I really don’t pay my own site the attention it should get re submitting to the search engines, creating backlinks, and promoting it in general. It’s the case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes– client sites get attention, mine doesn’t.

I have a free tool called the “Link Popularity Checker” that I occasionally run to check on how the sites I manage are doing, and whether their backlinks are out of google’s sandbox. Well, I ran the tool this morning, included my own url in the list of sites to check, and was happily shocked to realize that my own site was doing a whole lot better than I could ever expect, given the minimal effort I expend on it. I did some homework into the “why” and it came to this:

I post on a lot of messageboards, I comment on other people’s blogs, and I now blog myself and use trackbacks.

If a client seems to be the kind of person who is capable of blogging I suggest adding one into the mix as part of the overall design and SEO package, but this was a real wake-up call telling me how valuable they are. The messageboard posts were also an eye-opener, and is also a suggestion I make to clients (which is seldom acted upon, unfortunately!) I cannot stress enough the importance of this method of creating backlinks. And since the messageboards and blogs I comment on are usually web design, css and SEO oriented it’s increasing my strength for most of the words in my chosen keyphrases.

Such a simple thing! I wish I could make clients understand!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 8:18 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.