on ourselves I’m going to refer to our goal as “link saturation.” In other words the number of links you have showing in the index in comparison to your total actual inbound links. So if you have 100 links in the index but you really have 200 actual links that are identifiable than you have 50% link saturation. That aside, our object is to use methods of early detection to quickly identify inbound links to our sites, get them indexed, and if possible give them a bit of link power so the link to our site will count for more. This will have an ultimate ending result of huge efficiency in our link building campaign. It also will more than likely stir up a large percentage of long dormant links on our older sites that are yet to use the Log Link Matching technique. First let’s focus on links we’ve already missed by taking a look at our log files.

Methodology #1 – The Log Files
Our site’s common log files are a great indicator of a new and old inbound links that the search engines may have missed. Most log files are usually located below the root of of the public html folder. If you’re on a standard CPanel setup the path to the log file can be easily found by downloading and viewing your Awstats config file, which is usually located in /tmp/awstats/awstats.domain.com.conf. Around line 35 it’ll tell you the path of the log file: LogFile=”/usr/local/apache/domlogs/domain.com”. Typically your site as a Linux user has access to this file and can read it through a script. If not than contact your hosting provider and ask for read access to the log.

1) Open up the log file in a text editor and identify where all the referrers are then parse them out so you have a nice list of all the sites that link to you. If you use Textpad you can click Tools – Sort – Delete Duplicate Lines – OK. That will clean up the huge list and organize it into a manageable size.

2) Once you have your list of links there’s several routes you can take to get them indexed. These include but not limited to creating a third party rolling site map, roll over sites, or even distributing the links through blogrolls within your network. Those of course are the more complicated ways of doing it and also the most work intensive, but they’re by far the most effective simply because they involve using direct static links. The simplest of course would be to simply ping Blog Aggregators like the ones listed on Pingomatic or Pingoat. My recommendation is, if you are only getting a couple dozen links/day or are getting a huge volume of links (200+/day) than use the static link methods because they are more efficient and can be monitored more closely. If you’re somewhere in between than there’s no reason you can’t just keep it simple and continuously ping Blog Aggregators and hope a high percentage eventually will get indexed. After so many pings they will all eventually get in anyways. It may just take awhile and is harder to monitor (one of the biggest hatreds in my life..hehe).

There are several Windows applications that can help you mass ping this list of referral URLS. Since I use custom scripts instead of a single Windows app myself I have no strong recommendations for one, but feel free to browse around and find one you like. Another suggestion I have to help clean up your list a bit is to clean the list of any common referrers such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo referrals. That’ll at least save you a ton of wasted CPU time. Once you’ve gotten this taken care of you’ll want to start considering an automated way of doing this for any new links as they come in. I got a few suggestions for this as well.

Methodology #2 – Direct Referrals
Of course you can continue to do the method above to monitor for new referrals as long as you keep the list clean of duplicates. However it doesn’t hurt to consider accomplishing the task upon arrival. I talked a little bit about this last year with my Blog Ping Hack post, and the same principle applies except instead of pinging the current page we’ll ping the referral if it exists.

1) First check to see if a referral exists when the user display the page. If it does exist than have it open up the form submit for a place such as Pingomatic to automatically ping all the services using the users browser. Here’s a few examples of how to do it in various languages.

CGI CODE
if(($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} ne "") || ($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} =~ m/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\//)) {
print qq~<iframe src="http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title=$title&blogurl=$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}&rssurl=$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_feedster=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on" border="0" width="1" height="1"></iframe>~;
}

PHP CODE
if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] != "" || preg_match("/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\///i",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] > 0) {
echo "<iframe src="http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title=$title&blogurl=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']&rssurl=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_feedster=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on" border="0" width="1" height="1"></iframe>";
}

JAVASCRIPT CODE
I really don’t know. Can someone fill this in for me? It’s entirely possible I just don’t know Javascript regex well enough.

This will check to see if the referrer exists. If it does and its not a referrer from within your domain than it’ll display an invisible IFRAME that automatically submits the referrer to PingOMatic. If you wanted to get a bit advanced with it you could also check for Google, MSN, and Yahoo referrers or any other unclean referrers you may get on a regular basis.

If you have an older site and you use this technique you’ll probably be shocked as hell about how many actual links you already had. Like I mentioned in the other post, at first you’ll start seeing your links tripling and even quadrupling but as also mentioned its just an illusion. You’ve had those links all along they just didn’t count since they weren’t indexed in the engines. After that starts to plateau, as long as you keep it up you’ll notice considerable difference in the efficiency and accuracy of your link saturation campaigns. I really believe this technique should be done on almost every site you use to target search traffic. Link Saturation is just too damn fundamental to be ignored. Yet, at the same time, its very good for those of us who are aware that it is not a common practice. Just the difference between your link saturation percentage and your competitors could be the difference between who outranks who.

Any other ideas for methods of early detection you can use to identify new inbound links? Technorati perhaps? How about ideas for ways to not only get the inbound links indexed but boost their creditability in an automated and efficient way? I didn’t mention this but when you’re pinging or rolling the pages through your indexing sites it doesn’t hurt to use YOUR anchor text, it won’t help much but it never hurts to help push the relevancy factor of your own site to their pages while you’re at it.

Holy cripes! It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and written a Blue Hat Technique. It just so happens I need this one for the next SEO Empire post. I’m like blah blah talking about Keyword Spinning then I realized you guys have no fuckin’ clue what I’m yammering about. So I figure nows a good time to fix all that and luckily this one is really really easy but like all Blue Hat Techniques it works like a mofo in many situations.

The Problem
Let’s say you have a database driven website. A great example would be a Madlib Site or an E-commerce site. In fact this technique works so damn well with Ecom sites it should be illegal along side public urination. So we’ll use that as our primary example. You got your site setup and each product page/joint page has its keywords such as “17 Inch Water Pipes For Sale” and the page titles and headers match accordingly. You have several thousand pages/products put together and are well SEO’d but its impossible to monitor and manually tweak each one especially since most of the keyword research tools available aren’t entirely accurate to the keyword order. Like they may say “Myspace Pimps” gets 50 billion searches a day when really “Pimps On Myspace” are getting it. So while amongst your thousands of pages you have one page that could be ranking for a solid phrase and getting an extra 100 visitors/day for people searching for “Water Pipes For Sale 17 Inch” you’re stuck with virtually no search traffic to that page and never knowing the difference. It’s quite the dilemma and you probably realize that it’s more than likely already happening to you. Luckily its easily fixed with a simple tool you can create yourself to fit whatever needs and sites you have.

Methodology
1) Add an extra field to all you’re database entries. Any row that creates a page of some sort add an extra field called TrafficCount or something you can remember.

2) Add a snippet of code into your template or CMS that counts each pageview coming from a Goohoomsn referrer and increments the appropriate field.

3) Wait a month….*Goes for a bike ride*

4) Call the titles in the database. It can only be assumed, even in a commercial/free CMS that the titles or keywords are held somewhere in the database. Locate them and scan through them one by one.

5) Use the Google/Yahoo/MSN API’s to see if the page ranks for its keywords.

6) If it does rank than compare that to the traffic count for the month. Compare that to some sort of delimiter you’ve preset. I prefer to use a really small number like 5 for the first month or two then start moving it up as needed. If the traffic is too low than split the titles/keywords and randomly reorganize them.

*Sometimes you’ll end up with some really messed up titles like “Pipes Sale Water For Inch 17″ so if its too un-userfriendly than you may want to make a few adjustments such as never putting a For,The,If,At type word in the front or never rearranging the front two words so like Water Pipes always stays in the front then only the trailing ends. Once again it depends on how your site is already organized.

7) Reset the traffic count.

Wait another month and watch your search traffic slowly rise. Every month the site will get more and more efficient and get more and more deep traffic to the site. The pages that are already good will not change and the poor performing pages will start becoming higher performing pages. As an added bonus it will help improve your sites freshness factors.

9) Take a scan of your average number of keywords or title sizes. Let’s say your average page has very short key phrases such as “Large Beer Mugs.” There are only so many combinations that those keywords will produce so if its just a low traffic keyword theres no point in continually changing the titles every single month forever. So I like to only have the Keyword Spinning script run for a preset amount of months on each site. For instance if my average keyword length is three words than the most combinations I can have is six. So I should logically quit running after 6-8 months. At which point my site is about as perfect as it can be without human intervention. Lastly don’t forget to make improvements to your CTR.

Simple huh! Keyword Spinning is a really easy way to get the most out of nearly all your sites. The more you can squeeze out of each site the less sites you have to build to reach your profit goals. With minimal scripting its all very quick to implement and automate (please don’t do it by hand!). That’s all there is to it.

Usually with my Blue Hat Techniques I like to drop a little hint somewhere in it that references a really cool trick or spin to the method that’ll greatly increase your profits. Since You’ve been all so damn patient about me being late on the SEO Empire part 2 post, and for the moment at least, quit asking me why Blue Hat sucks now I’ll just tell it to ya. My answer to that question BTW is that I’m still working on my projects which is eating up some time and I’m not happy with what I’ve written so far. If I’m not happy, it doesn’t get published. Sorry but the boss has spoken.

The Secret Hint

3) Wait a month….*Goes for a bike ride*

Use this technique on your Cycle Sites that you’ve choosen to not cycle out. Instead of competing with the original author, who you are probably linking to might I add, you can sometimes grab even better phrases and rank for them giving you a ton more traffic (I’ve seen Cycle Sites increase their SE traffic over 50x by doing this). If not than you’ll eventually get their original title again which at least will put you where you started. It’s also the strangest damn thing, you’ll get a percentage less complaints and pissed off bloggers when you switch the titles around, maybe they don’t care as much when they don’t see you ranking for their post titles.