Search Engine Optimization SEO Tutorial

Should link building be about quality or quantity? Don’t be too smart by half

Link building is arguably the toughest part of search engine optimization. Often you will be pitted against other sites who have huge amounts of links, many of them being extremely strong links as well. SEO’s seem to assume that the more links you have, the stronger your site will be and therefore the higher you will rank in the search engines.  This is simply not true.

Quality Of Backlinks

If the top spot on Google is taken by someone who has one hundred thousand links but they are all really low quality links that have nothing to do with their site, then you can easily outrank them with high quality, contextual links. Things like high quality article submissions, blog comments or blog posts can easily allow you to outrank poor quality, spammy backlinks.

It is possible to even outrank fairly high quality but low PR backlinks with a few high PR backlinks. The power of high quality backlinks should not underestimated, it is much better to have a few high quality backlinks than thousands of low quality backlinks, the search engines prefer it and you will rank much better for your keywords.

Contextual Backlinks

Another way to improve the quality of backlinks is to make them contextual. A lot of people when they are new to search engine optimization, will be sucked into buying thousands of cheap backlinks like profile links because they are cheap and you can get a lot of them easily, these links never have high PR and they are never related to your site as well.

Google will give more weight to backlinks that are from pages that are related to your site, so make sure you get backlinks from relevant and related pages. Also you’ll be able to get some traffic from these backlinks as well, if someone is looking at dog food information and they see a link to a site about dog food information, they are likely to click through as it will be relevant to them.

Content Types

Then most people are trying to find backlinks for their site, they will usually stick to just getting backlinks off pages that only have text content on them. Backlinking strategies like article marketing, blog commenting or press release submissions normally mean you’re getting backlinks off pages with just other text on them.

This makes your backlink portfolio look extremely unnatural and that could mean you get slapped by Google, which will mean your rankings will suffer. You should shake it up a bit and get backlinks from pages that have videos and images on them as well, it will be extremely positive for rankings and it makes your backlink portfolio look extremely natural as well.

Blog commenting the right way

Blog commenting definitely works and it is an extremely powerful search engine optimization technique. Blog commenting is simply when you leave a comment on someone’s blog post, leaving a link back to your site in the comment as well.

A lot of people have abused this backlinking strategy, a lot of blogs will first moderate comments before accepting them and even more blogs will make all links in the blog comments no follow so you won’t get nearly as much power from their links. Here are a few tips to make blog commenting as effective as possible, and also to make sure your comments stick.

Don’t Spam

If you are blog commenting then the number one rule is to not spam. Do not hiring someone to do a mass submission of blog comments to thousands of people’s blog that have nothing to do with your site. It is much better to manually blog comment, it is much more effective as blog owners can spot a spam comment a mile off, and they will just simply delete it.

The best way to avoid making your comments being classified as spam is to post on relevant blogs. If you are run a website on dancing, then leave a comment on blogs about dancing. Read the entire post you are commenting on first. Participate in the discussion and add value for the blog readers.

It should really go without saying, but when you leave a comment don’t make it generic and meaningless, putting “Great article, well done.” just looks like a copy and paste job. Actually read the blog post and leave a blog comment sharing your opinions on the post, maybe even quote a section of the text or another comment.

Anchor Text

When you leave a comment on most blogs, the anchor text will be whatever you type in the name field, most people will leave their anchor text as their keyword, their comment will then be removed because the blog owner doesn’t want comments made by people called ‘iPhone Reviews’ or ‘Weight Loss Pills’ on their posts.

If you want your comments to stay not be removed, be smart about the anchor text and just put your actual name or pen name. It will still carry link juice and it is a lot more likely to not be removed. Readers of the blog will be more likely to click through as well, because they will know the comment was made by an interested human being and not a spam bot.

Comment On A Few Blogs Or Lots Of Blogs?

It is much better to choose a few blogs to constantly comment on, say five to ten, than sending mass blog comment submissions to thousands of random blogs every so often, as you will be able to build a reputation on these few sites. Don’t be concerned about if the comment links are dofollow or nofollow. It is more important that you are adding valuable information to the discussion. Think about receiving direct traffic via the link rather than just a backlink.

The blog owners may even invite you to write guests posts but even if they don’t, the longer you stick around, the more welcome you will be. This will mean that your comments aren’t removed, and it will mean that other readers will visit your website with much more ease.

What the heck is Panda and the problem with duplicate content?

It has been hotly contested for years and it now appears that duplicate content is definitely a no go, especially after the recent Panda update by Google. Panda massively affected anything from small sites to major authority that did not post original content.

Many SEO’s had the view that duplicate content was okay, they would copy and paste content from others sites and use it to bulk up their own sites. They would get good rankings and make ranking and money. But what was the real value for the reader? The same piece of content could end up in the top 10 results two or three times.

Google’s Panda update gave a massive slap to site’s using duplicate content. This was meant as a quality control, because it encourages web masters to use completely unique content on their websites. Original content is better for people searching on Google, and therefore better for the search engine.

What Should I Change Now?

The clear message to anyone using Google to gain organic traffic is to use unique content on your site, not just because it will mean that your site isn’t negatively affected by the Panda update, but because it is better for your readers and Google will actually respond positively to sites using completely unique content.

If you were negatively affected by the update and you have duplicate content on your site, get rid of it and start adding lots of unique content, once Google has noticed that your site isn’t using duplicate content any more and instead you are using unique content, you will drastically improve your rankings and you will begin to see pre-Panda traffic figures again.

Whilst it was important pre-Panda to make sure that the content you bought was unique, now it is even more important. Now if you are ripped off by a writer who sells you duplicate content, you will not only lose money, but your website’s SEO strength could also be massively affected, therefore it is really important you make sure writers are reliable before hiring them and you should also use a service like Copyscape to make sure content hasn’t been copied.

What Should I Do With All This Duplicate Content?

Remove or reduce duplicate content. Replace it with high quality original articles and text content. Also use original content when submitting to article directories. This will give you a better change of article approval and develop more powerful backlinks.

How the heck do you pick a niche for Internet Marketing?

One of the toughest parts of SEO is starting out and trying to choose a great market or niche to enter. This can be tricky because you have so many choices and because every good SEO will know that if you get this stage wrong, you will be destined to reap extremely poor rewards. If you are selecting a market specifically to gain organic traffic from through search engine optimization, then there a few things you should be aware of:

Saturated Markets

There is nothing wrong with competition. In fact, active competitors will usually mean that a market is alive and kicking, and that can be a good thing. You should steer clear of markets that are ridiculously over saturated. Even though most markets are still growing, if there are thousands of extremely active and strong competitors, your chances of ranking well may be reduced.

There is no point going after heavily saturated markets because there are other markets out there which you can generate huge amounts of money from that have minimal competition. Some markets that you should steer clear of are the internet marketing, weight loss and car insurance markets. They generate huge amounts of money, but it’s the big guys that make most of it.

Authority Markets

Another type of market that you want to avoid are authority markets. These can be almost impossible to break. Just like saturated markets, they are profitable and they can make you money. Why waste so much time and effort when you can use it in another market that you will make you twice as much money with the same amount of resources?

You can tell an authority market a mile away. They will usually have lots of .gov or .edu pages in the top 10. It is not impossible to outrank these sites, but because these sites are so trusted they attract a lot of high quality backlinks from other authority sites linking to them. This means these pages are constantly growing in power with high PR, high quality backlinks.

The health and business markets are some of the most powerful authority markets and you will be facing an uphill struggle to take any significant foothold away from the dominant sites.

Search Trends

If you are choosing a market based on organic traffic, then you will need to make sure that it is getting constant and steady traffic via the search engines. If you want to use the search engines as a major source of traffic, you don’t want to suddenly find out half way through ranking a site that nobody is searching for your market.

Best to do a search for the market’s main keyword in a traffic analysis tool like Google Insights. Take a look at the traffic trends and make sure that it is steady and either has a constant or increasing traffic trend line.

You really do not want to enter a market that has a decreasing trend line. It will mean your traffic numbers will only get smaller. It will also seriously affect the re-sale value of whatever domain you purchase, as people do not want to buy websites in dying markets.

RSS Feed Submissions

If there is one way a site can explode it’s traffic over night, it is through RSS feeds. An RSS feed is simply a feed that shows all the recent additions to a site, this way a reader can subscribe to their favorite website’s RSS feeds and get quickly updated when a new piece of content appears, without ever going on the sites.

RSS feeds provide a quick, easy and free way to build a customer base that will keep returning to your site every time a new piece of content is posted, obviously RSS feeds are most beneficial to sites that regularly update, not so much for sites that rarely update or are completely static.

They are also much less intrusive than email marketing, even though a user will still have to sign up to your RSS feed, they will check it when they want, they won’t be bombarded with emails when they might not want them. This means that the relationship may not be as close with your readers, but at least they will not feel spammed.

To get wider exposure, you should really submit your website’s RSS feed to RSS directories, as you will then get a backlink to your RSS feed and site, this is brilliant for SEO and even better for getting your RSS in people’s face. Also every time your RSS feed is updated with something new, all the RSS directories you have submitted it to will be alerted and you will be able to get instant backlinks to your new piece of content.

RSS feed submissions are also very easy to do, you can easily submit your site to the main RSS feed directories in a few minutes and you will benefit from them constantly. Since you will get instant backlinks to new pieces of content through RSS feed submissions, it will mean that your new content gets a big boost in terms of SEO, meaning it will rank well and it will also be indexed in a much shorter amount of time too.

RSS feeds are also brilliant for backlinking, there are many free services online where you can turn thousands of backlinks into an RSS feed, you then submit that RSS feed to thousands of RSS feed directories and it will help your backlinks get indexed. This is great if you are building backlinks on pages that would otherwise never get indexed, for instance if you bought profile links (these are typically low quality links that get indexed extremely slowly) then you could get them quickly and effectively indexed using RSS feeds.

On Site SEO Factors

When you ask experts about search engine optimization, they can often get so caught up in the latest backlinking strategies and techniques that they completely neglect to mention on site SEO factors, which are extremely important and can massively affect a page’s strength in terms of SEO.

The best way to show you how to use on site SEO factors to great effect is by example, through out this piece I will be using the example keyword “mobile phone” to show you how to master the simple on site SEO factors that most web masters don’t know about.

Before we go any further, since the Panda update Google hates duplicate content more than anything so bare that in mind the next time you’re creating pages for your site or updating existing pages.

Keyword Usage

One of the most important factors of on site is keyword usage, if you are targeting a specific keyword then you need to let the search engines know.

- Domain Name – If you are targeting the keyword “mobile phone” and you have the domain mobilephone.com then you will have a huge advantage when ranking. This is probably the most powerful on site SEO factor, these are called exact match domains and are highly sought after. But even having part of the keyword in the domain will stand you in good stead.

- URL – Including the keyword in the page’s URL is also extremely helpful, this is why it is better to have an URL like mobilephone.com/bestmobilephone, instead of mobilephone.com/23542, the search engines prefer URLs that actually use the keywords instead of random numbers. This is a must if you are looking to rank for additional keyword on sub-pages of your sites.

- Title – You should always include the keyword in the title tag of your page, so if you were targeting the keyword “Mobile Phone”, you would need to make sure it featured somewhere in your title. The best place is at the very beginning of your title as this will be the first thing that most search engines ‘read’ on a page, something like “Mobile Phone – What Is The Best One?” is a great way to put the keyword at the beginning of a title without it looking unnatural.

- Headers – The keyword should also be used in headers throughout the article, this is not only beneficial for SEO but by breaking up your article with headers, it is also easier for the reader as it will not be one huge block of unreadable text. You’ll find it is easier to write articles that are broken up as well, since you only have to write small chunks, not one huge piece of content.

- Keyword Density – Keyword density is simply how many times your keyword appears in the content, this is measured in percentage and whilst it highly disputed, anything between 3% to 5% is a good keyword density for a page. Bare in mind that an extremely high keyword density will look unnatural and this will negatively affect your on site SEO, search engines aren’t stupid and can spot keyword stuffing a mile off, so don’t over do it.

Use Of Content

- Images – Search engines love it when you use other types of content and not just text. It is also better for the reader, as it brightens up the page and makes a site look more developed. You should also edit your images so they are named with the keyword you are targeting, you should always put your keyword in the image’s title and alt tags.

- Video – If there is a type of content that search engines love above anything else, it is video. If you have unique videos on your site then you’ll get a nice SEO boost. To maximise the SEO boost from using videos, make sure that videos include the keyword you are targeting in their title and also in their description, even putting the keyword in the videos upload file will help.

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Dear Directory Customer,

Special Offer #1- Submit for a Standard Listing in either  www.HiveThrive.com or www.W3Dir.com and get upgraded to a Featured Listing at no charge.

To take advantage of this offer, please reply to this email and let me know the URL of your submission after Standard Listing payment.  Please note that top level submissions to http://hivethrive.com/business_and_economy/ or  http://www.w3dir.com/business/ are not eligible for this offer.

This Special Offer is good until the end of August 2011.

This Special Offer is good until the end of December, 2011.