Using GPS to be efficientLet’s face it: SEO can be pretty gosh darned boring. It’s an awful lot of work to build links and as much as you need to be creative about how you do the job, it’s also something which is in many ways repetitive. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some strategies that you could use to make your SEO efforts more effective and productive? Well that’s what today’s post is all about – making your efforts more productive.

Get Rid of Distractions

As someone who works at home, I have a great many advantages. I can roll out of bed, eat breakfast, walk the dogs and then head to work and never have to get into a car, bus or subway train. Heck, if I didn’t have to walk my dogs, I wouldn’t even have to leave the house at all.
On the other hand, because I work from home, I also have lots of distractions. I can watch TV, my dogs may come over begging for treats or just to be petted, I may read a book. In fact there are a whole host of different things which can distract me.
However (and this where you come in), even if I were working at an office, I’d have lots of distractions – chatting with coworkers, heading to the coffee machine, checking e-mail and Facebook, looking at my Twitter feed. In other words, in our modern world, there is no end to the ways that you could waste time instead of actually doing the job that you need to do in SEO.
So, my first bit of advice is to get rid of as many distractions as you can. If you work from home, tell the kids and the significant other that when you’re working, you’re off limits. Ideally, have a separate computer for work on which you have disabled the ability to look at Hulu and Netflix.
Make a commitment to yourself that you will have just five minutes per hour for checking your e-mail, personal Facebook and Twitter feeds (your professional feeds should be separate and should be monitored more often) and that you will get the job done. Since a large part of SEO involves writing, consider as well a word processor which provides a blank screen with no distractions.
In other words, you do need to discipline yourself, regardless of whether you are running a small home based business or you work for a big company and have to head to an office every day of the week to get the job done. If you can do this, your SEO efforts will immediately be more productive without the need for any outside tools.

Consider Semi-Automationautomation

This is another obvious idea which too many people either don’t bother with or which they decide to do in the worst possible way. Those who use fully automated tools to put out their blog comments, social comments and the like, relying on online spinning tools are usually doing themselves a disservice. By the same token, those who sit around retyping the same information over and over again are also doing themselves a disservice.
In essence, while you do want to write individualized comments for various blogs, you can use something like RoboForm to fill in your company name, personal name, website address, etc. There’s no need for you to constantly redo this over and over again. This is a massive time waster and those who do this correctly can triple their SEO efforts in the same amount of time.
There is also a trick I came up with which I recommend only for those who are building links on lower quality sites which are real (i.e. real blogs which happen to have only a PR0 or PRN/A).
In my previous post, I discussed why these kinds of links are important to get even though they are not high PR links and would seem to not be terribly worth your while.
Briefly, because Google wants to see natural looking links, it’s only natural that you would end up with links on dozens of different low PR sites which are real sites. That last point by the way is important. I’m talking real blogs which real people put together but which don’t necessarily have high PR values as of yet (if they ever will). This is as opposed to spammy junk sites which clearly exist just to provide links.
Anyway, on such websites, you may not want to take the time to read through individual posts and write comments which are super specific to the blog post. On the other hand, writing the usual “nice post, I learned a lot” kinds of comments will generally get your comment deleted without being published. Not to mention that if you simply repeat the same comment hundreds of times, it looks automated to Google even if they do approve that comment.
The solution I came up with, which again, I would only use on these lower level sites where you are doing it just for link diversity is to use a spintax comment which actually is related to the specific topic at hand. Here’s an example for writing about the high risk auto insurance pool (it’s for people who have had many accidents and can’t get regular insurance so they go into a “high risk” pool which gives insurance to anyone but costs a small fortune):
{The only thing I can say | The one thing I have to say | All I can tell you} is that {being in | getting stuck in | having to use} the high risk auto insurance pool {is a problem that passes eventually | is not going to be forever | is fortunately a temporary situation.}
As you can see, this is a spintax style comment which will give you dozens of different permutations and thus appear unique. It is also good enough that if you set your commenting software to search for “high risk auto insurance pool” you should get a reasonable number of these approved even though it’s automated and not specific about the topic at hand.
On the other hand, I would definitely not use this tactic for higher ranking blogs and websites because even this relatively innocuous tactic is likely not to work for blogs and websites which get hundreds of comments a day, most of them spammy junk which is automatically deleted. There, you need to write something insightful in order to get your ideas published along with your link.

Make Your Visitors Do the Work for You

I recently saw a brilliant plugin on the Warrior Forum which basically forces people to tweet, make a mention on Facebook or do something else and which will help you to solve a great deal of the problems that many of us have when it comes to doing the whole SEO chore.
In essence, the plugin allows your customers to see a certain percentage of the material that your article consists of and then requires them to tweet or share or do something else in order to see the remainder of the content. Of course, this means that your writing needs to be compelling enough to actually get people to want to continue reading, but it does help a great deal with your SEO efforts without you having to do extra work.
This is of course not the only thing which you can do in this regard though. You can also offer your customers a freebie in exchange for tweeting or Facebooking about your website. Running contests is a great way to get your visitors to do much of the work for you when it comes to doing SEO as well.
Of course probably the best way to get your visitors to do the work for you and by the way, the only method of SEO which Google is 100% happy to endorse is to do link bait. This means that you create content which is so compelling that people will simply want to share it with their friends and or family just because it’s so interesting to see.
There are a number of ways that you can do this. One possibility is to get a juicy scoop about someone. Another possibility is to simply come up with your own interesting take on a particular subject which nobody has thought of before and to make it sound compelling enough that people actually will want to share it with their friends and family.
Still another way is to employ your media. Make an interesting infographic or a funny cartoon. I’ve posted in the past about various places you can get free cartoons for your website may do a whole post on the subject in the future. Yes, these cartoons have links back to the original source, but so what? Why begrudge someone who worked hard a little exposure? Especially when it helps you as well.

Use Article Marketing and Video Marketing

Here’s another great idea for you which I have espoused in the past but which is worth repeating here yet again. Consider both article marketing and video marketing. I’m going to mention a website I discovered in just a moment which can help you with this, but first a brief refresher on what I actually mean when I say this:
Article marketing does NOT mean what used to be called bum marketing. It doesn’t involve spamming thousands of websites with junky, spun content which nobody will read and hoping that you create enough links to get Google to give you some love.
Instead, article marketing means that you create a high quality piece of content and make it available to lots of different websites and magazines for free in exchange for a link back to your website.
Now here’s the kicker: there’s no reason this must stop with article marketing. You can do the same thing with videos which you create for your website. If they are compelling and interesting, you can make those videos available for the web community share at large as well. Again, all you need is to embed a link back to your site in the video and ideally ask people to share the link back to your website.
To that end, I actually found a pretty cool website recently called Taboola. In essence, they automate the process of allowing you to share both your articles and your videos by getting your stuff before a large audience through their distribution network. There is a charge and I have not pinned down the details yet, but it does seem like a truly great idea which can get you lots of exposure.
Of course, you should also use more traditional methods of sharing your content such as video sharing sites like YouTube and the like as well as major article directories. Be sure to try to track where you stuff ends up getting posted as well and then contact the places who posted your material and offer them more of your stuff directly. This will allow you to attract even more traffic to your website without a great deal of work.

Consider Hiring Outsourcers

cognizant

Being cognizant of your own limitations is the key to success in SEO. If you need to, hire a pro.

Finally, we live in a global world and there are people quite literally all over the world who will be happy to help you with whatever work you need to have done. I’m going to be writing a post shortly about the best places to hire outsourcers, however, this is one way to easily avoid many of the pitfalls of doing SEO work. While $2 an hour may seem ridiculous to you, to someone in a third world country, it’s a decent living.
There are pitfalls to this as well. You can’t expect someone from a third world country to have the same command of English as someone from North America or other English speaking areas. You may also find that your outsourcers don’t always understand what you ask them to do. However, there are plenty of jobs which you can send to them which will save you time and money and which will make your SEO efforts more productive.