Mass Blog Commenting Services by a Singapore SEO Company

Today when I checked my mail in the morning I was surprised to see more than the usual number in my inbox, only to realise that a huge bunch of the mails are due to spam comments on this blog.

Blog Comment Spamming

All these comments came in within 2 minutes last night. And they all went into the spam folder. SEO effect? Zero – at least for my blog. Of course, they have probably spammed a thousand other blogs in the same fifteen minutes, and been lucky enough to have hit one or two that didn’t have their spam filter on.

Another surprise came when I realized that many of these spammy comments had URLs pointing to Singapore related domains or .sg domains. A couple of them were horrid looking “made for Adsense” splogs (they still exist!), and some were legitimate company websites.

What was common was that all these sites pointed to one SEO company in Singapore – one that sold packages of “5000 Facebook Invites for USD$39.90” and “100 Facebook Fans for $49.90”!

Frankly, I feel sorry for the legitimate companies who probably paid good money to this SEO consultant to market their website. On the other hand, I think there is a need to educate some business owners and marketing professionals on how to choose a proper SEO company – what do you think?

Blog Commenting for SEO

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that blog commenting does not work for SEO. In fact, from my own observations and experience, these blog comments still work very well, despite the fact that most blogs still have the rel=”nofollow” attribute for their comment links.

However, for the comments to go through and SEO to really take effect, the comments need to be insightful and valuable to the blog owner, not random phrases submitted by a piece of software. Like many things in life, its not what you do, but how you do it that matters.

Analyzing Web Analytics

To many people, installing web analytics for their site seems to be an ego issue – they want to know how much traffic they have so they can brag about it to everyone they see on the street. To a web marketer, however, being able to understand the data from these web analytics packages and using them to make marketing decisions is a must.

If you want to learn to use your analytics data for marketing, here are some snippets of information worth gathering and some questions worth asking yourself, when you view your web analytics reports.

1. Keywords – What are the keywords that lead people to your site? Which ones of these keywords are converting into inquiries or sales? How are these keywords already ranking on the search engines this month? How can you get these keywords to rank better?

2. Bounce Rates – What is the bounce rate for your website? Benchmarks these rates with similar sites in your industry. How are you doing? How do you improve your bounce rate?

3. Time on Site – What is the average visitor time on site for your website? Is this reasonable, considering the type of content on your site? If not, how can you engage the visitor better so they spend more time on your site, or how can you help your visitor perform their transaction faster, so they spend less time on your site?

4. Geographical Traffic Sources – Are you getting to the countries that you want to target? If not, what factors can you change in your website configuration (hosting, domain, content, marketing) to make sure you be more prominent in the search engines for that country?

5. Top Content Pages – Which are the pages that are most viewed on your site? Look at the top 10 pages – what do they have in common, and how can you create more pages that are similar to the top 10?

6. Screen Resolutions and Web Browsers – What are the screen resolutions used by your visitors? Is the current design of your website catering well to these visitors, or do they have to scroll horizontally in order to view all your content? Are your visitors coming to your site through a mobile phone browser? If so, are you catering to that segment of visitors by offering a mobile version of your site?

When you have your analytics tracking code installed correctly to track events and virtual pageviews – that is where the fun comes because you can not only track which pages of your site gets visited and for how long, but also what your visitors do on each page (to a certain extent).

Remember, the inferences you draw from your analytics data and the decisions you make can make or break your site. Take time to answer these questions as you look at your analytics reports.

The New Word of Mouth

Coming to think of this, it’s nothing less than amazing – I’m now seated a cafe in the airport, eating my breakfast and sipping my coffee as I type these words on my iPhone WordPress application.

The keyboard is small, but even as I misspell words, the iPhone automatically corrects the word for me. And I know as I hit the publish button on this screen, these words will be automagically be transmitted and transferred from my mini handheld device – halfway round the globe into the database of my web host (out of goodness know how many there are) and appearing on Blogopreneur.com for public consumption.

All these in less than 10 seconds.

Just a mere 20 years ago, how can someone even imagine this is possible?

With end users like me given this power to publish at the speed of thought, companies really need to realize how the “word of mouth” landscape has changed.

Word of mouth today no longer needs mouths. All it requires are two thumbs, an iPhone and a GPRS connection.

If consumers (your customers and prospects!) are publishing more information online than you every single day, how can your brand even escape from being drowned in their opinions?

How is your company coping with the changed landscape?

Are You a Paralyzed Blogger?

Hola! Its quite amazing how a whole month went by in 2010 already – its the 31st of January today and I’ve not made a single post since Christmas 2009! Heh. :mrgreen: Well, I’ve been bogged down helping companies get their web marketing off the ground – so much so that I’ve hardly had the time to focus back on my own blog!

Contradictory, I know.

And its frustrating.

No, its frustrating because sometimes, I do have the time to post – but being the perfectionistic me, I am always reluctant to do so before I get my thoughts sorted out and make sure my post REALLY made sense… practically waiting for the perfect blog post to appear before I hit the publish button.

Well, I never got the perfect blog post. In the end, all that waiting and thinking too much really paralyzed me.

Anyway, it time for me to get back to blogging here. 🙂

So I’ve learnt a lesson today and I hope this goes out to all “paralyzed bloggers” like me out there: Don’t wait for the perfect blog post. You might want to review your post to make sure it does not cause you to lose your job or destroy your reputation… but don’t stop posting because the post is not perfect. It will never be.

Google Chrome Frame

Today, Google released Google Chrome Frame, a plugin for Windows XP / Vista users to take advantage of richer javascript experiences. After installing a the plugin, you can specify a separate meta tag on your website, so users with the plugin installed can indentify themselves, and take advantage of the functionality.

I haven’t given Chrome Frame codes a go yet, but as much as I am excited about the possiblity of the new functionality, I also know in the back of my mind how long I’d have to wait for advanced web technologies like this to reach even 1% of a website’s audience (that especially if you are expecting a non tech savvy audience).

Back in 2005, Seth Godin posted about “stats that cannot be true“, and he mentions that its “inconceivable to me that 40% of the audience knows how to use their browser to erase their cookies.”

And what he says is true today, 4 years down the road.

Today, I see people in Singapore (a country with one of the highest Internet Penetration Rates in the world), still using Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98/95, and not knowing the difference between Microsoft Windows (the OS) and Microsoft Office (the applications suite).

So much for advanced web technologies.