How Your Anchor Text Helps The Search Engines
The folks at Yahoo Labs have been pretty busy lately. They recently published a paper titled "Building Enriched Document Representations using Aggregated Anchor Text" (opens a pdf file). It's an interesting read. The paper is all about how to rank web pages based on what the anchor text pointing to those pages say about them. The problem is, there are a lot of web pages on the Web that don't have links pointing to them. So what the does the search engine do? Well, you look at the Web graph (a fancy term for the aggregated whole of the Web - pages, links etc.) and consider the anchor text of external pages (pages external to the website on which your page exists) that point CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Link Bait A Viable SEO Strategy?
Link Bait is the practice of adding content to your site that draws an enormous number of natural links, which serve to push that page higher up in the search engines and therefore creating more opportunities to get more links. Is this practice manipulative? Is it is a good and white hat search engine optimization strategy? Will it always work? OK, these are three distinct questions. I'll answer them one at a time. Is link bait manipulative? Yes. It is. In fact, just about everything you do online is manipulative in one sense or another. Optimization, by its nature, is manipulative. So, yes, link baiting is manipulative and that's OK. Is it good SEO? That depends on who you ask, but if you ask me then I'll CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Internal Links The Same As Inbound Links?
The key thing to understand about how search engines work is that they index pages, not websites. In that regard, every page rises or falls on its own merits. On-page search engine optimization is an important factor for every single page on your website. So too is off-page optimization or link building. That means that any inbound links you have pointing to a page are going to be considered by the search engine algorithm for the purposes of PageRank and ranking. While inbound links from other websites will carry more overall weight, if they are good links, you can't discount internal links. Those will often be your first inbound links to every page. But the most important inbound link to your website (indeed, to every page CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Build Links With JavaScript
JavaScript is an interesting tool. It isn't crawlable so therefore any links you find in a script will not be crawled back to the source. On the other hand, search engines can detect the inbound links produced from JavaScript. In other words, you can get credit for inbound links that are hidden inside of JavaScript even though the links themselves won't be crawled by the search engines. Before you start talking about using JavaScript for paid links, consider that Google currently doesn't penalize sites for paid links within JavaScript. But here's the catch: They may start doing so at any time. Do you really want to risk paying for thousands of inbound links only to have those links discounted a year or two down the road? CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Get a Little Natural And Get The Links Flowing
As you start to execute the link building part of your search engine optimization strategy, I would recommend to make sure you always try to keep it natural. Doug Caverly at smallbusinessnewz reports on Phil Orford, the CEO of the Forum of Private Business, taking a casual 84 mile walk over the four days for a children's charity. It's no mean feat and will be reported in dozens of places around the web and the reports will no doubt include links back to his site. In fact Doug Caverly's report links to both the web site and the Twitter profile. If you, or one of your employees is involved in a fund raising venture like this, particularly where sponsorship is involved, why not broadcast the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do Short URLs Send Link Juice?
If you've been wondering whether or not to use short URLs, there are some advantages and some disadvantages. From a link building point of view, short URLs send link juice, but not to the destination URL. Rather, they send link juice back to the redirection service, the URL shortener. Here's what happens when someone clicks on a short URL: They first go to the short URLs website (this is very brief as you'll see in a moment) Then they are redirected to the destination page, the page represented by the URL the shortened URL represents Because traffic is first diverted to the short URL service, and link value along with it, you are adding link juice to the link vault of the URL shortening service rather than the website CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Do You Develop Authority?
You hear this word "Authority" thrown around these days. People use it for all kinds of reasons. In one sense, authority is a word that describes the depth of a person's knowledge. On another level, it simply means the power to which an individual has been elevated over others. Either way, people respect it. Authority can be abused. It can be acquired in less than honorable ways. But when legitimate, authority is a powerful force and when used for good it's even more powerful. And that's why you want to focus your efforts on becoming an authority in your niche. A strongly search engine optimized website is good, but it will only take you so far. Authority, however, will take you to the ends of the earth CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Natural Link Building Really Happen?
Darren Rowse of Problogger fame sent out this tweet this morning: for the record - I don't exchange links with anyone. I link to sites I think are useful to my readers and let link building look after itself That might work well for Darren, but what about the rest of us? Can we rely on link building to take care of itself? Naturally, natural link building for search engine optimization is preferable to trying to force a square peg into a round hole, but is it feasible to expect that thousands of other bloggers and website owners will link to you if you don't have a name brand like Problogger? Sure, name brands are cool and if you've got one that is popular then CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Is Natural Link Building?
You hear it over and over again - be natural. Build links naturally. Let your link building efforts grow naturally. Make your inbound links appear natural. But what does it all mean? Well, there's really no such thing as natural link building. There is natural linking, but you can't control that. Natural linking is the linking that other website owners do when you do something on your site that they like and link to it. You can just count those links as gravy. You didn't pursue them. You didn't ask for them. But you got them and they'll benefit you. But what about link building? It's more profitable, really, to discuss the types of things you DON'T want to do. For instance, You don't want to build CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Article Marketing Is Still Good for Link Building
When it comes to building links to a website, webmasters have tried a variety of methods over the years. Some of those have been very powerful and some of them have been banned, or penalized, by the search engines. But one method of link building that has remained as effective, and as acceptable, as it was on the very first day of the Internet is article marketing. But what does article marketing entail? Well, first, it means you will write articles on a consistent basis and submit them through article directories online. However, a newer method of article marketing involves submitting articles directly to publishers who are seeking exclusive original content. Both methods are great ways to build inbound links. If you've decided that article marketing is the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Articles Or Directory Submissions Better For Building Links?
A reader asked me a question in a recent blog comment, so I decided to write a blog post about this topic. The question was: When it comes to link building, which is better: Articles or directory submissions? Before we answer that question, let's answer a more fundamental question: Why do you need links in the first place? Links are important for a couple of reasons. First, they are a method of driving traffic to your website and to build and increase your online trust factor. In fact, place enough links in all the right places and you can drive targeted traffic to your most important web pages. Secondly, links are good for offsite search engine optimization purposes. All the major search engines base their CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Developing Link Diversity – One Step At A Time
It takes time to build links. But if you're going to do it then you might as well do it right. Build your links with diversity in mind. But what exactly is link diversity? Link diversity is link building that incorporates a multi-faceted approach to building links so that inbound links to your website come from a variety of sources with a variety of PageRank authority and high amount of relevance. It's true that high authority sites within your niche that are aged will send you better link juice than low authority new upstart websites that are not relevant. But why turn down a good link juice because it's worth a nickel and not a quarter? There are several ways to go about link building. You shouldn't limit CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Anchor Text Be A Call To Action?
Do you know the difference between anchor text and a call to action? A call to action is any phrase that you use on your website or blog to get a user to do something. You can ask for a sale, a newsletter subscription, or just simply say "click here". That's a call to action. Anchor text is using keywords within a hypertext link to assist the search engines in valuing that link for search marketing purposes. But can it serve as a call to action? The short answer is, yes. In fact, using anchor text as a call to action is a powerful linking technique because not only do you get the search engine marketing benefits that go with using the anchor text, but if the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Using Anchor Text As Call To Action
Anchor text is more than just keywords in a link. Anchor text is also a call to action. You want the user to click the link, right? Don't assume that just because you put a link in your text that it will be clicked. Not all links are clicked. There are number of factors that into whether or not a link is clicked. Link placement within the text Number of competing links Number of links on the page The text within the link anchor text Promise of benefit at the other end If you have too many links on the page then you rest assured that not all of them will be clicked. Most people have better things to do than run through your entire list of links. You can count CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Which Keywords Make The Best Anchor Text?
So you know you need anchor text and you know how to create links with anchor text. But how do you know which keywords to use for your anchor text as part of your on site optimization strategy? There's really no hard and fast rule. But I can give you some things to think about. No. 1, if you think about your anchor text as a call to action, it's a little easier. But the problem with using every link as a call to action is that you don't always use the best keyword for the situation. However, if you get the click-through then it's worth it, right? Different links server different purposes. For instance, an affiliate link has a different reason for being than a link from CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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