Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category
Friday, July 15th, 2011 |
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The Internet is a really strange environment. No other business model has ever been so contradictory, so hypocritical, so confused. Here’s the problem.
For a website to rank well in any search engine and especially Google it must have links. Although there are many ranking factors at play, links are still key to getting organic traffic. However, the best links according to Google are natural links, that is, when another website chooses to link to your website or their own accord because they like your business. This is considered a “vote” in Google’s PageRank system.
But, if your site is new there is no way for anyone today to find out about it in the search engines. In the past people used to find new websites by searching web directories. Today everyone goes to Google (or one of the other SEs) first. So if you are not in the search index how do you get discovered to then win some natural links? It really is a catch 22 situation. And although Google loves natural links, to get anywhere in the Google you have to build your own links.
Link building is almost considered to be spam. It can be argued that every single link that you personally create with the sole purpose of boosting your site in the search engines is a form of spam. Even if you are contributing to a blog by joining the discussion or writing a guest post, deep down inside you know that you are there to get your links. Is this wrong? Many people think so. Is there an alternative? There are some, but not many.
Google is extremely strict on buying links. If you buy a link on a website just to boost your PageRank then Google will punish you and probably also frown severely on the site that sold you a link. So buying links is not an option as you could get stung and never recover.
So you need a link building strategy of some sort. Really all you can do is accept that from now on every link you get could be treated with mistrust by Google at some future date, because they could change their search algorithms further to reduce the amount of gaming that webmasters and SEOs do. But for now, here is a plan that mostly works, when done right.
First, use some good old fashioned favourites. List your site in all the free directories that are still active and have some good search presence. There a thousands of web directories out there and a vast majority are completely useless, free for all link farms disguised as a web directory, but there are some good ones still. Best way to find a directory that is liked by Google is to search Google. There is no point submitting your website to directories that are not in the Google index, this will do nothing for your SEO efforts.
Blog commenting is another simple link building method. Do not spam. Everyone hates spammers. Go for quality rather than quantity and go for discussion rather than random remarks. So find blogs in your area, or in totally different fields that interest you and join the discussion. Consider your website being linked as an additional extra, not the sole reason for you being there.
Guest blogging is one of the better new ways to build links. Communities such as MyBlogGuest.com bring professional writers, businessmen, bloggers and publishers together. Again, the links are an added bonus, the main reason to guest blog is market yourself and your business to others.
More traditional methods simply involve contacting other websites and asking if they would link. This is very hit and miss, but if you personalise your message you may get lucky. A friendly email praising their site and suggesting how a recent article you wrote would fit in well with their next blog post is one way to ask for a link. Or you could take the route of “please add me to your blogroll”.
Forums are another way to get links. Forum moderators are really hot on spammers these days, so again, like blog commenting, join a community, be a part of it, and then when the time is ripe, share something specific on your site that will add value to the conversation.
If you can get some links using these methods then you will get listed in Google and in time your rankings should increase. Continue to build a high quality site and hopefully people will start to talk about your business and link to you.
Do not forget social media today, this is the next big area and is still evolving. Some SEO pundits believe that in time social media will be as important as traditional links, although the volumes of user interaction will have to be much higher. Maybe 10,000 social media likes will be equal to 1 link on a PR5 website (for example).
Right, now you have a plan, get to work. Happy link building.
Jon Wade writes. He used to dig holes. For a while he moved bits of paper about on desks in some of the worlds biggest financial institutions. But now he writes. Mostly he writes for Shareholders Portal, but also blogs about SEO and Google too, because he finds it interesting and it fills in the time when the markets are a bit slow. SEO is not so much a hobby, more a chore, as there is nothing worse for a writer than having his words go unheard.
Posted in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 |
Infographics are widely used today and you cannot open a newspaper, turn on a news channel or drive for long without bumping into one. Infographics are used widely online by media savvy businesses looking to build their brand identity and also because they are able to transfer a great deal of information using a graphic – they are much, much more than a simple picture.
We created Infographics Showcase a year ago to help with our clients’ link building and branding needs and it has been a wonderful tool for us. It has also lead to some infographic design work which has been a nice source of income for Big Oak Studios.
The format for an infographic is varied, but there are some common themes; they are very relevant plus how they render up the information to the user is easy to understand plus there is an added bonus of playing to a humorous aspect of the information or context.
Infographics are also widely shared – instead of people sharing a news article or blog post, it is simpler to share the infographic. The propensity to be shared is what makes an infographic such an excellent tool for SEO – not only are they highly relevant and easy to understand, but they create a lot of links by being shared or adopted by other users.
Infographics lend themselves to almost any situation; if you have even the most convoluted business model or idea, you can convey the fundamental features and benefits effectively using an infographic. An online storage company, Mozy.com, had a problem in getting people to understand how much data storage was provided by a petabyte. Many users are familiar with a gigabyte, but they do this by equating what a gigabit of data actually represents – for those downloading video, a gigabyte is a couple of episodes of a favorite TV show, or 300 to 350 songs on an iPod. The problem is consumers don’t have a conception of a terabyte (1024 GB), and the idea of a petabyte (1024 TB) is beyond any day-to-day equative understanding. How much data is represented by a petabyte falls into focus when you are told that it equals the information stored in 20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets though.
Infographics do take a lot of time to design because the different strands of information need to be drawn together. The designer needs to have a good view of the “big picture” and be able to handle large amounts of information as well as understand how the target audience is looking at the world. Companies using infographics tend to start off with small examples and work up from there; there is a degree of trial and error to find the right format, the right level of information to pitch at readers and the overall impact and feedback they generate for the business. You should not lose sight of the fact you are using an infographic for a specific set of business reasons – link backs, sharing of information, delivering relevant information to increase consumer awareness of you and your products/services or indeed, sales conversions.
Touching on the link backs for SEO purposes; if you create an infographic then you should be credited as the owner of the work. This means including your copyright mark (© 2010) and the link to your own website together with the small print stating the infographic can be shared but with attribution. This is also a good time to look at whether you have a company logo or not, because you should be aligning your brand identity with the infographic.
Posted in Infographics, Link Building, Site Reference | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 |
A new site has been launched to help online businesses build backlinks, save and share social bookmarks, and increase website traffic.
StumbleThis.net is a new social bookmarking website designed to provide business owners with a place to save and share their favorite web links. Joining the StumbleThis.net community of authors will allow you to take advantage of all of the following fantastic features:
- Submit your own stories
- Vote on stories that interest you
- Join and create interest groups
- Share stories with groups and friends
- Save stories to your personal profile
- View your voting and comment activity from your profile
Joining StumbleThis.net is absolutely free of charge and so is uploading articles to the site. As a matter of fact, there are no fees of any kind for using the site. So, do yourself a favor and check them out today…
StumbleThis.net Registration…
Posted in Link Building | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 |
Article writing. for SEO and better Internet marketing, is one of the major promotional tools for getting your website known to search engines, to the world wide web community and to your target audience. There are a number of reasons why this is the case and we shall be going into some of them, but the key point to take away from this piece is that good article writing is the cost-effective cornerstone of website promotion.
You also should understand that articles need to be relevant, well-written and provide real help and advice for readers if they, and by extension you, are to be taken seriously and for the strategy to work properly, i.e. gaining SEO benefits.
Credibility and the “Expert” Reputation
A major issue in generating sales through the web is credibility; many websites have a credibility issue simply because they are on the web, and this is more acute if they have no real world presence. By writing on your area of expertise and in particular, by providing insight and advice on how to tackle customer problems, you are building a reputation as being a “trusted” source of information. As human beings, we are prone to believe what is written more than what is said – we believe what is typed more than what is handwritten, and most of all, we read what is published either as a newspapers piece or as a book, most of all.
Article writing taps into this human belief very effectively and is powerful persuader, providing your articles are well-written, relevant and actually provide constructive help and advice. Writing articles will quickly give you “expert” status and the credibility which goes with that title.
Improving Backlinks
Articles are an excellent source for generating backlinks to your website or blog. If you write articles which are truly original and relevant, ideally providing some unique insight into an issue or problem which readers are likely to have, then you will find it is rapidly adopted by other web sites and blog commentaries with backlinks to your website.
While you control the quality of the article, you have little control over who reads it – if your article is read by a major web site, such as Twitter, Google or Amazon, then chances are that if they like what you have to say they will publish it on their own site, with a backlink to you – how much is such a link worth to you? Clearly a great deal, but if you simply knocked on their door and asked for a link to begin with, you’re probably going to be ignored!
Effective Keyword Strategy & Control
Keywords and key phrases form the fulcrum around which SEO strategies revolve; by identifying and optimizing on specific sets of keywords, you can improve your search engine rankings and with that comes a flood of traffic. More traffic means more conversions and more sales.
Articles allow you to integrate keywords into a broader campaign to get your site noticed by both human surfers and the search engines. At the same time, you control what is written and where it is distributed to so you can manipulate keywords to best suit your online marketing strategies. By writing a range of articles focusing on different sets of keywords, you get a broader level of penetration into the consciousness of readers and search engines as well as developing more backlinks to your main website.
By submitting articles to established article directories you also increase the level of traffic and awareness of your website which in turn, will further improve your rankings with the search engines.
Summary
Readers want good content – content which is engaging and either intrigues and interests them or provides solid help and advice on issues they may have. “Puff” pieces do not amount to much in SEO terms; you should focus on substance because this will have greater impact, be more widely read and more likely to return your investment to you. Articles are not simply about stuffing keywords into some text in the hope this will fool the search engines, your articles need to be written in a professional style so they make sense to human readers and not simply the search engine spiders.
Stay on topic, write in good English and write with passion and flair – this way you will engage readers and keep them coming back for more.
Posted in Link Building | 31 Comments »
Monday, June 28th, 2010 |
If you spend more than twenty minutes on any of the large webmaster forums, you are likely to find a lot of posts and threads related to link building since this is a great way to improve a site’s search engine placement. Of course, link building is only one part of a successful SEO strategy, but typically gaining a lot of quality backlinks doesn’t cost a penny and requires only time and perseverance.
How can you build backlinks and increase your website traffic for free?
Write an e-book: believe it or not, you don’t have to be a professional writer in order to write a quality e-book that other people would find informative and useful. Almost everyone is an expert in one field or another: find a topic that you know about and that you are passionate about, find what most people want to know about this topic, take the time to do some research, and finally put together an e-book. Make sure that you link to your main site or a few of its pages from within the text and as long as your e-book is of good value, you will soon discover other people linking to your site from their own blogs or forums. You may also submit your eBook to sites like clickbank. That way you do not only increase income potential, but the affiliates will also have to link to your site when they direct their traffic to your money page. This will, of course, strengthen your website in the search engines resulting in even more traffic and customers.
Write articles and submit them to the article directories: there must be thousands of article directories out there that will gladly publish your well-written articles. It is up to you to narrow down the list to a manageable size, then write articles, submit them, and use this as part of your link building and SEO long-term strategy. The top article directories also rank very well on the search engines and if one of your articles starts receiving good amount of search engine traffic, at least some of the people that read it are likely to visit your site as well. Most internet marketers know about do-follow article directories like ezinearticles, articlesbase and isnare which are among the best article sites out there, but too few publish their content on Buzzle. In my experience Buzzle and ezinearticles are the two strongest article directories in terms of ranking the best in Google.
Offer quality content on your own website: the majority of people are getting online when they need to search for information, for a product to buy, or to entertain themselves. No matter what your site is all about, quality content is likely to keep people coming back, but is also a great way of link building: if you have a computer-related blog, write detailed and up-to date article on anti-virus protection, include a few links to the best anti-virus protection software, and you are likely to get dozens if not hundreds of links from various computer forums, blogs, and websites. Search engines are becoming smarter and smarter and if you browse the net you will probably notice that sites with good quality content rank better in the SERPs. As an example there are thousands of article directories on the net, but those that rank the best, like Ezinearticles and Buzzle, are those with the highest quality criteria. Those sites will manually approve your content and proper English is a requirement.
Submit your website link to directories and social bookmarking sites: you might hear people saying that this is an outdated link building technique, but they are wrong. Of course, the search engines give less weight to such links compared to a few years ago, but this is still an easy way of getting quality links and getting direct traffic as well. Don’t get lured by the services that offer sending your link to thousands of directories for just a few dollars: out of these thousands of directories, only a few dozen are actually worth submitting to and you can easily create your own list. Here are a few quality social bookmarking sites I use: stumbleupon.com, digg.com, propeller.com, del.icio.us, reddit.com, folkd.com, diigo.com, mixx.com and newsvine.com.
RSS feed directories: Although utilized by many link builders, it is not commonly known that submitting your site to RSS feed directories is an actual link building technique. Submitting your site to those will indeed help your new post get noticed by the search engines, but many of them actually creates a valid back link too. Sites like feedage.com, rssmountain.com and feedagg.com are high page rank sites willing to link directly to your site.
Link building, however, is more than just knowing how and where to build links it is also important to actually do it the right way. Timing is the keyword. You need links from a variety of sites like directories, blogs, social bookmarking, article sites etc. otherwise big G will regard your efforts as manipulation of SERPs. What I usually do is to build links slow but steady starting with a few social bookmarkings, then a few link directories. Do never use any software to make your job an easier task. Google will know if you have been using software like Onlywire.com. You WILL need to write unique title and descriptions for all your social bookmarks and link directories. If you use blog commenting make sure that the blogs are relevant. The next step is to create blogs and publish articles together with press releases. This technique has the greatest effects if used long term. Do not suddenly stop creating blog / web 2.0 networks, it will seem suspicious in the eyes of Google. Instead slow down your activity for a while before quitting. Here are some do-follow web 2.0 sites I use with high page rank: WordPress.com, Weebly.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Blogger.com, Livejournal.com, Vox.com, Quizilla.com and Blinkweb.com. I have also found Yola.com sites to rank pretty well.
SEO strategies change constantly, but this shouldn’t discourage you from looking for new and better ways to build true backlinks to your site and it is almost certain that persistence and hard work will pay off sooner or later.
Guest post by Ronni Rebsdorf
Posted in Link Building | 34 Comments »
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 |
Link building is something a lot of people struggle to do effectively. The problem isn’t always knowing how to build links, it’s sticking to a couple of tactics and ensuring they yield results before moving onto the next one. In this post I am going to discuss to one tactic you can implement straight away using Google Alerts & RSS Feeds.
1. Building Ideas
One of the biggest mistakes people make is treating link building as a numbers game. They build a bunch of links and never think about them again. You should treat every piece of content as a sales piece for the site you are promoting. The content should be topical and relevant to the industry you are in. It should be themed around popular subjects.. To get ideas for your content, build your own RSS Feeds as follows:
a. search.twitter.com
You can enter keywords in search.twitter.com and build a social feed for them. If you use RT “keyword”, it will tell you what people are retweeting. The feed is available at the top right hand corner.
b. Digg / Delicious / PopURLS
These 3 sites are not only great sources of information, but can be used to highlight popular content around your target keyword. All of them allow you to search on a particular keyword and sign up to that RSS feed. Again this will allow you to quickly scan through content and see what is being marked as popular.
2. Stalking Article Writers
Once you have decided on your content from step one, do some investigating on where this kind of content gets picked up. Go to Ezine Articles and find a similar article. Click into it and check right down the bottom for “Most Published EzineArticles in the <Selected Category>”. Select a couple of those article titles and punch into Google [intitle:”<Article Title>”]. This will build you a list of sites (link targets) that accept content you are going to write and also popular writers in your market. For each writer you deem the most popular (you guessed it), sign up to their RSS Feed on Ezine.
3. Tracking Your Links
You should now have produced a batch of content that is already been picked up my 3rd party sites in your market. What most people do wrong at this point is seed the content and then forget about it. This is where Google Alerts come in. Create an alert for every piece of content you seed out. Simply track the article title (in quotes). Within your Google Alerts, set these as “Feed” and pull them into a folder named for the keyword you are targeting. The default for these is “Email”
Now you have a bunch of great articles out in the wild being picked up by 3rd party sites. Each time an article is picked up, review the site and offer more unique content if it’s worth getting a better link from them.
This is just one easy tactic you can implement straight way using RSS Feeds + Google Alerts. There are literally dozens of like these.
Searchbrat.com offer custom link building services to increase your sites visibility and ROI. Check out the full range of SEO Services being offered.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Twitter | 5 Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 |
How does Google handle multiple links from one web page to another web page?
flogner hobnobbin
hibbitgibble snarfling
shoeflarth glambri
Posted in Link Building | Comments Off
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 |
Our latest Ranked Hard, SEO Comic, is up for viewing. It deals with the concept of link buying and Google’s sporadic approach at curtailing the purchase of link. Take a look at Crazy Eddie’s Link Emporium.
Here is an excerpt from my post under the comic. Please visit and read the entire rant on link buying.
If you would listen to Google, and why wouldn’t you, you would be led to believe that they are against link buying and don’t reward sites who do buy links. In fact, they will penalize sites that do buy links. Don’t believe me? Read Google’s engineer Matt Cutt’s own words on buying and selling links. They even provide a handy dandy form to report paid links. Find a site selling links? Report them. Find a competitor buying links? Report them. Then, your site, which is honestly gathering links, should rise to the top of the rankings. Right?
Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.
Google has been caught selling links more than once. So they understand the temptation and financial rewards of selling a link. But the rewards can be much greater when buying a link: higher search rankings, more customers, more sales and more profits. But if link buying is really being stamped out by the big G, then why, oh why, are so many people doing it and dominating the search rankings?
Read the rest of rant.
Posted in Link Building, Out on a Limb, Ranked Hard - SEO Comic | 7 Comments »
Friday, March 13th, 2009 |
I am reposting this content. I originally wrote it as commentary for our SEO comic, Link Building 500, at RankedHard.com. Please visit and get your funny bone tickled.
As any quality SEO company will tell you, link building is crucial to any successful SEO campaign. Of course your on-site optimization needs to be done right – keyword density, the right titles and so forth, but without links you are left with a site no one will ever find via the search engines.
At Big Oak SEO link building is part of the monthly work we do for our client and it is mandatory. Often I will talk with unhappy clients coming to us from other SEO companies, and they will complain, rightly so, the fact that they spent thousands of dollars with little to show for it. My first question is what type of link building did they do? A moment of silence usually follows and then the response, “I’m not sure.” or “None.” Well, besides the fact that every client should know exactly what their SEO company is doing, I am shocked that any true company who claims to be providing SEO services is not heavily involved in link building.
And a few minutes of sleuthing it is easy to see that little to no link building was done and the client was basically paying for a ranking report to be run every month. Too many suspect “SEO companies” rely on an initial optimization and then cross their fingers and hope for the best. Or more likely they just don’t care and look for the next desperate site owner to come along. A churn and burn mentality is prevalent in the SEO industry.
Why is this? I think it is this way because link building, or more precisely, link finding is hard work and takes a lot of time and time is money. A successful SEO campaign needs to include link building which increases time and money. Money the client doesn’t want to pay, so the SEO company gives a low price to win the work and then does site optimization and then runs reports for 3 or 6 months until the site owner fires them. Meanwhile, 6 more unknowing clients sign up and the scam repeats itself.
Before you hire a search engine optimization firm, be sure they are doing the hard work – securing quality links to your site on a consistent basis. The focus of this post does not allow me to get into the types of links, but quality counts, so be sure they are building links that will help your rankings. I wrote a post on the perfect link if you are interested.
We joke in this month’s SEO comic Link Building 500 that this process can take on a race-like mentality and can be grueling, much like a NASCAR race, but that comparison doesn’t lie far from the truth. Usually the site with the best links and the most links wins the race to the top of the search results. But getting to the winner’s circle can take a lot of laps and that means larger budgets.
If you are an SEO company don’t insult or set up your clients for bad results, be up front and let them know that links will need to be created and it will increase the costs. If you are looking for and SEO company, I would say give us a call at 804.741.6776, but whoever you choose, be sure a link building plan is in place. Your site’s success will depend on it.
Posted in Link Building | 6 Comments »
Friday, November 7th, 2008 |
The power to make or break any website or blog is the amount of traffic and ROI (return on investment) that can be generated from month to month. When your livelihood depends upon your on site internet presence, it pays to think outside of the box and explore opportunities as they present themselves. Last week I introduced you to the Apple iPhones App for getting your blog iPhone ready and a quality back link from the Apple.com site.
Since it’s Friday and a gorgeous hello “Global Warning” day here in Richmond Virginia, I thought I would take the time to show you just another cool little thing I discovered in my mad labs here at Big Oak SEO – Richmond SEO Company.
I love the power of social media and Web 2.0 style sites, and one of my favorites has been Twitter. Yes that little tool that makes you get your point across in only 140 characters. However if you know how to use those 140 characters wisely it can pay off into huge dividends.
On election day, Nov 4th I was cruising around and saw that Yahoo had jumped into the Twitter arena. More importantly the folks that run the elusive Yahoo Directory. With a quick double check I confirmed it was the good folks at Yahoo and not some cyber loser and huge practical joke.
So I had nothing to lose and put my best 140 characters together and sent a Tweet to the folks at Yahoo – Directory.
a simple tweet: @yahoo_directory So you joined twitter, Check out http://www.parentinghelpme.com
11:53 AM Nov 4th from web in reply to yahoo_directory
Well the power of twitter and a decent website got the attention of the good folks at the Yahoo Directory and guess what…
Yup Today I got into Yahoo Directory from a single tweet. I didn’t even have to use all of the 140 characters twitter allows and I made it in with less than 80 characters and 3 days. Not Bad for an Election Day Result and Global Warming hitting Richmond Virginia this Friday November 7, 2008.
PS: You can Follow this site @BigOakSEO or me @bigebiz on twitter
Posted in Blogging, Link Building | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 |
While site stumbling today I came across a web page that offered fun 30 second diversion, that is what StumbleUpon is for, by the way.
The page was titled: How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Silly? Yes. Smart? Even more so. After I took the test (I could survive 60 seconds, btw), and I looked at the URL, I could see it was a site promoting bunk beds and is selling advertising for kids’ furniture.
To my point, I was very impressed with the creativity of the page and applaud BunkBeds.net for a great linkbait idea. Imaginative, fun, viral and themed well for the target audience of children. So, take a visit and see how you would do against a Raptor and even more important let this be a good example in creative link building.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies | 16 Comments »
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