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SEO blog posts are one of the best ways to get your links out there on the Internet. Search Engines love them and people can follow them easily to your site.

As an example I will link this keyword  ”Ghost Writers” here. Notice the link takes you to a site that offers the service related to it. I could have linked any word here but I choose to link one that is relevant and that will help improve keyword traffic.

The big problem for most is how to make the most of their blog. I have found tons of articles about how to seo your blog software, but not much on the topic of optimizing your blog posts.

I will give a few simple things to consider when adding your blog posts:

Post Slugs or Permalinks

Post slugs are how your URL is displayed for each post. In most WordPress Accounts there is a setting for Permalinks. If you login to your admin and click “settings” and then “Permalinks” look for the words “Custom Structure” and put this line of code in:

/%category%/%postname%/

There are many ways to do this, but this way allows the category name and title of your blog appear in your post. If my category was Ghost Writers then the link would be: /ghost-writers/optimize-your-blog-post/

Now, that you have your permalinks in place, click on “write” to add your post now. Depending on your version of WordPress you will either see the words “Post Slug” or “permalink”. Post slug is on the right column and “permalinks” is under the title bar. Either way you can change the way your post URL title will appear.

This is important to follow because some times people use character in their titles like:

How To Optimize Your Blog Posts!

The (!) character will cause your URL to show funny, or if you use (- , “) or any number of characters. So in your post slug or permalink, make sure you remove those characters. Play around with this a bit and see how the URL reads after you change the Permalink or post slug portion.

Keyword linking

This one is simple but very often over looked. Don’t go crazy here with this, but make sure to link 2 or 3 of your keywords to your websites home page and inner pages as well.

The keyword “SEO content” is not very effective if not linked properly. Notice that I linked the word “seo content” to my site. I also added a title tag to the URL for better keyword positioning. In your word press when you highlight a word or phrase you can click on the link icon and it will give you an option for the URL and Title. The title is for your keyword. Since I linked “seo content” I then used that word as my title tag as well. Notice that if you put the mouse over the link a title appears.

Proper Credit where credit is due!

Since many people are not truly inspired writers, many will find content out there and copy and paste it into their WordPress program and revise the words around to make it more original. Though using someone else’s content does not require creative thought, it can help if you convert over 50% of the content around and put them in your own words.

However, it is not professional of you if done without giving credit to the original writer. In your article you don’t have to say this came from some site, etc… You simply choose a keyword in your blog post and link it to the source where you got it from. Don’t be greedy, it looks better anyway when you do this properly and helps with SEO as well. If you are not willing to give up a link, then come up with your own content.

Add a Picture

Very simple, add a photo to your post. Upload a photos, add an alt text and a title tag, it is all provided for you in wordpress. It not only makes your post look more attractive but it again helps with SEO.

Give you photo a file name that is keyword based as well. Download your image, rename it and upload it.

If you hire a ghost writer to write your content, make sure they provide you with the original source and a photo to match the blog content and upload the post yourself or train your writer to do this for you. You will find this is very effective for online marketing.

Tags: blog writing, blogs, ghost writers, Linking Strategies, seo

In this second article, we examine some more things to watch out for when you are creating a link building campaign. Hopefully by the end, you will be in a better position to obtain and maintain good quality backlinks that help launch your site up the search engine rankings.

1. Is The Links Page Indexed By The Search Engines?

If a link on pages is not being read by the search engines, then it is not of much use to you. The further the links page is from the home page, the less likely it is to be indexed. If a page has PR, then you know that it has been indexed (by Google at least), although no PR does not mean that the page has not been indexed. You can conduct your own test by typing cache: followed by the url of the page in question. If the page has been crawled, you should see some results.

2. Should You Be Wary Of 3 Way Links?

Many people feel that direct reciprocal linking has limited value these days. One way around this is the idea of 3 way links; where site A links to site B, and site B links to site C. Site C then links back to site A again. One problem with this is that it is harder to control where exactly your link is going to end up. If as a matter of policy you have decided that relevance if of paramount importance, then 3 way linking may not be for you, Or at least, it may be harder to organise.

3. Association With Particular Sites?

Your decision whether to link or not should be a bit easier having read this article (hopefully). You should have some criteria in mind as to what constitutes a site you want to be associated with. If the site in question meets your criteria, then add a link. Equally, if that site does not meet your criteria, then steer clear.

4. How To Keep Track Of Links Back To Me?

This is perhaps the hardest and in some cases the most time consuming part of your link building process. Obtaining links is a painstaking and time consuming process, and you don’t want to give your work away too lightly. To protect your links and the integrity of your sites, you should check that your link partners are keeping to their side of the bargain and keeping your links live. You could do this by maintaining a spreadsheet of all of the links, and checking them one by one. Ouch! I can suggest an easier way to do this which will save you many hours a week though. I will go into that at the end of this article.

5. What Are The Best Links To Have?

There is no definitive answer the this question. Maybe one way to answer this is the links that deliver the most traffic to you. Or perhaps the links that give the best value to your customers. There is no right answer. One way to find good potential partners is to type in a specific keyword into the search engines, and contact some of the sites that come up at the top of the results. These should be good potential partners.

What you have now are some good ideas for a link building strategy that allows you to make good decisions based on sound principles, and now you should be better placed to make those decisions.

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Charlie Cory - You can make your link building life an easier by using tools that save you time and money. Link Checking is a breeze when you have the right tool to help you. This tool can also help you find better link partners. You can try some new link building techniques. These are very successful. Techniques that take the pain away from the link building process.

Tags: link building, linking, Linking Strategies

Google is all about linking. And if you want to snatch a top spot in Google’s search results you need to link like a pro.

But don’t worry. Linking is a whole lot easier today than it was a few years ago. Experience has taught us a lot and with the information in this article you won’t need to worry about endless trial and error. We have a repeatable process that anyone can do, as easy as 1, 2, 3.

That said; let’s take a look at the linking strategies that Google will give you the most credit for…

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Tags: Linking Strategies, links, reciprocal linking, seo

Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings. You can think of these links as votes in favor of you website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site can be very time consuming, however it is a very important thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.Before I continue, let me quickly define Link Popularity (link pop) for you. Link Popularity simply refers to the amount and quality of inbound links to your site. There are many free tools available on the internet for checking your link popularity.

How Link Directories Can Help You

Using link directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. Just so you know, a link directory is a web site that has a large collection of links which are organized by topic. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use links directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.

There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. I recently typed the keywords: link directories in to Google and received 1,120,000 hits.

When you submit your site to a link directory, it is edited by a human. Your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of you site, and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your website from quality link directories.

You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are three reasons for doing this. First, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase you search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your web site pages to get indexed quickly.

Some Features Of Link Directories

When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look something like this: o Featured Links o Regular Links o Regular Links With Recipricol The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links (this is one of the ways that link exchanges make their money). The trouble here is that if a lot of people are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list. With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with recipricol are offered for free. When I submit to directories, I always choose regular links and I only choose free ones. Listen, there is such an overwhelming number of link directories out there, that if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly empty your bank account. There are plenty of free ones to choose from (just type free link directories into Google, and you will be amazed at the numbers). A final note here is always choose the regular link (one way) as opposed to the recipricol option. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable that recipricol links (recipricol links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).

Link directories are ranked by Google just like any other web site. The range in page rank will be between 0 and 8. You will want to spread your submissions between all of the page rank values. This will make your links look more natural in the eyes of the search engines.

The Submission Process

There are basically three ways that you can carry out the submission process.

1. Sign in to your favorite search engine and type in “free link directories”. You will get enough hits here to keep you busy with submitting for the rest of your days.

2. Purchase one of the many link directory submission software packages out there. These packages are normally semi-automated and will save you a huge amount of time.

3. You can pay someone to do the submitting for you. There are plenty of web sites that will offer to do your submissions for a fee, but be careful, as some of them are quite spammy. Make sure to do your due diligence first. You should aim to do about 200 to 300 submissions per month.

Good luck with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a key strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website.

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Author: John Baril - I live in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with my wife and 2 young boys. I am a full time Paramedic and I love my career. In my spare time, I may be found flying, hiking, renovating our house or playing sports with the boys. Check out my affiliate marketing website: http://www.wealth-dynamo.com

Tags: Linking Strategies

I got into search engine optimization back in 1998. It sure has changed a lot since then. Back in the day you could use invisible text, load keywords to the point of overflowing and fill META tags with anything even close to what you had on your page. And you could do well on Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista; all the biggies. Not anymore.

Today SEO is about a 75% / 25% split between links and content, with inbound links being the most important thing. Especially on Google. When all is said and done, you can get to the top of Google in just two simple steps. Seriously. I’ve done it hundreds of times and it’s easier than you’d imagine.

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Tags: google rankings, Linking Strategies, top rankings

Here in part four of “Linking Practices” we will cover how to maximise the benefits of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined“, part 2: “Links Applied” and part 3: “Link Tricks“).

Okay, so you’ve already noticed that this is part 3 of 4 (you did notice, didn’t you?). After all it is commonly known that the best trilogies come in fours. These are unconfirmed ideas. I don’t think anything can really be classed as a myth or truth in SEO simply because what holds true today may not hold true tomorrow or vice versa. That’s why I refer to these as ideas and not myths. I guess that’s what makes it all so very exciting.

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Tags: linking, Linking Strategies

Here in part three of “Linking Practices” we will cover how to maximise the benefits of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined” and part 2: “Links Applied“).

This section could also be classified as: Tips, Hints and Cheats. While I recommend and try at all times to adhere to ethical and honest practices there are many webmasters out there that do not. While PageRank still remains a prize in eyes of many webmasters there will always be a handful that will do anything to try and game the system. These are some of the usual ways in which they do this:

Robots.txt

The robots file is a little plain text file that resides in the root directory of a website. The purpose of this file is to notify the search engine spider of which pages should be indexed and which should not. After all you wouldn’t want the backend to your website indexed in the search results. This file stands alone and you cannot know its contents by looking at a standard webpage on that site. I know many webmasters have now started using the robots.txt file to exclude their link pages from the search engine spiders. By doing this they are effectively preventing the search engine from seeing the link to your page. This in turn makes your link back to them seem like a valuable one way link.

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Tags: linking practices, Linking Strategies, links

Here in part two of “Linking Practices” we will cover the application of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined”).

As with all marketing practices the best place to start is always with a plan.  In this case we will need to establish what the purpose is of building these links.  With links being a major factor when ranking a website many webmasters use links to try and gain higher rankings in search engine results.  Sometimes links are valuable simply as they drive traffic to your website.  As we all know traffic is very blood that powers your online business.  Consider links the veins.

Reciprocal Links:
These links often offer very little aid when it comes to ranking highly in the search engines.  While these links usually reside on a page that is no more than a long list of URL’s occasionally these can be of great benefit.  A reciprocal link simply means a link exchanged.  Usually you can request the anchor text and description you wish the link to display as well as the URL this points to.  This makes sense as this is supposed to be a beneficial exchange for both parties.

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Tags: linking practices, Linking Strategies

When you are trying to develop your backlink strategy it is important to understand the different ways to gain links to your site. The easiest way to get links to your site is by doing a link exchange.

Link exchanges are done with similar sites with both sites placing a link to the other. Link exchanges have been penalized by search engines because of heavy spam but there still benefits to doing a link exchange, so don’t be afraid to try.

The best links to get our inbound one way links. These links are sometimes difficult to get because there is no exchange. It requires the other web site to link to you without you linking to them. Gaining one way links should rank near the top of your off-page optimization strategy.

In order to get one way links you have to get noticed. Getting noticed online is not a whole lot different than getting noticed off-line.

In order to get other sites to link to your site you have to provide unique original content on your site. One way to develop this content is to add a blog, Forum, or other method to regularly add content to your site. If you have a static web site it will be much more difficult to gain links.

Applying SEO techniques such as the above can bring great benefits. As an example if you are trying to optimize a site that sells vitamins. The first step would be researching highly ranked competitors. After analyzing their sites you can use their blog or forum to determine what topics are hot. Typically in these community sites hot topics will draw quite a bit of traffic and comments from readers.

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Tags: inbound links, Linking Strategies

Here in part one of “Linking Practices” I will run through and explain in a little detail.  While each method of linking has its benefits it also often has disadvantages.  More often the advantages outweigh the disadvantages - if done correctly.

Reciprocal Links:
While many believe reciprocal links to be dead, these links have the potential to be either very useful or very useless; it all depends on the source for this one.  A reciprocal link is a link swapped with another website.  While the search engines don’t really give these all that much weight (unless from an authority site) these can be useful in driving traffic to your website from related websites.  With enough of these links each driving small amounts of traffic to your website the increase in traffic can be quite noticeable.

A reciprocal link from an industry leader or a related industry leader can often lead to good volumes of traffic to your website.  The greatest benefit here is that these are visitors that are already interested in your product or service.  The disadvantage of running reciprocal links is that you get the world and his brother wanting to swap links with you, usually with absolutely no relevancy at all.

One Way Links:
These are the most valuable links when considering the search engines.  A “direct “or “one way” link is a link to your website that is not reciprocated.  The reason that this is so much more valuable is because in this case it a website that has linked back to yours without any solicitation (or at least that is how the search engines see it).  The theory behind this and the PageRank algorithm is that every link to a website counts as a vote.  Obviously the more votes you have the move important you site is seen to be.  However it is also believed that every vote that you have to send out weakens your importance.  Kind of like if you had a group of 10 people that all gave you $10, you would be up $100, but if you also had to give out $10 to each of them, then you simply break even.  In the same way, the more votes that you are able to “bank” (not handed back) in this case the better off you are.

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Tags: deep links, Linking Strategies, links