Just a reminder about the $200 worth of free advertising available from Microsoft’s AdCentre programme. Two days left for those of you who have a USA credit card.

See this previous post.

One way of obtaining cheap, high PageRank one-way links to your site is to buy keywords on word cloud sites.

These sites are a bit of a fad which have sprung up as ‘get rich quick’ schemes following the launch of 500words.com (which in turn followed the the Million Dollar Homepage).

Are links from these types of sites good quality? It’s debatable. By definition there are loads of links on these pages and not much content. On the other hand, if you can find a word cloud site in your niche, it could be a very valuable link. At the very least, they can provide a bit of PageRank juice.

The cost of these links vary wildly from a reasonable few dollars to the ridiculous – $100 dollars and more. Value wise, the cheaper ones are comparable to a featured listing in a newish directory, but you generally get more PageRank. You can pay extra to add text formatting to your link and make it stand out on the page, but this is only worth doing if your site is related to SEO and you want to attract the users of a word cloud site to your site.

A couple of things to look out for are whether you can choose your own keywords and how long your link will remain on the site – many of them say it will stay for 1 year or something similar, but don’t say when that period started! (Once a word cloud is full, how long is it going to stay up and not making money?)

Anyhow, here are some of the higher PageRank word cloud sites. I’ve confirmed their PageRank at SEOlogs.com using their Fake PageRank Detection tool (you can’t be too careful) and listed basic prices. Check them out and make your own decisions.

PR5
http://www.raasmzone.com – $2
http://www.300blogs.com – $50
http://www.300things.com – $50

PR4
http://www.claimyourword.com – $10
http://www.kccrump.com – $5
http://www.the-pure.net - $2
http://www.500auctions.com – $10
http://www.500directories.com – $10

PR3
http://www.milliongooglepixel.net – $2
http://www.automaticbanking.com – $1
http://www.claimyourwords.com – $5
http://www.mylifethroughalens.com – $3

I have a more extensive list of over a hundred word cloud sites, including PR, price, and numbers of backlinks. Will post it in a few days.

This bookmarklet sends the URL of the webpage you are currently viewing to Yahoo Site Explorer and displays the number of incoming links (backlinks) to the page. By default it excludes internal links within the domain, but you can change that once you are on the Yahoo Site Explorer page.

To use, drag the following link into your bookmarks or favourites: Yahoo Inlinks, then click on it when you want to see the inlinks for the page you are viewing.

Happy new year to everyone!

Here’s hoping 2007 will be a good year for your site and SEO efforts.