Search Engine Optimization And DMOZ
In case you forgot, DMOZ recently celebrated their 10th birthday. Forgot? Most people would say, "who is DMOZ?" - sounds a bit like a rap artist perhaps. For many years DMOZ has been a bit of quandary for search engine optimization specialists. DMOZ is one of the oldest web directories and the popular belief is that having your site listed on DMOZ will greatly improve your rankings. Getting listed on DMOZ does provide a little boost to the rankings, but not enough to justify some of the hype that certain search engine optimization specialists attribute to it. So they turned 10 - happy birthday! Search engine optimization specialists, rejoice - mind you, we will still take six months to get your submission approved and your site CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Link Baiting A Legitimate SEO Strategy
Link building is a tough business and many webmaster use a technique known as link baiting as part of their search engine optimization strategies. Many webmasters who are new to search engine optimization may wonder if link baiting is white-hat or black-hat in the eyes of Google. Google's approach to links, while a little complicated in their approach, can be summarized fairly simply. If links are natural and not in any way 'bought', 'sold' or 'farmed' then they will pass muster. Search engine optimization strategies that attempt to develop natural links will generally not face any penalties. The optimum word is 'natural'. How you gain these natural links is the hard part. Link baiting is a process where your content is written in such a way that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Link Building Through Comments
To gain the most out of any link building campaign through commenting, you need to follow certain unwritten rules, almost the opposite of Andy's spam list. To get the best value, you need to select blogs or sites that are closely related to your products, services or keywords. Comments need to add value to the content that you are commenting on. Value is the keyword here. Provide supporting evidence for the content, or argue against the content, either way leaving a sense of authority on the subject matter. Finally, don't keyword spam. If you are going to include a link within the comment, don't use keywords that are irrelevant. The best approach is often to link your name. Possibly not as valuable as a keyword, but the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Your Outbound Links Authoritative?
Or do you even have any outbound links? Should you? Whether or not you have any outbound links depends a great deal on your editorial philosophy. Some old-style SEOs say that you shouldn't. Others say that you should. I think it really matters on your goals and your style. If you do choose to include outbound links, you should start by choosing links that make you look good. Don't use any other kind of links. That is, your link partners should be chosen not on whether or not they are linking to you but on whether or not they provide your visitors with any real value. If you create outbound links that give value to your visitors then you will be seen as an authority in your CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Search Engines Optimization And Internal Linking
The next time you create a new page on your web site, consider internal linking as one of your first strategies in search engine optimization. The use of internal linking is often one of the last considerations when in reality it should be one of the first. Many web site owners (and bloggers), when creating a new page, always think forward - they rarely think back. By this I mean that all their search engine optimization strategies are focused on the new page. Who can I link to? Who can I get to link into my page? Often the most useful links are right there in front of you - if you look back. Pages that have already been indexed and ranked can give your new page CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can StumbleUpon Increase Your Link Juice?
Jane Copeland wrote an interesting blog post about StumbleUpon traffic. I like what she has to say and I didn't know that StumbleUpon revisited a website more than once. That's good to know. While StumbleUpon doesn't give Search Engine Optimization link juice, it can increase your chances of getting link juice if you play it right. What you want is to encourage others to link to you, but how do you do that? If people are always Stumbling and not linking then are you really getting any benefit? I guess the key is to appeal to people who have not yet discovered your site and might want to link to you because 1) they really like what you offer and 2) they are CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Forums Good For Building Links and SEO?
Back in the old days, when walking to school was uphill both ways, forums were a great source of inbound links for a website. You could visit several forums a day and leave several posts at each forum and be credited with an inbound link at every one. That seems to have gone by the wayside these days as most forums now nofollow all their links. But not all forums do, which is the point of my post for this morning. Anyone who posts in forums solely for the link juice is doing it for the wrong reason. That's not the real benefit of forum posting. It never has been. Even when every forum online gave link juice that wasn't the primary benefit; it was ancillary. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Widget Creation, Link Building and Search Engine Optimization
It seems that one way to get links to your website or blog is to create a widget. This is the going thing now and a lot of people are doing it. But are we overdoing it? I mean, will we soon reach a point to where we are over-widgetized? That is, will the widget market be saturated? Will web surfers get tired of all these widgets and finally just decide not to use widgets at all? There is no shortage of places online where you can go to create your own widgets. If you are a member of some social networks, you can get the network's API and create a widget to share with others through that system. Some networks that offer widgets include: Facebook StumbleUpon Digg MySpace Technorati BlogCatalog Almost all CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Links Vs. Traffic: Which Is More Important?
There has much fanfare made of link building as part of Search Engine Optimization. In fact, if you Google "website traffic" and "link building" you'll find that there are only 12,700,000 results for "website traffic" (without the quotes) versus 42,900,000 results for "link building" (again, without the quotes). Judging by these numbers, you'd think that link building is more important. There are some folks who would likely tell you that is the case. I'm not one of them. Links are valuable. The right links are most valuable. But not all links will provide your website with value. Even if you get a high PR site in your niche to link to you and give you a boost in search engine juice, if that link doesn't deliver CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Links Are More Valuable Than Content
You've heard it said often enough: "Content is King." But is it? Second-rate Search Engine Optimization experts and followers all over the Internet will repeat this mantra over and over again as if it is true and add such silly wisdom - let's call it Sisdom - as "If content is king then link building is queen." Yeah, right. Let me tell you why this is all wrong. Any schmuck can put content on a web page. In fact, a web page is not a web page without content. Try putting up a blank white screen with nothing but your html and body tags. Call that content and every goober with a hat on will laugh at you. (The goobers without hats will stare blankly.) I've seen CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
YouTube Can Help SEO Your Website
YouTube is rolling out a beta version of a personalized home page. I think this is great and could have implications for Search Engine Optimization. I think this is a sign that Google sees its personalization efforts as successful. I assume I don't need to remind you that Google now owns YouTube, which means the move is a Google executive decision. So the Search Engine Optimization implications are even more far reaching than one I'm about to tell you. In terms of Search Engine Optimization, since many webmasters use YouTube videos as embeds on their blogs and websites, personalization could make these embeds more accessible. If I, for instance, have a tendency to embed videos about search engine optimization and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do You Sell Text Links? Think About This.
Darren Rowse at Problogger wrote about an offer he received from someone wanting to buy text links on his website. The conversation is very interesting. Even after being told "No" umpteen gazillion times, the link buyer was persistent and kept upping his offer, going from an initial offer of $150 to $400 per paragraph. Keep in mind that this offer was for a permanent placement, not a monthly recurring fee, and that each paragraph would consist of 4 or 5 text links. At $400 one-time payment, that would come to $100 total per link for a PR 5 website to help with the link building part of Search Engine Optimization. What a rip off. Darren breaks down his decision to refuse the offer this CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Robots.txt May Allow Link Sellers A Loophole
Here's a creative way of getting around Google's paid link policy. The search engine has effectively told webmasters that they will be penalized for selling links. Many webmasters have gone to instituting nofollow attributes on their paid links so that they aren't penalized. That penalizes the webmasters buying the links as they don't get any PR transference from those nofollow links. So will Beard's Robots.txt solution solve his problem? It's possible, but not likely. Robots.txt will allow webmasters the ability to tell Google not to crawl their pages. If you have a page on which you link to other sites that have paid for you to do so then you can prevent Google from crawling that web page altogether. The page will still be indexed, but CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Best Internal Link Structure For Your Website
One of the most important aspects of your website infrastructure is your internal linking structure. You really need to give it some thought as to how to make the most use of your internal links. There is one site structure that I recommend for most websites that will help you keep a handle on this very important aspect of website maintenance. Using a tiered page system, you can ensure that you drive traffic and spread your PageRank around so that you get the best benefits from your search engine optimization efforts. The tiered page system looks like this: Home Page Page A Page B Page C Page D A1 / A2 CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Blogging For Inbound Links
It's no secret that you need relevant inbound links to benefit your website. But where do you get those? Well, there are various ways to build inbound links to your site. Starting an off-site company blog is one of them. Granted, a butt load of links from one website only go so far. But an off-site blog benefits you in other ways too. No. 1, you can attract traffic to your blog much faster than you can to your static website. You can then funnel that traffic to your website. Secondly, you can use the blog to increase the number of pages you have indexed at the search engines. Every page you create is one more leg up on the competition. Then there's the link building CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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