An article SiteProNews got my attention when I read a headline about the best 3 - count ‘em, three! - SEO tips for this year. Here’s what the author suggested:

• Subscribe to Google Alerts
• Search Engine Optimize your 404 page
• Build links - seriously

Notice he didn’t say “optimize your content.” I wonder why.

Seriously, everyone serious about search engine optimization knows that optimizing your content is important, but can you over-optimize? Can you under-optimize it? Can you optimize it optimally?

It’s not a joke. You can use too many keywords for your content pages. You can also use too few. And you do it just right and still not get ranked well for your important keywords. That’s because keywords are not the only elements the search engines look for in order to rank your website against your competitors. Other factors, which you don’t have control over, are the age of your website and the age of your competitors’ websites, how well your competition does at optimizing their websites, and other related ranking factors concerning your competition. Let’s face it, Search Engine Optimization is competition.

I think Google Alerts is a wonderful tool. I also like the suggestion about optimizing your 404 page, but even if you don’t, it’s not a deal breaker. Neither of those two suggestions will make or break you. Even mediocre content won’t necessarily kill your business. But not building links will.

There is a lot of emphasis on optimizing your content, and rightfully so, but truth be told, you can spend too many hours anally going over every word to get the best optimization you can get when you could be doing something much more productive with your time - like building links. You can actually write mediocre content and build links to your website and see your search positions rise just on that alone. Rarely will you ever see your search positions rise on the basis of improving your site’s content without doing anything else. If you do, it’s likely because your content sucked in the first place.

So what it really boils down to is this: Would you rather have mediocre content and darned good links or kick a$$ content and hardly no links at all? As for me, I’d rather have awesome inbound links and mediocre content. Though it can’t be said enough that content that doesn’t sell, now matter how well optimized it is, isn’t going to do you much good at all even if you have the best linking strategy in the world.

There are two things that good links do for your website. They’re both easy to measure and easy to accomplish, but it is time consuming to do it the right way.

Links can increase your search positioning - i.e. your rank in the search engines as part of your Search Engine Optimization. But it can also drive traffic to your website. Neither of these are really hard, but it can complicated trying to figure out what type of links you really need.

When it comes to traffic, there are two ways to think about it. You can go for quantity, in which case you simply try to get as many links as you can in as many places as you can. The danger with this is that you could get pegged as a spammer and your Search Engine Optimization benefits will decline. The upside is, if you do it right, you’ll get a lot of traffic. And you don’t necessarily need link juice in order to make this happen. Nofollow links work just as well as relevant links from high PageRank sites. If you are link building for traffic then don’t worry too much about the Search Engine Optimization.

On the other hand, to get the best links you’ll need to concentrate at least some of your efforts on building relevant links from high PageRank sites. By increasing your link popularity, you essentially are telling people that you are serious about building a brand. That link popularity will translate into higher search engine positions, which in turn leads to more traffic.

It makes sense, then, that if you want more traffic and higher search positioning then you’ll work on increasing the trust factor of your website and seek quality links. While quality is better than quantity, quantity is better than nothing and quality + quantity is best of all. So figure out a way to get as many really good links as you can and keep trying until you get it right.

Spend just a little bit of time in an Search Engine Optimization forum and you’re bound to hear someone talking about link bait - what it is, how do you do it, why it’s important, when it’s necessary, etc. etc. Well, there is link bait hype and then there is link bait tripe. But either way, link bait doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t have to spend countless hours coming up with new and creative ways to get the blog next door to link to you. Sometimes all you have to do is make it simple.

Link bait comes in many ways and shades. Some people are going to link to you no matter what. Others are going to link to you because they like what you are doing. And some bloggers just won’t link to you. Period. What are you going to do? Twist their arms?

When you create a linkable blog post then the links will start coming. All it takes is a simple list. Come up with 10 things you like about an important concept in your industry. Or maybe 10 things you don’t like. A good way to get people to link to you is to list 25 of the most important people in your industry. Then send an e-mail to each of those people and let them know that they made your list. If anyone will link to you, they will. Then, their friends will link to you because the think it’s cool that their friend is on your list.

Link bait isn’t hard. Sometimes it’s the simplest things in the world that helps…

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 in the same niche as you.

I’ve found that the best way to ensure that you keep targeted traffic Stumbling your sites is to use StumbleUpon in conjunction with other networking sites. For instance, BlogCatalog has a great networking tool in its groups and there are several groups devoted to social media and StumbleUpon, in particular. But those are general groups. While you want to network through those groups, you also want to network with others who blog and own websites within your niche. By networking with people within your niche at Facebook, BlogCatalog, and other such networking sites and asking them to Stumble your website or blog, you increase your chances of getting extra Search Engine Optimization link juice. Those are the people most likely to not only Stumble you, but link to you from their blog and website as well.

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.

The real benefit to forum posting has always been the relationship building aspect of being a member of the community. Forums are discussion groups. They are places where people go to get specialized knowledge and information from others with similar interests. It’s a friend-helping-a-friend platform and you always have people with different levels of skill chatting with each other about philosophy, technique, tools of the trade, etc.

As you interact with other members of the group, you are allowed to provide links to resources (even your own), and can even put in signature links with all of your posts to let people know what business you are in and allow them to visit your website. Again, though, not all forums allow signature links. Some forums make you pay for privilege.

What happened?

Well, in short, spam is what happened. As soon as word got out that forums were a good place to get link juice, every Search Engine Optimization expert and Internet marketer in the world flocked to the forums and flooded the message boards with their “Come to my website and see the fabulous new widget I’ve built for people who never visit this forum” type comments. Yes, without concern for the character of the board or the interests of the people in the forums, Internet marketers only left blatant marketing messages and didn’t bother to be useful or join relevant conversations. This unnerved a lot of regular forum participants who began to complain to the forum moderators.

To cut down on spam, forum moderators did two things. First, they instituted the “nofollow” links policy, which effectively cut down on the amount of spam they were getting almost overnight. Secondly, many forums started limiting the lines you could have in your signature link or not allowing signature links at all. In essence, what they were saying was, “If you aren’t here to join and be a part of our community and all you want to do is promote yourself then we aren’t interested in you being here.”

But not all forums went this route. Most did, but some forums still allow signature links and still give link juice. They’re hard to find, but they’re still there. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should run out and look for all the forums that give link juice and start posting marketing messages. It does mean that if you have relevant information that fits for a particular forum and you use decorum in presenting what you have to offer, not only can you realize the benefit of more traffic to your website, but you can also realize a small Search Engine Optimization benefit. My word of caution: Don’t abuse it.

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 of the major social networks now allow you to add a widget to your profile page and you can create one using that network’s API. But there are also standalone widget creation web sites that will allow you to create your own widgets and use on your website, blog, or social networking profile. Some of them are:

• Grazr
• KickApps
• Yourminis.com
• Yahoo! Widgets

It’s really not hard to create a widget, but it can be time consuming if you’ve never done any coding. There is a certain skill involved. But a cool widget can draw people to your website and help you build link popularity that will help your Search Engine Optimization.

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 targeted traffic to your website then it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a link.

Traffic makes you money. The best a link can do is push you up a few notches in the search engine results and send you a few leads. It’s up to your website content to close the sale. Without traffic, however, no matter how good your sales content is, you won’t last long online. That’s why it is important to make sure all of the pieces fit together and work together for the common good.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, and some of them involve link building. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand, though often they do.

Here are a few ways you can drive traffic to your website:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Article Marketing
• Blog
• Social Bookmarking
• Reciprocal Linking
• Link Buying
• Directory Submissions
• Online Advertising
• Press Release Distribution
• Social Networking
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Viral Video Marketing
• Podcasting

And that’s not all. There are as many ways to drive traffic to your website as there are link building methods. Actually, even more. In terms of Search Engine Optimization benefit, link building is far more important, but in terms of ROI, traffic is what will pay your bills - if, and it’s a big if, your website is capable of converting. So which is more important? Link building or traffic? You tell me.

There’s a great article over at The Link Spiel on link building. Debra Mastaler has some great thing to say in this article. Here’s a gem that I found quite intriguing:

Generating links through the social networks can be a crapshoot, you get what you get. Unlike traditional linking, you can’t pinpoint where those links will come from or control which sites to target.

So the question is, are the links generated through social media campaigns any less efficient?

That’s a great question. Debra goes on to provide some useful insight into the question, but I do have some thoughts.

First, link building is not as difficult as some people will have you believe. The hard part is knowing what kind of links have the best value. Not all links are created equal. Because of that, social media links and links garnered from social media marketing can be difficult to measure. Every site has its own challenges to overcome, but there are benefits as well. A few social sites offer their own link juice:

• Digg
• Propeller
• Furl
• Techorati

To name a few. Others, however, don’t:

• del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• Almost all of the rest

Like article marketing, though, you shouldn’t be using social media to gain links from the social media sites. Social media is not an end unto itself. It is the means to an end. You therefore have to see through the media to the other side and view your link building in terms of who you can reach through the social media sites that you are targeting.

Some industries, for instance, have niche social media sites that you can target. Your target market likely hangs out there. Using those sites will likely be more profitable for you than a general site like Digg or StumbleUpon. While you can potentially get a lot of traffic from the big social media sites, much of that traffic will likely be untargeted and unqualified. And, yes, you may get some links from those sites, but will those links help you in the long run?

Link building through social media marketing, as Debra Mastaler points out, is not like traditional link building. You can’t see it that way. It is important to count the costs of your time and investment before you go leaping and bounding into the never, never land of social media. There are benefits, to be sure, but those benefits, like everything else, should be carefully measured.

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 people build a five page website and just wait. “Yep, built a website! The business will come any time. I’m juu-uuu-uust a-waitin’. God bless my soul.”

OK, I’m being silly. But you know it happens. People build a website - they’ve got content - and nothing happens. Some king.

Content without links will get you nothing. I’m not saying start building inbound links and all your problems will be solved. But I am saying that you can take any crappy site with content, build links to it and at least improve your Google juice. Content alone will not ensure you any rankings. It won’t ensure you any sales. It won’t ensure you any traffic. But put one strategically placed link somewhere else on the Web and point it back to your crappy site with content and you’ll likely increase your traffic. You’ll likely also increase your PageRank and Google’s algorithms will jump for joy because they found something of value related to your content - even though it’s not on your crappy website.

Now, that’s how links are more important than content. Even a bad link - not a spam link or a “bad neighborhood” link (I’m talking about an ineffectual milquetoast link) - can increase the Search Engine Optimization juice on your lousy content website. Oooooh, but take that lousy content and rewrite it. I don’t just mean change a few verbs and rearrange your keywords. I mean really rewrite it. Rewrite it from scratch so that your content shines - like Patton’s combat boots. Spit polish your content until you can see your own reflection. Don’t do anything. Now you’ve got a website with valuable content - and that’s what will make a difference.

Lesson: Content is not king. Good content is king.

Inbound links to a lousy content site with crappy content is better than a website with bad content and no links. But take that website and make your content good and your good content site without links will outperform a bad content site with all the links in the world. Add links to it, however, and you’ve got one hell of a website to be proud of. And it will make you money as part of your Search Engine Optimization efforts. I think that’s what Rand Fishkin meant when he said that links are more important than content. To that I wholeheartedly agree.

I’d like to confirm the backlink question posed at WebProNews recently. Do spammy backlinks hurt you and your Search Engine Optimization efforts?

Yes, they can. But it does take a lot.

Let’s say you run a small business website that is beginning to attract spammy backlinks from porn sites, pharmaceuticals hawkers, and spam blogs. You’d better have a bunch of good links going in because if you don’t then those nefarious backlinks could hurt your reputation in a really bad way. It’s not the value of the links per se; it’s more the quantity of the bad links and the percentage of bad links compared with your good links.

If you have just 10 good links, because you’re a fairly new site, and you start getting hundreds of backlinks that are low quality spam links, porn links, warez sites, and the like, then that won’t look good for you. On the other hand, if you’ve got 30,000 good links and just a thousand or so of these bad links then you’re probably OK because you’ve got so many good links that Google will tend to overlook the bad ones. That’s another reason why inbound links are so important. They’re effective in reputation management and Search Engine Optimization.

Article marketing, off site blogging, directory submissions, and other valid link building strategies should never be abandoned. Get those good, solid links in place before your competition decides to bombard you with bad links. This could be the new trench warfare - competitors killing each other off with sour link juice. Don’t be a victim, be a proactive linker and do it right.

Once again, Rand Fishkin, wrote a blog post with some meat in it. The questions people ask about ranking at one search engine vs. another are worth a read. Just a little snippet:

Google rewards a few very high quality, trusted links over many lower value links and thus, you’ll frequently see pages and sites in Google’s rankings because they’ve won out through the value Google places in their sparse but more trusted link profile.

This is probably one of the least understood principles of search engine optimization. It is definitely the most misunderstood thing about link building. You don’t necessarily need a ton of links. Yahoo likes a lot of links. Google doesn’t. In fact, Google has been known to penalize websites for certain kinds of links. So you’re much better off targeting your link building efforts toward a few websites that will garner you great link juice than a lot of websites will get you modest juice or none at all.

Link building is an essential activity for search engine optimization. Do it wrong and it can cost you. Do it right and the benefits will stick around for a very long time. You should take some time to learn what each of the search engines consider a valuable link and work on optimizing your link building strategies so that you get the right benefits from each search engine.

Much has been said about online press releases. How they’re important for branding, building an online business, getting lots and lots of publicity. But you can use them for Search Engine Optimization?

Absolutely.

Links in your press releases work the same way as links anywhere else online. But it may not necessarily be just about the press release distribution website. Like article marketing, you can submit your press releases to distribution websites that are visited by newspaper, television, radio, and Internet journalists. These press releases are then used to promote your company and products on news sites and sites related to your industry.

There are two ways a press release can be used by these other companies:

1. The press release can be used just as you wrote it, links and all
2. Or the news site or industry site can contact you for an interview

That second way is the way most press releases attract attention. You’ll get a call or an e-mail from a news or industry website wanting your opinion on a topic or wanting to do a story on your company. In the story, they will usually use link to your website. That link will count as an inbound link for you website and it will garner the same link juice that any other link will, subject to relevance, authority, etc. Overall, press releases can be a great addition to your search engine optimization.

Are paid links necessary?

If you read the blogs of people John Chow and ProBlogger you’d think you couldn’t run a website without selling links or buying them. Is it true?

Personally, I’d say that’s not true. Paid links may have some value, but there are so many ways to get free links and it’s so easy to do that I wouldn’t even think about buying links without first using the free methods of link building at my disposal. But what about selling links?

When it comes to selling links on your website to others who want to buy them, there are a few things to keep in mind. No. 1, is the link buyer a spammer? If so, you want think long and hard before you sell links.

Who you link to says a lot about the type of website you run. It’s your reputation and you want to guard it viciously. Not just against the search engines either. You human visitors want to be able to trust you and they are far more important than the search engines. Spiders can deliver you traffic, but if your traffic doesn’t trust you because you will sell links to anyone for any reason then it won’t matter how much traffic you get.

That’s why paid links are such a problem. Yes, you can good money on the short term. But how will it fair long term? If you can’t translate those short term benefits into something permanent, you’d be better off leaving the paid links to someone else when it comes to your search engine optimization.

This is helpful, from Matt Cutts:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.

In other words, if you have 2 or 3 versions of the same article on your own website and it doesn’t exist anywhere else then you don’t have anything to worry about with duplicate content. That’s because the search engines index the best version of an article or web content. That’s why you can have the original article, a .pdf version, another version for easy printing, etc. You won’t have to worry about penalties. That’s a very important distinction.

Even more importantly, I think, you need to seriously consider how much you syndicate your content. Here’s why:

However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

That’s a very important piece of information. These submission services that promise to submit your content to thousands of websites at one time may actually be hurting you. When it comes to content syndication, more is not necessarily better. That’s not to say that it’s better not to syndicate at all. There is an optimal level of syndication. For search engine optimization purposes, it is in your best interest to be weary.

I would encourage you, if you’re going to put content on your own website AND syndicate it, to put it on your own website first then wait a couple of weeks before you syndicate. I would also limit myself to a handful of article directories and websites. First, I’d pick the websites that I know I’d like to see my content on and I’d submit to them. After a couple of weeks (again), I’d submit my content to no more than a dozen directories and/or submission sites. I would stay away from the submission sites that submit to thousands of sites at once. The only exception would be if my content was in a niche that would intrinsically limit who will publish it and then I’d probably submit only to those mass submit sites. It’s usually better to submit only to mass submit sites or specific directory sites, but not both. The main reason for this is because any article or content that is syndicated to more than 100 places online has likely reached its limit.

You’ve been told time and time again that directory submissions are necessary to help build up your link portfolio. But just how necessary are they?

Well, it depends. For the most part, it is a necessary link building strategy for search engine optimization but be careful who you hire to do it. There are a lot of directory submission and search engine optimization companies out there that promise you the moon, but all they really do is mass submit your website to directories and there is no follow through. If you’re going to pay someone to submit your website, e-zine, or blog to a directory then you should pay someone to do it manually. Otherwise, you’re really just wasting your dollars.

I highly recommend directories. They do provide you with one way links and many of them are from high PR sites. But don’t fret about it. Many websites have done very well without directory submissions. What the directory submissions do for you, though, is provide you with inbound one-way links that can prove valuable to your trust factor over time. But it isn’t the most important thing to be doing with your time and money. Building well optimized high value content pages for your website is far more important.