Key Tips for a Link Building Campaign
Finding new links for your website is an on-going battle, at first finding ‘link juice’ is relatively easy and the sources seem to be inexhaustible. After a long link building campaign you will come to appreciate the ease of obtaining those first few groups of links back to your website. For after a while it becomes much more difficult to obtain good links, this is especially true in competitive markets such as car insurance and personal finance.
As a webmaster it is important to continue building the links to your website to better optimise your site for the search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing amongst others place rankings on these individual links. In the scope of Search Engine Optimisation inbound back links are considered the main component of any SEO campaign. These links are weighted individually and are a strong indicator of websites popularity and rank on the Internet.
Search engines use weighted algorithms to calculate the relevant search terms or keywords to a website. The essentials are easy, more back links means that said website is more likely to rank higher in organic search engine results. More ‘credit’ is given to websites with higher quality inbound back links than those with lower quality back links. Therefore having links from established, quality websites is worth much more than a link from a newly created blog site. Ultimately a link from a website like BBC will be worth dozens if not hundreds of links from other sites, due wholly to their reputation on the Internet.
Another key factor when link building for your site is to do so over a period of time, spend a set amount of time each month building the links. Building many links to your site in a short period of time could be damaging to the long term visibility of your website. If your site has been around for some time and already has a good reputation then this is less likely to ‘hurt’. Regardless it is not a recommended practice. Links submitted on one day a month would generally be released over time as there usually subject to moderation techniques to ensure your content is described correctly, is not spam and is beneficial to the websites visitors.
Ensure that when you place links on other websites that you use relevant anchor text where possible, using keyword research tools will help you to find popular terms which people actually search for, using a combination of popular terms which are relevant will aid your optimisation efforts. But ensure you do not optimise too much as this can adversely effect your rankings with the search engines.
There are many other techniques out there which will help you to build links successfully and help your overall SEO efforts. Link building is one exercise that should be proactively pursued. Keeping up to date reading informative articles such as the ones found at Daily SEO Tip will ensure you are primed with the latest SEO and link building information.
This Guest Post is by Isaac Bullen who writes for The Caring Host who provide Green Web Hosting solutions and provides a fair hosting guarantee to there customers.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Non-Geeky Link Building Tips for Small Business Owners
Non-Geeky Link Building Tips for Small Business Owners
If you run a small website for your business then the chances are you have a million things to think about. Having just come across the rabbit hole that is SEO, link building probably seems like a challenge on par with running a marathon backwards. The problem is, link building is time consuming and not always that straight forward. In fact, it can be incredibly difficult.
Here I have put together some realistic methods and tips that you can use to improve your link building skills, and gain some quality backlinks for your site. These ideas are just a starting point, don’t feel bound by these!
Use your connections.
Just because you are building links online, doesn’t mean you have to do everything online. If you have a website then the chances are so do your suppliers, customers and any other industry relations out there. Sometimes with your best relations you will simply be able to ask for a link from their site, other times you may have to offer them something. Either way picking up the phone is nearly always more successful than emailing.
For example, why not try offering testimonials? Using your industry connections, get in contact with any suppliers of software, hardware, office supplies etc and offer to provide a testimonial for their website because you like the product so much and they will most likely link to you. If not you can probably get away with politely asking afterwards.
Use your community
If you have an active community of users on the site already, why not try running a competition that involves getting users to create videos or tweet and shout on Facebook. This works especially well if you have a youthful or tech minded userbase combined with some good site content. The added social buzz will help generate traffic and links to your site. Remember, the overall aim is traffic, so even if it won’t always strictly benefit SEO it could still be worthwhile.
Copy your competition
This may end up becoming slightly more technical, but a starting point of any link building campaign should be proper competitor analysis. SEO tools like Yahoo! Site explorer or SEOmoz’s version make competitor backlink analysis incredibly easy, even for novice link builders. Gaining an idea on what your competitors have done to beat you in Google is crucial and can unveil some fantastic link building strategies, after all they must be working if they are above your site in the search engines.
If you run a small website for your business then the chances are you have a million things to think about. Having just come across the rabbit hole that is SEO, link building probably seems like a challenge on par with running a marathon backwards. The problem is, link building is time consuming and not always that straight forward. In fact, it can be incredibly difficult.
Here I have put together some realistic methods and tips that you can use to improve your link building skills, and gain some quality backlinks for your site. These ideas are just a starting point, don’t feel bound by these!
Use your connections.
Just because you are building links online, doesn’t mean you have to do everything online. If you have a website then the chances are so do your suppliers, customers and any other industry relations out there. Sometimes with your best relations you will simply be able to ask for a link from their site, other times you may have to offer them something. Either way picking up the phone is nearly always more successful than emailing.
For example, why not try offering testimonials? Using your industry connections, get in contact with any suppliers of software, hardware, office supplies etc and offer to provide a testimonial for their website because you like the product so much and they will most likely link to you. If not you can probably get away with politely asking afterwards.
Use your community
If you have an active community of users on the site already, why not try running a competition that involves getting users to create videos or tweet and shout on Facebook. This works especially well if you have a youthful or tech minded userbase combined with some good site content. The added social buzz will help generate traffic and links to your site. Remember, the overall aim is traffic, so even if it won’t always strictly benefit SEO it could still be worthwhile.
Copy your competition
This may end up becoming slightly more technical, but a starting point of any link building campaign should be proper competitor analysis. SEO tools like Yahoo! Site explorer or SEOmoz’s version make competitor backlink analysis incredibly easy, even for novice link builders. Gaining an idea on what your competitors have done to beat you in Google is crucial and can unveil some fantastic link building strategies, after all they must be working if they are above your site in the search engines.
Must-Do Tips for Creating Social Share Worthy Infographics and Blog Posts
Key to success of any blog is blog posts and info graphics that will inspire people to share them. Social sharing, such as on Facebook and Twitter, emails and personal blogs, are one of the top ways that news spreads in the blogosphere. If your blog isn’t interesting enough that readers are going to recommend it to their friends and colleagues, it isn’t going anywhere, period.
But how do you attain the ultimate goal of share worthy posts? It’s not just about the information you present, but also about how you present it. Here are a few tips to help you perfect your posts.
Make it something somebody cares about. People share blog posts and articles only when they find it personally relevant, or they know someone who will. The number one rule of blogging, therefore, is to post stuff that your target market will care about. Company news may seem interesting to you, but it probably isn’t going to convince anyone to follow your blog, let alone share your posts. Posts that address the concerns, interests, or fears of your target market, on the other hand, will. For instance, if you sell medical supplies, a seasonal post on five ways to protect yourself from the flu is probably going to generate a lot of interest.
Make it compelling. A day in the life of a computer programmer probably isn’t going to inspire anyone to share your blog post, unless you can find an interesting twist. The same goes for posts or graphics that share statistical data. Find some way to draw readers or viewers in, whether that is by making them laugh, asking a rhetorical question, or staging a rant. Do more than just relate dry information.
Make it easy to digest. Studies show that online readers tend to skim more than readers of any other media, which means your blog post needs to be structured in a way that makes it easy for readers to take away your main points. Bulleted or numbered lists are therefore great for blogs, because they allow readers to skim without missing anything important: “Five Ways to Save Money Every Day,” for instance. How-to posts, with clearly numbered and labels steps, also work well. And of course, visuals such as graphs are always great ways to relay information.
Make it visually appealing. You can’t always offer a graph or pie chart that will offer information in a visually stimulating way, but there are other ways to make your post aesthetically appealing. Using headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points makes it easy for the eye to skim, and more blank space around text tends to be more visually appealing to readers. You can (and should) also use pictures, graphic images, and videos to draw the eye.
Having your posts and graphics shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, or even linked to on someone else’s blog should be every company’s goal. When people share your posts through social media, it expands your readership exponentially — at least for that post, and sometimes for your blog in general, too. A blog that regularly has posts that are important and compelling enough to be share worthy is likely to have a large, loyal, and very active readership.
Kevin Harris is a freelance writer for Adobe. Adobe software, such as image editing program, and services revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information; anytime, anywhere, and through any medium. They also offer many other services such as elearning.
But how do you attain the ultimate goal of share worthy posts? It’s not just about the information you present, but also about how you present it. Here are a few tips to help you perfect your posts.
Make it something somebody cares about. People share blog posts and articles only when they find it personally relevant, or they know someone who will. The number one rule of blogging, therefore, is to post stuff that your target market will care about. Company news may seem interesting to you, but it probably isn’t going to convince anyone to follow your blog, let alone share your posts. Posts that address the concerns, interests, or fears of your target market, on the other hand, will. For instance, if you sell medical supplies, a seasonal post on five ways to protect yourself from the flu is probably going to generate a lot of interest.
Make it compelling. A day in the life of a computer programmer probably isn’t going to inspire anyone to share your blog post, unless you can find an interesting twist. The same goes for posts or graphics that share statistical data. Find some way to draw readers or viewers in, whether that is by making them laugh, asking a rhetorical question, or staging a rant. Do more than just relate dry information.
Make it easy to digest. Studies show that online readers tend to skim more than readers of any other media, which means your blog post needs to be structured in a way that makes it easy for readers to take away your main points. Bulleted or numbered lists are therefore great for blogs, because they allow readers to skim without missing anything important: “Five Ways to Save Money Every Day,” for instance. How-to posts, with clearly numbered and labels steps, also work well. And of course, visuals such as graphs are always great ways to relay information.
Make it visually appealing. You can’t always offer a graph or pie chart that will offer information in a visually stimulating way, but there are other ways to make your post aesthetically appealing. Using headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points makes it easy for the eye to skim, and more blank space around text tends to be more visually appealing to readers. You can (and should) also use pictures, graphic images, and videos to draw the eye.
Having your posts and graphics shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, or even linked to on someone else’s blog should be every company’s goal. When people share your posts through social media, it expands your readership exponentially — at least for that post, and sometimes for your blog in general, too. A blog that regularly has posts that are important and compelling enough to be share worthy is likely to have a large, loyal, and very active readership.
Kevin Harris is a freelance writer for Adobe. Adobe software, such as image editing program, and services revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information; anytime, anywhere, and through any medium. They also offer many other services such as elearning.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Google Cache date not updated on each crawl!
Almost all optmizers are aware that though Google's spiders or bots crawl their websites on daily basis or may be twice or thrice a day, still Google does not update the cache date after its every crawl.
In a day, your website might get crawled by the bots several times, but that changes are not reflected every time.
In a day, your website might get crawled by the bots several times, but that changes are not reflected every time.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
New to SEO???
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Nowadays, there are billions of websites available on internet. Some websites are informative, some are for entertainment, some for promotions and many more things....
If we search for a particular product or question on Google we get billions of results. But do we always get what we were searching for easily??? Okay, just leave this question. Lets think about this later!!!
Coming straight a way on the point, many (almost all) website owners feel that their site should be seen 1st on the google. But they are not aware how this can be achieved. Here comes the role of SEO. Every website must be well SEO ed... What does SEO mean? Full form of SEO is Search Engine Optimization.
As the name suggests, SEO means optimization of websites for Search Engines like google, yahoo, bing etc.etc... Now the question is whether is it easy to optimize a website? If your website is purely html based, then yes it is...But, if it is dynamic then there are many manipulations that are supposed to be done in order to do optimization....
Need to go now..so will discuss about rest of the stuff in detail later...
Nowadays, there are billions of websites available on internet. Some websites are informative, some are for entertainment, some for promotions and many more things....
If we search for a particular product or question on Google we get billions of results. But do we always get what we were searching for easily??? Okay, just leave this question. Lets think about this later!!!
Coming straight a way on the point, many (almost all) website owners feel that their site should be seen 1st on the google. But they are not aware how this can be achieved. Here comes the role of SEO. Every website must be well SEO ed... What does SEO mean? Full form of SEO is Search Engine Optimization.
As the name suggests, SEO means optimization of websites for Search Engines like google, yahoo, bing etc.etc... Now the question is whether is it easy to optimize a website? If your website is purely html based, then yes it is...But, if it is dynamic then there are many manipulations that are supposed to be done in order to do optimization....
Need to go now..so will discuss about rest of the stuff in detail later...
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