So I’ve been really busy lately with some new projects. Sorry I can’t tell ya what they are, but now I’m finding myself sitting here on a sunny Saturday morning staring at a blog that hasn’t been posted on in almost two weeks. My apologize. Honestly, I haven’t been doing much SEO lately. I’ve been trying to focus on other forms of traffic.

Yes they’ve been going well :)

If I may be frank, there are plenty of SEO blogs I would love to tell to shut hell up. I’ve never been one to be truly active in the webmaster community, but I do have strong opinions about certain people who are. I firmly believe there is a certain point where “SEO experts” get too involved within the community. At that point they start becoming more useless(my favorite oxymoron). They begin to network more and SEO less. With the fast pace of the industry they soon get lost with the knowledge and loose their own understanding of the concept. So then they do what they find they are best at; Networking with other players. Beyond that it’s all one big clique. It’s not long before you find yourself walking around a packed SE conference shaking hands with a bunch of fake smiling people who honestly haven’t even developed a single website in years(most if ever) yet have no problem chatting about search technologies. For a guy like me I couldn’t imagine a worse form of hell.

In the spirit of not being a complete poser I will boil the excuse of not blogging about SEO in two weeks simply to, I haven’t SEO’d in two weeks. So lets quit the rhetoric and talk about alternative forms of traffic. Personally I think this is a great opportunity to remenis(not sure how to spell that) about the yester years of traffic building. There used to be some bad ass ways of building traffic to your site that were so much fun I hated to give them up. So lets quickly roll through my top 5 favorite old school traffic generation techniques. This is going to be fun and surprisingly relevant.

5-Tagging
Fuck you Technorati. No ones talking about you for once. I’m talking about the classic empire built solely on watermarking and redistributing other peoples content. This form of promotion is loved by all except the select victims. Hey Ebaum I agree with you buddy. Gotta make enemies before you can make some friends. Some great content to steal is flash videos/games, pictures, videos and of course porn. Great ways to distribute include but definitely not limited to humor sites, picture sites, and P2P.

4-Top Sites Lists
Oh man Top Sites Lists were fun. You just put in a top sites list on a subdirectory, signup with a ton of related top sites lists. Then you just vote for yourself everyday till the growing traffic starts flowing in this nice little circle. Then you change all your outbound links on the other topsites lists to your main page and boom, an easy 3k visitors/day and growing.

3-Banner Farms
Banner Farms were always one of my personal favorites. Remember banner exchanges? They still exist and are a great way to pull huge traffic from old geocities type home pages. If you’ve given up on traffic from old 1996-98 sites just because they are a hideous mess of frames and dancing baby animations then your missing out. They are particularly great for small traffic reliant projects. Just throw a few still existing banner exchanges down at the bottom of your site, proxy hit and repeat.

2-Signature Tagging
Still popular as all hell. Boils down to the more popular you are, the more popular your website will be. Create a giant flashing banner ad with lots of noise and attach it to every single mundane post you make on forums. Undeniably the winner of the longest running traffic grabbing technique award.

1-FFA Link Hijacking
Definitely my favorite. Nothing gave me more pleasure back in the day than hijacking those pesky Free For All link posts. You just attach a little meta refresh tag onto your description. Put yourself in the business category(always shows up first alphabetically) and boom you got yourself some free low quality traffic to drive your top sites list and banner exchanges. Also worked surprisingly well on a few guestbook scripts.

God those were the days. Still the new ones of today are still damn nice :)