Create Buzz on April Fool’s Day

Earlier today Mike Arrington announced that TechCrunch is acquiring F**kedCompany. While it’s pretty obvious now from reading all the comments that this is in fact an April Fool’s Day joke it sure did fool quite a few people at first.

What’s great about this joke is the amount of buzz its created. In the couple hours since the joke was posted the links have been rolling in. I’m sure Mike’s intention was probably not for the links and rather the buzz (plus a few good laughs) that has been generated.

Although most of us don’t have the audience or brand to create this much noise, it goes to show that if you have a clever April Fool’s Day joke you can create a lot of buzz and get some extra links.

What clever hoax will think up this April Fool’s Day?   

Having Trouble Ranking Your New Site?

Ranking a new site for competitive terms is next to impossible. Yes, it can be done in rare cases but most of the time it’s just not likely. Aside from the stiff competition that’s already years ahead of you in terms of links and content, you have to deal with the sandbox, among other things. About the only ways to rank for these types of terms, I can think of are if you have bottomless pockets or if you solve a major pain (like a cure for cancer).

Don’t let that discourage you though. I have a solution that could possibly work for you. Create a new profile page on an established social media site and optimize it.

The bigger social media sites already have the built up trust and authority with the search engines. So while you’re waiting for your "real site" to start ranking create a profile with branded content and optimize that to rank for a couple of those competitive keywords.

Think about how often you see MySpace, YouTube, and Technorati pages ranking on the first page of the SERPs. Combine that with a nice link building campaign for the pages you create and it’s now looking realistic for you to take one of those top 10 spots.

Keep in mind that this is a technique to be used more for the purpose of targeting a few key phrases and it’s not very effective for going after long tail traffic.

Creating a Free Service to Build Links

Statcounter.com is one of the most successful sites on the web when it comes to links. If you look at what they have done, they have built millions of links because of their free product.

If you look at the image above, it shows that they have well over 2 million backward links. The main reason they have this many links is because everyone using their service links to them through a noscript:

<noscript><a href="http://www.statcounter.com/" target="_blank"><img  src="http://c7.statcounter.com/counter.php?sc_project=743506&java=0&security=4bbd17e6&invisible=1" alt="invisible hit counter" border="0"></a></noscript>

What other free services do you know of that have been very effective at building links?

Preferred Domain – Google Webmaster Central

Search engines view http://url.com and http://www.url.com as two separate sites and you will find that some people link to http://url.com while others link to http://www.url.com. This can hinder the full potential of your sites rankings on search engines which is why search engines recommend redirecting one of them to the other. Most people do this on their server, but you can also do it through the Google Webmaster Central.

If you haven’t yet, signup for Webmaster Central and make sure Google sees your website as 1 URL instead of 2.

Five Linkstars Discuss Link Strategies

When five of the brightest linkstars in the world get together and talk about link strategies it’s wise to listen up. Read up as Sugarrae Hoffman asks Todd Malicoat, Eric Ward, Rand Fishkin, and Roger Montti to go in depth and share a bunch of their knowledge and theories about link development.