Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Link building for a lot of people is confusing or may be time consuming. However, for those who may not have the money to spend on link building companies, building links is a huge undertaking. I am sharing 12 simple link building strategies to give your website a leg up.

1. Start a Twitter Page

If you fill out your profile, you will show up in the search results. Furthermore, if your website link is in your profile, people can easily find your website.

2. Start a Facebook Group and/ or Fan Page

Got friends, colleagues, co-workers, a startup business, or a fun idea? Groups and Fan Pages are great. You can share links from your website, and above all connect more with your followers and fans.

3. Ping Your Site’s pages.

There are so many sites out there that you can submit your own website to that will give you a back link. Take advantage of those (I will be putting out an A-Z list shortly and put a link here for your convenience.)

4. Use link baiting techniques.

Please note that link baiting should be done at your discretion and also be done in good taste. There are some site owners who link bait negatively, so if you do not want bad attention, try to be courteous.

5. Submit your site to directories.

Directories are effortless method to create back-links quickly. You are able to submit many of directories for free. However, quite a few directories are garbage sites that will put a virus on your computer, or put you on spam email lists.

6. Submit Press Releases

Drudge Report or Fark.com are great places to do this.

7. Participate in Discussion boards

While you may be ecstatic about Facebook and Twitter, some of the forums and discussion boards out there are still excellent places to mingle.

8. Blog Comments

Make sure that if you do drop a link that it is not spammy and that it is indeed related to the post you are commenting on. In the case that you are commenting at a blog that has CommentLuv enabled, make sure to put your site link in, and choose an article related to the topic. Of course, with CommentLuv, it is fine to just choose one of your posts, but if you have a recent article, you never know, sometimes the blog owner might add it to their article as a related link to read.

9. Join Your Local Chamber of Commerce
Most bloggers should be considering themselves businesses, especially if you monetize your site. If you are to the point that you are successful, try applying for your local Chamber of Commerce. Sometimes you can get a great back link with them, especially if you offer discounted services to the Chamber of Commerce card members. It does not matter if your website targets a national audience. You are still a local business.

10. Call or email clients that already use your services or support your website.

If they have a website too, perhaps you can exchange links with them.

11. Ask your blog friends to link you or exchange a link.

Regardless of it being a return link, both you and your blog exchange buddy are basically telling your blog circle that you recommend certain people and proudly list them on your site. Even if it is not a link in a sidebar, and on a special link page, it can be a win-win situation.

12. Social Bookmarking.

A lot of social bookmark sites give great back links. It can also drive in traffic depending on the topic. Encourage your readers to submit your articles to social bookmark sites and also, do not forget to do it yourself too.

There are many more link building strategies, and I am sure from time to time I will be introducing them. In the mean time, I really would love to hear what your link building strategy has been.

If your website was designed by someone else other than you, and their link to credit their work is at the bottom of your site, are they stealing your link juice?

Some of the SEO consultants out there will flat out say yes.

However- it is not true…

…unless you are not putting your own site link at the bottom as well. It is not illegal, not frowned upon by Google, and usually is something agreed upon between the client and the web designer. It does give your web designer some link juice and some help. While it can be seen as advertising, like said before, it is a choice between the web designer and the client. The client can always remove it later or request their designer to do it for them.

To Improve Your Footer:

• You SHOULD have a link to your site at the bottom for your home page, just like the top of your site.
• You SHOULD even have the simple javascript hyperlink to allow your visitors to jump to the top of your page lickity-split.
• You MIGHT want to make sure your web designer’s link is not bigger than your site name at the bottom of the site and is not before that link.
• You SHOULD make sure your website designer has made sure that your site has valid coding, both XHTML or CSS.
• You MIGHT consider if you are hesitant about having the link in the footer: a) make a blog post and mention the designer, b) add them to your blog roll, or c) make sure the keywords used (if the designer uses them instead of their business/ website’s name) does not conflict with what you are trying to optimize on your own site.

Most web designers who still put the link at the bottom of their work normally try to ask clients if it is okay. While in the late 1990s and earlier 2000s, it was fairly common to see this practice, it is not as prevalent. Link juice is link juice however you give it: in a post, in your sidebar, on a static page, in the footer, or even author credit in the meta or style sheet.

Will leaving the credit link to the web designer have a negative impact on your rank?

NO, unless their site has already been tagged as spam, or removed from the search engines (blacklisted).

Optimization started with the website owner’s basic layout and the content. It goes with putting your keywords in the titles, making sure titles are the right headings are being used, images labeled properly, and much more.

Do only cheap web designers put links at the bottom of their client sites to get link juice or as some say- Google juice?

No, all types of web designers and developer of all price ranges practice this. Now, not all web designers do, but it is not just the beginners who charge barely enough that put a link on their design work.

One link to a web designer to give them credit is NOT going to ruin it all! The funny thing is that in a lot of cases, the client gets a return link from the designer’s portfolio, so it ends up being good for both parties.

There are many advantages that are associated with guest blogging and should be really beneficial if you are looking for ways to promote your business. In this article we will be having a look at 5 interesting ways on how your business can benefit from guest blogging.

SEO

The first way that you will likely benefit from guest blogging is that it can help you with your SEO task. After the Google Panda update there are some people that believe that article directories are simply devalued and it may be a waste of time trying article submission for SEO purposes. This is where guest blogging can come in handy. By posting regularly on related blogs you will be able to build some really good backlinks to your own site and allow you to get your site up the SERP.

Traffic

Guest blogging can also help you get some interesting traffic towards your own site. Indeed if you post some really useful content people will be really interested to check your site and this can help increase the amount of visitors to your site. However you will need to ensure that your articles are really useful to the readers and that will truly encourage them to click on the link and visit your site.

Reputation Building

By posting quality guest posts on some authority sites you can successfully build your reputation online. Again all will depend on whether your articles are really useful and whether it really adds value for the readers. The more you do so the more credibility you will build online and people will gradually consider you as being an expert in the niche.

New Contacts

Guest blogging can also allow you to make new contacts in your niche. This not limited only to fellow webmasters but also to visitors of the host blog. One benefit of this is that you can get feedback on your blogging quality and hence help you improve your blog. Guest blogging can also provide you with opportunities for joint ventures and hence help you to develop your business.

Subscriber Base

Another interesting advantage of guest blogging is that it can also allow you to build your subscriber base quickly. Rather than just relying on organic traffic to build your list, guest posting on related blogs can help boost your subscriber base radically. However you need to make sure that your landing page is optimized well to ensure that you make the most of the surge in traffic on your blog.

SEO parameters and rules consistently change over time. What works well now may not work at all within a few months or even weeks. While many webmasters, bloggers, and other types of content providers do their best to stay on top of the latest techniques, SEO mistakes occur regularly.

This is especially true since the recent Panda/Farmer algorithm changes made by Google. The search engine demoted as much as 12% of their total listings due to sudden “new” regulations. There is now an entirely new set of SEO precautions that go beyond the usual suspects of keyword stuffing, leaving keywords out of titles, java script, etc.

Here’s a quick rundown of new things to watch out for on your site, which may have knocked you off page one:

1. No Action on Long-Ignored pages: Google’s John Mu clearly explains what to do with pages you’re not updating anymore. If you don’t want the pages, get rid of them.

Let them return 404. While you’re at it, come up with some entertaining way to tell your viewers they’ve reached a dead end. They’re more likely to click back to the page they came from, or to whatever link you provide on the page.

Use a 301 redirect to merge product pages. If for some reason that doesn’t make sense to do, then use the rel=canonical link element. If you’re going to rewrite a page:

• Use a noindex meta tag.
• Keep the URLs in your Sitemap file. Make sure they’re not disallowed by robots.txt.

2. Bad Homepage-to-Article Site Content Ratio: If you’re submitting content to article sites for the purpose of building links back to your homepage, but you are not updating your homepage, you’ve got problems. Publish your best content on your website first.

Your website needs to have the best and most relevant results to say in Google’s good graces. Bookmark new content when you publish it in order to tip off Google that your site was the first place the material appeared. Once you update your home page, completely rewrite your article for submission to other sites. This is important, since most submission sites will no longer accept previously published content.

3. Write Something People Want to Read: Chances are, every aspect of your chosen profession has probably been analyzed to death online, in every way you can imagine – except one: through your own experience. Write about your business from your point of view. Add your own expertise to the subject matter – spice it up. Become an expert. You can make good content happen by making it yours.

4. Size Matters: Believe it or not, the search spiders are smart enough to think they know quality when they see it – and garbage when they don’t. The industry standard of 500 words isn’t cutting it anymore. Vary your word counts. If today’s new content is 500 words, write 800 next time, or 650, or 430… the point is, mix it up with quality.

Keep these four tips in mind as you move ahead, and with any luck your site won’t be subject to any more Panda attacks.

Post provided by Troy Ireland, you can contact Troy on Facebook and Twitter.

I have seen the most illogical keywords that people come up with, and mainly because they are trying to put in everything they can think of that hopefully ranks their site higher in the search engines. This is pure folly to do as it is over-optimizing. Another thing is actually search engine optimizing with keywords that people will actually search for, rather than just putting a bunch of garbage.

In the case of targeting local SEO, it becomes apparent that “Deck Coating Irvine, California” may help, but unfortunately, using it exactly like that in your page or blog post title, and within your article to humans is just illogical. Even if a person were to put in their title “Deck Coating in Irvine, California”, you would still do pretty good in the search, especially if you are going out there and promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Of course, you can put in your meta and your tags the “deck coating irvine california” and that might help too.

However, it is important to sound logical to your readers and to even potential readers stumbling upon your article in the search engines. They may believe your command of the English language is sub par.

If you really are carefully optimizing your site, regardless whether it is for a business, a blog site, or both, you have to think like a human and not the search engine when optimizing. Most people have used a search engine at some point to find something out there. This is not like in the 1980s when you might be putting in a command for DOS and get an error syntax for putting the wrong words in.

In the case you are not sure on what you should be optimizing for, but have a clue who your competition is, look at their site and seek out their Alexa rank, just as a quick look. On their Alexa rank page, there is a section for keywords people look for and land on their site. Optimize with articles that would compete with theirs, and yet sound logical to your readers.

How have you been optimizing your website?

If you have a blog, you are pitching. How often have you heard that (even at conferences)? It is a very true statement. When you put up a website, you are most likely not hording it all to your lonesome. You are telling people about it.

Some of you might not understand this and be saying – ‘I have a personal site, so how can I be selling.’

You are selling your words.

Every time you share that blog post out on Twitter, Facebook, and all the social network sites out there, you are basically advertising- ‘Here is my post. Please come read it.’

There is no shame in that, but make sure your pitch is a clear one. If it takes a long novel to describe what your site is about, people will not be interested. Keep your pitch simple and between 3 to 20 words. This pitch is something you can use at your site’s description so when Google picks up your site, that will include exactly what you want people to know about your site.

For example- I use: “Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar” for Blondish.net

You will know I help people with their websites and that I hope to make sure their websites turn out awesome.

Try your pitch here. Tell me it and how you came up with it? If you do not have a definite one, do you need help?

Search Engine Optimization is hard for everyone (Experienced Bloggers and New Bloggers.) – I know this because every time I write an SEO article I get comments from bloggers telling me that this is a very hard topic to understand and that they’d rather just write ‘quality content’. So this time I am going to write this article in short and point wise to keep is clear.

1. Keyword in URL and domain name
   Although many experts in marketing traditional search engines have been reluctant to admit and recognize this factor, it is almost self-evident that has a tangible impact on increasing relevance in search engine results of Google. The keywords in the URL indicates that the relevant keywords are used in the actual file name of the published page. The same applies to the entire site domain name. The more “tuned” to the actual content it provides, the better.
2. Update Frequency
   The most frequently updated and changing blog’s content can becomes a negative factor for your blog. Although it is my own speculation, expect only news sites update their home page and several times a day.
3. Anchor text for incoming links
   This is one of the most effective factors that affect your ranking within the Google results page. The key here is to have other sites using anchor text pointing to the link you are targeting the specific keyword for which you want to increase the reach and visibility. For example, I want this site (MasterNewMedia.org) to have an increase in Google search results for queries related to “communication tools” needed to have a significant number of websites linking to mine to use the words “tools communication “in the anchor text.
4. Traffic Trend
   It is speculated that via the a href=”http://toolbar.google.com/”>Google toolbar, which is installed by millions of Internet users, Google keeps track of statistics for traffic trends at individual sites thus being able to have a “big picture” of how it’s performing a site. These data should be similar, their advantages and limitations to the data provided by Alexa(now owned by Amazon.com), which also provides data on traffic trends in general for any site on the Internet (here too the data are behavioral data collected by people using the toolbar selected.)
5. Give it time
   Since Google gives a critical value to the “age” of your site (spammers generally do not last long) to establish his ranking and “credibility“, a good rule of thumb is to give enough time for a site to be established. Those looking for quick and dramatic results can be easily disappointed, but if you work some of the key points mentioned in a systematic and consistent results really come.

What other tips do you have for search engine optimization?

If you want your website to simultaneously draw in customers and sit proudly atop search engine rankings, there is no escaping the fact that fresh content is the key.

You have probably heard this statement so many times that is had lost some of its impact. But it is worth reminding yourself of it from time to time, because the moment you start to overlook the importance of well-written, freshly-produced copy is the moment you start to lose customers and slide inexorably down search rankings.

Image Courtesy: djheights.com

Most companies now recognise the vital importance of content generation and how it can increase success, which is why SEO is currently such a thriving industry. However, in focusing solely on their own potential glory, many companies tend to forget one important fact. Namely, that without their loyal, paying customers, their business is nothing.

In the global marketplace, a big reputation alone simply isn’t enough to bring in new clients and sustain a company’s operations. New customers need to be drawn to your business, engaged by the services you provide and encouraged to keep coming back for more. For this to happen, you need to ensure that your site is regularly updated, and that the content you produce is 100% relevant to your potential and existing customers

Churning out pages of new content just to please the search engines is not enough. While it may keep the likes of Google happy for a while, your website will ultimately be used by living, breathing visitors who care very little for keywords. What users want is original, well-written and authoritative content that tells them what they need to know with the minimum of fuss.

If you can provide them with what they are looking for, your company will be seen as a trustworthy source and your chances of converting that visitor into a long-term customer will increase dramatically. That newly-converted customer will then spread the word within his or her industry, and within no time a wave of new visitors will surge towards your site.