I recently read a Blog Post on Leads Leap discussing the value of back links. I’ve preached on this topic before, but thought it might be worthwhile to share another person’s take.

The Power of SEO Backlinks: A Classic Example

Technorati Tags: back links, backlinks, leads leap

Article Marketing – Four Wins in a Row

Article Marketing as it has evolved on the internet is a classic win-win-win-win institution that has become one of the backbones of the internet. There are four essential players in the article marketing game, all of whom benefit, each in their own way.

Like any market, article marketing is a business of supply and demand. There are end users, who get material from their local vendor who in turn gets material from their wholesaler, who in turns gets material from individual producers.

Unlike most markets, the transfer of goods in the article marketing arena is largely free. The end user wants free access to information. The magic of the article marketing model is that it has created economic incentives to all the parties to meet that demand.

There are many places online for people to get information. These include static web sites, blogs, forums, ezines, ebooks, etc. The producers of these sites, blogs etc are frequently monetizing their efforts with products and services they sell directly or on behalf of others or by various forms of advertising revenue.

Several of these, blogs and ezines in particular require a constant source of new material to keep their site fresh and to attract information seekers with the expectation that a certain percentage of them will also take a revenue producing action. The challenge for these venues is coming up with new material on a regular basis.

Their options are to write it themselves, hire it out or find a free resource of relevance to their specific niche of readers.

Article Directories

Article Directories have emerged to fill that role. They are the wholesalers of articles across a vast array of topics and specialties. They recruit article submissions from individual writers and group them in easy to search categories for the blog writer to search.

Most offer this service free of charge to the blog writers and anyone else who just wants to research a given topic. They make their money the same way most of the blog and ezine writers do. They usually have Google Adsense ads on their site as well as other advertising. They sometimes offer additional premium services for article writers and users as well, but these vary widely.

To be successful, article directories have found it necessary to be editors. They want their customers on both ends to benefit from the equation. To assure this they develop specific rules for the type of material they host on their site and editorial guidelines. These vary by individual article directory. Article writers must meet these standards to be accepted into the directory. This in turn assures a quality product for the blogger and their readers.

One of the most frequent editorial restraints is to contain blatant advertising. Most article directories have strict rules that prohibit advertising except in a section added to the end of the article called the Resource Box.

So who produces all this free editorially up to snuff material? What’s in it for them?

There are three primary motivators for the authors. Some are born writers who just need to write to express themselves. Or perhaps they are motivated to establish themselves as an expert in a given arena or niche.

Another major group are individual business people who seek to inform prospective customers about their product or service. In some cases they may share the desire to brand themselves as experts.

The motivation for most businesses lies in the utilization of the resource box. Most article directories allow authors to include two or more hyperlinks in this appendix to their article. These offer two major benefits to the submitting business. They can send people to your web site, called “traffic” in internet circles. They can also serve as back links to a specific page on their web site. These back links are helpful in getting attention from search engines and serve to help increase the targeted web sites ranking

As articles get picked up more and more bloggers and ezines these back links appear in more and more places increasing the relevance of the site in the eyes of the search engines. They are in some sense votes for the targeted web sites.

As importantly for many businesses is the traffic they bring as more and more people read the articles and go to the sites where a certain percentage will buy products or take other desired actions.

This entire arrangement is interdependent on each of the elements. The fact that is has evolved as an essentially free service for the most part is one of the marvels of the internet. The end user gets information, the blogger gets readers, the article directory traffic that they convert to revenue through ads, and the authors who get recognitions, traffic and search engine ranking. A win-win-win-win situation.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, article directories, backlinks, resource box

How to get to the top of the Search Engines, XIII

So far in this sequence I have stressed the need to get your on site ducks in a row if you want your web site to appear at the top of the search engine rankings. This is a critical first step that most people never get around to. Have you? If not, I still offer my Wart Services to analyze your site. Then make the changes. They matter.

The second part of my sequence has been focused on back links and how to get them. We’ve talked about anchor text, and several social networking sites you can use to build backlinks to your site. The advantage of these sites is your own ability to custom create your own backlinks. This give you control over the actual keywords used in the anchor text and where they link on your site. This latter control allows you to direct links to internal pages, which bolsters your standing in the eyes of the Search Engines.

Article Marketing

Today, we start a series on the most important way to build links and traffic to your web site, article marketing.

I will explain how it works tomorrow, and then in subsequent posts explain the four things all articles must have, how to create an outline for your articles, easy ways to get you creative juices flowing, what to do before submitting to article directories, and some red hot tips on how to get your articles read, and perhaps most importantly, how to write a resource box that makes people click. I may even offer suggestions on what to do if you hate to write.

Article writing requires a bit of work and it’s like slow feed fertilizer. The results of article marketing take time to build. The plus of article marketing is that it does ultimately flourish and will generate an exponential growth in the number of back links to your site. And as we have demonstrated, backlinks matter.  They matter even more when they are coming from a wide variety of places and grow over time.

The essential mathematics of article marketing comes from posting a single article with an article directory service.  Once it is accepted there, you have a back link to your site from a generally high ranking resource. But even better, as first a couple and then many more people find your article and post it on their blogs, newsletters etc, you start getting back links from many different places. So instead of having one back link, you may now have six or sixty.

There are thousands of article directories, some of which are very large. You can post the same article to more than one directory, multiplying again the number of potential backlinks you can create for your self with one half hour of writing. Since these articles stay on the directories indefinitely, it’s possible that an article you write today could be published off and on over the next five or ten years.

A disciplined approach of writing an article a day or even an article a week can over a period of a year or two lead to thousands and tens of thousands of backlinks. That level of backlinks could put most people on the top of their respective niche even in highly competitive niches. And put them there to stay.

The best part of article writing is that it is essentially a free way of building your standings.  Although as we will learn, there are some worthwhile paid services that can be real time savers.

One last tidbit for today. You don’t need to be a great writer to effectively use article marketing. So if the thought of writing scares you, don’t despair. The power of article writing is too significant to allow your lack of skills or fears to get in the way. We will discuss some options that will allow you to be successful without writing a single word.

Technorati Tags: anchor tags, Article Marketing, backlinks, WART Analysis

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines XI

Squidoo – Who ever came up with this name?

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We have established that to advance up the search engines your site needs to be set up properly in terms of on page factors, and also needs to get Back Links from other sites to boost your credibility. Ideally these backlinks should be in the form of anchor texts that highlight the specific keyword you want your page to rank for. For most locally based businesses, it also makes sense to have these keywords and anchor texts include your specific geography such as Home Staging Atlanta or Minneapolis Best Meat Market, etc.

One point I should have made already and didn’t is that these back links need to be one way backlinks. I’ve used the term “Link Juice” before. Imagine that a web site by linking to you is passing on to you some of their Link Juice. If they are a high value web site the back link may be a gallon jugs worth, if it’s a lower ranked site you might just get a pint. That’s if the link is one way to your site from theirs. If you return the favor, you have a hole in your bucket, dear Liza. The Link Juice leaks right back to where it came from. Now if you have a higher ranking than the person linking to you, you may actually loose juice in the process.

At one time it was all the rage to build reciprocal linking arrangements, and one of our readers reported just that after my last post. Unfortunately these are no longer wise moves in terms of search engine ranking. That said, they may still make sense if they send traffic and business from one market to another as part of a referral system. If that’s the case, you may well want to keep them even if they cost some “juice.” But don’t build reciprocal relationships hoping they will help out your search engine ranking. They won’t.

Nor can you set up a circle, where A links to B and B links to C and C in turn links to A. Such circles are readily detected by the search bots, even when inadvertent. So pals we may be, but mutual admiration societies are not the way to get ahead on the search engines.

So how do we get these one way links? There are a lot of ways actually. I mentioned a few to you last time and today we will take a closer look at one of my favorites, Squidoo.

Squidoo is one of many so called Web 2.0 sites, which merely means it is part of the recent wave of sites that allow visitors to interact with the site rather than just read it like a static web page.

There are four primary things I like about Squidoo. First it’s Free. Second, it allows you to put blatantly self promoting commercial messages on it. And thirdly, it’s relatively easy to use. A fourth factor is that is has a high page rank of 7, which means that back links from Squidoo to your site send you giant economy size bottles of Link juice, which is very nice indeed.

To get to Squidoo just go to www.squidoo.com. Once there, sign up for an account. It’s free and easy.

Once you have your account, you are going to create your first site, which Squidoo refers to as a lens. Perhaps the most important thing to remember when setting up your first lens is that what you name it is critical.

For my Minneapolis Meat Market, I want to name the Lens “Minneapolis Meat Market” – if that is the phrase that I want to rank for on the search engines. Now every lens on Squidoo needs to have a different name, so your favorite term may already be taken. If that is the case try adding hyphens between words, or an extra relevant word before or after your desired name.

Some times it is easier getting your Squidoo lens ranked high in the search engines than your main web site due to Squidoo’s high page rank and its tens of thousands of pages, many of which are new every day. The search engines are crawling all over Squidoo constantly, and they will find your new lens very soon after you publish it.

Once you have created your title, you need to fill in the introduction module. Here you want to repeat your keyword/title in anchor text with a link to the page on your web site you want to drive traffic to.  So if you are Shar Sitter, one of my Home Staging Clients you may introduce your lens as: “Rooms with Style is a Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging firm specializing is serving the South Metro Area etc etc…”

If you did a good job creating your web site’s meta tag description, you may want to use that here. It should have your keywords in it, and be a pretty good sales pitch while including the key geography you serve.

By using HTML code to create a link on “Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging” as I did above, the search engine bots learn that the end link is about Minneapolis and St Paul Home Staging and they have good memories. This is called anchor text and we went over how to set up this  HTML code a few messages ago.

This is one of the advantages of Squidoo.  Since you are creating the link yourself, you can control the way the link is created. You always want to use anchor text links.  The only exception is when you are specifically letting people know what your web site address is and even then, make sure you use anchor text elsewhere in the posting.

If you go to Shar’s site via the link above, you will see it doesn’t go to her home page. It could have, but instead I set it up to link to her page titled “services.”   This is called internal linking because it links to an internal page on her web site. Google in particular likes this, and you get a little extra juice for your overall site because of it.  Since you have control of the link creation on sites like Squidoo, it makes sense to create these internal links whenever you can.

At any rate, the goal is to use anchor text right away in the introductory portion of your Squidoo lens.  That will serve as a powerful back link to your web site. Complete the first module with what other introductory material you feel appropriate.

I’m already at book length for this post. So let me quickly say that the rest of the lens can be simple or complex. It’s up to you. Squidoo uses modules. I tend to use their text modules and fill them with text and pictures. To insert pictures you will need to learn a tiche of HTML code, which is not difficult. You can search on Squidoo for a lens on HTML, there are several good ones.  Alternatively, I publish an inexpensive ebook called HTML in Simple Terms for under $10. The advantage of the ebook is that you can print it out and keep it handy by your computer. I find it easier to look things up in print than online.

I also publish an eBook called Squidoo Basics. It costs $17 and will help get you acclimated to Squidoo quickly.

The thing to keep in mind about Squidoo, is that you can publish as many lens as you want.  For link building purposes they don’t need to be fancy or even complete.  But spend a little time on them and focus on one topic about your business.  Create another lens to discusss another aspect. If you serve more than one town, you can be DryCleanersOmaha and OmahaDryCleaners or SouthOmahaDrycleaners. Etc.  Each additional link of this sort will help increase your ranking for Omaha Dry Cleaners.

If you are a home stager, you might want to create a lens just for Realtors, and use the Lens as the place you make your special pitch to them. Just be sure to link back to the Realtor page on your main web site.

Once you get the hang of putting up pictures, and I promise you that learning the little bit of HTML code to do that is not difficult, you may want to create a before and after lens for each of your projects.

Just be sure to include back links in each new lens to your web site’s various pages and in no time you will discover than not only is your web site on the top of the search engines, so too will be a number of your Squidoo lens.

When your prospects find you not just on the top, but also number 2, 4, 6,7 & 8 on the listings, they get pre-sold pretty fast that you are the dominant player in your community.

Yes, it will take a little work. You may need to learn a couple new tricks, but with a bit of persistence you can do it.

Next week, we will look at a similar site called Hub pages and maybe a couple of others. If you have questions about today’s post be sure to leave a comment. As I did today, I will incorporate any questions into the next posting.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, backlinks, squidoo

Getting to the top of the search engines X

Getting High Powered Backlinks

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Once you have your on-page ducks in a row in terms of search engine optimization the next step is to get back links to your site.  All back links matter. They can all deliver traffic and most will be tracked by Google and the other search engines. Some back links are considered to be more valuable by Google however. These are back links from relevant authority sites.

There are two aspects to that. Relevance and authority.

If you are a home stager and get a back link from my favorite site on ice fishing it will not “weigh” as much in Google calculations of your rank as it would if it were coming from a site dealing with interior decorating. I don’t think I need to spend much more time on this aspect.  The link is still worth having, just not as valuable. The key point here is that the Google bots know what’s on the page the link is coming from, and it matters.

More to the point is the perceived “authority” of the site. This topic is far more actionable.  Some sites have been online for a decade or more and are the “go to” sites for specific types of information. For example in the health care arena, WebMD is an established player. Your website about Weight Loss will get much more benefit from a link from WebMD than it will from a link from your cousin’s three month old blog no matter what its topic. And when you think about it, it should.

Some years back, Google started giving web sites what’s called page rank. Web sites are ranked from zero to ten based on some internal process at Google. I have a Google toolbar on my Firefox browser that lets me see the page rank of any web page I am on. Now the bulk of what I read on SEO these days says Google no longer uses page rank in its formula for ranking the value of back links. That may be, but page rank can still be assumed to be a pretty good indicator of relative weight.

So here’s the bottom line.  You want to get back links from relevant sites that have high or at least relatively high page rank. Fortunately, that’s not hard to do.

With the advent of the Web 2.0 era, there are lots of new authority sites that are easy to access and that carry significant page rank and more importantly seem to convey significant “Google Juice” or weight to their back links.

The next series of posts here will discuss a couple of  these in more detail.

Some of the more popular of these sites for search engine optimization are: Squidoo; Hub Pages; Weebly; Learn Hub; Wet paint; Yahoo Answers; Google Groups; and Yahoo groups.

I am most familiar with Squidoo myself and also have some Hub Pages, so I will discuss those in more detail in my next posting. If you are already familiar with any of the others, you will want to pay particular attention to opportunities to create back links to your web site.

When you do, keep in mind that you want to use anchor tags as we have discussed before and you want to link not just to you home page but also to internal pages as well.

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If you are interested in learning a lot more about search engine optimization you owe it to yourself to take advantage of a special offer from the stomper net folks. It’s about to expire so you need to move quickly.  They have a top level course called Stomping the Search Engines II.  They have sold this for $497 but are now offering it for $1 as a promotion to launch a new monthly newsletter called Net Effect.

I encourage you to grab the offer, and check out the first copy of their newsletter. If you aren’t interested in the newsletter you can cancel within the first 30 days and keep the course.  I know a lot of people who are grabbing this deal, who have no intention of subscribing to the newsletter. So don’t feel bashful about it.  http://cli.gs/TpmR1u

But hurry, this offer ends soon!

Technorati Tags: anchor tags, backlinks, search engine optimization, SEO, squidoo, Web sites

Getting to the top of the Search Engines IX

How Many Backlinks do you have?

A bit of a detour today. I have had several people ask how they can find out how many backlinks they have to their web site. A good question and one I can answer.

First thing you want to do is go to Yahoo.com rather than Google or MSN and search for the term “linkdomain:” and then the web site you want to inquire about using the Yahoo search box.  This will take you to Yahoo’s Site Explorer site.

When you do this for your site you will see two boxes at the top of the page. One will show the number of pages on your website, and the second will show the total number of inbound links to your site.  These are your backlinks.

Now if you want to see what you need to do to outrank that pesky competitor of yours, it wouldn’t hurt to enter their domain name the same way and see how many backlinks they have.  You might want to check out who they are, because there is a good chance you should be able to get back links from some of the same places.

Now as we mentioned before, not all backlinks are created equal.  Some have higher page rank and are thus weighted more than others. So it’s possible that someone with fewer backlinks could rank higher.

As an experiment, go to Google and enter the keyword “Home Decorating” in the Google Search Box. When I did it for this article the top three “organic” listings were www.home-decorating-made-easy.com;  www.tuscan-home-101.com and www.hgtv.com

I looked at each site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and found the top ranking site had 627 pages of content and 1726 back links.  The second ranked site, the tuscan one, had 88 pages of content and 794 backlinks.  I believe the number of backlinks to be the major determinant in the higher ranking by home decorating made easy site.

But what about the third place site, HGTV? It has 203,974 pages and 7,285,773 backlinks.  A behemoth by anyone’s standards. This is where relevance plays a role. HGTV has a lot of pages and backlinks, but not all of them were specifically relevant to the keyword term “Home Decorating.”  At least not in Googles eyes.

If you enjoyed this exercise, play around with a few other keywords, and see if the number of backlinks doesn’t seem to play a role in most of them. As you do, you will come to appreciate how important backlinks are to ranking.

In our next article we will discuss some easy ways to get a bunch of high value backlinks.  [ I should be charging for this. ]

Technorati Tags: backlinks, search engine optimization, SEO

SEO Off Page III

What is a backlink?

I’ve already spent a couple articles talking at least in part about back links without specifically explaining what a backlink is.

According to Wikipedia, Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Thus when I create a hyper-link in this blog post to one of my Home Staging clients, Jane Ann Lance and her web site http://enhancedbylance.com it appears blue in most web browsers and you know that when you click on it, you will be taken to her web site. This is thus a back link to her web site and when the Google bot or one of the other search engine bots scans this page it will follow that link to her site and note it as a backlink. Notch one up for Jane Ann’s site.

Now even better would be a link to another of my home staging clients if instead of using her web address, I just sent you to this link: Hamptons Home Staging. In this case, the link is being made to http://www.styledandsold.com/home.html in the form of what is known as anchor text. This anchor text, “Hampton’s Home Staging” tells the bots that this back link is about Home Staging in the Hampton’s and reinforces the keywords on Allegra Dioguardi website. While both are backlinks, the second is more powerful.

Unfortunately, since we are now dealing with off page factors, you no longer have direct control over how others will link to you.

Thus we come to realize that not all backlinks are equal. Some are more important that others. A backlink from a blog that’s been published regularly for many months is going to have a somewhat more valuable link than one started today with just a single entry assuming the new blog is even visited by a bot. Even more valuable is a link from a site Google considers to be an authority site. Google has devised a series of page rankings that it uses to provide guidance as to the relative standing of various major web sites. A back link from a site with a 6 rank may be worth dozens of back links from dozens of unranked sites. That said, there is still a great deal of value in having back links from a large number of sites even if smaller.

So while we will be talking about some places where you can get some relatively highly ranked backlinks, don’t neglect getting links from lesser lights as well.

In our next session, we will show you how to get some backlinks with anchor text that you can control and that have high page ranks. The best of both worlds.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, backlinks, search engine optimization, SEO

Getting to the top of the search engines VII

In out last post we suggested that the key to getting ranked higher in the search engines was getting back links. Today, we will look at that a little closer, but first we are going to discuss my perceptions as to what Google is looking for when it ranks web sites.

Now keep in mind that Google is just one of about 40 major search engines. And what applies for Google doesn’t always apply to all the others. But also keep in mind that Google has about 60% of the search market in the US, so it really is the elephant in the room.

The key distinction that lead to Google’s ascendency in the search engine business is not just the speed with which it found relevant sites, but the relevance of the sites it found.

Google understands this deeply, and it remains their paramount objective to deliver the most accurate results to their search engine customers as possible. Most of the people who go to their computers to look up something are looking not for something to buy. Most are looking for information. And most are looking for free information, if they can find it. I bet that true of you as well.

Now if Google finds more than one site that appears to be relevant to a particular keyword search, they need to find a way to determine which one is the more valuable site. Their ability to do that is what has made them famous.

One of the factors is size.

That’s why we suggested you might want to get your main page up to at least 425 words of text when we were talking about on page factors. That suggests to Google that your site contains some material of relevance. It’s also why we suggested that you try to have your keyword appear from 1-4% of the time.

When you do that you are offering Google an indication that the CONTENT on your site is relevant to what the searcher may be looking for. In internet marketing circles the mantra is, “Content is king.”

It’s one thing for you to say your site is about the keywords you put in your meta-tags and on your page. Too many people have tried to fool Google before by stuffing keywords on the pages and in their meta tags. Google learned and adapted. It now looks outside those factors to what others have to say about your page. Do those outside factors confirm what you have listed on the page? And who is it that is confirming the authenticity of your site and your keywords. We will discuss all of this, but the first message I want you to understand is that the more and better the content of your site meets the needs of the searcher the better your chances of ranking higher in the search engines.

You may think your visitor is looking to hire you. Maybe they are, but what they are more likely interested in is information about the type of product you are selling or the service you are providing.

They are searching for information, and that is what Google wants you to be giving them. The searcher has questions in their head, they may not even be fully able to articulate them. You must answer those questions on your site, in your content.

Google looks to your site and those sites that link to you for clues about the quality of the content on your site. If you appear to be answering peoples questions, you will rise in the ranks compared to other sites.

I hope I have made myself clear. Way too many web sites are brochures about the company or person portrayed. Instead they should be about the questions their likely visitors have in their minds. Google isn’t a mind reader, but they do everything they can to figure out if your content answers those questions or not. Make sure your pages do.

Thus for my home staging friends. Your page will perform better if you answer the questions, “How much does it cost?” and “Is it worth it?” Or, “Do I need to de-clutter my house fist and then invite the stager in, or can I call her fist and get her to help me,” and a myriad of others. If you spend at least some of your time answering these questions, Google will notice the content and you will probably rank higher. More importantly, you will be giving prospective customers the information they want and need.

There are a lot of tactics to getting links to your pages, and thereby improve your ranking in the search engine. The first and foremost item is providing worthwhile content on your site.

Due to the Memorial Day holiday in the US, the next post on this topic will be scheduled for next Tuesday, May 26. We’ll get into more nitty gritty next week.

Now I have been doing my homework in an effort to share with you the lessons I have learned about SEO. While I’ve learned alot about the topic, the experts in the SEO field are the guys at Stomper Net. They are probably the number one resource used by professional internet marketers on the topic. They have just released a FREE 7 lesson course on SEO that you will find interesting. While it covers some of the same material as I do, I think you will find their presentation to be more than worthwhile, and as I said its free. Go to http://cli.gs/T8aGze

Technorati Tags: backlinks, content

Getting to the top of the Search Engines VI

Over the past two weeks or so, we have focused on what I call “On Page” search engine optimization. We are now ready to move forward to discuss the “Off Page” factors that affect how Google and the other search engines rank your site.

It was important to deal with the on page factors first. They are for the most part they are the easiest to change and or fix. You have complete control of the on page factors. Second, the off page factors require work. Now some of you may go running and screaming because of that four letter word, but what we are about to launch into take some effort. It will be worthwhile effort, if you did what I have already advised.

If you haven’t yet or are confused about any part of it, spend a few bucks on my WART Analysis and I will tell you exactly what needs to be done. Then if you find you still can’t do it. Let me know and I will arrange to do it for you. Most of it is simple.

But if you only have 60% of it done, all the work you will be doing on off page factors will only get you about 60% of the effect they would have if you had fully completed the front end on page things. Clear enough?

In the old days, getting your keywords, meta tags, titles and etc. done correctly was enough to get you to the top in the search engine rankings. In narrow niches it still may be, but if you are playing second fiddle to a competitor or two for your favorite keyword you have some homework to do.

Professional search engine optimizers use a wide array of tools to get their client sites to the top of the search engines, many of which aren’t necessary for most small business operators serving a local market. You can largely count on your geographical keywords to get you in front of most of your customers.

While there are a variety of tools, the key concepts of off page search engine optimization is focused on one concept: Backlinks. And when discussing backlinks the two major components are Focused Keywords and Anchored Text.

As we progress over the coming week of two, these words will reappear frequently.

There are many different ways to generate backlinks to your web site. In discussing this topic we will return to talk about the content on your site, social media sites like Squidoo, Twitter, Hubpages, directories, article marketing, forums, press releases, blog networks and more.

In the next post we will talk about Google in particular, and ask why Google ranks one site higher than another. Or at least my best take on that topic.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, backlinks, SEO