Link Building Strategies That Are Proven To Work

Hello everyone in SEO field  we all have our own ways of doing link building. Here are some tips how to save some time and make sure that your links are quality stuff.

Ranker.com

Ranker.com is a content hub where you create a list and rank all the items on it. It's not exactly like Suite101 or Associated Content because all that is expected of you is a title, opening paragraph, and a list of items, give or take a description of each. So, what's the difference in terms of link building? Time. It could take you 15-20 minutes to create a quality post on this site whereas it would take you upwards of 45 minutes on the two examples previously mentioned. You not only get a quality anchor text link at the top of the page right under the title, but you also start building authority in your niche. In reality, it's a win-win.

Empirical Article Linking

Essentially, this technique is article marketing but with a twist. WHAT? I thought you said these were 'unorthodox' linking strategies? Yes, this is one, but hold on before you get skeptical. In a nutshell, this strategy involves interlinking all of your different submitted articles. For example, if I submit an article to The Free Library, instead of using all four backlinks to point back to my site, I might use one or two to point to other articles I've submitted, such as on Ezine Articles or GoArticles. What this does is increase the quality of your links on those sites. Here's the best way to do it - use your best keywords on Ezines & GoArticles, and try and build up 10 links to each article. You'll see some serious results if you do it right.

Dofollow Blog Commenting (the right way)

Skeptics - hold on before you start criticizing again. This tactic involves commenting on blogs that don't have a nofollow attribute on their comment links, so what you get in return for a comment is a quality link (not super high-quality, but it's better than most comment links). First, you need a list to start off (My blog has a list of solely SEO & Internet marketing dofollow blogs). Then once you find a couple high page ranked & high quality blogs, you need the SEO Quake add-on for Mozilla Firefox. Once downloaded, you will be able to sort your search results in Google by different metrics. For this strategy, you will be sorting results based on page rank.

So, here's what you do - type into Google "site:exampleblog.com" (replace 'exampleblog.com' with the blog you want to comment on). Then sort your results by Page Rank. I know it's not a flawless tool, so you will still have to go page by page to find high PR posts, but you get the idea. Now what you have in front of you is gold - a list of high page rank blog posts you can easily comment on & get in on some of that link juice. Obviously, go for the high page ranked posts first, and move your way down. REMEMBER: contribute to the conversation; no one wants just another "great post!" comment, and chances are it won't get approved.

.Edu Blog Commenting

Another form of blog commenting, but this time the strategy will net you a few .edu links. Yes, they will be nofollow links, but they will help build some trust. Here's how to find the blogs to comment on:

Type this into Google: inurl:.edu inurl:comments/feed

What this query will do is get a list of results that have Wordpress on a .edu domain. You will get around 2,000 results, so you'll first have to find which blogs are approving comments on a regular basis, and which ones are higher authority. Since the results you are finding are comment feeds, by clicking on the results and looking for the date of the last accepted comment, you can get a good feel for which ones are currently approving.

Using LinkChecker to Build High-quality Links

This is one of my top link building strategies in my arsenal. Let's just say I've netted a few PR 5 blogroll links over the past couple weeks. Here's how to do it - First download LinkChecker for Mozilla Firefox (another add-on?!). This tool will help you check pages for broken links by right clicking and choosing "Check Page Links". Next, you will have to find medium-sized industry-related blogs that have large blogrolls. The easiest way to do this is to just find one, and then check all the blogs in their blogroll, which leads to more, and so on. Now, I say medium sized for a couple reasons. The first is that large-sized blogs rarely have broken links and probably don't want to link to you for any reason, and the second is that smaller blogs are still good, but medium-sized blogs are obviously more valuable.

So here's what you'll be doing: Find these blogs, check their page links for broken links, and once you find a couple, you're in. Find a contact email, create an email titled "Broken Links" or "Broken Links on Blog", and say something like this:

Hi!

I was on your blog when I came across a few broken links that I thought you should check out. I know you've got a lot on your plate with the blog and all, so I listed them:

* Broken Link
* Broken Link
* Broken Link

Broken links are never a positive sign for a blog, so I hope this helps. Also, do you think you could replace one of the broken links with a link to my blog? It's myblog.com.

Cheers

*Your name*

Bam. Doing this ten times will usually get you 2-3 responses, and usually one or two say yes. Notice that the broken links are usually found in their blogroll (hence finding blogs with large blogrolls), so they're more willing to replace a bad link with a link to you if it's already external.

How to Pick an SEO Friendly Designer

A Web designer is one of the persons without whom it is not possible to create a site. However, when SEO is concerned, Web designers can be really painful to deal with. While there are many Web designers, who are SEO-proficient, it is still not an exception to stumble upon design geniuses, who are focused only on the graphic aspect of the site. For them SEO is none of their business and they couldn't care less for something as unimportant as good rankings with search engines. Needless to say, if you hire such a designer, don't expect that your site will rank well with search engines.

If you will do SEO on your own, then you might not care a lot about the SEO skills of your Web designer but still there are design issues as we'll see next, which can affect your rankings very badly. When he or she designs the site against SEO rules, then it is not possible to fix this with SEO tricks.

When we say that you need to hire a SEO-friendly designer, we presume that you are a SEO pro and you know SEO but if you aren't, then have a look at the SEO Tutorial and the SEO Checklist. If you have no idea about SEO, then you will hardly be able to select a SEO-friendly designer because you won't know what to look for.

One of the ultimate tests if a designer is SEO-friendly or not is to look at his or her past sites – are they done professionally, especially in the SEO department. If their past sites don't exhibit blatant SEO mistakes, such as the ones we'll list in a second and they rank well, this is a recommendation that this person is worth hiring. Anyway, after you look at past sites, ask the designer if he or she did the SEO for their past sites because in some cases it might be that the client himself or herself has done a lot to optimize the site and this is why the site ranks well.

Here is a checklist of common web design sins that will make your site a SEO disaster. If you notice any or all of the following in the past sites your would-be designer has created, just move to the next designer. These SEO-unfriendly design elements are absolute sins and unless the client made them do it, no designer who would use the below techniques deserves your attention:

1 Rely heavily on Flash

Many designers still believe that Flash is the next best thing after sliced bread. While Flash can be very artistic and make a site look cool (and load forever in the browser), heavily Flash-ed sites are disaster in terms of SEO. Simple HTML sites rank better with search engines and as we point out in Optimizing Flash Sites, if the use of Flash is a must, then an HTML version of the same page is more than mandatory.

2 No internal links, or very few links

Internal links are backlinks and they are very important. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the text on a page must be hyperlinked to all the other pages on the site but if there are only a couple of internal links a page, this is a missed chance to get backlinks.

3 Images, not text for anchors

This is another frequent mistake many designers make. Anchor text is vital in SEO and when your links lack anchor text, this is bad. It is true that for menu items and other page elements, it is much easier to use an image than text because with text you can never be sure it will display correctly on users' screens, but since this is impacting your site's rankings in a negative way, you should sacrifice beauty for functionality.

4 Messy code and tons of code

If you have no idea about HTML, then it might be impossible for you to judge if a site's code is messy and if the amount of code is excessive but cleanness of code is an important criterion for SEO. When the code is messy, it might not be spiderable at all and this can literally exclude your site from search engines because they won't be able to index it.

5 Excessive use of (SEO non-friendly) JavaScript

Similarly to Flash, search engines don't love JavaScript, especially tons of it. Actually, the worst with JavaScript is that if not coded properly, it is quite possible that because of the use of JavaScript your pages (or parts of them) are not spiderable, which automatically means that they won't be indexed.

6 Overoptimized sites

Overoptimized sites aren't better than under-optimized. In fact, they could be much worse because when you keyword stuff and use other techniques (even when they are not Black Hat SEO) to artificially inflate the rankings of the site, this could get you banned from search engines and this is the worst that can happen to a site.

7 Dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs

Well, maybe dynamic URLs is not exactly a design issue but if you are getting a turn-key site - i.e. it is not up to you to upload and configure it and to create the links inside - then dynamic URLs are bad and you have to ask the designer/developer not to use them. You can rewrite dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs on your own but actually this means to make dramatic changes to the site and this is hardly the point of hiring a designer.

These points are very important and this is why you need to follow them, when you are choosing a SEO-friendly designer. Some of the items on the list are so bad for SEO (i.e. Flash, JavaScript) that even if the site is a design masterpiece and you promote it heavily, you will still be unable to get decent rankings. SEO-friendliness of design is a necessity, not a whim and you shouldn't settle for a SEO-unfriendly designs – this can be really expensive!  

Five SEO Tips You Should Know.

Traditional search engines are the searchable results of automated programs that index the web using multiple “spiders” or “bots”. The web marketer should optimize for these bots by knowing how spiders read a page, index it, and rank it. Marketers should know how to read the SE results and glean optimization ideas from them for basic SEO techniques. Spiders need a path to follow in order to find pages. This is why inbound linking is so crucial to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines, that “sniff out” a site from multiple quality links, will rank that site higher in link relevancy.

Stress link quality not link quantity.

Search engine optimizing no longer means maximizing. In the past, web marketers would create mirror sites on similarly-named domains that all pointed to a system of ad pages. Web marketers would also create a formidable volume of interlinked “doorway pages”, the theory being that this improved their chances of being spidered by the big search engines.

Doorways and mirror sites are no longer in the wise SEO arsenal of basic SEO techniques. Multiple sites with low relevancy linking to a site may give a site a temporary boost, but for long-term results, quality links are necessary for the website to be well-ranked. The marketer will also want to stay away from scripted methods that attempt to masquerade as blogs or similar quality sites to the search engines.

In large part due to all the spamming, Google eventually downgraded the value of link quantity in favor of link quality. For instance, Google places much greater emphasis on “trusted” links or “content-rich sites”. Yahoo.com is a “trusted link“. Modern examples of “content rich links” might include one-way links from blogs, lenses, information hubs, content articles, and similar sites. It is also beneficial to remember, in light of basic SEO techniques, that Twitter is a search engine and will be more and more in play in days to come.

Keywords ARE important in basic SEO techniques.

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing (filling a page or tags with keywords. Keywords are still vital, but they must be placed in the text, and in proper context with relevancy to the site itself. Relative keyword density is now the important factor. There are many excellent keyword search utilities on the web, even a couple of free ones. There are many theories on keyword choice. Some web marketers prefer less-popular, more targeted keywords. Others say it is better to rank #192 on Google for the keywords “free stuff” than #1 for “free eyeglass cases”, for instance.

Domains.

If a domain has been around for more than two years, its “ranking karma” is improved. Domains are a great help with basic SEO techniques. Purchasing domains from the drop list (the list of domains that have expired and are no longer held by the database), with more than two years of history, may be one low-radar way to improve your site’s Google credibility. A domain with keywords that match the site’s is also helpful.

Who is your visitor?

In order to find the right traffic, it is important for the web marketer to know what type of traffic he seeks. Who is your customer? To whom must you market? From which types of sites are they more likely to come? Has the site been listed in high relevancy directories? Can you post your link to forums and blogs that deal with the topic of your site?

The best basic SEO techniques include search engine optimization for the future.

A marketer who builds the best site possible, with regularly updated unique content, and thereby has other sites linking to them, will not have to do a lot of optimizing. The site will optimize itself.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is very important. It can make or break a campaign. All of your web pages should have targeted keywords, but which ones? How do you research and choose the right keyword for your project?

It is very hard to have a successful search engine optimization campaign without proper keyword research. Your main objective, when selecting a keyword is to get your website to show in the search results for key phrases that will benefit your project or business.

How Do I Find The Right Keywords?

There are specific keyword research tools online that help SEO  find the right keywords for their campaigns. There are free and paid tools available.
Below is a short list of the ones I recommend (free and paid).
Free Keyword Research Tools

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

Paid Keyword Research Tools

• Market Samurai
• Goodkeywords

Market Samurai is a reasonably priced product and most importantly, it is a very powerful tool for researching key words.

A free alternative would be Google keyword tool. It features a high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database. 

Wordtracker is also a good alternative but it is limited to 100 results. If you want to see all the keywords, you will have to pay.

How Do I Choose The Right Keyword?

Because it’s free, I will use Google keyword tool for this article.
Basic keyword research is fairly simple.
First, you will have to enter a keyword or phrase that best describes your project or web site. For this example, I will use the phrase “Real Estate”.

As you can see, globally, over 30 million searches are made for the phrase “Real Estate” every month. Ranking on the first page of Google for this phrase would be very profitable but to do so will take an extensive amount of money and time.

Be realistic with keyword selection

If you sort the results by global monthly searches, you’ll see that the phrase “real estate in new jersey” has only 246,000 monthly searches. It has significantly less searches than the phrase “real estate” but, selecting a longer tailed keyword like this will be more targeted to your business (if you have a real estate business in New Jersey).

This keyword will take less time and cost less to optimize for because there is less search volume and less competition. You can use even longer tailed keywords like “buy real estate in new jersey” or “new jersey real estate for sale”.
Remember, just because the keyword has less search volume doesn’t mean it will be less profitable.