Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Blogging is a wonderful way to increase online traffic to your main website. Many people will log onto an cool looking blog, and this is the perfect way to get them to click a link across to your home webpage. If you don’t have time to get a blog of your own going, you can get a specialty SEO/social media firm to either set you up one or post comments and niche blog reviews for you to get the ball rolling.

Blogs used to have to be built by HTML savvy technogeeks, but h free blog creation tools like Blogspot (provided by Google to Gmail users) let almost anyone can create a smart looking blog in a matter of minutes. All of teh deep mystery of setting up a blog is nearly gone, and if time is a factor, you can always hire the job out, thanks to these and other user friendly programs now freely available across the market.

There are usually free templates you can download to get started, and then you can update or change them later as desired. Pics are also easy to download, and you can utilize a large variety of fonts and text colors ato make your blog stand out from the crowd.

Update your blog on a daily basis to get it indexed regularly and to attract more attention. Place hot keywords in your titles and tags to bring extra traffic to your blog, and ask visitors to post as well. Moderate the comments to be sure everything stays kosher.

You can use contests to help get your blog noticed. Try a guessing contest or a competition to choose the name for a new product, and use an attractive, attention getting logo to promote your blog and your business. Create caps or t-shirts and give them away to the first twenty or fifty people to sign into or register on your website by linking from your blog.

By getting the the existence of your blog out there and making it a main go-to place for information and for discussion in your niche, you will start to see people linking in and  search engines will start picking it up as well. When people visit your blog, they often return and link their friends as well. Other bloggers can link to you as an interesting blog to follow, and even niche blog review services can help you out on your way to the top of the blog pile.

Determining the value of any one link to your site is more than PageRank. There are many simple techniques and strategies to help determine the value of a link. Basically, the best links come from the best sites – you can indeed follow in the footsteps of others and ride their coattails to success. The trick is getting them to let you.

Decide how much top rankings are worth to you, use the best SEO tactics to get you halfway there, then budget appropriately. A Link Building Service can help you get the best links – but you need to know what those are.

Determining link value can be very subjective. The best bet is to examine a few main signals of quality and trust, then target links that display those quality indicators.

Aged links are better than new links, so look for sites that have been around a while. Links from older sites tend to have more value and trust to pass on, because they have had more time to gain trust from users and search engines.

Even just a handful of links from older, trustworthy sites will increase rankings dramatically. You want to have quality links. That doesn’t mean it only takes a handful of links for top rankings; you have to take into account the industry, competition, current rankings, and the individual site. In a competitive niche, this will be an ongoing race.

A text link from the content section of a page has more value than a link from the sidebar or footer. The part of the page will drive the most click-throughs should be investigated and should determine link placement. A perfect link is one that drives traffic AND passes link juice.

So don’t skip over a great linking opportunity because some people say the placement won’t have much value. Remember, not all raffic comes from the SERPs, non link juice links can still be enormously valuable.

Yahoo!’s Link Domain queries can tell you how many links are going to the page and site you want your link from, and can give you an idea of where thier juice is coming from. You might even find a few new places to get direct links yourself.

Also, don’t skip over sites lack hundreds or thousands of domains linking to them. A small industry site with 100 domains linking to it from other industry sites, competitors, and related sites is better than some random site with links going everywhere, many unrelated to your niche.

You want associations that will help you position your site in neighborhood that can help search engines figure out your relationship to the industry. High numbers aren’t everything. A solid link building package that balances quantity with extremely high quality niche links is your best bet.

Hiring an SEO firm to generate backlinks can help you, but only if they follow the rules and don’t get you tangled up by using black hat tactics.

To buy backlinks is against Google’s Webmaster guidelines, paid links are taboo:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank, and asks webmasters to turn sites in that are in violation, so don’t think you won’t get caught, and know thaty you and no-one else will be held responsible for your site, no matter who actually bought the links.

Hiring a link building firm is still a great help if they do it right.You can build as many links as you want and Google will be fine with that as long as you follow webmaster guidelines. In fact, Google actually encourages you to add links to build a better, more authoritative web site. More pages, more articles and more links makes your site user friendly.

Building links is a lot of work, though. You can significantly reduce your work load by hiring a link building company, as long as the firm that you hire really knows what they are doing and follows all the rules. Linking back is the key to getting the traffic plus search engine rankings.

Enlisting the services of a link building company can even help you get your site on the front page of Google, increasing traffic and business for you, so consider that as a good option.

A podcast can keep people coming back and also be something that brings in traffic as people tell their friends about it and send them to your website.

You can get a podcast online in about 5 – 10 minutes, and it can instantly go to work increasing the audience for your business. Podcasting is becoming more popular among both bloggers and webmasters who are turning to the inexpensive and flexible medium of internet radio shows to get their message out.

First you have to decide the content of your podcast. What is the message you ant to deliver? Create an outline, and organize the subject you want to discuss. You will need a computer, microphone, webcam (for video pod casts), audio software and hosting for your pod casts.

Next, record the audio for your pod cast. Make sure your audio is of good quality and use a decent microphone. Speak slowly and clearly, with natural inflection. Some background music adds style and interest, but make sure you have the rights to it. If you don’t have the rights to use the song, then you can be sued by individual artists

Save the audio file (in MP3 format) to your computer desktop. Open it in your sound editor and edit out extra background noise You can also add intro/outro music if desired. Bboring, run-on pod casts will lose you subscribers, so make sure each one is informative and entertaining.

Now create your RSS podcast feed. The feed must meet all industry standards, and the easiest way to do this is by using a blog to post your pod cast. You want your RSS podcast feed on the Internet, so follow the following directions: Go to Feedburner, type in the URL of your blog and click “I am a podcaster!”. The next screen lets you configure the elements for your podcast.

Upload your mp3 file to a free media outlet for easy access, and copy the link. Make sure your audio is saved in mp3 format, since some systems don’t support other audio formats. (You can also use the del.icio.us to create and manage the RSS feed for your podcast once you have your mp3 files hosted somewhere on the internet. Just create a bookmark for each one on del.icio.us with a unique tag for your podcast.)

Finally, make the post on your blog/website – the title of the post the title of that episode of the podcast, and the content will be the “Description”. This should be a short blurb about your pod cast. At the end of the post is the link directly to the media file.

Feedburner will automatically add the post to your feed… and there’s your episode! You can submit it to podcast directories to get it shared around. Ping appropriate podcast directories when a new show is updated. Realize that bandwidth consumption can be high, and use a server that can handle periodic spikes if you expect a lot of traffic.

Don’t forget to include appropriate subscription buttons on your website so people can subscribe to the RSS podcast feed. Make sure the RSS podcast feed is valid!

The question of linkbait is always up in the air. Some say it is imperative, while others warn that Google doesn’t take kindly to deliberate misdirection for links sake alone. We all remember the summer of ‘08, when notorious baiter Lyndon Antcliff ran the story about the 13 year old who supposedly stole his father’s credit card and holed up in a Texas motel with two hookers he hired to play X Box with him (and whom he told he was a circus midget to allay their worries about his age).

The hook set deep, and the story went viral, generating an insane amount of links back to the UK banking site Antcliff was working on. Antcliff scoffed at the idea that he had done anything underhanded – his attitude was that anyone who had been fooled by the story deserved it, and that he couldn’t believe how many people had been taken in.

The SEO community, however, was incensed. Some might have been sour grapes, true, but many felt that the integrity of ‘useful, valuable information spread through linking’ had been compromised. If Google counts links to a site as part of its core value, how accurate could that valuation be if the links were all bogus?

Viral marketing took on a completely new and ugly tone. Is it really ethical to bait a real, established site with a lie to get links? General concensus: computer says no.

That doesn’t mean all linkbaiting is bad. You can plug a celebrity name or pick up an angle on a current news story to boost your rankings and get attention. Use social media for all you are worth to garner links back to you, and create compelling, intriguing copy to get those clickthroughs. What you shouldn’t do is construct stories out of nothing just to get attention.

Matt Cutts from Google was asked by Danny Sullivan in a You& A session about his thoughts on the incident:

Matt says they don’t want to be the “truth” police. Matt says it was different than a prank like April Fools. It was more deceptive than that as it had no disclosure that it was fake. Matt looks at it then as more intentional than accidental.

Matt says to not take any action on a story that is fake like that one was would be irresponsible. He sees it as an attempt to get links even if you have to “lie” about it and feels that is just wrong. In reality, it was a move to protect Google users from lies and deception.

Matt is kind of Google’s mouthpiece when it comes to webmaster ethics, so we’ll leave you with that. Don’t be evil. Linkbait responsibly – or not at all.

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