I was just checking analytics traffic for my special effects website and came across a startling number: today alone, as of 2:30pm, I’ve had 138 referral visits from lowcarbfriends.com. “What the hell?” I said to myself… I usually have a LOT less referral traffic to that site. It looks as if somebody liked the video I posted on the fat chick losing weight using adobe photoshop (I love that program by the way). I think from this particular incident I’ve learned a few things:

• Interesting/good ideas spread: not only did one person link to my blog site but there were other people commenting about that person’s link, creating more links to my site in the process.
• Obviously, referral traffic (if you can get it) is good. There are many other ways to gain referral traffic, just take a look at Digg or Del.icio.us
• “Filling the gaps” is key: If you want more referral traffic try playing on people’s interests or unfulfilled concerns. In this case, a weight loss support web site linked to my video about losing weight via photoshop. I wasn’t looking to get links from a weight loss site, but naturally people found what I posted and found it interesting. How about reading forums or blog comments and look to see what questions people pose… then fill the gaps with answers in the form of something newsworthy!

So all in all, I give referral traffic a big thumbs up. Thanks guys.

Once in a while I read craig’s list to see who’s offering what seo service at what price. There will be advertisements for “seo link building services” and a lot of the time you will hear people use the term “PageRank” or “PR” as an indication of a web page’s importance. They will say they can get you lots of links from high page ranking sites. This may be true, but why is it that nobody uses the term “cache date” as a page’s value indicator? It would seem the more often a spider caches or indexes a page, the more importance a search engine is giving the page since it is always checking for new updates - and checking a page’s cache date is easy, just click on the link that says “Cached” in the search results and look near the top of the page.

Take the example a high page ranking directory: uncover the net. It appears it has been dropped from the Google index. Try running a search for “site:uncoverthenet.com“, you won’t get anything. Yet if you browse to their home page they still retain a high page rank. Uncover the net has a PR of 6! And since we know pages that are dropped from Google’s index don’t pass much link juice (or any) it would seem page rank is not a good indicator and these people advertising their link building services are either ignorant or just playing on the ignorance of people looking for “SEO” services.

Google really hates SEO people, those who perform search engine optimization. But why? Well, at least that’s what the following video explains about people doing SEO work: essentially SEO’s have a “parasitic relationship” with Google in a way that not only feeds off of them but brings Google down.

Does this mean that Google tries to kill the SEO business?

No, they just want to kill spammers or anyone who tries to move search results away from what the majority of people actually are looking for (under a given keyword search), i.e. spammers trying to put Viagra affiliate web sites at the top of search results for quick and easy gain. Sadly, there is little distinction between good SEO people and spammers, since we all have to follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines. But there is hope.

Leveraging interest of the general population

As the major search engines increase their search engine A.I., SEO can be thought of as moving away from manual link building and into the realm of natural buzz and interest of public relations, i.e. the most talked about articles and pages will show up first, not necessarily the content that has been submitted to directories a million times over for SEO purposes.

How can we generate interest and or “buzz”?

It’s not that directory submission are bad, some of them are good, like the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and Business.com, links created in these directories have been known to be syndicated else where, and there may even be other quality niche directories worth your time depending on what market you’re optimizing for - but submitting your site to hundreds of directories is losing it’s value as the search engines get smarter. A better idea would be to create Google alerts for your top keyword competition (and URLs) to see where they are getting their directory links from.

Online profile sites can also be a good place to generate buzz, places where you can write a page of fresh content about your web site and generate some value to the reader, search engines love this. Some good places to start are: Squidoo, City Search and Merchant Circle.

Social media sites are a great place to leverage interesting material such that you can generate back links & interest if your content is actually worth talking about. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are among a few of the worthy sites. Having an article on the front page of a social media site such as Digg can generate thousands of free back links, this can be an efficient use of your SEO time.