These methods should all be white hat as far as I know

PermaLinks

First thing you want to do when setting up a WordPress blog is setup permalinks. Google and other search engines will like to see keywords in your url. They may also really hate the look of ?p= because it is a dynamic link, this may hurt your rankings in itself.

Link Building

If you want to get right down to it, back links are king. The more back links you have, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your rank in the search engines. You need lots and lots of back links from other sites. Some easy ways to get back links would be through Entrecard, they have “top dropper” days where you will get listed and pick up back links. Also, if you want a quick way to get indexed by Google and the other search engines, you’re going to want to use Entrecard. If you’re not a blog, you might want to try something like ProjectWonderful to start your site off. Advertising is a necessary evil to starting a site. Once people know your site exists, more links will come rolling in by themselves if you write good posts.

Social Networking

Submitting some of your articles to Digg or StumbleUpon is a good idea for a little while, because your dugg articles will show up in the search engines.  However, you will get banned if you submit too many of your own articles.

You notice all that crap at the bottom of my site? Those are other blog networks that hold my RSS feed and list my articles there for people to find. Some also keep track of my traffic to a degree. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and Technorati  are some examples. Even listing your site on Twitter can help. I have just recently started with Twitter to see how it goes.

Some other places you might want to list your articles would be MySpace and FaceBook if you have those accounts, let your friends know you have a blog. I use some WordPress plugins to automatically post there.

RSS Submissions

You should submit your RSS feed wherever you can, because it will list your articles more places, meaning more people are likely to find them and read your articles.

Keywords

Keywords are highly important. I don’t pay much attention to them myself, but if you really want to rank well you need to research keywords. The wording on your site can mean the difference of 50 unique/day and 0 people find your article through search engines. If you pick a term that is far too competitive for your site, you will not rank. I have only just begun to try and play with keywords in my articles. The point is, try to pick less competitive keywords when you write a post by using different wording.

Some useful SEO WordPress Plugins

All-in-one-seo - This plugin helps to automatically handle some SEO functions like title and description of the page.

Sociable – This plugin automatically puts Digg/Stumble/Etc links under each post.

TweetSuite – Puts the Tweet link under each post.

WordBook – Automatically posts your posts on the blog to FaceBook.

Google-XML-Sitemaps – Automatically creates site maps for Google and other search engines.

WordPress Related Posts – Shows related posts based on tags on each post. Helpful for getting people to read more than one article

Conclusion

That is about how far I have gotten with my SEO. I’m still working on it day by day, trying my best to optimize the site. Hopefully someone will find this information useful. Feel free to contribute more SEO and Traffic tips in the comments.

This graph shows pure search engine traffic from Google, mostly. I did go and check my ranks on certain keywords and they seem to have DROPPED. So, when I quit using Entrecard my search engine traffic shot up, and when I started again the search engine traffic shot down. I’m not sure why this would be caused merely by using EC or not using EC. Regardless, I know I have a long way to go before I really start to rank in the search engines.

If this is the way it works, I might as well get free traffic from the search engines rather than dropping 300 all the time to get the exact same amount of traffic. Also, the search engine traffic is of a higher quality, showing a 60% bounce rate, where Entrecard has an over 90% bounce rate.

My intentions were to stack the Entrecard traffic ontop of the search engine traffic, not to kill my better source of traffic!

So, I think I’m dropping entrecard. Sorry guys.

Analytics states that I’m getting approximately 117 – 150 unique per day, since I started dropping less with Entrecard.

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Now, switching over to just search engine traffic with analytics we see that approximately 50% of my traffic per day recorded by Analytics is search engine based. It’s growing slowly.

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Analytics seems fairly consistent with my ProjectWonderful stats, which means that various blocking plugins for FireFox are not only blocking ProjectWonderful, but Analytics as well.

Webalizer

Now let’s have a look at what webalizer has to say about my traffic.

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Seems as if Webalizer is painting an entirely different picture. It shows that my traffic really didn’t drop off when I started to drop less on Entrecard. I believe this can be explained by my search engine traffic growing, which lead to my drop off of EC not showing up. It’s actually quite apparent to me I’m part of the search engines. Why? Well, I get a lot of spam comments even with BadBehavior running. Without BadBehavior, I once received 50 spam comments in one day.

Conclusion

If you’re using Analytics, I would consider switching to something that is blocked less by the various plugins out there. Clicky analytics was recommended by nukeit.org, and I have to agree. Anything that is being blocked by NoScript/Adblock Plus and the other assortment of things out there, is not going to give you reliable stats. The best stats come from log analyzers such as Webalizer.

The thing is, I’ve seen blogs that are supposedly popular, and yet the site itself looks highly inactive That means that the only reason people are going there is for the all mighty widget, so they can drop.

I would like Entrecard to implement something like ProjectWonderful traffic stats. It’s pretty difficult to find out which sites are actually receiving traffic from other sources. Maybe I would like to advertise on a blog that’s not receiving all Entrecard traffic. It’s pretty difficult to find such a blog with EC’s current system. On top of that, the most popular blogs have an insanely high EC credit amount to advertise on, and it’s just not worth it to spend your EC there. In my opinion, you should stay below 512EC, but I’ve spent over a thousand EC on an advertisement before, just because I had extra credits and I didn’t know what to do with them. I suppose I should have gave them away

Choose wisely when advertising on Entrecard. In a way, you’re better off advertising on a ton of 2-32EC blogs, then ever bothering with the more popular ones. Unless you are trying to get your popularity rating up, advertising on the top blogs might get it up for you.

Entrecard’s system doesn’t work all that well, and that’s why a lot of people have dropped Entrecard and stopped using it completely.

You want to know the secret? THERE IS NO SECRET. Any site that says there is a “secret” is lying. How you get traffic is very obvious.

• ADVERTISING, ADVERTISNG, AND MORE ADVERTISING
• SEO – SEO is very important for driving targeted traffic to  your website, continuously. This is where quality content comes in. If you have good ranking in search engines, you’re all set. You won’t need to spend a dime. It’s very difficult to get good rankings, however and it’s best to start with ADVERTISING.
  

That’s about it. There’s no real “secret”. If you have a lot of money, it’s quite easy to setup a high traffic site. Right off the bat. Just use something like adwords. However, there are some services out there for those of us that don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising.

• Entrecard – You’ve seen me talk about this before, it works to a certain point. I’ve gained some readers from this service You also get a chance to connect with a lot of different people that blog. You’re not alone. I say entrecard is worth it.
• Adgitize – I haven’t tried this personally, but I know it’s probably worth the $14 a month. I did some poking around in TechByPC’s traffic stats on ProjectWonderful, and I saw it definitely was hauling in some traffic. (TechByPC you can have me remove this if you want)
• ProjectWonderful – Cheap advertising, you just have to know how to work with the system. You can get 100s of clicks very cheaply if you know how to work with it. Finding sites that are within your target niche can be difficult. It’s best  to try and find new sites that were just listed that have high traffic – ads are very cheap at that point.

You see ads on my site. I’m not doing this to annoy you. I’m not doing this to make money. So why are they there? They’re there for my own advertising. I can make a very small amount from having these ads there (except entrecard) and that money goes to advertising for this site.

Conclusion

Getting traffic can actually be quite easy. If you have thousands of dollars laying around you don’t know what to do with. I notice that a lot of blogs exist only because they’re trying to make money. I hope they’re ready for disappointment, because to make money you have to have traffic, and to have traffic you have to spend money.. Yea it doesn’t make much sense. Let me know if I missed anything. I know this isn’t on topic very much, but when you’re trying to promote a site all the time you blog about it as well.

NoScript

NoScript is a plugin for FireFox that blocks all scripts on pages. You have to disable script blocking on entrecard.com and amazonaws.com

Next, you have to MAKE SURE that temporarily allow top-level sites by default is clicked. It was blocking entrecard still and I wondered why, this option makes that problem go away.

Firefox Settings

Go to Tools>Options>Content and add exceptions entrecard.com and amazonaws.com to the “Load images automatically” option. Then disable that optioin. Also uncheck “Enable Java”.

Linky

Linky is a plugin for firefox that allows you to select links from a page. First, what I do is go into my drops inbox and select all the people who have dropped me. Then I use linky to open all selected links in tabs.

I also drop randomly a lot, so I just go into campaign, select all the links in “New” , “Cheap” , or “Random” for about 12 rows. The only issue I have with that is I have to manually uncheck the details link, but I’ve been thinking about making an autoit script for that. The amount of tabs you can have will probably depend on how much RAM you have in your computer.

Note that I still browse blogs and drop comments after I’ve dropped my cards. I highly doubt anyone who drops 300 cards is doing everything manually, that would take an eternity I wouldn’t have anytime to blog or work on my site.

Let me know if I missed anything, this should be very similar to other guides out there, but I use linky instead of some other things people do. I have to thank nukeit.org for linky, I believe he mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

The fact is, many people are manipulating their rank on Alexa, which means that their rank is bogus anyway.

Trojan Horse

I don’t recommend this. I was using IE on it (Don’t exactly remember why, I hate IE) and there must be a new exploit of some sort for IE. I visited a certain site and zonealarm freaks out about ~.exe trying to become a startup item. I denied that, then denied access to the internet & trusted zone. I then searched for this file and lo and behold it was in the system32 folder. In case you don’t know, most virii/trojans hang out in that folder. I could not delete it nor could I end it’s process, since it was not added to a startup item I decided I should reboot. I then disconnected my modem, went into system32 and deleted it. Then I proceeded to do a full virus scan with nod32 & zonealarm. Nothing came up, so I guess I made it out alright.

I would have liked to analyze this file, but I would have to setup a vmware machine and play with ollydbg and I wasn’t really in the mood to go that far with it. Of course, I suppose I could have analyzed it with IDA Pro, but alas I didn’t bother since I wanted it gone. I was kind of interested in whether it was a trojan or a downloader for adware. Could’ve dropped it into one of the various online virus scan sites as well I suppose.

looking at milw0rm it looks like there are quite a few IE exploits. Still, most of the sites on RoyalSurf are shady and I really would not recommend using them.

On the flip side, I highly recommend ZoneAlarm, because it has saved me a few times from being infected. I usually don’t have issues with infections, it’s rare but it happens. I wonder sometimes how everyone else gets along with out getting infected with anything.. I think I read somewhere that most Windows PC’s were infected with one thing or another.

So many ways to disguise a file and hide it from virus scanners. Packing, hex modification etc, and with a nicely packed trojan, spliced onto a regular exe I can’t see how a normal user would notice. On top of that, they’re often disguised as FireFox.exe or IEXpore.exe or a system process. So, even if a user bothers to check out running processes, it’s unlikely they’ll see it.