SEO

I've been slinging Web CEO for so long, making such a huge amount of bank on it (not really). Tens of thousands of clicks later, I find myself assessing my success and doing a bit of soul searching: Is Web CEO or any SEO tool worth the money?

Here is what I really think:

All SEO tools are a total waste of time and money!*

(*for you... because your content is not up to par)

I'm about to give away a good portion of the store, so read carefully

I help small to medium-sized businesses come up on "money" searches. When prospecting, I can show many examples of businesses that I have helped, a couple of which I helped push to the top on some fairly competitive key phrases. Not to brag or anything...

The verdict is in: Free Traffic System works... pretty well.

I tested the free version of the system on three different sites for three different sets of keywords. One set of keywords was ridiculously competitive, one moderately competitive, and one not so competitive. I did no other link building during the month that I used Free Traffic System.

The results:

Go full-nerd and read on...

Before getting to the main point, let's muse on backlinking, shall we?

OK, so it's official: Inbound links are important, maybe not as important as quality content, but important nonetheless.

Get backlinks -- two tools that won't sully your white hat (too much)

OK, both of the tools and methods I'm about to recommend work well. They work so well that -- disclosure -- I became an affiliate of each of them.

I'm going to share a link-building strategy (not specific tactics) that has worked exceedingly well for me when it comes to driving traffic to a website. This will not work for everyone because, frankly, few can produce content of high enough quality to make this strategy feasible.

(If you think you're tough enough to hang with this, you need to keep reading.)

This is very interesting. I'm in my sixth week of not being able to type. While I have been out of the game, some enterprising person has taken it upon themselves to build a bunch of icky links to my sites. These are links from spammy Viagara pages, cigarette vendors and a couple of porn pages that even make me blush.

Do these unwanted "bad neighborhood" links hurt SEO? Yes, it seems. Combined with my inability to add fresh content, it may have been very mildly effective (search engine traffic across my sites is off by 14 percent from the monthly norm).

File under: Don't make the same mistakes I made... or maybe not

One of the reasons I more or less abandoned chucklinart.com over the past year is that I was focused on another site, Survive Unemployment! A little over a year ago, you see, I became totally unemployed. Finding a job seemed impossible so I started trying to make money in a million ways. I thought I would try my hand at the internet publishing business, among other things, and I had a great idea.

If you've been following, you know that I'm on a mission to bring this blog back from the dead with regard to its Page Rank. Incoming links have grown steadily through a "nice guy" strategy of linking out and hoping the favor is returned. It's too early to draw any firm conclusions on that, but so far it seems to work. According to Google Webmaster Tools, links to this site increased from 18 to their current 159. An impressive 71 new links were generated to the main page.

If you have been following this thing, you have probably been hanging on the edge of your seat. These quixotic quests are great story fodder, aren't they? No matter what happens, the audience gets a good show. If the hero fails, we can laugh at him for being such a fool or lament his tragedy without actually having to experience it firsthand. If the hero succeeds, it gives us hope that we too might someday conquer the insurmountable obstacles in our own lives.