SEO Smart Links Plugin

It has been a long time since I recommended a WordPress plugin, but here we go again. I started using this plugin on a niche site, and so far it seems to be helping a lot with the search engine optimization.

The plugin is called SEO Smart Links, and it basically allows you to specify keywords, and whenever those keywords appear on your posts or pages the plugin will automatically create a link to the post of your choice.

As you can see this can be useful both for your human visitors and for search bots, and your posts will be interlinked more efficiently. Here’s a screenshot of the options page:

Another use for the plugin is to insert affiliate links on your posts. You just need to select the keywords, and the plugin will automatically link them to your affiliate offers.

It’s quite a handy tool to have on any WordPress blog, so check it out.

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Using Linkbait to Gain Dozens of Targeted Links to Your Site

This is a guest post by Ryan. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Wouldn’t it be nice if dozens of bloggers in your niche gave you backlinks to a targeted post that could drive affiliate sales if you ranked well in Google? Well it is possible with a bit of creativity and by creating a linkbait post that boosts the egos of other bloggers in your niche.

I recently received dozens of backlinks and tweets on a post which was simply a list of personal finance books. The topic itself wasn’t anything special, but the way I created the post was beneficial because it drove enough attention that it now ranks on the first page of Google for my desired search term.

The idea is simple, poll the bloggers. I’ve seen it done before with several other blogs about blogging so I decided to try the same thing in the personal finance niche. Seeing as there are hundreds of blogs in my niche it wasn’t that hard to reach out to other blogs and ask them a quick question.

I created a list of about 100 personal finance bloggers and sent them all an email which said:

“Hi (bloggers name),

Ryan here from plantingdollars.com. I’m doing a post about the best personal finance books according to 100+ personal finance bloggers and I’m wondering if you could simply reply by telling me your favorite personal finance book. I’ll let you know when the post goes live and give you a backlink from it if you decide to participate.

Cheers,

Ryan

Granted I didn’t have a mailing list established beforehand so I literally emailed each one individually which took a good chunk of time, but following up was easy once the original email was set.

I waited about 2 weeks to see who responded. In total 38 bloggers did end up responding out of 100 which was more than I expected. I then created the post based on their responses and in the end gained an insightful post and a piece of linkbait simply by asking others questions.

After the post was written I also added affiliate links to amazon for each book that was mentioned and as promised gave each blogger a backlink to their site.

When the post went live I then emailed each one back with a personal message about their pick and let them know where the post was located so that they could easily link to it. This is what I sent the second time around:

Hey (bloggers name),

I Just wanted to send you a quick note to say thanks for taking the time to respond to my question about your favorite personal finance book. “Art of the Deal” was a book I also enjoyed quite a bit and was pretty inspiring.

I just posted the results from other bloggers here: (inserted link)

Hope you’re doing well and thanks again,

Ryan

In total I spent about five hours emailing the bloggers, compiling their answers, adding backlinks, and then following up with them, but the result was dozens of backlinks, and a post that ranks well for the term “best personal finance books” which should drive affiliate sales indefinitely.

I would consider the post a success considering it would take significantly longer to gain as many backlinks via guest posting. From this experience I hope to do a few more “poll the bloggers” type posts to gain a post that’s insightful for readers and provides a win win for backlinks for myself and the bloggers who participate.

Have you have any luck compiling information from other bloggers in your niche and turning it into a post?

About the author: Ryan is a personal finance blogger who writes about achieving financial freedom through smart money management at PlantingDollars.com.

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Consistency Is A Very Important SEO Factor

If you ask people what they think is necessary to get a website ranking high for a particular keyword, most of them will mention things like an optimized title tag, unique content, backlinks and so on.

While those factors are indeed important for SEO, they will produce very small results if you don’t combine them with consistency.

That is, you could launch a new website today with a lot of unique content and many backlinks, but unless you keep adding new content and getting new links consistently over time your website, would not rank high for any competitive keyword.

The opposite is also true. Even if you launch a website with little unique content and no backlinks, you can still get it ranking high for competitive keywords if you consistently keep adding new content and getting new backlinks.

Let me illustrate this point with some numbers. Suppose we launch two websites targeting the same keyword, website A and website B. On website A we publish 50 articles right away and manage to attract 500 backlinks on the first day thanks to a viral campaign on social media sites. On website B, on the other hand, we work our way up gradually, publishing one article every other day and getting 10 new backlinks per week. After 6 months I would be willing to bet that website B is ranking higher than website A, and that is because of the consistency factor.

In fact Google confirmed in the past that the pace at which a website publishes new content and gains new backlinks is indeed used inside its algorithm.

Whenever you plan an SEO campaign for one of your sites in the future, remember that slow and steady can win the race, even on the Internet!

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SEO Strategies For 2011 And Moving On From Algorithm Changes

This is a guest post by Abdul Karim. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I got a chance to attend the Affiliate Summit West 2011 in January got a chance to meet some heavyweights in the SEO world such as Todd Friesen of Performics, Greg Boser of Blueglass Interactive, Stephen Spencer of NetConcepts. I had a lot of takeaway information from the seminar, one of the most useful was the ask the seo pros talk panelled by the aforementioned gurus.

I’ve noticed a lot of talk in forums about many sites getting deranked or even completely removed from SERPS altogether. Let’s not forget the content farm debacle of late, and all the talk around that either. SEO has changed, and black hat methods are fast becoming redundant, and if you haven’t switched to more long term white hat means now is the time. Here are some great takeaway SEO tips I got from the summit.

1. Article Spinning

Article spinning is the act of rewriting articles by computing alternative words and sentence structures. Most spinning articles tend to read very poor, and thus end up on unmoderated low quality sites, and therefore the links tend to be low quality too. Additionally the poor return on investment on spending so much time spinning articles are better spend on high quality content that sticks around builds linkjuice over time, secondly if it works it still leaves room for your competitors to do a backlink analysis on your site and report you to Google.

The days of article spinning is numbered, it may work to an extent, however Google recently tightened the noose around content farms that accept low quality articles, which also means the linkjuice passed has reduced as well.

2. Scalable Whitehat Solutions

Focus on quality not quantity; guest posts on high quality blogs with high RSS readerships and daily visitors are valuable. Aside from creating high quality content, you should build relationships with other bloggers and influential social media players and leverage your contacts to get your content promoted across the social media networks.

There are many high PR homepages that do not treacle pagerank over to subpages, so much of the work lies in promoting the individual blog post, which can be speeded up with high quality content and good social media contacts.

Outsource

The most scalable method is to outsource article writing, you may need to split tasks up between researchers and writers to utilise people skillsets better, and focus your attention on building relationships with influential figures in the blogosphere.

Linkbait

Viral marketing is a fantastic way to organically build links, giveaways, personality tests, top 10 lists, articles, widgets can help massively a fantastic way is to place linkbait/viral content on your site or produce widgets that other bloggers can install on their site which link back to you. You simply write a few press releases about the linkbait content and place on high traffic blogs and websites, and let the linkbait content rise in popularity through social media.

Authority over low quality

The future lies in being the authority in your niche, not just another cookie cutter player in the field, aim to have the absolute best knowledge in your field, and as you do you will naturally get more organic links over time, rather than having to work hard to get people to link to you.

3. Backlink Anchor Spam

More and more websites are being penalised for unnaturally high anchor text backlinks. Most organic sites tend to have the url as the anchor for the vast majority of cases, but many manipulative seos focus solely on keyword rich anchor text which is unnaturally high.

Google has evolved away from relying on anchor text to index sites on appropriate keywords. While anchor text still counts for a lot, it’s important not to overdo it. It will look more closely into your page content, and the content of the linking page, if the two pages are semantically similar then google will classify the link appropriately regardless of the anchor in the link. A high authority, domain name anchored link is worth a lot more than a keyword rich low quality link.

Additionally on organic sites anchor text are more diverse, a page about cheap boots will get a variety of different keywords and synonyms, blackhatters tend to overkill it with the same anchor, to understand this Google search for ~cheap art, it will use lots of different synonyms for “cheap” in the search query such as affordable, budget, low cost etc. So a site aiming for just “cheap art” as an anchor may trigger a penalty because it appears unnatural for organic backlinks to use the exact same adjectives to describe a site, if you search ~cheap art, you will end up overwhelming with results of inexpensive art.

Exact match domains names are an anomaly, it seems because they can’t be penalised for having too many keyword rich anchors for the domains, because the keyword IS their brand name. However this may get rectified soon as there are many inferior exact match domain websites ranking up against high quality content websites.

Google now has much better insight onto real user behaviour from Google toolbar, and Google chrome. And can use these metrics to evaluate quality of sites and quality of links a lot better. And can use actual click through traffic data as a sign of quality, and nullify the effect of dormant black hat links that nobody ever clicks.

4. Link Networks

Sitewide links have a low tendency of being organic and more often than not paid links, in particular footer links across a large website. It doesn’t hurt to have them, however their worth is largely subsided, for cross linking related web properties it’s far better to have a dedicated links page with links and a brief description of the site.

Also with regard to paying money for insertion in link networks, what tends to happen is that certain link network owners will have the same clients, and therefore across multiple websites there is a correlation of the same recurring links of unrelated websites appearing across the network, which is easy to spot algorithmically and therefore easy to penalise/discount.

About the Author: Abdul Karim is the writer for OnlineBackupServices.co, where you can read up on latest news, press releases, guides and reviews of the best backup services.

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Why Companies Should Create a Business Blog

This is a guest post by Nick Stamoulis. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

A major component of SEO is content marketing: developing well-written, quality content and submitting it to content distribution sites for publication. It not only helps establish you or your company as an expert in your given industry, it also helps raise brand awareness and creates credible in-bound links to your website. But Google’s recent crackdown on “content farms”—websites that produce low quality, republished or spammy content—means that content marketing has taken a hit. Even major content distribution sites like EZineArticles and HubSpot were labeled as “content farms” and fell dramatically in their rankings.

Now, more than ever, companies should be creating, publishing and promoting a company blog. A company blog that produces quality content is less likely to get flagged as spam than an article that got submitted to a general distribution site. A company blog can also rank in the search engines and drive more targeted traffic to the main site.

Here are a few more reasons to create a company blog if you have yet to do so:

1. Blogs give you the opportunity to target specific keywords per post. This gives you the space to go after certain keywords more thoroughly if you feel like they are a little under-represented on your main site. It also allows you to target completely different (yet still related) keywords that you may have had to remove from your site entirely.

2. Company blogs allow you to give a personality and voice to your business and brand. They are a great way to communicate with consumers in a more informal setting and encourage consumer feedback and conversation.

3. Blogs are a great place to quickly post company news and updates. A structured press release can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get distributed and picked up by news channels. A blog post announces the news immediately.

4. A company blog can help establish your company as an industry expert. If you create your own content, as opposed to republishing work from other authors, you are directly contributing to your field and encourage consumer trust. Over time, your blog could be deemed a credible source of information for anyone looking for information about your industry. This builds reputation and brings a level of prestige to the company.

5. A company blog is also a good way to establish connections with other members of your industry. Invite them to write guest post posts or comment on yours. Do the same for them with their blog and help develop a meaningful relationship. These kinds of relationships can also help with link building, as a link exchange between two companies that work together is fairly common.

The key thing to remember about having a business blog is that you have to actually use it. If you are only going to be able to submit one post a month, it isn’t really worth doing. Aim for at least one post a week to keep the content fresh and relevant and your readers engaged.

About the Author: Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a full-service web marketing and Boston SEO company. He also publishers the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, so check his website to subscribe.

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Two Announcements from Google to Pay Attention

If you haven’t been following the tech news scene lately Google made two announcements that all bloggers and website owners should pay attention to.

The first one is called +1, and it’s basically a button you use to recommend stuff around the web. Google says that “the +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.”

The button appears both on pages inside websites as well as directly in the search results. Why you should pay attention to this? Because clicks on +1 buttons are going to start influencing search results, so might start playing a role in your search engine optimization. If you want to add it to your site here’s the page to get the code.

The second announcement is called Google+ (I know, they need to hire someone to come up with better names…). This one is Google’s attempt to start a real social network around its services and online properties. I recommend reading Search Engine Land’s coverage of the topic if you want to know more about it.

Here’s a quotation:

What about the product itself? Google dubs Google+ as a “project” rather than a product, stressing it’s part of making Google itself more social rather than being a standalone social network to take on Facebook.

“It’s ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better and ‘project’ because it’s an ongoing set of products,” said Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president who oversees Google’s social products.

I’ll keep you guys updated as I find more about those two new products/projects.

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