July 31, 2010

Getting Found By Search Engines

How do the search engines really find your website content?

If you want to start getting natural search engine traffic, being discovered by the search engines is the very first step to get the ball rolling. There are several ways to get discovered by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing and the best part is that most of them are free. Let’s talk about the old ways of getting discovered and some of the new upcoming trends.

Submitting your website or page. Back in the day this was the most common way of getting discovered when he had a new website. There was actually a big line in front of you at all times of those who had already submitted their sites and were waiting for Google to crawl their sites before yours could have its turn. It was not uncommon to have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to be found by the major search engines.

Site map submission. Site map is a map that the search engines can follow once they get to your site to continually uncover new and fresh content. When you make changes to your site map, it is important that you submit the site map back to the search engines so that they can recommend you to consumers on the web. If you use WordPress, there is a great plug-in that will do this for you automatically called XML-sitemap.

RSS and Atom – Search engines want to find pages that worked really links to other pages within your site. So they started to crawl your RSS feeds or atom feeds. These are the content tools that are automatically updated when you some of the new story or at a new page on your blog. This is a great way to get discovered and a great way to update your readers.
Social Media – the explosion of social media sites has really changed the way and time frames of being discovered by search engines. But sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others are starting to get more and more attention from search engines like Google because they represent a growing trend in the Internet.

One-way links. If you go on to a highly traveled website, and comment on a blog post, leave your backlink to your site,search engines can find you this way as well. When I crawl that page again, they’re going to see your link and follow it to your site. This is a great way not only to get discovered but to build valuable backlinks to your site and improve your SEO.  Word to the wise, don’t spam your links.

Article marketing. If you use any websites like Ezinearticles.com or GoArticles.com, you can also get discovered and valuable quality backlinks from the site as well when you contribute original, well-written content. The same concept applies to article marketing as it does to one-way links, but this is just another way of getting your links out there.

Being discovered is the first step of getting your site to that place that you want it to be. Lots of readers a lot of traffic. If Google doesn’t know that you exist, they’re not going to send you any business. I’ve seen several websites over the years, actually more than several, that have been on the web for years and years, but still had not been indexed by Google. Needless to say, those sites are probably not getting very much traffic if any at all. Don’t be one of the sites, get indexed right away and start building for your future.

How To Backlink To Your Website

Image representing Digg as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
If you have ever thought about building backlinks to your website, you’ve probably wondered what type of back links and what type of strategy works best. Here are five different places that you need to start to develop a back link portfolio from.

Number one. Articles

Article marketing is a great way to get your content out all over the web instead of just on your website. Now, you can do this with a strategy of gaining top positions in Google, but this is only going to work for very long tail keywords with article marketing. If you’re going after a keyword that is very competitive, you are going to have a hard time ranking on the front page of Google with article marketing. But, that really isn’t the strategy for article marketing anyway. Chances are, very few people will even read those articles unless they are on the large article websites like ezinearticles or goarticles.  Your main goal with article marketing is to gain back links to your original post with the anchor text for terms you want to rank for. Check out unique article wizard if you’re looking for a good article marketing tool.

Number two. Directories

Getting your website submitted to several directories is a great way to get some easy one-way links back to your site. These links are not very high quality, but will get your site listed with these directories and also get crawled by some of their directory spiders. DMOZ is a great place to get listed.

Number three. Local links

Getting your site listed with Google local, Bing local, and Yahoo local is a great way to get some local links back to your site and actually have a way for local consumers to find you. This will be your listing on their search engine, and also a map-based search tool with your business and it.

Number four. Niche specific sites

the more that you can collaborate with other people in your niche, the better. The search engines really like to see your link on industry specific sites. So, if you are a real estate agent, wouldn’t it be great to have a link from realtor.com coming back to your site? Not only is realtor.com specific to your website, but is a very powerful and highly trafficked website.  This can get you a very valuable back links your site and in some cases a lot of traffic if it is placed in the correct spot.

Number five. Blog links

If you can get a few links from some related blogs, this is a great way to boost your SEO as well.  Again, you going to get a valuable back link, but because it is also industry-specific typically, you can actually get some good traffic as well. You can become a guest blogger to get back links, or you can comment on blogs that allow dofollow links.

Number six. Social bookmarking links

It is highly rumored that social bookmarking links are beginning to gain more and more power in the SEO industry.  Because search engines are looking to make their searches more and more functional and more versatile when it comes to real-time news and updates, social bookmarking links are again a great way to get traffic and a great way to get a lots of links pointing back to your site. Twitter, Facebook, DIGG, FourSquare, and all the others will become more and more of a importance in your link building portfolio as time goes on.  There are some great social bookmarking tools to help you. Try SE Nuke for a Free Trial to help you with your social bookmarks.
 How To Backlink To Your Website

Building Backlinks The Right Way

quality link building backlinks Building Backlinks The Right WayBuilding back links to your website to drive traffic and also to boost your SEO is a very important practice in Internet business marketing. It’s a way for you to get your name and your website out .   Think of it like a vote.  The more people that vote for you, the more popular you going to be. This is going to drive your traffic and your page rank.

When you’re building backlinks to your website you want make sure a few things while keeping in mind that Google is smarter than you think. Let’s take a look at some very important tips that you need to adopt when you start your backlinks and SEO.

1. Have different and anchor text.

Google and all the other search engines want to rank sites at the top of their searches that should be placed there naturally. So when you think of your back links think of being natural. What I mean is, if there was 100,000 people posting your links all over their sites today, what anchor text with a use. Well, some of them would use your domain name, some of them might use your name, some of them might use a targeted anchor text, and some of them might say just click here. So when you use your anchor text make sure you build it in the same fashion keeping a little bit more of a heavy focus on the anchor text that you want to rank for.

2. Your links from everywhere.

Just like your links would appear naturally, they’re probably going to be all over the web. Meaning, you might have some links on high-ranking sites or pages with high page rank, and you are bound to have a bunch of other links on common or unranked sites as well. Although having those links on high page rank sites is super important, if you look at it from a natural state, you should be on a lot of different sites pertaining to your niche.  Even some with low page rank.

3. Index or sub?
I see all too often that people send all of their back links to their home page or index page. Is that the way it should be? Not at all. Each page on your site is typically a bounce an individual topic right? Your back links should be targeted to that page. So, if you write a page about iPhone’s, the back links coming to that page should have been anchor text relating to iPhone’s. It is much better to have several high page ranks on your website rather than just one. They all help each other.

4. Get several different types of links.
There are a bunch of different types of backlinks you can get.  They can come from comments, articles, social media sites, inside blog posts, and featured links. Make sure you don’t focus just on one of these, and make it look natural.

5. Linking groups
Several years ago I had someone do some link building for me.  They were confident that they could get me to the first page of Google for my keyword. So I paid them, and they got to work. After about two weeks my website was sand boxed by Google.  My page rank went from a rank of three on my index page down to zero overnight. The person doing my back links was using a spam like link building network that Google obviously knew about. Now my site was in the network and I lost out big. Don’t do It I did.

6. Think long-term
A lot of people get excited right up front and start building links at an abnormal rate.  This is a red flag. Keep them coming in slow and steady.

How To Find New Keywords For Your SEO – 7 Tips

Finding the right keywords that your prospects and customers are searching for on Google, Yahoo, and Bing is a foundational part of internet marketing.   You may have heard of or used tools like Google’s keyword tool, Keyword Elite, or Wordtracker, but there are 7 other ways to find relevant keywords quick.

1. Misspellings – I can’t count the number of times that I mistype the same word over and over again.   I remember when I used to use Hotmail, and always typed “Hotmal” instead.  Oops!  Someone was capitalizing on that because I got sent to a porn site.  That was way back in day.  There are some great tools out there to find common misspellings for your niche that you can capitalize on.  Here are a couple places to search

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/Default.aspx

and

http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi

2. Technoriati

Technorati is a search engine and gathering site for blogs of many niches.  They track the most recent tags and mostly commonly used keywords.  You can find some great keywords that people are using and searching for at http://technorati.com/tag/

3.  Twitter

I actually found myself seaching on Twitter this past year for up to the second information instead of using Google.   I think this is the new trend and Google seems to realize it too.  You can see what is being searched for on Twitter and what is popular with the following services

http://www.tweetvolume.com/ and http://trendistic.com/seo

4. Facebook Lexicon

Facebook Lexicon is a great place to see some recent keyword activity.  They have graphs and more so you can see search trends at

http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php

5. SeoBook

I have used SEObook quite a bit over the years to find out some of the volume of keywords being search in the search engines.  They have a great keyword tool at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

6. Google Wonderwheel

Google’s Wonderwheel is part of the Google search page.  After you search at http://gooogle.com you can click on “show options” and then scroll down to “wonder wheel” about half way down on the left.  This is a way to “drill down” and follow a vein of keywords to find what people are looking for.

7.  Your own site

I have looked on my own stats on my site and noticed that I am being picked up on the search engines for tons of long tail keywords that I didn’t even plan on.  If you see this happening, make sure you capitalize on it and also make sure that the page those visitors are going to is a converting page for maybe an optin or a product.

There are tons of places to find good keywords to go for.  Just make sure you go after some long-tail keywords and don’t be afraid to go after the “big daddy” keywords of your niche too.  (The ones that get tons of  searches).  Somebody has to.

How To Get High Quality Backlinks

backlinksBacklinks are very important to the longevity and effectiveness of any websites out there in cyberspace. However, just because you have 17,000 backlinks is not mean that you’re going to rank above someone who has 1000 backlinks.  When you’re thinking about your link building strategy, you really need to think about the quality of your links and not just the quantity.

I wouldn’t say it easy to get thousands and thousands of links but anyone can really do it using tools like Unique Article Wizard, Myarticlenetwork, or SENuke rather really getting gives you high-quality links. When I say high quality links I don’t mean to links on domains that happen to have high page rank on their home page, I am talking about getting backlinks on pages that actually have page rank on that page.  remember, Google scores websites page by page not site by site.

Scoring You Backlinks

Anchor text - Your anchor text is crucial when it comes to getting ranked for the keywords that you want to bring for.  This is the text that is clickable on any page and links to your page.

Relevance of the page you are on – If you get a backlink from a page that is about “electronics” and your page is about “real estate” you are not going to have high of quality for that link.

Number Of Outbound Links - If the page with your link on it also has 30 other outbound links, the quality score of that link will be diminished.

Where on the Page Is Your Link?  When Google scans a page, they read it from top left to bottom right.  If your link is the first thing that Google spiders see, you will be rewarded.

Age of Domain: If you can find a domain that has been around for 10 years that will backlink to you, you can really get a boost.

Follow vs NoFollow Status.  When you get a link, it is great.  If it is a “follow” link it is much better.  There is talk about Google abandoning their rule of not giving link juice for nofollow links, but that is just rumor.  In the meantime, go after follow links as much as possible.

PAGERANK - This really matters.  If a page linking to you has a 7 page rank, you are going to get spidered fast and probably rank up quick too.

My recommendation for building links through a network is Linkvana to accomplish these above.   Check it out.

The best way that I have found to build high-quality backlinks for free is to comment on dofollow blogs, guest blog, press releases, and even buy backlinks through some of the available networks. Just don’t tell Google about the buying links part.  Link baiting is also a good way to go.  That means writing a blog post of very high quality or of some sort of controversy post to get people talking and linking to your page naturally.

Linkwheels and SEO: How To Use Them

linkwheels600x600 Linkwheels and SEO: How To Use ThemI got a question recently about linkwheels. It’s a little bit of a buzzword in Internet marketing community these days even though and has been around for a while. I guess you need to ask yourself is creating a linkwheel important for your SEO or is it something that you don’t really need to pay attention to.

What is a linkwheel?

When you are building links or backlinks to your website, the most standard practice is to have every link linking back to the page on your website that you want to bring link juice to. Keep in mind that most people don’t even do this. A lot of website owners people trying to do their own SEO can to send all of their links to their index page rather than to the page they are really trying to index for that search term.

In linkwheel,  you are not linking every page to the page that you are looking to index whether that be your home page or one of your sub pages. What you are doing is creating a series of articles or links, that links to each other in a sequential fashion. For example, your link on a website A was linked to website B, your website be linked with link to your website C link, your website C link would link to your website D link, and your website D  link went links to your page you are trying to get indexed.

So essentially what you’re doing is getting your link juice to each sequential page in the series. By the time website D links to your page that you are trying to rank for, website D has much more link juice than website A had originally. So you are creating more significant link to your page that you’re trying to rank for in the end.

Is it more effective?

I haven’t seen any research yet on the effects of linkwheel’s versus traditional link building as of yet. But you can see some of the benefits that it might bring by just looking at the structure of the practice. Rather than having 50 zero page rank links coming to your page you might be able to build up a few other pages that have some page rank does giving you higher quality links.

I will give you any updates I care about link wheels and their effectiveness.

Seo Most Common Mistakes

seo mistakes Seo Most Common MistakesWhen it comes to search engine optimization, the fact of the matter is that it is always changing. What was true for years ago may not be true today, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. We all know that Google is the number one search engine around and if you want the most traffic you have to play by their rules. Let’s talk about some of the most common misconceptions about search engine optimization.

#1. You have to get back links from sites that are in your same niche for them account in Google.
Google wants the best experience for their users and understands that not every natural links from one site to another is always going to be in the same niche. In fact that was always in the same exact niche, you can Google might be a little suspicious.

#2. The page on the site that actually carries your link must have high page rank for it to really give you any juice.
Naturally, if a new page pops onto a website with your link or maybe even a review about your product or website, it goes without saying that it’s going to take some time for that page to get ranked in Google, and also climbed up the page rank scale. If Google likes the entire website as a whole, chances are they going to be some great SEO juice for that link going back to your site regardless if it is in the same niche or not.

#3. If Google’s back links record doesn’t show your backlinks, they don’t count in Google’s results.
Google’s backlink checker really doesn’t show all of the backlinks that their algorithm tracks. If you really want to see a more complete list of your backlinks, try looking on Yahoos link checker.

#4. I need to have one of the top 3 spots to get any traffic.
It is true that the first 3 spots get most of the traffic, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of keywords that you rank for. It isn’t always about quality, but it can be about quantity sometimes. And as your site grows, so does the strength of all of your pages.

SEO Tools: My First Purchase

seohosting SEO Tools:  My First PurchaseI started getting into SEO for myself I wanted to make sure that I was doing it correct right off the bat. I wasn’t really sure what was most important in SEO at the time,and I didn’t want to get started off in the wrong direction. After listening to 10 to 15 suppose it SEO experts, I was more confused than ever. Some of them are telling me that on page optimization was super important while others said that it didn’t matter at all. Since then I’ve learned that on page optimization is important in fact, but you’re off page optimization will always trump your on page optimization.

The best example of this that I found that I think might help you picture how SEO works is for you to type the words “click here” into Google and see what comes up first. for me, at least on this day, Adobe.com comes up first. If you’re that page you’ll notice that it does not say click here anywhere on the page. Why does the ranks first for “click here”? Because thousands of other websites tell Google that adobe.com should rank best for “click here”. They do that by linking to Adobe.com with the anchor text of “click here”.

So anyway, when I got started I wanted someone who really knew what they were talking about to teach me the ropes. That’s when I ran into a great product called SEO Elite. This really help me not only get started with SEO, but help me also understand the dynamics of how the search engines work. To me this was priceless. Brad Callen does a great job with the software making it easy to use and also throws in video tutorials and educational material to help you understand the product and the program.

If you want to take the first step, you can check it out at SEO Elite.

Seo Strategy Mistakes: My Top 10

seo blocks Seo Strategy Mistakes: My Top 10When you want to be found on Google, MSN, or Yahoo there are some very important tips but I think that I should did you to help you get there quicker, and ease the frustration.

If you implement these strategies right up front, going to have a much easier time in the long run and get to the top of search engines even quicker.

10 mistakes SEO to avoid.

1. Not having a marketing plan upfront. If you don’t know what you’re going for, you not ever getting get what you want.

2. Choosing keywords that don’t really have anything to do with what you want people to find you for.

3. Not finding keywords that you were customers are finding. If you want people to find you you have to know what they are searching for. That is why it is so important to do your keyword research up front.

4. Only finding keywords based on the traffic volume. If you’re only going for the high-traffic high competition keywords chances are you to get frustrated and quit before you even get momentum.

5. Not knowing the difference between each search engine. You might dominate MSN, and not having get ranked in Google. You have to know what pleases each search engine they’re all different.

6. Relying on keyword density. I’ve seen it time and time again when people just spam their own blog with keywords they want to be found for. When you really know how the search engines work, you’ll see how foolish this actually is.

7. Poor page and post titles. When any one interested in your type product searches on any of the search engines, you need your “advertisement” to really shine. What you’re really wanting them to do, obviously, is click.  if you have just a run in the mill information, you’re not a standout.

8. Not getting back links to your page. A huge chunk of the importance from your SEO comes from getting back links from other sites. If no other sites on the net think that your site is important, neither will Google.

9. Doing black hat tactics. Many times people try to trick the search engines into ranking them higher. It used to work, but these days going by the rules and keep you in the game for a long period of time.

10. Taking SEO to the next level. You can make sure that your thinking on the next step. What happens when it’s your site? You need to make sure you have a back end that takes them where you want them to go.