What is interesting is that all public Google Notebook pages are indexed. So, it seems we have one more link building opportunity. Arjan Snaterse did a test to see whether Google really values those links.

Well, inspired by Arjan’s story, I decided to do my own research in this area and scrutinize the case myself.

I created my own Google notebook and published it.

Click on the image to enlarge it 

To get my notebook indexed by search engines, I need to have a couple of inbound links to it. So, I used Fast Blog Finder Gold edition, found several DoFollow blogs and posted a few comments on them. When filling in the comment form I entered a link to my Google notebook into the Website URL field.

To tell you frankly I doubt your Google notebook will help you much with ranking well in Google itself. Google most likely filters its website index and doesn’t rank well the websites from its own domain. However, Google is not the only search engine on the net and I’m pretty sure it will work in Yahoo! and MSN.

So, don’t miss such an opportunity to get some additional DoFollow links and move your website higher in SERP. Setup a Google account if you don’t have it yet, create your notebook and work at getting some inbound links to your notebook.      

What will you store in your notebook? Following my example you can add links to your most important web pages you would like to give more exposure to. What is nice is that the links in your Google notebook will be all “DoFollow”. But do not spam by adding a huge amount of links to your notebook. It seems Google deletes such notebooks because I found many “404 Error” pages when clicking on the notebook URLs. Make your notebook look natural, include a reasonable amount of links with your best anchor text and you’ll be rewarded.

Secondly, I would not definitely recommend that you store your private information like passwords, user names, and other links you don’t want to be visible to other people in your notebook. After you publish your Google notebook, it will become available for everyone who will come across it using a search engine. So, ensure it doesn’t store any personal or private information.  

When creating your Google notebook, you will notice an option to create a user’s profile in your notebook. In your profile you can tell about yourself and upload your photos. But the best thing is that you can also add as many links to your profile as you want. The links in your profile will also be “DoFollow”. Look at my profile below and notice the links to our products at the right side.

Click on the image to enlarge it 

How long will Google notebook and profile work for? Truly, I don’t know. With an increasing amount of web spam, I think Google will take some measures to stop spammers. Anyway, since it works today, why not take some advantage of Google notebook and profile and improve your website ranking?

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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2 Free Super Simple Link Building Tips

Tags: blog comments, blog finder, find blogs, find dofollow blogs, Link Building, Link Building Tutorials, Search Engine Marketing

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However, you may notice that despite all your efforts your website doesn’t rank as high as you would want it. The situation is most likely under your control. You just need to know what can go wrong to correct it.

So, here is a list of common Google glitches that may keep even best web sites from getting to the top positions in search results:
 

1. Bad "Neighborhood"

Google doesn’t treat all the sites in the same way. It uses its own trust thresholds to classify the sites. It’s not a secret that trusty web sites can boast more indulgence from the search engine.

To rank your web site, Google carefully analyzes your "neighborhood" – your incoming and outgoing links. You should watch over the sites you want to get links from (blogs, directories, etc.).

And moreover you should be very careful when linking to someone else’s site. Google understands that you have a full control over your outgoing links and will penalize you or lower your website ranking for your "bad neighborhood".

You know not every link is good. The most obvious example of a bad link is a broken link. If your HTTP 404 error log file reveals that a link leads to a page on your web site that doesn’t exist anymore, you can drop a quick email to the site’s webmaster asking them to repair that broken link. If the webmaster didn’t correct the link, you can use a permanent 301 redirect method to redirect the link to the right page.

There are 2 ways to find HTTP 404 error log files for your website:

1st way:

- follow this link http://www.yourdomain.com:2082/

- login to your cPanel

- look at HTTP Error codes section in Awstats and click on "404 Document Not Found" link

2nd way (if you use a WordPress blog):

- download and install this Redirection plugin. Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.

Another example of a bad link is a link with inaccurate anchor text. A classic "Click here" or "Read more" is obviously not the right anchor text you would want to have for your links.

There is nothing wrong with asking the linking site’s webmaster to change the anchor text in your link with the right anchor text containing your keywords.

Bad links are also coming from link farms. If you came across your web site listed in a link farm, get it removed from there by contacting the link farm site webmaster. The majority of link farm webmasters will remove your site upon your request.

With that said, you should be concerned both about the sites you obtain links from and the sites you link to and put your efforts to obtain as more quality links as possible.
 

 2. Unnatural Looking Incoming Links

It’s still about links because they seem to be the primary factor Google takes into consideration when ranking a web site.

Despite the fact that Google does not favor the practice of buying links, many web site owners are engaged into such practice. If they are caught, they are typically penalized.

However, there are two "secrets" here:

• Firstly, more natural incoming links a web site has, less likely the site will be penalized for buying links or getting links from low quality web sites.
• And secondly, one just should be careful enough in order not to be caught by Google. Many web sites manage to buy and sell links under the Google’s nose. They just do it carefully, deliberately, bypassing any link brokers and other known link selling resources.
   

 3. Keywords Abuse

Using excessive keywords on a web page is a practice that doesn’t work with Google anymore. At best, Google will ignore them. At worse, you will be penalized or your website ranking will be dropped in the search engine index. In either case it’s not worth your effort.

The common places where your keywords must be located are your title and description tags and your headers. You can also naturally intersperse your page content with keywords where appropriate.

And the best place to put the keywords in is the anchor text of your links. That’s where you will get the greatest return!
 

4. Duplicate Content, Titles and Descriptions

Google tends to maintain unique content in its index. So, if your website has content identical to the content found somewhere else, your web pages may not be listed in search engine results. The same thing applies to meta Titles and Descriptions.

If several pages of your website have the same title or description, Google will choose itself which pages are worth to be listed in the search results and which ones are not. This may be a problem if you want all of your pages to be displayed.

Therefore, you should take time to make each page of your website look unique and valuable to Google.

But there is a trick here. You have a great chance to be listed in search results and leave your competitor behind if:

• your web page obtains more incoming links than the competitor’s page with the similar content, or
• your web page has less links but those links are from the websites with a great weight and authority.
   

5. Low Visitor Count

Google is able to track your website visitor count (through the Google toolbar and through the tracking links in SERP) and compare this metric to the ones of your competitors’ websites. If during a certain period of time the relative visitor count for your website is lower than your competitor’s one, Google can rightfully consider your website as low quality, less important and less relevant to the search terms. Thus, you should put your efforts to ensure a consistent and steady traffic to your website by posting comments on other people’s blogs and submitting your site to web directories.
 

6. Slow Hosting Server

The server response time is another factor that affects the website ranking in search results. If your website response time is consistently slow, it’s reasonable to suppose Google won’t value your website highly.

Don’t get me wrong but if your budget cannot afford a high quality hosting service with a fast server, the game is not worth the candle. So, if you are unhappy or not sure about your hosting company, consider looking for another high quality web hosting service that would provide you with a fast response server with a dedicated IP address.
 

7. Website is Often not Accessible

Ensure that your website is up and running. If a Google bot comes to your website and consistently gets the "Page Not Found" error, how do you want Google to rank your site? This may be the primary reason why your website cannot climb at the top of the search results. You may have a brilliant website with quality and unique content but if it is frequently down, you lose any chance to be at the top.

Once again, be concerned about your website availability and look for a web hosting company with a good fast hosting server. Don’t wait until your competitors eat your lunch. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and efforts.

As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in comments below.

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7 Top Google Rank-Killer Glitches

Tags: bad neighborhood, inbound links, quality content, search engine, site optimization, trusted sites

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I’m talking about the meta tags of the web page such as Title and meta Description. The Title tag has been the simplest yet one of the most important on-site optimization components for the latest years. And even at present you can have an improvement in SE ranking by optimizing your page meta Title.

The secret is to place your primary keywords as close as possible to the beginning of the Title tag. It’s important that each page of your website has a unique meta Title because you don’t want to have issues with duplicate content. By the way, the keyword stuffed Title tag is a great way to show the difference between similar web pages.

Here is an example of a good Title tag:

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />   

The keywords the user types in the search engine are highlighted by bold in the search results. And the meta Title tag which exactly matches the search query tends to be on the higher positions in search results and thus, will have a higher click-through rate.

While inbound links with your keywords in the anchor text are probably considered as a more important ranking factor, the bad thing is that you have less control over somebody else’s website linking to you. On your web site you’re a master of the situation and should not miss this simple opportunity to rank well in search results for your targeted keywords.

The most important thing to remember is that if a good meta Title tag can help your web page ranking a little, a bad Title can bring to nothing the web page’s chances of ranking well in the search engine results. So, if you feel your meta Titles are not good enough and can be improved, don’t wait too long and edit them right away. Simply by including a well compiled meta Title tag into the page source, you can jump a few positions up in the search results.

Along with the meta Title tag the meta Description is a another important ranking factor of an on-site optimization. While the Title tag stands as the main headline of your site in the search results, the meta Description presents the summary of your web page to the user viewing the search results.

An accurate and relevant to the page content meta Description wins the prospective visitor’s favour and makes them click on the link.

<meta name="description" content="With brilliant designs and powerful features of G-Lock EasyMail you can bring spectacular results to your email marketing campaigns and beat your competitors in the business" />

Here is how the meta Title and meta Description are shown in the search results:

If you do not include the meta description in the HTML source of your web page, the search engines will add the description on their own by taking any snippet from your page content.

Would you like users to see the description for your web page as below?

Title: Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail
Summary: Home, Downloads, Buy Now, Support, Tutorials

I’m sure I wouldn’t want the search engine to just repeat the navigation links in my site description. And this is more likely to happen if you fail to include a well written, relevant to the page content meta description.

Don’t rely upon the search engines to choose the right description for your web page and take time to include the meta Descriptions yourself on every page of your web site to entice prospective visitors to click on your site listings.

A simple way to learn how to write good descriptions is to read ppc ads related to your market niche. Then you can compose your own meta Description in a similar manner if appropriate. Like a good copy of a ppc ad, a good meta Description copy containing keywords will increase your click through rate and will also help your web site rankings because Google will consider it to be more relevant to the search query. But unlike the ppc you don’t have to pay any fee for organic search results. A well written description will naturally attract visitors and bring you a higher CTR.

If you use WordPress as your blog platform, the plugin called All in One SEO pack will automatically optimize your titles for search engines and generate the description from the first 25 words (or more) of your post. This plugin is a must  for anyone who uses WordPress.

The bottom line: the meta Title and Description are still important factors of the on-site optimization and should be used on each page of the web site you want to be described in search results. If you cannot afford much time for SEO, the first thing you should think about is creating good meta Title and Description for your web page. This is your number one task. They will work for the benefit of your site while you can engage into other SEO tactics.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Quick and Easy Way to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Tags: anchor text, content type, description meta tags, inbound links, meta description, quality content, search engine ranking, search query, site optimization

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Why do you write new content? Firstly, because you want to attract more readers to your site or blog, and secondly, because you want to get a few more links to your website.

Many webmasters consider new content primarily as a website ranking leverage and focus on creating content only to get potential links. Their websites often have a cheap, freelance content overfilled with keywords and optimized for search engines only because they are interested in adding content only to influence search engines.

Creating new content simply to obtain links cuts both ways. This tactic can work sometimes; sometimes it can totally fail. Some will appreciate your content, few people will link. Content created for search engine optimization purposes only can often seem artificial and may not bring you a link you were looking for. Yes, it can help the website ranking for a while but it won’t be a long lasting success.

Adding new content just because you have to and not because you feel inspired and want to tell something valuable to your readers simply leads to a huge amount of mass junk pages that turn the readers off. And what is more interesting, many webmasters know that web pages with bad content are doomed from the start but they continue and continue churning out those pages hunting after more and more links like a drowning man will catch at a straw.

Well, I personally incline to a different approach to content creation. If you get down to creating new content with no SEO element in your mind and write just because you have something to tell to your readers, your content will gradually and naturally generate links. Why? Because it’s good. A good content will favor the search engine rankings while bad content will hurt it.

The big secret (in fact, it’s not a secret at all, it’s just a common sense) is to write to attract more readers and not links. More readers, more chances to get links. Write quality content for your visitors and you’ll be rewarded. Many will return and link.

Here is the proof. Look at the screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools. There is the statistics on the number of inbound links my articles generated. I didn’t ask anyone to link to these pages. All of the links were obtained naturally and I think it’s quite fair (or maybe I’m flattering myself?).  

Click on the image to enlarge

What I want to suggest is that you forget about search engines and SEO purposes when creating content. Focus on your readers interests. Spend more time to create a unique quality content and the results will not take long to appear. Be honest with yourself, take time and think - would you look after that cherished link if search engines don’t exist at all?

You know I don’t want to blame anyone. We’re all in the Internet marketing and just like in any other business we want to be the number one in our niche. I just want to find a core of sense and pick out SEO tactics that really work among the tactics that only seem to be working.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Forget about Search Engines When Creating Content

Tags: Internet Marketing, Link Building Tutorials, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

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If your market niche is too popular on the Internet and you have many competitors, it’s very difficult to rank well for 1-2 best keywords. And even if you do this, your success is less likely to be long-lived. Expenses are maximal, output is minimal. Thus, it simply doesn’t worth your effort and time.

Sometimes to achieve better results and convert your website visitors into customers, you need to think outside of the box, be original and unique. No, I don’t mean you need to create a totally new product. You can have one of the products of the kind but approach its marketing and promotion from a different angle.

One of the secrets for a stable success is to rank for long tail keywords (keyword phrases consisting in four, five or more words). It’s much easier to rank for long tail keywords because they are more specific and are not as trite as primary one or two keywords.

Let me show you an example in order you could better understand what I am talking about. Our company sells G-Lock EasyMail software. The first keywords that come into my mind and that I might want to rank for are "email software", or "email sender", or "bulk sender" or the like. But there is an incredible number of email senders on the Internet. And if most of email software owners think like me, it will be extremely hard to be in top ten search results for any of those clichés. Thus, I will follow a bit different way. I will look after long tail keywords. To promote my email sender software, I may want to rank for such phrases like:

- Email marketing software solution

- Email sending and tracking solution

- Bulk email marketing services

- Software for permission-based email marketing

- Create and send HTML email newsletter

- Download bulk email marketing software

Got the idea?

Now make a list of long tail keywords relevant to your niche. Write both the singular and plural versions of each keyword phrase if applicable, for example: Bulk email marketing service - Bulk email marketing services, Email marketing software solution - Email marketing software solutions.

Write an article containing 500-1000 words and be sure to link one long tail keyword phrase to your website. You can include a link to your website with a long tail keyword phrase as the anchor text either in the article content or in the Resource box.

When the article is ready, submit it to article directories. Then write a new article, optimize it for another long tail keyword phrase and submit it to directories. Write as many articles as the number of long tail keywords phrases (relevant to your market niche) you can imagine. If you don’t feel like a good writer, you can hire someone to write articles for you.

Together with article submission, you can use directory submission to rank for long tail keywords. When you submit a website to a directory, you need to provide a title that will be then used as the anchor text for your website URL. Just enter one of your long tail keyword phrases in the Title field and it will be linked to your site.

The key is to get ranked for many long tail keyword phrases. You won’t generate much traffic from just one phrase. But if you rank for dozens of long tail keyword sets, the overall traffic can be high and can bring you many new customers.

Yes, copying/pasting a new long tail keyword phrase as the title in each directory can be a tedious and time-consuming work. But now we have a great time-saving solution – Fast Directory Submitter.

With this semi-automatic directory submission tool you can fill in the website profile form only once and enter as many titles (using long tail keywords) and descriptions as you want. When submitting your website to directories, Fast Directory Submitter will automatically fill in the submission form rotating your titles and descriptions from directory to directory. You just need to verify the suggested category, enter the verification code if required by the directory and click Submit button to go to the next directory.

Thus, your website will be submitted using different long tail keyword phrases. When your listings are approved, you will get hundreds of links to your website. After Google indexes those links, you’ll be on the top positions in the search results for long tail keywords.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Long Tail Keywords – Incredible Free Traffic Secret

Tags: Link Building, New Link Building Methods, Search Engine Marketing, seo backlinks

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To get that second page listed within the Google results, link to it heavily from other pages of your website. Google will automatically attach it as an indented result next to your first listing. See an example of a double website listing below.

If internal links do not help the new page rank in the search engine, you may need to build links to it from external sites as well.

When it comes to link building, traditional link building methods such as directory submission, article submission, press releases, reciprocal linking, blog commenting and some other are great. That’s what almost all webmasters do for solid long-term results.

But sometimes when you’re at the beginning of your link building campaign, you may want to quickly get a couple of quality "DoFollow" links. With all that said, I’d like to share with you a couple of quick "DoFollow" link building opportunities for your new web page:

• Post on educational blogs. You can search for blogs set up on trusted academic domains and leave a relevant comment. Many of those blogs may be NoFollow but not all. You can enter a search query like below into Fast Blog Finder Gold Edition to search for .edu blogs in your niche. Then filter the blogs by the Type to show only DoFollow links and read the posts. If you feel you can add something to the conversation, leave your comment to get a DoFollow link in return.

Example:"some keywords" inurl:".edu"

• Setup a profile on Twitter. In your profile settings you can type a couple of links into the Bio field, for example, www.yourdomain2.com, www.yourdomain2.com, etc. Note that if you only setup an account, that will do no good. But if you are an active user, those links may send some traffic to your website and give some SEO benefit.
• Post on LinkedIn Answers website. You can setup a user account on LinkedIn Answers, search for questions relevant to your market niche and post answers. Be serious and use your regular user name, write a helpful answer and include a link to your website or blog for more information.
• Use DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites. There are a number of social bookmarking sites where the links located on the first page are "DoFollow". You can start with less popular websites that require fewer votes to get to the front page.

Here are some of "DoFollow" social bookmarking sites:

Furl (PR7)
Backflip (PR6)
Bibsonomy (PR6)
LinkaGoGo (PR6)
Mister-Wong (PR6)
Raw Sugar (PR6)
Spurl (PR6)
Buddy Marks (PR5)
Jumptags (PR5)
MyJeeves / Ask (PR5)

It’s a good idea to add a "Bookmark It" button to your website. This will make it easy for your readers to vote for your site in social bookmarking services. You can use this free Social bookmarking tool to generate a code with the "Bookmark It" image and a link to a list of 80+ social bookmarking services.

Example of the code: <a href="http://www.expertarticles.com/bookmark/?url=http://www.fastblogfinder.com& title=Fast Blog Finder">Bookmark with Your Social Network</a>

You place the "Bookmark It" button on your website or blog. By clicking just one button your readers will be able to vote for your website in dozens of social bookmarking sites.

Note that these tricky tactics cannot compete with general link building methods and I do not want you to focus on them as your primary methods to get links. I just want you to keep them in mind as unconventional link building ideas that sometimes may be helpful to kick start your link building process.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Double Your Search Traffic

Tags: blog comments, find dofollow blogs, Link Building, Link Building Tutorials, New Link Building Methods

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Blog commenting is a great link building method and can give you a lot of links and targeted human traffic if your comments are valuable and informative. One of the ways to build links by leaving good comments is helping people who are seeking for a solution.

In the articles people often describe how to solve certain problems. The readers can ask for help in the comments. If you are good at the specific area, here is a good opportunity for you to make a show of your wit in the comment and get a link back to your website. By helping others not only obtain you one more link, you also establish yourself as an expert in your market niche. If you provide a viable solution in the comment, more readers are likely to click on your link and come to your website.

It’s quite easy to search for blogs where people are asking for help using Fast Blog Finder Gold Edition. You just enter the words or phrases that people use when asking for a solution and run a search, for example:

"how to"
"problem"
"help"
"tutorial"
"how can I"
"solution"
"is there a fix"

To find the blogs relevant to your niche, add your keywords, for example:

"how to" +"keyword phrase"
"problem" +keyword

To search for the "help" words in the post title, add intitle: to your search query:

intitle:"how to" "keywords"
intitle:"how can I" "keywords"
intitle:"tutorial" "keywords"

You can even indicate the quantity of comments and search for the blog posts where a discussion is already open

intitle:"problem" +keyword +"1 comment"
"tutorial" +keyword +"2 comments"

Read the articles on found blogs and especially read comments posted by other readers. If the post deals with one side of the question, people may ask related questions in the comments. If you have something to add, enhance on the post subject, or write about the solution you found that is not addressed in the post. You can even reply to a particular commenter and there is a chance he or she will come to your website for more information.

Your success in link building depends on how your idea is different and worthwhile. Try to do something that others don’t think of. Good link building is a combination of research, creativity, and knowledge. It’s about helping other people, solving problems and thinking outside the box. None of automatic submission tools can post a comment which would provide help and solution to people when they are asking for assistance. And absolutely none of automatic black hat tools can write a comment better than a live person does it.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Blog Commenting Ideas: Think Outside of the Box

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When it comes to link building, not every link is counted as a vote for the website. Although the search engine is not a human, it uses the algorithm to discern good and bad backlinks. The search engine evaluates the websites links are coming from, anchor text, quantity of links appearing within a period of time and some other factors. If there is any doubt, the search engine can consider the links as spammy and lower the website in ranking.

So, whether you are just starting your link building campaign, or looking for new link building methods you’ve never used before, here is a good list of things Not To Do while optimizing your website:

Abusing Wikipedia

As you probably know Wikipedia has an enormous value for the users. This site provides accurate data based on facts and not on assumptions. Many Internet users search Wikipedia for quality articles and stories. That’s why Wikipedia ranks high in search engines. Some webmasters think about editing an article on Wikipedia related to their market niche hoping to obtain a backlink. Not a bad idea. However, to get accepted, your article must be well written, quality, open-minded and it must not contain any promotional or sales material. With all that said, if you are not very skilled in writing, consider changing your mind towards Wikipedia.

Abusing Video Sites

The websites sharing video files may be a good teaser for webmasters looking for backlinks. People come to such websites, watch the video they are interested in and share their thoughts in comments. But be careful. People hate when somebody chucks in their conversation with an off-topic comment. If you suggest a website that has nothing in common with the discussed video, you may hurt yourself. Potential website visitors may hate it in advance if they find it on most video sharing sites.

Spamming Forums and Blogs

Forums and blogs are being created to unify people interested in the same topic where they can chat, share their thoughts and opinions. Unfortunately, forum and blog spam is not uncommon now. If you run a forum or blog, you are likely to get so-called posts and comments that give nothing to the readers but are full of pure links. To protect against spam, bloggers often use anti-spam plug-ins such as Akismet which detects suspicious comments and moves them to the Spam folder on the blog. Using this method to build links you create a bad reputation to your website and company. In addition, because of several spam posts or comments you may end by being banned on the specific forum or blog and you may not be allowed to submit good comments or posts.

Adding Pending or Low Quality Sites to Web Directories

Submitting the website to the appropriate category in popular web directories is one of the common link building tactics. However, one of reasons the website is rejected from the directory is a poor, low quality website content. Do not submit carelessly done websites in the hope to get a link. Take time to develop a quality website thinking primarily about the end user and not about a search engine. After all, it’s not a search engine but human visitors who will browse the site, read the content, and click the links. Here you will find directory submission best practices

Spamming Other Webmasters

Contacting other websites owners for link exchange is not a bad idea. In fact, there is a good chance to get solid links this way if the link exchange is equivalent, the websites have a common theme and if you approach a website owner personally in a well written message. Sending an automatic email to random webmasters with irrelevant link exchange requests does no good for you or your website.

Creating Link Pages

Some time ago generic link pages were very popular. Those pages gave absolutely nothing to the users because they contained only pure links (often irrelevant) to other websites with no other content. The search engines consider link pages as an attempt to artificially build incoming links and increase the PageRank. So, if you were thinking about such a way of exchanging links, better forget it and consider placing links on web pages with content relevant to your niche.

The best results can be achieved with the links placed within the page content. Side-wide links and links placed in the page footer are not so valuable because they are mostly paid links. The search engines used to devalue a link if something would suggest that you have bought the link (the words like "advertisements", "sponsors", "supporters", etc. near your link). If you still decide to buy links, at least make sure you are not buying tons of links with the same anchor text. With all that said, I would recommend blog commenting, guest blogging and creation and submission of unique articles as good methods to get inbound links within the web page content.

Well, I described just a few shady link building methods that can hurt your website if they are not used properly. I just wanted you to know these tactics exist and might be used by your competitors. However, if you think they are ethically wrong, do not engage into such practices and focus on good link building methods that produce not quick but valuable long-term results.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Shady Link Building Methods You Should Avoid

Tags: Guest Blogging, Link Building, Link Building Tutorials, New Link Building Methods, seo backlinks

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Of course, a "DoFollow" backlink is a great reward for a valuable comment because it helps improve the search engine position. But the comment allows a reader have only one backlink and this link may have the commentator’s name or nickname as the anchor text that doesn’t mean much for search engines. 

So why not to reward the comment author with an extra link with more relevant keywords in the anchor text? This is an excellent way to promote the readers’ websites and this can be done automatically with the use of a particular plug-in!

I’m talking about CommentLuv. The CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will visit the RSS feed of the blog address the reader provided in the URL field, attempt to find the last post the reader made and display it under the comment giving the reader a great internal backlink to his/her website!

Example:

Now many WordPress blogs are applying the CommentLuv plugin. The bloggers understand that it gives the readers an extra incentive to leave a comment, encourages people to add to the conversation by giving something back right away.

For the reader commenting on a blog that uses the CommentLuv plugin is great for the following reasons:

• Second link to the website/blog. CommentLuv gives you an additional link, which is more advantageous than the link provided in the URL field because it has the post title as the anchor text. If you use your keywords in the post title, it will help you to rank well in the search engine results for those keywords.
• More traffic and readership. When people look through the comments, they can see the titles of other commenters’ latest posts. If the title looks interesting, there’s a good chance they will visit your site and read the post. Some of those readers can become your subscribers or buyers.
• Help with PageRank and search engine results ranking. If the blog using the CommentLuv plugin is a "DoFollow blog", the link to your last post provided by CommentLuv will also be "DoFollow". So, not only will it send the readers to your website or blog, it will also pass you some PageRank.

These advantages are really extra incentives to leave a comment, aren’t they?
 

How to search for blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin

 You may be wondering how to find relevant blogs with the CommentLuv plugin enabled on which to comment on. The answer is simple – use Fast Blog Finder or Google and type the search query like below replacing "your keywords" with your real keywords:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"your keywords"

By adding your keywords at the end of the search query, you will reduce the large quantity of blogs to blogs relevant to your niche. You can also use some of these search options to narrow and refine your search results.

For example, if I want to find the blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin and are relevant to the "Internet marketing" keywords, I type in the Blog Finder Gold Edition:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"Internet marketing"

By the time of writing this article I found 127 blogs with CommentLuv enabled for the "Internet marketing" keywords. 39 from these blogs were "DoFollow" and 74 "NoFollow".  

Well, I get at least 39 blogs where I can comment on. It’s assumed that my comments are not spam, so I can hope to get 78 "DoFollow" links to my blog (because one comment will have two links: one for the anchor text in the Name field and the second one – a deep link to the latest post on my blog)! And we all know how valuable "DoFollow" links are. Just a couple of them can considerably improve your website ranking in search engines.

Of course, I gave a single niche example but you got the idea. Now you can change your primary keywords to your secondary keyword set and find one more hundred or two of blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin and are worth to comment on.

Few tips from me:

• If you are going to comment on blogs with CommentLuv, make sure your blog posts have appealing titles including your target keywords. Not only will good titles attract the readers prompting them to click on your link, they will also help you rank well for your keywords.
• If you use Feedburner on your blog,  you’ll get a redirection link to your last post instead of the direct link to the article on your blog. You can read here how to disable the redirect.

Please, share your thoughts in comments.

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Tags: dofollow blogs, find dofollow blogs, Link Building, New Link Building Methods, seo backlinks

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And we all hate spam. The owners of "DoFollow" blogs observe an explosion of borderline spam comments and moderate like crazy!

You may think you did everything right. You typed your SEO terms into the "Name" field and wrote a comment. And since the blog is "DoFollow" why not add one more link in the signature to get more backlinks and clicks?

You think this is smart. However, you hurt yourself.

Don’t think the blogger is stupid when you leave a comment. If the blogger considers your comment as spam, you just wasted your time and you will not get backlinks with your keywords as the anchor text. At best, the blogger will simply delete or edit your comment. At worse, they will report you to Akismet. In either case you won’t get any link juice.

The thing to remember is that if you are reported often, you will have troubles with commenting on all blogs protected by Akismet or Spam Karma (most known anti-spam plugins for WordPress). Akismet or Spam Karma will reject you before the blogger sees your comment.

How does the plugin recognize spam comments? It analyzes the following things:

• Time between the page loading and comment submission. If the comment is posted immediately after the page is loaded, the plugin thinks this is an automated submission. It’s supposed that people will take time to read the post before submitting a comment.
• Occurrence of the "stop" words in the comment text and URLs (comments containing "blacklisted" words like "porno", "viagra", etc. are automatically marked as spam)
• Quantity of URLs in the comment text. More URLs, more risks to be flagged as spam.
• The size of URLs in the comment text is compared against the text size. If the whole URLs size is bigger than the size of the text, the comment will be marked as spam.
• "Spammy" IPs are filtered (if your comments are reported as spam many times, your IP will be blacklisted).
• The plugin looks at how old the post is and how much time passed since the latest comment on the post.

In addition, some blogs can have plugins that give a "DoFollow" link after you leave several comments on the blog. So, you should not count to get a "DoFollow" link on your first visit.

Things to Avoid When Leaving a Comment

I would suggest that you remember this rule – "Don’t be greedy". When you comment on a "DoFollow" blog for the first time, post a well thought comment with one link and your name as an anchor text. It’s like asking for a slice of pie. The blogger won’t begrudge you a slice but they won’t give you a whole pie!

Well, below is a list of common things you should avoid when leaving a comment on a "DoFollow" blog:

• Many irrelevant links in the comment text. Your comment will look spammy if you insert a lot of URLs that are not related to the post or to the comment text.
• Too short answer. Some bloggers may treat your short comment like "Thank you, great post", "Thank you, I agree", or something like this as spam even if you have the proper "Name" and don’t abuse the links. Of course, you can thank the post author for a great article if you liked it. But also, think about adding some information to this, maybe share your own experience, or add some more useful resources to make your comment more valuable.
• Duplicate signature at the bottom of the comment. As you already have your signature in the "Name" and "Url" fields, there is no need to repeat it in the comment text. The readers who will want to visit your website can click on your name.
• Large number of similar comments per day (if a search engine bot finds, for example, 100 comments with the same anchor text and comment text per day, it looks a bit unnatural and your links will be devalued).

There is one more important thing to think about: SEO term in the "Name" field. Some bloggers may allow the use of the keywords in the "Name" field, others may not. Before submitting a comment, take a look at other comments (if the post has any) to find out if the keywords are allowed in the "Name". If other people submitted the comments under their names or nicknames, you should do the same. Some bloggers can let you write something like "Julia — Directory Submission". But again, look and make sure other commenters did it.

With all that said, I would highly recommend that you avoid using automated comment submission tools. Yes, you are able to submit dozens or even hundreds of comments every day using an automated tool but will those links do any good for you? I bet no. You have no control over your comments. The program just fills in the form with your name, URL, email address and writes some text it thinks appropriate. The search engines are (or will be) smart enough to recognize automated submissions and devalue your links. A hundred of comments with the same URL and anchor text per day is the first "red flag" for the search engine saying that the comments were made automatically. In addition, the submission rules differ from blog to blog. What is OK for one blog may be considered as spam on another blog. You risk to be added to the "blacklist" and won’t be able to post comments anywhere. They will end up in the Akismet or Spam Karma spam folders.

In short, if you want to improve your search engine position, visit "DoFollow" blogs. Read the post, scan other comments to know what is allowed in the comments and only after that leave your well thought comment on the post. Quality over quantity - that is the rule to follow when building links from blog commenting.

Remember that there is no "easy button" to push. You can’t just set the things and sit patiently waiting they will work without you putting ANY effort! You will get outstanding results only if you are willing to take time to make them happen.

Please, share your thoughts in comments below.

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