Using Gather to promote your Squidoo Lenses
Posted on | May 25, 2010 | No Comments
I’m not going to even start to fathom the depths of how Gather works or ways it can be used all on its own, but strictly from a Squidoo Lensmasters point of view I found it an excellent way to reach a large untapped audience and also increase ones own backlinks and exposure to search engines.
The Squidoo Strategy
A picture tells a thousand words…
http://www.squidoo.com/gatherdotcom
Things to look at a site when building backlinks
Posted on | May 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Determine quality of your site
Before you even go after looking for link inventory on for your site you should first determine the quality of YOUR OWN site first. Why is that? Simple, if you know how much time, effort and links you have built so far for your site to have a certain authority, to start ranking and to have a homepage strong enough to give link juice to your inner pages and help them rank, then you will exactly know what type of site you want to link to yours and what type of link juice would that site bring to you.
Once you have determined the quality of your site, you will then start looking for links on sites that have EQUAL quality as your site OR even HIGHER. This can be determined by few factors such as:
Inbound links that the site has
The quality of those links that the site has
Google pagerank of that current site (even tho this isn’t a big factor, but however does help, trust me)
The outgoing links of that site (make sure it doesn’t link to bad sites or to off-topic sites, those are too easy to be tracked and penalized)
Things you don’t want a site that links to yours to have
Negative impact such sites linking to yours can have
If you think that that will be his own problem if he gets his site flagged, penalized or banned then you are wrong.
If a site that links to yours is flagged your site could be also counted in as one of his network sites and have your site flagged as well. If you get flagged you will no longer be able to pass juice to your inner pages and most likely will start losing rankings with your inner pages.
If a site from where you got a link gets a PageRank penalization, in that case your site will no longer receive that link juice it used to receive when it had pagerank. Which results into wasting time and effort for you, so you now need to replace those links and get more quality links.
Benefits from avoiding such sites to link to yours
Even the benefits should be plain simple and clear. If no flagged, penalized, banned site is linking to yours then you will not be risking to get flagged, penalized or even banned. In addition, while avoiding to get links from such sites you will save loads and loads of time, which then you can invest into looking a more quality resources, you will most likely even help to clean up the web by cutting the nasty business of these co called webmasters.
The main business of these webmasters is to sell links, if they can’t do that then they are out of their business. The effort they put into creating such sites is minimal, the risk that these sites could harm you is very high, so stick away from them, all the time.
Tools to get similar site information’s on the fly
If you don’t have other softwares or tools to gather such data then you might consider using Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar for firefox. It is just an addon and can be installed quickly.
Already got a link from one of those nasty sites and got penalized, and now you wonder how to fix it?
How To Promote Yourself on Social Sites Without Actually “Promoting Yourself”
Posted on | March 4, 2010 | No Comments
ONLY submits sites they own or have an interest in
DOES NOT vote on anything from other sites
Attempts to FRIEND EVERYBODY even though they may not know them or have any common interests
Doesn’t know how to FOLLOW THE RULES of the community
Creates MULTIPLE PROFILES so they can vote their stuff up
Why you need inbound links to your sites
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | 1 Comment
In the world of Internet Marketing, there is a lot to know, understand, and keep up with. In this community, we hear about ‘building links’ a great deal. But what is building links really all about?
The fact is that for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO), you need other website owners to include a link to your site from their site. There is, of course, a great deal more to it than just getting a simple link on someone else’s site, as you will soon learn, but that is the basic answer as to what building links is all about.
These links are called ‘inbound links.’ This means that the link points to your website, so that when someone clicks the link, they arrive at your website – they are inbound. An outbound link means that there is a link on your page that when clicked, takes the visitor to someone else’s website – it is outbound.
But why do you need these inbound links? When search engines crawl through your pages, they are also looking to see who is linking to your site. There was a time when the quantity of the links mattered more than the quality of those links. Website owners around the globe went virtually crazy trying to get as many inbound links as possible, visiting link farms and essentially creating link farms of their own – on their own site – in order to exchange links with other website owners.
The search engine companies soon realized that this was not conducive to producing better – relevant – search results, and they changed things up over time. Now, the number of inbound links that one has isn’t as important as where the links you do have come from. In fact, these days it isn’t healthy – in the eyes of the search engines – to have an over abundance of inbound links, unless they are from what is considered authority sites.
The search engines also become suspicious – and start penalizing sites – when they build too many inbound links in too short a period of time. Search engines are becoming quite picky about these things, and in order to protect your site, while promoting it, you need to be fully aware of just how discerning the search engines can be.
There is a great deal that one can learn about the wonderfully world of link building – a long with an entire new vocabulary of words and phrases such as reciprocal linking, multi-linking, three-way linking, automated linking, link exchange, incestuous linking, over linking, under linking, link doping, link bait, and of course link popularity.
There is so much to learn about linking that entire courses have been written on the topic – and many marketers spend a great deal of time building inbound links. Fortunately for you, you don’t have to do this. You don’t really have to understand all of the terminology or the strategies. You don’t have to spend weeks – or even days – building links.
This publication is designed to help you build the inbound links that you need, through a variety of methods that the search engines will not become suspicious of. We can call it natural link building.
Of all of the terminology associated with link building, there is actually very little of it that you need to understand. You need to understand what link popularity means – to the search engines – because that is exactly what it needs to mean to you.
Look at it this way: are you getting your link on other sites so that the little bit of traffic on those sites will come to your site – or are you getting links on other site so that the search engines will see that your site is a popular site, raising you listing in the search results, which will be seen by thousands of people? Link popularity is something you need to understand.
The search engines determine how important your site is by looking to see who is linking to you – not how many people are linking to you, although this used to be the case. These days, in the search engines opinion, it’s not how many people you know, but who you know that counts…and you thought you left the popularity contests behind in high school!
You could say that search engines have become followers of the crowd. They are the ones that will always do or agree with whatever it is that the most popular girl is doing or saying. Go to the search engine right now and type in your main keyword. Take a look at the search results. Skip the paid listings, and look at the natural results. The site in the number one spot is the most popular girl in this class.
Now, look at that site. It most likely has a page rank of five or higher. If you check that site out on Alexa, at http://www.alexa.com, you will most likely see that it has an abundance of inbound links – but if you look at the site, you will note that it does not have very many outbound links – if any at all. The most popular girl doesn’t have to link to others in order to get them to link to her. She can get people to link to her by just doing what she naturally does.
The good news is that you don’t have to work very hard to become the most popular boy or girl in your niche. All you need to do is to follow some simple, natural linking techniques, and your star will rise!
http://webmasterautomation.com/blog/2009/02/08/why-you-need-inbound-link…
What Link Building
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Link Building aims at higher Search Engine Rankings. It is a highly rated SEM technique that can boost the rankings of your website exponentially. The more the number of links point to your website, the more popular your site gets, and is recognized by search engines. But if ranking your website through Link Building seems so easy, can’t all the websites rank at the top? The trick however is not Link Building- it is Quality Link Building which paves the way for increased rankings.
The search engines are smart enough to use techniques that calculate the authenticity and relevancy of the websites and the content that links to your website. Therefore, it becomes imperative that your Inbound Links are able to impress the search engines. To be more precise, it’s the anchor text that stores the essence. Before you start any reciprocal linking campaign for link popularity, it is of prime importance to evaluate that the anchor text that links to your website is one of the main keywords for your site. Let us analyze this with the help of an example. Supposedly, you have a website that deals with Tourism of Switzerland, and one of your higher ranking keywords is “Hotels in Switzerland”. It is very important that your inbound links use this particular keyword (or its permutation combination) as the anchor text. This helps in guaranteed rankings as search engines consider it an added advantage.
So for your Switzerland Tourism guide, it is important that the keywords pointing to your site are like “Click here for information on Hotels in Switzerland”, “Luxury hotels in Switzerland”, “Find Hotels in Switzerland-click here”, “For information on Hotels in Switzerland, click here”. The sites which link to your website should have similar, if not same relationship with Tourism.
Quality reigns supreme in Link Building. Or to be more precise, it is the quality link building that serves the right purpose of Link Building. One of the main keyword being the anchor text is very important for all search engines, and particularly for Google. Few quality links containing the ‘keyword as the linked text’ can improve your rankings in Google substantially.
http://www.giantnc.com/what-link-building.html
Top 10 SEO Link Building Tips
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
You may spend hundreds of pounds/dollars/euro ’s to design, set up and fine-tune your website, but chances are, it may neither achieve appreciable, search engine ranking, nor deliver profitable, results, should you be running a business. The truth is that thousands of web owners face this problem and are none the wiser. If you are at pains to understand why your website isn’t delivering results, the way you’d like it to, may be it ’s time you took a closer look at your site and revamped your SEO link building efforts. Here are the top 10 SEO link building tips that can contribute to your site ’s success.
1. Establish “Relevant” Links
The search for links by webmasters and website owners is a continuous process, many preferring one way, “inbound links” for better search engine results, as well as inbound, web traffic to their sites. However, if you choose to establish “reciprocal links” to your site, it ’s crucially, important to ensure, that the links chosen, are associated in some manner to your website. In short, they must be relevant to the product or service marketed by your website. For example, if your website is offering a “Home Improvement” product or service, try and establish reciprocal links with “Home Improvement” sites marketing allied products.
2. Maximize Reciprocal Links
Top search engines such as Yahoo or Google pay close attention to the number of “relevant”, links possessed by a website, and reward them with better ranking. Therefore, if you have succeeded in establishing relevant, reciprocal links, try and maximize that number.
3. Increase Online Longevity
Most search engines do not rank sites unless they find them active for a minimum of 6 months, with content frequently refreshed and updated. The longer your site is seen online, the more it will be perceived as reliable, and ultimately, the better its chances of attaining good search engine ranking.
4. Demonstrate Steady Growth
Slow, steady and consistent, growth of your website is preferable to erratic, inconsistent development. This is a factor that top search engines keenly watch and take into account when ranking sites. Therefore, ensure that you demonstrate slow yet sure upward, growth of your site, establishing relevant links, and adding to them along the way.
5. Use SEO Optimized Keywords
SEO optimized keywords in your links can significantly increase, if not double, the chances of attracting web traffic and inbound links to your site.
6. Choose Online Press Optimization
As an alternative to SEO optimization, Online Press Optimization is a great way to optimize your website, and a proven way for effective, link building and appreciable, link results.
7. Organize SEO Logically
Remember, SEO and link building, complement each other. Therefore, it ’s essential to build links to your site around SEO while marketing it. This will increase the chances of driving significant, visitor traffic to your site.
8. Select RSS Fee Optimization
This is another intelligent, way for effective SEO link building. RSS Optimization is a process that permits transmission to a varied, group of viewers using, among others, special buttons on toolbars.
9. Offer Free Web Hosting Space
Offering Free Web Hosting space is an effective, way to increase site exposure and enhance SEO link building. Increased exposure will also build traffic, and ultimately gain high search engine ranking for your site.
10. Concentrate on providing creative content
While frequent updating of content is important, it is equally important to infuse creativity in your site ’s content. A new, informative and refreshing look will always have more appeal and greatly contribute to significant, SEO link building.
To Link OR Not to Link
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
There have been a lot of heated discussions regarding link building. Is it ethical to create a link building campaign? Does Google or any other search engine penalize for “link farms” (a bunch of non-related links created for the SOLE purpose of increasing search engine ratings)? Is the “link building era” over?
Link Farms
Many webmasters claim that Google penalizes websites for link farms. If this is so, why are a link farm sites that have a page rank of 5 on their link farm page? Let me give you an example, go to Google.com, type in any popular keyword(s) and append the word “links” to it. For example, “ABCD Links.” Notice you’ll get tones of websites that are linking to unrelated sites, but still have a great PR. I do not encourage link farming in any way or form, but building valuable partnerships is something I do encourage. Remember, many webmasters claim to know the truth regarding search engine algorithms, but no one knows the EXACT TRUTH except the programmers at the search engines. Webmasters may have been penalized in the past for link farms and doorway pages (pages created around certain keywords for the sole purpose of redirecting surfers to the main page), but who’s to say why some HAVEN’T been penalized.
Who Should I Create Link Partnerships With ?
1. Create link partnerships with sites related to your site.
2. Create link partnerships with sites that have an audience that may be interested in your products
3. Exchange homepage links with websites that fit in your genre. You’ll receive a link on a page with a good ranking and you’ll get quality, targeted hits.
How Do You Find Link Partners?
1. Signup with an automated links management provider that organizes your links and helps find link partners. Automated tools are the best because they help you save time. Uploading and downloading your pages for every link exchange can be a huge pain and very time consuming. Automated tools are NOT link farms because they give you complete control of who you exchange links with. If a member exchanges links with every website, he/she might be abusing the tool. If a member uses the tool responsibly, it can be very effective.
2. This is a great little exercise I would recommend to anyone.
a. Write down 20 search terms pertaining to your website
c. Contact as many websites as possible listed under that search term and ask them to exchange inner page or homepage links with you. If they’re NOT interested, ask whether they would be interested in selling advertising space. If your website is fairly new, you may want to ask sites for advertising prices. Free hits are the best hits but sometimes you might have to go the extra lap and pay for service. I wouldn’t recommend spending over $100 / month for advertising UNLESS it’s a high traffic site with your site audience. The best deals are the ones that offer $10-25 / month. There are sites out there that will sell SUPER cheap advertising, and others that charge an arm and a leg.
EVERYONE gets rejected sometime or another so keep your head up and keep moving along! The internet is comprised of Billions of websites. If you’re rejected 500 times, you still have MANY business opportunities left! This is a continuous job so set aside time every week to do this. If you don’t have time for this, then you don’t have time to make money.
3. Hire a Link Building firm (this can be quite expensive but if you have money, its minimal work for you)
The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Link building is an ongoing struggle between two sides with different motivations. Webmasters obviously want to increase traffic and rank #1 in the search engines for their targeted keywords. Search engines on the other hand aim to neutralize webmasters’ link building efforts and return the most relevant search results pages. So as a link builder, how can you win the battle?
With Google’s emphasis on links in its ranking algorithm, links have essentially become the currency of the net. People are willing to shell out thousands of dollars for links in hopes of better rankings and higher traffic. However, Google is fighting back by weeding out “artificial” links and devaluing sites that engage in aggressive link building tactics.
Every webmaster needs to proceed with caution when attaining links. There’s always a right way to do it and a wrong way. The key is to stay under the radar and strive to appear “natural”.
How can you do this? In this article I discuss the best ways to build links naturally to prevent tripping any filters or raising any red flags. Sure you might be able to fool the algorithm but the true test is having your links pass a human review. That should be your goal with every link you place on the web.
1. Provide value, attract links organically
The foundation of every link building campaign is your content. Are your pages worthy of being linked to? Provide value and you’ll naturally attain links from people who will voluntarily share your content with others. This is becoming increasingly important because Google is looking to eliminate thin pages from its index. The more value you provide, the more links you’ll get. You can then be more aggressive with your link building campaigns because it’s unlikely that a human reviewer will be able to tell the difference between “real” links and “manipulated” links.
2. Vary the link anchor text
Link anchor text is extremely important for SEO and could mean the difference between ranking for a keyword and being nowhere to be found. However, there is such a thing as over-optimization and it’s better to vary the link anchor text to appear more natural. For example, if your main keyword is “apple cider”, mix up your links with keywords like “buy apple cider here”, “click here”, “apple juice”, “apples”, “the best apple cider”, etc. The probability of all of your links being exactly the same is low, so don’t give the search engines reason to be suspicious so easily.
3. Deep link to pages on your site
Again, every link building campaign should aim to mimic natural linking patterns. Most people link to deep pages on a site, not just the homepage so you should be doing the same thing. Attain links to a diverse set of pages on your site. If you have a sound internal linking structure, your entire site should benefit.
4. Get links from relevant sites
Would a site about guitar lessons link to a real estate site? Most likely not. When analyzing the link graph, search engines give more weight to links that come from the same topical neighborhood. In the guitar lessons example, a link from a music site is much more valuable than a link from an unrelated site. Keep this in mind and target links from sites that have some sort of connection to yours. It’s what search engines love.
5. Take your time – slowly build up your link profile
It’s tempting to do a rush of promotion to get as many links as possible in a short period of time. However, this will usually raise red flags to the search engines, which will then devalue many of your hard earned links. It’s better to slowly build up your link profile over the long haul. Rather than attaining 3,000 links in a day, aim for 10 high quality links per week for a year. The long term benefits will be much greater.
6. Look for similar PageRank neighborhoods
Would you be suspicious if a new site with PageRank 1 suddenly had links from PageRank 8 sites? I don’t know about you, but Google would be. Generally speaking, most sites have links from sites with similar PageRank. For example, a PageRank 4 site will likely have links from sites with PageRank 3-5. Aim for the same and reach higher as you grow bigger.
7. Minimize links from the same IP address
Thinking about interlinking all of your sites together to maximize SEO potential? Think again. Google can easily detect links that come from the same C-block of IP addresses and will discount these links accordingly. It’s probably not a good idea to interlink your sites if they’re hosted on the same server. Then again, you shouldn’t be linking unless your sites are related in some way anyway.
8. Diversify your link profile
There’s a variety of sources for links and you should tap into all of them in your link building efforts. Get links from directories, blogs, press releases, scraper sites, old resource sites, forums, news sites, etc. The more diverse your link profile, the better because everything will look a lot more natural. You can then be more aggressive in your tactics because you’ll have a solid foundation already set.
9. Buy links discretely
Buying links is a very controversial topic because Google looks very negatively at any sort of paid link. However, if done right, paid links can have a huge positive effect on your rankings and traffic. First of all, it’s important to take into account each of the points listed in this article. Always go for related sites and vary your landing pages and anchor text. Spread out your purchases and contact webmasters directly instead of going through link brokers and networks like Text Link Ads. If you do it discretely, it will be almost impossible for Google to detect what’s paid and what’s not. As for valuing links, read Aaron Wall’s article on how much a link is worth to your business.
10. Eliminate obvious footprints
If you plan on using more aggressive strategies for your link building campaigns, it’s extremely important to hide your tracks and eliminate any obvious footprints. Do everything in moderation and mix things up to prevent the search engines from detecting any patterns. For example, if you plan on passing link value through your affiliate program, don’t use obvious parameter names like “aff”. For more information, read Patrick Altoft’s article on how to make sure your affiliate program passes SEO benefits.
Bonus: Be careful when buying domains for SEO
If done right, buying up sites have tremendous SEO potential. You can buy a trusted domain and redirect to your own to benefit from all of the inbound links. You can utilize content to piggyback off of your existing site. You can even buy a site to instantaneously achieve a #1 position in Google. If you have the money, buying sites might be a great investment. However, it’s still important to stay under the radar and not make it obvious to Google what you’re doing. For example, don’t redirect to a random irrelevant site and don’t quickly change the WHOIS information. These kinds of things tell Google that ownership has changed and they’ll often reset the site’s ranking potential. For more tips on buying up sites for SEO, see the recap of the Buying Sites for SEO session at SMX Advanced 2008.
How are you building links to your site? Are you thinking like Google and considering the implications of your actions? Every link counts and it’s important for you to stay under the radar and aim for a “natural” link profile. What are your experiences building links? Have you ever been penalized for being too aggressive and raising up red flags? Share your stories by leaving a comment below!
The importance of effective link building for a website
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
Companies providing link building and SEO services in India, consider effective link building, to be one of the most integral parts of website optimization.
The companies providing link building services suggest the following tips for effective link building:
Ensure that the search engine spiders can crawl through your navigations. For making your navigations spiderable, you can either use anchor text with text based navigation or image based navigations with attached alt attributes which are relevant.
For internal linking, you can use breadcrumbs for anchor text differentiation and usability.
Experts of link building in India suggest the use of in-content links because these links are more relevant and have a higher click through rate.
The use of a sitemap is suggested, as it is useful for search engines and visitors, both.
While inter linking your web pages, link your keywords to relevant and important pages of your website.
You should have a consistent linking behavior.
Identify the pages which are most linked-to and ensure that the link flows to all the important pages of your website in a well optimized manner.
Keep a check on your 404 statistics. Keep a track of websites which have been linked to your old or misspelled URLs, so that you can contact them and provide them the new URL to which they can link to.
Create and keep on updating your ‘link to us’ page which contains information about how people can link to your website.
Leave a relevant comment on the blogs of other sites which you visit.
Link all your internal websites together and redirect the important and relevant links to your main website.
The leading SEO in India follow the above mentioned tips to build effective links and optimize their website effectively.
The Easiest Way To Find Link Exchange Partners
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Unless you have lots of people offering to exchange links with you, you’ll probably have to find your link partners yourself. The best link partners you can have are ones that are optimizing their website for “almost exactly” the same keywords as you’re going for. If you linked out one-way to their website, Google wouldn’t penalize you because they’re considered “useful” and “relevant” sources.
The first thing you need to do is create a page to add all of your partner’s links on. You could link to this from your navigation as “Useful Links” or “Useful Sources”. After you have your links page created, search Google or Yahoo for websites that are optimized for the same keywords you’re going for. Add a link to their website on your link exchange page and write a “unique” description of their website under that. For example, if you wanted my website as a link exchange partner, you could link to me using this link and description:
SiteStartups.com – A Unique Blog For Webmaster Ideas Find useful tips and tricks for succeeding on the internet. The owner of this blog also has a great list of interesting internet ideas you may want to use.
After you’ve done this for a few potential link exchange partners, you should create a new email address for your potential partners to contact you by. Don’t use a mailbox that’s already filled because you may miss some emails. I would recommend you use something like linkpartners@yourdomain.com since it sounds professional.
Go down your list of potential link exchange partners and send them an email stating that you already added a link to their website and that you want to exchange links with them. If you added the link and description I gave you above for my website, you could send me an email that says something like this:
“Dear SiteStartups.com Webmaster,
After analyzing the targeted keywords and quality of your website content, I’ve come to the conclusion that you would make a perfect link exchange parter. I have already added a unique link and description to your website at http://www.mydomain.com/useful-links.html and would kindly like to ask you to do the same. Please email me at linkpartners@mydomain.com after you have added a “unique” link and description to my website. I think this is a great opportunity for both of us to improve our SEO, and would recommend you accept my invitation. If I don’t get a response within 3 days, I will presume that you are not interested in exchanging links and will remove your link from my website.”
If the webmaster decides to exchange links with you, make sure they add your link on a page that will be indexed by Google. Some webmasters will create a page that cannot be accessed from the homepage which makes that link useless. You should also lookout for other sleazy tactics such as linking to your website with the “nofollow” attribute. Make sure to keep track of all your link partners and check your backlinks at least once a month using a reciprocal link checker to see if any of your partners have taken off your website.
keep looking »