Posts Tagged ‘link building tips’
6 SEO tactics to avoid
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
Any business with a website wants theirs to pop up when people search for their product. Wanting this to happen is one thing, while achieving it is very much another. Success usually comes from diligent and patient SEO efforts but some web owners get a little antsy and decide they want results NOW.
This is not a good idea. If you want immediate results it’s likely you’ll have to ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking your website is the best (which it very well may be) but let me let you in on a little secret….search engines don’t take to kindly to being fooled. The result can be banishment from the search engine which will effectively crush your online dreams.
So here are 6 tactics that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN regard as ’shady’ and will penalize you for using (courtesy MarketingProfs.com ).
1. Link Farms - There’s general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a Web page. A link farm is a group of Web sites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given Web site. These links are not "real" (in terms of signaling the quality of the site they link to), and so they are trying distort search engine results.
2. Automated Content/Duplication - Search engines like content. They particularly like frequently updated content. Unfortunately, creating unique content takes time and energy. To try to trigger search engine spiders to index more pages from a Web site, and do so more frequently, some may try to auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites and republish it.
This technique often goes hand in hand with link farms (because if you’re creating thousands of sites, you need some content to put on them in order to get the search engines to index them and for the links to matter).
Google has gotten very good at determining what is "natural" content vs. content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value. As for duplicating content on other Web sites without permission, this is often in violation of copyright laws, and it’s unethical.
3. Keyword Stuffing - This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword in the hopes of influencing search engine results. Search engines caught on to this trick many years ago, yet it remains popular for some reason.
4. Cloaking - This practice involves delivering different Web site content to the search engine spiders than is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but to send different content to real users. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you’re suspected of using cloaking, it’s easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your Web site as a human and check whether you’re cloaking. This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.
5. Hidden Text - This technique "hides" text on the Web page that search spiders will index (for ranking purposes), but is invisible to a human. The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background.
Based on how sophisticated you want to get, it could be based on something as simple as tags in the HTML, CSS stylings or Javascript that changes the page dynamically. Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.
6. Doorway/Gateway Pages - This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to spiders, a doorway page involves getting a given page (the "doorway page") to rank well in the search engines, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end-users as they don’t get the content they would have expected.
For more information on the right way to build links please read "Link Building Tips for Beginners "
Tags: E-Commerce and E-Business, link building tips, Rebecca Button, seach engine optimization, SEO, tips
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Small Business Resource Review: IBP Link Building Tool
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
When Google and other search engines index your site for inclusion in their search results, one of the key factors in deciding whether you should have a high rank or a low one is how popular your site is. This is determined by the number of incoming links to your site (as well as the quality of the links), and the best way to get incoming links is through link building.
However, unless you have lots of spare time to seek out companies willing to link into yours, you probably won’t have too many links coming your way. This is where the IBP’s (previously ARELIS) link building software comes in. Costing just $299.95 for the Business Edition, it’s an excellent automated method for bringing in effective and worthwhile links.
Easy to use, IBP will let you set up numerous projects depending on the types of links that you want. After all, if you’re a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, you’re probably not going to need a link in from a specialist IT firm. However, if there are suppliers who sell storage or transportation units for fruit, or businesses that buy direct from you, you can use them to increase your web presence.
Because it’s a reciprocal link, you’ll then link to their website from yours, increasing traffic yet again. And because the software allows you to email the Webmaster directly for each site, you can cut down the amount of time you need to spend getting your links set up.
Some of the other key features of IBP include:
* Automated link finder shows companies happy to allow your link
* Email filter warning if your email will be intercepted
* Quick and easy access to Alexa, the industry standard ranking website
* Outgoing link checker to make sure they’re relevant
* Incoming link checker to make sure your link is still active on partner site
Perhaps one of the most useful features of the IBP link building tool is the ability to find out what sites link directly to your competitors. This is an excellent tool that will allow you to keep up with your competition - after all, there’s a strong chance that if a website is linking to your competition, they’ll also link to you. With the option to demo the product, now is an ideal time to see what IBP can do for your business.
Tags: danny brown, E-Commerce and E-Business, ibp link, link building tips, Marketing, SEO, small business advice
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Link Building Tips for Beginners
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
If you have a website, you’ll know that one of the most important aspects to improve your search engine rankings - and therefore increase your visitors and customers - is to have strong search engine optimization, or SEO. This will use keyword phrases and specialist marketing techniques to get your site higher up the search engine rankings. However, there’s another highly effective method, and it’s just as important - link building.
What is Link Building?
Just as the name suggests, link building allows you to build quality links into your website from other websites. This raises your profile because links show that people are visiting your site often - and the more visitors a site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it will go.
This is because Google and the other search engines believe that the more quality links a site has coming into it, the more useful the content of that site must be, so it places you higher up the rankings to encourage people to visit you. However, you can’t just use any links - indeed, if you have too many worthless links, you might end up being penalized by Google if they feel you’re trying to beat the system. So how do you link build and stay on the right side of the major search engines?
Some of the best ways to increase the amount of quality links to your website include:
- Request links from websites that complement your service or product. If you sell educational tools, ask universities and online colleges to link to you.
- Register your site with directories for incoming links.
- Offer reciprocal links. For each company that links to you, you’ll do the same for their company website.
- Write articles to put on your website, either as latest news or as expert tips, and submit them to article directories like Ezine.com or Quality Content. Not only is fresh, quality content great linkbait, you can create incoming links yourself by submitting your content to article sites. One thing to watch out for, however: If you want an article on your site to rank well, submitting it to article sites that have a higher Google PageRank (PR) than your site may hinder those efforts - the article site may rank higher for your article than your own site!
- Use press releases. These are becoming increasingly effective and important at driving traffic to your site - if you have a news story to tell, write a press release with a link back to your website, and then have it published on one of the numerous press release sites online, like Press Release PR or PRWeb.
- Buying links. While this strategy has come under fire in recent months and has even resulted in Google penalizing websites that buy and sell links for SEO (what has been known as the infamous “Google PR Smackdown”), you can still buy a few links here and there. Just don’t buy a lot at one time, and make sure the site where you’re buying a link is highly relevant to your site. Also, if you’re going to buy a link, make sure it’s on a page that has a Google PageRank (PR) of 5 or higher.
These are just some of the ways you can increase the links into your website. If you want, you can also ask friends and colleagues to link to you, if they have a blog or website of their own. As long as the website linking to you has some value, and isn’t regarded as a porn or gambling site, then you’ll soon see your ranking increase on the all-important major search engines.
Tags: boosting traffic, danny brown, E-Commerce and E-Business, generating website traffic, incresing website traffic, link building tips, Marketing
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