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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 19 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:42:13 +0000

For the last couple of posts, I have been concentrating on strategies and processes on how to get more incoming links (build links for SEO), and it is worth a few posts to consider the possible strategies and techniques required to focus on getting more incoming links. Links are one of the most significant ways to get a higher search engine ranking. Here are some more techniques to move ahead on this:
- As part of link building strategies, there is not much focus on having internal link build strategies, you know, where you link to pages within your own site. However, research indicates that having a effective link strategy to your own pages helps in link love, and ensures that pages improve slightly in terms of ranking; this would mean that you would need to ensure that you can reach most pages in your site within a couple of links rather than having complicated linking strategies. This also means that if you have a cool JavaScript based internal page structure, you are worse off. In simple terms, the navigation system of a site should be easy and simple.
- Even if you do get links from external sites, it is becomes useful when such sites are recognized as valid sites in terms of linking; so such sites must seem like natural sites which are somewhat similar to what you are doing rather than unrelated sites that are obviously more of linking sites. Focusing on sites which are more of the former rather than obvious linking farm types of sites is much more useful
- There is nothing wrong in linking to sites that seem relevant to you and the subject that you are talking about. If you do link to external sites that are relevant, then it gives an indication of the validity of your site to search engines. In addition, when you link out unsolicited, and other webmasters see you linking to them, there is a high chance that they will link back to you. Hoarding your links does not earn you any benefits, neither does only trading links.
- Check out your the number of links that your competitor has, and then search for the higher value ranked site that links to your competitor (or if you don’t refer to other sites as competitors, consider other sites that offer content similar to yours) and start focusing on those sites to get links from.
- Keep in mind that link building process is a slow and gradual effort, and can take to achieve results. There is a temptation to try and take short cuts to get there faster, which means also using techniques that can cause problems, or to depend on consultants that can get you in problem with the major search engines.

Here is a Youtube video on Link building:

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 18 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:15:52 +0000

In the previous post (How to get links for SEO), I outlined some more steps to get good quality incoming links. Some of these may be something that you think that you can do, in other cases, you might be somewhat worried or embarrassed. For example, I know some people who are very embarrassed about the thought of writing lots of emails to other webmasters requesting for a link; for such people, it is important to keep in mind that getting links is one form of promotion and is also a marketing strategy. For any sort of marketing, even the most effective ones, people need to learn how to promote their own blogs and be not in the least bit afraid of doing useful steps if that means that promotion of their blogs happen.
- Look to find some experts in the field that you are writing about, and if you can get interviews or an explanation of their techniques, you will find more people linking back to your site. This may require some amount of persistence in getting these interviews or comments, but the result will be worth it.
- Court controversy. This is a controversial tip, and is more relevant if you are writing about some sort of news, reviews, or something where opinions can be strong. If you take strong views on a particular subject, especially if you are going against the majority opinion, then you will find a lot of people linking to you, even if these referred posts are critical of your viewpoint.
- Get in depth about the topics you write about. This is back to the viewpoint about writing posts that has a rich content, but this can be repeated again and again; if you do a lot of research about the topics you are writing about and come up with content that ir rich, you will find a number of people linking to you even without your needing to do anything about it. In fact, if you have a series of well written posts, then many people will start referring to you as a guru.
- Being quick on the take. This sort of tip is more useful for people who write about news related stuff. How many times have you seen blogs being referred to when a blog makes a scoop of some information that has not yet made it to the popular news – no need to answer, this happens many time. Conversely, If you write about a subject that has already been beaten to death, then you will not find many people even interested in this post, forget linking to your post.
- Encourage people to link to your post. In many cases, a large percentage of the people who think about linking to your posts don’t follow through for any reason (could be laziness, could be putting off the linking, and so on). What you need to do is to encourage people to link to your posts by proving a section at the end of the post (something like, if you like this post, why not link to this post -and create a small box where you provide the code to do this linking)
- Use Twitter and give an option to readers to re-tweet your posts. Once this happens, when people happen upon your posts, many of them will actually try to re-tweet your posts (when I say many of them, even 5% doing so is a good percentage); this in turn makes your post accessible to more people and increases the percentage of people who will link to your post.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 17 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:32:17 +0000

The previous post (Links for SEO) was an explanation about how to get incoming links for the purpose of SEO. However, this topic is too long to explain fully in one post, so this post will continue with the same topic, with more detail about how to get quality incoming links for SEO purposes.
- Search for quality directories and post your blog over there.
- Yahoo answers is a great initiative where you can earn quality incoming links. The idea of Yahoo Answers is that anybody can ask questions, and if you answer the question and it is judged to be a good answer, and the question itself is popular (and search engines also index the question and answer), then you can get some traffic coming your way
- Ask your friends and relatives (those who run sites and blogs) to link you; in this case, you should be able to get a high success rate
- Create a Facebook Page (How to create a Fan Page) and link up your blog posts to your Facebook Fan Page so that you can start getting Fans (and if you have good content, slowly you will start seeing an increase in the number of fans). On the Fan Page, provide a link to the Blog.
- Be active in forums and discussion boards related to the topic of your site. If your information is found useful and people value the updates your provide, then some of them will want to explore your site as well (make sure that your site is there in your signature) and many of them will also link to your site
- This one will take more effort, but many human edited directories ask for editors; become an editor and also take the chance to easily submit your own sites as well
- When you are writing a post that refers to another post of yours, then refer to that post using a link with keywords as the anchor text. You might think that an internal link does not matter, but you would be surprised.
- If you have multiple blogs and some of them are ranked higher, then you should have a link from these blogs to your other lower ranked blogs. Why not take advantage of some link love from your stable of blogs.
- If somebody has already linked to your site using some non-descriptive text such as ‘click here’ or something similar, request them to change this to something more descriptive – ideally supply them a short keyword rich phrase along with an already formatted link
- Keep on monitoring your logs to see which are the keywords that most people use to link to you, and then modify your posts that are on the same topic to become more keyword centric, and also focus on those keywords when requesting links from third parties
- Prepare newsletters and send them out on a regular basis to your subscribers, and at the end of the newsletter, ask people to link to your site if they feel that the newsletter was useful or informative to them
- If you are a product company that orders a lot of equipment from many vendors, then ensure that all of these vendors have provided a link to your site. Since you supply them business, most of them will indeed do that.
- Do a competitor search, and if you find sites linking to your competitors, then write to them requesting them to link to you as well. If you write politely, and if they don’t have any association with your competitor, many of them will honor your request.

As always, this post is getting about as long as I would like it to be .. so the next post will continue on the same line.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 16 – How to get links

ashish — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:34:12 +0000

In the previous post (Avoid paid links), I explained how paid links can cause problems to you, in terms of search engines not liking the concept of paid links, and penalizing you if they detect your buying or selling links.
In this post, I will write about some ways of generating links that do not offend the search engines, and give you the required boost in search engine rankings without getting you in trouble with the search engines. These are a combination of organic and inorganic methods (to explain, some of these happen on their own, while for the others, you have to take an extra effort).
- Write good content. If you write content that is unique and interesting, people will link to you on their own. It sounds very simple to say this, but a lot of good links that a site generates is because of rich content that other people like linking to. This sort of linking is very valuable
- Create content that people like to link to. As an example, when people look for a way to ensure tight security for their sites, a site that presents content in the form of a checklist or similar works a lot. So, if you create a post with the title as “10 steps to increase security for your site” and have good easy to read and useful content, a lot of people will link to such content
- Create resource sites of links; for example, if you are interested in photoshop tutorials, it is very useful to search for the best such tutorial sites and link to them with a structure such as “Best Photoshop tutorials”. Inform the owners of such sites that you have done so, and many of them might feel gratified enough to link back to you
- There is a lot of balyhoo about comments being useful. However, comments directly do not get you any PageRank since most commenting software is now configured to prevent any PageRank from passing through. However, when you post a comment that is useful, adds value, and is otherwise interesting, a fraction of people will come to your site, and some of them may add links.
- Using link farms and link exchanges is not a very feasible option nowadays, since search engines have learnt to ignore such inputs now, and in some cases, these turn out to cause more harm than good
- Search for article sites, some of which are pretty high PageRank sites. Consider for example, a site such as BlogCritics (link), where users can post articles and where you are allowed to post your own link (to your own site). This site is a PageRank of 7, and you get pretty useful PageRank. There are many other article syndication sites, which allow you to post your own articles and earn some useful links.
- Ask people for links, while many of them will refuse, others will indeed link to you. Ask politely, already have a reciprocal link on your site (even though they may be a competitive site) and provide them a readily formatted link that they can just copy and paste. Even if this works for only a fraction of the sites to whom your write, it can give you a nice supply of links that add to the ranking of your site.

This post will be continued with more information and techniques …

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 6

ashish — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:21:02 +0000

In the previous post (structure of a post for search engine optimization) I talked about how to structure a post in terms of title, H1, H3 tags, inserting keyword phrases, and so on without doing it in excess.
This post will talk about things such as defining permalinks (relevant for all blogs, although my experience is more with WordPress blogs), adding breadcrumbs, making your blogs faster, cleaning up the code).
- First of all, permalinks. Your WordPress default installation comes up with setting permalinks in the form of a parameter, and nothing descriptive. What you need to do is to go to your Settings inside the Admin -> Permalinks and change the settings from the default to something like ‘Month and Name’. Now, whenever you give a descriptive title to your post, that same will also be set for your post. So, for example, the URL for this post is something like ‘http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/02/search-engine-optimization-tips-and-tricks-–-learn-how-to-increase-visibility-in-search-engines-–-part-6′. This descriptive URL makes the search engines pick up the URL and rank it higher.
- Make sure that you add Breadcrumbs to your site; what are Breadcrumbs ? These are the text near the top of a post that point out the path to the post. So, for example, for this post, the Breadcrumb would be in the nature of: Articles -> Optimization -> Search Engine Optimization. Breadcrumbs give your users an easy way to do site navigation, as well as also allow search engines to easily navigate your site easier. One way to do that is through a plugin such as the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.
- Search engines read your site like a text browser, and cannot read your fancy JavaScript and CSS, so if you have built navigation systems based entirely on Javascript, then some search engines will have problems being able to read your site. You want search engines to be easily able to index your entire site, so make sure that the navigation to all your pages is easily available.
- In continuation of the above tip, make sure that you do not have too much of CSS and JavaScript code inside your site code, instead move it all to CSS files that are referenced properly from within your code. This provides a clean interface to search engines.
- Use Sitemaps. Sitemaps are easily available if you do a Google search, so make sure that you have setup a sitemap and submit to the different search engines (for example, for Google, submit sitemaps to the Google Webmasters site). Sitemaps allow search engines to get notified when you update your site, as well as provide them a way to get into all the pages of your site.
- Learn more about how to speed up your blog. Use database speeding up techniques to decrease the load required with database interactions, including reducing the number of database interactions. In addition, as the number of your viewers increase, start using plugins such as Wp-Cache and WP-Super-Cache to speed up your blog. Do other tips such as reducing the number of plugins you do not actually use, or which can be pretty heavy (such as the plugin that hunts for relevant posts – very useful, but can be heavy in terms of DB interactions)

As usual, you will read more in the next post in this series.

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