Sulumits Retsambew

Contest ended. I won !!! I can not express how happy in this moment I am. Final top 10 entries are:

1. www.sulumitsretsambew.org
2. www.sulumitsretsambewno.com
3. www.sulumitsretsambew.biz
4. www.sulumitsretsambewblog.com
5. www.yehia.org
6. www.stevz.com/tag/sulumits-retsambew
7. www.tadkashadka.com
8. www.carissaputri.com
9. www.discodog.fr/sulumits-retsambew.html
10.  www.bleuken.com/sulumits-retsambew

Everything started five months ago on 15.03.2009. Who would say that this competition will go so well for some unknown Bosnian webmaster? I was lucky enough to catch good domain name but there must be something good in my link building tactics. Domain name is not all that matters in SEO, but certainly keyword rich or even better, exact match domain, helps very much.

After Will Spencer announced contest I went quickly to my Moniker to register domain. I picked up “.com” and when I went through checkout it said it’s registered. I searched again and .net and .org were still available. I picked .org since I am fan of these domains and I thought someone is already registering .net domain. Luckily .org was available and I successfully registered domain five minutes after contest start. That day I did nothing more except I figured out my site organization strategy.

I wanted static page on the frontpage with few pages around it with the SEO blog where I will talk about various SEO tips and tricks and news from our Sulumits Retsambew competition. I also decided that niche will be contest itself since it would be hard to convince Google that Sulumits Retsambew is some type of Bosnian food or place in Kyrgyzstan.

On same day and a few days after I registered sulumitsretsambew.blogspot.com, sulumitsretsambew.wordpress.com and few more web 2.0 sulumits profiles among them myspace account (though I never used it).

Day after, I registered hosting account on www.monoblue.org since I had my sites there over 3 years and I had no problems what so ever. I thought why to experiment with different hosting since big offline time can screw all my efforts here.

After hosting account I decided that I will pick Wordpress CMS. I am long time Joomla user (Mambo too) but I figured out that this is great chance to experiment with Wordpress and I wanted to run away from Joomla robust systems and lot of work on onpage SEO optimization. So I installed Wordpress and found some SEO claimed theme. What a mistake. This SEO theme had only one good thing, content was very close to the top, but onpage seo, h1, h2, h3 were really bad. Every page had site title in h1 and title of blogposts in h2. It even had sidebar titles in h2. So I decided that I will rewrite the code.

In the meantime I started to add much of the content. As I said I wanted static frontpage with latest post on it, some static pages and a blog. Wordpress had all that. It is simply enough to write some page and pick it as default frontpage one and an other page that will be blog.

I never controlled keyword density. I just simply mentioned my keywords in text few times where I thought it will be appropriate, so that when you read text it looks natural. Later I calculated that my keyword density varies from 4% to 6%. I mentioned keywords in h1 and h2 tags on frontpage and I bolded and underlined few ones… Added image with name sulumitsretsambew.jpg and alt tag Sulumits Retsambew.

I added short info, last 5 blog entries, last entry excerpt on the frontpage, page navigation, my brand rss by feedburner (you get feedburner with personalized url like http://feeds.sulumitsretsambew.org/sulumits), tag cloud, blogroll and I validated the template. I later realized it would be better that I shown 15 latest articles instead of tag cloud.

In that moment time has come for additional plugins for Wordpress.

Here is list of used plugins:

1. Akismet – Akismet is Wordpress spam watcher. Basically I added Wordpress API key and selected option to delete the spam comments automatically on posts older then month.
2. All in One Adsense and YPN – This plugin insert flawlessly Google ads in the content. It’s known that in content ads perform better then other types of ads.
3. All in One SEO Pack – This plugin is must have. It arranges my titles and meta descriptions across the site.
4. Contact Form 7 – I used this plugin to generate Contact form with Captcha at my contact page.
5. Karailiev’s sitemap – This plugin generates Sitemap for spiders (Google). It does job on excellent way. After adding this it’s needed that you add your sitemap to your Google Webmasters Central.
6. Really Simple CAPTCHA – This plugin is needed for Contact form 7 plugin.
7. SEO Friendly Images – Excellent plugin for SEO-ing your images. This plugin will append post title to every image ALT tag and by that your images will become more relevant to the given topic. You can specify more option according to your taste.
8. Sociable – This plugin will add bunch of WEB 2.0 and social bookmark buttons so your visitors can easily bookmark it.
9. WP-Syntax – If you publish code from time to time, this plugin will do code highlighting for most programming languages.
10. WP-Pagenavi – This plugin will give you navigation numbers as you can see it on my Blog section. However I use manually coded version because of xhtml compliance.
11. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This plugin will find relevant post by calculating not just simply using tags, but with complex algorithm that use, post titles, post content and other functions to find your related posts.

I added privacy policy, logo and favicon not because of SEO but because I wanted that all this looks little bit more professional. In that time maybe 5 days after beginning of the contest I started planning my Link Building strategy. I decided that I will not buy any links (however I paid few people to do some jobs for me since I don’t had will to do it myself (social bookmarking and blog commenting, but I will talk about this later).

Basically everything was fair and played by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Actually I paid one link, but I could not resist to get PR 5 backlink, very visited for just 10$, but since that guy is my friend, probably if I was boring enough he would give me that link for free J).

So my strategy was not something special.

Decision was to get 30 backlinks daily no matter what. And then everything began.

Link directories

First I decided that since everyone will do link directories submissions and everyone will have anchor Sulumits Retsambew and their link submitted to SEO sections of link directories then it would be wise that I do that before them. Since no one could then have link in that section with my keyword anchor. I registered my site at www.easysubmits.com and started to submit it there with only one anchor Sulumits Retsambew. People suggest changing anchor every certain amount of directories but I did not wanted to that. I wanted to stop as many people as I can that they get backlinks with Sulumits Retsambew anchor in SEO section of directories.

I started to submit 30 links daily starting from high PR dirs to low PR dirs. After I managed to submit to all PR2+ dirs I slowed down submitting to 20 dirs daily. On every 60 dirs I changed site description but anchor was always the same.

WEB 2.0 sites

I created few blogs and accounts on web 2.0 and similar sites that linked to this entry. Examples are
blogger.com, blogger.ba, blog.co.yu, slideshare, myspace, twitter, my.opera.com, youtube, metacafe and similar…

RSS Directories

This one was one of the first thing I also did it. I took some RSS lists and submitted my rss feed to over hundred of rss sites. I did that before starting to publish my content, since most of the rss dirs show last ten posts from your site with small excerpt and backlink to you. On this way every post of mine got instant backlinks. Check details for lists.

Forum signatures

Slowly maybe every 5 days I introduced forum signature links. I did not watched are forums appropriate or not. On all forum where I was active (in that time over 7k backlinks) I simply added my site to signatures, on the way that Sulumits Retsambew is an anchor. But as I said I didn’t added to all of them at once. One forum maybe every 4-5 days until I depleted all forums. My reason for this was that I was worried how I will get backlinks when I spend all backlinking solutions, and I did not know how much Google will value this links. I watched also on other Sulumits Retsambew entry appearances across the forums so I can leave my message there with the rest of the guys.

My sites

From time to time I added Sulumits Retsambew link to my sites. Somewhere I put the link sitewide, somewhere in blogposts and somewhere in footer. On this way I got maybe 10 sitewide links, and over 20 blogposts.

Link baiting

I had lucky for this one. Some of my blogposts became much visited and people started to link them across the net. For example Sunita (www.sulumitsretsambewno.org) picked up iFrame worm and by visiting her site I picked it up too. Worm infected all my sites and I lost 2 days to clean them or recover last clean backups. SulumitsRetsambew.org got infected too, but I clean it maybe 2 hours after. After that I simply wrote in a blogpost my experiences and information about that worms and that was full hit. Over two months my blog was first on Google for the mentioned pest and many people linked to that article.

I repeated the same with few other articles .

Friend links

Beginning of the contest went well thanks to one more important source for my backlinks – links from friends. I got many backlinks from my Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian friends. I thought their links will consist at end of the contest with less then 1% but they gave me more then I thought they will give me. Friend links for my entry make more then 15%. Without them I doubt that this entry would have position it has today.

Article marketing

After 2 months of contest I depleted almost all my strong backlinking options. And I concluded that it is time for Article marketing. I never did that so I don’t had clue how to do it. After researching I registered on ezine articles and wrote one but it got declined because of bad English, I fixed that and resubmitted my article and it got declined again because of failing to comply to their guidelines. I got irritated and I dropped the idea of article marketing. However I saw many results on Google that comes from Article sites and I again decided that I must have that links. So I decided I will pay someone to do it. I hired Sturat from NetBuilders.org and he did the job on excellent way. He wrote 5 articles and submitted it to 25 article directories. Every article was approved .

Social bookmarking

When I realized how it’s easy when someone else is doing it for you, I dropped my slow Social Bookmarking and hired Dailyearner (again from NetBuilders) that he submit my site for 100 social sites for only 8$. That went well too. BTW I did some social bookmarkings at the beginning of the contest by help of my friends.

Blog commenting

In third month time I started use blog comments. I decided that wherever I leave blog comment (I do that much – maybe 5-20 daily) no matter is it dofollow or nofollow I will leave my Sulumits Retsambew link. This showed extra results especially if I leaved comments on blog that have latest comment widget activated… I started to notice those links in Yahoo search explorer, but also I had misunderstanding with some people. When they realized that my link is SEO contest entry they became angry, which they would not if my link was my usual personal page. However I continued with the tactic.

Its worth to mention that I was never concerned is links dofollow or nofollow I simply did not watched on that.

I forgot to say that those web 2.0 sites at the beginning of the contests were sites like blogger, wordpress.com (who banned my whole account because of that – but screw them they suck anyway), youtube, metacafe, slideshare and similar where I made few blogs, videos and slides with only purpose to gave link to my entry.

During my commenting period, I tried to comment and get backlink from country domains like .ba, .rs, .hr, .de, .ru, .se, .fr, .in and similar. Since I wanted that people around the globe talk about my entry. I thought if everybody talks about you then you must be authority in the field.

Contest

At the beginning of the contest I made domain give away contest. I gave 4 domains for free. By leaving comment people automatically got chance to win one domain. However 3 domains are given and one guy did not want his reward. Because of my laziness that domain expired. This domain giveaway contest gave me up to 50 backlinks from various people blogs…

End

After I completed all of above steps I stopped almost all activities. Last two months I only forced my self to make blogpost every 2-3 days. My backlinks continued to coming from my 30+ daily posts on forums and my 5-15 blog commenting links.

In short I did the following:

-         Bought domain, installed Wordpress and theme.

-         On page SEO (Mainly meta tags optimizations, heading tags optimizations, titles optimizations, permalinks optimizations).

• main article for this was http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

-         Unique content.

-         Submitted to directories on www.easysubmits.org. Probably it’s a good idea to pay someone to do it for you. You don’t need to use this site; those submitter guys have even better and larger directory lists.

-         Submitted to RSS directories

• http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/06/06/55-active-rss-directories-to-help-promote-your-feeds/
• http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
• http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/

-         Made 10 blogs and web 2.0 profiles with same topic and they all backlinks to my entry (blogger, wordpress.com, slideshare, youtube, metacafe and similar).

-         Submitted my site to the Social Bookmarking where I am active.

-         Paid Sturat to do article writings and article submission for me – largest package.

-         Paid Dailyearner to do Social Bookmarking of my site on 100+ SB sites.

-         Blog commenting minimum 5 daily.

-         Regular site updates.

-         One domain giveaway contest.

-         Added my site to my forum signatures (7500 posts across the net).

-         Maybe 30 blogposts at my blogs and my friend’s blogs.

-         Asked friend to spare me link or two.

-         Bought one link on PR 5 site (Sorry it was only 10$ with no other links on it and it had 3k indexed pages).

-         Added link to maybe 20 of my sites.

-         Blog comments on other Sulumits Retsambew sites.

-         Five two way link exchanges and from that ones one was with other Sulumits competitor.

Conclusion

I did not worried are links do follow or no follow. I aimed to get links from different top level country domains. I aimed to get links from high PR forums. I did not worried are links from the same niche or non relevant. I didn’t do any page rank sculpting.

Now if you want to buy this blog feel free to give me offer. It has 60 UV daily this proves how much Alexa is worthless. It earns 10 cents daily . It has PR 2 and who knows maybe on next update it can be even PR 5.

My personal oppinion is that dedication won in this contest. Sunita made more backlinks then me but she had certain other troubles… I finished with over 20k backlinks as I planned with maybe 70 working hours spent on this entry. I am also very happy to see Sunita and Sony on podiums and best regards to them. I also want to say thanks and say greetings to all who knows me and who supported me. See you on a next seo contest.

p.s  Sorry for my English mistakes .

p.s. Feel free to ask any question related to this topic that I maybe not mentioned above.

And yes register at

WWW.NETBUILDERS.ORG