Link Building : Help Your Employee Grow

Find something that will make the job more interesting and help your employee grow. Set aside a certain amount of time each week, even if just an hour, for this project. Here are some examples.

Flextime

Is your link marketer creative? Remember all those link building ideas that were suggested you didn't think would work?

Allow your person to spend a certain amount of time each week to try some out. Many may not work out well -- yet other successful ideas may arise from those.

As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."


Networking Events

Have a person that enjoys socializing? Send them to networking events to meet business people, and to obtain some great links at the same time. These are the type of links that would be hard to get via e-mail or a phone call.

Take them to industry conferences, chamber of commerce events, or any local business networking event. The ROI from links more than justify the cost. Just ask the sites with top three results in competitive fields.

A couple weeks after the conference have them contact their new colleagues. That's when the actual link development begins.

Some might be reluctant to send their main link person to these events for fear of them being recruited by another company. Trust me, if they wanted a new job there's no shortage in the link field! Instead keep them happy, and motivated to stay with you.

Study Traditional Marketing

Everyone is looking for that sexy, clever new idea to astonish the world. The truth is most traditional marketing tactics can be applied to link marketing.

If your link person is really into marketing, this is a great strategy. Have your link marketer study more traditional marketing techniques, then figure out ways to apply it to links.

On a tight budget? Have them study guerrilla marketing strategies. That's always a good way to reduce costs.

Their Personal Interest

Another way is to allow them to study successful sites in a field they like. Since they're already interested in the topic they know the sites. They also know the industries well.

Have them study how those sites obtained their links, then figure out a way to apply it to your site. The results will surprise you.

More

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Why Your Blog Isn’t Getting Any Readers

Boring posts

Going through a boring blog is like reading a comic book or a novel with a dragging plot. Uninteresting or poorly-written articles may be the main reason why people don’t take a second look at your blog. When posts become dull and predictable, your readers lose their urge to return to your site.


Outdated blog posts

Blogs can be considered as magazines, too. A blog’s content should be fresh and regularly updated, to keep the readers’ interests and attention. Many Web users visit blogs because they want to know about and learn new things.

Untidy website

Fill your site with useless ads and disorganized content, and people will surely avoid visiting your blog in the future. People put a lot of importance on the visual appeal and design of the websites they visit often, because these factors also affect a website’s functionality. Cluttered websites tend to repel, instead of attract, site visitors.

Disabled comments

Many people choose to communicate with blog authors by posting comments on blog entries. When the blog’s ‘Comments’ feature is disabled, you’ll lose the opportunity to gain site traffic and potential links that can enhance your website’s SEO campaigns. Blog commenting is one way of expanding your network, because readers, bloggers especially, want to interact and share their ideas with you.

Posting unrealistic content

Many blogs out there are obviously unrealistic and dishonest. Don’t post about your supposed encounters with famous personalities or celebrities just to boost site traffic. Lying would definitely spell doom for your blog’s existence.

Not responding to e-mails or comments

Many bloggers tend to leave their e-mail accounts unchecked, because they focus more on their blog posts. You should remember that not all readers direct their queries on your blog; some prefer to do it by email due to issues of privacy. Whether it’s through email or direct blog commenting, take the time to answer your reader’s questions.

Having a profit-centered blog
Majority of bloggers on the World Wide Web consider their blogs as extensions of their business websites. There is nothing wrong about that. However, business bloggers should remember not to focus solely on profit. Do not over-promote your products and services, because it will only annoy your readers. They visit your blog to learn about you and your services, but not to buy all your products.

More: SEO Updates

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SEO Factors For Improve Search Engine Results

One clear lesson emerges from this list, which has been compiled by people from all over the world in a variety of fields, not just SEO. The lesson is this: If your SEO people aren't talking to your coders or your writers (or better still, supervising them), you're in trouble.


Factors that improve search engine results:

Code

1) Search terms in the "TITLE" tag
2) Search terms in "B" or "STRONG"
3) Search term in anchor text in links to a page
4) Search term in image names
5) Search term in image ALTs
6) Search terms the first or last words of the Title Tag
7) Search terms in the page name URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/folder/searchterm.html)
8) Use of hyphen ("-") or underscore ("_") in search terms in URL (for example, search-term.htm is better than searchterm.htm)
9) Search terms in the page folder URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/search-term/page.html)
10) Search terms in the first or last words in the H1 Tag
11) Search terms in other "H" tags
12) Search terms in the page's query parameters (e.g. acme.co.uk/page.html?searchterm)
13) Search terms (and location) in the meta-description tag
14) XML sitemap
15) XML sitemap under 10k
16) Accuracy of XML sitemap
17) Sitemap folder geo-targeting
18) Index/follow meta tags
19) Robots.txt present
20) URL length
21) Title attribute of link
22) W3C-compliant html coding
23) Video header and descriptions
24) Video sitemap
25) Compression for size by eliminating white space, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate. GZIP can be used
26) Use CSS sprites to help consolidate decorative images
27) No redirection to other URLS in the same server
28) "NOSCRIPT" tags (even though I don't know anyone who doesn't have JavaScript enabled)
29) Geo-meta tags if the business serves a targeted geographic area
30) Relevance of "TITLE" tag to page content
31) Relevance of "META DESCRIPTION" to page content
32) Code-to-text ratio
33) Canonical URL
34) Directory depth
35) Number of query-string parameters
36) Link attributes -- like rel=nofollow
37) Link structure
38) Microformats
39) Mobile accessibility
40) Page size
41) Page accessible
42) Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has)
43) ALT Image Meta Tags (this can be helpful for FLASH elements too)
44) Age of prominent / 2nd level pages

Copy

45) The most important rule of all: plain old simple quality relevant content
46) Keyword density
47) Keyword proximity -- number of words between search terms (less is better)
48) Keyword positions in page
49) Keyword prominence (start/end of paragraphs or sentences)
50) Words in page
51) Page category (or theme)
52) Relevance (to searched phrase)
53) Synonyms to query terms
54) Language
55) Linear distribution of search terms
56) Legality of content
57) Frequency of updates
58) Standard deviation of search terms in the population of pages containing search terms
59) Semantic relevance (synonym for matching term)
60) Rich snippets
61) Rich snippet UGC rating
62) Search term density through body copy (about 3-5 percent)
63) Search terms in internal link anchor text on the page
64) Search terms in external link anchor text on the page
65) Search terms in the first 50-100 words in HTML on the page

Site

66) Length of contract for ownership of domain name
67) Domain registration information hidden/anonymous
68) Site top-level domain (geographical focus, e.g. .com versus co.uk)
69) Site top-level domain (.com versus .info)
70) Sub domain or root domain?
71) Domain past records (how often it changed IP)
72) Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
73) Domain IP
74) Domain external mentions (non-linked)
75) Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools
76) Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools
77) Domain presence in Google News
78) Domain presence in Google Blog Search
79) Use of the domain in Google Analytics
80) Server geographical location
81) Server reliability/uptime
82) PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank)
83) The PageRank of the entire domain
84) The speed of the website
85) Reputable hosting company
86) Geo-located results
87) Search terms in the root domain name (searchterm.com)
88) An active Adsense campaign
89) Domain age (older is better)
90) The number of pages on the topic related to the search term
91) Wikipedia listing?
92) Listed in DMOZ?
93) Number of pages within site (more is better)
94) Website size (bigger is better)

Links

95) Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site)
96) Quality of link partners
97) Diversity of link partners
98) Links from good directories
99) Rate of new inbound links to your site
100) Relevance of inbound links -- subject-specific relationship with target page
101) Placement of back-links in page
102) Quantity of back-links
103) Quantity of linking root domains
104) Quality of linking root domains
105) Link distance from higher authority sites
106) Outgoing followed links from back-linked pages
107) Domain classification of linking domains
108) Outbound links with keywords
109) PageRank of outbound link targets

Behavior

110) SERP click-through rate. If your website is ranked No. 1 for "bike shoes" but 90 percent of the traffic goes to the website ranked No. 2, Google will notice and make an adjustment
111) Search trend data
112) Social graph fans (they like/follow you)
113) Social graph fans earned impressions (they talk about you)
114) Social graph fans earned impressions with links (talk about and cite your content)
115) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions
116) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions (retweets, likes of friends)
117) Other citations (social media linking)
118) Visits (personalization)
119) Visits (scraped from Alexa)
120) Number of SERP click-throughs
121) Visitors' demographics
122) Visitors' browsing habits (what other sites they tend to visit)
123) Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spikes in incoming traffic)
124) User experience -- "human raters" -- a large number (thousands) of Google employees are there solely to check and manually tweak search results.

Rules for beating Google

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3 Funny SEO Quizzes

There are quite a few in-depth SEO quizzes to test your knowledge (I for one never had the time and patience to take any), but this post focuses on funny SEO quizzes only – can you link to more?

1. Which Stage of SEO Career Are You at?

This quiz was created by yours truly using ProProfs quiz builder. It was fun to create as I loved picking LOL cats for each answer (if you take it, hopefully, you’ll appreciate the humor

If you have an idea of another fun quiz, please shout – I am always happy

2. SEO Cartoon Quiz

This one is rather an association game which is quite funny. I haven’t seen to get the attention it is worth, so I am happy to mention it here.

Currently the quiz consists of 15 cartoons, most of which only an SEO will understand – gotta try it out!

3. SEO quiz – Just the Essentials

This one is a bit outdated as it was created soon after SEOmoz’s SEO quiz was publicized back in 2007 but it can still be a perfect example of timely and funny linkbait.

The quiz is the parody and, unlike the one from SEOmoz, it won’t take you “25-30″ minutes – you will only need a couple of seconds to pass it. Enjoy!

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Super Solutions For The Robots.txt

Use robots.txt can prevent effective inbound link

The only thing about using robots.txt to block indexing of search engines is not only that is quite inefficient, but may also reduce the flow of inbound links. Locking a page using robots.txt, search engines are not indexing the content (or links!) Page. This means that if you have inbound links to the page, the link juice can not flow to other pages. It creates an impasse.


While inbound links to the blocked page is probably some benefit to the general area, this value inbound links are not used to their full potential. You missed an opportunity to convey a certain value link internal page blocked in several important internal pages.

3 Big Sites with Blocked Opportunity in the Robots.txt File

*1 - Digg.com

*2 - Blogger.com or Blogspot.com

*3 - IBM

Super Solutions to the Robots.txt

Great site, for example above, we have covered the wrong robots.txt file. Some of the scenarios were not included. The following is a list of effective solutions to maintain the contents index of search engines with no link juice to lose.

Noindex

In most cases the best alternative to robots.txt robots exclusion meta tags. By adding "noindex" and make sure it does not add 'nofollow' your pages will remain in the results of search engines, but will link value.
301 Redirect

The robots.txt file is not a place to list the old worn pages. If the page has expired (delete, move, etc) is not only the block. Redirect this page through a 301 to replace the most relevant. Get more information about redirecting the Knowledge Centre.

Canonical Tag

Do not block your overlap since the versions in robots.txt. Using the tag canon to keep the additional versions of the index, and consolidate the link value. Where possible. Get more information at the Information Centre on canonization and use the rel = tag canon.

Password Protection

The robots.txt is not an effective way to keep the information confidential at the hands of others. If you have confidential information on the Internet, password protect. If you have a login screen, go ahead and add meta tag "noindex" page. If you expect a lot of incoming links on this page for users, be sure to link to some of the most important pages of internal login page. This way, you pass through the link juice.

Effective Robots.txt Usage

The best way to use a robots.txt file does not use it at all. Use it to report that robots will have full access to all files on the site and to control a robot in the sitemap.xml file. That's it.

Your robots.txt file should look like this:

-----------------

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

-----------------

Bad Bots

"Robots and instructions for the robots.txt file," which means that there are robots that do not follow the robots.txt at all. So when you do a good job of keep away with a good, you are doing a horrible job to keep away from "bad" against. In addition to filtering to allow access only to the Google bot Bing is not recommended for three reasons:

1. The engines change/update bot names frequently.
2. Engines employ multiple types of bots for different types of content.
3. New engines/content discovery technologies getting off the ground stand even less of a chance with institutionalized preferences for existing user agents only and search competition is good for the industry.

Competitors

If your competitors are warned SEO in any way whatsoever, they look at your robots.txt file to see what they can discover. Say you are working on a new design or an entirely new product and you have a line in your robots.txt file that disallows bots "index" it. If a competitor appears, check the file and see this folder called "/ newproducttest" when they just won the jackpot! Better to keep it on a staging server, or behind a login. Do not give all your secrets in a small file.

Handling Non-HTML & System Content

* It isn't necessary to block .js and .css files in your robots.txt. The search engines won't index them, but sometimes they like the ability to analyze them so it is good to keep access open.

* To restrict robot access to non-HTML documents like PDF files, you can use the x-robots tag in the HTTP Header.

* Images! Every website has background images or images used for styling that you don't want to have indexed. Make sure these images are displayed through the CSS and not using the tag as much as possible. This will keep them from being indexed, rather than having to disallow the "/style/images" folder from the robots.txt.

* A good way to determine whether the search engines are even trying to access your non-HTML files is to check your log files for bot activity.

Robots.txt High Impact Solutions

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) For Multilingual Sites

Factors To Consider

The Internet has really opened doors to international trade, enabling us to reach a global audience like never before. English is often cited as the language on the Internet. But consider this: 75% of the world population does not speak English.

Multilingual approach is essential if the company provides services to international customers and consumers. But it is equally important to optimize your site so that search engine. The following is a list of things to consider if you have translated, or if you want to translate your site.

Countries where English is the official or primary language:

Country Specific Domains

Country specific domains, and any help www.mywebsite.co.uk www.mywebsite.fr improve your ranking in local search. The disadvantages are that they are expensive and difficult and tedious to maintain. Go to specific areas, if resources permit.

Subdomains & Subfolders

Only one domain name. You can invest in this multi-lingual content. So, for example www.mywebsite.com / FR for French and www.mywebsite.com content / en content in English, etc. The advantages are that it is much easier and cheaper to manage than country-specific domains and can create the impression that the goods or services are far reaching, and therefore successful.

Keywords

Does not directly translate keywords. Users in different locations can write different things when looking the same products / services.

Key tip: carry out local keyword research!

One Page, One Language

Do not put two different languages in parallel on the same page. This confuses the search engines that will not go down well. It may also confuse the readers.

Automated Machine Translations

Translation of an automated machine offers an inexpensive way to build multilingual websites. However, beware: Because of its poor quality, Google can see the machine translated content as spam and may penalize the ranking of the website. If you use machine translations which provide the relevant pages are not indexed by search engines.


SEO for Multilingual Sites

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Joomla being SEO Friendly

Joomla is an excellent CMS, but when it comes to search engine optimization, you need some time to tweak it the way it needs to be. I have spent lots of time doing it and would like to save your time. So I compiled a little tutorial for Joomla SEO

How to make Joomla truly SE friendly?

This is not an exact tutorial, so you are doing it at your own risk. I am just posting what has worked for me and what not.

1. Think about SEO from install on

Firstly you will need to install some extensions, to prepare Joomla to be serving URLs the right way. We will use SEF patch, openSEF and Joomap.
Important: Do it immediately after installing a fresh copy of Joomla.

2. Install Joomla SEF patch

This will patch Joomla core and enable you to add keywords and description in every menu and content item of your site. It will also make titles show the correct way. That’s what Google and other SE want! File is located in our Webmaster Center. Instructions and Homepage. (Takes you to Joomla At Work)

3. Install openSEF component and make it work

1. Enable it. Site > Configuration

 

 Go to SEO and Click Yes for Search Friendly URLs.

    2. Change .htaccess from integrated SEO to 3rd party SEO

    3. Install openSEF. Go to Installers > Components

Select your file from hard disk, Upload and Install.

For troubleshooting go to this forum.

4. Configure OpenSEF with these instructions.

OpenSEF will basically rewrite your internal Joomla like urls to external that are SE and User Friendly.
Here is a video how to configure openSEF.
IMPORTANT: Once you launch your site, DO NOT CHANGE your content item names and category names, because your URLs will also change. And this breaches Google’s guidelines and WILL, I repeat WILL hurt your rankings.

So make sure once you set your urls and content to leave it that way for good.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING: If you will be using components, check if there are OpenSEF extensions for these components. This will make these components SE friendly too. Check this great forum about this matter. I use Docman and it has been producing me lots of junk urls. Installed extension and now works GREAT!

5. Install Joomap

Joomap is a next step to Joomla SEO. It will create a sitemap for your site and a XML sitemap that will feed Google spider. It automatically creates XML file every time a new item is added.

1. Download it from our Webmaster Center .
2. Enable it by creating a menu item which points to this component.
3. Configure it by going to Components> Joomap

Configure which menus you want to include in the sitemap.

4. Configure the way it will display information; you can even exclude items or categories.
   
   

5. And the important thing: Submit your XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps. You will find your sitemap address in Back-end Administrator in Joomap settings. Once you enter it into Google, it will automatically pick up changes.

Be careful: set your live path in configuration.php in joomla with www before your domain. Also make it the same for Google Sitemaps. They have to be the same or Google will show errors in your sitemap.

6. Joomla Seo and Content:

Make sure to delete all unused content items and menu items by default Joomla installation. Clean it so you won’t have problems later.
Each URL needs to have proper Meta tags for Joomla seo (keywords, description), title and consistent use of H1 and keywords in text. Thanks to SEF patch, you can now manually configure each page Meta tags.

7. OpenSEF Friendly URL tweaking:

Once you click on all your links site wide, OpenSef will compile a list of Search Friendly URLs. Because of Joomla Nature - it produces several duplicate ids and id items, you will have to manually set only one URL to be used, and set others off. Don’t delete them, just turn all cases with the same external URLS off, just leave one to be used. I don’t know why, but sometimes it worked only if i selected case with id and itemed in the name of internal url, instead of those having only id in the name of internal URL.
Here is a video how to manage URLs with openSEF .

Conclusion

Joomla CAN is SEO friendly. That is what worked for me. If you have any suggestions or comments let me know.

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On Page SEO tips for SEO Beginners

Title -
Use your keywords in your title.

URL -
Use your keywords in your URL slug - shorter is better, hyphens not underscores.

Headline -
(h1) Use your capsule headers (h2) instead.

Natural repetition in body of content -
Repeat your keywords, but don't "stuff" them unnaturally.

ALT attribute -
ALT tag controlled via the caption segment of the image capsule.

File Name -
Changes file name upon upload.

Keyword Location -
Use your keyword within the first 100 words of your content also use in your custom summary.

Internal Links -
The amount of links to your content from within the site itself are valuable, using tag pages in order to get internal links will give you a boost on top of the powerful built in interlinking that HP already employs. This is essentially what a HP tag is, an inbound link from within the site that you can control. Also be sure to interlink your own content with anchored text link.

Italics/Bold -
They have a tiny SEO benefit - italics more than bold - and do not need to be used more than once!

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Joomla SEO Tips For Beginners

Joomla is not the default search engine. You need a little work on improving this. The most important thing is observed when starting work at the site of Joomla SEO is the address of each page. The URL of the page generated by Joomla is not search engines. Always search parameters that do not provide lots of information for search engines to index and classify these pages correctly. By optimizing the page for search engines, one of the things you should pay much more attention is the URL of the page you want to optimize. It should be informative and well filled significant extension of keywords, and preferably. "HTML."

Use the first search engine friendly URLs, you can make your Joomla site web search engine friendly, you have several options. The first is to use standard Joomla SEF plugin. By default, this plugin is not enabled, then you must go to your global configuration page and activate it.

Arts catch the titles of pages for each page of your site more often I see sites in the default Joomla header that says "Start." This is the title of the homepage. Most beginners do not see and how to change the title a bit 'dark to begin with. As you know, the page title is one of the main reasons for the search engines view sites site ranking. So you must give place to place significant main keywords in it. If you want to change the title as follows:

a. Menu Manager and select the main menu.
B. a menu list, open it says "home"
C. Now, on the right side of the screen a number of parameters can be changed. Open "Parameters (System) field and change the cover, which tells the page and save desired.

Define the metadata for each page on your site meta-data can not be so precious in the eyes of search engines were used in a few years ago, but still works well for optimization. When the meta-data optimized website. You should place greater emphasis on description rather than keywords. Write a good description of your side, preferably to 160 characters. This description is what you will see the results of a search engine with the title of the page. And therefore it's very useful for connecting the results page stands out. Of course, if the search engines you can not find an adequate description meta tags, which try to extract the body text of the article page and use it as a description of the results page of search engines. But you have to decide to put in place, use the advantage of attracting more visitors from search engines.

The biggest problem I think many of Joomla powered using more meta description and keywords of each page of your site. This is wrong! It should provide a description and keywords of each page of your site. You can still use the global configuration defines the metadata for the entire site, but you must add metadata Each element adds to the main section of the page. You can add metadata to the article you wrote, looking at the right side of the article [edit] page to find sites that offer data and metadata.

Using page 404 pages most often you see a Joomla site with the standard 404-page with little information about the error and a link to the site. You must submit a 404-page, or by some sort of plugin or a manual configuration. Include useful resources on this page to the user's location to your website. Or include a search form that can be used by the user on the right track. You can also use phrases users search on the previous page and produce a page of search results as you. The point here is to prevent users from being frustrated by the average error page.

Insert H1 Tags in Joomla is a good idea to use H1 tags to your contractor under the article. Is of some importance to students to convince search engines that the page is currently in the keyword that you quote the title page. I know the pages that do well, no H1 tag, but who cares if you can get a little help from your SEO work for nothing or almost nothing. Go ahead and H1 tags for the title of your items.

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