Saturday, February 16, 2008

The Right Way to Build Backlinks Through Article Syndication

So you've heard that article submissions is a great way to SEO your site but don't know how to do it the right way? There are many things you need to focus on, the first step is to write content for human readers and not for the search engine spiders, web crawlers will eat the content if it is fresh and unique so don't worry too much about them. The following are a good pointers you might want to follow if you are genuinely interested in optimizing your site and building backlinks the right way.

Article Title:

Learning how to write your article title will provide great benefits in your article marketing efforts, catchy article titles or interesting title lines bring in the more hits, for instance writing about the "History of video games" will not bring you as many hits as writing about a game in particular. Another factor you need to keep in mind is that high PR sites look at your title and if you place advertisements on it, you are very likely to be turned down, advertisements include your site name or a call to action. Using an extremely short title will also cause problems because it is very likely other authors have submitted an article with the same keywords, tracking such articles is nearly impossible if you target highly competitive keywords on it.

Article Content:

Basic rules of article submissions is that your content should reach at least 400 words in length, many write 500-700 word articles and have no problems at all. Just like your title, the content shouldn't have any advertisements or calls to action, if it does the ratio should be very small. Some article sites will allow you one or two links in the body but most of them won't so you might want to keep that in mind just in case you are quoting sources. Remember to keep a natural flow which readers will enjoy and make good use of paragraphs, remember that the content you provide will entice visitors to click on your resource box links.

Keyword Density:

This part is widely misunderstood among article writers who have a notion of SEO. Site optimization principles dictate that in order to rank for a specific keyword you have to target a specific set of keywords, which is true and can be easily accomplished if you stay on topic, however many people over do it and use their keywords several times throughout the article copy, this has negative effects because readers will think of you as if you have no more ideas to write about and reading such excerpt would be very odd because everything is repeated over and over. It is important to keep the concepts of article submissions and on page optimization separate. You could write a good excerpt for your site which may have a high keyword density but things are very different with article submissions. The rule of thumb when it comes to article marketing is to never go over 3% KD, in some cases this means that you shouldn't repeat the same keyword or set of keywords more than 9 times throughout the article body.

Resource Box:

This is the most important section of your article and the whole reason why you write unique content for other sites, the resource box will bring visitors to your site if it appeals to the readers, this is the only section of your article where you will be allowed to place advertisements and sale lines which will bring visitors to you. If you are trying to promote yourself as an expert in a particular field you may use your name in the resource box, if on the other hand you are trying to promote your site, the most effective way to do so is to place your site's name in the resource box, this will make it's name stick out and people will be more likely to remember it. The length of this section should not exceed 500 "characters" not "words" so make sure that the HTML view doesn't go over this limit, some sites will allow you longer excerpts, make sure to read their rules.

Anchor Texts:

This is the most important part when it comes to search engine optimization, depending on the keywords and key phrases you use to link to your site certain pages will start to rank for those phrases is the content in your site is relevant to the topic and anchors. Since article sites allow you to use up to 3 links in the resource box you can deep link pages within your site, all of these links are one-way links which have more value than reciprocals. A good practice is to research your keywords with tools such as Wordtracker or Wordze, they will show you what the most effective keywords for your particular niche are as well as the ones which bring the most traffic, once you have a good set of keywords you may focus on their long tail variations which will give you anchor diversity from links coming from different C-classes and IPs.

Write interesting content for humans and follow the rules outlined above for great article marketing and link building results!

If your looking for a reliable and affordable link building service check out Nationsubmit Manual Directory Submissions or try their Manual Article Submission Service today.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Bad Ways to Build Back Links

When it comes to SEO many webmasters think of link building in order to boost their rankings, generate traffic and earn money during the process, however the methods used by many people are less than appropriate and the same practices are replicated by many others who want to make a quick buck. When it comes to link building, the end doesn't justify the means.

If you are brainstorming your link building campaign here is a good checklist of things to avoid while optimizing your sites.

Spamming Wikipedia

As many of you know, this particular site has tremendous value for the end user, it has unbiased information which can be used for research because it is factual and not based on emotions and speculations; in fact this is one of the reasons why it ranks so high on the search engines, particularly Google. Many webmasters have thought of editing an article related to their site with the purpose of obtaining a high PR link, the only problem is that in order for your article to get accepted at this online encyclopedia it must be well researched, well written and unbiased; while it may sound easy to do, it is actually quite hard since you have to eliminate sales speech and provide pure information. With all of this said, you might want to reconsider your plans of "spamming Wikipedia"

Incidentally, Wikipedia has been using the "no-follow" attribute for some time now, so your site will not get the link equity you might be after.

Spamming Youtube and other Video Sharing Sites

This is yet another "opportunity" for people desperate for back links. Just like Wikipedia, video sharing sites have implemented the "no-follow attribute" which provides no SEO benefit to your site. Moreover, people hate it when they are having a discussion relevant to the video being watched and all of the sudden someone bluntly suggests a site which is not even relevant to the conversation, if you ever decide to do this you would be killing your SEO campaign since potential visitors now hate your site because you have been spamming it all over video sharing sites.

Spamming Forums

Message board spam has been around for quite some time. Message boards or forums were designed to attract people who would like to share their ideas and opinions with people interested in the same topic, as you see forums are all about content relevancy which is what most "sig-spammers" forget.

Spamming Blogs

If you have ever had the change of starting your own web-log, you may have noticed that several individuals tend to post "comments" which are highly irrelevant to the post and are also filled with a plethora of links. Bloggers dislike this practice very much, that is why blogging platforms such as Wordpress have implemented anti-spam plug-ins such as Akismet in order to minimize this "comment-abuse" Again, building links this way gives your site a bad image.

Spamming Webmasters

It is very annoying to check an email client just to find out that one more webmaster has sent a poorly written and sometimes irrelevant link exchange request, there is a really good chance to acquire strong links this way, however sending machine generated messages to a random list of webmasters will not get you anywhere, in fact, it will hurt you. When building reciprocal links, it is always a god idea to focus on relevancy and quality instead of quantity.

Link Pages (not relevant or useful) - Site-wide reciprocals

When webmasters were caught on the "link-fever" a few years ago, the creation of generic link pages became popular. People added links to a huge list which offered absolutely no value to the surfer, if this is what you are doing then you might want to research new ways to attract inbound links. Exchanging reciprocals with other sites is not a bad idea if it is done the right way, so forget link pages and place those reciprocals on pages which have content and are directly relevant to your trades, this will also avoid site-wide links which look like an effort to artificially create weight and page rank.

Submitting Undeveloped or Poor Sites to Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Joeant.com, etc)

The sites quoted above provide great SEO benefits if your site gets listed and indexed within their categories, the main reason people get rejected from these directories is because their sites are not fully developed or provide no value to the visitor, if this is the case you might want to add content thinking about the end user rather than the search engines because in the end, the ones clicking your ads and buying your products are not the search engine spiders but the "human visitors"

If your looking for a reliable and affordable link building service check out Nationsubmit Manual Directory Submissions or try their Manual Article Submission Service today.

Monday, February 4, 2008

How to Select Good Web Directories for Link Building

It is common knowledge among webmasters that web directory submissions are of great help for search engine optimization, the fact that you can get several of these listings allows your site to be exposed to more people who visit the directory and the search engine crawlers which visit them as well. An added benefit of directory submissions is the link equity which comes from sites with good reputation, a vote from one of these trusted sites will often count a lot more than links from similar sites.

Today's web directories tend to be quite diverse in terms of categorization, traffic and trust. Some directories will offer several categories which may apply to your site, however its is important to see what type of content distribution they are applying to the resource, some will allow their indexes to be spammed simply because the directory is ran by one person who doesn't have the time to review and edit all categories and certain sites do have periodical reviews in order to keep all the content properly organized.

As you may know some web directories sell links, others list them for free, some include reviews and extra content on each sub category and others are simply there to collect revenues from ad space sales. In order to decide which are the best directories to submit your sites to, you need to pay attention to all of these aspects.

Web directories which are exclusively dedicated to sell links might not be a good place to list your site if the listings are unfiltered, irrelevant and somewhat spammy, for instance if you visit the "business section" which is known to be a popular category for spammers to exploit, you can take a good look at the type of sites they are listing and linking to, if you see credit card sites listed next to car loans and debt consolidation sites without a proper sub-category tree this might not be the place you want your site to be listed on, this is because directories which let their indexes be constantly spammed will end up loosing trust with the search engines and their votes will count less and less, some of these sites have even turned into link farms due to the lack of editorial reviews.

Yet another factor you must pay attention to is the "ad to content ratio", this means that if the directory lists many ads on each subcategory your link may not be able to attract visitors because images and flashing animations will obviously grab visitor's attention a lot more; the page rank is quite important, however some may not pass the desired link equity because they use link parameters which block your site from getting the page rank benefit, such parameter is the rel="no-follow" html tag which tells the search engine spiders not to rate your site based on the listing you might be getting from the directory.

Nationsubmit.com takes in consideration all of these factors and also relies on tools which let us see the link strength a directory has, for instance directories which count with .gov and .edu back links are more likely to provide better link equity than sites which rely solely on .com top level domains (TLD) for their rankings.

A great list of established directories Nationsubmit.com trusts are: the dmoz.org open source project, another highly recommended source for those site owners who can afford the link price is the Yahoo business directory which was established back in 1995 and counts with over 2000+ .gov TLD which link to it, yet another great directory to take a look at is the business.com directory which counts with great page rank and can provide much benefit for your sites. As you can see the listings on these directories are paid, however the human editors which are in charge of keeping the quality of the listings on each category are quite strict, in other words spammy sites will not be listed.

In addition, web directories such as Quango.com, goguides.com, Joeant.com, 123world.com follow great quality and review guidelines which are endorsed by Nationsubmit.com, there are several other web directories which deserve be listed how ever you must always use your better judgment, knowledge and common sense in order to decide whether or not a site is worth submitting to. Remember that the time you spend submitting to directories represents your opportunity cost, so invest it well and make it count.

If your looking for a reliable and affordable link building service check out Nationsubmit Manual Directory Submissions or try their Manual Article Submission Service today.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Optimal place for content

In web-site development and SEO industry we can classify content into few groups. First group is the content for human beings. This type of text should be very interesting, unique not only in wording but in sense as well and this text should not to be optimized well. This type of content usually used for reasonably big web sites with quite large traffic. Second type of content is the human like, SEO optimized texts. The main goal of this content is to attract users from the top positions of the search engines. Third type of content is the readable text, preferably unique to avoid search engine sanctions. This type of content should not be optimised and should never be on the top of any searches, but the role of such type of text is quite high – this is a feeling of the small sites, also known as a satellites. The only important role of these web sites – proper niche links with required anchors to support main project. The last, fourth, type of text it the computer-generated text, SEO optimized, completely senseless. The only usage of these texts is doorways and similar techniques.

Another interesting question – where should we place this content? Home page or it should be somewhere deeply inside? It depends from the type of the content and from stage of development and the type of the project in whole. Let us consider some simple examples of the second type of content – SEO optimized human like texts. These texts are usually optimized to some keywords or key phrases. If you’ve got reasonably weak web site with PR less than 5 then you should be very careful when selection place for your texts. It the main keyword is very competitive, and then you should consider opportunity to place your text to the home page. Please check TOP10 for the very popular keywords, like car or auto and you can see that all the TOP10 results are pointed to the home pages. If you’ve interested in simpler keyword then you should carefully analyze your opportunity. Let us consider keyword beryllium, this is a chemical element number 4. Analysis of the TOP5 from Google SERP reveals that this beryllium is reasonably difficult keyword. Despite that the first few search results are pointed to the internal pages, the PR on these pages is between 5 and 8.

For the new chemical elements projects it is almost impossible to go to the TOP10 with this keyword. The only opportunity is to optimize the home page for this search and sometimes submitting of your site into few web directories can do some good results for you. We’ve checked this idea with this chemical term beryllium and after massive directory submitting this web site occupies position between 15 and 20. This meant that it is possible to move this site to the TOP10 by few extra efforts with free links from social bookmarks, blogs etc. If we will try to optimize the internal page with this keyword, the total number of links will be much bigger than it is possible to find for free. Internal pages of this website are optimized for less popular key-phrases, for example beryllium isotopes and they already in TOP10.