The Raging Tech

Build SEO with .EDU Backlinks

If you looked at that headline and went “Huh?” - you’re probably brand new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is an entire business industry setup around helping web site owners, blog authors, and online publications optimize every page - make that every word of every page of content - highly optimized to be indexed by search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

Search engines each have their own algorithms for indexing and ranking pages - there are books, seminars and get-rich-quick schemes all surrounding the cult of Google Page Rank. Businesses seem to live and die by their Google PR. The better optimized your site, the higher your page rank will be. A page rank is what determines how high in the results your listing is when customers are searching on certain keywords.

If you want people to find you, you want to be earlier in the search results, right? If your competitors are in front of you, your potential client might go with them first, and that means lost sales or ad revenue. Google and other search engines want their search results to be the most relevant, so they check things like your site’s meta-data and description and match it to keywords.

Back-links are when a site with more credibility or popularity than you links to your site. If it has a higher page rank than yours, it helps your page rank grow. Search engines rate links from sites with .EDU addresses as more relevant, because only educational institutions are allowed to have them. Since school teachers and administrators and professors are likely to be more researched (or so they think), an edu link is worth a lot to growing your site’s relevance within search results.

Also, just a link on a .EDU site isn’t going to help. Search engines look at the content around a link, so a link on the side of a page not surrounded by content is going to be less relevant than a link surrounded by content in an article, for example.

SocialSpark: How I Survived Google Spanking Me

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I often write content that is sponsored, and I am pretty open about disclosing such things. At the bottom of most sponsored content, you’ll notice a small blue bubble that will say “Sponsored by” and then the advertiser name. However, some folks didn’t take kindly to any of my content being sponsored, and said it wasn’t cool that I write the same quality of content whether it’s sponsored or not.

Ever since I got my page rank slapped down to zero from it’s former beauty of 3, I had been totally killed on the sponsorships I could take. I’ve previously written about how I’d be taking a break until I could work out sponsorship again. Well, that time has come, as you might have noticed. I have signed up for SocialSpark, which may prove to be the revolution for which the blog monetization game has been eagerly waiting.

SocialSpark uses a system called RealRank, based on actual page views and traffic to your site. It’s also a fun social network that gives bloggers ideas, or “sparks” on what to write about when you’ve got writer’s block. It hooks up bloggers with advertisers and other bloggers, and lets you comment, vote, and leave feedback for each other. Think of it as a MySpace for blog owners, only without all the crap.

You get a friends list, as well as a “fav 9″ to highlight your favorite bloggers. You can send messages, invite people to be your friend, give “props” to those people you like or opportunities that you like. You can see the stats on a blog you’re interested in advertising on if you’re an advertiser.

My favorite part of this system is the pure distinction between blogger and blog. You can give props to a blog instead of directly to a blog owner, which is especially great for people who have more than one blog.

SocialSpark requires 100% in-post disclosure, 100% transparency (no games, man!), actual blogger opinions - they don’t tell us what we should like or dislike, and I only take the opportunities I think are appropriate for my blog and my readers. Sign-up is easy, and payment goes out to your PayPal account, so if you don’t have one of those already, be sure and sign up for one.

It’s free to sign up, even though it’s still in beta, and if you have a blog or are an advertiser looking to spread the word about your product or service, give SocialSpark a try. I’ve never regretted being a part of SocialSpark, and so far it’s been a blast!

Get Proper Rankings for Your Blog

Google Page Rank has been king of the web for far too long. They use a “mysterious” and “magical” formula whose inner workings is only barely understood by the public. GPR also has a certain amount of manual human adjustment to weed out those that “cheat the system.” How biased or unbiased this system is has been subject of some debate among bloggers.

Now is the time for change - bloggers can take ranking back into their own hands again. Izea Inc., the company behind PayPerPost and SocialSpark and RockStartUp and firm spacebar atheists when it comes to titles, have launched IzeaRanks.com. This RealRank system is based on the actual popularity and traffic to your site, and is reserved specially for bloggers.

It’s fairly simple to install and use - just visit IzeaRanks.com and sign up, then get the code for the ITK tools (a small snippet of Javascript) that you put into your blog’s HTML code. Usually that’s somewhere inside your blog’s template. Their website has instructions on where it should go.

Once installed, the IzeaRanks RealRank system will show you how many site visitors you have per day and on average for the week and show you on a line graph how you do on a month-to-month basis. You’ll then be ranked amongst other RealRank bloggers. There are already thousands of other blogs on this system, so you don’t have to feel like your ranking is artificially inflated because of a low number of initial rankings.

Finally, show off your blog’s ranking using an IzeaRanks badge, another small snippet of code you can put in your blog’s sidebar or other location that displays your rank for bragging rights.