Link Building SEO Strategies

Link Building with My Blog Guest

2010-08-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

Guest blogging has always been a very powerful way to get strong links from editorial quality websites. The reason is because it is a win-win opportunity for both the site owner, as well as the guest poster. If you look long and hard enough, you can find many websites that allow guest posts (including this one), however Ann Smarty went above and beyond when she created My Blog Guest.

My Blog Guest is a community of guest bloggers and website owners who are looking for guest writers. The site does the job of weeding out the search of finding which sites accept guest posts, so you can save time and get right to growing your website and expanding your link building SEO targets.

With this community, you can quickly search for blogs in your industry, that target the right audience, and that have enough authority themselves to pass a quality link to you. Not only will you get a dofollow link from every guest post you make, but you will be doing the webmaster a favor and also be introducing yourself to a plethora of potential new subscribers to your content which may also push more sales.

There really is no reason why you shouldn’t be guest posting, as everyone wins.

Google Launched The Phone Call Option For Gmail And The Quality Is Impressive

2010-08-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

And yes the day has come when Google launched the call option for Gmail. From today you can make phone calls from mail application. The 1st call was made from San Francisco to Paris. Now let’s talk about the price of it. No it’s not free but it’s very cheap in my opinion: $0.02 a minute.

The calls inside USA and Canada will be free of charge. For international calls you will have the option to buy prepaid credits with the Google Checkout. This option will be available in the next weeks but the free calls to the North America are available from today so pick up a PC and call you friends with confidence.

In a press release Google officials had this to say: “Our hope is we’ll be able to make enough margin on international calls to keep offering it at that low price,”
Our friends from En-gadget had a test and compared the Gmail feature with the same one offered from Skype and the 1st impression was that the 1st one offers the best quality. And it’s only the beginning.

HTTP 200 Response Ok Error

2010-02-18T03:54:00.000-08:00

Standard response for successful HTTP requests. The actual response will depend on the request method used. In a GET request, the response will contain an entity corresponding to the requested resource. In a POST request the response will contain an entity describing or containing the result of the action. This is also one of the link building strategies

The initial response line, called the status line, also has three parts separated by spaces: the HTTP version, a response status code that gives the result of the request, and an English reason phrase describing the status code. Typical status lines are:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

or

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found

The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request, for example:

GET an entity corresponding to the requested resource is sent in the response;

HEAD the entity-header fields corresponding to the requested resource are sent in the response without any message-body;

POST an entity describing or containing the result of the action;

TRACE an entity containing the request message as received by the end server.

HTTP 100 Continue Status Code

2010-02-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

This means that the server has received the request headers, and that the client should proceed to send the request body (in the case of a request for which a body needs to be sent; for example, a POST request). If the request body is large, sending it to a server when a request has already been rejected based upon inappropriate headers is inefficient. To have a server check if the request could be accepted based on the request's headers alone, a client must send Expect: 100-continue as a header in its initial request[2] and check if a 100 Continue status code is received in response before continuing (or receive 417 Expectation Failed and not continue).

The purpose of the 100 (Continue) status is to allow a client that is sending a request message with a request body to determine if the origin server is willing to accept the request (based on the request headers) before the client sends the request body. In some cases, it might either be inappropriate or highly inefficient for the client to send the body if the server will reject the message without looking at the body. This is one of the important Link Building Strategies.

Because of the presence of older implementations, the protocol allows ambiguous situations in which a client may send "Expect: 100- continue" without receiving either a 417 (Expectation Failed) status or a 100 (Continue) status. Therefore, when a client sends this header field to an origin server (possibly via a proxy) from which it has never seen a 100 (Continue) status, the client SHOULD NOT wait for an indefinite period before sending the request body.

Google Supplemental Index Exists

2010-02-08T00:56:00.000-08:00

One way that you can measure your websites’ SEO health is by figuring out if your most important web pages (such as those that contain your biggest selling services or products) have been placed in Google’s supplemental index. Many people think that when Google ceased to label the supplemental results pages, that signaled the end of their supplemental index. False. Google made in clear in their article “Supplemental goes mainstream”, published at their Webmaster Central Blog, that:

“The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as Supplemental Results. Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google’s supplemental index being deeper and fresher.”
The pages which are the first results for any SERPs are those in the main index. The only time you’ll find pages from the Google supplemental index is if there are very few or zero results for your chosen search term in the main index.
Furthermore, Google has a tendency to transfer old cached pages over to their supplemental index. These might be pages which aren’t even on your server any longer.

Bot Herding for PageRank Flow

For appearance in Google’s main index, your web pages must have a certain indefinite amount of Pagerank or “juice”, in addition to and apart from other relevant factors. Google makes use of PageRank values for setting crawling priorities and determining whether or not a document belongs in their main or their supplemental index.

Matt Cutts, who heads up the Google Webspam Team, has this to say:
“PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a URL is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results.”

Once you understand the common causes behind supplemental pages you will be able to determine which pages might be placed in the supplemental index. Then you’ll be able to improve your websites’ internal linking via links from fully indexed and more prominent pages added to your pages and your home site.

Effective Link Building Strategies:

Andy Beal says something very similar to Matt Cutts:
“If you got 60,000 pages, and you only got ’this much’ PageRank, and you divide it [...he mumbles], some of them are going to be in the supplemental index. Given ‘this many people’ who link to you, we’re willing to include ‘this many’ pages in the main index.”

An SEO professional or a Link Builder will tend to advise you that the most highly effective way of getting your pages out of the supplemental results is by creating unique, high quality content and then doing promotional work to acquire inbound SEO Link Building.
That’s right, but why go through all that trouble without first seeing just how far you’re able to get with the PageRank that your site possesses now?
There is a handful of internal link-based strategies that you can use to fight supplemental results. One highly effective and widely used popular strategy has been dubbed “Bot Herding.” This is merely a methodology for improving yourwebsite’s navigating system via control of the flow of PageRank for enhancing the prominence of your most valuable and important pages. You can achieve this through linking to them from pages within your domain, etc.

What commonly causes supplemental pages?

The main cause of Supplemental results is very simply a lack of Page Rank. Nevertheless, this is not the sole cause. There are several others:

Pages with no or very low PageRank;
Suspicious pages, including non-unique or irrelevant page content heading tags, meta tags, links to bad neighborhoods, and so on.
Pages with canonicalization problems (duplicated content, too much content similarity);
Lengthy URLs, especially ones with extensive parameters, starting with a question mark (?) and being separated with an ampersand (&) and are not rewritten;
Pages with very little or zero original content;
Poor website navigation;
Keyword stuffing (using many irrelevant keywords);
Orphaned web pages which no-one links to, including your own;
Error pages, if a site does not use If-Modified-Since, Last Modified and/or Expires rules.

If you have pages that have been placed in the supplemental index, you know what to do. Remove them from there, save yourself money and time, and increase your website’s rankings!

Importance Of Alt Image Tag In SEO

2010-02-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

Alt image tag is a (Hypertext Markup Language) HTML tag which gives the web page owner the option of instead of showing an image (jpeg or gif format) file it will be shown as standard text type of information instead. It is one of the onpage factor in Link Building Strategies

Syntax
< IMG SRC = " spacemarine.gif " ALT = " Space Marines by Games Workshop Limited " >

Alt image tag uses

As of this time images is not a factor in the rankings as image files cannot be indexed by the search engine spider, but having an image will enhance the appearance and the presentation of a web page. Some web page may contain image files that are integral to the content they are presenting. Web surfers with slowed down internet access will be horrified to visit your site as it may take a thousand years to load it all, however, having an alt image tag will remedy this problem and also give these surfers an idea on what the image of your page have. It is therefore a good way to put an alt image tag, and while you're at it would also be a good idea as well to include your keyword to it.

Alt Tag Optimization

Alt tag text is now ignored by the top search engine spiders due to the fact that this is another one of those things that web designers have abused to notch up their ranking in the natural results. Alt tag optimization will therefore use the alt image tags to not only describe the keyword but out relevant keywords in that tag. The top three Search engines (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) may not allow their spiders to index such tags, there are still other search engine that uses or allows the alt image tag be used as a ranking factor. One idea also gives rise to the fact that the algorithms use in search engine rankings is never stable and is always changing so it is better to be flexible and prepared to an instance wherein the alt image tag may once again be considered a factor in ranking a site on the natural search results of a search engine.

Infobarrel - Dofollow Link Building

2010-02-05T03:01:00.000-08:00

Just like Hubpages, A website called Infobarrel is a good site to build backlinks to your blog. This is because InfoBarrel has a pagerank of 4 and is well perceived by Google. Infobarrel allows only unique and quality articles on the site. Before your post goes live, the post has to be approved by a moderator. This is to make sure that your post is unique and properly written. The approval process is short. It is usually done within 24 hours. From my point of view, this is good to keep the quality of the site. You are allowed only 2 links within the post to another domain. But there is no limit to you linking to other Infobarrel articles. It is from this allowed 2 links that you use to build Link Building SEO to your blog. You need to use your anchor text to build the link, and not the URL. Your articles can also be edited by other members. I believe this is to get rid of anything in the articles that doesn’t meet the requirements and the moderators missed it during the approval process.

Infobarrel is another revenue site i.e it pays you from the revenue it generates from adsense from your article. In terms of adsense earning, I can say that it is better than Hubpages because you get more percentage of the adsense earning. Infobarrel gives the author of the article 75% of the adsense revenue, while Hubpages gives the author 40%. But in terms of affiliate marketing, Hubpages is better. It is better because you are allowed to put eBay and/or amazon products in your post using your affiliate id of both sites. You are also allowed to show Kontera inline ads on your Hubpages.

Unless you have an established domain, it is better writing articles for Infobarrel. It is easier for your article at Infobarrel to have a better SERP than if the article is on your blog. Remember, Google has already recognized the site to be an authority site, so therefore any article on the domain is indexed and will rank faster.

Getting Traffic From StumbleUpon to Blog

2010-02-04T01:05:00.000-08:00

StumbleUpon (SU) is one of the coolest social bookmarking sites. You can really get some traffic out of this site. Today I’ll give you some tips that would help you get the most out of it. And I’ve specifically written this guide for blogs. But, you could use this guide for your forum too.

Stumbling other sites

I’m assuming that you have an account and have the toolbar installed. If not then go do that first. Okay don’t just start stumbling your own blog. It is also helpful for SEO Link Building Lets make it look legit and save your ass from getting banned by SU. So, go to some of your favourite sites and click on the “I like” button on your toolbar aka stumbling it.
Do that on about 2-6 sites. And make sure that you write a review on at least 2 sites. Make sure that the review is nice and not just some dumb shit.

Time to stumble your blog

Yeah now lets work on your blog. First pick a post (preferably a recent one) that you think is superb and would be useful to people. Bookmark that. Write a nice little review and try not to look spammy. Okay good. Don’t stumble all the posts. Just pick the best ones.

Adding friends

Add a few random people as your friend. And if you know people that use SU and has been a member for a long time then you just won the lottery. Add them right away. Ask them to stumble your blog and write a nice review.

Stumbling Networks

There are sites which are dedicated to stumble exchanges. Like people there will stumble you and in return you’ll stumble them. Smart bastards, huh? One of the sites that does that is StumbleXchange. And another one is BlogCatalog. You’ll find groups like this on BlogCatalog that exchange stumbles. You could give them a try. It’ll be worth it.

Generate Traffic Through Mybloglog With Link Building

2010-02-03T01:12:00.000-08:00

Mybloglog is another Bumpzee style community website. It also allows you to create a profile that shows the latest posts from your RSS Feed. They limit the number of posts shown on the profile to 5, so it doesn’t really matter how big your Feed is here.

You can also really leverage off the Internal Linkage here. There’s literally thousands of communities & absolutely nothing stopping you from joining every single one of them. It’s fairly easy to nail a PR4/5 Profile page in a short space of time and thus helps for SEO Link Building for your website

You can check out the mybloglog profile here.

I think one of my favorite ways to generate traffic and also one of the most underestimated, is to choose a unique and standout icon, and visit sites displaying the widget. I think you’d be surprised at just how many people will click on an interesting looking icon. I personally click on all of the ones that visit here with an icon that catches my eye.

Build out your community

MyBlogLog, at its core, is a social networking site. One of the best ways to bring traffic to your own site, is to let other members of the community know you exist. With MyBlogLog, you simply navigate to someone’s community profile and click the “Join Community” button to add yourself to their list.

Expand your friends list

Similar to building out your community, MyBlogLog also gives you the option to add individual members as contacts. The benefit of doing this is that it is a much more personal gesture and allows you to show interest without having to individually visit every single blog they run.

The largest benefit, however, is that by adding yourself as a contact, you appear on the FIRST page that people see when checking out a profile. That means that your eye catching avatar from our first point is now front and center on a large number of profiles.

Post messages in other communities
Another social networking option available with MyBlogLog is the ability to leave messages to others in a community message block on their profile page.

This option allows you to exchange messages either publicly or privately with members of your community. The biggest benefit of this, in terms of generating traffic, is it gives you a chance to make a more personal introduction and also to establish yourself as an active member of the community. By promoting those aspects, you will generate more visits to your site and are also more likely to find visitors who will consistently return to your blog for further posts.

Tag your Site

Last, but not least, another new but great way to get traffic from MyBlogLog is to take advantage of their newly added profile tagging options.

Blog Commenting Tips For Effective Link Building

2010-02-02T02:24:00.000-08:00

Here are 7 tips for you to get a more enjoyable blog commenting experience For Effective SEO Link Building:

You should avoid spamming the blogs in any way.
Don't do mass commenting. For instance, if you see several blog posts on the same website, don't submit one comment for each. It can be targeted as link spamming even though you are providing valuable comments.
Don't submit the same comment across multiple blogs. Chances are it will be difficult to do that since you need to find blogs talking about the same thing. But incase you do that and the topics aren't similar, your comments will just be deleted as they are irrelevant unless you submit a general comment like "Great Post" to all of them. But like I mentioned earlier, avoid sending these type of comments and say something more constructive.
Provide value to the post. Share your ideas, opinions and offer tips, solutions or personal experience.
Don't put your url in the comment box. You have a URL field for that.
Don't stuff the NAME field with keywords only. Use your name generally or sometimes it works to use your company name as some blogs won't mind.
Interacting with the blog owner or other blog commentators is also beneficial. It builds networking and relationships as well.

Blog commenting as a link building seo technique is highly effective when done the right way. When blog owners post content, they like other people telling them what they think or give their own ideas and opinions. And some of them really don't mind to give a link and not only a link but a link which gets value from the search engines provided they are receiving solid and valuable comments.

Guide To SEO And Link Building

2010-02-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

Per Comscore Market Research Study, 60% of average website's traffic comes from search engines. Google organic search alone drove an average of 41% of all traffic to the websites in Comscore study. For most websites then, the single most important thing to do to increase traffic is to optimize for Google's organic search algorithms and create content that speaks to relevant search.

There are two main categories for optimizing your website for search engines: On-page and Off-Page. On-page optimization means:

Creating valuable content on your website
Ensure your content is rich with relevant keywords for your industry
Building clear site structure, navigation, and sitemap
Creating friendly url that is packed with your keywords
Get a good domain name that contains your keywords

Off-page optimization means

Getting inbound links from other relevant website

Why Links Matter For SEO?

Links are a source of traffic.

The more inbound links you have to your website, the higher the chance your potential customers could discover your products or services.

Relevant inbound links improve your organic search engine rankings.

Search engine robots crawl the web to analyze the vast amount of websites' contents and prioritize the relevancy of each website. Building relevant inbound links to your website with relevant anchor text is the most important thing you can do to improve your organic search engine ranking.

Your Website's Content And Inbound Links

Both content and inbound links are important for your website to rank high in search engine. Google controls 70% of search market and one of the most important factors in Google's search algorithm is inbound link popularity. The important factors when building inbound links are:

The number of inbound links to your website
The quality of sites that link to your website
The relevancy of sites that link to your website
The anchor text (Anchor Text) of links to your website

Ways To Get Inbound Links To Your Website

There are multiple ways to get inbound links to your website depending on your budget. Many small webmasters or bloggers often do manual link exchanges with other relevant sites. This process takes a long time and efforts, and two-way links are not as favorable as one-way links.

Larger companies often hire SEO professionals to do the arduous tasks of SEO link building.

An effective method to build inbound links is to buy text links ads on relevant websites.

Tips When Buying Links

Buy links from relevant websites
Our search functionality allows you search for keywords that exist in the publishers' websites.
Use various anchor
text that reflects your Top Keywords. e.g: "Home Insurance", "USA Home Insurance", "Buy Home Insurance"
Buy links that point to an important page in your website
e.g: You may want to link directly to the category page of your e-commerce website. If you sell electronics, then you may want to link directly to LCD TVs category.
Keep your links for at least three months to see results
Search engines also classify websites based on their IP addresses. The more unique websites with different IP addresses linking to your website, the better.
Track your results by looking at your web analytics (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc). Look at "organic" traffic referral.
Use Yahoo's Site Explorer to track the number of inbound links to your site. You can do query such as: "link:http://www.mywebsite.com"

Redirect To WWW Canonical Redirect

2010-01-29T22:26:00.000-08:00

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name. This will help in indexing in the search engines not to split and also in SEO Link Building

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect Old Domain To New Domain - htaccess Redirect

2010-01-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.This would be helpfull in SEO Link Building Process for search engine rankings.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

301 Permanent Redirect For Webpage

2010-01-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page inspite of doing SEO Link Building. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

IIS Redirect

    * In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
    * Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
    * Enter the redirection page
    * Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
    * Click on 'Apply'

PHP Redirect

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

Dofollow Link Building With ChaCha

2010-01-24T22:30:00.000-08:00

This little diamond in the rough I discovered earlier today when looking up incoming links to a high ranking article that I had previously promoted. The website that this post will be talking about is called ChaCha, a service that allows you to text them any question you have and they will have their staff members look up the answer for you. Unlike the similar service called KGB that many of you may have heard of, ChaCha is completely free and is supported by advertisements.

I have used ChaCha quite a few times in the last year when I needed an answer to something that I could not find themselves, as they usually could help me out.
However, I noticed that when one of their staff members use Google to find an answer, they are obligated to state the sources of it, including the exact article as well as the domain it was found on. For example, Datepad.com wrote an article about the most fattening foods and over the course of a few weeks, many people have apparently used ChaCha to ask what the most fattening foods in the world are, with many of the ChaCha staff members citing that article.

When you are cited by ChaCha, you are given an anchor text link with the article’s title to your page, as well as an extra dofollow link that gives your homepage a little juice as well.

Now for you experienced SEO Link Building fanatics out there, you can find an article or a piece of link bait that you have written that ranks #1 for many of its related keywords, and then text a clever question that you know the staff members will Google the answer for. There you go, an easy permanent link anchor text link from a PR6 domain that may also send you some traffic over time.

Piczo - DoFollow Link Building Blog

2010-01-23T01:33:00.000-08:00

The blog here at Seo Leela want to share with you today is a website that has a pagerank of six and is very popular site. The site is called Piczo, and here is a little copy/paste snippet from their about page:
Piczo empowers teens worldwide to creatively express themselves, build personal communities, and share experiences with their friends in a safe environment.

Well, in addition to offering you the ability to make your own personal community and website on their server, you can also include links to your already active websites inside your blog posts. Registering for the site takes only a few seconds, and then creating a blog post and promoting it will only take a few minutes more. The end result is you will end up with a keyworded subdomain on Piczo’s PR6 domain that can easily and quickly be indexed and linking back to your flagship site in no time.

Leela Link Buildings Piczo Blog took under a minute to build, and is not very professional, but it gives you a quick idea, and obviously you should notice the HTML dofollow link that links to SEO Link Building homepage.

Footygoss - Another Dofollow Link Building

2010-01-18T23:01:00.000-08:00

Hello readers of Leela SEO's link building blog. Today I am here because I wanted to submit a guest post to show all of you a new place to build a link.

Recently I visited one site called Footygoss that provides news for the AFL and the various state leagues, especially the WAFL. Footygoss vision is to become the leader in football news and information at all levels right across Australia.

As usual I registered there and discovered that this site allows you to create a free user profile.

Register in Footygoss.
Go to My Account.
In the Personal Settings click Edit Profile
Fill the information and in the Bio section give Dofollow Link.
Update the profile section.
You can view the profile in the top of the website in Public Profile.

You can add a pure html dofollow link in BIO Section.

Here is my profile London Management Training

Do Follow Link Building With Red Gage

2010-01-18T04:35:00.000-08:00

The community director of a website named RedGage contacted me plugging her company. I signed up for the website and dug around in it for a bit, and decided it was worth sharing with you guys. Rather than doing my usual super-short-review of the site, I enclosed the community directors description of her site in her own words.

Redgage has many features that you can read on their or many of the startup reviews that you can find with Google. From a SEO link building perspective, there is a place on your dashboard that allows for adding link(s) to your profile, which are anchor text and dofollow. Take a look at the London Management Training RedGage profile for an example (yes I write about myself in third person now).
$25 Contest

The site also has a daily $25 giveaway contest for people that blog about the site or refer members. You can give me an entry by putting “collinlahay” into the referral spot or by using this referral link: If I win the $25, I will give it away to a charity or a reader, so there is reason you shouldn’t give me an entry

Google Changed How It Handles Nofollow

2010-01-12T02:08:00.000-08:00

In reality this change happened over one year ago, but only recently it surfaced. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam team, talked about it in the latest SMX event, and soon afterward the whole SEO sphere was commenting. He also wrote a post explaining the whole issue, titled PageRank Sculpting.
Here is a quote from that post that summarizes the change:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

According to Matt Cutts, the change was implemented to discourage website owners who were using a technique called PageRank sculpting, which is the process of using the nofollow attribute internally to change the PageRank flow among different pages. The objective is to give more PageRank value to some pages (the ones that sell something, for example) at the expense of less important pages (the Privacy Policy or Terms of Service, for example).

If Google wants to discourage PageRank sculpting, I am fine with that. The problem that I see with the change is that it might affect other types of websites negatively, blogs above all.
Why?
Because now all the links on your comment section are reducing the PageRank that would otherwise flow to your internal pages.
Here is a numerical example to let you understand it. Suppose that you write a super cool post explaining “Why Obama really won the U.S. presidential election.” The post gets some exposure on social media, and it ends up receiving 200 backlinks from other sites and blogs. Let’s assume that, on average, each backlink was carrying 5 points of PageRank, so the total points of PageRank for that post would be 1,000.

Now let’s suppose that you have 20 navigational links on your layout (e.g., the main menu, the categories and a section with popular posts). This means that each of those internal links would carry 50 points of PageRank to other internal pages on your site, which is good.

The problem comes when people start commenting on the post. Let’s say that, given the popularity of the article, it ends up with 150 comments. Each of those comments carries a link to the site of the comment author. Despite being nofollowed, they would still be counted on the PageRank distribution of that page. Now we have 170 outgoing links, so each link receives only 5.9 points of PageRank. Each of your internal links will only pass 5.9 points of PageRank now, and the total points of PageRank that will remain inside your website are 118.
In other words, before Google changed how it handles the nofollow attribute you would have gained 1,000 points of PageRank with that post. With the change, this number is reduced to 118.

And that is just what would happen in one post. What if we consider a blog with 1,000 posts and tens of thousands of comments? Such a blog could be losing a huge amount of PageRank.

Google might do something to fix this problem, but we still got to hear about it.
Is there any solution? Yes, you can either close your comments completely (but I wouldn’t recommend that), or use an iframe or Javascript to host your comments, so that the links to the comment authors won’t be inside your pages. Andy Beard wrote a post on the topic titled Disqus – Why 95% Of Bloggers Should Switch.

If changing to an iframe or Javascript based solution could give a huge PageRank boost to my blog, I will seriously consider it. For the moment, though, I will wait a couple of weeks to see how the debate around the nofollow changes will evolve. I will keep you guys updated if anything new emerges.

SEO Permanent 301 Redirection Setup

2010-01-08T23:25:00.000-08:00

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites and for SEO Link Building. You can use it in several situations, including:

to redirect an old website to a new address
to setup several domains pointing to one website
to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)
to harmonize a URL structure change

There are several ways to setup a 301 Redirect, below I will cover the most used ones:

PHP Single Page Redirect
In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

 header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");

exit();

?>

PHP Canonical Redirect
The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

 if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}

?>

Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect
In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect
Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

ASP Single Page Redirect

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

<%

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'

%>

ASP Canonical Redirect
The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be located in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

<%

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."

& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")

& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

End if

%>

Manual SEO Link Building

2010-01-06T05:45:00.001-08:00

Link building is one of the most essential parts of internet marketing and search engine optimisation. By gaining links to your site you will see your rankings increase, which will naturally bring you more traffic. There are many different ways of gaining links but the most effective ones are one-way links from web sites or directories that have relevant content.
The operative word in the title of this article is “MANUAL”. People try to trick and get round the search engines by using automated software but at the end of the day the search engines make the rules and we have to follow them. By gaining good links manually you will ensure that they are all submitted correctly and at a steady pace. When link building, if you gain too many links to quickly then link based search engines will see this and dismiss the links to your site deeming them worthless which is a waste of your time and money.
Web directories
This is the best way to gain a base to your link building campaign helping you get your site cached faster, giving you initial traffic and links. This takes some time to do and unless you pay for this to be done all it will cost you is time. You can submit your link to directories and get good one-way links but don’t forget to put your keywords in the title! This will help you gain rankings with less popular keywords and give you the foundations for ranking with competitive keywords or phrases. Web directories are launched and closed all the time so you should constantly check for new search engine friendly directories and ensure you have a constant and increasing amount of links to your site. Also a great benefit of directories is that there are niche directories which you can submit to. The advantage of this is the content and links around your link is more relevant, which can helps give the link more credibility.
Article directories
By submitting articles across the internet with relevant links you can gain some very effective links to your site. The obvious problem with article submission is the amount of time needed to create and submit your article but as with the web directories they dont charge you to submit your articles. There are many companies which will submit manually to the directories for you and give you reports so you can follow your articles. Some article directories allow you to have your keywords in the article linking directly back to your site giving you relevant one way links. In some article directories you can have as many as 3 direct links to your site in your article helping you optimise more than one keyword. Also the directories allow you to put a one-way link in the resource box helping you gain even more links.
Article submissions are very effective because you can dedicate a full page of content around your links, maximising the relevant content. The search engines see the link as very relevant and give it more credibility than just having a link from an unrelated site or a link from a page with a high link ratio compared to the amount content.
Link exchanging
This is a good way for site owners to swap links to gain some extra links and traffic. This can be done by simply having a links page on your web site and advertising the fact you are willing to exchange links. You need to make sure the web sites that are offering to link to you are cached in the search engines and are search engine friendly. You can also join networks between sites which all swap links to help gain better rankings and more traffic. In general the better the sites page ranking you are swapping with the more valuable the link is to you.
However you must remember not to get associated with a network of web sites that regular swap links between themselves because you never know what the search engines have up there sleeves in future updates.
Triangle linking
Triangle linking is a good way of exchanging links but still gain a one way link from a web site. This is achieved by a web site linking to your main site and then having a second site that can link to their site.
However you need to ensure that your 2 web sites are on different IP addresses, do not have duplicate content and are completely unassociated else your second site may be picked up as
a gateway or as a duplicate web site, which will potentially ruin your rankings on both your web sites.
Paid links
If you have the budget and need to gain links from web sites that have good PR and traffic then you can purchase search engine friendly one way links from such web sites. By having a site with a higher page rank linking to your site it shows the search engines your site is important enough for good respected sites to link to you hence why it may be worth paying. This is not essential to do as you
can gain good links from the other methods discussed. However, if your fighting for a competitive keyword then it may be essential to help you rank near the top.

Tips On SEO Canonicalization

2009-12-29T23:30:00.000-08:00

When I look at websites on the Net, it is amazing how many have problems with canonicalization. Say that word to most people and they'll reply "canon-what!" But if you want to get high rankings in the search engines it is something you need to know about. Here is a brief guide to SEO and canonicalization.

For our discussion a canonical URL is where two or more URL's resolve to the same page. This is commonly seen on the home page of a website. It could be possible to access the home page if you typed in any of the following: homepage .com or homepage.com or homepage.com/index.html

As far as a human is concerned these 3 web addresses are all one and the same page. But a search engine might read them as 3 different pages.

Why is this an issue for SEO? First of all it may divide the 'link juice' between the different versions of the page. It is much better to have 100 links pointing to the same home page rather than 50 links pointing to version one and 50 to version 2. This can have a significant effect on where you rank in the search engines.

You can tell if you have an issue with canonicalization by going a Google search for one of the numerous free tools. Alternatively you can do a manual test by typing in the various versions of your web address.

If you find a problem, you can resolve it by doing a 301 redirect. Choose either the www or non www to be your preferred web address and redirect the other one to it. You can do this with your htaccess file or via php.

As with many things, prevention is better than cure. The next time you are starting a site, think about canonicalization when designing it. Make sure that internal links are all to your preferred web address. Again, when you are building links from external sites, ensure that they are pointing to the correct version.

Importance Of Robots.txt In SEO Link Building

2009-12-29T00:59:00.000-08:00

Robots.txt is an important file that contains instructions to search engine spiders that tells them which pages are to be indexed and made public, and which pages should not be crawled.

It is important that all the pages of our website are indexed by search engines and that the search engines do not skip any pages for good search rankings. Whenever, search engine spiders visit a website, the first file that they search is the Robots.txt file. They use this file as the starting point because this is where they will find information regarding how they should treat the site. If there is no Robots.txt file, then by default it will try to crawl all the pages. But in practice, we can see that the search engine spiders skip some of the pages in their indexing for reasons of its own. However, if there is a Robots.txt file, which says that the spider should crawl all the pages, then it will ensure that none of the pages are skipped.

At times, some of the pages in our website should not be crawled such as pages within the members' account and other pages with sensitive information, etc. In such scenarios, it is important that we tell the search engine spiders that they should not index and list such pages in the search results. This information will be included in the Robots.txt. There may be situations whereby you may be adding a new page to your website but those might be still under construction. This page may have broken links and incomplete information. So when search engines crawl pages with broken links then it will have negative effect on the search rankings. Therefore, in such situations too, using Robots.txt we can stop the search engine spiders from visiting those pages.

There are times when we will be having two versions of the same content in our website for various reasons such as in the case of having a print friendly version and web version of the same page. Such pages can run into duplicate content issues with the search engines leading to receiving penalties from search engines that will affect our ranking. Therefore, to protect ourselves from such problems, Robots.txt file is highly important.

Power Of Contextual Link Building

2009-12-23T04:47:00.000-08:00

By now, anyone who has dabbled in internet marketing or SEO for their website knows the best way to rank in the search engines is to link build for the keywords they wish to target. While the search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, most experts agree that link building is one of the biggest. However, not all link building techniques are created equal.
As any true link building expert can tell you, there is a big difference between amateur and quality link building. True experts know that any link building campaign should be a balance of several different techniques which can include targeting less authoritative links through article marketing and forum participation as well as going after the big links, which typically include contextual and one way link building from high authority sites.
The goal of the search engines is relevant results - the number one result for a search should be a website that has the best chance of fulfilling the need of the searcher. If the search engines had their way, nobody would be actively seeking links - it would happen naturally based on relevance, usefulness and popularity of a site. Luckily, that's not the case.
Thanks to search engine optimization, we now know that we can engage in certain link building services and activities and actively help our sites to rank for our popular keyword phrases. Since the search engines call for ethical link building, the most powerful form of building links tends to be one way contextual links on relevant, high authority sites for keyword phrases you're targeting. Not only are they powerful links, but they look more natural to the search engines.
Contextual link building is one of the toughest, most time intensive link building techniques you can engage in - but the results are worth it. Not only do the links help your rankings, but you should also receive traffic from people clicking on those links. Getting contextual links is about finding sites that use your target keywords in their content, and persuading them to link to your site using those keywords as anchor text. To the search engines, this looks like an authority site is actually recommending you as a resource for that keyword topic - the more of these you can get, the faster you'll climb in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.
Here are a few SEO link building tips on how to find highly relevant and trusted sites to request contextual or one way links from:

Search your target keyword on Google and look at the top 100 sites. You want to get as many links from these sites as possible. To find the page on a site that is most relevant to your keyword, search Google with "site:domain.com keyword".
Use a tool like Hub Finder (from Aaron Wall's SEOBook) or similar software to run an analysis of these top 100 sites and find additional sites that link back to two or more of your top 100 - then get links from as many of these sites as well, preferably right within content.
If you can't get links from some of the top 100 (and it's tough, since many will be your competitors) examine their backlinks and try and get links from those sites. You can utilize Yahoo's "link:domain.com" search for this. Use the Google search mentioned above to find the page on the site that is most relevant to your keyword.

These three tips are some of the most powerful tactics you can employ when increasing links to your site. By mixing these highly relevant and authoritative links with lower level links from article marketing, blog writing and forum/blog participation, you can create a long term link building campaign that is sure to boost your rankings.
Keep in mind that building links is a long term process - rankings don't happen overnight (in most cases). But by engaging in ethical and quality link building, you will eventually see your site ranking for the keywords you've targeted. In the end, until the search engines drastically change their ranking methods, the site with the most links (and most POWERFUL links) will win the rankings race.

The author, Ashley Lichty, works as a copy writer, PPC specialist and expert link builder for a Lancaster, PA-based internet marketing company. ProspectMX provides various SEO services to businesses in need, including high-powered link building services such as: contextual link building, cherry picking links, authority link building, content marketing and much more.

4 Things To Look For Link Building Service

2009-12-21T20:36:00.000-08:00

One of the best things a business or individual can do to promote a web site is contact a link building service. Needless to say, high-quality, relevant links are very valuable, and a solid link building campaign has the potential to have a high return on investment. Because of the importance of links in today’s search algorithms, businesses and individuals should not take choosing a link building service lightly. The following are a few tips to help sort out the good link building firms from the bad.

1. Webmasters seeking a link building service should look for expertise first. The link builder should have a grasp of advanced link building algorithms (such as VIPS and TrustRank). Reading through the link building service’s web site with the utmost care is a must. Quite simply, the link building service should demonstrate knowledge and understanding of SEO, marketing, search engine algorithms, and appropriate business practices. Experts in the field of link building will undoubtedly make their expertise known on their web site.
Additionally, it is advisable to look at the link building service’s web site as a whole. Is the design professional and user friendly? It may seem like a waste of time investigating the web site design of the company, but it can be a very telling representation of what type of link building service owns that site. Experts in any field take the highest pride in their work. An expert link building service would want to present itself in the most positive light. Since the web site is indeed the portal from the link building service to the customer, its design and usability are quintessential. If a link building service is haphazard with their web site design, they will certainly be more likely to haphazardly build links.

2. When searching for a link building service, one should look for examples of proven success. A solid link building service will make past successes available for all to see. When coming across the proven success statements on the web site, be sure to follow up on the claims of the link building service. If the service claims to be ranked number one in Google for “widgets,” be sure to follow it up. Search “widgets” in Google and see if the service is truly number one. If it is, then that link building service might be a good choice.

3. The reputation of the link building service should be taken into account. People in the SEO industry understand high quality link building, versus low quality. A recommendation from peers should be considered to be very valuable, because colleagues can often be the best judges and offer the most objective opinions. The SEO industry is relatively small, and most SEOs are familiar with others’ work. A link building service that is well known in the industry is certainly worth consideration.

4. Any link building service should be honest about how links are obtained. There are straight foreword ways of building links (observing search engine guidelines) and there are ways that are considered to be “black Hat” (not observing search engine guidelines). Depending on preference, one should consider how the link builder would obtain links. If your web site has a reputation to protect, then hiring a “black hat” SEO could be a gamble. Additionally, search engine algorithms are always improving in order to shield themselves from black hat SEO tactics. That being said, a link obtained dishonestly could end up hurting the web site rather than helping.

Essentially, the best SEO link building service will proudly display past successes and offer all pertinent information about its link building service. A top-notch link builder will have expertise on the subject, and wonderful presentation (professional web site design). The link building service will make past successes available, and inform the client about how links will be obtained. The link building service should also have a good reputation within the SEO industry. The best firms will demonstrate knowledge, understanding, and initiative in link building practices. Searching for a high-quality link building service can be tedious, but if carried out correctly, the rewards will far surpass the effort.