While many bloggers are happy to blog in relative anonymity and obscurity, if you are seeking to attract a larger audience, monetize your blog, or develop contacts within the field of your interest, generating links to your blog is going to be a crucial task.

Why would you build links?
Well, links are about relationships: relationships for traffic – visitors to the linked sites will click on links to come to your blog; relationships for PR – this will help to raise your profile with Google, thereby improving search results, monetization possibiliities; and link popularity is about building authority – if you have a substantial body of links to your blog, then you will be seen by search engines, Technorati, Alexa, and a plethora of newer Web 2.0 services as having authority.

So, serious bloggers need to pay attention to the importance of building your link popularity. The process of building natural links though is going to be quite slow, by nature. So, as an alternative to this slow process, an SEO expert like Submitawebsite can help supplement or even run link building campaigns by using fundamental link building strategies, such as text links, submitting to directories, publishing your press release submission, or even doing blog reviews.

So, if you are intent on developing your link popularity, you’d certainly be wise to concentrate on natural link building. There are some free tools that can help you to analyze your current link popularity at Submitawebsite.

Suggestions and links supported by Submitawebsite.

One of my visitors recently noted some interesting problems on my blog, writing in response to my recent post on how to speed up my blog:

I just noticed something very strange on your blog. Whenever I click on a link with my middle mouse button, which should open it in a new tab, it not only opens the new tab, but also redirects to that link in the same tab your blog is.

I suspect it has something to do with your payperpost tracker, because whenever I click with any of the mouse buttons the page starts loading and in the status bar it says: Waiting for tracker.payperpost.com…

Have fun correcting this problem 😀

Well, it is time to come clean on the oddities. I was helping the Payperpost team test the statistics side of their new Argus system for managing the Payperpost Websites. While the system is under wraps for the time being, there are some general tips on what Argus is/will be:

The focus now though is well and truly on Argus. We have just 2 months to get together the most amazing overhaul you’ve ever seen and bind in a bunch of new technology we have that we feel you guys desperately need. For everyone this is a fantastic opportunity to right wrongs, and to make PayPerPost.com everything we always dreamed it would be. …

…The end result will be a fast, highly scalable application that can cope with massive growth of the user-base. The resulting application will also be highly maintainable, and uses an architectural design we’ve come up with that will also allow us to scale up and down the dev team on demand without suffering a productivity hit.

We’re talking here about a system that is free of bugs, that is snappy to use, that does pretty much everything most of you have asked for it to do, and then some. …

… Above all else though, we’ve listened to you. You want hundreds of opps. You want a higher quality network. You want more opportunities to get your brand out (if you’re an advertiser) and more ways to make money (if you’re a postie). Argus addresses those desires.

You can read more about the ongoing testing process here, what Argus might be here, and generally search for information on the boards here. The original announcement was in October.

Since few people are giving much actual information away, I’m not sure what preparations are needed, or if Payperpost in its current form will continue alongside or be merged into ‘Argus’. Well, its coming next month so we’ll see…

In the meantime, I had to remove the new tracking code that Payperpost provides and re-add the old one. Behavior is now back to normal. I also offed an email talking about the problems to Daniel explaining the problem. Let’s see what he says.

…. I must admit that I have removed the code temporarily because of the strange behavior that it exhibits on my blog.

For example, it is continually contacting Argus for almost EVERY reason, including screen scrolls, clicks on a word, clicks on anywhere on the blog, and worst of all, right and middle clicking buttons have had their function curtailed to opening the link. This behavior is too obtrusive as a form of tracking, and I’m not sure at the moment if it’s worth it to inconvenience my visitors so much.

One visitor wrote and said: … (as above)

While I might be willing to try this out on a smaller blog, with fewer visitors, it is causing problems as it is. So I have removed the tracking code for the time being. I’d appreciate your comments.

Best Wishes
Kenneth