SEO Tips & Information

Trading links with other websites can still be a help in boosting the performance of a website. One way links are best but a link exchange can still be good. I tend to think of a good link exchange as an insurance policy. If the links to my sites fall away it’s likely my link partners will still pass me good link juice - a kind of safety in numbers thing.

If you’re going to trade links with another site there are a few things to look out for. Personally, I never feel comfortable about doing a link exchange unless I’m getting a fair deal at the time of the exchange. I also like to feel confident the value of the link I get won’t drop off over time. For these reasons I always do some research on a potential link partner before doing a trade. Here are the main things I look for:-

Check the backlinks make the PageRank believable

Does the PageRank of the site match the number of backlinks the site has? Examine the site’s backlinks using Yahoo SiteExplorer. Got to www.yahoo.com and type in link: followed by the domain you want to check, e.g.

link:www.dowebseo.com

If the site has a PR of 4 and only 2 links, the odds are the PageRank shown on the Google toolbar is out of date and the real PR of the site is a lot less.

What share of the available link juice will you get?

How many other outgoing links are there on the webpage you’ll get a link from? Are there loads of links in the sidebar/ blogroll and footer? I never trade with a site that has more than 10 outgoing links on its homepage and unless the site has PR > 5, I like to see less than 5 links. If the page is PR 3 and there are 50 outgoing links, you aren’t going to get a lot of link juice passed your way.

Does the site have unique content that will turn up in searches?

Check if the site contains content duplicated on other sites. Take a few phrases from the site and do a search for them on Google. Place the phrases in double quotes when doing a search, e.g.

"this is the phrase to search for"

If the phrase turns up on a number of sites, the content is copied and the site is not a good candidate for a link exchange.

Does the website look a bit shady?

Does the name of the domain match the theme of the content? For example if the domain name is pet-food related but the site contains reviews of gadgets like mobile phone’s stay away. It’s likely the site is a dropped domain and the value of any backlinks it has are likely to be discounted by Google.

Does the site look like it sells links?

Does the site contain other outgoing links to unrelated sites on different themes? If it does then the site may be selling links rather than gathering quality link exchanges. The value of any link from the site might be devalued by Google.

There are other things you can look out for but I’ll go into these in a later blogpost. Following the 5 tips above is a quick way to spot the majority of bad link partners.

General SEO, Link-building

Back a while ago I wrote about a simple way to find dofollow blogs. The method I recommended showed how to find blogs that were part of the “u comment I follow” movement. Recently I’ve come across another set of SEO tips on how to find blogs to comment on. This method lets you find blogs with a specific domain extension, e.g. .gov or .edu. These blogs are usually thought to be more valuable than .com sites since Google reputedly puts more trust in links from .gov or .edu sites.

Finding .gov or .edu blogs is really easy. All you need do is use the site: operator in the Google search box.

For example, to find blogs on .gov sites:

site:.gov inurl:blog

or blogs on .edu sites:

site:.edu inurl:blog

Of course visiting blogs found using the above method doesn’t mean the blog is necessarily dofollow. to make spotting dofollow blogs easier, I’d recommend using the FireFox browser and installing the NoDoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights nofollow/ dofollow links on a web page and will help you pin down possible linking opportunities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Happy blog hunting!

General SEO, Link-building

In earlier posts on do follow blog commenting, I’ve given some simple tips on how to find dofollow blogs. I’ve recently come across another really neat way of finding relevant dofollow blogs. To get the most benefit from a blog comment, there are three key things to find:

1. The blog comment will be on a page with a decent PageRank.
2. The link to your website will have use your keywords as the link anchor text.
3. The blog is dofollow, i.e. the link won’t have a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

This link-building tip can help you with all three of these factors. The tip involves finding blogs that have the KeywordLuv Wordpress plugin installed. The owners of these blogs want people to comment and in return they give back a dofollow link with keywords of your choice. It’s a fantastic plugin for both bloggers and blog commenters.

To find blogs with the KeywordLuv plugin installed, search for the following on Google:

“YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Keep the quotes around the search term and DON’T replace YourName or YourKeywords - type the search phrase exactly as it appear above. All blogs that have Keyword Luv installed, have this text as an instruction to commenters on how to get their keywords as anchor text. This tip helps with point 3 above and, if we assume that on average higher PR blogs will appear higher in the SERPS, it might be of some help with point 1 above too.

Helping out with point 2 is simple too - add your keywords to the search phrase. So if your keywords are SEO tips, search for this:

seo tips “YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Google will then return results containing all of the phrases. Spend a few minutes seaching and you’ll find loads of blogs to comment on. Remember to make a good, relevant comment that adds to the blog post/ discussion. Owner’s of blogs with KeywordLuv are good enough to provide high-quality links to their commenters so don’t abus the blogs by spamming or the owner will go no follow wiping out most of the worth of any links.

For more link-building tips, read: Using Press Releases to build links and Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

Blogspot SEO, General SEO, Link-building

If you want your website to do well in SERPs, you need to build lots of backlinks to your website. One simple SEO tip for building links is to submit your site details to web directories. Web directories are a bit like online versions of a telephone book. Hundreds or thousands of sites are listed together with a short description of the website and a link to the site. Unlike most other types of website, directories actually WANT to give out links. There are thousands of directories available, so with a bit of persistence - either using manual submission or using a directory submission tool - you can build up hundreds of backlinks.

SEO isn’t as simple as submitting your site to thousands of directories though. The vast majority of directories will only give you a weak backlink and in a lot of cases, the web page your link appears on may be completely ignored by search engines like Google.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, Google has realised that people were building huge numbers of links through directory submission and has devalued the worth of directory links. It’s quite common to find directories that have a decent homepage PageRank of 3 or more but all their inner pages have a PR of N/A. A PageRank of N/A means that the links on the inner pages are pretty much worthless. This doesn’t mean though that all directory links are bad. If you have your site in Google Webmasters and Google shows the link from the directory in the External Links section, it means you get some benefit from the link even if it’s small. I know that for some of my sites in Google Webmasters shows a few hundred directory backlinks.

Here are 4 directory submission tips:

What sort of directories should you submit to?

Well, the usual advice is to submit to directories with high PR. However, for the reasons given above, just because a directory has a homepage PR of 4 or 5 doesn’t mean that the inner pages have any link juice to pass on.

Unless the directory is old and well-established, e.g. DMOZ or BOTW, you can’t be sure the homepage PR will stick for very long anyway. In some cases directories are put on dropped or recycled domains and usually, at the next PR update, the PR drops off.

Also, just because a directory is new, or has low PR today, doesn’t mean its PR won’t increase in the future. When people set up a new directory they often start out allowing free submissions or submission that don’t require a reciprocal link. So if a new directory appears make a submission before the directory goes paid or starts needing a reciprocal link before you get listed.

So my recommendation is that since directory submission is so easy, especially if you use a semi-automatic directory submitter, submit to as many as you can - new or old, high PR or low PR.

Do you get a benefit from being listed in major directories like BOTW?

I have to say, in my experience the answer is no. I never saw any benefit from being listed in BOTW - either in ranking in SERPs or in traffic. I also never saw any decrease in rank or traffic from cancelling my listing in BOTW. I did save a few dollars though by cancelling my subscription.

Should you pay for submission?

Maybe, but not much. If you do pay for submission, make sure the page your site gets linked from will have a decent PR. You might pay for submission if you think the directory will give you lots of traffic even if the PR is N/A but you’ll never be able to tell how much traffic you’re going to get before you pay. In the past couple of years, I’ve received no more than a handful of referrals from directories. Remember also, that even if the page your link is on has a PR today, Google might come along and drop it to N/A in the next few months.

Should you give a directory a reciprocal link?

No. Reciprocal links are a bit devalued anyway. The whole idea of directory submission (and SEO) is to get a one way link to your website. Giving a link in return defeats the purpose of doing directory submission.

For more info on directory submission and link-building, read:

• Directory Submitter Software Tools: Can they harm your site?
• Using Press Releases to Build Links
• Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

Link-building

A simple SEO tip for building links to your blog posts is to enable pinging in the Wordpress Admin pages.

Pinging the major search engines and blog directories notifies them that you’ve made a new post so they should come and index it double-quick. On this blog, a new post normally appears in the Google search results within 5 minutes of being published.

The bigger benefit of pinging though is that there are a loads of automatic blogs that pick up new posts and link to them. It’s usual that within a few hours each new post on this blog picks up 3 or 4 links from other blogs as a result of pinging. These links aren’t of the highest quality but never turn down the opportunity for an easy link.

To enable pinging, you need to tell Wordpress which pinging services to use when a new blog post is published. To do this:-

1. Log into your blog as the admin.
2. Click on the Settings link over on the right, near the top of the page.
3. Click on the Writing link on the left.
4. Paste the links to pinging sites in the Update Services field at the bottom of the page.
5. Press the Save Changes button.

There are hundreds of pinging services you can use, but there are only a few major ones worth bothering with. Here’s the list I use.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

If you want to easily find out when someone links to your posts, enable trackbacks when you write a post. When another Wordpress blog links to you, you’ll then get a comment on the post being linked to in the form of a trackback. Askimet will pick these trackbacks up as spam so you can easily delete them before they get displayed as comments, but it’s a quick and easy way of knowing who’s linking to you.

For more Wordpress SEO Tips read Improving Wordpress blogpost titles and How to use the All-In-One SEO Pack.

Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips

Whenever you ask for advice on SEO for a website, the main advice you get given on webmaster and SEO forums is to keep building links. This is usually closely followed by advice to keep adding fresh content. Link building is an essential part of SEO - having great content is good but nothing beats a nice set of links from high PR pages.

As far as adding new content regularly, if your site ISN’T a blog, I’ve never found that adding lots of fresh content has significantly improved the site’s ultimate performance in SERPs.

What I mean is that if your site is selling a particular product or service it’s usually optimised for a specific set of keywords. If I have a page optimised for a specific keyword then the performance of that page in SERPs doesn’t seem to improve a great deal just because I add extra pages to my site on a similar topic. The extra pages might start to do well for the keywords they target but the older pages on my site remain pretty static in SERPs unless I go and get more incoming backlinks. The hard part about adding new pages is to make the pages work as well as your existing pages. After all there’s likely to only be a smallish set of keywords that are worth attacking in SERPs.

I’ve come across some people who were a bit overkeen on adding new content to their websites. I’ve seen sites almost turned into article directories where they add a new page containing a short article every couple of days. As more and more articles get added, the article contents gets increasingly irrelevant to the main topic of the site. The articles will pick up long-tail traffic but the traffic will be mainly junk as the visitors will land on a page with little relation to the main purpose of the site. Some people put in more effort and try to write more and more  landing pages for different keywords. Often they end up falling into the same trap as the pseudo-article directory approach, the keywords on each page get less and less relevant and although the number of visitors increases, the visitors are less and less likely to stay on the site and buy the goods on offer.

Some tactics for adding fresh content can have a negative effect on SEO and should be avoided. Never be tempted to add a directory (like a PHPLd directory) to your site expecting that as people submit listings your content will grow and improve your SERPs performance. Directories are unlikely to be looked on favourably by Google.

In most of my site’s niches my main competitors have very static sites with homepages that change very infrequently - sometimes not for months. This doesn’t seem to harm them and their position in SERPs is very stable.

Of course, regularly adding fresh content (new pages or additional or altered text on existing pages) does have advantages. If your site is updated often, Google will reindex your site more often, meaning that any changes you make will be reflected in the SERPS more quickly. For example, if Google reindexes your homepage every day, you can try out a new title tag with new keywords one day and see how you do in the search results the day after. If Google only reindexes your site every couple of weeks, you’ll only be able to see the effect on SERPs of a change once every two weeks.

So, does adding fresh content improve SERPs performance? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and “maybe”. Yes, fresh content helps if you have a blog and you just want to attract visitors and readers - who might be tempted to click on some nicely placed Adsense. If your site is selling a product, if the new content is highly relevant to the product and written to encourages sales, fresh content is very useful. It can be a lot of effort to come up with great new content though. Don’t worry though if you can’t keep coming up with new content, your old content will still keep on working for you.

General SEO, Keywords, Link-building

Back on my dofollow blog commenting tips post I gave some ideas on how to find dofollow blogs. One of the ideas I talked about was to simply search on Google for “list of dofollow blogs” to find lists of blogs other people had already put together. You can also use a dofollow blog search engine to search for blogs on particular topics.

Recently though I came across another way of finding dofollow blogs. There is a dofollow blog community called U COMMENT I FOLLOW. These blogs have dofollow comments and also display the following image on their website.

An easy way to blogs with this image is simply to search on Google for the words “u comment i follow”. Usually the blogs will have these words mentioned somewhere, often in the alt tag for the “u comment i follow” image. You can experiment by searching on the usual www.google.com search engine and on the images search engine http://images.google.com/.

Remember when commenting on blogs that links to your site from pages on relevant themes are likely to be worth more than those from irrelevant pages. To try and find dofollow blogs with relevant posts, you can experiment with combining search phrases, e.g. to find dofollow blogs related to software development, try searching for:

“u comment i follow” “software development”

This is an easy method of finding dofollow blogs. When you do find a dofollow blog, it will also be quite likely to link to other blogs that are dofollow so spend some time looking at the sites linked in the blogroll.

Remember though that any blog that is deliberately dofollow will also have an owner that is carefully vetting and moderating any comments. If you want your comment to be approved, make a quality comment rather than a short and spammy “Great post! Thanks for the info” type of comment. In my experience, comments where the author’s name is obviously a keyword, e.g. “seo tips” instead of “Dave” are very unlikely to be approved.

General SEO, Link-building

One way of building backlinks to your website is by making press releases. When you make a press release, you aren’t writing an announcement for publication in real newspapers, instead you are writing text containing good keywords making an announcement related to your site or the products your company sells. You submit your text to a press release site like http://www.free-press-release.com or http://www.prweb.com and you end up with a whole page dedicated to your release with a link back to your site.

Submitting press releases is in similar in some ways to article submission or directory submission.

The advantage of press releases over article submissions are that it’s often easier to write a press release than an article since you can simply write about events happening on your site or the launch of a new product. Press releases can often be shorter (300 words or so) compared to an article. Another advantage is that you can submit your own press releases with links back to your own site. Article directories often require articles to be submitted by a third party.

The disadvantages of press releases compared to article submissions are that it’s usually free to submit an article and you can also include links with anchor text in the signature paragraph of the article. With press release sites you usually have to pay a dollar upwards to include a link with anchor text.

The advantage over directory submission is that you can make multiple submissions to a press release site whereas with directories you can usually just get one link with one set of anchor text back to your site.

In my experience, submitting to press release sites is pretty successful. Your release will be linked from the press release site’s homepage and will be indexed very quickly. Often the homepage will have a high PR - 7 or 8 in some cases - and your article will usually do pretty well in SERPs for the day or so that the article remains linked on the homepage. Some of the press release sites also provide easy social bookmarking options allowing you to build a few extra links to your press release, giving a slightly longer term SEO benefit.

For more link-building tips, see: Building links by commenting on blogs and Building links using forums.

Link-building

One of the often repeated myths about Google PageRank is that these days it has no effect on the performance of a website in the SERPs. Today Google is supposed to treat content as king and in some ways this is true. Type a search phrase into Google and look at the results. As you go down from position 1 to 10 you’ll find that the PR of the sites in the better positions isn’t always higher than the PR of sites in the lower positions. Sometimes sites with a PR of 0 will outperform pages with PR 5 for a particular keyword. If you write a program to analyse the top 50 results though you’ll usually see a general trend towards lower PageRank values as you go further down the results.

With a little thought it should be pretty obvious that PageRank alone can’t determine the position of a website in the SERPs. Simply because two pages contain the same keywords and have the same pagerank doesn’t mean they’ll appear next to each other in the search results. Read my top 10 SEO factors post for more information on how non-PageRank factors affect the performance of a page in SERPs.

There is one way in which PageRank can have a BIG effect on the performance of a website though. Pages in the supplemental index are unlikely to turn up in the SERPs except for very obscure keywords. The best - if not the only - way of pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get backlinks from pages with decent PR. The higher the PR of the pages you can get links from the better. With smaller websites that have only 10 or 20 pages, a home page with a PR of 2 or 3 and a half-decent internal linking strategy, most of the site’s pages will be in Google’s main index.

However, with large database-driven sites that have thousands of pages, usually the only way of improving the performance of the site and pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get some high PR links to the homepage and to node pages within the site. Node pages are pages which link to lots of other pages in the site. In a site like a web directory, an example of a node page is a category page. For large sites, getting links from pages with PR 6 and above are ideal.

You can find the supplemental index ratio for a site using the site: command. First type the following into the Google search box to find the number of pages in Google’s main index for a website (replace www.dowebseo.com by the URL of the domain you want to examine). Note the number of results returned.

site:/www.dowebseo.com

Then type in:

site:www.dowebseo.com

and again note the number of results returned. The ratio of these numbers gives the supplemental index ratio for a site. For a large site with 30,000 pages and a homepage PR of 3 or less it’s fairly common to get a ratio of 0.075 meaning that less than 1% of the pages on the site regularly turn up in the SERPS. Getting some good links from high PR pages should pull more pages out of the supplemental index within a few weeks. For tips on link-building and ideas on where to find high PR pages, see link-building using dofollow blogs and link-building using dofollow forums.

General SEO, Google PageRank, Link-building

A couple of database-generated sites I own have in excess of 50,000 pages each. Building links for these sites requires a different strategy to link-building for my smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages.

With smaller sites you can quite easily build deep links to the inner pages of the site as well as links to the website’s home page. After building links to the main pages on a small site for a few months, you should end up with a good number of landing pages that do well in SERPs.

With larger sites though like PHPLd-based directories or PADKit-enabled software archives, it isn’t practical to build external links to all the pages on the site. The internal linking within larger sites is critical to the website’s performance in SERPs. Ideally, each page should get a decent number of links from some of the other pages within the site. As with all link-building, the best links are those from pages on a similar topic.

Link Back To Category Pages

Almost all large websites have a tree-like structure. The homepage links to category pages, the category pages to sub-categories and then finally, in the case of a software archive, to details pages. In the case of a software archive, each details page will show information about a single software package. The main link juice or PageRank for the site is likely to be provided by the external links to the site’s homepage. The PR will then flow like water through to the category and subcategory pages to the details pages. The link juice can be better distributed around the site by linking back from the deeper pages to the higher level pages as shown in this picture.

Link Related Pages

If the internal linking strategy ends here though, each details page is getting only a small share of the available link juice. By the time the link juice gets to the details pages it’s been divided up many times so that there’s little left. More work must be done to maximise the link juice to the details pages. The details pages are the real content of the site and the pages you really want to do well in SERPs.

A really good way of improving the performance of details pages is to link related details pages together. For example, on a software archive, if a text editor program is listed on one details page, the page could also link to 10 other text editor details pages on the same site. Luckily, when software is submitted to a PAD-enabled software archive, the PAD file lists keywords for the software so with a bit of programming you should be able to quite easily match programs based on keywords.

Link-building, Uncategorized