tellhimfred.com

I spent a little bit of time last night posting on BlogString.com and LawFirmBlogging.com. I was trying to think of some useful tips for bloggers that are trying to get links to their site, and came up with “5 Ways to get links to your blog“.

Over on LawFirmBlogging.com, I’m keeping track of all the steps I’m taking to promote MassLawBlog.com, a new blog from an attorney I work with. I’m posting some similar content on both sites, but on the Law Firm Blogging site, I wrote about “Other Sites and Page Rank“.

I’m trying to come up with ideas on how people can get more links to their blogs without spamming the world. Right now, there’s a big problem in that webmasters have figured out how to dupe search engines into believing they have actual blogs that are linking to interesting sites. This is what they’re doing:

Example:
1. The webmaster of http://www.example.com wants to get a better search engine ranking. He stuffs his site with keywords, invisible text, etc.
2. He then creates a couple of blogs. Instead of actually writing posts, he takes a bunch of marketing text and makes links to http://www.example.com
3. Then, he has all of his blogs link to each other.
4. Every time he posts, he pings Technorati and BlogSearch and they index the post, which is nothing more than spam linking to http://www.example.com

The problem: This creates lots of useless blogs. Many times these bloggers will fill their posts with keywords that are being heavily searched, and link to sites that have nothing to do with those keywords. That frustrates visitors. A lot.

So when I’m writing posts here, I’m really cautious. I don’t want to link to my other blogs too much, because I don’t want people to think I’m trying to spam them. It’s definitely a delicate balance. Sure, I want as many links as I can get….and if I link to my own sites, the number of inbound links goes up…but I don’t want to be that guy.

So if I ever link to those sites from here, I promise it’s because I think there’s something interesting.

In other news, I really like Giraffes. I really want a miniature giraffe.

I remember the day my fascination with them started. I was in 10th grade in Biology class. One of my classmates had a strange family business: They bred miniature horses.

He didn’t give a reason why. But we went into the whole genetics part and how they breed for certain traits, etc. He brought in two of these little guys and everyone was petting them and gushing over the cute suckers. And while that was happening, I was daydreaming a bit.

I thought, hey, if you can do this with horses, why not other animals? And why not giraffes? Then, my mind transported me to a beach in the early morning. I imagined myself walking a miniature giraffe on a leash. It would be the coolest thing ever. For sure.

But, I don’t have the time, money, patience, or room to develop this wonderful breed. Perhaps if I hit the lottery, I can spend some time on this important genetic project. But until then, I can only stare longingly at my collection of tiny giraffes that adorn my monitor: