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Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail

02 2011 Sunday

By Maria Nemenman in Featured

A good website builder knows that solid links mean solid rankings, but it’s an ever changing challenge to get them. Learn how to avoid a loss of link juice now.

Links are incredibly important in getting relevant traffic and good position in search results, but links are like any other relationship… they can go sour. Here’s a list of ten reasons why otherwise knowledgeable link builders blow their efforts. Pay attention and don’t fall into any of these traps. As a website builder you have got to get this part right or you are heading for disaster.

1. One Hit Wonder

The worse thing that can happen to websites that stumble onto a source of links or who only rely on one method of building links is for that accident or that plan to actually work. That sounds counter intuitive, but if you convince yourself that only one method is needed, you’re heading for a fall. You need to diversify your efforts and not have all your eggs in one basket.

2. Quantity Not Quality

The link builder who writes an article, spins it and then uses article submission software can easily develop 1,000 links to a web page in no time at all. The only problem is those links will be worth next to nothing. Building links is not just a numbers game. Links gain their value from the value of their source. A single link from a PR 4 is worth 1,000 links from PR 0 websites.

Tips for Developing a Link Building Strategy – A SPN Exclusive Article

02 2011 Thursday

By Nick Stamoulis in Featured

Link building should be considered phase two of any SEO campaign (on-site optimization being phase one) and is a critical component of maintaining site ranking and establishing a trust factor with the search engines.

Link building is an ongoing campaign necessary for improving a website’s inbound link stream which can help promote your brand and overall visibility in the search engines. Link building can also help boost unique visitors to your site which in turn can lead to an increase in conversions. Link building efforts come in many forms including: local profiles, blogging and blog commenting, social networking, directory submission and online publicity, among others.

The overall goal of a link building strategy is to grow links from many different, but relevant, sources over time. Most link building strategies range from 3 months to a year and should incorporate 10-20 different scheduled tasks a month. It is important to create a very specific link building schedule and stick to it as much as possible. Growing links too fast raises a red flag with the search engines and can result in negative consequences. Growing links slowly helps establish a trust with the search engines, leading to better positioning in their results.

SMX Melbourne : Designing a Bullet Proof Link Building Campaign

11 2010 Tuesday

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

link building strategies

This is a summary of the presentation given by Ian McAnerin, CEO of McAnerin International Inc. at SMX Melbourne earlier this month about how to design a bullet proof link building campaign.

Link History

Twelve years ago, pre-Gooogle, search engines just analyzed content in order to rank sites, says Ian. Linking wasn’t part of the ranking algorithm. Google put paid to that by making links part of the equation. Suddenly, SEO became a lot more difficult.

Ian explained Term Vector Analysis (TVA) and Citation Analysis and how they influenced the concept of links. TVA is how keywords appear on a page (relevance). Citation Analysis is the influence of keywords on a page (authority). Google was built by students who were using citation analysis on a daily basis. Keyword density isn’t used by search engines. However, it is kinda similar to term vector analysis, which IS used by search engines.

Every web page stored in Google has a term profile containing number of times a keyword is used, density, proximity, position etc. Google then looks for clusters of terms that appear in proximity to the search phrase and finds the Representative Average to display in the SERPs. The process of TVA is excellent at figuring out informational pages such as Wikipedia pages.

The problem is that TVA can’t give search engines the entire picture – it’s difficult for them to tell the difference between spam and awesomeness. This is how search engines worked up until Google. Then Google came along and threw links into the equation. The more links you had to the page, the higher rank you would have in the SERPs.

Typically, the better writing, the worse the SEO, because good writers use flowery, descriptive language.

Types of Links

Now, to rank, you need three kinds of links:

1) Authority (aged)

2) Relevance (current)

3) Buzz (social)

So you need a combination of old and new links. Therefore you need to be constantly building links!

Stinking Linking – reference to articles by Mike Grehan about the prob with aged domains and links.

Link Quality

Link page quality is measured by:

PageRank of the page
cached
nofollow
number of other links on page
topic

Remember that it’s the PR of the PAGE that’s important, not the PR of the domain or main site. So if someone is offering you a link and bragging about having a PR4 on their home page, but your link is going to go on a inner page that has PR0, there’s no value there.

Page sculpting is not as influential now. No point no-following all your links on a page as they all leak PR anyway.

Sources of Links:

Seeds – Yahoo, DMOZ
Directories and connections
competitors (meet then beat)
articles and blog posts
widgets
reviews
case studies
contests and publicity
profiles
social media
internal linking campaign
link reclamation
pick up the phone!

Ian suggests starting any link campaign with your own site. Make sure you are cross linking internal pages. Then go and do link reclamation – check your 404s in Webmaster Tools to see if anyone is linking in to pages that no longer exist and ask them to update.

As an idea to attract links, Ian suggests holding a contest e.g. school laptop giveaway – put the rules of the contest on your web site and then the school / parents etc link to your web page for the rules.

Anchor text is virtual content. Rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t spam your web site with the same keyword phrase, don’t do the same with your link building. Mix and match the anchor text linking to your pages and ask people linking to you to do the same.

Deep links are the best links. Don’t ask everyone to link to your home page! You’ll get better crawls and better rankings and your audience gets a higher quality experience if you inner pages are well-linked. Plus the crawler starts at inner pages that it might have missed before.

Tools for Link Building:

Link Don’ts:

Use Free For All (FFA) links
Off topic links
Non-editorial
Obviously purchased links

Generate Backlinks To A Weblog In Natural Way

09 2010 Friday

By Craig Jaya in Featured

One of the toughest areas of gaining publicity for a weblog is ranking in nature for targeted key phrases. If you have only started your weblog newly, you are likely competing alongside weblogs which have been around for many years, with countless entries already listed and ranking high inside the major search engines.

It may be daunting in the beginning – a thousand-entry disadvantage right from the beginning – but with the proper blogging tactic it is potential to outrank any older competitors with only a fraction as numerous posts and backlinks.

How? It is all about quality, and the tipping point. If you maintain a very high quality weblog, your posts are picked up much more often than the ones of a relatively high quality weblog. The online audience is discriminator for that last 10% that bridges the gap between the good and the excellent.

Good content? It will go for miles, making the best way through social media sites plus perhaps several social bookmarking services.

Excellent content? You will rapidly see good – high quality articles and blogposts rank at the frontpage of social bookmarking sites, attracting much more traffic than their mildly successful competitors. Building natural backlinks is about that one thing: quality. Like several search engine optimization pursuits, it is potential to increase your way to the top spot with low quality work, but it places you in a position that is very difficult to maintain.

Low quality work just goes so far, particularly when it is spread sparingly. Give it some thought when it comes to a highly trained group of troopers facing off against an untrained military. One has influence in numbers, but is rapidly spread apart and controlled. The other is powerful not only in mass but in relatively small quantities.

While the massive military can manage ground, it is rapidly pushed away by the good – high quality troopers. Take care of your content in the same way. Whenever you are looking to get backlinks, concentrate on using good quality content to achieve your target. While countless low quality weblog posts spread over various weblogs can provide your site several linking power, they are rapidly brought down by one well-targeted opponent.

Utilize a direct, high quality method. Generate backlinks through the work of others; submit high quality content to social bookmarking sites and allow the users spread it for yourself, all through their enthusiasm.

One well written article will spread 100 times further than 10 low quality written ones, and is definitely the better backlink tactic. So next time you may need to build backlinks for your weblog or site, concentrate on the 10% content gap that actually matters. Low quality content can only be spread through brute force and ridiculous quantities of work, and is rarely a cost efficient option.
Good quality work goes far, but often falls short with regards to climbing to the top spot.

Good – high quality work may travel through social media sites, social bookmarking sites, and eventually through sheer word of mouth. That is the kind of content that builds weblog backlinks, and that is the kind of content that you need to be focusing on.

If you want to rank super-high at Google’s organic search results, you need hundreds or even thousands of highqualitybacklinks.info and highly advanced backlinking tactics that deliver proven, consistent Page #1 results. Newsletter about full of innovative ideas you can use to grow a wildly successful globalbiztoday.com.

Link Bait: Put Your Link Building on Steroids

09 2010 Thursday

By Patrick McCord in Featured

The most significant and perhaps the hardest part of website optimization is link building. Website promoters beat the bushes trying to discover the blooming valleys of premium quality links to pick up some juicy links there. However, it isn’t that easy and quite often all efforts may be in vain.

But as the saying has it: “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain!” If you can’t get links from well-established websites you can encourage them to link to you themselves! One of the ways you can build up tons of links is by producing premium quality content that may potentially go viral. This SEO technique is generally referred to as link baiting. Generally it’s about enticing website visitors to promote your site via links from their own sites.

Here are the high spots of the link baiting techniques that may encourage anyone (be it a well-known blogger or the Average Joe) to link to your website:

Write About the Industry’s ‘Big Guys’

You can get yourself a huge piece of link pie if you write about the authorities in your given market niche. If you tell a story about the leaders who have impacted your niche or post an interview with them you are sure to build a good reputation and attract more visitors. But you must make sure that the story or the interview you post is really noteworthy and useful to readers.

10 Steps To Getting The Click

08 2010 Tuesday

By Sharon Housley in Featured

There are a number of steps a webmaster can take to encourage visitors to “click” on a link or graphic located on their website. The following steps will help “get the click”…

1. Colors

Use contrasting colors for links. This makes the links easier to discern from other text on a web page. Also, avoid placing links against a patterned background, as it will make it much more difficult to read the link text. Bottom line, the link color should stand out from the rest of the web page, and be easy to locate.

2. Link Traits

Underlining is still the universal indication of a link. Using the “underline” for links will send a clear message to website visitors about which text on the webpage is just text, and which text is actually a hyper-link. And along this line of thought, you should avoid using underlining for text that is not a link, just to avoid confusion.

3. Visible

Make all the links visible. Do not hide the links or navigation on a web page. Avoid using scripting to display links, as these links will not be visible to website visitors who have turned scripting off in their browser for security reasons.

4. Textual

Text links have a higher rate of clicks than linked images. The one exception is typically a “Buy Now” button, which tends to be more effective than text-only “Buy Now” links. Keep this in mind when creating a linking scheme for your website.

5. Consistent

The location of links should be consistent as the visitor moves from page to page through your website. Do not move links around as the content of the web page changes.

6. Position

Place important links in a location that is easy for the website visitor to see without having to scroll. Position important links “above the fold” on the website.

7. Font Style & Size

In order to make links easy for the visitor to see, be sure to use a font style and size that can be easily read.

8. Graphic Links

If you use image links, the clickable graphics should be vibrant and should stand out from the other content on the page. Use bright or bold contrasting colors for the graphic. Be sure to include appropriate ALT text for each linked image, so the visitor will have an indication of the material being linked to as they move their mouse over the graphic.

9. Split-Test

Conduct split-testing by changing colors and moving links around, and then monitor and track which options and locations result in the highest number of clicks. What may seem intuitive is not always as obvious as you might think.

10. Fresh Eyes

Ask a friend or family member to navigate your website. It may surprise you to learn what they see and where they click. A fresh set of eyes will give a good indication of how others will perceive your website and the clickable content.

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll audio recording and editing software.

5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking

05 2010 Wednesday

By Jill Whalen in Featured

Linking-Strategies Think you’re doing a good job of tracking and measuring the success of every link to your website that gets announced to the world in some fashion?

While most website marketers are tracking website referrals from search engines, as well as links from other websites and paid search advertising campaigns, a lot of visitors show up as “Direct Traffic.” Do you ever wonder where they came from? I know that I do!

I’ve talked about ‘campaign tracking‘ via Google Analytics before, so I won’t bore you with the mechanics of how to create these links so they don’t look ugly. But do read that article if you need a refresher course. After you have a good system in place for adding campaign tracking codes to your URLs, the most important thing you can do is remember to use them on everything!

10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines

01 2010 Tuesday

By Terri Seymour in Featured

When you build your website, you, of course, want to get high rankings in the search engines. There are lots of ways to do this and lots of ways to NOT do this. Below are 10 things to avoid if you want to be in good standing with the search engines.

Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not set up multiple sites or site pages using basically the same content with a few different keywords spread around. This does not fool the search engines.
Cloaking – Cloaking is when a website or webpage is set up to show different content for a search engine spider than the human visitors. The cloaked page (for the spiders) is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings. What it can get you is banned!
Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Be careful who you link to because you can be found guilty by association. Do not link to adult sites, gambling sites or link farms. Also be careful not to link to sites that use any of the SEO methods mentioned here.
Title Stacking – This is simply trying to give each page more than one title tag so you can use more keywords to get higher rankings. The search engines consider this a dirty little trick.
Doorway Pages – Doorway or gateway pages are pages that are set-up for one keyword topic but then they take you to different content. These pages usually have little value in the way of content and have little to do with the rest of the site. They are used solely to try to get a higher rank in the search engines.
Redirect Pages – Redirect pages are set up to rank high in the search engines but when you click on the page, it will take you to another page which is usually a sales page for a product or service. So, what you see isn’t what you get!
Automated Submission Services – Do not use automated submission services. They are against Google’s TOS and can get you banned.
Hidden Links – This is when a link is added to a page in such a small size that it cannot be seen by human visitors but can be picked up by the search engine spiders. This might work for a time but when the search engines discover it, you will be penalized!
Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing or spamming is simply being too repetitive with your keywords as to the extent of your content not being sensible. For example if your keywords are cat food and your text reads something like this: When your cat gets hungry be sure to feed them this cat food because your cat will like this cat food. This cat food comes in an easy to open cat food can and contains fish, chicken and healthy ingredients that all cat food should have. So, when your cat is hungry for cat food, give them this cat food because this cat food is the best cat food for your cat!You can easily see why this kind of keyword stuffing should not be used.
Invisible Text – This is when you hide text by using the same color text and background. The invisible text is meant for the search engines only and not for visitors. This is done so you can stuff a lot more keywords on your page without wrecking your content. The search engines will discover this and they will penalize you!

Be careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods because it could cause you a lot of trouble with the search engines. Be careful as well, who you hire to work on your site because some of these things can be done without your knowledge and cause your site to get banned or penalized.

A few things you should do to get higher rankings are:

Research keywords and use relevant keywords on your web pages and in your page title.
Add new content to your site regularly
Link with relevant, quality sites
Use a site map
Don’t use a lot of javascript or flash. The search engines do not read these.

Following all of the above can keep you from getting banned and improve your rankings!

Terri Seymour (also known as “The eBook Lady”) has over ten years online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site at http://www.seymourproducts.com for resources, $1 resell ebooks & software, free tutorials, affiliate programs, free ezine and free business ebook with Master Resell Rights. http://www.seymourproducts.com/free.shtml

How Many Links Does It Take To Get To The Middle Of Google Page One?

10 2009 Friday

By Bill Platt in Featured

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: http://911reputation.com/ Bill has also owned http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001.

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt

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SiteProNews Blogs

Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail

Tips for Developing a Link Building Strategy – A SPN Exclusive Article

SMX Melbourne : Designing a Bullet Proof Link Building Campaign

Generate Backlinks To A Weblog In Natural Way

Link Bait: Put Your Link Building on Steroids

10 Steps To Getting The Click

5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking

10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines

How Many Links Does It Take To Get To The Middle Of Google Page One?

Top 3 Problems with Directories

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