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 yourself to just one way. In order to build a diverse portfolio of links, you need to expand your horizons beyond directory submissions and article marketing. Yes, you should include those in your strategy, but don’t limit yourself to them. Get creative.

Some other ways you can build links back to your website include:

• Posting in forums
• Commenting on blogs
• Online press release campaign
• Being a guest blogger
• Social bookmarking
• Setting up social networking profiles
• Industry association memberships
• Getting your website reviewed
• Getting your book or other product reviewed
• Offering a testimonial to another site owner you’ve done business with

And I’m sure you can think of plenty more on your own. Don’t just settle for one method of link building. Diversify!

Are you busy trying to make your links look natural? Have you hired an search engine optimization company that sold you on a link building plan based on making your links appear natural? If so, fire them. Your links should not appear natural. They should be natural.

It happens all the time. Some new web entrepreneur or small business person trying to make the migration to online marketing reads an e-book, or a blog post, about how important links are and decide to do a little link building. Either they are going the budget route and doing it themselves or they hire a company to do it on the cheap under the guise that those links will appear like natural links. Uhm, guys, if your links are natural then they will look natural. Comprende?

It’s not hard. Actually, link building is fairly time consuming and arduous. But understanding the importance of it isn’t hard. And understand that au natural means more than mere appearances. You aren’t running for Miss America. You’re building your business. So don’t cut corners and don’t try to look like the most beautiful, intelligent, talented woman on the stage. Put the effort in and be the most beautiful, intelligent, talented pageant girl on the stage. See the difference?

Mike McDonald at WebProNews wrote a great article on SEO ranking factors and which ones are most important right now. Of course, it’s not all encompassing. It only touches on a few of them. But one thing I noted was that Mike and Rand Fishkin agree that H1 tags are not that important for ranking. Here’s what he says about the subject:

H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that ‘hey, this text is important because it’s bigger’. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets.

That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable. However, currently, while H1 tags aren’t going to hurt you, they don’t seem to be much of a factor.

First, let’s clarify something. H1 tags in and of themselves aren’t that important. No H1 tag is going to push you up to the top of search engine rankings. But H tags in general, if used properly, can be a benefit. The problem with some webmasters is that they have misused H tags.

Spam hurts. Can we all agree on that? Even H-tag spam is self-dustructive. It’s like sticking a needle in your arm. You may not be an alcoholic, but if smoke crack then you’re still destroying body. Misuse H tags and you could be killing your SEO. Plain and simple.

So What’s The Proper Way To Use H Tags?
The best way to use H tags, in my humble opinion, is in the classic newspaper style. Newspapers have always published the largest headlines at the top of the page and made the headlines increasingly smaller down the page toward the bottom. Using this classic design style for your web pages still works. It’s a quality content issue. Such decreasing h tag styles makes reading easier on human eyes and search bots don’t seem to mind either.

Now, will that make your pages rank better? I don’t think it will make them rank any worse. But if you have 12 H1 tags down your page because you think they’ll give you special search engine favor then you are likely to find out that such H-tag spamming will just end you up in the SEO gutter. Therefore, H tags can help you if they aren’t hurting you. In other words, the absence of a negative is a positive.

So, with that in mind, how’s your H1 tag hanging?

Chris Crum is da man! His article about Bing and SEO provides some great insight into how Microsoft’s new search engine has, and will, affect search engine optimization. The question is, should webmasters change their SEO strategy?

My take? If your doing well with your optimization efforts right now, Bing doesn’t change anything. Still, you’ve got read Chris’s article. Here are a few highlights.

With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP.

That’s a brilliant statement. Personally, I like the categories on the search page because it’s an intuitive and a recognized way to narrow down a search query. Thanks to the popularity of blogging, people are already familiar with tagging and categorizing. So it will be natural to narrow a search result to a specific category if it fits what you are looking for. Therefore, Chris’s observation that you should focus on getting to the top of the right category for each search query is a great observation. But does that change how you should conduct your campaign?

Not really. But, realistically, perhaps a little bit. It will become more important to rank your blog content into the proper category. It might even become feasible, and perhaps prudent, to add categorization to your static website. Time will tell on that one. At any rate, Bing’s categories could very well make SEO strategies a bit more focused.

On links, straight from the mouth of Bing’s horse:

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. “We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites,” explains DeJarnette.

Bing’s link philosophy is not really any different from Google’s so your link building campaigns really shouldn’t change. As Chris says, the presentation Bing offers may differ from Googles, but your SEO goals should be the same.

One aspect of Chris’s article that I really appreciate is his discussion social media. I believe social media is going to be more important for optimization. It already is and I’ll tell you why. Traffic. Plain and simple. Social media delivers targeted traffic. If you can manage a successful social media campaign to deliver targeted traffic to your site that stays on your site then that increase in traffic coupled with a lower bounce rate can affect your rankings. We’ve discussed that before here and here.

So back to the original question: Should you change your SEO strategy for Bing? I say ‘not yet’. What do you think?

Most of us consider optimization of links to be mostly about inbound links. While inbound links are important, they aren’t the only links that are important. You also need to optimize your internal links to prevent broken links, good traffic flow, and PR flow.

PR = PageRank, for the uninitiated.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about your navigational menu, although that’s a good place to start. You want your links to be good, solid hypertext links, not dynamic links. For instance, those snazzy little drop-down menus on your nav bar? They don’t really help you. Sure, they look cool, but for search engine optimization purposes they are hurting you because they just won’t get crawled.

So step 1 of your link optimization strategy should be crawlability. Any links that don’t get crawled are a big ding in your search engine armor.

Also, be sure to use the proper anchor text for your internal links. That means using keywords that are appropriate for the linking page. And title attributes for your links can increase your optimization efforts as well.

When it comes to on-page optimization, don’t forget your internal links!

When it comes to search engine optimization, it used to be about 2 things: Keywords and Links. Well, there’s really a lot more to it today than there used to be, but in some fashion SEO can be boiled down - as can Internet marketing - to 3 things. We can call them the 3 prongs to your SEO tuning fork.

What are those prongs? Glad you asked.

1. Keywords
2. Links
3. Traffic

Keywords are the basic currency of search engine marketing. You don’t have to count out strict density patterns. But how you manage your keywords - placement, quantity, the specific phrase you choose, etc. - determines how well you have optimized your on-page content and even, to some degree, your off-page content.

If keywords are the currency of search engine marketing, links are the currency of traffic authority. Specifically, I’m talking about inbound links. But your link management should consist of outbound and internal links as well. And when you manage your linking well, you’ll be judicious in how you use your links. If you use them the right way you can channel traffic to the pages you want it and increase your search engine benefits through the use of anchor text, and placement on authority sites of relevance to yours. Links are the glue that hold the other two prongs in place, the center prong, if you will.

Traffic. A lot could be said for that. It isn’t often thought of as an element of SEO even though every webmaster knows its importance. Without traffic you don’t have a Web business. You won’t make money. Who’s going to buy what you have to offer if they can’t see the offer? Still, conversions aside, traffic does affect your search engine rankings in some way. Though it’s not known just how much, stats like bounce rate, time on site, time on page, and other such relevant metrics could give you SEO points in some search engine algorithms.

How well do you manage the three prongs of your SEO tuning fork?

Increasingly, SEO is becoming more about the quality of content and not just quantity of keywords. At one point in the past, your content could have been total smack and you could have achieved great search engine rankings by using keywords correctly. That’s a lot harder today these days. Sure, in some cases you can still get away with keyword spamming, but in general it’s not a good idea to even try.

The search engines have become a lot more sophisticated. Google, in particular, analyzes much more than keyword quantities. During the migration of Google’s rise to power, we’ve seen emphasis on keyword densities move to keyword placement for on-page optimization elements and from number of links off-site to link quality and relevance. While Google still emphasizes link relevance and quality to some degree, even those factors are beginning to lose effectiveness. Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms to keep SEOs on our toes.

Now we’re seeing traffic factors much more important. Time on site, bounce rates, traffic patterns in terms of quantity and even traffic sources can effect your search engine rankings.

Going forward, anyone who wants to rank well in the search engines will have to spend considerable time keeping up with changes at the search engines that effect how your sites are perceived, indexed, and ranked. Otherwise, you could see your pages fall in the rankings in a heartbeat.

I’ve been reviewing notes for HTML 5, the 5th generation of major changes to the Web’s standard programming language. It doesn’t look to be a complete overhaul, but there are some changes that appear to be for the better. Currently still in development, under W3C committee, HTML 5 is still a work in progress, but I find the following elements to be very welcoming from a search engine optimization perspective:

• Section tag instead of Div tags to divide a web page into sections
• Header and footer tags
• Nav tag for navigational menus
• Article tag
• No alt tags for defining images
• Video and audio tags

I think HTML 5 will be easier to learn for most people than HTML 4 is. I also think it could have some impactful SEO implications. The audio and video tags, for instance, will make optimizing for those elements much more easier. Also, web pages will likely begin to take on a more magazine-like appearance.

When will HTML 5 be available publicly? Who knows? But I’m looking forward to it.

It has been some time since Google announced that it can crawl and index Flash files. Even then, the capability was very limited. The search engine has recently expanded on that ability, however.

From the Webmaster Central Blog:

* Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
* Discover links within Flash files.
* Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
* Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
* Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

So it looks like video optimization is moving a little closer to photo optimization only better. As of now Google can’t crawl or index content within photos, but it does use text near the photo to better understand what a photo is about. The primary ingredient in photo optimization, however, is the alt tag.

With video, there’s no alt tag, but Google can crawl an SWF file and detect links, which is a huge move forward. Webmasters should have a heydey with this one.

I’m not sure what to make of this one. But it seems that some spam comments did have a negative effect on one guy’s search engine rankings. I’ll tell you why I think that is in just a moment.

But for now, here’s a little snippet from Chris Crum’s article:

Breaking out some Google Analytics data, Baxter shows us that one of his most popular keywords for driving traffic to his site had him ranking high in a search for that keyword until a few spammy comments about things like “hairy asian men naked,” “nude female superheroes,” and “large nipple galleries” were left on the page. Shortly after that, the page fell out of the rankings, but was re-included within 24 hours once the comments were finally deleted.

First, let’s observe that we’re not talking about ordinary spam here. We’re talking about porn spam, which is worse than your ordinary keyword-specific niche-targeted spam. If your site is about automatic widgets and you can a few spam comments like “I agree. You hit the nail on the head. I like widgets.” and “Very interesting topic. I bookmarked this site because my sister’s widget site is almost as good as yours.” then chances are those comments won’t hurt your rankings at all. They may even help it, unless - there’s always an ‘unless’ isn’t there? - the spammers link back to a warez site, porn site, or other malicious site from the comment.

I think that’s what happened in Richard Baxter’s case. His site isn’t porn related, but the spam comments that got by akismet were of that nature. Google likely sees those as a reputational threat to itself if searchers looking for information on search engine optimization see those comments on his technology blog.

So the question, Can spam comments kill your search engine rankings, is best answered as “maybe.” If those comments can lead to malicious or otherwise damaging sites for the end user then it’s huge possibility. If the links were not to porn sites, but did lead to otherwise innocent looking pages that were found out to contain downloads with malicious malware on them them Baxter likely would have had the same result. What do you think?

If you’ve never used Google Analytics then you’re missing out. It’s free and that’s a good selling point, but it’s also one of the best metrics tools on the planet. It’s certainly better than anything else out there in the free (or even paid) category of tracking products. And if you’ve been to the Google Analytics site but decided it wasn’t for you because you couldn’t find any of the helpful information, that has changed. They’ve changed the way they look.

Obviously, the new face is meant to make Google Analytics easier to work with for new users. If you are a veteran user then you likely sign up through your Personalized Google account. If not then you may see the face. It’s still helpful.

If you have a website and you want to know how users are using your website then I highly recommend Google Analytics. You simply add a little code to the pages of your site and verify it then you can track how users are using the site, including the number of visitors, unique visitors, time on site, time on individual pages, bounce rates, navigation patterns, traffic sources, and you can even create your own customized reports. It’s the perfect metrics tool to measure your search engine optimization efforts as well as paid search. Try it out.

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 link is an effective call to action then you’ll also increase your sales and marketing power. It will lead to increased conversions.

An example of a good link with a strong call to action and well-placed anchor text is right here below:

Notice the phrase “SEO Service”. That’s my anchor text. But “learn more about SEO” could just as well be the anchor text. It’s a phrase that some people, albeit fewer, might use to search for information online. And it’s a link. The call to action is “click here”. It’s clear what I want my reader to do. If they are interested in link building they should click the link to learn how to do it. Anyone interested in learning about link building is promised a benefit. And that’s how you use anchor text as a call to action.

Call me a Google apologist, but the company just keeps making itself better. The latest Google improvement? Google Analytics Goals and Google AdWords integration.

Seriously, what can you do with this? Well, let’s see. You set a goal in Google Analytics and import that goal into Google AdWords then track how well you meet your goal. Want something more specific? Sure. Here’s an example.

You sell widgets (original, huh?). You set a goal that you want to sell 10% more widgets in July than you did last July. You’ve been tracking your online sales for three years now so the data is there. Now, import your goal settings into Google AdWords and start tracking your progress. Simple.

At the expense of oversimplifying, that’s it in a nutshell. Before, you had to insert code onto your pages just for the conversion tracking. That was in addition to your Google Analytics. Now, you just need the Google Analytics code and that’s it. If you know how time consuming it can be to install a few lines of code onto every page of your website then you can apprciate this change.

And one more simple tool to help you out - get step-by-step instructions on the integration process.

What’s this got to do with search engine optimization? Nothing, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Now go ahead. Call me a Google apologist.

Google has always been interested in bounce rates, primarily to let webmasters know how readers are responding to the content on their pages. But what Google Analytics reports as your bounce rate is not entirely accurate.

Every page on your website is optimized for a number of keywords, not just one. Some of those are intentional and some are not. Just in the last 6 months or so Google has been tinkering with the way that it displays SERP snippets. In some cases the snippet is taken from your meta description, most often when the search query used matches your primary keyword for the page. But when a search query is for another keyword phrase the snippet is often quite different. Google will then use a snippet of page content where that search query phrase is used. This supposedly has resulted in increased click throughs.

If Google can measure your traffic for each keyword, which it does, and it can measure your traffic for each keyword per page, then it can measure your bounce rate for each keyword per page. It may not be reporting that to you through Google Analytics, but it’s measuring it. And if Google measures something it’s for a reason.

When a searcher types a search query into Google and finds your website, she immediately determines whether or not that’s what she was looking for. If you have one sentence on your page about the topic she was searching and that’s all she can find then she will likely back out and visit another page on the SERP. If enough users do that then you’ll eventually fall in the search engine rankings for that keyword because Google figures that a high bounce rate for that keyword for that page is a bad fit for its search results page. On the other hand, if you get a high number of searchers who visit your page after a particular search query and they stay on your site longer then that’s a good sign that your web page is a good fit for the search query. You’ll have a lower bounce rate for that key phrase for that page and you’ll rise in comparison to other pages based on their bounce rates for that key phrase.

I haven’t read anywhere that this is the case, but it does make sense and I’m pretty sure that if Google isn’t doing this already then it soon will be.

I’m becoming more and more convinced every day that Google is diminishing importance on inbound links and increasing importance on visitor traffic patterns, particularly bounce rates. Google’s complex ranking algorithms are constantly in flux. It’s change or be changed.

Why would visitor bounce rates be more important than inbound links? For several reasons.

• No. 1, inbound links have been gamed much too often and in too many sordid ways.
• Rising traffic patterns mean that a site is growing in popularity and is an indication that site visitors may be helping a website grow by sharing pages and information from that site with their friends. Since many website visitors are not webmasters and therefore not capable of providing links, they can still “vote” on the quality of a page by bookmarking pages, sharing through e-mail, and through other user actions like return visits. Google likely considers all of that in its ranking considerations.
• Bounce rates are particularly telling because a visitor landing on a page, particularly from a search result, only to find something other than what was intended and leaving immediately means that the webmaster did a poor job of “marketing” that page in the first place.

Links are still important, but they are losing importance and will probably never have the same status that they had in 2005. Traffic patterns are becoming much more important and I think Google will only get more sophisticated in the way that it measures traffic and bounce rates.