Yesterday, I received news that my last day working for the local search marketing company I had been working for was yesterday. Benefits(health insurance) would end at the end of the month which happens to be Friday. This does not come as a shock, since Lizzie and I both had worked for the same company for several years, and downsizing has been occurring over the past year.

So if you need any SEO/Social media work to include consulting, link building, or general site evaluations, please keep me in mind.
My Plan of Action

1. Get the word out to various contacts which could offer assistance.
2. Update resume and post on various sites.
3. Visit various job sites to include careerbuilder.com, montster.com, and Oaseo.com an SEO job community.
4. Visit various job boards such as the Problogger job board.
5. Keep working on existing freelance clients.
6. Contact previous clients.
7. Back-sell other services to current clients.
8. Keep on networking.
9. Cut back extraneous expenses.
10. Prioritize my efforts.

What would you do in my situation? How would you generate leads? Any advice would be appreciated.

Update: A project that was in the pipeline came through today. We are actually ahead of the game.

Factoring  in lost income, tax advantages of paying our own health insurance, income from the new contract, expenses of the new contract, increase availability of time due to having less clients; we are way ahead of where we were yesterday.

Wow, I just read Steven of VandelayDesign.com’s post How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic were Stephen shares his method of generating a huge amount of traffic using a combination of Social Media sites.

In short, after Steven writes a post that is written for his Web Design niche, he then submits the post to several web design niche social media sites, which he calls second tier social media sites. He then receives a couple hundred visitors from the second tier sites. The visitors from the second tier sites then submit the post to the big three Digg, Stumbleupon, and Del.icio.us.

Of course there is quite a bit more to it than what I have written here, and Steven goes into pretty good detail about this method which he has used on three separate occasions. The most being 34,000 visitors to his post 77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer. 34,000 visitors…wow.

Three key ideas I got from his post:

1. Write a sweet piece of Linkbait for your niche.
2. Submit the linkbait post to some social sites in your niche.
3. Optimize your posts for the three large Social networks, by making it easy for your visitors to submit to them.

Stop by and read Steven’s post, and let me know what you think. Hmm, I think I need to come up with some some SEO link bait to submit to Sphinn.

Steven of Vandelay Website Design, another Top Commentator for August, has a really awesome post about increasing your blog’s Search Engine traffic. This post is Monday’s post for a five-day series of posts about growing your blog, and offers up some solid advice about increasing traffic to your blog.

Steven starts out his post by listing some of his blog’s impressive traffic stats for the past few months. He then lists four methods for increasing traffic to your blog. Each of these sections are packed with some great blog marketing information and resources such as the Bloggers D-list which is a list of blogs that do not use the No Follow tag.
If Stevens post is an indication of the quality information that can be found in this series, I recommend reading it and the other posts in this series on Growing Your Blog as well.

Great job Steven, keep the great posts coming!

This is the fourth post in my link building series, although the last one in the series was done in March in the Niche Directory post. Not much new in the link building scene. Directories continue to play a role in many link building campaigns. But as noted in a previous article about the many crappy directories that seem to be growing in numbers, quality directories do exist, and should be sought after and used.

Here are some tips for link building with directories.
Tip #1 Very your titles frequently- If the keyword I am using is “Link Building”, the phrase and only the keyword phrase should be used in the title at one time. Don’t submit a title with more than one keyword phrase. For example, I would not submit a title like “Link Building for Search Engine Optimization” more than one or two times for variation, because it uses the two keyword phrases “link building” and Search Engine Optimization”.
Variations that I might use more frequently include:

• Link Building | url(use the entire http://www…domain)
• url | Link Building
• Link Building from url
• Domain name – Link Building
• Link Building – Domain name
• Stop words* can also be used occasionally for variation – for example- Want Link Building?

Tip#2 Build links to your links. Ok, your site is listed in a directory, but Google and the other search engines are not caching the page. What do you do? You get some links to your category pages. This can be as simple as submitting the category page where your link is listed to a handful of directories.

Tip#3 Build a free weblog for nothing but listing your directory links to your site. Be sure to submit the Feed to the major directories. In addition to helping to get those links cached, often times your linking weblog can be used as a form of three way linking for sites that are involved in reciprocal linking.

Tip#4 Click on your Link- Many directories sort submissions by hits, and often times it is only the first page of a category that is cached(listed) in the SERP’s(Search Engine Results Page), so therefore the sites with the most hits will be on the first page and many times this will be 1 or two hits. So when your site gets into a directory, visit the category page your site is listed on and actually click on your link.

Thats it for Link Building Four, if you have any questions or have some other area of SEO that I or my associates maybe able to cover, please let us know.

Some other SEO Blogs that I recommend:

1. Darin CC
   
2. Matt Cutts blog
3. Search Engine Watch blog

*Stop words, like the word “Want” are words that the Search Engines(Google) ignores. Read this Search Engine Watch post about Stop Words for more info about them, and here is a nice list of Stop words.

The trial period of using Kontera ads on Pixelheadonline is over. After reviewing the records, it was determined that the Kontera ads were not worth as much as they cost. Lizzie, who was never a fan of the Kontera bubble ads, was right. Yes I said it in writing, she was right and I was wrong.

The ads in addition to being annoying, also slowed down the page load times considerably. For visitors who use slower ISP’s, the extra time could be quite considerable.

However, we will still be monetizing the site with a variety of advertisements to include text link ads, banner adds, paid blog reviews, directory links, and of course Google Adsense.

If you are reading this, and are interested in Advertising on Pixelheadonline, please see the Advertising page.