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 | 22 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 »
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 »
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
Ever Googled your name and wished you where in the top search results? Ever wondered what people see when they Google you? Considering the fact that the second most popular search criterion on the web is searching for a person’s professional background (Pew Internet American Life Project) – it may get some people thinking that it’s time to create a web presence for themselves.
It doesn’t take long to conclude that creating a web presence for yourself is something of necessity to ensure your professional growth, your business success, and taking action to represent yourself accurately on the web. The challenge is to find something unique and innovative the tackles all of the following issues:
• You want people to find you when they search your name on the web
• You want to manage the information people see about you
• You want to create a strong and professional online presence for your name
The people at LookupPage came out with the idea of developing an easy-to-use tool for people to create, enhance and manage their online presence. LookupPage is not a social network like LinkedIn, and focuses on getting your name on Google. Using the following simple rules, they are usually able to present better results than others for your name search:
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Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 14 Comments »
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Many of you may know about LinkedIn. If you don’t, then let me enlighten. Linkedin is a social networking site that targets business professionals. It is helpful in setting up relationships for business opportunities and partnerships. It also has a more social aspect that is gaining in popularity. You can read more about LinkedIn here: What is LinkedIn?
And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.
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Posted in Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 31 Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Okay, I fully admit I got this from Search Engine Journal. It was written by Loren Baker, Editor. So be sure to read the original list there with full content. Thank you, Loren.
I put the list I here so I would always know where to find it, since it is our company blog. I did abbreviate the content and I plan on adding more. I hope if any readers find better blog directories, that are particularly excellent, they will add them by commenting below. If they are really good I’ll add them to this list officially.
- Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs.
- EatonWeb Blog Directory is a real jewel with many aged inbound links and a blog rating system.
- Blog Hub offers a drop down category and member blog list.
- Upon visiting Bloggernity, you find a crisp, clean, and easy to navigate site.
- Blogarama has an impressive listing of over 65,000 blogs.
- Blog Search Engine is owned by Performancing’s parent company and serves search results powered by IceRocket.
- Blog Catalog features a vast directory of categories, from academic to writing, while offering the ability to search by country, language, or user.
- Globe of Blogs has too many features to list. In order to be listed on the site, the blog must not be commercial.
- Blog Universe is the perfect place to promote your video or podcast themed blog.
- Bigger Blogs is a relatively new blog directory with only a few blogs registered. The blog is intertwined with a business directory.
- Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet
- Bloggapedia has an interesting and eye catching homepage.
- Spillbean is a well-designed blog directory site with categories such as health, society, internet, and personal.
- Blogging Fusion is a blog with over sixty categories.
- Blogflux is not only a tool for bloggers, but a directory that has the listings in alphabetic order.
- Bloglisting are fun, colourful, and catch the attention of the reader.
- Blogio may be a small blog directory with few listings, but it worthy of a submission.
- Blog Explosion claims to be the largest blog promoter on the internet.
- Super Blog Directory is a great site that offers tools to posters that others do not.
Posted in Blogging, Link Building, SEO Tools | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
We’ve all met that person (or, maybe, we’re secretly guilty of being this person). You know the person — the one who won’t share.
Yup, there, I said it, I’m on to all of you people. Didn’t you learn anything in kindergarten? Seriously, share and share alike. How do you expect to make friends when you never share anything?
By this point, you’re probably wondering, “That’s fine and all, but what does this have to do with linking out to other people’s websites?”
Let me put it very simply — do it. Don’t be afraid to share, put that link out there.
Linking Out Excuse 1: If I Link Out, People Won’t Stay on My Site
Here’s the thing about the Internet, it’s designed (on purpose, mind you) as a way of sharing knowledge. If you’re writing about something and happen to know a reputable resource on the subject, link to it!
This will have various added benefits for you. Your users will think, “Wow, this person is providing a great resource, I’ll come back to them in the future because they’ve really helped me out.” Honestly, do you remember the Boston Tea Party because of the book you read it in, or do you remember it because of your 7th grade teacher who pointed you to the book?
Linking out also tells Google the neighborhood where your site lives. When you’re connected to a bunch of authority sites on fishing through outbound links, and you’re a fishing site, it’ll make sense for Google to rank you higher for fishing. Why? Easy, you’re all in the same neighborhood of fishing authority sites! When you link to other authority sites, it makes Google and the other search engines perceive you as an authority site.
And, seriously now, if you never put an outbound link on your site because you think it’ll keep people on your site, do you really think they don’t know how to work the back button? Or, know how to look for a more authoritative site than yours?
Linking Out Excuse 2: Linking Out Will Lose Link Juice
Alright, let’s ignore the whole neighborhood and authority site status (really, that should be enough to stop you from being scared to link out). Now you’re worried about your link juice. Rightly so, I mean, if PageRank flows from page to page via links, when you link out, it’ll spill onto someone else’s page right?
Here’s the deal: yeah, some of your link juice will flow over there, but that’s not the whole story. When a website gets a link to it, the webmaster will notice. This person will then come over to your site and check you out. If you get a link from a site, you check out the site linking to you, right?
This is the point of SEO, getting people to your site because you have great information. By linking out you have successfully had one more person check out your site! However, the story doesn’t stop there. The webmaster comes to your site, sees that you have a lot of great information and then they might just link over to you themselves, from a post they wrote about a great site they found! Now you’re an authority for them!
Link Out and Reap the Rewards
Remember this when you’re linking out — who you link out to matters! Link out to high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Since you control the outbound links, if you link to trash, your users won’t like it and the search engines won’t like it. Though, when you know of a great site, and have found a great resource, link to it and get ready for the benefits!
Don’t want to take my word for it? Well then, check out what the experts are saying on linking out for yourself!
Posted in Link Building, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.
Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time.
If you’re paranoid that having your link appear on a black hat scraper site will hurt you from an SEO standpoint, don’t be. The odds are against that happening in this situation. Google should be able to figure out that the only reason your link was involved with a bad neighborhood was because it appeared in content scraped from Wikipedia.
The other common opinion is that if you manage to pickup an external link on a popular or semi-popular Wikipedia page, many people will see your link and naturally create backlinks to it. Wikipedia pages do tend to get loads of Google traffic. This isn’t April 2007, so Wikipedia doesn’t rank number 1 for everything anymore, but I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s still fairly popular in the Google SERPS. And by “fairly” I mean “extraordinarily.” I’m digressing, but Wikipedia is the classic example of a site who’s success was truly driven off the back of Google. In fact, I would venture to say that if it wasn’t for Google, Wikipedia never would have entered into the mainstream.
Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
- Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
- Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.
Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 38 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
When it comes to SEO, many small to medium players can get discouraged by the bigger players. They have more resources, so why should the smaller businesses even put forth the effort with SEO? Simple – because they can actually compete with the larger companies. Here’s why.
Brand Recognition
One thing to remember is that the big guys have resources, but because of that they often focus on the more traditional avenues for gaining traffic to their sites and stores. Take the diamond engagement ring business for instance. While any number of us can probably name a dozen national chains off the top of our heads (DeBeers, Zales, Kay Jewelers, and Jared to name a few), not a single one of them shows up in the top 50 for the term “diamond engagement rings”. In fact, only Kay is in the top 100 and Jared isn’t in the top 500. Why? Because they don’t have to be thanks to brand recognition. How does this help you?
Because they rely so much on brand recognition, most of your larger companies never bother to engage in SEO. For example, the #5 result for “diamond engagement rings” is Danforth Diamond, who’s home page title has the words “diamond engagement rings” in it, where as Jared and Zales both have only their company name in the title. Probably why Danforth Diamond is ranked #5 and Jared and Zales are both outside the top 50.
Red Tape
When it comes to writing copy for your website, you usually have one, maybe two writers, and yourself to answer to. When a big corporation decides to write copy for their website, they have to have one of their writers come up with copy that is SEO friendly, then that copy has to be worked over by the marketing people to make sure it works with the brand message, then it has to go to the legal department to make sure that they aren’t making any claims that can’t be substantiated, then it can go back to the writers for more edits, then back to…well I think you get the picture.
Smaller companies have the advantage of not having to deal with the same red tape that larger corporations do when deciding to make changes to their website. While you only answer to yourself, larger companies have to answer to their CEO’s, board of advisors, stockholders, and anybody else that has a corner office with a view.
Site Maintenance
SEO takes work, especially on your website. Between changing titles, adding products, adding content, installing a shopping cart, there’s a lot going on with your website. While smaller companies can handle having systems that are SEO friendly and perhaps take a little longer to make changes on, larger companies need changes made over night, and that typically means a content management system (CMS) that is less than SEO friendly.
Because the larger companies use CMS that aren’t SEO friendly, many of them don’t bother engaging in SEO and instead rely on brand awareness (which I mentioned earlier) to help drive traffic to their sites. Going hand in hand with this is the fact that since the larger companies don’t engage in SEO, when you do find them you’ll find their home page and have to search through their site for what you’re looking for, whereas with smaller sites you can have focus on internal pages to take customer to exactly what they’re looking for. This helps conversion rates, which ultimately means more profits for the little guy.
Reporting to Everybody
As I mentioned when talking about red tape, larger companies aren’t just answering to themselves. Zales might do a lot of business, but they have to report to their shareholders, board of trustees, and everybody else. When the little jewelry store down the street has a good quarter, the only person they’re answering to is themselves.
Because of having to answer to shareholders, larger companies need to be able to quantify their numbers into something that is easily understood, and that usually means time, energy, and resources channeled into producing these reports, as well as a system in place on the website that can easily produce the numbers needed. Those systems are often not SEO friendly. So while Zales might be able to tell their shareholders how much money they sold in the 3rd quarter of 2005, the small jewelry store down the street can figure out how much money they made, how many of each product they sold, and still rank in the top 10 for their big keywords.
Keep on Fighting
Sure, it can be discouraging to look at big companies and the money they can spend, but in this digital age with more and more people finding the products and services they want online through search engines, smaller companies can compete with larger ones through quality SEO and user-friendly websites. With a little work your company can get more internet exposure than those that spend millions of dollars on commercials, radio spots, and billboards. That’s the beauty of quality SEO.
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 11 Comments »
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