Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
June 14th, 2010 | 
Author: An often over looked factor in SEO is that of HTML validation. If you have poorly coded HTML it may hinder achieving good search engine rankings as it may affect spidering, keyword results and other on page factors. In addition to thsi it may also have a negative impact in your visitor experience – poor load times, incorrectly formatted pages etc.
For these reasons it is important that you run your pages and sites through a HTML validator – ours is free so why not give it a go !
Posted in 
Backlinks – Are All Links the Same? – this is a very important question that, unfortunately, many internet marketers seem to pay little or no attention to. The general approach adopted by many internet marketers seems to be that that quantity counts over quality – but is this really the case ?.
The resounding answer to both these questions is – ABSOLUTELY NOT !.
We need to be very clear that all links are not equal – in fact it is possible to go even further than this and actually say that some links are less than worthless, in fact they may even actually be harmful to your ranking.
If you were to create a ranking list of possible links then this would be the order:-
1) Links from .edu and .gov domains are the “best” types of links a site can get – particularly if the site has a high pagerank as well.
2) Links from well established, high pagerank general domains (e.g. .com, .net, .co.uk etc)
3) Links from more recent, lower pagerank sites (i.e. more recently created / less well established sites)
4) General sites
Many of the “Dominate Google” tools and sites that you see that offer an apparent shortcut to getting a top ranking on google will simply create hundreds of backlinks to your site from their existing network of sites (usually blogs). Whilst this may give a short term boost to your rankings this will not be sustainable. The quality of these links is normally very poor and you will eventually be penalised for these links and your ranking will drop accordingly.
So all links are definitely not the same and you need to invest time and effort in gathering the right type and quality of backlink for your site.
Writing content for web which is SEO friendly is sometimes not as obvious as it seems and sometimes a little help is required. This article will look at How to Write For SEO and give 10 Tips in this area.
1) Keywords, Keywords , Keywords ! – many people start writing content without fully researching what they are writing about. You need to be very clear what your keywords are prior to writing anything, do not try and cram too many keywords on one page – 3 or 4 max or you need to split the piece up into smaller pieces.
2) Title – your title MUST contain your primary keywords and it must also draw the user in
3) MetaTags – anything you write should have meta tags – title, keywords etc
4) Keyword Density – make sure you do not “keyword stuff” your content – the keywords your are optimizing for should not be more than 2% o fthe word count of the entire piece.
5) Length – 250 to 500 words is optimal, less than this and you cannot get the message across effectively and any more and you run the risk of being boring and irrelevant.
6) Write for Humans – at the end of the day if the piece of writing is not attractive to humans it will not be attractive to the search engines.
7) Be original – do not Plagiarize and do not simply spin existing content – try and do something new.
Watch the page names – if you are creating web pages then the page names should reflect the keywords and title of the piece – page1.htm is not a good page name !
9) Know what your competitors are doing – you are not operating in a vacuum – do searches on things you are going to write about and see what else is being written, what people are interested in etc
10) Proof Read ! – mistakes do not look good to humans nor do they look good to spiders.
How to Build Quality Backlinks to Your Blog Posts ? is a question that is often asked by internet marketers, particularly those that are new to internet marketing. This article will help to answer this vitally important question.
In essence the answer is no different to the answer for any other type of website – there are several techniques that you can use and these are outlined below :-
1) Articles – by writing and, more importantly, distributing articles that relate to your blog posts you can not only get your message across to a wide audience but also help to generate those all important backlinks via your authors signature. The key is to post your articles to good quality directories like ezinearticles, articlebase and goarticles. You may also wish to consider using a distribution service such as iSnare.
2) Search engine submission – by submitting your site to the many engines out there you will not only help generate traffic but also generate further backlinks.
3) Forums – by posting relevant and useful posts (complete with a signature that contains a backlink to your site) to relevant forums, you will generate further links.
4) Content – as the saying goes content is king and by having good quality, fresh content you will offer a clear incentive for other sites to link you.
5) Freebies – everyone loves a freebie and if you can offer something tempting on your blog site you will get people to link to you.
6) Comments on other blogs – if you post relevant and useful posts (complete with a signature that contains a backlink to your site) on other peoples blogs you will generate further links. An interesting slant on this is through the use of the commentluv wordpress plugin – we will deal with this in another article. A particular favorite tool of ours is “comment kahuna” – great for finding relevant blogs to post to !
This is obviously not an exhaustive list and we cover some of these subjects in other articles but hopefully we will have given you some food for thought.
It is often said that backlinks are your best bet to land in the top ten on Google but is this a true statement ? – this article will examine this very important question.
It, of course, goes without saying that landing in the top ten on Google is the aim of every internet marketer but are backlinks the secret key to achieving this aim ?. The simple answer to this question is …… a resounding yes !. Without a variety of high quality backlinks you will not achieve such an aim (or at the very least you will not be able to maintain such a position).
Backlinks are considered to be “votes” for your site and the search engines, particlularly Google, take particular consideration of these “votes” when calculating your position in the results. The quality of these votes is also important – certain types of sites have more weight when it comes to backlinks (particularly if these links come from high ranking well established site – .edu and .gov sites are particularly important in this respect).
The text that is used for these links (known as the anchor text) is important in determining the phrases that you will rank for e.g. if you are trying to get good results for “bird cage accessories” then this is the term that should appear in your backlinks (i.e. the anchor text for your links).
Of course the critical element with backlinks is actually getting them in the first place – this may not be as difficult as it seems and we will cover this in other articles.
How to use a backlink is a question that is often asked, particularly by those who are new to internet marketing. Whilst there are many possible answers to this question this article will focus on the main ones only.
The main answers are as follows :-
1) To increase your search engine ranking – many of the engines heavily favour the number of backlinks that you have to your site when calculating your ranking. Therefore in order to achieve a high position you need to have as many backlinks as possible to your site. In addition to this where these backlinks come from is also very important- links from high pagerank sites, from .edu or .gov sites have more weight than those from low pagerank, generic domains. It is also possible to have links from sites that actually harm your ranking – this will be looked at in a seperate article.
2) To generate traffic directly – as well as helping with your ranking efforts having numerous backlinks will also help to generate traffic directly. One of the main ways that the internet works is through interconnectivity i.e. links between sites – as a user browses a site they will click links to find out further information about the subject they are interested in. If one of these links is a backlink to your site then this will bring that visitor directly to your site.
3) To drive traffic to specific areas of your site – most sites only have one entry in the search engines and this is usually the main site page. If you want to deliver visitors directly to specific pages on your site then you may want to create backlinks straight to these pages.
As you can see having backlinks is critically important to generating traffic for your website, in other articles we will examine how we get these links, what types of links to get and some of the risks around getting bad quality backlinks.
