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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 15 – Avoid paid links

ashish — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:57:07 +0000

In the previous post (Advantage of links to SEO), I covered the importance of links as a part of a SEO strateg. Links are very important to get your blog ranked highly, as long as those links are from good sources, since links from trashy sites are likely to drag you down.
In this post, I will be looking at what are some of the problems associated with a strategy of trying to increase your SEO rating by buying links or using such programs, such that search engines associate you with trying to subvert the normal method of getting people to rate your site by linking to it, and accordingly penalize you. Let me put out a few links and blog posts that convey how serious this is (and remember, if you are using such a scheme, there is a very good chance that the folks at Google Search also know about it, and if they detect you using it, then they are likely to penalize you for it).
Google Help on Paid Links (link)

A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.

Thus, if you are having a paid link to your site, then be sure that it has a ‘nofollow’ tag associated with it; but then that does not help your site in terms of PageRank, so might as well not do it.
Google Help on Link Schemes (link)

The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

What does this mean ? It means that if you indulge in buying or selling of links that do not have ‘nofollow’ tags (which pass PageRank), then Google can reduce the PageRank of your site, and for sites that are dependent on search engines to provide the traffic to them, this can be disastrous. If you do indeed face such a penalty, you can remove such links and apply again, but everything takes time. Google has implemented this for many sites that were selling such links.
To make it clear again, Google is worried about links and states this as a policy in terms of what to avoid: “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”
So, be very careful about using paid links.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 5

ashish — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:26:52 +0000

The previous post in the series (Duplicate content and Search Engines) talked about duplicate content, how search engines ignored such content, and could potentially penalize you for the same.
This post talks more about how to structure your content for improving your rankings in Search Engines and involves the use of keywords in H1 and other headings. In a previous post, we talked about Keyword density should form around 4-6% of your post contents (not more, otherwise it will look like keyword stuffing). Identify key phrases that you want to emphasize in your post before making the post, and get a general idea of the location where you should use these keyword phrases. So, for example, if you consider this post, you should use the following keyword phrases ‘Search Engine Optimization’, ‘SEO’, ‘Content’, ‘Search Engine Ranking’, and similar such phrases.
- The title and H1 tags in your post should contain some of these phrases, but always keep in mind that the they should still be readable and be comprehensible to your readers. So, if you have a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking SEO’, it has a number of keywords, but does not form any sort of correct grammar (and keep in mind, that for titles and headings, you can use phrases instead of sentences), then it can look strange to readers. It is not very hard to have a correct combination of a keyword dense title that makes sense.
- With the above example, as you get down to the H2 and H3 tags, include the main sections of these keywords such as using ‘Search Engine’, or ‘Search Ranking’, so you are not stuffing your keyword phrases in all your headings, but are still using some of these keywords in a way that makes sense to your readers
- In the body of your message, use sections of your keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine’, ‘Ranking’, etc, utilizing them in the body of the message, but keep in mind that your usage of the phrases should fit in with the body of the message and not break the flow of the post body.
- The way to start in this technique is to first write your post in your regular flow, and then optimize it for Search Engine Optimization. As a part of this, make sure that you use around 60 characters for the title of your post. Now, review your post and then consider breaking up the sections of the post using H2 tags; this helps to guide your readers through the post, and also provides relevant tags for the search engines.
- A typical WordPress installation has multiple links to the same content, and it makes sense to reduce some of the potential duplicate nature of these content that is visible to search engines when they spider your site. Using a plugin such as the All-In-One-SEO can set noindex for some of these locations, reducing the areas where this duplicate content is visible
[Consider this video about how to use the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (link)]

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 4

ashish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:28 +0000

In the previous post (Content is king for blogging), I had talked about various tips for using content to increase your search engine rankings. In this post, I will talk more about how having duplicate content on your blog (copying content from another blog) can lead to penalties for your blog, and what are the steps you should do to ensure that you don’t suffer from penalties.
- First of all, if you are writing content that is not duplicate, many of your readers who would have wanted to get some quality information (and who would have already read similar information on other sites will quickly skip over and may not come back if they see this happening on a regular basis)
- Search engines also want to ensure that their users do not get the same type of content in their search results, and hence will penalize sites which have content that are duplicate of each other. Search engines have complicated algorithms that are able to distinguish as to which blog was the original content creator, and which blogs have copied the content.
Read more about it at this blog (duplicate content penalty)

If your content was copied from another source, the search engines will not list those pages or give you any credit for that content since it was indexed already from another site. Does this mean it is alright to do and I will not get a penalty? No it is not, consider it a self imposed penalty on your own real estate website as those pages will never be indexed, thus a waste of your time and a waste of page space on your website.

- There are many cases where you want to syndicate your content to other sites. For example, you would certainly want to write an article on other sites that are highly ranked to get some incoming link credit (will explain this technique later), but how do you avoid a duplicate content penalty by having this same article on your site as well. There are 2 ways of doing this – You can either send a shorter version of your content for syndication, or you can create 2 different versions for syndication and for your own blog. This will help you to avoid the duplicate content penalty
- If you do have duplicate content on your site, then it is very much possible that aggrieved content owners who had the original content on their sites come after you. They can issue you cease and desist letters, or can actually file cases against you with your service providers or hosting companies. So, in addition to search engines ignoring this content, you can actually get into hassles with this content.
- However, you are not prohibited from quoting other blogs if you appreciate the blog or want to post a critique of the blog. You would need to post a link to the blog post which you are referring, and can post a small section of the post length while either praising or criticizing the post. You should make sure that you are not copying the central idea of the post, or posting huge chunks of the post.

As usual, you will hear more in the next post about content, SEO and related stuff.

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