New Orleans Internet Marketing

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost.

Use the PageRank Option
PPP has been pushing their “RealRank” and coming up with lots of excuses to make it seem like RealRank is great. The fact is, that the “RealRank” system is flooded with penalized PR0 blogs that Google knows are selling links. What do you think has a better chance of increasing your rankings, a blog known for selling links or one with decent PageRank that’s still under Google’s radar?

The good news is, that the bloggers are getting smarter about advertising the fact that they do paid posting. The ones who keep their PageRank aren’t linking back to PayPerPost or hosting their banners on their blogs.

Buy a Mixture of Different PageRank Posts
To make your campaigns look more natural to Google, don’t purchase all of your posts on blogs of the same PageRank. Try to mix things up as much as possible by using different campaigns targeting different PR blogs. If buying a lot of posts, spread them out over time also.

Require at Least 200 Words
Google values content, and a post with 200 words of relevant content looks more valuable and less like an ad than a 50 word post with a link to your website. You may have to pay more in order to get the posting opps taken this way, but it pays off in the long run.

Stay Away from Per-Post Disclosure
“This is a sponsored post,” is a dead giveaway to Google and visitors. You can avoid bloggers who disclose on a per-post basis by adding this line to your opportunity description:

**Bloggers, please do not take this opportunity if you disclose on a per-post basis.**

Generally, that works pretty well. Give the blogger a bad rating if they ignore it and disclose your paid post on that individual post.

Categories and Regions
It should go without saying that you should choose the most appropriate category for the blogs you want posts from. If you have trouble getting your opps taken though, you may want to try another campaign using a different category if it’s appropriate.

Another helpful tip is to block out blogs from the free blogging services. While it looks more natural to have a little bit of both, if you allow the free services you will get a majority of blog posts hosted by those services. You can usually get all of your opps taken with blogs hosted on unique domain names if you offer the right amount of money. I usually block out all of the free blogging services. I also add these to the “other” exclusion box: i.ph, bravejournal.com, blogrox.com.

For regions, if you’re promoting an American website, exclude all of the other regions. Most of PPP’s bloggers are from the US, so it’s easy to get your opps taken from US bloggers.

Links (most important!)
Don’t be lazy. Create different anchor text for every single link. While this can be very time consuming, it makes your posts look much more natural. Try to think of ways to write your anchor text so that bloggers can easily fit the wording into the post. Use articles, prepositions, and pronouns around your keywords to make it look more natural, and don’t link them all to the same page on your website. Match up keyword anchor text with content on your pages.

Example:
Keyword You’re Targeting: Blue Widgets
Anchor Text to Use: blue widgets, these blue widgets, some widgets that are blue, I found these widgets, website with blue widgets, check out these blue widgets, page about blue widgets, etc.

Remember the goal is to make the posts look natural, like the blogger likes your page and is recommending it.

Other Important Tips
Don’t use PPP as the sole form of link building for your website. Combine it with many other forms of link building to give your site a more “natural” looking link profile. Spread your posting opportunities over time to make it look like there is regular, ongoing buzz about your site in the blogosphere. PayPerPost can be an extremely effective SEO tool if used with these considerations.

The Downside
The downside to using PPP for SEO is that neither their system, nor the bloggers who write for them are perfect. Sometimes opps get taken by bloggers who don’t meet your PageRank requirements. I flag every one of these and complain about it; hopefully PPP will get the picture and fix this glitch one day. I’ve also had bloggers from regions that are excluded take opps they weren’t supposed to. As far as the bloggers go, sometimes you may get a few who are just bad writers, and there is nothing you can do about that. You also can’t control what the bloggers write, so there is the danger that some careless bloggers will post some misinformation just to get paid for a post. You can use their rating system to avoid poor writers, but that’s not perfect either.