Are Website Directories Worth The Effort?
Website directories come in all shapes and sizes. Some provide link juice, others do not. Some require reciprocal links, some do not. Some ask you to pay a fee while others will list your website for free. Which ones are the best ones? Answering that question is difficult because the answer depends on a lot of other variables that may or may not have an answer. How much traffic does the website directory get? What is its PageRank and does it matter? Is it a niche directory? How long is the wait to get listed? What is the fee and can you afford to pay it? A directory's authority is perhaps the most important thing. Many website directories are here today, gone tomorrow. They won't help you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do Outbound Links Hurt Your Rankings?
One question that comes up every now and then about outbound links is, "Do they hurt your rankings?" The question is based on the precept that linking is a zero-sum game. That is, if you have 1,000 inbound links and 1,000 outbound links then they'll cancel each other out. That's not true at all. If it were true then it would seem to reason that 2,000 outbound links versus 1,000 inbound links would hurt your search engine optimization and provide you with negative benefits. I don't think it's true at all. Outbound links provide only one negative effect, that I'm aware of. I'm talking about healthy linking here, not linking out to bad neighborhoods and bad sites. If you link to good neighborhoods and good sites then CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Perform Link Building Research
We've talked about it in the past, the importance of the link building aspect of search engine optimization. But do you know how to go about finding the sites you want to obtain links from? The process is simple but time consuming. Here are some strategies to use to find relevant websites to your niche: Straight Search Method - This one is a bit intuitive. After you've performed your keyword research just Google your keywords (the ones you want to use as anchor text) and see who pops up. Chances are, the sites that come up are competitors, but you may find some complimentary gems in there as well. Linkdomain Method - To to Yahoo! and type in Linkdomain: followed by your competitor's website. You'll have to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do Directories Still Provide Valuable Links?
Online directories have long been a good source of links for webmasters. But with the advent of other link building strategies like social media marketing, online publicity, social networking, article marketing, bookmarking and viral marketing, how does directory submission stack up? Directory submissions aren't what they used to be, but they're still good. You have to shop around for the right directories, but once you find a handful of directories worth submitting to, it's well worth the effort to go through. After all, directories usually provide anywhere from PR 2 links on up to PR 8. If you submit to DMOZ then you can get a PR 8 link, which is nothing to sneeze at. But the best way to go about directory submissions for most CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Outbound Links Are More Important For Your New Site Than Inbound Links
New webmasters often spend so much time fretting over gaining inbound links that they forget about or totally ignore the value of outbound links. But for new sites, outbound links are infinitely more important. First, they connect you to the wider Web and give you social proof. Since the search engines crawl links to go from one page to another, all you need is one inbound link to your website to get the whole thing crawled. But outbound links tell just as much about your site as the inbound links. They tell the search engines that you are willing to provide valuable information for your visitors and that you aren't just in it for the value to yourself. Outbound links show up referrer logs. Because most webmasters CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Social Browsing Can Help You Optimize Your Website
StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social sites on the Internet. Unlike other sites, like Delicious, it isn't social bookmarking, nor is it, like Digg, considered social news. Rather, StumbleUpon falls into the category of social browsing. You can use the social browsing concept to help you optimize your website. There are two ways you can do this. The first way is to pay attention to hot topics within your niche. When you browsing the topics within your niche and you see a blog post or content on another website become popular then you have a clue as to what other social browsers might be interested in. Visit the page and look at the website to find out what it's keywords are and build a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Less Traffic Protect Your Copyright?
Online content creators have a big stake in protecting copyrights. Primarily because of the ease of distribution of RSS feeds and other subscription-based content, you can easily lose control of your creations. As pointed out by this article at SEOmoz, enforcing your right to ownership online can lead to a decrease in traffic, but what exactly does that look like? If you experience a decrease in traffic due to fewer RSS feeds or your subscriptions falling down, there are a few ways that you may actually lose traffic. The obvious one is that you'll have few people visiting your website by RSS feeds. But that's not all. Since RSS feeds include back links, and usually they are do-follow back links, you will also be decreasing CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Two Ways To Build Strong Anchor Text Links
There are two ways that you can use inbound link anchor text to help you push your web pages up in the search engine rankings. Both ways are viable, but which one you choose depends on whether you are just starting and have no rankings at all or whether you have existing pages that are beginning to rank for terms that you didn't expect to rank for. Anchor Text Trick No. 1 - This method is for new websites with no rankings yet. You know which pages you want to rank for which keywords. If you built your pages correctly, each page on your website should have at least two keyword phrases that they could rank for. It's better if there are three or four keyword CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Linkbaiting: When Should You Do It?
There are many ways to build links to your blog or website. You can write articles, trackback, leave comments on other blogs, submit your blog to directories, buy links (if you're brave), and engage in any of several other tactics to help you achieve this. All of those link building methods require some work on your part. But link baiting is less work. You write a blog post and everyone else does the rest. The problem is, you may not get the links you want or think you deserve. There's a risk involved. Chris Brogan recently write a blog post about the 7 types of link bait (though he attempts to give credit to someone else). Brogan also says you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
President Obama: Cheerful Achiever Or Miserable Failure?
Googlebombs are back. It seems they never go away. And this time it's new President Barack Obama. Matt Cutts explains how Google deals with Googlebombs. I didn't realize there were separate algorithms for detecting Googlebombs and for fixing them. It makes me wonder how my algorithms Google really has. Usually, you hear of Google's algorithm - singular. But it's really the case that Google has several algorthims - plural. That's nice to know. Nevertheless, that doesn't take care of Obama. We all know about former President Bush's "miserable failure" Googlebomb. Well, that was fixed and now Obama has his own, but Google fixed that in its index. Yahoo!, however, still has Obama ranked for "miserable failure" and for "cheerful achiever". Before CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Directories Still Worth The Link?
Back in the day, webmasters would scour the web looking for directories where they could submit their website and get a link back. It worked like a charm as many of the websites were able to rank highly for their key terms just by optimizing well on site and developing a good link building strategy that focused a great deal on directories. Many webmasters built links through hundreds of directories and did well. Does this strategy still work? The short answer is, No. Directory links are still valuable as part of your off site search engine optimization and long term link building strategy, but not as valuable as they used to be. You'll still get good credit for many directory (though not all), but if you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Get Quick Backlinks And Create A Buzz
In the old days of search engine optimization the gurus would write an article and submt it to hundreds of article directories in hopes that webmasters, e-zine editors, and other publishers would pick up the article and publish it sending traffic and high quality backlinks in the author's direction. Well, the article directories still exist and you can still submit your articles to them, but if you get any traffic and/or back links it's a slow process. Sometimes a very slow process. Today, you can actually get better, higher quality links much faster and get loads more traffic in the process by doing article marketing in another way. What you do is write an article highly optimized around your keyword and include an author resource box just CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
There Is More To Social SEO Than Profile Links
Just as social bookmarking can help you build links back to your website, social networking can do so as well. In fact, it is pretty much common knowledge that social networking profiles are good sources for links for the long term ongoing link building aspects of search engine optimization. But why stop there? When you use social bookmarking sites like Digg and Mixx (and of course quite a few others), one thing to keep in mind is the social voting aspect of the service. Simply submitting your content might get you a link, but a lot of votes on your content will gain some search traction. Your social networking works the same way, but slightly different. With social networking sites link LinkedIn and Facebook you are not CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Yahoo! Links Vs. Google Links
Google pretty much created link popularity. Before Google, no one cared about inbound links except for traffic purposes. But the other search engines have caught on and now all of them include link analysis in some form in their web page ranking algorithm. I find it interesting to compare Google data with Yahoo! data for a number of reasons. Any time I check my link popularity, the first thing I notice is that I have a few links counted at Google and a lot of links counted at Yahoo! When I go to look at the links, I see that Google shows me one link from each domain and usually not much more. Yahoo! however shows me a lot of links from the same domain. Yahoo! CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Facebook Pages: One More Optimization Tool
If you haven't guessed it already, Facebook pages are great opportunities to increase your Internet presence mainly because you can optimize the pages just like any other web page - and they show up in the SERPs. Facebook pages have advantages over the traditional Facebook profile. No. 1, there is no limit to the number of fans a page can have. Your Facebook profile, on the other hand, is limited to 5,000 fans. While Facebook profiles often show up in SERPs, the do so mainly for the names of account holders so they make great reputation management tools, but you can optimize your Facebook pages around specific keywords. That means you can make a list of your important keywords and optimize Facebook pages around those keywords CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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