Tag : search engine rankings

  • 10 Link Building Tips You Don’t Want to Miss

    Posted May 27th, 2011 By in Link Building With | No Comments

    Online entrepreneurs know that link building is one of the best ways to increase a site’s rank in search engines and thereby generate more traffic. Despite understanding that link building is an essential component of search engine optimization, many business owners balk at the complicated and time-consuming task of getting well-respected sites to link back to their websites. These 10 tips will give you the guidance and tools you need to maximize the effectiveness of your link building efforts without wasting your time and resources.

    1. Check out what your competition is doing. Never underestimate the value of experience, expertise and most important, results. You can discover high-ranking competitors who target your same audience and then determine what their most effective links are.
    2. Focus on pages that already rank well for search engine queries you’d like to rank for. Pages that rank well for the keywords you’re using have successfully established themselves as authorities and thus are great pages from which to acquire links. Of course, in order to get a link from those pages, your link will have to add value to them.
    3. Investigate the age of prospective linking partners. One of the most significant factors in measuring the quality of a domain is how established it is. Simple queries using readily available free tools can show you how old a domain is, which is one factor in determining how established a website is.
    4. Keep the focus on quality. A few high-quality links will benefit you much more than a large number of mediocre ones. Concentrate on established, trusted domains with content that directly relates to your site and target audience.
    5. Use effective anchor text. If the words “click here” appear anywhere on your site, fire the person responsible! Internet users don’t need to be told where to click anymore, but search engine users do need to be able to find you; without meaningful anchor text, the chances of that are pretty slim.
    6. Provide superior content. The battle may always rage, but now more than ever content really is king, and sites that offer relevant, compelling copy are rewarded in many ways, including by attracting quality links organically.
    7. Submit your articles to article directories. Now that you have relevant, high-quality content, submit it to a directory where webmasters can post it to their own sites with a link back to you, driving traffic to your site and creating opportunities for the content to be picked up by trusted sites that bestow link authority.
    8. Become a blog commenter. Focus on blog posts that are directly related to your niche and offer commentary that is constructive and useful to the reader.
    9. Submit your content to social media sites. Tailor your headlines to individual sites for the best response; the idea is to inspire people so that they spread the word for you, generating quality links in the process.
    10. Network via email. Building partnerships with others in your niche can help grow your brand. When writing your email copy, use the same rules you would for articles on your site: Write an attention-grabbing headline and follow it with useful content that benefits the reader.

    Guest Author: Randall Davidson is a co-founder of AudioTranscription.Org, a San Francisco-based audio transcription company that provides high quality general and business transcription services. Through founding and developing his audio transcription business, Randall has learned the importance of link building in order to increase search engine rankings and to drive traffic to his site.

     

     

  • 3 Valuable Tips for the Yahoo! and Bing Search Transition

    Posted Jul 22nd, 2010 By in Bing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Yahoo With | 2 Comments

    After a partnership agreement was signed exactly one year ago, Yahoo! has finally started testing organic and paid listings from Microsoft Bing this week. Yahoo! states if all goes as planned, users should expect Yahoo!’s organic search results to be powered by Bing around August/September.

    The organic search transition will happen automatically. However, if you perform SEO on your site and ranking high in these search engines is important to you, I recommend keeping a close eye on any updates and tips from both Yahoo! and Microsoft.

    Yahoo has already provided its users with three valuable tips:

    1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
    2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
    3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

    I also found the Yahoo! FAQ page to be extremely helpful in answering some the questions I had.

    Here’s to a smooth transition!

  • Internal Linking Best Practices to Help Boost Rankings

    Posted May 31st, 2010 By in Internet Marketing, Link Building, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) With | 3 Comments

    When putting together a website, it’s important to think about optimizing your internal link structure to make sure it’s as search engine friendly as possible. A lot of the time, the potential of internal linking is overlooked in favor of other SEO factors, focusing mainly on the specific pages and not looking at the website as a whole.

    When structuring your website, you want to be making it as clear as possible to the engines what pages are most important, what categories exist and what subcategories lay under these. This effect is often done through the initial navigation and via the use of breadcrumb link trails. This is also usually backed up by a sitemap listed in hierarchical order or priority calculation with XML sitemaps.

    Another thing that is often overlooked is using the full URL when linking to internal pages (i.e, <a href=”http://www.mirnabard.com/2010/05/9-steps-to-reduce-scraping-and-catch-blog-post-theft/”>). Many times the relative URL is used, (i.e., /category.html). The effect this has on rankings hasn’t quite been determined, but what is for sure is that if any of your content is picked up by scrapers, you will have a full link back to your website.  This helps the page to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content.

    Anchor text is important when linking to your internal pages. Often the benefit of this is overlooked, but don’t forget that these are controllable and important links that can tell the search engines a lot about your website. SEOmoz has an interesting post about internal linking.

    Another key thing to consider when looking at internal linking is PageRank sculpting, making sure that your website links well to the most important pages is vital. Think about how the search engines are going to look at your website. What pages do you want to make sure they find and understand are important?

    By following these steps and making sure newer/deeper pages are well linked to with targeted anchor text from already established pages, you can help to give them a boost in the SERPs.

    Guest Author: Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based search engine optimisation company, Navaro.

  • 12 Ways to Boost Blog Visitors

    Posted Mar 10th, 2010 By in Blogging With | 10 Comments

    What blog doesn’t need more visitors and eye balls?  A few days ago I posted six reasons why you need a business blog.  Today we’re going to look at how to increase the traffic to your blog using some pretty simple methods.

    1. Comment on other blogs. It literally takes a few minutes to find blogs through Google Alerts (set up for your keywords), Google Blog Search or Technorati.  Once you find relevant blogs that are relevant to your topic, leave a short note with a link to your blog.  That simple action can get you hundreds of new followers.

    2. Stay active on social networks. Whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or niche social networks, be aware that your traffic levels are directly proportionate to your activity levels. If you only post once a week on Twitter, you won’t see much return on your investment.  Consistently post on social networks, interact with others and you’ll enjoy a nice boost in traffic.  Also remember, that many of these social networks allow you to bring in your RSS feeds that automatically show posts on your profiles.

    3. Write some articles. Article marketing is an often overlooked method of increasing the number of visitors you get to your blog. It’s also a handy way to build backlinks, which help boost your search engine rankings.

    4. Write great content. This might seem obvious, but the sheer number of cruddy blogs out there means that this one is necessary to mention (And, I am not saying my blog is perfect J). If you do a good job on your posts, include keywords in your title and several times in the post, you’ll see a rise in search engine traffic as well as word-of-mouth buzz.

    5. Link to other blogs. It might seem tempting to hoard all your traffic, but by sharing your favorite blogs, you’ll gain the attention of other bloggers. Often this results in a link back, which can be very beneficial, particularly if it’s a larger blog than yours.

    6. Use social bookmarking. There’s nothing wrong with letting online bookmarking contacts know when you have a new and awesome blog post. If they want to bookmark it, then you will get more traffic. In order for this to work, you need to only forward your best work.

    7. Include in e-mail signature. Include a link to your blog or RSS in your e-mail signature constantly reminding people to read or subscribe to your blog.

    8. Highlight a featured post in your e-newsletter. Do you have a weekly or monthly e-newsletter (e-zine) that goes out to your opt-in list?  Include a synopsis and a link back to a featured blog post.  This way you are taking readers from your e-zine to your blog.

    9. Submit to directories. Take your time doing research of the top blog and RSS directories.  Submit your blog to a few new directories each week.

    10. Become active on forums. Find forums that are relevant to your industry and target audience, and keep your eyes open to people asking questions about a topic that you have already addressed in one of your blog posts.  Try to help them out by providing a brief answer and leaving a link back to your blog post that addresses the question.  You would be surprised how many people will appreciate this!

    11.  Interlink old posts. Your older blog posts should not be forgotten if the information is still relevant.  You can bring them back to life by mentioning and interlinking them with newer blog posts.

    12. Mention at speaking engagements. If you are a speaker or regularly present to prospects and clients, don’t forget to mention to your audience that you give great tips and advice on your blog.

    Gaining traffic to your blog is rarely done by going with just one method. You’ll need to combine several, such as comments, writing great content and submitting to directories.  Don’t forget to measure your blog traffic with analytics to see which methods are working best.

    Where do your blog visitors come from?  Please share below.

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