It can be done. You just have to be willing to dip your fingers into the gray hat area of seo. With that being said, I don’t find anything wrong with what I’m about to say. Obviously or else I wouldn’t write it, right?

1. You need more than one account on any of the major social bookmarking/networking sites. Namely Youtube, Stumbleupon, and Digg. Let’s focus on those 3 for right now.

2. The reason you need more than one account is so you can give any of your own stories at least one more vote besides the initial one. That gets the ball rolling.

3 Get all of your friends (yes, all 5 of them) to digg, stumble and favorite anything you put out, a story, video, picture, blog post. Get them to leave some kind of half ways smart comment on the viral piece.

4. Here’s the crucial part: Email anyone you have in an email list, and tell them about the post. Get any list of people you can, log into any and all forums, and post the link in there. I run this paid business PR3 directory, but I send out emails to anyone who submits their site, with my affiliate links and new stories.

5. Conclusion: You can’t “buy” or spam your way into being viral, and I’m not promoting that idea. The idea is to send the quality content to as many people as you can in a short amount of time and hope you get some traction from it.

We are trying to come up with ways to get a large influx of traffic to seo.com blog this month.  Here’s what we came up with:

1.  Hold a contest, and submit to the contest directories online

2.  Get a guest blogger like Brian at CopyBlogger to post on seo.com (haven’t invited him quite yet)

3.  Stumbles (not targeted traffic, but still a good source of general traffic)

4.  Do interviews on other popular blogs that mention seo.com with a link.

Do you have any ideas?  Let me know.

Let’s get one thing straight.  You don’t have much time for anything.  What with your RSS feeds, link building, reading the latest trend on Matt Cutt’s blog, and reading Digital Point, what else is there to do?

I am going to show you, over the next 20 blog posts,  how to get a consistent flow of traffic to any site:

1.  If you have never heard of squidoo, you are living in the dark ages.  I have spent the last 6 months studying everything from how many times your lens is emailed to ranking for a pretty competitive key word phrase just by updating your lens once a day.

So tip #1.  Create a squidoo lens, which takes about 5 minutes of your time, here.  You have to know your keyword research, and use your keywords everywhere.  Add a wikipedia module, a google maps module, a del.icio.us module, a text module, and a flickr module.   Tomorrow, go back and add another lens.  It takes about 10 seconds, I’ve timed it.  For the next month, add one module, or piece of text or a link to any of your other modules, once a day.  Also, stumble it, and submit it to DP for stumbling exchanges as well, which you are already doing I suspect.

Next time, I am going to go into more depth on making actual money from squidoo on a regular basis.

If anyone who might read this wonders how to get more traffic to your site, what ever it may be, you are in the right spot.  THE best place to get traffic, and pretty good targeted traffic, for FREE, is Stumbleupon.com

There is a trick to doing it though.  Let’s say you have a general adsense site, about aquarium fish.  You get some good traffic because you have been doing seo for awhile, and maybe some ppc.  But you want a boost in your traffic.  So here’s what you do:

1. Login to forums.digitalpoint.com (if you don’t have an account, sign up for one)
2.  Go to the “freebies” forum area.
3. Look for people who post something like “Stumble my 2, I’ll stumble all yours”
4. Go in and stumble their site (aka : give it a thumbs up)
5. Post your urls, and who ever started the thread will stumble your site

You want to go in and review all of your own sites, and try and get others to review your site as well.  Reviewing a site on Stumbleupon gives you a do-follow link from a PR2-5 page on stumbleupon.  My own stumble page is torkildson.stumbleupon.com, you can add me as a friend.

First, the basics.

Start with your keyword research, obviously. The more niche you go, the easier it will be to rank for your keywords, but you have to balance that with what people are actually searching for. So start with ranking for niche keywords, and then after about 6 months start trying to rank for more competitive phrases. Here is a sample of Art related keywords and their searches per month, taken from keyworddiscovery:

As you can see, the keywords vary widely. Your next step is to look at the competition for each phrase:

• Query    Searches    Occurrences    KEI    Predicted Daily
• art    4991193    856000000    1.12    275256.32
• clip art    1915477    6560000    5.13    105621.61
• free clip art    1584938    908000    7.11    87404.05
• fine art    1341763    129000000    1.69    73997.53
• art galleries    1228954    2200000    5.88    67757.26
• art supplies    920197    1400000    6.09    50747.49
• body art    880042    281000    7.81    48533.2
• art gallery    765096    29600000    2.62    42192.28
• framed art    538714    1560000    5.44    29691.61

Obviously, if you own a body art store, you will want to try and rank for that quickly, and also go for your local phrases as well. Then, once you have all of your pages built with all of your keywords, submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, (you have to have a gmail account to do that) and you should get indexed in no time.

As this is the first post ever on this blog, it will have to be a good one. I have learned a few things from working at seo.com and while setting up a few totally different and widely varying web sites for clients and friends. Some of my projects include building utahmassage.net by making the main site purely informational, in Cold Fusion, and then I bought another domain, massageutah.net, and made it into a shopping cart where memberships and massage gift certificates could be purchased. Neither of those sites just mentioned are fully operational yet, I just thought I would link to them for some seo benefit.

My other projects include animenaruto.net, and sellvinylrecords.com, both of which I am hosting for friends of mine on my no limit domain account through hostmonster.

To end this post, (I know there wasn’t much to it) I will be adding a new post every week about one topic/category from this business directory, in which I will try and help anyone who submits their site as a featured link gain more exposure through seo. So start submitting, and I will start writing.