4 Techniques For One-Way Link Building

by Cleva Smith

On the Internet, search engines are deities you have to appease for them to give you blessings in the form of more site traffic. Now, the Google god and the almighty Yahoo look at many aspects of your site, like the amount of traffic you get or existing penalties. Inbound links, however, have proven to be a particularly effective way to improve your rankings, so you should maximize every opportunity to get them.

Link Directories

Using link directories is a very direct way of getting one-way links for your site. Take note, though, that not all link directories will necessarily be good for your site. It's a very thin line between link directory and link farm, and search engines have been very much against the latter.

If possible, look for those link directories that have admin-approved submissions and require reviews or descriptions for each link. Measures like those mean that the directory has some sort of quality control, and would thus be good for one-way link building.

Blog Commenting

With Web 2.0 in full swing, blogs are plentiful on the Internet. But it's not just the owner and the authors who can benefit from blogs. With a little research, you could get links even from blogs that you have absolutely no affiliation with.

Most blogs have a comments section where readers can post their thoughts or reactions to what's been written. This is a great place to insert links to your site, especially if it's a very well known blog. Even as part of a comment, that URL still counts as a one-way link to your site, and will still improve your rankings.

Social Bookmarking

Once again, Web 2.0 comes to your rescue with social bookmarking, one of the newer trends in SEO. Essentially, it's just people sharing interesting sites and links with other people through bookmarked URLs. Imagine the volume of extra traffic you could get if your site was among those bookmarked. The key to social bookmarking is to make your site look particularly interesting and unique, even to just a niche market. It's usually those sites that get the most circulation on social bookmarking networks. But you should submit your URLs to the networks in any case. Because they'll store the URLs in a database or a repository somewhere, that will still count as a one-way link coming from a very popular site.

Article Marketing

The Internet today is all about information. You have to offer one of three things - products, services or information - in order to get noticed on the WWW. But since you're already offering the first two items, you could use the third one to promote your site.

Article marketing services basically place links to your site inside chunks of text content that's related to a certain niche. The niche content ensures that you'll be reaching out to your target market, to some extent. And once your marketing articles get posted on sites and big directories, each of those links will help boost your rankings as well.

While article marketing is touted as the most effective among these four, there's no rule that says you should limit yourself to just one. Try to use as many of them as possible so that you get to cover all the bases and eventualities.

Why Is Keyword Research Critical To SEO?

by Kurt Steinbrueck
Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Why is Keyword Research Critical?
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, "search engine optimization" gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while "search engine marketing" gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target "search engine marketing", you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for "search engine optimization". There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable (found on the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it's a key component of search engine optimization.

What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don't share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online which are generally thought to be pretty accurate and Google does offer a free tool that gives the "approximate" number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google's) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It's not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Since Google's figures come from…well…Google, they are probably the most accurate, but even their figures are only estimates and I've found that many keywords return a "Not enough data" result. You may wish to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.

The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use "web page" for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.

1. No one other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine folks aren't talking.
2. Each search engine has a different way of determining how competitive a site or page is. So, even if you could figure out one, it wouldn't necessarily be so with the other search engines.

Despite these difficulties the search engines do give us some general information about what makes web pages competitive (what determines page strength). I'll look more into how you determine keyword competition in my next article.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It's best to know what you need to be targeting.

Short summary of SEO strategies and secrets - Part 1

by Alla Babin

Here is just a short summary of the SEO techniques that can be helpful in promoting your website. You can find more articles on SEO, Marketing Strategy and other marketing and web related issues.

Part 1

How to increase a website search engine Page Rank (PR) and improve SERP?

1. Put a lot of content on the page. Make your web pages content clear and attractive.
2. Make it informative, unique and useful for HUMAN visitors.
3. Build a sitemap for your website and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
4. As little as possible outgoing links.
5. More pages with more content and less outgoing links
6. More inbound links (preferable one-way links) from sites with a page rank higher than yours.
7. Good internal links structure.
8. Update your website as often as possible by adding more unique content.
9. Publish articles on various free Articles Directories. Do it often… as often as possible.
10. Leave comments with your site URL in various relevant blogs.
11. Submit your website to quality directories.
12. Make sure all the pages of your site link back to the Home Page.
13. Make sure the loading times for your website are not too long. Google seems to take it into account when calculating the PR.

General SEO tips

1. Create site map and upload it to Google.
2. Create a robots.txt file.
3. If you really want your content to be correctly indexed by Google, it must be within HTML.
4. Submit your website only to QUALITY directories.
5. Do not submit your website to link farms.
6. Do not submit your website to directories with low page rank.
7. Write articles and publish them on Article Directories for free. Submit more articles, and more… this really works.
8. Link your website to social networking websites.
9. Minimize your pages loading time. It affects their ranks.
10. Give Google some time to rank your site. It doesn't happen overnight. You may expect the first ranking at the next "Google Dance," which happens every 4-12 weeks.

According to what criteria does Google evaluate sites?

1. Number of incoming links
2. Authority of incoming links
3. Age of site
4. Page rank
5. Keyword prominence

How do web spiders/crawlers work?

1. They don't understand text, nor the language.
2. They are handling words and work with them.
3. They find frequencies, removing non-significant words (e.g. is, the, a )
4. They evidence correlations.
5. They work with thesaurus and synonyms (only advanced crawlers)
6. They find correlations between words and phrases from meta-tags (keywords, description, etc.) and words and phrases from the content of the corresponding page.
7. They count those words and words combinations (phrases) and figure out their density and distribution throughout the page.
8. They like the density of about 3% - 6%. Higher density may be considered artificially created content. This reduces web page rank.
9. They like even distribution of the keywords and key phrases throughout the page.

What is the best way to write titles?

1. Use main keywords.
2. Keep your entire title below 90 characters.
3. Use the Page name first, then, if you still have free characters, use your site name.
4. Think of what your potential visitors would be searching for. Make sure the title tag clearly reflects the content of your web page.

Short summary of SEO strategies and secrets - Part 2

by Alla Babin

Does a domain name (URL) play any role in SEO and how to choose a good domain name?

1. Google does not appear to give any weight to keywords in URLs. The keywords in URLs appear (are highlighted) after the calculations for ranking have been completed. They are not counted in the algorithm; they won't help you get better rankings by trying to manipulate them for search engines.
2. Yahoo gives a little weight to keywords in URLs.
3. MSN gives a lot of weight to URL names.
4. It's better to use hyphens than underscores. Hyphens tend to split the keyword phrase whereas underscores are treated as one keyword.
5. Google announced that they treat hyphens and underscores the same way, however it's not the case with Yahoo and others. Stick to hyphens, it's safer.

How to build Back links (or inbound links)

1. Submit your website to search directories under related categories. It's recommended to use those directories where no back links from your site are required.
2. Submit your articles in Articles Directories. It's free.
3. Don't forget to use good anchor text with your main keywords. (Anchor text is the text that contains a hyperlink to your website.)
4. Use forums and communities to promote your website there.
5. Don't put links to your site on the websites whose Page Rank is lower than yours.
6. Simple reciprocal links (from site A to site B and back from B to A) are not efficient any more since Google "learned" to recognize and ignore this kind of "artificial" optimization technique.
7. Checking back links to your site, do not rely on the Google "link" command (link:mysite.com), it is flawed. Instead search Google for the string: "mysite.com" -site:mysite.com . This will show you all the pages indexed by Google, which are not part of your site. The "minus" sign in the string tells Google NOT to show the site itself, but only external links to the site.

How to optimize a blog ?

1. Find operators of other websites that are willing to swap links between the pages where your blog is and their pages. Swap links with these pages.
2. Make your subject matter topical, such your opinion of the news of the day or of issues that are of concern to a majority of people. This will result in other pages linking to yours.
3. Give the title of your page a unique name, but one that is easily searchable. The easier it is for the search engines to find your blog or website.
4. Search engines tend to ignore blogs that are less than 250 words, so use that length as a minimum.
5. Set up meta tags including a description and several keywords, which should be there in your blog. Search engines will use these to find your blog or website.
6. Use headlines and subheads in your blog. Search engines tend to rank these fairly high when they examine your website, and they should increase your ranking.

Is it Ok for SEO to use Flash sites?

1. Quite recently Google has announced that they have been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, they've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology. However, this technology is not yet as effective as html crawler and it's still preferable follow the below rules.
2. Use Flash effectively: i.e. a few banners on site, some short animated text, etc.
3. Google can "read", although not very effectively, text and content of a flash file.
4. Other search engines can't do it.
5. Avoid using Flash to display content.
6. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can't "read" links in a Flash file. Never build a site with Flash-only navigation. You should at least create a parallel html navigation (NOT in javascript).
7. Remember that robots do NOT run javascript and can't "see" whether graphics are coming from flash or pictures. If you want your site to be easily and effectively indexed by robots and spiders:
   • Make sure that all the content is in full text. Of course it prevents you to use fancy and smart fonts, and might look less nice, but by getting these pages indexed you give surfers an occasion to find your pages.
   • If you use fancy navigation (Flash, javascript, or picture maps), be sure to put in parallel some html-coded navigation.
   • You may also consider building an html map of all your pages, where visitors, as well as search engines, will be able to see links to all of your pages with one-paragraph descriptions of each page.
   • The html-coded text on each and every page should have at least a link to the home page and to the page of the map.

How to avoid Google penalization to your site or blog?

1. Google can penalize a website that has:
   • Bad link structure;
   • Hidden text;
   • Small fonts;
   • Paid links;
   • Duplicate content;
   • Excessive link exchanges;
   • Back links from online casinos, adult and drug related sites.
2. How can you know if Google penalized your site or not
   • Using Google Webmaster Tools , to "tools". If your site has been banned, you should see a link to "resubmit your site.|
3. What to do if Google penalized your site?
   • First of all, eliminate all the possible causes of the penalization (see # 1).
   • Resubmit to Google, explaining what exactly you have changed.
   • Do not try to justify why this happened.
   • Remove all the links to any sites unrelated to your content.
   • Submit your site only to quality directories that do not require a return link.

SEO Strategies That Always Work

by Jeff Schmidt

When it comes to what works in the search engines, a ton of recommendation you read is the newest flavour of the week or loophole that somebody's exposed that may help you get great search engine rankings… for about a week.

Learn how to increase website traffic at UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com

It is also true that tiny things change on a or weekly basis. These tiny changes can be virtually impossible to keep up with.

So what's an individual meant to do to get great search engine rankings? Easy . Stop targeting the tiny things, like tweaking your keyword density, or changing your meta tags, and target the factors that are going to matter long term.

Fortunately, there are some basic principles that you can apply that will help you weather the storm of continually fluctuating search engine algorithms. These are techniques that have worked for years, and will work for the obvious future.

One ] Write Great Content Make the focus of your website on having really good content. I'm sure that if you have read some of my previous articles, you can know that I continually harp on the significance of having great content. Well, the rationale is that the search engines need to rank the sites that have the best material the highest. Also, folks will naturally link to great content. Give the search engines and people what they want - quality content. Dodge quickly thrown together crap, and if you hire writers, make sure they know the subject matter they are writing about.

2 ] Update Often Your website should be updated frequently. This suggests not just going in and modifying what's already on your website, but having a steady stream of new content flowing into the site. I love to use blogs for this purpose since they're really straightforward to use and maintain.

3 ] Get Links Build up your links. You need to always be searching out quality one way links. If you are using article selling, directories, or press releases, be proactive in getting new links to your web site. Once you start focusing on long term optimization methods, you'll find that your rankings will improve without you having to go in and make tiny changes each time you read about what the search engines are favoring that month. Your content will rise to the top over time without you needing to continually mess with it.