Social Media

As a new blogger and a new face to the crowd of SEO, I’m faced with this big challenge: where are my readers going to come from? I encountered this issue before when I first started blogging back on my personal blog (now defunct … or rather, just hidden) back in the day, but my friends were not the type of people who were actually interested in reading everything — though I will admit that I did have a good following among the closer ones. I will credit Andy Hagans for his excellent guide to getting out of the sandbox so that people will actually know who I am and maybe consider me to be an authority one day.

What is this sandbox that I speak of? I’m new, so allow me to introduce this, even though you’ve seen it hundreds of times before if you’re already in the industry. The sandbox effect is a Google method of basing its rankings (bringing them to the top of the search engines) on a trust mechanism. Furthermore, older sites (and domain names) fare better. Getting your site on authoritative sites is critical. Link bait is a necessity for people like me, and the list by Jim Westergren, while old, still holds true today and is a great starting point. This guide by Andy at TextLinkAds (also known as TLA) is definitely worth serious mention and consideration.