In this (slightly technical) article from SEOMoz, Russ Jones shows us 2 relatively simple methods you can try right now:

Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream by Russ Jones

I have a confession to make. I love infomercials. In fact, I would probably call myself an infomercial elitist / hipster. I liked infomercials before they were cool; before the Billy Mays and Slap Chop Guy made their way into internet memes. I pledge my allegiance to the godfather of infomercials, Ron Popeil, while guys like Anthony Sullivan weep at his alter, asking forgiveness for their sub-par jobs as pitchmen. OK, maybe I take it a little too seriously - I do happen to have a DVR full of Gator Grip, Ginsu Knives, and Flowbees - but I believe there is something extremely motivating about this type of advertising. And Ron Popeil hit it on the head over and over again: Set It and Forget It.

This was the tag line for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, an amazing success for infomercials. You see, there is an innate desire for us to find solutions to common, everyday problems that do not require our attention. These nagging, annoying problems like making dinner, cleaning up, and in our industry - SEO tedium - tend to suck up our time and attention while bringing only marginal improvements.

Unfortunately, there is this perception, almost bias, against automation in our space: a misbelief that there is nothing that we can set and forget in SEO. Well, I am here today to free you from the reigns of some of your daily miseries of  SEO, all for the incredible price of free.

Strategy 1: Real Time Referrer Indexing

We often joke that "Google knows everything." While we can lament the loss of privacy and liberty, there is one thing that I do want Google to know about - my links. I want them to know about as many links pointing to my site as possible. Unfortunately, Google misses out on a good portion of the web. Well, what if you could find links that Google hasn't necessarily found, and then make sure that Google does index them and count them? Introducing Real Time Referrer Indexing:

If you were go into your Google Analytics right now and export all of the pages that have sent visitors to your site since your website's inception, what percentage of them do you think will have been indexed by Google? 90%, 95%, 99%? Sure, it will probably vary from site to site, especially given how many different sites out there have sent traffic to you, but there are likely to be a handful that Google never got around to crawling. Our goal with this first set-it and forget-it tactic is to find the pages that refer traffic to your site on-the-fly and make sure if they have a link, that Google knows about it.

Ideally, our automated solution would work like this...

1. The script would record every referrer from other sites.
2. The script would spider that site to see if it actually has a real, followed link.
3. The script would check to see if Google had cached that referring page with the followed link.
4. The script would coax Google to reindex that page if it had not yet found the link.
5. The script would continue to check to see if Google had cached the referring page.

This is actually quite easy to accomplish programmatically. The first three steps are done every day by tools regularly used by SEOs.The only difficult part is finding a way to encourage Google to visit the referring pages it has not yet indexed. We can solve this by simply having a widget on the page that displays those referrers, essentially an "As Seen On" bulleted list of pages that had linked to your site, but had not yet been indexed.

Well, I have a treat for those of you who are or know someone with some half way decent programming skills. Here is sample code that does just this on your typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation. A word of warning - it is highly likely that this code is buggy. Make sure that you check it and make modifications before running it on production. All you need to do is install the script on any pages of your site for which you would like to perform real time referrer indexing.

This is exactly the type of set-it-and-forget-it SEO that I love. Simple techniques, simple solutions, long-term results.

So let's move on to another set-it-and-forget-it technique.

Strategy 2: On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery

Alright, so if you haven't heard of PageRank Recovery before, you are going to need a quick little lesson. Whenever someone links to your site, but screws up the URL, the PageRank that flows through that link essentially evaporates. I am pretty sure that it ends up in Matt Cutt's personal PageRank stash, which he has learned to convert into a powerful foodstuff that he consumes prior to mountain climbing and running marathons. But I digress, if you can find where those broken links point to on your site, then 301 those URLs to a real page, you can "recover" that PageRank. Virante created a tool to do just that based on SEOMoz's Site Intelligence API which Rand highlighted a little while ago, but it still requires you spend time going and running the tool regularly. I want to be lazy and have my site recover PageRank for me while I watch The Facts of Life dressed in a Snuggie and downing 5 hour energy shots. So here is how it would work:

Ideally, our program would do the following...

1. The script sits in your CMS right before a 404 is fired. If you don't have a CMS, you would direct your HTACCESS file to pass all 404 traffic through it first.
2. The script captures the URL that the visitor or GoogleBot tried to visit.
3. The script somehow magically knows what URL you MEANT to visit.
4. The script 301 redirects you there.

What's that you say? "But Russ, our programmers don't know magic. They are all muggles. And even if they did know magic, I can't find a USB powered wand anywhere these days." Well, I am bringing you good news from some friends: Mr. XML Sitemap and Ms. Levenshtein.

If you were paying attention to countless blog posts in the SEO world, you should have an XML Sitemap which keeps record of all the URLs on your site. This is a good start to the magic that is On-The-Fly PageRank Recovery, because now we know all the possible URLs your visitor or GoogleBot may have been trying to reach. Now, we simply have to find the most similar URL to the one the visitor came to. How do we accomplish this? Levenshtein Distance.

Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance, is a measurement of the minimum number of changes necessary to convert one piece of text into another by adding a letter, removing a letter, or substituting a letter. For example, the Levenshtein Distance between the words "Rock" and "Russ" is 3, because we will have to substitute the O, C, and K with U, S, and S. Below is an example of how Levenshtein Distance could be used to find two similar URLs:

So, the way On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery works is by reading all the URLs in your sitemap and then comparing the Edit Distance between those URLs and the URL your visitor entered. If the server finds a close match, we then 301 redirect rather than show a 404 error. Subsequently, when a Googlebot tries to visit those previously 404 pages, it will instead find that 301 redirect and appropriately pass the PageRank through to the intended page. Plus, On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery is a huge usability win for visitors who now don't have to try and search your site to find the correct page.

Want to give it a test drive? Try any one of these broken links back to Virante and my blog, TheGoogleCache

• Virante's Tool Page: http://www.virante.com/se9-toolz
• Second Page Poaching: notice the dollar sign in the url

Now, It would be hypocritical of me to talk about setting it and forgetting it, and then make you go out and do all the work yourself to get it up and running. So, in the spirit of laziness, I have included a couple of options for you to use as well. Of course, double-check everything before you go into production with any code you ever get on the internet, regardless of whether or not it is on a trusted site like SEOmoz.

• WordPress Plugin
• Drupal Module
• Generic PHP Code

Final Thoughts

There are incredible opportunities in the world of Search Engine Optimization that we have only begun to address. So much more can be done in terms of describing, detecting, and repairing SEO issues all in a programatic, automated fashion. These are just two of them. Good luck, and keep inventing!

About russvirante — I am the CTO of Virante, Inc. I am married to Morgan, who is frickin awesome, and I have a new daughter, Claren, who is also frickin awesome. We live happily in Durham, NC.

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WOW, was I surprised by the results!  Here's a quick summary:

• People most need help with focusing on one thing, avoiding shiny new object syndrome, getting organized, and taking action.  Not a single person said they needed help with how to use the multitude of marketing strategies and tactics out there.  Not SEO, not social media, not advertising, not video marketing, not product creation - nothing.  I was shocked!
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• Most people who participated in the survey are using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  A few also use Google +.  I was VERY surprised that no one reported social bookmarking sites or using Youtube's social features.

All of this information has given me a much clearer picture of what my readers say they need.  The main concern I have is that less than 1% of my subscribers responded to the survey, and I don't think everyone is in the same place. So...

This site and my main mailing list will continue to be a mix of beginning, intermediate, and advanced topics to help you grow your business.  This will include things like being strategic, improving daily habits and finding out about cutting edge concepts as they're discovered as well as straightforward marketing how-to information.

And, as always, your feedback is invaluable.  If there's something you need to learn about, post a comment here and let me know!  If there's a tool you need, ask me about it, and I'll tell you which one(s) I like.

In fact, let me share one with you right now that everyone needs, no matter where you are in your information marketing journey.  It's free, and it will help you.  Here's the link ==> http://thebreakthroughmarketer.com/bmt/imiorganizer/

Get it, use it, and share it with everyone you know in the IM universe.  You will be very happy .

I also host a LOT of teleseminars and webinars.

Lately, I've attended several webinars that have left me...let's just say "less than satisfied."

I'm sure you've seen video sales letters, right?  Basically, the product promoter creates a slide show with the content of the sales letter, and you get to review the sales pitch in video format.

Works great, I love them, they're a wonderful tool to get the message out there.

But when a webinar host simply regurgitates his or her sales letter - or even worse, PLAYS THE VIDEO SALES LETTER AS THE ENTIRE WEBINAR - well, them's fightin' words.

And it seems like lately that's all a lot of people want to deliver.

What the heck is going on?

Whatever happened to giving people valuable, HELPFUL information, then sharing with them how your tool/service/training will make it faster, easier, better for them to implement that valuable, helpful information?

I know everyone has their own approach to marketing.  I know everyone isn't going to do things the same way or the way I think they should do them .

But if you take an hour or more of my time and just read a sales letter to me, I will NOT buy your product.  I will leave the webinar feeling like you wasted my time.  And chances are, you will never get me to give you my hard-earned money.

The benefit you get from delivering webinars is that you get to SHOW your audience some really cool stuff so they feel COMFORTABLE when you  ask them to vote with their wallets.

So please, if you do webinars or teleseminars, please, please, give your listeners/watchers something of value they can use right away.  Let them get to know you, who you are, what you're all about, and demonstrate that you know how to solve their problem.

Your bank account will thank you.

See this in action.  I'll be doing another webinar webinar (no that's not a stutter, it's a webinar on how to do webinars) on Monday, November 14 at 6pm Central time.  Sign up here ==> http://thebreakthroughmarketer.com/event/webinars/

I guarantee you will leave with information you can implement immediately!

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Don't let the fear of not understanding computer programming or being unfamiliar with all those technical tools stop you, because it's easier than you think.

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Intimidated by the thought of hosting your own webinar?  You won't be after this conference.

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I stopped holding these classes because I was under the (mistaken as I've found out) impression that most of my subscribers were more interested in tools and advanced tactics than in how to handle the core functions and foundational strategies of building their businesses.

Now I know better. And I apologize if I've let you down.

So take advantage of the training. Sign up, participate, and let's earn huge income by sharing our valuable knowledge with the people who need what we know.

This week, we're going to talk about using webinars to increase your profits. It constantly amazes me how many people are intimidated by the thought of conducting a webinar. If you follow a few simple steps, you can do it! And I'm going to give you those steps.

Sign up at ==>  Faster Profits With Webinars

I look forward to seeing you there!

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