Showing posts with label blog SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog SEO. Show all posts

SEO is a must when hoping to rank high in the SERPS

This is a quick update on my efforts on getting this blog to rank better in search engine result pages. It all started a few weeks back when I decided to do an experiment. I tried to get as many legitimate and ‘legal’ in the eyes of Google backlinks, pointing back to this site with the keyword “make money blogging”.

Although this is not a high traffic keyword, it is a keyword with a lot f competition. Many blog behemoths are ranked in the first page for make money blogging and I wanted to see, if me, a noob, can get there. I briefly made it a few months back, I stayed on the first page enough time for me to get a screen shot that you can see here: 1st page on Google

I don’t deserve a medal for it because I think it might have been due to what they call the ‘sandbox effect’.

After that brief little stay on the first pages, then my blog plummeted back to the dark depths of the SERPS. I drew out a plan, I stuck to it, I even surpassed my backlink goals, and as a result I am staging a comeback. Ideas and money is currently on SERP 2 for make money blogging. It has been there for almost one week. I am hoping that as more of the links I created get indexed I will rank higher.

If you are interested in SEO and curious to see what I have done to get here read the following

Blog SEO Backlinks
Climbing the SERPS
Blog SEO


Blog SEO tips for immediate ranking results

Get backlinks; and never pay for your links.

Getting links means putting in some work but it is worth the results. Get many, one way, keywords to your site follow the following tips and traffic will follow. I mean search engine traffic. After writing good content the single most important thing you can to for your blog is getting backlinks. The same applies for every kind of site. Getting backlinks should be where you dedicate most of your blogging time. I cannot stress it enough. Without backlinks your blog or site will be sitting in limbo forever and ever…and ever…till the end of time and then some.

Joking aside, it is very important. Think of backlinks as votes of confidence for your site. The more votes you have the better your pages will rank in search engine result pages. The better your ranking the more visits you will get. I dedicate a good chunk of my free time in getting as many backlinks as I can.

Let’s take things one by one.

The argument

Getting traffic to your blog and or site is not rocket science. Blogging is not rocket science. Making money blogging is not rocket science either. In order to make money with your blog, you need traffic. In order to get traffic you need to make accessing your site or blog easier for your potential visitors. There is a whole debate going on about what kind of traffic is the best kind of traffic. Search engines or social networking? Well this debate rages within the circles of social networking advocates. Anyone else, who is making or has made money online knows that the best way to do so is by driving search engine traffic to your blog. Aside from the specifics and the conversion rates and click through rates, that I don’t know much about, what makes sense is this. How many people do you thing use social networking sites? Then ask yourself, how many people do you think use search engines to find what they are looking for? I’ll let you answer that question. This post is not about debating the effectiveness of either social networking or search engines. It is just about getting backlinks.

Thinks about it like this:

Is it social networking or search engines that people use most to get around the web? When you are looking for something on the web, whether it is advice or a product or whatever, how will you go about finding it?

Under the assumption that search engine optimization will produce better long term results for your site this post will outline three ways of getting more backlinks with anchor text and therefore allow it to rank better in search engine result pages.

Comments

Once you have set up your new site you should immediately start getting a few easy backlinks. Backlinks from other high page rank sites that will allow for quick indexing. The best way of going about doing this is by visiting and commenting on blogs. Don’t comment spam, and do not use your keyword on your name. Your comments will just get turned down. I turn down those kinds of comments all the time. Read the post, and write something relevant, constructive and useful. You are getting a free backlink from this so you should at least offer some decent content for that site.

Dofollow

Some blogs are set up in a way that does not allow search engines to crawl the comments. Other ones are set up in the reverse way. It doesn’t really matter how the blogs you are commenting on are set up. All you need to worry about is getting those links. Make sure that the blogs you are commenting on have some sort of a page rank. If not, make sure they are indexed by Google. How you can do that? Well you can search the web for a page rank calculator and copy/paste the URL and figure it out. Or, you can go download seoquake for a quick overview of a site. Once you get the seoquake firefox toolbar plugin you will be able to see which blogs have PR and which don’t and therefore be able to get the best backlinks for your comments.

Remember, better PR means better links. Dofollow links are better than nofollow, however, links are links. If your site is new, and has not been indexed yet, go write a bunch of comments and indexing will follow. Ten, twenty, fifty….it is just a matter of how fast you want to get indexed.

Article Marketing

Write three articles, then go to as many article submission databases as you can and submit those articles. In order for you article not to be turned down make sure that it is over 500 words, you have a maximum of 2 links with anchor text placed in the resource box. If the particular database you are submitting to allows anchor links in text even better. For best results get as many articles submitted as possible. There is software to help you do this. Google the term free article submission software and you will find a few for sure. Get it, start writing and start submitting. Keep in mind that sometimes it takes up to 3 weeks for each article to get manually reviewed and approved by the database you submit to. Its ok…in the meantime, you should be working to get more links. Do social bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking

Find 10 social bookmarking sites. Create accounts for all of them and get to work. Submit as many links as you can for every post of yours and for every blog. Try to include a few different links, links not from the same site, to avoid getting banned for spamming. For every link you submit, in the title place the keyword you want that particular site, or post to rank well in. In the keywords, write as many keywords as you can. 10-15 should be good. For every keyword that you write the social bookmarking site gives you one more link. So think about it, if you are getting links for, lets say 10 of your posts from 10 social bookmarking sites, with ten keywords each….that’s 10 posts times 10 sites, times 10 keywords, for a grand total of 1000 anchored backlinks to your blog. Be careful, not to push it with your bookmarks. Big social bookmarking sites, are very particular with spamming and they will not give banning you a second thought. Try to fly under the radar by bookmarking other sites as well.

Directory Submission

Don’t forget the directories. Some of them have been lying around for a while and have excellent page rank. You should make a point and submit your URL in as many as you can. Its free, it just takes time.

Blogging is not rocket science. You get links, you rank better, you get traffic and you make money; it is simple.

A few Simple ways to help you build more backlinks

I haven’t been posting much lately. What I have been doing on my spare time is getting backlinks and lots of them. I have been literally working hard in getting as many backlinks as I can; backlinks for the home page of this blog as well as for individual posts, deep links. Backlinks are very important in achieving higher rankings in search engine result pages. For the ones interested in pursuing a similar strategy of building backlinks read on and perhaps this post will help you see things under a different light. In the past few weeks, I have managed to increase the backlinks to this blog tenfold. Here is a recent screenshot from my Webmaster Tools link report.


As you can see most of these links are for the home page… I am trying to change that.

I have been building backlinks in two different ways, by submitting articles in article databases as well as by getting many newer and older posts bookmarked in social bookmarking sites.

Let’s start with the articles.

Writing Articles

Most article databases accept articles in a standardized format. Make sure your articles are about 500 words in length, keyword rich; they have the keywords, in the title, in the beginning and in the end paragraph. Also make sure you incorporate two html links in the resource box. Even though some databases accept links in the article body, try to avoid doing so. Just so you won’t deter other webmasters from republishing them. Try to keep your links to only two, because some databases will reject articles with more links. If you are submitting one or two articles to a few databases being consistent with these parameters doesn’t really matter. Nevertheless, if you are going to do some bulk submitting this will save you loads of time.

Publishing Articles

Publishing Articles is one of the most recommended and easy ways to get links. All you need to do is to write a few articles and submit them to as many article databases possible. If you have a relatively new site or blog, the best way of going about doing it is by starting with a few established and relatively high page rank databases; databases that are crawled regularly by Google and other major search engines. At least initially, you want to avoid posting any duplicate content. So pick the 5 or 6 most popular ones and submit a different article to all of them. Sometimes articles are accepted with a bit of a delay, but you will start getting some links published within a few weeks. Don’t start submitting in bulk and in many databases in the beginning. Allow the links you have published in the established ones to get crawled by Google first. This will allow your blog-site to get indexed by Google. These are the ones I use regularly:

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.articlealley.com

Once you achieve indexing you can start submitting in bulk. You can submit the same or similar article to hundreds of databases in a matter of a few hours.

Automated Software

There is a wide selection of automatic article submission software out there; they are easy to use and very effective. I use one as well. After I get a site indexed, I start submitting to hundreds of article directories, even if it is the same article, a link is a link. Even if Google might take away value form that link, it is still a link. I am not an SEO expert and I am not sure what the implications with duplicate content might be; I haven’t seen any negative aspects of publishing the same article over and over. If you are weary of such an approach avoid it and submit a different article in every database. If you are on the prow for automatic submission software, Google the term ‘Article Submitter’ along with the keyword free and you will be able to find one in the first page of results. If you are new to all this and kind broke, don’t pay, get a free one and take the time to calibrate it to your specific needs. If you need any additional help, just post a comment here and I will be more than happy to assist you in any way I can.

Ok, back to the linking…

Social Bookmarking Sites

Get free backlinks for all of your posts. It is as easy as 123, but it can take as much time as counting to 1,000; just because there are so many of them on the net. I use a series of bookmarking sites most of them main stream except a few that I enjoy using for their simplicity. Here are the

Bloggingzoom
del.icio.us
Digg
SEOtree Social
Reddit
StumbleUpon

All of the above are great for building links, there are tons more and if you know of better ones please write a comment. I really enjoy using Bloggingzoom since the links rank pretty well in the SERPS. If you would like to read more about blogging zoom you can by checking out an older post about backlinks.

A few weeks ago, I came across a post on blogtomic.com about this mega social bookmarking site that was referred to as the Holy Grail of Social Bookmarking. I just remembered about it now and thought it might be a good idea to mention it.

I will definitely try it out and let you know how it works.

That’s it for now. Here are some more related posts you might find helpful

Backlinks
1st page on Google
Blogging Tips