TOP SEO TIPS AND TRICKS

XML Sitemaps Explained

2012-01-16T05:06:00.000-08:00

XML = extensible markup language

This specific purpose for XML and their developers was to design a new coding system that is easily read by humans and machines. With that accomplished, XML had to conform to all W3C and web standards to produce the current, highly effective XML code of today.

XML Sitemaps are very efficient ways of building a “table of contents” for the URLs of your domain. Helping search engine spiders locate and crawl all of your inner pages, this is a definite benefit to your SEO marketing efforts. Not only for SEO, but thousands of different tracking and analytics programs use XML code to help them track website progress, visitors, and a lot more detailed factors. Make sure that you are looking at all possibilities when building and developing your own domain, XML sitemaps, PCrobots, and other simple scripts can make your transition from new site to established blog much quicker.

Search engines send out thousands and thousands of crawlers each day for the purpose of finding and indexing web properties throughout the world. Sitemaps are one of the simplest tools to install on your website that will make this process more efficient and effective. Giving spiders a clear navigation to your domain and inner URL structure, showing off your content and media as fast and effectively as possible. With most established websites, Google and Bing index every new URL that is setup unless it is blocked by PCRobots.txt or the sitemap. You’ll be able to upload your sitemap into the webmaster tools admin console, do this as soon as your content is ready for release.

XML Sitemap Benefits:

Submit to search engine webmaster tools – Google and Bing
Help crawlers find additional pages and posts on your website
Get content and media indexed faster
Ensure that all of your inner pages are being indexed and ranked on search engines

How to Setup a XML Sitemap:

*WordPress Users = download Google XML Sitemaps or similar plugin to automatically create your sitemap at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Create a sitemap online – there are a ton of great free sitemap generators online -> http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Download and save the sitemap .XML file
Upload the .XML file to your website directory
Your sitemap should exist at /sitemap.xml
Submit sitemap URL to search engines, blog directories, and others

My Simple XML Sitemap

Types of Sitemaps:

Text XML
Video
Multi-level (sites over 500pages)
News
Mobile

Sitemaps can also be produced in other script formats such as HTML, ROR, and others. This can be used if you are trying to specifically cater to a certain indexing system or directory outside of the search engines.

Depending on your needs you may want to break up your sitemaps into multiple levels or build video sitemaps since you have such a major database online. No matter what type of site and index you are currently displaying online, you should be sure to include sitemaps for the benefit of search engine rankings and SEO progression.

All Publicity Is Good Publicity, But What About Online?

2012-01-16T04:34:00.000-08:00

Publicity issues have always been on the hot seats for all types of different media avenues, online is no difference. Individuals, celebrities, and businesses’ most commonly shared problem is “being isolated and unknown”. They go about resolving this problem by creating conversation to the public through link bait, advertising and promoting the benefits of their services and products to gain their target audience. Publicity really signifies its strong influence on business branding, promotions, exposures and how to gain power even in history.

A big part of correct “online publicity” is making sure you are targeting the correct keyword terms and phrases to reach traffic and search results that will bring you conversions!

Benetton Ad Examples

In 1984, Benetton gained recognition because of their “All That Colors of The World” campaign, which was later changed to the “United Ensign of Benetton”. The link bait was simply the “racial parity” of the advertisement as it became very controversial, and was later on addressed to a lot of other issues. Due to its wide spread controversy, Benetton attracted thousands and thousands of new onlookers and potential clients. Because of the issues surrounding the campaign, they gained great popularity that made Benetton an even bigger brand. People will always choose to focus on the spectacle, radical news, or exciting event immediately. Then you can use that attention to turn news and media into strong link bait for thousands of new readers all because some simple yet controversial matter.

Today, in a world where publicity is publicity, there are questions related to it.

Can every brand manage to stir brand awareness with bad publicity?
Is bad publicity good for brand awareness?
Does bad publicity really work?

In 1996, it has been made known that Nike mistreated employees in Vietnam. This caused some controversy on Nike’s part. Employees were allegedly forced to work by creating conversation below human conditions. Furthermore, their salaries were a pittance with and barely even raised. This resulted in multiple, front-page editorials by the New York Times, stirring a lot of drama up and teaching thousands of people about Nike. Yet instead of poor sales and a bad reputation, Nike still has the reputation that Nike sells quality products, created in third-world countries. The controversy had been creating conversation between many ordinary people, as it still has the negative involvement to the controversy itself. The Coca-cola Company in third world countries also had the same controversy. Although citizens continue to support and drink Coke, the ‘insect killer scare’ has probably left a mark on the trademark’s picture in many third world countries around the world.

Since we have observed, Benetton enthused up its controversies while Nike, along with Coke landed into controversies and were almost ruined. But how might you benefit because of a controversy? Obtain the crate for De Beers, that lucrative giant into the diamond manufacturing. In the 1990s, the De Beers features severed censure for community discussion purchasing, along with dealing into ‘blood diamonds’. Furthermore, it indirectly sustained the brutal commands they dealt through. It openly confirmed that it will cease to acquire diamonds from illegal sources. At that same point in time, De Beers organized the Kimberly Procedure Certification Scheme, to which seek toward certification of the derivation of diamonds. Through staying separated as companies and spreading out the liabilities, De Beers directed to undertake the community discussion with negative advertising. The negative advertising did not hurt them and started to be an asset when it became one of the causes of higher productivity in its time.

So what do all these signify?

Controversies can WIDELY expand a brand’s reputation and awareness, if it succeeds in inspiring positive sentiments than you are golden, if the sentiments are negative than it’ll often be positive in the long-term still.

Benetton’s trailer shocked a great quantity of citizens, but they also efficiently portrayed numerous burning matters which were at peak of people’s minds at the time. Hence, it managed to strengthen the brand’s online reputation in the process. On the other hand, the disagreements surrounding De Beers, Nike and Coca-Cola were clearly undesirable and left a sour taste. However, while Coca-Cola and Nike failed to profit in any way from these matters, De Beers administered to reinvent itself as a spotless brand, thanks to the controversies. Indeed, bad publicity is still publicity, no matter which angle you look. Although it may have created a link bait problem, the products involved may be talked about, creating conversation within a company. The community discussion might lead into better things, and may create a better online reputation.

Add More Media, Get Better Rankings

2012-01-16T04:29:00.000-08:00

If you want to improve the visibility and user-friendliness of your website the use of images has got to be part of your solution. If you want to have good SEO results and rankings than images must be placed on your posts and pages. Images not only gain more holding weight from search engine spiders and ranking results, they will also give you added inbound links from photo sharing sites and directories like Flickr. This is one of the best ways to make your website more attractive and impressive. It will be of great help for driving readers to visit your site and give them added reasons to check your site on a regular basis.

Captivating images can go viral

Google images has a huge collection of photos gathered along the web, they crawl and index pictures regularly including HTML and CSS meta tags. If your company is looking for the latest or best-looking website in the world, then you have to search it on Google images. Your business owner does not have to hire the world’s best website image maker, but images and media is a powerful way to connect and be found by search engine browsers. Google images indexes pictures immediately and will give added significance to the weight and overall rankings of your website. When they find original images attached with keywords, they’ll match your contribution with the correct keyword ranking results. Because all your work is done by experts, hopefully, and all this expertise quality of image developing will shine through and establish your authority throughout Google, from web results to 1,000′s of images.

SEO Tips – Images:

Try to add at least 1 picture per page/post on your domain to get benefits in rankings
Add full, quality descriptions, titles, file name, etc and target keywords
Distribute through social media networks (FB, Google Plus, Chime.in, more)
Add to photo sharing sites – Flickr, etc
Gain backlinks and try to use anchor text in any place possible

Video marketing is a bit more detailed and time consuming than that of creating images. Yet there is no better way to gain attraction and build brand awareness than a quality video marketing campaign through the viral networks of Youtube, Vimeo, and more. Big businesses and organizations hire expert video makers for regular editing of videos that is of different kinds and also for different purposes. Today, video marketing is so important to improve or to enhance one’s business activities and it is also necessary to describe goods and services fully. It also helps in achieving several tasks like it shows different parts of products at one time making it highly demanded.

Angry Birds Video Marketing - 1,000,000's++ of Youtube Viewers

Viral videos are the goal, whether its weird, odd, funny, nerdy, goofy, whatever. Shock and awe works great in online marketing, people want to be surprised, amazed, and intrigued. Stale and boring power point like videos are not shared very much. Crazy, insane footage with a quick clip to the brand at the end might be shared a million or more times within a week if people love the footage. Thats the true insane power of Youtube, but you’ve got to be working with some original, and awesome footage to get a hold on teh sharing popularity of today’s insanely high paced Youtube.

SEO Tips – Videos:

Fill out all descriptions, titles, meta with keywords
Search engines love seeing original video content
Gain backlinks from leading video sharing sites
Distribute videos on profiles with inbound links and get as many views possible

Unique media search engine marketing means that you are developing modern, high tech content for your website to spur conversation in the midst of your readers. Whether you are distributing on your site, in social media, or even news outlets, great media can be use as the launching protection for an enormous discussion concerning the topic of your matter of media information. For this matter content syndication is needed to immense your readers and your video or image to online sources. Content syndication takes time to go through manually and submit your images and video with the added content necessary. There are really not any shortcuts for this, especially if you want to receive the best benefits and long-term success.

If it is not uniquely written, then the article or document is not going to stay indexed by Google, and Panda may devalue the distributed media that is needed for achievement of a long period business. Anybody who has dabbled into search engine optimization (SEO) knows that unique media or content stages a significant role in your online success. Readers and search engine spiders a like are getting smarter and smarter, now they demand useful content and well written information. Search engine spiders are used to apply sophisticated algorithms in millions of different keyword results to weed out duplicate, scraped, and junk content. Unique media creations of images, videos, and text will help your domain maintain strength and positive energy toward your search rankings.

For SEO purposes, the use of diversifying media uploads is extremely interesting, since it diversifies styles of media and your backlinks that are promoting your business from hundreds, or thousands of sites. This established network of mixed media types will serve your well to to promote business with the help of diverse online audiences. As for those who have not heard yet, diversifying media uploads is a type of business developing strategy designed for any corporation. Keep mixing up your upload strategies and seek to make things more profitable through better sales, quantity obtained, new products plus new markets.

If you are a publisher or marketer seeking to build up the web presence for your company, to increase your website traffic, to promote your services and products, to achieve the sales you desire and expand the value of your investment –the efforts of social media optimization or (SMO) through image/video creation and SEO can be your best weapon.

Google still Loves Blogs, But..

2012-01-16T04:25:00.000-08:00

Blogging is one of the fastest growing online hobbies and side professions for millions of people around the world. But, despite the “blogger” fad and some publicity with celebrities and famous sports players, not many bloggers are making millions of dollars per year. There are some pretty exciting success stories out there though, from small personal mommy bloggers to large corporate outlets with thousands and thousands of followers.

Top 5 Reasons to Blog:

Added content = more authority with search engines
Google’s latest “Freshness” algorithm update prefers up to date and recent search results for many keywords
Gain extra organic traffic from long-tail keywords
Many additional URL page/post rankings for Yahoo, Google and Bing
Associate more and more keyword terms/phrases with your domain, backing it up with useful content

Building relationships with these bloggers can help create a stir and presence for your company or business online. Engage with them and help create/contribute quality content and media to their web communities.

So how can you best connect with these other bloggers?

Start your blog!

Whether your a small personal site or a large corporate company with 1000′s of employees, a blog is good for your website, period. I’m sure you and your professional staff are knowledgeable with hundreds to thousands of topics that are relevant and interesting to your peers, clients, and potential customers. Turn them into posts and pages that will help you rank better and create a larger community of followers, network connections, and possibilities for success online. These extra posts will rank for all kinds of keyword phrases, helping you gain extra search traffic every time you produce a piece of quality content. Throw in some media, write more volume and SMARTER copywriting than your competitors and you’ll be seeing some serious boosts in Google traffic.

Blogging for a Business Site:

If you are in a competitive niche, or a large corporation, write at least 2-3 blog posts per week
Look at your competitors posts – write more, construct images and videos
Google gives the most credit to posts with at least 650+ words and added “media”
Think about your users and what information they are searching for online
Get ideas/topics posted that can draw in and educate potential customers

Comment on other people’s blogs!

Look for the major players in your niche and industry, reach out and start getting connected with the individuals and businesses that have major followings and large communities. Begin adding comments that are worthwhile and well-though out to those relevant blog sites around the web. Get engaged with the highest page rank sites first, start profiles, fill out all information, and get to work trying to communicate and define new relationships.

General SEO Blogging Tips:

Always write at least 500+ words
Be consistent
Do your keyword research and target specific terms and phrases with your posts
Keywords in titles, descriptions, meta, and URL structures
Add images and video for best rankings
Submit your posts to social media sites and start new relationships around the web

Blog Commenting Tips:

Use real names or name@keyword for most approvals
Look for high page rank blogs
Stay with relevant domains, don’t spam the web with no regard
Add worthwhile comments, read the post for 2 minutes and respond
Be consistent, try a few comments per day over time you’ll see results

SEO Tip: One of the most successful tactics used by general “white hat” SEO enthusiasts, is to look for guest blogging opportunities. Guest blogging is simply addressing relevant site owners in your niche and industry and asking to write a post for them on related topics. They’ll usually offer you 1-3 dofollow back links as well, possibly with your anchor text, author’s name, or site name. These are really high quality contextual back links that have a low outbound link amount and strong keyword association in the content. Well written, big volume blog posts will be a long-term benefit for your website’s search engine rankings on related terms and phrases.

Sticky Content and Your Blog

2012-01-16T04:19:00.000-08:00

Sticky Content = online writing that stays in readers minds, quickly offering information/value to them, and rises to the top!

What is sticky content?

It’s really all about focusing on writing posts and pages for your blog that make sense, deliver the information quickly, and add value to the web space. When a visitor firsts lands on your blog are they bombarded by advertisements and affiliate offers? Or do they quickly see the headlines, titles, and factual points you are trying to deliver and are hooked into staying by finishing reading the post.

Obviously we can see the benefits of writing viral content and media, getting a thousand extra views per day or even per hour would be nice eh? I’m sure you can figure out how to use the thousands upon thousands of possible visitors resulting from top quality link bait.

What message are you sending?

What is your hook? – tap into emotions and feelings like new, original, exciting, scary, true, crazy, etc
Does the title reach out and grab your audience?
What message do you convey through your title?

Example: “MARINES TO OAKLAND POLICE: “You did this to my brother!” (One of the most viral stories online this week)

One of top stories on Digg this month

This was one of the top stories whirling around the social media bookmarking sites this week and it’s obvious to see why.

People immediately make an emotional connection of respect, admiration, and friendship with the subject, “MARINES”. Then, you see a surprising “subject and accusation/blame” combination following this, “OAKLAND POLICE and YOU DID THIS” which instantly triggers thoughts about guns, life changing experiences, and controversy. Lastly the statement places the event at home, in the U.S. and up at Oakland, California. The full title offers a 3 step series of trust/connection, then shock of the shooting, and finally its in our community.

People read this title and have strong emotions, it’ll be shared and talked about, discussed and argued by people who are emotionally invested and connected with the HEADLINE.

That is why you really need to think about how you are addressing your audience and what kind of message you are sending. Most online users will only BROWSE headlines and titles, they won’t even read descriptions unless they are “hooked” and interested. So plan ahead and think of how your potential reader will be scanning and browsing Reddit, Digg, Youtube, or any other social media site.

Where’s the hook?

Sharp headlines and titles – get their interest and attention immediately
Think of the message you are conveying
Crisp imagery and video – online browsers LOVE pictures and videos

What about the actual heart of your content, the writing itself. One of the first mistakes I see bloggers make is to write college style, research essays that are 8-12 sentence paragraphs. Large paragraphs are massive walls of text to online readers. It’s hard as hell to read! So stop writing huge blocks of text and be a bit more creative with how you deliver you ideas, thoughts and concepts to potential visitors in the future.

What works a lot better is to write in bullet points, lists, add images, quotes, and keep your sentences short.

Sure, search engine spiders love to see lots of keyword rich text and images, but don’t forget how the readers, and potential customers are seeing your website. It’ll be just fine for spiders to go through more paragraph breaks and spaces, lists and forms, or bullet points. Take the time to plan ahead for the distribution of articles, press releases, social bookmarks and make sure you’ve got the following tips in line.

Sticky Content SEO Review:

Have a hook – readers browse titles/headlines, make sure yours will grab their attention
Web writing is king! Don’t write massive walls of text, use bullets, lists, creativity
Add images and video for maximum success on social sharing sites

Connect Google Plus with your Blog

2012-01-16T04:09:00.000-08:00

Authorship has become increasingly important to Google and their search algorithm over the past 3 years. This really comes in line with their philosophies toward consistently improving their search result quality for users. Matt Cutts has said numerous times that Panda is created to eliminate duplicate content and scraped results so that users get original, diverse sources of information based on their keywords.

Why connect your blog to Google?

Better rankings as a recognized authority for your niche
Once Google has realized the author(s) of a blog/site, they can easily identify all scraped, copied, stolen, and duplicate content that is reproduced off your original work
Greater quality control for Google results – only show original content sources, no duplicates

Google Plus "Get Started" Page

Where to find “Direct Connect” on Google Plus?

Sign into Google Plus
Click “Get Started”
Scroll down and select “Google + Direct Connect”

What steps are needed to connect your Google Plus page and blog?

Add the Google + Badge to your website
Link to your website from your Google + page
Get as many +1′s from readers and peers to help get your blog noticed!
Google's Tips for Connecting

Now this will not occur instantaneously, it takes time for Google to full recognize the association between your social media account and website. Depending on how important or high your authority is, will directly correlate to how quickly the identification process will occur. I’ve seen a lot of the top guys in SEO get their blogs recognized within a week or two, while other sites, including quality companies, may take a month or more.

So there’s a couple of things you want to do to get your Google Plus page connected quickly, setup the badge, link from your Google Plus profile, and start writing good content. The more you are recognized around the web that sooner you’ll get connected and gain more authority with the big G.

This is a solid step in proving authorship and protecting the future of your content. You’ll help Google eliminate all the scrapers and blogs out there stealing and duplicating your blog posts and pages, helping you get to the top of the results.

AdSense Tips: Improve Your CTR

2012-01-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

When it comes to online advertising, the small things matter. It is a very common mistake to underestimate the effect tiny details have on potential clicks. Webmasters get caught up in building strong SEO campaigns to attract traffic to their sites. This is indeed a very important aspect of online marketing but if the site, ad or content are not appealing, users are not going to proceed beyond the front page. Here is a small list of some of the integral parts of a webpage or advertisement on said page that people tend to overlook.

Google created this industry and are privy to information that they have been collecting since AdSense started.

Font size, type and color. Yes, the type of font you use on your website or blog does matter. If it is difficult to read, people won’t read it. If the color is too light, people wont read the content. Internet users like color and usually want to see it incorporated into the text of websites.
Images; Users love images. We are a fast paced society that is constantly connected to the internet. If an infographic can explain something that a paragraph would normally be used for, then use one. Major search engines love images too, so it will help with the SEO efforts as well as please visitors of the site or blog.
Phrases matter; The difference between “closeout sale” “closeout merchandise” “end of year inventory blowout” etc. is huge. Phrases that mean the same thing to the advertiser don’t necessarily translate the same to potential customers. These small intricacies can account for a difference of 50% or more in CTR. If an add isn’t working, change the wording.
Ad placement; is probably the most important aspect to online advertising. Webmasters can’t slap ads wherever they think the images look best. There are certain areas of pages that provide better returns and these locations change on whether it is a front or internal page.
Blog and site design; imagine your site or blog as a person. Whenever you meet a colleague or peer, there is the introduction period and first impression. Whenever someone visits your site or blog, the front page is their first impression of your hard work. If the layout is not pleasing to the eye and uninteresting this first reaction by visitors will reflect how they interpret the content of the site. Bad design = bad CTR.

CTR is a term that can be applied to many different aspects of the internet, it does not have to relate solely to advertising, but most people think of the figures in marketing terms. I think a large reason for this is because Google has integrated CTR information into their AdSense program, the premier form of internet advertising on the web today. Because Google created this industry, they have been privy to information that they have been collecting since AdSense started.

Advertisers were not really aware of what techniques would work and what details were important. But as Google collected more data they have been able to isolate some of the best methods for converting with their AdSense model. In fact when advertisers reach a certain amount of traffic or rank well for highly competitive keywords, Google will often approach the webmaster and provide advice on how to increase CTR. Don’t forget, if Google is not providing their customers with quality conversions on AdSense clicks they will go elsewhere for their marketing needs. The more successful Google’s publishers are at creating relevant clicks, the more potential clients are interested in using AdSense. The most useful advice that Google gives its publishers is in regards to ad placement. This is their official advice for publishers starting their first AdSense campaign. (Note that they are concerned with many of the issues discussed up top.)

“The best location for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when considering where to position your ads:

What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
What do they do when viewing a particular page?
Where is their attention likely to be focused?
How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?” – support.google.com

The last question that Google poses to the user is interesting. They acknowledge the fact that websites and pages that are too cluttered chase users away. I agree with this premise but the amount of advertisements they recommend publishers place on their pages often creates an overwhelming user experience. But they have the data, we don’t so lets take a look at where they say the highest click through rates occur.

The darkest boxes represent the highest CTR locations and the lightest are the lowest. The information is not all that exciting as most people would assume the top left location of the screen is where most internet browsers read and click first. However this allows for some psychological mind games that Google has no problem promoting.

Text Ads directly below the navigation bar. If the ads are working properly the text should correlate to the content on your front page. Visitors will commonly click the Google ad thinking it is a category. This seems like misdirection, but is perfectly acceptable.
Text ads in the sidebars work similar to those below the navigation bar. Internet users expect to find links in the side bars and commonly mistake Google text ads for links to articles or categories.
Information encourages users to place ads above the fold. If webmasters used their allotted AdSense ads in the majority of locations that the CTR is highest, most of the content that is used to attract visitors is not even visible. Google says they want content above the fold so users can benefit from sites, but their advertising advice points in other directions.

They don’t want the same problems associated with many CPA companies to plague their model of online marketing.

It is a common misconception that Google does not approve of confusing advertising methods. They do not allow blackhat techniques such as cloaking of information or misdirection of potential consumers. No advertisements are to be altered by publishers as they represent the integrity of Google. They don’t want the same problems associated with many CPA companies to plague their model of online marketing. However, if one reads the terms of service there are a number of tricks that can be employed to increase CTR that Google has no problem allowing.

When determining where to place advertisements on your homepage just think about where your eye usually rests after opening a webpage. That should be one location you place an image ad. Images tend to engage readers much more quickly than text. I think text ads are best used to blend with other related content in the sidebars or below the navigation bar. The majority of highly trafficked homepages only use image advertising and reserve text ads for the inner pages. Take Mashable.com for example, they don’t even use text ads, they rely on massive imagery to keep their visitors engaged and possibly click on an advertisement.

I try to use successful blogs and websites as examples to follow. The resources are available for anyone to get involved with online advertising, the problem is people don’t know where to look for help. Sites and blogs that make large sums of money are a good place to start as they must be doing something well to earn that revenue. Google also provides great advice for anyone starting out, so anyone trying to monetize their site or blog should begin with the AdSense basics.

Users have different expectations of what they will find on articles and blog posts as opposed to what is on the front page.

Previously I touched on the fact that the homepage is a completely different entity than the inner pages. It is an enormous mistake to model the inner pages after the home template. Users have different expectations of what they will find on articles and blog posts as opposed to what is on the front page. I am a big fan of text ads on the inner pages as they fit nicely along side content, but images and media are the way of the future so it could be beneficial for people to adopt this method as soon as possible. To give people an idea of what advertisements should look like on a blog post or web article, I have added some more Google advice.

Once again, the maximum amount of advertising allowed is recommended. Depending on how long a particular post is, this format can look more or less cluttered. Imagine a 300 word article versus a 1,500 word post, obviously the more space on a page, the more natural the advertisements will look. So it is understandably difficult to give a universal guide for ad placement, but I think this gives many people the wrong perspective on how to market to their readers.

there is no reason webmasters should not use the tools they are given.

This post originally began as information regarding online advertising in general but has turn pretty AdSense centric. I am going to attempt to illustrate a change in ads that has been occurring over the past few years. As more people are becoming connected to the internet, the potential for more online exposure grows. Many people are not well acquainted with the world wide web and can fall prey to some pretty shady tactics.

Email marketing; email marketing is not illegal, but there are many scammers that exploit peoples willingness to respond to messages and participate in limited trials and offers. Some internet users do not understand how to filter their email properly and treat every message as something that demands reading.
Advertisements that look suspiciously like some type of instant message. Or a request from a real person that requires an immediate call to action. New internet users feel obligated to respond to a call to action and click boxes without thinking. This is not illegal, just an intelligent way to market a product.
Ambiguous images that encourage visitors to click advertisements simply to find out what the picture is. I really like this strategy. Google uses it for some of their AdSense images.

There are thousands of intricacies that can be tweaked and changed with online advertising. Webmasters and bloggers should change different aspects of their sites and see how they effect CTR. If something doesn’t work as intended it is very easy to change back. Some people don’t think the aggressive advertising techniques commonly found online are ethical. In some cases this is true, and many fraudulent online businesses have been shut down. But as long as Google and the judicial system find the majority of online marketing practices acceptable, then there is no reason webmasters should not use the tools they are given.

Bloggers, Backlinks, and Getting Famous

2012-01-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

As 2011 comes to a close, there have been a lot of changes to Google’s algorithm which have affected our online rankings and future strategies. Bloggers now need to focus on building content with smart copy writing and in high volumes to keep up with and ahead of the freshness update. With this being said, bloggers are spending more and more time writing posts than doing any search engine optimization.

But now that you have went and written all these great posts,how are people going to find them online?

You’ve got to keep expanding your efforts to improve your reputation throughout the web. There are some easy websites that help you consistently build, and develop relationships and properties online that promote your blog. Some of the options are to write more content for specific web 2.0 sites, where the user can add their own posts or articles, creating lasting, unique properties that Panda and Google will love to see. Keywords and relevant terms are splattered through your copy writing as to help integrate your back links with the correct search terms for future rankings.

Reputation Building Goals:

Gain contextual backlinks – high quality inbound links that Google appreciates currently
Integrate social media signals – “FB Likes, +1′s, Tweets, Diggs, Stumbles, etc”
Build inbound link properties that last over time and have user worthy content
Unique, large volumes of content with related keywords and strong association for your main site
Anchor text inbound links targeted at keywords you have researched previously

You aren’t gonna get famous over night. But, if you keep producing better content and blogs than your competition, there is a great chance for success in receiving thousands and thousands of visitors per month within a year or two. Of course many segments of the internet have seen large increases in the competition that is competing for a given keyword or niche. Google always says that they’ll reward the sites that offer a worthy user experience for their search results.

Don’t forget social media. You have to engage in conversations and create social signals that can boost your rankings.

So now that bloggers are busier than ever writing unique and original content, where do you go for backlinks?

Favorite Backlinks for Bloggers:

Squidoo – great site with strong PR, write unique articles and add images. Gain contextual links and they will last over time. Only place up to 3 links to your own domain, add some official/authority sites too.
Google Plus – get your posts on the web, +1 your content and engage into conversations with other like minded users. Conversations can always open new doors of opportunity for your site, don’t be shy!
Chime.in – fun site that is easy for social bookmarking, add a pic and link for max effect. Join all the communities that fit your niche and industry.
WordPress – build a free blog and post additional personal rants and raves, any original content can help improve your reputation. Add backlinks to blog and profile. Update your WP free blog regularly.
Blogger – good to make an account, add some unique info and place some inbound links. Come back and make comments to other related bloggers and also add some updates here and there.
Twitter – need to have an account, don’t focus too much time on tweets though. Just tweet and re-tweet some other related stuff, consistency counts.
Typepad – get a free account and post new blurbs/clips of information on it, gain more backlinks and social signs for Google to pick up on.
Facebook – no brainer, I don;t think it needs mentioning but try and get involved in any groups and communities you can.

This quick list of easy backlink hits will help any blogger see rankings improvement quickly. Just remember that due to all the algorithm changes this year it is important to take the time and effort to write new, original content for these backlink properties. Helping your work in building web 2.0′s last and gain page rank over time, constantly improving your inbound link portfolio as Google evolves.

Don’t spam these sites as you will be moderated, but try and engage at all levels. For example, make your Google Plus account complex over time. Keep adding +1′s for people and posts that you enjoy online, as well as, +1′s on your own site. This helps develop a sense of expertise and authority in a niche, since you are consistently finding and reading top level pages/posts in your industry. Social signals like this are becoming the new backlinks in 2012, I foresee a lot more time being spent on social media sites and small user controlled web 2.0s where people are constantly updating and modifying their profiles.

5 Tips for SEO Friendly Blogging

2012-01-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

1. Content is king

Matt Cutt’s “content is more important than SEO”
Look at your competition – how good are their posts? how often are they posting? what kind of social media is involved?
The more content you have, the more search results you can pull organic traffic from
Add keywords and be original (keyword density under 5%, don’t spam)
Consistency is key – write every week and daily if possible

With panda being the major algorithm that affects content and bloggers directly, you’ve got to be able to produce posts that have quality information and media for your visitors. The volume of content you need to produce is directly related to the type of competition you have working against you in the SERPs. For the most part any competitive niche is going to need 600+ word posts for best weight and keyword associations. Larger volume posts can also add in a lot of long-tail keywords that will produce extra organic traffic from low volume first page rankings. Competition is a lot lower for the long-tail keywords.

SEO is still very useful for bloggers, but if you do not have quality content, you will not see high rankings on high competition keywords. Many low volume/low competition search results can still be obtained by small niche and micro websites, but authority and content powerful websites are starting to dominate all high to mid competition search engine results. You’ve got to be keeping up with the “freshness algorithm” and producing large volumes of strong content that is loved by the “panda update”.

2. Keywords in Title

Titles are one of the more important factors of on-page SEO currently with Google, don’t waste too much time with meta keywords, but titles go a long ways. Make sure to match up the keywords in order as well, exact match will give you the strongest weight toward better rankings.

Don’t build long, spammy titles, just try to remember what your audience is looking for and how to include your key search terms into that heading. Most titles should not be over 100 characters, and that is on the long side. This is one of the most simple ways to see quicker rankings from on-page SEO, no need to write very vague and mysterious titles unless you already have the clout and rankings to go with it. Otherwise, make sure you include the keywords that your keyword research has provided you. All of the old keyword stuffing and junk on-page techniques are useless, focus on producing top notch content and making sure search engine spiders can read/associate the right keywords and phrases along with it.

3. Add Images and Video

Create your own original images and media!
Make sure to re-size and fit properly, keep file sizes manageable for broadband users
Place keywords in file names, good for getting picked up by Google images and search spiders
Place keywords in titles
Add all applicable meta tags – don’t spam, keep them diverse and no duplicates

Google demands that top level blogs are including serious media for their users. You don’t have to be uploading HD video, but nice stock photography or other quality imagery can really make the difference.

Not only is media important for Googlebot to see, you can also gain quality back links from distributing and uploading your original work around the web. Sites like Flickr, Youtube, and Slideshare are great for sharing media, adding keywords, and getting solid inbound links. Make sure to also be using your image creation talent or go buy some stock photos for social media uploads as well. This can really help you get more views and better results when social bookmarking or writing content like press releases, articles, and more if you can include your related imagery.

4. Integrate social media sharing!

There has been a major shift over the past two years in Google’s algorithm toward giving significant more weight to social media “signals” over other styles of generic back links. These social media backlinks are created when original pieces of work are shared, discussed, and often spread virally through communities online.

One of strongest back links currently = social media shares
If your post goes “viral”, you can get major traffic boosts
Let people make back links for you, white hat links and they can build them faster than you

Matt Cutts and Inside Search blog have both stated that social media signals are the new back link of the future. You want your blog’s readers to be reading, sharing, and discussing your posts. Ultimately you need some sort of sharing tool or platform that users can click into immediately once they land on your blog.

Goals = to get blog readers to share your posts through likes, +1′s, Diggs, Stumbles, Tweets and more Top Sharing Tools for Blogs:

5. Get the right plugins

Some of our favorite ideas for plugins and widgets are:

SEO plugin – homepage and posts meta data tags, time saver
Inner linking between posts/pages on keywords – i.e. SEO smartlinks
301 redirects
WP cache tools
Custom permalinks
Social media “sharing” widgets and plugins
XML sitemaps
PCRobots.txt
Automatic ping tools

WordPress WordAds Challenges Google’s AdSense

2012-01-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

WordPress has been around for a long time, and established its self as one of the best content management systems available to users. This blog is built from the WordPress platform. The product works well and has a community of dedicated users that are helpful for nearly any problems one might run into. There are 67 million WordPress powered blogs on the internet. This alone attests to the quality of the product.

WordAds has just been announced for the WordPress platform, something the community has been demanding for some time. It is supposed to be an alternative to Google AdSense and other methods of monetizing blogs. WordPress has made its opinion of Google’s AdSense very clear and it is not favorable.

There isn’t much information available regarding the service other than that a custom domain name is required. However, I would assume it will be similar to Google AdSense banner and text adds. WordPress thinks their users deserve better options than what are currently available to them and have decided to create their own service.

…they need to offer something extraordinaire.

This is exciting news as they might bring something fresh to the table. WordPress is known for developing great products and lets hope this holds true with WordAds. I have never been a fan of AdSense and would love to have an alternative. Here is the official statement.

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better.
Well we think we’ve cracked it, and we’re calling it WordAds.
Blogs are unique and they shouldn’t be treated like every other page on the internet. There are more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs coming online every day, and every time I explore them randomly I’m always surprised and delighted by how people are using the platform to express themselves.
As a WordPress user you’re breathing rarefied air on the internet: the Creators, the Independents. Creative minds aren’t satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain, and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you’re proud of because it’s so… you. @WordPress.com

It sounds like WordPress does not think AdSense is a quality option for their users. I don’t love the service but it has served as a valid way to monetize millions of WordPress blogs. Many people have found success using Adsense, CPA advertising or selling add space. Most people avoid change and enjoy using services they are familiar with. If WordAds wants to convert the millions of WordPress users to their service they need to offer something extraordinaire.

WordPress has the ability, I just hope the end product is something useful. It will be clear in the coming months if the service is a viable way to monetize a blog. More options are always welcomed.

Tips for Engaging Users

2012-01-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

Being good at search engine optimization doesn’t always have to do with link building and social media, the main focus is still on getting your content to engage and convert users. Whether this is toward your product, services, or building subscribers, you need users to gain power and influence on the web. That influence can easily net you thousands upon thousands of new back links, social signals and more benefits if you get the right type of viral attraction and sharing.

Are you writing your content with the end user in mind?

Checklist for User Engagement:

Is your content easily readable and understood by your browsers? (mobile? tablets?)
Do you have strong headings and titles that quickly identify the subject matter and hook?
Enhance your blogs pages with media that is relevant and connects with visitors quickly.
Create pages that users can easily navigate and scan upon first arrival.

Design is everything.

The design of your website is crucial to getting better results with your visitors online. Depending on what type of interaction and potential outcome you are looking for, different e-commerce and corporate sites have specific goals while bloggers generally are looking to build their network and following. Most bloggers hope to earn passively through advertisements, e-books, affiliate marketing, and similar type commission sales.

Layout – easy to read, navigate, and visualize various elements upon first arrival
Font and colors – identify vital areas with different font changes; size, color, bold, italic, underline, etc
Imagery – ensure that images are related and will entice readers to stay on your blog
Videos – can you integrate them in a meaningful way, don’t use auto-play and annoy visitors away, know your audience

Some things to think about when looking at your websites or blogs layout is the overall page width and sidebar dimensions. The hopes would be that your content width is wide enough to fill the majority of the visitors screen, while the sidebar still remains easy to read, navigate, and see. Visitors understand that websites main purpose and hopefully solution or use to them, exists in the main content area of the screen. So don’t disappoint them by having major ads and other junk spammed through the primary areas, instead intelligently add these features so that they blend in with your overall theme and style.

Create user friendly links!

Lots of times users do not want to be “told what to do” and demanded that they click a link. This has often been the style of scam and spam websites of the past, labeling links with text like, “click here”, doesn’t help tell the user where they are headed or what they are getting themselves into. While this may have worked in the AOL days of 2002, users have wisened up and you’ll see a lot of bounces if you use those tactics. Helping tell your readers and gain interest of those viewers who actually will convert and buy into your marketing is key. There’s no reason to trick an audience that won’t support your business, look to be honest and market to those consumers who are in need of your offers.

Studies have shown that users are more adverse to links with text like:

Learn more
Click here
Click for more information
Click now

It is best to gie your readers the keywords and summary for where you’ll be sending them if they click your link. Informing your readers of where they are going, will help gain your the clicks and conversions that will actually matter and create opportunities for your website. This is important in ensuring that the type of traffic your links are receiving is useful and targeted.All an eagle would really like, is a teapot

Xrumer – Black hat SEO techniques

2012-01-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

What is Xrumer?

Xrumer is an extremely powerful software system that offers a huge selection of tools and functions that can be used for search engine optimization. It can literally build 1000′s of backlinks in hours or even minutes. Is this all legit?

Well, it is a bit of a “black hat” technique. Meaning that it isn’t 100% illegal, but you could look like a spammer for using these techniques and receive penalties from Google or other search engines.

How does Xrumer work?

Builds database of forums, blogs, article, membership type sites – need to have profiles/posts/articles to create backlink
Generates keywords/scripting for specific website to promote
Automatically fills out all fields needed to create profiles/posts/forum login etc
Backlinks are generated by the 1000′s
Promoted website gains 1000′s of backlinks naturally over the next month as spiders crawl forums/posts/blogs/etc
Move up in SERP rankings!

What are the requirements for Xrumer?

Dedicated server
Offshore hosting
Private or good public proxies

So total hosting would be about $1,000 or so a month. Depending on where you are currently, I would assume this is a bit expensive for backlinks. And remember that this type of tool needs to be used carefully and very wisely to not get your domain banned from Google.

There are some affordable Xrumer options out there on the market. Many of which can be used intelligently and safely to provide some future, and rather quick, search engine ranking gains.

Scrapebox

2012-01-06T11:25:00.000-08:00

Since my last post was about Xrumer, I’m going to go ahead and speak about Scrapebox a little bit and how useful it can really be.

What is Scrapebox?

Locate thousands of URLs from Google, Yahoo and Bing in minutes! With custom footprints for finding WordPress and Movable Type blog posts, you can build massive lists of links that are highly relevant to your specific keywords. Great for researching competitors, finding new blogs to comment on, doing product research or even gathering facts and info for your next blog post or article.

Utility software that searches the web based off keywords to find backlink opportunities
Finds blog comment sites, forum posts, forum profiles, other
Uses proxies to keep your IP and Domain safe from being labeled a “spammer”
Finds 1000′s of related blog comments in minutes

Dangers of Scrapebox

If you abuse it, your website is going to be banned
Spamming comments to blogs will see very few accepted
Abusing an IP or Proxy will get it banned and you will need to find new one

Our recommendations on how to use Scrapebox effectively:

Search for thousands of backlink opportunities in your related niche/market
Manually review and post comments at related blogs
Start with high quality and high PR blogs
Rinse and Repeat

Akismet Explained:

Over 50 comments or comment tries within 30minutes = permanent URL ban
Akismet is very common on PR2+ blogs
Auto-approve lists ARE safe from the Akismet ban

Excellent tool to help you build backlinks, I really enjoy using this tool instead of doing manual searches in Google. But, you can still be very effective by doing manual commenting and such through Google using search parameters like, inurl:blog, site:.gov etc . So make sure you do not abuse this tool and spam comments all over the web, you can get banned and you might lose your Adsense account or something.

SEO and Social Bookmarks

2012-01-06T11:19:00.000-08:00

Social bookmarking is one of the most valuable search engine optimization techniques on the web today. This is especially true since Google’s recent algorithm change which de-valued a lot of blog, profile and other backlink type. Google has also noted that they are putting more emphasis on social media, which they believe to be the future of the internet.

What are social bookmarks?

A simple post that is added to a social media website
Categorized for relevant and interested viewers
Summarized backlinks that can generate their own traffic

My Favorite Top Social Media Sites

Digg
Reddit
Mixx
Diigo
Del.icio.us
Bibsonomy
Stumbleupon
Slashdot
Folkd
Gather
Blogca
Fark
Newsvine
Faves

How can this be accomplished?

Sign up and register, include links in profile if possible
Manually submit your link and a summary to each particular website
Use an automated tool to do this for you i.e. Bookmarking Demon
Ping the successful posts for quicker indexing

SEO Tips for Social Bookmarks:

Make sure to point each bookmark link at the specific URL for the original post
Write a unique, keyword rich summary
Add a comment
Give a “thumbs up”, or “vote it up” etc
Make sure to use Pingler or Feed Shark on the submitted bookmark

Thats pretty much the basics of social bookmarking, it’s an incredibly useful strategy for driving more traffic to your website that can convert into followers due to it being all relevant content. Also there is a lot of weight behind social media backlinks, Digg, Mixx, and Reddit can quickly help push your site to the top of rankings. So get started today and manually build them or if you have the extra cash make your life easy and buy Bookmarking Demon and create hundreds of social media backlinks quickly and effortlessly!

Updated SEO Strategy Section

2012-01-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Just updated the SEO Strategy section, also included a quick link wheel which is the basic fundamentals for many SEO campaigns.

This is really useful for those of you who are just getting started with search engine optimization and internet marketing.

Check out the link wheel and start creating web 2.0s, article submissions, and more backlinks. It’s all about getting going and putting in the effort, manual links can give some great weight and page rank. Just don’t waste all your time reading other pages and blogs.

SEO link strategy

Also depending on what your goals are for your website/domain, keyword research is absolutely everything in terms of marketing reach and traffic amounts. Make sure to put a lot of time and effort into your keyword research..

The What is and How to of Article Marketing for 2011

2012-01-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk on internet marketing forums about the current state of article marketing. How did the recent algorithm affect it? Article sites and directories took hard hits on the rankings, most losing 20-40% of their usual organic traffic. That really was a shock to a lot of search engine optimization “pros” who had been banking on strong PR article backlinks for a number of years.

So we know that article sites have been hit hard due to changes of content weight and quality for search engine rankings. Many of the penalties of this evolution was regarding duplicate content, spam sites, and often adsense violating websites.

Then we saw websites and blogs that consisted of primarily unique content jumped rankings and had a bit of a rush for low-medium competition keywords.

My current recommendations for article writing:

Write unique and separate content for articles
400+ words, spin heavily for automatic submissions
Increase density of 3-4 keyword phrases that are targeted
Only add backlink in authors box, spin multiple links and deep links
Use 3-5 various target keywords for anchor texts
Keep content relevant to backlinks

Top Article Auto-Submission Software:

Article Marketing Robot
Brad Callen’s Article Submitter

Best Content Spinning Software:

The Best Spinner
Spinner Chief

Social Bookmarking Tools: (great for building backlinks and traffic from articles)

Bookmarking Demon
Onlywire.com

Google has announced the future direction of it’s search engine algorithm will be aimed at social media and web 2.0 propeties. But, unless there are some serious changes coming soon, article backlinks will and continue to still be given some nice weight and can compliment any websites backlink campaign. Most of the links I am seeing from article directories are running Page Rank 2-4 overtime if quality content is used. Also, there is always the method of creating more links, blogs/forum posts/etc, targeted at the article submissions to increase their Page Rank faster. Just keep the content unique and relevant and don’t spam.

SEO Best Links – Tools to Use Everyday

2012-01-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

I feel there is a lot of inaccurate information out there on the web and people are mislead into scams and/or other junk websites when searching for SEO help and tips. So I’ve compiled this “SEO Top Links List” to help give you a foundation of websites to visit and complete tasks that will help in your search engine optimization efforts. Many of these can be used to create backlinks, but there are other SEO tools and sites that are very important to be including in your daily activities. It’s the whole package of diversifying your techniques and footprints to create the best SEO campaign for your website.

SEO Top Free Tool Links:

Pinging:

Pingler.com
Pingfarm.com – mass ping .txt and other lists
Feedshark.brainbliss.com – great RSS submitter as well as ping service

Pagerank Checker:

Mozilla’s “Live Pagerank” add-on
PRChecker.info

Unique Content Checker:

Copyscape.com

Word Count:

WordCountTool.com

Automated Social Bookmarking: (free trial)

Onlywire.com

Backlink Checker:

Backlink-Tracker.net
Backlinkwatch.com
iWebTool.com

Free Proxies:

Proxylist.co

Website Valuation:

Cubestat.com

Top Free Backlink Sites:

Web 2.0 Properties: (excellent for backlinks)

Blogger.com
Blogspot.com
WordPress.com
Weebly.com
Squidoo.com
Hubpages.com

Best Social Media:

Digg.com
Reddit.com
Tumblr.com
Delicious.com
Plurk.com
Scribd.com
Fark.com

Top Submission Sites:

Dmoz
Technorati
Manta
Google places

Google Tools: MANDATORY

Keywords Tool
Webmaster Tools
Adsense – ads for your website, marketing for other advertisers
Adwords – paid cost per click advertising

Keep utilizing all these tools and making an effort to get web 2.0 and other properties up. Google takes their time to recognize and allow a new domain to reach the first page of any SERPs, but stick with it and stay consistent. You will see results.

Are Paid-Backlinks Worth the $$?

2012-01-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

For a lot of webmasters, especially those of you managing larger companies and e-commerce websites, time is everything. Nothing takes more time than building a quality foundation of backlinks for your domain. We all know its a long process where you must consider link velocity as a factor, the steady improvement of backlinks is vital to long-term success. This makes it an on-going effort that will absolutely payoff, but takes away a lot of any webmasters time.

To save a lot of time and effort, many webmasters decide to pay for backlinks.

But what factors determine whether “paid” backlinks are worth the money? And, you want to make sure that there will be no negative consequences or future issues with the methods your paying for.

Beneficial “Paid Backlinks” Requirements:

# of Out-bound Links- NEVER pay for backlinks that are going to be from a web-page that has more than 50 Out-bound links.. a lot of the paid backlink companies offer cheap link packages that consist of thousands of OBLs on 1 web page, which means that all of the link juice is drained to practically nothing. This should be the first question you ask the SEO or Link pushing company, you want to receive the most link juice per web-page, so the lower out-bound links the more power your backlink is going to have.
Anchor Text – you want options here, I recommend choosing at least 3-5 different anchor text per 100 backlinks, a good strategy is having about 40% of links be your priority keyword(s) and then mixing the last 60% with more natural keyword phrases and such.
Relevance – you hear this word all the time in SEO and Google is pushing more and more for this in their algorithm each update. Make sure to compare your paid link options and stick with sites that can offer some relevance for your niche/business/etc.
Context – it is always preferred if you can add your own unique content with your link, this could be a short article or description that is spun. Spinning helps create hundreds or thousands of unique pieces of content that will help match your backlinks with content that is relevant and can help the search engine spiders give more weight to your links.
Page Rank – NEVER pay for backlinks from domains that are below PR2. It is not worth the money.

Using these factors to rank the different backlink services on the web will really help you eliminate the spam and junk offers. There is definitely no point in paying for links that are from pages spammed with thousands of other websites that are completely non-relevant to your site. You’ll receive little to no link power and it will not give you an improvement in your search engine rankings. I would only recommend using such cheap services for diversifying your link wheels or setting up anchor texts, other than that, these services may actually harm your sites “trust” with Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Hopefully this will help you eliminate the junk and choose the SEO companies that do offer excellent link packages, they are out there but they’ll cost a bit more. Yet, I feel the cost is often worth it and it is one of the best ways to see quick results in the SERPs, just watch out for SPAM!!

Can you build too many backlinks? If so, when? Why? How?

2012-01-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

The common SEO question -> “Can you build too many backlinks for a new website?”

Simple answer = “Yes, if the quality of backlinks are poor. BUT, You will never be penalized for having any # of backlinks if they are from related and relevant sources i.e. authority sites in your field or are natural i.e. link bait, viral social media explosion, etc”

the assumption = “If you build too many backlinks, your new website will be banned and de-indexed from Google!”

SEO Facts:

Google DOES have a “waiting period/sandbox” where they must build trust before allowing new sites to see quality rankings (this time can be very short or long depending on many many factors – different and more difficult post altogether)
Google DOES shuffle and dance your result rankings when re-evaluating newer websites as backlinks come in, once your in the authority phase you’ll see this dance is less and less
Google DOES NOT penalize based off quantity of backlinks
Google DOES NOT want webmasters to manipulate or game their algorithm
Google DOES associate YOUR website with the websites that you are getting backlinks from

I feel that these are some really basic points, but say a lot about how your website is going to be treated within the “new” phase, roughly 6months to a year in most SEO eyes. For a lot of new bloggers and internet webmasters, this seems like a long time. But for Google, the quality of search results is everything, if they lose accountability with their users and the quality goes down the drain, then so does their company.. Google cannot allow spam, fraud, and other criminal acts or false information to dominate their rankings. So taking a few months or even just a year, before giving you the keys, ain’t that big of a deal is it? Your website is going to be around a lot longer than that..right?

This new phase will be a time period for Google to learn why your website should be ranking on the first page. And how can Google learn about your website? Just like making a new friend, who are they associated with? Who says what about them?? In the online world, that’s your backlinks.

How does Google build trust with your site?

Backlinks – quality and relevance
Content – unique and duplicate %’s
Website quality – html/css/etc errors? any cloaked links? keyword stuffing/spam, blah blah
Domain age

Well, here is my take and experience with backlinks and new websites.

10,000 (indexed) backlinks or more per month within any of the the first 3 months attracts attention, you will be scrutinized further and possibly manually reviewed. If you pass and those backlinks are natural, than you are the man or have some friends who own Facebook or Youtube and happened to drop your link front page.. Only new websites with massive content at launch, >1,000 pages should be looking to generate a backlink footprint anywhere near this PER month so early on.

Backlinks that are NOT relevant or related should NOT be built in high quantities PER domain. The best way to avoid any penalties and see positive results, is to make sure they come from different domains, never stack 1,000′s of backlinks from a single domain, especially if it isn’t relevant.

Backlinks that are from authority and other relevant sites in your niche/market/profession/etc you will NOT be penalized for, build as many as you can. These look absolutely wonderful to Google and will greatly increase your search engine rankings quickly. You can spam higher numbers of these backlinks PER domain but I would recommend having a diverse variation in anchor text to reap the most benefits.

So there you have it folks, it’s not really the “amount” of backlinks as it is the quality and source. If you spam thousands and thousands of backlinks from junk domains you could be penalized, but most likely all of those links will be de-valued a lot.

SEO Tips Backlink Strategy for New Websites:

Build as many links as you can from related/relevant websites
Build high PR/quality non-related backlinks from as many DIFFERENT domains as you can (not as many per domain)
Diversify your backlinks as much as you can
Keep your anchor text natural – target numerous keywords and phrases, mix it up

SEO Tips for Backlink Tools/Creating Backlinks Manually:

Aim low quality/junk backlinks to Web 2.0 and other sites that then pass the link juice to your money site (buffer buffer buffer, don’t ever spam your main domain!!)
Make sure to not repeat the same “footprint” of backlinks, for example, do not spam the same 500 article directories every week with the same URLs/anchors and content types. This will raise a red flag as we have seen many of the directories been hit post-panda.
Never inter-link websites on the SAME ip address. This is gaming the system and Google will nail you for it. Even if your using a high PR authority site.
Get blog comments, article posts, press releases, directory listings, social media links, social bookmarks, and don’t stop. Keep blending, twisting and changing, you’ll build a network of link juice in no time.

Indexing vs. Crawling – Backlinks Explained

2012-01-06T05:05:00.000-08:00

Backlinks are really the foundation of search engine optimization, and there are really hundreds of different types and sources your website could be getting backlinks from. Anything from blog comments to profile links, social bookmarks and RSS feeds, web 2.0′s blah blah blah, you take the time and you’ll build a diversified and complex link wheel for any website. There is definitely plenty of information on where and how to get backlinks on this site, but a question I hear pretty often is , “how do you know that your inbound links have been ‘counted’? “. The first answer would be that they must be indexed, BUT through experiments and tests we know that links that are not indexed STILL pass-on a certain amount of link juice to your website. Which makes absolute sense because Google/Yahoo would not want to show all their inbound linking data and info about a specific website, that would be much easier to manipulate. Matt Cutts has made that clear in a number of interviews, so they show a “portion” of the link wheel that supports any domain and they may do this to show the best average of backlinks. No one is exactly sure and unless you work at Google we’ll never know, and if you do please email me

We know that Google does not show all of your backlinks in webmaster tools and will constantly re-evaluate, de-index and shift weights around on all your inbound links. This will happen because a backlink gains more popularity or goes stale and is dropped from the SERPs, all sorts of different changes that happen constantly to the search engines “environment” of data. This is where there are a lot of differing opinions on how indexing vs. crawling of backlinks vary.

Indexed Backlinks:

In-bound links that are showing in Google webmaster tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and/or SEO software
Links that are showing in Google would be considered highest value
You know that your receiving maximum benefits from that backlink

Crawled Backlinks:

Inbound links that have been pinged and crawled by search engine spiders
Carry “some” weight, but no one is sure how much compared to indexed links
Usually these links do not have much “content” associated with the link, more content (when relevant) is going to help improve the association and worth of a backlink pointing toward your main site

SEO Tips for Getting your Backlinks Indexed:

Always Ping – use Pingler.com, Feedshark, Pingfarm.com(mass list pings)
Setup an RSS feed with all your backlinks in them so spiders can crawl the feed regularly
Build a 2nd tier of backlinks pointing at your 1st tier links (2nd tier can be much worse quality)
Bookmarking Demon/Xrumer/Scrapebox are excellent resources for building a variety of 2nd tier links to get your primary/high quality 1st tier backlinks indexed

When blasting 2nd tier backlinks that point at your 1st tier, quality does not matter and who cares if your 1st tier properties get “sandboxed”, they’ll still pass on the link juice!!

No matter what, we know that having ONE backlink is better than NONE. Just make sure to keep your backlinks in good neighborhoods, try to associate relevance and unique content with every link you make. Whether its a small relation like a “business directory” or geographically, just stay away from spammed and junk websites that will effect your trust and rank negatively. If you are having trouble getting your web2.0 properties and such indexed, definitely focus on building an RSS for those that can be “dripped” pings consistently, then I would look to start creating your 2nd tier or links. Again, this is where I would really recommend a tool like Bookmarking Demon or Scrapebox, you can blast thousands and thousands of blog comments, bookmark submissions, Pligg sites, etc so that your main links are picked up and also this will distribute more link juice to your main site down the chain. This has really become the standard of the SEO industry recently, especially after Google’s algorithm changes which have made it much more difficult to use poor quality/junk backlinks to rank for your keywords. Its better to build lower quantity, high quality link properties and then build a foundation of linking toward those. Look for more backlinking tips, strategies, and techniques every week from SEOBestTips.com.

Beginning your Off-Page SEO Campaign

2012-01-06T02:46:00.000-08:00

The start of a business website can be complex and time consuming, integrating deep product catalogs and adding 1,000’s of items to your shopping system is the norm. With the beginning of search engine optimization you must properly setup the foundation of your website which includes: on-page SEO, content writing and curation, keyword research and targeting, and the structure of these elements through W3C validated html/css and a sitemap. Once this is established you can start implementing off-page techniques which will maximize that foundation and propel your website to the front pages of Google and Yahoo search results.

To quickly touch back on your previous on-page SEO and keyword research efforts, we must take into account those keyword phrases to write content for our off-page SEO campaign. For example, let’s say our company sells sporting goods and our primary keywords are: sporting goods, sport equipment sale, cheap sports equipment, sport equipment online, and such. The secondary keywords are much more specific and target lower competition keywords: baseball equipment for sale, hockey equipment, cricket gear, soccer shoes for sale, etc. Often we will be linking to deeper pages of your site that have correlated content, this provides a more diverse foot-print of backlinks that are spread to multiple URLs and pages/posts of your website, ultimately passing link juice throughout your domain. This will be the blueprint for our off-page SEO content distribution and in-bound link building, creating unique content that is focused on specific keywords with in-bound links to a matching page or post existing on your domain is the key. Intelligently incorporating your keyword research, on-page SEO, and link structure with the backlink source is an excellent way to create trust and reputation quickly with Google and Yahoo.

With the basic game plan set ahead of us, we can start creating relationships throughout the internet with other domains that can provide a beneficial effect in our search engine rankings later on. The first step for any sized company is to look at your market and peers that are already established and successful online and to connect with them. Use emails and blog comments to reach out and trade information and linking for a benefit to both groups. Often times a company will write high quality articles and blog posts which another domain can use to attract visitors and add content, but giving you backlinks that will support your efforts for organic traffic and search engine results ranking.

Think about the following questions when writing that content or sending out an email to the webmaster.

What does your company offer that stands out or/and are high specialized in?
Where are your strengths that you can leverage to create a mutual relationship with these players in your market for success?
Can you develop higher level content and media than what is currently being shown and used?
What steps do you need to take to reach that quality? Imagery? Video?
Make sure to align the content your writing and posting with the keyword goals of your website as well

There is no faster way to reach quality rankings in Google or Yahoo then to interact and build relationships with trusted, authority sites in your niche. So keep at it and bring something positive to the table for both players, if you cannot offer your peers something worthwhile, then go back and re-work your angle. Make it profitable and helpful for both of you. Second to that you’ll need to start incorporating your site with websites that will help build the credibility and trust behind your business. These websites are going to be of the “directory” type. As a rule, we do not want to form relationships (backlinks) from any directory that is associated with spam, junk, and other low quality sites. That would give us little benefit initially and will drag our site down over time as those backlinks get de-valued and eventually de-indexed from Google and Yahoo site tools.

Foundation Backlinks – Directories

The #1 trust directory on the web – DMOZ
Trusted Advertisers give good backlinks – Yellow pages, Google Places, Manta, and more
Look for business directories of a page rank 3 or higher (make sure to file your link/info in the right section)
Specialty directories specific to your market/niche are excellent, good relevance and look for page rank 1 or higher here

At this point your company’s website should be interacting and developing linking ideas and exchanges with your peers, helping you gain trust and credibility with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Secondly, you should be building online reputation through business directories and listings. A big part of this is that many of these website directories like Manta, Google places, and Yellow pages will not accept illegitimate companies in their listings. You’ll verify your company to get the listing and this quickly establishes legitimacy in the eyes of search engine algorithms.

Though this is just a small step in the overall SEO campaign needed for a company to operate successfully online, it will setup a strong foundation for your continued progress toward reaching the search engine rankings and keywords you’re looking for. Without this base it will be more difficult to establish trust quickly, especially if your backlinks are coming from “free ads” or other spam networks, they’ll not give you the association you want for success. So make sure to tie into the trusted networks of advertisers and business directories that have been established for many years to provide the backbone of in-bound links to get your company ranking toward the top!

Press Releases and SEO

2012-01-06T02:25:00.000-08:00

As we move forward through 2011, we have learned a lot about Google’s most recent algorithm evolution and how search engine optimization has been affected. We know that there is more and more of a focus placed on content, it’s quality and uniqueness is a major factor now. Since the Panda update, we have found that the strongest back links are being created through contextual linking. Press releases are an excellent source for contextual based links.

Basics of an Online Press Release:

150-600 word average: paid releases may have multimedia incorporated and 1,000 words
One link toward company site: paid releases may have more links + anchor texts
Focus of Press Release needs to be newsworthy, something new about your company
Provide accurate contact information, you never know who’s browsing
Its best to use multiple PR sites, instead of making multiple releases on 1 site

Press Releases and SEO:

High PR domains: some free and a lot of paid press releases
Write your own content; keyword targeted and relevant
Very low outbound links, you’ll get the most weight for your backlinks
Fast indexing: PR sites are constantly spidered by the search engines

It’s pretty easy to see why press releases are so strong for SEO improvements on any business website. There are many high page rank sites for press releases, most of them are PR5 or more, giving you a good connection to authority sites. Also, you get a lot of worthwhile content with your backlinks, unlike social bookmarking or small directories where you just get a link and a description. Make sure to take advantage and write the most you can, keep it on topic and target the keywords your looking to rank for.

Paid or free? That is one of the most difficult questions but it usually comes down to a simple answer, if you can easily afford it, paid press releases are much more powerful. You can often incorporate videos from your company, imagery, and a lot more content. These parts of your press releases will give you increased ranking power and should move the specific page of your press release up the PR ladder a lot sooner. Not too mention, you’ll also get added explicit SEO improvements that will directly transfer more weight and use than the average free option. Most paid options give anchor text for your link, now you’ll be targeting those keywords MUCH better with that anchor text. You might receive the option of using multiple links, instead of just one link in your profile or something harder to find for the search engine spiders. Not to mention just gaining added backlink options, most of the paid press release sites have their own distribution network which can be very valuable for creating more backlinks, attracting targeted organic traffic, and establishing more trust with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Even better than just their own network, most of the higher ranked PR sites are also in Google news, which offers a great connection for any new website, establishing trust and quality backlinks quickly. I highly recommend utilizing the paid option for Google news, it has a great impact on your SEO campaign and will affect your rankings quickly.

SEO Tips for Press Releases:

Utilize all the free press release sites you can once, no need to continue to post free PRs
Select the best PR sites you can afford a paid release and send 1 out per month on a newsworthy update for your company
Look for paid press releases that have networks to syndicate and distribute your content
Google news is a major plus to any paid release
DO NOT spam PR websites, it’s best to have more domains than multiple PRs from 1 domain

So now that you have more information about press releases and how they excel for your SEO campaign, go out and search for the best spots to write up your first release. I promise you’ll see results quickly, especially if you look into paid options out there. Do not pay for any press release on a domain under page rank 3 though, there are plenty of sites that offer PR5 and higher press releases, they are well worth your time and money.

Best Press Release Sites for SEO: (paid and free)

PRlog.com
PRweb.com
Free-press-release.com
PressMethod.com
PR.com
OpenPR.com

Backlink Diversity – Finding Post Panda Success

2012-01-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

Backlinks are a major part of any websites SEO campaign and although many SEOs are well versed in various methods and techniques, the game has changed quite a bit since the last algorithm updates by Google. Also, the merger of Yahoo and Bing should provide some serious revamping of their own website valuation algorithms and tactics, we are not sure if it will follow Panda closely, but you can assume that they will also be looking to improve SERP quality and eliminate spam/junk sites throughout the net.

Panda has shown us very quickly that duplicate content will be devalued first, we have seen this happen to thousands of websites across thousands of niches, if you have duplicate or scraped content you’ve probably seen your rankings drop a lot. If you haven’t had it happen yet, be sure, Panda is coming and they are uploading new data sets almost monthly now to re-evaluate the web and search engine results, you’ll be de-indexed before you know it.

But what about backlinks? Google has announced that their Panda algorithm is critically evaluating the quality of inbound links for a given website and will be harsher on those who have heavily manipulated their backlinks or have a lot of low quality/spam linking.

Often we have not attributed this new calculation of inbound links to the decrease in rank of many websites as we see that many of the low quality/spammed backlink websites also have duplicate and scraped content. But what about the millions of websites that need backlinks to be built on a steady basis today, to help them climb the search engine rankings and receive organic traffic. You’ve got to be smart about how you build links now, especially with Google tightening their ability to read and find poor manipulation techniques for inbound links.

Future SEOs must create intelligent and diverse backlink footprints that will not be penalized by Panda and future algorithm updates.

What is required for the BEST SEO Backlink footprint today?

Diversity
Relevance vs. Quality
Content Syndication

Diversity – this is really the base of any SEO campaign, you’ve got to keep things looking natural. Websites that have 1,000 blog comment backlinks and nothing else is pretty obvious manipulation. Especially if all the anchor text is matching.. For strong diversity we’ll need to setup backlinks from many different sources for example:

blog comments
profile links
forum signatures
article marketing
guest blogging
advertising (Manta/Yp/etc)
press releases

There are still hundreds of more ways to get backlinks for a website, but this general overview would quickly keep your inbound link footprint safe from Panda. As you can see this would offer 7 different sources for inbound links that should have various anchor text that are targeted at your keywords but not spammed/exact match. Never over use and abuse one specific linking method, make sure to not allow one specific keyword technique to get over 25% of your inbound linking. Panda will start to penalize your backlinks if it sees that a vast majority of links are coming from a very similar method, this is pretty easy to identify for manipulation, especially since you are probably using an automated SEO tool like Scrapebox, Xrumer, or others.

Relevance vs. Quality – Now I know that we are constantly preaching RELEVANCE in backlinking, while that is absolutely true and very important to your link-building efforts it is not always required. When we talk about many of the automated or simple backlinking methods such as blog comments and profile linking, we definitely want to keep it relevant because the quality of links and the PR/authority of these pages is pretty low. But, if we are gaining backlinks from high PR and trusted authority pages, the relevance is not as important because Google is already trusting and putting a lot of weight into the quality of those pages.

As the quality of a backlink increases, the relevance required to successfully pass on PageRank and other weighting factors for your SERP rankings decreases.

For example:

PR O blog comments = low quality, high relevance needed to gain weight for SERPs

PR 7 authority guest blogging = extremely high quality, relevance a much smaller factor in receiving weight for SERPs

So as you build links throughout the internet remember that the lower quality source, the higher relevance is needed to obtain the highest weight toward your websites backlink footprint and search engine rankings. This is a general rule that has become more and more prudent since the Panda update and if you stick by this you’ll see that the links you are creating will generally be successful in passing on page rank and other weight factors for your rankings. You’ll also be more effective in your link building and recognize what opportunities are worth your time and which ones are not.

Content Syndication – the final rule to ensuring the backlinks you are creating will be successful and a positive contribution toward your overall rankings, is that you’ll want to establish links with quality content. Also, try and stay away from gaining backlinks from websites that are already penalized or devalued by Google, especially those with scraped/duplicate content such as autoblogs and other sites. Those backlinks will end up being devalued and removed anyways, plus your starting to associate your website with “bad neighborhoods”, this can hurt your SEO campaign if it becomes a majority of the inbound links to a site.

do not backlink from websites that have duped/scraped content
focus on adding content that is unique and relevant with your backlinks, i.e. make quality blog comments, web 2.0s and such
backlink content should be keyword targeted
mix anchor text but keep them focus on primariy keyword goals
spell check and use correct grammar, its a quick step and you ensure the best results

Hopefully these backlinking tips will help you stay clear of various methodology which could end up hurting your overall campaign to climb the search engine rankings and gain the ever important organic traffic you’ve been looking for. Panda has eliminated a lot of previous SEO tactics, both white hat and black hat, from here on out we are going to need to be much more careful about how we approach our link-building and what kind of footprints we leave behind. There is no doubt that Google is increasing their own efforts which in turn, are making our jobs more difficult and time consuming. So step up and put in the time and effort to create well diversified link wheels and footprints that will not be devalued in the post-panda world.

Why ping? SEO and Ping Services

2012-01-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

What is a Ping? A ping is a simple outbound ICMP packet containing URL and website info(title/desc/etc) that is sent out to a server requesting a response. SEOs target specific search engine, blog networks, social media and other servers so they respond and come investigate the URL includes in the ICMP ping request.

When you hear about “ping services” and “pinging backlinks” it is all about the “ping”.

But why are webmasters shooting out pings everyday and what functional use do they have for your website?

The primary reason that webmasters utilize ping services or plugins is to help get their content and URLs browsed by search engine spiders. Once you have established a new page or post with great content, keywords, and media, you’ll want the search engines to be aware of it. Sending out a ping request to search engines to come spider and read your new post/page is the easiest way to get pages indexed quickly into Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Plus there are some other worthwhile networks which you can send pings too.

Why Ping?

Get backlinks indexed and found sooner so your website gets credit and link juice
To get search engines, blog networks, RSS feed sites, etc to spider and index your website
Get your new pages and posts indexed into Google, Yahoo, and Bing faster
Indexed pages show up in search results, so the faster they get indexed, the sooner you can get traffic

Only send pings when new content is added to your site and spiders can find something new/worthwhile, spamming ping services can get you penalized or banned.

There are a few different ways to ping the search engine servers. You can utilize a free ping service, there are a lot of quality ones out there and remember that most of them use the same server lists. Also some ping services even have automated registration and “ping profiles” that you can build for custom ping schedules. Otherwise you can just input the data quickly and manually ping the links you need when you want. I don’t mind taking this effort since it will only take you a minute or two tops, but you’ll be sure to have no spamming or automation issues..

SEO Recommended Free Ping Services:

Pingler.com – great ping system for single URLs and main domains, setup an account and customize an automated schedule if you’d like
Pingfarm.com – excellent MASS PING website, great for backlinks and link lists that you want spidered for indexing
Feedshark.Brainbliss.com – use this to ping Podcast and other blog networks as well, great ping tool

WordPress users are the real lucky ones, they get to utilize plugins to optimize their WP blog for ping service use. These plugins will regularly ping your newly created content, whether its a post or page to all services included. One of the only problems is you have to get an optimized ping services list, which I will post at the bottom of this page. If your a blogger you’ll never need to do this manually, except for backlinks and offsite work. Just setup one of the ping plugins and make sure you set it to ping only on new content creation, no need to spam already indexed and spidered pages non stop. You can be penalized and even banned for spamming ping services, you’d have to do it a lot, but why risk it.

WordPress Ping Services Plugins:

CBNet Ping Optimizer – excellent tool, all options and you can set it to ping only new content or manually use

Ping Services List:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogoole.com/ping/
http://blogoon.net/ping/
http://blogpeople.net/ping
http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
http://blogsnow.com/ping
http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2
http://hamo-search.com/ping.php
http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogoon.net/
http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2
http://ping.fc2.com/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.kutsulog.net/
http://ping.myblog.jp/
http://ping.namaan.net/rpc
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.wordblog.de/
http://popdex.com/addsite.php
http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping

1 Link Building Rule: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify

2012-01-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

Today’s link building focuses on new, unique content copywriting and distribution through quality channels online.

Diversify!

Link building is a part of the kind of seo or search engine optimization called “off-page” SEO, because you are creating web properties that hold new, unique content and build a reputation for your website. You must have heard of this if you have been into the business of SEO. These backlinks transfer direct link juice and page rank from having inbound links from another domain. That’s, perhaps, easy enough for you to understand now. But these backlinks and often, link wheels are multi-tiered linking that can actually easily help with the optimization of a page and online rankings.

Today however, the panda algorithm and new Google ranking requirements demands webmasters to pay close attention to the quality and diversity of links.

If you have been doing any forms of link building then I hope you know that it is important these days to diversify links. This may mean for you to go with multi-tiered linking or to go with the various link wheels that you can come up with. This may seem difficult at first but if you are creative enough to be able to diversify these backlinks and other such links then you can do it.

This can be done through press releases, blogging, guest posts, directories, articles and all types of content that may have been written with the link to your site and the like. The sources where you spread these links should be diversified so that people can go into your site in different ways or modes. This isn’t that difficult to do if you have different ways of marketing your products and such online. Backlink seo really is one of the simplest ways in which you can optimize your site well.

A lot of people today are into online marketing and SEO. And, pretty much all of them have some understanding and have been introduced to backlink seo strategies. This is actually one of the basic ways of doing search engine optimization of a site, but there are some bad ways to do this as well. Certain automated, black hat techniques can place penalties on your website and cause some serious issues with your rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Pay attention and do things of the highest quality, careful of spammy or low quality sources. If you are experienced in things like these then you can teach others who it is to do seo link building. This can be very helpful knowledge to those who have yet to learn how to do so.

Backlink Tips:

Target High PR sites
The less outbound links on a page the more weight you will receive i.e. link farms are very low quality
Unique content only, especially since Panda
Don’t spam, build them slowly and naturally
Write content specifically for keywords you are targeting
Add original media (images/video) for better results and PR gains

Diversifying links may be a more difficult and time taking effort, but you’ll see better results and long-term success.

What do I recommend?

You can always focus on one step at a time, and use high quality content on web 2.0 or other sites to setup the use of the link wheels.
Then after you have the first high quality web 2.0 and social media properties up, start adding more lower quality but high quantity backlinks for the more complicated multi-tiered linking.
Once your link wheels are built or started, focus on engaging with your community: blogging, forums, and other strategies
Make sure you are regularly updating your main domain during this period as well

Trying to be very broad in the websites and domains you are gaining links from is crucial to long-term success and best weight. Google does not want to see serious abuse and heavy manipulation, so spreading your links out across many styles, domains, and methodology helps keep your reputation clean. This way, your site will be able to benefit from many different kinds of backlinks to help your site receive more hits and organic traffic.

Search engine optimization is important to every website these days because this is one of the best ways to improve traffic over time. The more traffic a site receives from multi-tiered linking or link wheels, the more visible they are to others. If you are the webmaster of your site then you should know more about seo link building or the nature of backlink seo. You should also be able keep in mind to remember how crucial it is to diversify links.

The combination and implementation of all these strategies will help you get the rankings you’ll need to receive more traffic to your site and maybe get some conversions.