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Link Building is an Important Part of Optimizing Your Website

January 24th, 2010 admin No comments

If you are concerned about optimizing your corporate website and pulling in the most amount of quality web traffic as possible, link building should be a major part of your overall Search Engine Optimization and management strategy. It is one of the most important elements to any SEO and SEM campaign. Link building is a very important part of search engine optimization (SEO) and management. The main role that link building plays in SEO is that it helps the search engines determine how important or valuable your site is considered to be by others. If high quality, high traffic sites are linking to your site, then logic dictates that your site is also high quality. It is sort of like being cool by association. Of course it is important to have many links coming into your site, but it is much more important to have high quality links attached to your website. The key benefit to having high quality web sites, blogs and directories linking in to your website is that, for search engines, it is one of the major factors involved in determining the quality or usefulness of your website. Once search engines deem your site to be high quality, they will start sending more traffic to your site by giving your websites higher rankings, or status when accommodating web searches. There have been a lot of rumours lately about linking no longer being important, thanks to black hat link building techniques. These rumours are simply not true. While there is no denying that some unscrupulous SEO imposters have tried to outsmart the search engines with some less than white hat link building techniques, this has not made search engines devalue links altogether. Search Engines have simply evolved and adapted find and punish black hat attempts at link building. This is why it is important to always link with high ranking sites and directories that are somehow related to your website content. As an example, a confection e-retailer would benefit from receiving links from high ranking suppliers, children’s sites, or shopping / review blogs, rather than links from dog kennels, garden shed suppliers, or computer review blogs. In other words, it is well worth your while to seek out links from high ranking, pertinent sites than it is to connect with low ranking, irrelevant sites. So how do you know if you have found a white hat or black hat link building company? Well, there are a few clues. If link building is part of an overall and encompassing SEO strategy, this is a good sign you are in good hands. Ask for references from past and present clients. If the company you are considering gets accolades from their existing clients, this is also a good sign. Do not forget to ask questions. Ask the link building company if any of their clients have been black listed while under their care. If so, why and what did they do to get them out of the mess. . . were they successful in removing their ban? These are just some of the clues to help determine if you are dealing with a purely white hat company. If you are concerned about optimizing your website and pulling in the most amount of quality web traffic as possible, do not ignore link building as part of your overall SEO strategy. It is one of the most important elements to any SEO and SEM campaign.

Link Building – 12 Ways To Increase Your Site’s Ranking with Quality Links – Part I

January 17th, 2010 admin No comments

Link Building (also known as off-page optimization) is one of the biggest and most important SEO challenges every website promoter has to meet. You can do whatever you want to your own website: change the structure, play with the keyword density all you want and optimize your content in all possible ways, but when it comes to making other people do something on their site for you, it’s quite a different cup of tea. The question almost every webmaster is concerned with is “how do I get links to my website?’ Here are 12 proven ways to build relevant links to your website that are sure to boost your link popularity and give you more leverage in the search engine rankings. 1. Submit ArticlesWrite unique and compelling articles on a topic relevant to your website and submit them to the biggest article directories such as ezines, articledashboard, etc. There are lots of them on the Internet and most of them allow you to put 1 to 4 links to your website either in the body of the article or in the resource box or both. Do read the ToS before posting!The link value you get from article submission is not very big, but the upside is that you shape the content yourself; therefore the link will come from a topically relevant page. As an extra bonus you get some traffic from the article and if it’s good enough it will be republished on more websites and blogs. 2. Comment in BlogsBlog commenting is another link-building technique that has become quite popular these days. Search the web for authoritative blogs in your niche that allow do-follow commenting and speak your mind there. Make sure you read the post before commenting and try to make a point with your comment; don’t just go on spamming blogs with links to your website, or you’ll just get your comments deleted and end up with no links and a spoiled reputation. 3. Social MediaSocial media websites can provide tons of valuable links if you manage to bring your story to the top. But you’ll need all your creative power to do that and maybe a bit more. Since social media sites are seeing more and more spammy content submitted to them by marketers of all sorts and fashions, running a successful social media campaign gets harder every day. 4. Press Release SubmissionWrite a press release about your company or product and submit it to PRWeb and similar resources. Take the time to make your press-release newsworthy and the chances that it will get syndicated increase depending on how good you manage to make it. 5. Submit to DirectoriesThere are a lot of directories on the internet where you can submit your website. Although links from them won’t give you any drastic jump ups in the rankings, they are still worth submitting to, especially if you have a young website. Make sure you submit your URL into a relevant category. These link building techniques are sure to get you quite a number of quality and relevant links that will add good value to your website’s search engine rankings. To achieve best results with your link building always keep track of the links you get and evaluate your off-page optimization campaign. The most efficient way to do it is to use special tools for link building. Check out the second part of my article Link Building – 12 Ways To Increase Your Site’s Ranking with Quality Links – Part II for more link building techniques you can use.

Link Building – 12 Ways To Increase Your Site’s Ranking with Quality Links – Part II

January 16th, 2010 admin No comments

Any SEO campaign is just impossible without a strong link building tactic. If you think about the structure of a successful optimization strategy, link building is the backbone of it. Here’s the second part of my article on the 12 effective ways to build quality incoming links to your website.    6. Participate in Forums and Discussion GroupsMost forums out there allow you to put a link to your website in your signature which gives you another effective way to build links. Just make sure you don’t make the same mistake a lot of website promoters seem to be falling into: don’t post just to get a link. That means you don’t just drop into every single thread with a ‘me too’ post or start tons of ‘hey guys, check out my sweet website’ topics in every forum you come across. Try focusing on the forums you can get some valuable info from and have something to give back to the community. Answer questions, share some interesting and useful information. This way the links you drop in your sigs won’t just hang there giving you a pure SEO effect (which is rather small) but you’ll also see a substantial flow of traffic and if your website happens to be just as valuable as your forum post, people will end up linking to your website. 7. Create Great Content and Let People Know About ItI’m sure you’ve seen this link building tip tons of times. However, a lot of people supporting it somehow stop half way telling you just to create outstanding content. But that’s just a part of the job and although it’s the main part, you still need to spread the word about the work you’ve done. Once you’ve written a great blog post or article on some topic that you believe will resonate with people and spark their interest you need to tell the world about it. Go to blogs and websites that have similar or related posts and tell how you agree, disagree or complement the points made there in your article. Whenever someone asks a question that is answered by your blogpost, give a short summary answer and drop a link. Submit your story to social bookmarking sites, and if your content is really worthy people will notice it and link to it.    8. Fix existing linksSome sites maybe linking to the pages of your website that don’t exist. You can find these links with the help of Google Webmaster Tools and ask the people linking to you to change the anchor URLs to the actual pages of your website or 301 redirect the links. This way you’ll not only get the credit for the links from the search engines but will also tap into the visitors that were led to 404 error pages instead of your website. 9. Exchange LinksThis is the old proven method of to build links to your website. Find relevant websites that are indexed and (preferably) well ranked by the search engines and offer them to exchange links with you. Sounds easy isn’t it? However, alongside with getting reciprocal links you need to make sure they stay in place, which is a very time consuming task. Good news you can save a lot of time on finding link partners and maintaining your links by using quality link building tools. 10. Hold ContestsPeople get excited about contests in every possible way: we like to participate in them, we like to win them and we like to tell others about them, which online means linking to them. Think of a contest you’d like to jump into and create one, if it resonates with more of us, you’ll get a lot of top quality links. 11. Give Away FreebiesYep, we like stuff, especially, we like free stuff. If you have something to give away be it a product, free wordpress template or simply valuable information, just share it with others and the links will follow. 12. Think a Step AheadIn every industry there are certain events that happen on a regular basis and draw a lot of attention. Prepare for these events beforehand and start covering them on your website or blog before everybody else does. This way early searchers interested in the event will come to your website and a lot of people will link to you as the first to deliver information on the topic. Hope these techniques will work for you helping you achieve higher search engine rankings. Find out more about link building to ensure strong and lasting SEO success for your website.

Why Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Enough! Legitimate Link Building After the Nofollow Tag. PART 1

December 26th, 2009 admin No comments

SEO or SEM? With all of the SEO companies popping up everywhere how do you know your SEO efforts are going to pay off? I spend a significant amount of time reviewing SEO offerings from other companies and find that the range in quality of SEO can vary greatly. While doing proper SEO is very important, will SEO alone dramatically improve your ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? If you donâ??t have an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, the answer is probably not! SEM uses several techniques that could include but arenâ??t limited to, SEO, Link Building, Pay Per Click, Social Media and more.  The focus of this article, and one of the more difficult and time consuming aspects of a good SEM campaign, is link building. What is link building and why is it important? Link building is the process of building your sites link popularity, or simply put, creating links back to your site from other sites. This is very important and arguably the most heavily weighed factor in determining your site ranking in the SERPs. Through building a large amount of outside links back to your site, the Search Engines will view you as more relevant, credible (possibly), and popular. Ideally you should try and build links from credible websites with content related to you site. The more popular and credible the linking website the more it should help you. There are all sort of potential ramifications for building links from unsavory websites and link exchange services which are beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say you can actually be doing more damage than good if you try and take shortcuts. Remember if something sounds too good to be true, it usually isâ?¦ and itâ??s been my experience that this adage holds truer today, on the internet, than at any point in history! (Thanks Nigeria!) Why link building today is harder than ever. After many years of link building abuse from comment spammers and the like, Google came up with an answer, the nofollow tag. Because of rampant misuse of people posting spam comments on blogs, bulletin boards, and content sites, the nofollow tag was introduced. This is a method by which sites could still allow users to post links, without lending any of their sites credibility to the referring link. In other words, your site now gets NO credit for linking if the referring site uses the nofollow tag.  It seems major sites, that were once a staple of link building (both credible and otherwise) are all going the way of the nofollow tag. Wikipedia, craigslist, yahoo answers, and the list goes on. While I am not sad to see spammers lives made more difficult, this has made credible link building more difficult for the rest of us. Below are 5 ideas for good and credible link building after the nofollow tag. 1.  Article Syndication â?? Writing relevant articles with good content, that will interest readers is always a great idea for more than just link building. It helps establish your reputation as a professional and build credibility. It is also very time consuming but over the long run well worth it. As part of your link building campaign consider writing 2 to 3 articles a week and syndicating those to 10 â?? 20 different article syndication sites. Part 2 of this article will include syndication sites listed by popularity and that will be a great place to start! It may take you an extra 5 or 10 hours a week, but your efforts will pay off big time over time. If you donâ??t have the time, consider hiring someone who will work with you to develop link building plan and submit your articles for you. There are many good companies out there that can help you with this. 2.  Press Releases â?? Have you recently launched your business or a new website, product or anything else worth telling the world about? Consider issuing a press release. While most of these services are not free they are a very effective means to get the word out about your company and create links from highly trusted websites. PR Newswire offers a large variety of services that can reach many different audiences. Itâ??s not free but it is effective. 3.  Social Bookmarking â?? Social bookmarking sites are a great way to promote your content. Part 2 of this article will include a current list of social bookmarking sites that do not make use of the nofollow tag and more detailed strategy using social bookmarking. 4.  Blogging â?? Blogging is a great way to add content to your site, gain a following of readership, gain relevancy and credibility with the search engines and your prospects and clients. Blogging can also be a great way to link build. Once you have established your blog and have a decent following, you can make use of guest bloggers from other popular blogs, or even link to another popular blog when you see a post that you think is excellent and your readers would appreciate. There is a reasonable chance the owner will notice your inbound link and link back, if you have good and relevant content. Warning: if you do plan to blog, make sure you stay on top of it and post content frequently. Weekly if not daily is preferred, but even more important than frequency of posting, post GOOD CONTENT. 5.  Trade Links (if itâ??s relevant and beneficial) â?? Email the webmasters of sites that compliment your site but generally do not compete with it, the more popular the better. Outline the benefits for them to link to your site. Explain how their readers could benefit from the content on your site and how your readers benefit from the content on theirs! ALWAYS HAVE A LINK TO their site on your site already BEFORE you do this. Include the location of this link on your site in the email and explain why your visitors benefit from linking to them. This can be a very effective tool when done right because you are building links from highly popular and highly relevant sites to yours. Part 2 to this article will discuss strategy to trade links in much more detail. For more tips or information on how T2T Marketing can help you market your business online successfully, call us at 858-952-0848 or visit our website at for help with your SEM or SEO Campaign.