What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Building

A bunch of theories and ideas behind link building, with the main idea being links take a long time to get, and those who have lots of links have an easier time at getting more links.

Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm

Funny pictures of Google and Ask.com billboards.

CSS Float Tutorials

A huge collection of float tutorials for CSS. It shows you how to make image galleries, align images, format captions, etc.

FeedSmith Plugin Security Bug Found and Fixed

Some security researchers found a vulnerability with the FeedSmith plugin that can potentially allow people to change your plugin settings while you are logged into WordPress. An updated plugin has been released.

Anyone who knows anything about the Internet mentions Google at least once per day. That is just a fact of life that we all must live with (and look, I’m talking about Google now, see what I mean?). Lately Google has been causing quite a bit of controversy by penalizing some popular bloggers (like John Chow) for doing things like selling text link ads.

John runs a blog that is about making money online, or as he says “I make money online by telling people how to make money online.” I haven’t got a clue what his actual traffic figures are, but I’d imagine the amount of traffic coming from Google is fairly minimal. Regardless, somehow he is still gaining popularity and since he got penalized his monthly income has shot up by several thousand dollars.

But wait, how can that be? Isn’t the Internet all about Google? Well, that is a false belief. There is much more out there besides Google.

The Other Search Engines

Google’s current market share is (I think) around 50-60%. There are still many other search engines out there you can get traffic from, like: Yahoo, Live, and Ask.com (all 3 of those make up most of the remaining search market). While they are much easier to game, I personally tend to have better luck when searching on them than I do with Google. I suspect most spammers spend the majority of their time figuring out ways to game Google.

In fact, a recent survey done shows that Yahoo Search satisfies users more than Google.

Other Blogs

This is by far your most valuable source of traffic, and it is a good indicator of how well you are doing. If you’re getting traffic from other blogs on a fairly steady basis, then keep up the good work, but if you’re not then you should probably do a bit more promotion in related forums and in comments. Word of mouth advertising (someone telling someone else about a product or service) is much more powerful than anything you can get from Google. You can get the highest rankings in the world, but when it comes down to it people want to know if you are legit, and the only way to find that out is by reading about you on other blogs and web sites.

Social Media

It isn’t too hard to do fairly well on StumbleUpon and similar services, but the traffic they send tends to not convert into readers nearly as well as other Social Media Sites. If you can get on the front page of Digg and/or Reddit and/or Del.icio.us - your almost guaranteed to get a ton of traffic and a ton of links (which means other people are talking about you, see above). With that said - too much social media can be bad in some ways (over exposure).

Advertising

If you have some extra money, another option is to get some ad space either through an ad network or directly. I haven’t really tried this option yet, so I’m fairly clueless about how well the traffic converts (any bloggers out there know?). Don’t forget about services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

Do Other Things On Your Blog

As I mentioned yesterday, you can do things with your blog besides blogging. I get quite a bit of traffic for the programs on here. The Webmaster tools I’ve written have also brought in thousands of extra visitors. And guess what - most of that traffic is from other websites and blogs.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

My entire point with this post is you should promote you blog several ways, not just one way. If one of your traffic-generating methods goes out, your blog can still grow and be a success if you take the proper precautions. I think the only method that can make a huge negative impact is if other bloggers stop writing about your content - if that happens then it is probably time to close your blog or take a break and completely redo it.

So my answer is yes - it is very possible to succeed without Google search traffic.

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts!

One of the most debated topics among bloggers is whether or not you should “nofollow” links left in your blog’s comments. The nofollow tag makes a link worthless, so if it points to an iffy site you won’t get penalized by Google or one of the other search engines. In WordPress the default way of dealing with links in comments is to add the nofollow tag, but a plugin called dofollow strips that tag and makes the links pass link juice.

Why Use It?

Most bloggers, including myself, use Dofollow to give each commentator a bit of a reward. Some bloggers feel that giving away free content is enough of an incentive to comment, but others think bloggers should do something more.

Reasons Not To Use It

There’s one main reason not to use it - it can mess up your blog’s standings in the search engines. If someone who runs a site marked as a spam site leaves their URL, Google (and Yahoo, MSN, etc) will pick that up and may give you a bit of a penalty.

Another reason to not use it is you can lose control over how many outbound links are on your pages. Most blogs only get one or two comments a day, so it isn’t a big problem. But if you start getting 15+ comments a day, then it can become a pretty big problem. Each of those links will make every link on the page pass that much less link juice.

Does It Make A Difference?

A while back Lorelle wrote a post on The Blog Herald asking their readers if dofollow makes a difference in their decision to post a comment. The commentators almost unanimously agreed “nope”. In my comment I even went as far as saying I haven’t noticed any blogs that use it experience an increase in the number of comments.

I certainly don’t think it has made a different here.

Why Not Try It Out?

As with anything, try it out for yourself and see if it makes any difference. I use it here, and I certainly don’t plan on disabling it anytime soon unless I know for a fact it is causing issues.

Oh, by the way, if you’re looking for a button to show that you have nofollow disabled, I made some a while back.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts.

Search engine optimization is one of my favorite topics. It is always changing, so you must stay up to date with your knowledge, and what works for one person might not work for another, so you have to experiment all the time. It is mind boggling how many different variables there are that can greatly affect your outcome.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization is how you optimize your pages to get the best possible rankings on search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Each search engine may rely on different data to rank pages, but the SEO for all of them is roughly the same.

Understanding Keywords/Phrases

Most optimization occurs in places where your keywords and phrases appear. This includes your blog post titles, your content, page title, and links to your page. Keywords are what your page is about. Phrases are basically a short sentence containing the keyword(s). “How to make money online” is an example of a phrase. Phrases are better than keywords because people search using phrases, not keywords, and phrases are much easier to rank for (less competition than using just a keyword).

Optimizing Your Title

The page title (and with blogs, the post title as well) is the most important thing to optimize. Even if you have the best content on the planet, writing horrible titles is a sure-fire way of getting poor rankings. The whole point of the title is to describe what the page is about. The page title is also often used for links pointing to your blog post, so that is yet another reason why it is important.

An example of a bad title is something like “Baking Cakes”, a good title would be “How to bake a cake in under an hour”. It is catchy, and the search engines like it a lot more.

Optimizing The Content

Content optimization is a bit like title optimization - you use your chosen phrase throughout the content. However, don’t go around filling up every sentence with “baking cakes” just yet - there is a fine line between doing correct optimization and spamming the search engine. There isn’t a set rule that says “you must use your phrase every x words”, even one time can be enough to get the desired result. You’ll learn what to do with experience, just experiment and study the results.

Use Search Engine Friendly URLs

Most content management systems will initially make your permalinks look like “example.com?id=1″, but those aren’t search engine friendly. Using something called URL rewriting, you can make a URL look like “example.com/my-post-tile”. Which would you rather use? Not using a search engine friendly URL won’t kill your rankings - but unfriendly URLs make it harder for both humans and search bots to understand what is on your page.
With most systems you can make the switch by changing one or two options.

Don’t Link To Bad Sites And Don’t Be A Bad Site

Linking to spammy sites and blogs can quickly kill your rankings. Search engines do whatever they can to limit the power of spam sites, and they will go as far as penalizing good sites for linking to them. Another thing to avoid is linking out to too many sites, even if they are all good sites. Having too many links (usually over 80 or so) will usually mark your site as being a link farm, thus you will get slapped with penalties.

Do A Bit Of Promotion

While it is very possible to get rankings without incoming links, it is much harder and you will never be able to get high rankings. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to get extra links, just do a bit of promotion. E-mail other bloggers, link out to posts on other blogs that you like, and eventually the links will come.

Be Patient

SEO is a long-term thing, don’t expect results in two days. Usually it will take up to a couple of weeks for major changes to take effect, and it can take up to a month to start getting any real amount of traffic. Sometimes it’s quicker, other times it is slower.

Follow The Webmaster Guidelines

Perhaps the most important thing is follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. By following them you will almost guarantee that your site is legit and won’t get banned.

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts.

This is a guest post by Amrit Hallan. Amrit maintains a copywriting and content writing blog at Content Blog and a how-to blog at HowToPlaza where he publishes links to the latest how-to blog posts and articles from all over the web.

For the survival of your blog, website search engine optimization is as important as having a website, especially if you seek targeted traffic from search engines. SEO for me is not simply getting traffic from various sources; it is getting highly targeted traffic. A few mistakes here and there and all your SEO efforts will go down the drain. In fact wrong SEO tactics can sometimes prove costlier than having no SEO strategy. Although there are unlimited things you can do to improve your SEO and unlimited mistakes you can commit in the process, in this blog post I’m going to discuss 6 SEO mistakes you should avoid.

Here they are:

1. Don’t have the same title for every page: If you are a blogger you might not face this problem because most blogging software generates unique page titles (here too you can post blog posts without titles — some people do), but if you run a website make sure all your pages have a unique title. The logic is that every page carries a unique message and the best way to present that message to the outside world is by having a page title that aptly represents the message of your page. On external links people click on your link when they find your page title attractive. People using search engines click your link when they see the title of your link. So have a unique title for every page and make sure the important phrase that represents your page content appears in your title.

2. Don’t spam your pages by stuffing keywords: Your keywords and key phrases are certainly taken into account when search engine algorithms rank your web pages, but it doesn’t mean you insert your keywords everywhere. This will be considered keyword spam and your website runs the risk of getting black listed by all of the major search engines. Your keywords appearing nonsensically in your title, in your description, all over your text and everywhere in your links, is not going to get you anywhere. Even if for a few days you get to the first page of the search result pages your website will be blacklisted the moment it is noticed by someone from the search engine company. Instead, create highly focused, specialized web pages so that they cater to the theme of your keywords. Let your keywords and key expressions appear naturally on your pages. The important thing is not getting ranked higher as soon as possible, what is important is increasing the overall relevancy of your website.

3. Don’t use bells and whistles: The more needless stuff you have on your website, the tougher it is for the search engine crawlers to crawl and index your pages. Run a check on your website and see if there are some JavaScripts, some images and animations, or some CSS definitions that you can get rid of, and if you can, then get rid of them immediately. Make your website as light as possible.

4. Don’t use dynamic URLs: A dynamic URL is something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.php?p=345. The search engines simply cannot make sense of them, and even if they can, it takes lots of effort on their part. Instead, use a URL scheme that has your keywords in it. For instance, the URL of this post will probably end up with /6-seo-mistakes-you-should-avoid/. All current content management systems and blog publishing platforms give you the ability to create search engine friendly URLs.

5. Don’t participate in meaningless link-exchange schemes: Inbound links are definitely important for your website or blog, but they should appear on external websites voluntarily and not because you are going to put their link on your website. The entire logic of having inbound links is to convince Google that your blog or website has got content worth linking to and they should be coming from reputed websites. The very fact that the other website is readily exchanging links with you means that it does not get linked to because of its value, and this, consequently, is not going to give you any SEO benefit. In fact exchanging links with disrepute or totally unrelated websites can adversely affect your SEO efforts.

6. Don’t submit to search engines: It’s no use submitting your website to different search engines because the search engines themselves are perpetually crawling the Internet to locate and index new and recently updated pages. It takes its own time for your web pages to start appearing on search engine result pages whether you submit them or don’t submit them. So if you are thinking that by simply submitting your website to “1000s of search engines” your SEO job is over, please do a re-think.

So avoid these mistakes and keep yourself focused. Remember that search engines want to provide the best content available on the Internet to their users so that their users keep coming back to them for their search needs. Create a website or a blog that the search engines will happily present to their users among top results.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts!