Archive for the ‘Linking’ Category

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New and Improved 10 Tips to the Top

Oct
27
2005

Written by Jill Whalen (c) 2005 for SeoNews

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started:

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. Due to Google’s aging delay for all new domains (see this forum thread), your best bet is to use an existing domain/website if at all possible. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.

2. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those “someones” are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

3. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page.

Nevër shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.

4. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let’s say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of development?

(Look for keyword phrases such as “preschool toys.”) Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.

5. Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.” The search engines can’t fill out forms, can’t search your site, can’t read JavaScrïpt links and menus, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will nevër find those resulting pages. You’ll need to make sure that you always have some kind of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There’s nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard tags, as the search engines can follow image links just fine.)

6. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click-through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “clïck here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

7. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.” This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly. (Purchase and read our Copywriting Combo for exact tips on how to implement this correctly.)

8. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weïght with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

9. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without you even asking. It’s fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

10. Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings. If you’ve done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffïc, salës, and conversions. (You can sign up for a frëe trial of ClickTracks, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.) It certainly won’t hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don’t simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!

About The Author
Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the frëe weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill’s handbook, “The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines” teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company, Search Creative, LLC.

Posted in General SEO, Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, SEO, Tools | Comments Off

Using New Content to Build Links

Oct
26
2005

Written by Rob Sullivan for SiteProNews

Sometimes, link building is more than just searching out sites to request links from. Sometimes you have to get creative in how you build links.
In this article, we look at another way of building links that doesn’t really require you to go out and search for relevant sites to request links from.

The web is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Technorati, a popular blog search and syndication site estimates that the blogosphere alone doubles in size every 5 months. As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links.

Who knows how much the rest of the web grows? I would bet that while it doesn’t double every 5 months its rate of growth is pretty impressive.

It is because of this growth in the web that other forms of link building become somewhat easier. I am talking about building links through content creation and publishing.

Chances are you are reading this article on the Text Link Brokers blog, or one of a number of syndication partners who agree to republish the article with links intact.

Through such syndication, you could come across this article through a variety of high profile websites on the web. In addition, these high profile sites are industry specific.

This means that any links I embed into this article (which is then syndicated) will ultimately point back to this site on important key phrases.

Think about this, for the time it takes me to write this article, I could have built as many as 2 dozen high quality, keyword rich links back to both the main site as well as the blog site.

Normally, for me to build 2 dozen high quality links for one of my clients I’d have to start with a list of about 500 somewhat related sites, filtering out those that are lower quality and submitting to 50 to 100 sites in hopes of achieving those 20 or so links.

And it has been my experience that I would be lucky to achieve 5 to 10 links from that initial list of 500 sites.

All this would have taken me about 5 or 6 hours – even longer if I hadn’t used a few tools to help gather those links.

Yet hëre I am with much less effort, able to achieve almost the same number of links.

That’s the nice thing about content – it can do so many things for your site:

~A growing site helps encourage search engine crawlers to visit repeatedly.
~A growing site has more pages which have the potential to rank for other phrases.
~A growing site offers more entry points to searchers.
~A growing site offers more opportunities for others to link to it.
~A growing site can help positively influence link popularity (if internal navigation is coded properly)
~And More…

There are many other great reasons for starting an ongoing content development program. Aside from the link building opportunities, you can also begin to develop your online reputation as an expert in your field.

Further, as visitors do searches on search engines, there is a greater opportunïty for your content to appear for those searches, helping to build your brand.

If you take your content development program a step further and syndicate your content to a wider audience (via blog pings and so on) you can reach even more people, potentially building even more links and allowing your name (and brand) to reach beyond the “traditional” web.

For example, when I do a search for my name, I find myself in traditional organic SERPs but also on sites like Google News, as well as most of the main blog search engines. This is because this site, and others I write for, are syndicated. Plus those sites that I mentioned earlier – the syndication partners – are also syndicated.

So my articles appear numerous times for the same search. This helps build my reputation online.

Not only does my name appear throughout the web, but articles like these also get picked up by even more sources. Ones that perhaps didn’t read this blog, or one of the syndication partners, but they may have found it on Bloglines, Technorati or any of the other large blog search engines.

Then, the article gets picked up by even more sources, in its entirety, with links and all.

So, the number of new links I’ve created has nöw jumped from the original two on this article, to a couple dozen on our syndication partners to ????

It’s interesting to see where articles get picked up. I’ve found myself quoted in PDFs belonging to Universities, on foreign sites where I’ve been translated into Korean, Chinese and even Russian. And, you guessed it, the links remain intact.

That’s because these articles aren’t like news – they last much longer than a press release which, while gaining huge exposure for 2 or 3 days, quickly disappears.

The articles last “forever” because they continue to be circulated by various sites who find them in searches, and either copy them or link to them. Then their sites get syndicated and found by others who then also link or copy the article.

You may begin to see that this type of linking can go on almost forever, because what I’m writing hëre isn’t necessarily newsworthy, but it is an article that people will find useful for months and years to come (I hope). As it becomes more and more established on the web (and more entrenched, because of the number of high quality related links already pointing to it) it begins to take on a life of its own.

And the more articles which I write for this site which appear like this, the better it is for the site.

So, what is the downside to this plan?

The only one, really, is that you have to be able to write. And not just scribble your ideas down, but make them intelligible and easy to read.

This is what takes the practice. But I can tell you that while you may (and likely will) labor for hours over your first few articles, over time they do get easier.

So much so that you will begin composing them in your sleep, or while you are waiting for your bus, or any place else where you have “down time.”

So if you are concerned that a massive and costly link building campaign is your only option to increasing your online visibility think again. Sometimes something as simple as an “I was thinking” article can drive dozens of new relevant links to your site.

About The Author
Rob Sullivan – SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com.

Posted in Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation | 3 Comments »

The Rhetoric Of SEO

Oct
24
2005

Mary Anne Donovan | Expert Author
WebProNews

Did you know that we have left the Age of the Information Economy behind and are now well into the Age of the Attention Economy? What does this mean? It means that if you rely upon the Internet to conduct your business, the age of putting up a web site and getting instant results are long gone.

Now you must clamor for the attention of web surfers, your prospective visitors and customers, who are lured by the frantic actions of the billions of pages currently indexed on the web. To give you some perspective, Google alone indexes over 7 billion pages. Therefore, to survive means to grab people’s attention and
you do that by using good digital rhetorical skills.

Now there’s a scary word – rhetoric. In my case, rhetoric was a terms the nuns used to throw around in regards to the essays we wrote in English class. You know, the reading, writing, and rhetoric thing? Go back now to first year high school English; remember the purpose of an essay? It is to grab your reader’s attention and persuade her to adopt your point of view, to agree with your argument. And that is what rhetoric is all about: rhetoric can be defined as the art of persuasion: of using words, either verbal or written, to catch attention and persuade readers to think, do, or believe what you want them to think, do or believe.

Mechanical Rhetoric

Now let’s apply this concept to search engine optimization. The first challenge is to grab your readers’ ttention. How do you do that? One big way you do that is by ranking high in the search engines, because then, when a user enters a relevant keyword term, your site will come up as one of the (hopefully) top 10 web sites!

Okay, so working backward, how do you rank high? First, you fill your site with good, solid, well-written content. You offer value to visitors. The search engines measure your content and score it according to its value to users. In other words, you use the skills of good rhetoric, which includes the skillful, artful, and meaningful use of words.

Second, you select keywords that your users are most likely to use to search for what you offer on your site. The trick here is to select keywords that are likely to be used, but that won’t draw a big number of web sites in a keyword search. Here’s where you need to work with an SEO expert, or employ the use of special keyword software.

Third, you have a lot of quality sites that link to your site. These links are viewed as “votes” for your web site, and the “better” the site in the search engines’ eyes, the higher the value assigned to your site. The search engines look at the quality of the content on sites linking to yours, as well as their relevance to your site.

Fourth, you need to design your site in a search-engine friendly way.

How do you do that?

First, don’t use Flash. You know those sites that have that introductory page where it says “Click to skip?” Well, the search engine crawler never gets beyond that page and therefore doesn’t index your web site. Also, avoid using JavaScript. Same thing there, the search engines get lost in the complex code it generates and that’s the end of their crawl on your site.

Second, make sure all your internal links are working, and make them text links that contain your keywords.

Third, if you use image maps or pull down menus for navigation, make sure you also have textual navigation on the same page.

Fourth, pay careful attention to the content of your Title tag, Description tag, Header tags, and body text. As for your Keyword tag, Google doesn’t even look at it, but make sure you still have it contain all your site’s important keywords. Also, make sure you use your keywords in each of these in a relevant, normal way.

Read the entire article: www.webpronews.com/txt/SEORhetoric.html#tags

Posted in General SEO, Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, SEO | 1 Comment »

Corporate Blogging: Killer App Or Corporate Killer?

Oct
12
2005

Written by Kent Lewis for WebProNews

We all know how popular blogs have become, especially in the past few years. Millions of blogs are being created and read every day. As such, many companies see the potential and are jumping on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, an ill-conceived corporate blog strategy can generate lawsuits, angry customers or employees and a bad brand experience.

Since I first started off in the search engine marketing industry in 1996, I’ve managed an ezine, so I know a little about publishing. Since then, I’ve also consulted with clients on their corporate blogs and newsletter strategies. Based on my experience, I’ve identified 7 key elements to developing a successful corporate blog strategy.

Research

The first question I ask clients that want my help in developing a corporate blog strategy is “why?” It’s critical to understand the corporate blog’s objective, as it directly affects the overall development, maintenance and promotional strategy. A corporate blog needs to be unique, so find out what your competitors and industry pundits are doing, and do something different. The research will also help determine optimal design (branded vs. sponsored), content and format (daily vs. weekly, etc.).

Credibility

When developing (or reading) a corporate blog, establishing credibility is key. Who is the author? What are their credentials? What unique perspective, experience or knowledge do they bring to the table? Industry credibility is especially critical in the world of corporate blogging. If you don’t have a well- respected senior executive or well-known industry pundit available to contribute regularly to a blog, reconsider your strategy. A well-written blog is always going to be perceived as more credible than a poorly written one, which is a factor that is often overlooked.

Accuracy

Typical corporate blogs are managed by one person. This one person may be credible and have a balanced perspective, but they may not have the time to thoroughly check facts or explore an idea or story to the full extent. That would be somewhat counter-intuitive to the principle of blogging. Companies can’t afford to publish inaccurate content (see Liability below). Ensuring the editorial team has adequate resources to research and validate content will increase the corporate blog’s overall effectiveness.

Perspective

One of the biggest arguments I’ve seen consistently in favor of the power of corporate blogging, is the author’s unique perspective. While I don’t disagree that perspective makes corporate blogs interesting, it also has the potential to make them myopic, scattered and hasty. There is a reason publications have multiple writers, editors and a publisher: to maintain standards and provide a more balanced perspective. If you want unique perspective, watch Fox News. If you want your corporation to have a credible, balanced perspective, support your corporate blog with a qualified team.

Relevance

I’ve read articles that talk about how corporate blogs are going to usurp corporate Web sites in search engines, due to the timeliness of content. While that may be somewhat true today in search engines like Google, that may not always be the case. Blogs typically touch on a variety of themes or issues in a given day or week. Even with niche blogs, specific topics are rarely given more than 250 words, yet these posts are
supposed to be more relevant than an in-depth 1,500 word article on a publication or corporate site. Not all topics or issues are timely and satisfy searchers with brief posts.

Liability

The numbers of companies enacting corporate blog policies are increasing. Sun and Microsoft are two notable companies that encourage their employees to blog. Don’t be fooled though, as both have rather stringent guidelines and restrictions due to the potential for legal liability. Corporate lawyers and HR dab the perspiration off their foreheads, hoping to avoid lawsuits created by inappropriate posts by employees. For marketers, the greater transgression is the potential to misrepresent the brand in ill-thought posts. To minimize liability, minimize the number of authors or external corporate blogs.

Maintenance

Far too often, I’ve seen companies enthusiastically launch a corporate blog, only to have it die off within months, if not weeks. What these companies don’t understand is that a half-assed corporate blog is far more damaging to their brand than no blog at all. Prior to developing and launching a corporate blog, make sure you’ve committed the appropriate resources for the long haul (I recommend a 6 month a trial period as a minimum). Even the best intentioned corporate blogs don’t work out, but at least you will have given it a concerted effort. It’s important to develop quality content over a period of time to show stakeholders you take corporate blogging seriously.

Read the rest of the article.

——————————————————————————–
About the Author:
Kent Lewis is President of Anvil Media, Inc., a search engine marketing firm based on Portland, Oregon. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and covers emarketing-related topics for a variety of industry publications.

Posted in Blogging, Google, Internet Marketing, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation | Comments Off

Search Engine Advertising Choices

Sep
30
2005

Written by Jim Hedger for WebProNews

Search advertisers are offered two basic marketing models, paid-ads and free organic ads. While there are advantages and disadvantages to both models, one clearly stands out as a better advertising option than the other.

Why is it then that advertisers from small business to mega-corporation tend to show higher interest in the more expensive and least effective of the two?

Most SEOs speculate that advertisers understand paid-advertising better than organic placement. As much of search marketing is conducted in-house and optimization is a learned-skill, corporate marketing departments lean towards the very simple model of paid-search. Organic search engine placement continues to be perceived as a nebulous service that can take time to show results. On the other hand, paid-ad placements tend to show up minutes after they are established and bidding one’s way to top spot is relatively easy.

With search ad-spends sometimes topping five or six figures per month, many SEOs shake their heads at businesses that refuse to invest a much smaller (generally low to mid four figure) sum on organic optimization. Ranging from small to mega sized operations, the number of paid-ad advertisers that ignore organic optimization seems to be growing.

Over the past three years, independent research has consistently confirmed that search engine users tend to click on the center column organic (free) ads far more often than on paid ads. Earlier this year, search marketers benefited from a number of published studies that clearly demonstrate the higher value of organic placements. While the results of this research is easily available to all, traditional and tech media stories tend to focus on paid-search advertising.

Two studies that made an enormous impact on the search marketing field this year are the Eye Tracking research conducted by Enquiro CEO Gord Hotchkiss and a whitepaper published by Lisa Wehr, CEO of OneUpWeb titled, ” Target Google’s Top Ten to Sell Online.” Gord’s study shows the basic F (or triangular) shape search user’s eyes tend to follow when examining search results. Lisa’s study found that search users are up to 6X more likely to click on the first few organic results as they are to choose any of the paid results.

A third study, “Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough Data as Implicit Feedback,” released earlier this week by Cornell professor Thorsten Joachims looked at the links users found on search engine results pages and questioned why they choose which link. The results show again the importance of high organic search engine rankings. The researchers asked subjects to perform searches and looked at which results they viewed, which they clicked on, and what happens if those links are mixed up.

The Cornell study found that search users tended to view (look at) the first five organic results with a high percentage of them (approx. 2/3) viewing the top two listings with 42% of them selecting or clicking on that link. The number of search-viewers halves to approximately 1/3 of users viewing sites appearing in positions 3, 4 and 5. The numbers drop to about 1 in 10 users tending to view the 9 th and 10 th placed sites.

When a search user views search listings, it doesn’t necessarily mean they click on those listings. In this context, to view means to examine. Users tend to examine the text used to phrase the reference link as well as the descriptive paragraph appearing beneath the link before deciding to click on it.

This is especially true for the smaller number of searchers who view listings found in the 3 rd to 10 th positions as users who examined those listings tended to spend more time on the results page before choosing the link to click first. In other words, 1/3 to 1/10 of users are conducting preliminary research by seriously reading the text used to phrase the results before clicking.

This finding was backed up in another part of the Cornell study that showed when the same Top2 results were reversed, the text used in the link and description had a notable influence on which link the user clicks. The research found that when results were switched around, 34% of the users would still click on the site ranked in first place, even when they had seen the now #2 site there earlier.

In his Alertbox review of the Cornell study, Jakob Nielsen succinctly notes, ” If users always clicked the best link, then swapping the order of the two links should also swap the percentages, and this didn’t happen. The top hit still got the most clicks.

Read the Full Article

About the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Posted in Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, Structure | Comments Off

Six Powerful Truths About SEO That You Don’t Know

Sep
29
2005

Written by Jason DeVelvis for SeoNews

Everywhere you turn on the ‘net, you see something about search engine optimization. I’m convinced that 90% of the information about SEO is regurgitated crap. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that you can’t do anything without a well-optimized web page. If your web page sucks, the search engines will treat it as such. But nöw, search engines have shifted their focus from the web site in question to the page that link to the site.

Many authors have covered the basic need for backlinks, so I won’t go into it hëre. However, if you’d like to learn more about backlinking, read another article I wrote: Crash-Course-in-Getting-a-#1-Google-Ranking

A quick note – You can view all of the backlinks for a site by visiting MSN.com or any other major search engine and typing in link: followed by the domain (ex. – “link:http://www.YourDomain.com”). I use MSN to find my backlinks, because they report all backlinks they have indexed, as opposed to Google and Yahoo, that only list ones they deem “important.”

Ok, nöw on to the 6 truths!

Truth 1: The Page Title of The Website Linking To You Matters

Yep, this one matters a lot. If the title of the links page includes one or more of your keywords, it will give the link to your site more weïght. So chëck into your prospective link partners, and look at the title of the page your link will be on.

You can usually find this pretty easily by using the backlink listing from above, as most page titles will be listed in the search engine results.

Truth 2: The Number of Outbound Links On The Website That Is Linking To You

One page can only have so much “importance” (Page Rank) to give away, so the more links on the page, the less the link to your site counts. Therefore, if your site is the only outbound link on the page, it’s going to carry much more weïght than a “links page” with 100 outbound links on it. I suggest a maximum of 25 links per page – many more than that devalues your link too much.

This one will require quite a bit of work if your link is on a lot of typical links pages. You’ll have to visit the page and manually count how many links on the page are outbound links.

Truth 3: The Content of The Page Linking To You

If you can get a link on a content page (as opposed to a links page) it will definitely be to your benefit. This is because 1) there probably won’t be many other outbound links on that page, and 2) the content on the page will most likely be related to the keywords in your anchor text, so the search engines will give your link more weïght. You’ll also enjoy the bonus of the targeted traffïc coming directly from that page. It can be tedious to find out which sites have your link on a content page. You may be able to find this out by checking the referrers’ section of your stats package – if you’re getting quite a few clicks from a certain site, your link is probably on a page with some content.

Truth 4: The Number And Type Of Links Linking To The Page That’s Linking To You

Wow, that was a mouthful. In a nutshell, the more the owner(s) of the site linking to you concentrated on offpage optimization while they were considering their linking partners, the more it will increase your link’s weïght.

This is pretty much worthless to try to figure out on your own, unless you have dedicated staff people who you can pay, or a program to automate this process and report back to you. You’ll have to find out the offpage optimization for each site linking to you, and that will take time you don’t have.

Truth 5: The IP Addresses Of The Pages Linking To You

Search engines look up the IP address of the pages linking to you, and links from the same IP are devalued accordingly. This is to keep webmasters from pointing all of their sites at each other. It’s not a bad thing to have more than one link per IP, but it’s more valuable to have lots of links from different addresses.

To find the IPs of the pages linking to you, go to WebRankInfo.com and enter between 2 and 10 links to chëck their IP addresses. However, this will become very tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks to chëck.

Truth 6: Whether Or Not The Websites Linking To You Are Deemed By Google As An Authority Website

This is something most webmasters don’t even know exists – “authority websites.” Most government (.gov) sites are considered “authority” sites. Or, sites like About.com, Microsoft.com, and others have also reached the “authority” status. This status is usually granted only to “supersites” that include tons of content and information, and if you can get a link from one of these sites to your site, it can be a huge positive effect on your rank. It’s almost impossible to know if a site is considered an authority, but any site with PR 8-10 is probably in this category.

This Sounds So Time Consuming, Is It Worth It?

In one word: Yes. Spend all the time you need to get good, targeted backlinks from pages with great offpage optimization. If you don’t have the time to do all of this by hand, look at SEO Elite. It finds all of the information I’ve discussed in this article (and more), and all I have to do is clïck a few buttons and give it a URL to start on. I’ll find the #1 website for a keyword I want to use, put it into SEO Elite, and then copy their linking strategy for my site. Most of the sites trading links with them are more than happy to trade with me as well, so it takes a ton of work off of my plate.

Armed And Dangerous

Nöw that you’ve got valuable information that most other webmasters don’t have (or don’t use), get out there and get your sites listed higher! Just don’t beat any of my sites…

To Your Success, And Your Number One Website!

About The Author
Jason is a long time web developer and the owner of Premier MicroSolutions, LLC, an Internet Marketing firm in Ohio. For more SEO tips and tricks, claim your FR-E-E copy of “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” – Get it at PremierMicroSolutions.com today!

Posted in General SEO, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, SEO | Comments Off

Using Content Hubs To Promote

Sep
21
2005

Written by David Risley for SiteProNews

We’ve all heard it before: content is king. And it is true. If you own a site, you need to post something interesting that people want to read before you can expect people to stop by. If your site is a content-based website, then you’ve already taken a huge step. However, if your website is a business website whose only purpose is to talk about your services, then you really should make an effort to post some content onto your website which is helpful to readers, frëe, and relevant to your services or website. If you do this, your site will attract traffïc from people looking for information, not just to purchase something. And with increased traffïc in general, you will get increased attention. And this increases your statistics.

Writing content for your own website is only half the battle, though. You have got to get people to read it. Just posting a website is not going to get people to come to it. It would be like building a business in the middle of the mountains. Nobody knows its there and you won’t get any customers. If you get your articles out there for people to read and the articles are written correctly, you can position yourself as an expert in your field and promote your own website. One way to do this is by publishing on content hubs rather than limiting it to your own website.

A content hub is a site which publishes articles on all topics (usually categorized). Those articles are freely available to anyone to use on their own website, newsletter, blog, etc. So, many publishers or site owners in need of fresh content for their website can go to one or more of these content hubs, find an article they like, and use it. They have to maintain proper credit to the author and publish the small author bio which accompanies the article.

Let’s look at this, though, from the author’s viewpoint – your viewpoint. Let’s say you are selling consulting services for search engine optimization. You have a site for your services, but you blend in with all the other such services. So, you write a series of articles giving tips to webmasters on how they can optimize their website. With your article you include a short bio of yourself. You include a mention of your services and a link to your website. You publish your article on a bunch of content hubs. Other websites, newsletters and blogs grab your article off those sites and use it on their own. Your article therefore spreads throughout the internet. Being that your site is linked with the article and is therefore on all of these other websites nöw (including the content hubs themselves), search engines who are constantly spidering the internet pick up on your article and index it associated with your website. This, in turn, raises your ranking in the search engines. And you get increased traffïc to your website not only from search engine searches but also from your article.

Nöw, let’s say you have done some research on keywords and you interlace your article with certain keywords. When the search engines spider your article all over the internet and associates with your website, it will raise your search engine rankings even more. There is a real science to this, and if done correctly, can drastically raise your internet presence in a short time. I recently had a meeting with the CEO of In Touch Media Group, a Clearwater, FL based company which is in the business of internet marketing. They use content hubs as part of their strategy for clients and they couple this with their vast archived data regarding keywords. They showed me the stats of one site which they have, in the course of just a few months, taken from essentially no traffïc to a VERY respectable level of traffïc. After getting an article out in the content hubs, they will follow up a few weeks later with a press release.

So, how can you publish some of your articles on content hubs? Well, the first step is to find and visit them. There are many of them out there, but below are some of the better ones:

GoArticles.com
ISnare.com
SubmitYourArticle.com – a service to send your article to a bunch of hubs at once
ArticleCity.com
ExchangeNet.com
Article-Directory.net
FreeZineSite.com

There are services to help you distribute to a large collection of publishers at once. I have used Isnare’s distribution service and it seems to work well. There are also distribution groups on Yahoo. Hëre are a few of them:

Free-Content
Article Announce List
Article Announce
Articles4You2Use4Promotion
Article Submission
Frëe Reprint Articles

With that, I wish you the best of luck in your promotion efforts. Start writing!

About The Author
David Risley is a web developer and founder of PC Media, Inc.. Specializes in PHP/ MySQL development, consulting and internet business management. He is also the founder of PC Mechanic, a large website delivering do-it-yourself computer information to thousands of users every day.

Posted in Blogging, Directories, General SEO, Google, Internet Marketing, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, Podcasting, RSS, SEO | 1 Comment »

What’s the Most Effective SEO Tactic for 2006?

Sep
12
2005

Written by Brad Callen for SiteProNews

Today, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to go out on a limb hëre and make a blind assumption about you.
“You think that the Q-square formula (quality + quantity) of getting inbound links (reciprocal or one-way) is the best way to increase your search engine rankings.”

Just about right, eh? And unless you are a complete newbie to search engine optimization, this is exactly what SEO experts have been telling you time and time and time again. And if there was any doubt that search engines were being spammed, paid links put rest to those fears. The SEO experts make monëy, you get a boost in your rankings, everyone’s happy.

Or so they’d have you think.

Over the past year or so, search engines have started to take serious measures to combat sp@m against them. Search engine spamming usually occurs in one of three ways:

Multiple submissions of your web pages (you’d be surprised to learn that people still do this). Keyword spamming in low quality content. Link spamming (building tons of links to a new site REALLY quickly). On the other hand, you’ve probably heard about the need for quality content ever since you started learning about search engine optimization (hopefully). Either way, here’s a refresher:

Search engines are looking for unique and useful content – information that is accurate and important to the people interested in that field. Search engines also look for fresh content – regular additions to your website, etc (this is why blogging became / is such a huge craze). So let’s put that all together:

Search engines are working towards fighting SEO sp@m – bad, keyword stuffed content and link spamming – by:

Devaluing the “ranking boost” that these elements give. Penalizing the websites that are obviously spamming search engines. The end result?

Traditional link building is no longer your best bet to get high search engine rankings.

That’s not to say that you should dump your link campaigns all at once and scamper for the hills – links will continue to have value within search engines and until the search engine algorithms develop well enough to distinguish between “organic” linking and links generated through a link-building campaign (not easy to do at all, even with Google’s or Microsoft’s resources), getting inbound links will stay the easiest way to bump up your search engine rankings by several pages.

However, for SEO purposes, that brings us back to square one. We like things to be easy, but we also want things to work well. If link-building is a good tactic, but not the best tactic (especially when everyone and their mother is getting a few hundred links every month to their 30-page AdSense websites), then where does it leave the rest of us?

The answer lies with what the search engines have been saying all along – quality content, wrapped around quality, organic links.

Let me explain that.

Search engines have taken two specific measures to improve their results and reduce commercialized sp@m from their search engines:

Link pages are being “identified” as such and therefore are being considered as low-quality links (you’ll remember from Link Building 101 that the quality of the link is a big factor in how much it improves your website’s rankings). Some of the identifying criteria for a link page are: the number of links on that page, the ratio of text to links on that page, and relevance of the link, which I explain in the next point. Search engine algorithms are currently looking at the context that the links are placed in (i.e. surrounding text as well as the page’s keywords) to measure the relevance of the host site to YOUR website – in other words, checking the text of the page your inbound link is placed on to find out whether that site is relevant to your industry / niche. This leads us to the following conclusions:

The linking page must have as few links as possible. The links should be focused on as few sites as possible (to funnel the value of the link page). The links should be surrounded by “relevant” content. The linking page should contain “quality” content (written for human reading rather than written for search engines – there’s a sharp difference between keyword optimization and keyword stuffing). Now you must be wondering….”is there a point to all this?” And I respect that, because this is exactly what internet marketing and SEO gurus have been saying for a long time nöw. Just like I often ask myself:

So WHAT?

So…

What if I told you that you could use a blindingly simple marketing tactic that will not only bring you relevant, powerful and valuable inbound links, but that it will ALSO bring you regular visitors?

How many SEO techniques can promise visitors from other websites?

Nöw I’m not trying to sell you a product, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Take a single page. Take ONE core keyword describing your industry / main business, and a few more keywords for a couple of main category pages. Write 350-550 words of unique, quality content that gives the reader useful information. Each paragraph should be tightly focused around one keyword, and should contain one link (not more) to a related page (for your main keyword, link to your website, for your category keywords link to your category pages). Use keywords (but not sentences) as anchor text.

Once you’ve completed this page, contact link partners in YOUR niche – not direct competitors obviously, but complementary businesses (if you sell information books on candle-making, your ideal link partners would be informational websites on candle-making), and make them this pitch:

“Are you looking for a quick and easy way to boost your search engine rankings? Search engines demand relevance, they demand quality, they demand freshness. I’d like to offer you the chance to do a valuable exchange – I’ll provide you with an optimized article on a subject relevant to your business, and in return all I ask is that you allow me to place some links to my website on the page. In fact, you can even plug in your own links – affiliate, to your own website or any other website.”

Of course, you’ll probably have to write a more sophisticated approach letter than those 6 lines, but the intent is clear: write quality content, and then place it on websites relevant to your industry. Usually, the website hostïng the page will want some monthly payment in return (after all, you’re effectively buying a page on their website). If you’ve followed my advice and picked well-ranked websites with quality content, the monëy will be worth it. In addition, you’ll probably be paying less than an out-and-out link purchase as you’re also giving them something in return (quality content to boost their search engine rankings).

Got all that? Congratulations. You’ve just learned about what I like to call a “Hosted Marketing Page”. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity. What I’ve explained in 4 paragraphs (318 words) will probably be the subject of endless marketing campaigns and short $49 reports over the next year.

Nöw some of you might be saying: I know this – isn’t this just another version of marketing your website through articles (where you write articles, submit them to article directories and have webmasters pick them up to post on their websites)? What’s so great about this? We KNOW this.

The question isn’t that you know this, the question is: are you doing this? Article submissions are shots in the dark – article farms do give a better boost in search engine rankings than simple links, but most article directories are too general to help you rank well on the relevance factor. If your article gets picked up by a few webmasters, the extra links will be dampened by the fact that the content is “duplicated” – thus reducing its value.

Search engines are wising up to article submissions just as they started combating link sp@m a year and a half ago – at any rate, article submissions are marketing tools / branding tools, not pure SEO tools.

Experiment with a Hosted Marketing Page of your own. If you don’t have the time to contact link partners directly, talk to your link-building expert (or company) and explain what you are looking for (heck, you can forward this article to them).

The beauty of Hosted Marketing Pages is that they complement your regular SEO strategy. Link building, if done right, is still a quick and cheap way of getting higher search engine rankings. However, if you are looking to make a HUGE splash instead of just poking around, then I urge you to seriously consider the power of Hosted Marketing Pages.

If you would like help with your “Hosted Marketing Page” campaign, visit Textlinkbrokers.com. They are the leader in link popularity building programs and are the only company offering this particular service.

About The Author
Brad Callen – SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant for TextLinkBrokers.com SEOelite.com

Posted in Blogging, Google, Internet Marketing, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, Structure | 1 Comment »

Ranked #1 at Google for “Invisible Entrepreneurs” But No Traffïc?

Sep
09
2005

Written by Mike Banks Valentine (c) 2005 for www.sitepronews.com

I am ranked #1 for that silly phrase at Google. So What?

Here’s a secrët. You can be ranked #1 at Google for the phrase “Waterfall Watches” if you put the phrase on your page 4 times and in metatags twice. How do I know that? I did it in 2001 and still rank number one in Google for the phrase in 2005. On another of my sites I rank #1 for the phrase “Screeching Camels” by simply putting it on the page once in a comment about silly SEO guarantees.

I’ll wager that many phrases you’ve targeted for your business are almost as silly and deliver NO traffïc to your pages from the search engines. Don’t take that too personally. Simply look at your traffïc statistics to see what phrases are bringing visitors to your web site. If your logs show no delivered traffïc for keywords you thought were golden, you’ve targeted the wrong phrases.

I’m always fascinated when discussions of search engines focus excessively on ranking of a particular site in one particular search engine without checking corresponding statistics about referred traffïc delivered to the site from the targeted keyword phrase. Referred search visits from engines is not taken into account. Anyone who looks at their rankings without looking at how much traffïc is referred and DELIVERED to your site through the rankings is missing the most important part of the story!

When you chëck your site traffïc statistics for where visitors are coming from and in what numbers, for which keyword searches and from which search engines, you will be astonished to see that things you think are important are sometimes not so important. I’ve struggled for years to gain top rankings for “Small Business Ecommerce” and have achieved #1 at Google #5 at MSN and #13 at Yahoo (at this writing).

But guess what? No one searches for that phrase in significant enough numbers to deliver any traffïc from it! I’m not saying that this was wasted effort, because in the over 1000 pages at WebSite101 we have enough related phrases that the targeted phrase contributes to the rank of hundreds of related phrases. “Open Source Ecommerce” gets huge traffïc for one single page, ranked at # 29 in Yahoo, #7 at MSN and #1 in Google (as of this writing).

But the really interesting thing is that even on phrases that rank equally well across all three major engines, Google delivers referred traffïc at a rate of 65% compared to MSN at less than 1% and Yahoo about 5% of all referred visitor traffïc. In NO case does Yahoo or MSN refer any clickthroughs at higher than 10% of all referred traffïc.

Referred traffïc being visitors that clicked on your link from search results or links. This applies both in single instances for specific keywords and cumulatively for all referred traffïc.

Hear this very clearly – it has nothing to do with ranking! There are dozens of search phrases that visitors have searched on all three of those engines that deliver traffïc to my site that I can’t find my own site for in the top 100 results at ANY search engine. In every case, Google delivers more than twice the traffïc for every keyword combination than does MSN or Yahoo!. In many cases, I rank HIGHER on both Yahoo and MSN for many of those phrases, yet Google delivers far more referred traffïc for those phrases ranked higher at MSN and Yahoo! Does that make any sense?

If your referred traffïc from top rankings at MSN and Yahoo send you no traffïc, why be concerned that you rank well with either of them? This same scenario has played out across dozens of client sites I’ve reviewed traffïc statistics for. No matter how the site is structured, no matter how many pages they have, no matter what keywords they are targeting.

Search engine referred traffïc from Google is always ALWAYS 2 times higher than the other two and very often as much as 10 times. If we ranked engines, NOT on number of searches performed, but on how much traffïc they refer, then Google would be more than twice as highly ranked in all cases.

If Google disappeared tomorrow, there would be some dramatically reduced visitor numbers for ALL sites across the web. We would, every single one of us, löse over half of our (organic) search engine referred traffïc. Look at your traffïc statistics for natural search engine referred traffïc (not PPC) volume and which keywords are currently working to deliver that traffïc as far more important than your specific # keyword ranking on those search engines.

Avoid the practice of “Keyword Voodoo” to rank for words that no one searches. Google “Keyword Voodoo” and you’ll find me ranked 5 times for that phrase on page one of the search engine results page. “Reciprocal Linking Turkey” will give you the same result, showing my article on several web sites. Each of those does me no good at all and brings no more search engine referred traffïc than does my number one ranking for “Invisible Entrepreneurs” used in the title of this article.

Target the wrong keywords and you will become one of those Invisible Entrepreneurs.

About The Author
Mike Banks Valentine practices ethical search optimization through content aggregation and creation for your website Optimizing press releases for keyword density – distributed online for visibility & more effective link building

Contact Mike at: http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Posted in Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, SEO | 1 Comment »

Build SEO Links & Web Traffïc With Content Distribution

Sep
06
2005

By Joel Walsh for SiteProNews

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe that trading links is the most effective way to build the hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But there’s another way to build links that deserves your attention: content distribution.
A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an “author’s resource box,” which is a brief “about the author” paragraph promoting the author’s site.

Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a relevant website owner. That’s it. No adding links to your site and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you can get more links from the time and resources you spend on link-building.

Links are not always available through reciprocal linking. Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking. Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of website owners.

Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal links may be “dampened” by the search engines; i.e., they will not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course, reciprocal links are still valuable, there’s a just a question of how valuable they really are.

Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that the higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each link has. When a website publishes an article, the author’s backlink is often the only live link to another website on that page.

Distinct Non-SEO Benefits of Distributing Content

What makes content distribution a truly special method of link building is that it’s the only method where the non-SEO benefits may even outweigh the SEO benefits:

Website building. If you create special content for your link-building campaign, you can publish it on your site. As a general rule, the more content your site has, the more search engine traffïc it will receive. Just publish the article and get it indexed in search engines before distributing it, which should help you to outrank your republishers in search engines for that same content.

Traffïc generation. The links in distributed content generate traffïc in the förm of highly qualified leads: people who liked what you had to say. Distributing content gets you traffïc even when it doesn’t get you a link. If your article gets picked up by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of highly qualified traffïc.

Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign method that can make the recipient website and its owners appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they’ve distributed.

Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.

Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content distribution:

Desired anchor text is not always available. Unfortunately, the content management systems most widely in place today make it easier for website owners to accept content as text rather than HTML. This means that many website owners simply have their content management system convert a URL into a live link, rather than taking the time to code in the anchor text. Still, an experienced content distributor can usually find ways around this problem to make sure that many if not most of the links use anchor text.

Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as sure a thing as reciprocal linking. The site that publishes your article has to like not only your site, but also your article. This is especially true for the passively-generated links that come from content clearinghouse websites. But results can vary the other way, too: an article that catches on will yield more links than you ever could have gotten through the same investmënt in reciprocal linking. In order to minimize the risk of content not catching on with website owners, you should make sure your content is high-quality, and also plan for a large content distribution campaign: the more content you try, the more likely you are to find a wïnner.

Requires significant investmënt. You need high-quality content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few work-hours to distribute the content and track the results. Of course, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of reciprocal linking, which is also significant. These costs can be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process from soup to nuts to a content distribution specialist. Costs of outsourcing content distribution compare favorably with costs of outsourcing reciprocal link building.

Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this requirement has to be weighed against the real-world requirement of special expertise in other link campaign methods. Again, this drawback can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist.
In short, there are benefits to both reciprocal linking and content distribution. All things being equal, you should use both. Still, content distribution is the only one method that carries substantial non-SEO benefits as well. Plus, a professionally managed content distribution campaign may even yield greater SEO results than reciprocal linking would for the same investmënt.

You owe it to yourself or your clients to add content distribution to your SEO-toolkit–before the owner of the next highest-ranking site finds out about it.

About The Author
Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content, offering a fully managed content distribution campaign guaranteed to get you at least one hundred one-way inbound links for every three pages of content: website content distribution

Posted in Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, SEO | 1 Comment »

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