FocuSoft SEO Blog

Today I would like to talk about an easy way to get high traffic links to your site for free. This method is really simple and only requires a little of your time to see results. I have personally used this method to generate 260+ links and 392+ unique visits to my site in under a month. It also produced top ten rankings in Google, yahoo and AltaVista without even submitting my site to them! Sound exciting? Let’s get started.

What you will need:

You will need the Google traffic ebook to find the page rank of any given page. You can download it for free from HERE.

Once you have the toolbar installed, you are now ready to start your quest for high powered links. Think of your target market and go to http://www.google.com. If you own a site about dog training, do a search on dog training and look at the results that come up. Now, click on the sites that are relevant to what your site is about. Look at the Google toolbar at the top of your web browser; do you see the page rank display? If not, click on options and put a checkmark in display Google page rank. This will allow you to see the rank of the current page simply put your mouse cursor over the green bar under page rank in your toolbar.

Look at the number that is displayed, this will be anywhere from 0-10 the higher the number, the more traffic that site is getting. Ok, so you found a site with a good page rank, 4 or higher is, in my opinion, a good ranking. Now, look at the links on the page, do you see anything on the page that says links, resources, directory or anything similar? If so, this is where you can add your website link and description of your page. Some webmasters will ask you to put a link on your website in return for the one they place on their site. This is very easy to do. Simply create a page on your site called links, or resources, or whatever you think would be relevant to your site.

Most website owners will have specific instructions on what they would like you to place on your site. just follow these and it will work out fine. You will want to make the description of your site as attractive as possible to entice people to click on your link. If the site receives a lot of traffic, it is likely a lot of people will click on your link and check out your page. There you have it, FREE traffic.

Do this every day, and if you get only one link a day that’s 30 links a month pointing to your site! This will produce good targeted traffic and get you listed in the search engines quickly and it won’t cost you a dime.

Websites are quickly becoming one of the most popular ways of advertising. Whether it be a business, its product or service or something completely different, everyone of all ages are turning to the web as a method of getting their message out there. With the popularity of this marketing medium increasing and the number of websites always growing, it is obvious that everyone wants to appear at the top of Google’s search engine rankings. Achieving such a task is never an easy feat, however with a bit of perseverance, one can definitely increase their chances of reaching that glorious first page result.

Given that there are a heap of websites out there who are on the first page, what is their secret? It is a little industry term called “SEO” and it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO basically consists of the customisation of your website, its content and its internal and external links to assist in the overall indexing and ranking of your website in popular search engines. There are many contributing factors that are used in determining a website’s ranking and every search engine is different. This makes trying to optimise your site for Google, Yahoo, Live and the many others quite a pain staking task.

As most of us are aware, Google is currently the most popular search engine for the majority of Internet users. As such, it is only normal that we’d want to focus our sights on achieving a higher ranking within Google first with a hope that the rest will follow. To do this, we must start a journey that could potentially take months before we start seeing any real change, however we have to start somewhere.

Our journey begins by defining some of the key contributing factors that Google uses to determine a website and webpage’s ranking within its results. These factors range from keyword use to manipulating internal and external links and the list goes on. To get you started, we have listed the top twenty factors that you should focus on in order to help get your website that little bit closer to the top of the search engine results listing.

Keyword Use Factors
The following components relate to the use of the user’s search query terms in determining the rank of a particular page.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag – Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.
2. Keyword Use in Body Text – Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.
3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords – Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.
4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag – Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase
5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL – Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com plus target terms in the webpage URL, i.e. seomoz.org/keyword-phrase.

Page Attributes
The following elements comprise how the Google interprets specific data about a webpage independent of keywords.

1. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page.
2. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages – Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
3. Age of Document – Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant.
4. Amount of Indexable Text Content - Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page.
5. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) – Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.

Site/Domain Attributes
The factors below contribute to Google’s rankings based on the site/domain on which a page resides.

1. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity).
2. Age of Site – Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership).
3. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site – The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword.
4. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
5. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site – The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.

Inbound Link Attribute
These pieces affect Google’s weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page and ultimately will assist in the ranking of that page.

1. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.
2. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.
3. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.
4. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
5. Age of Link.

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes
There are also some points we should make before you start getting your hands dirty. With any type of SEO marketing, there are some things that can actually have a negative impact on your ranking. These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or its rankings at Google.

* Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
* Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
* External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
* Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
* Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

It’s now time to get busy! Start prioritising your tasks, modifying your content and building your internal and external links to meet some of the above guidelines. Keep in mind that improving indexing is mostly a technical task, improving ranking is mostly a business/marketing strategy, what might work now may not work in the future and finally, it takes time. Loads of time. Still, with a bit of trial and error and a good dose of persistence, you can achieve the search engine ranking you’re after.

The difference between search engine optimization(seo) and search engine marketing(sem) is money. Optimization is the art of getting ranked high in the organic(free) listings of a major search engine for the keywords for want. This provides free very targeted traffic to your website. Search engine marketing is paying not placements in a major search engine.

Search engine optimization can be broken down into 2 pieces building quality content for the keywords you are targeting and getting quality, related websites to link to that content. This article is focused on getting quality, related websites to link to your website. After all, you can have all of the quality content on a subject you want, but if no one links to it it will not rank well in a search engine. Getting ranked high for certain keywords in your industry, will bring you continual targeted traffic. This is a vital part of an overall marketing approach for any internet business. This effects the bottom line directly because it reduces the spending you need to do to get traffic.

Posting in forums is arguably the best way to pay for your hosting (you post, host gets money form forums ads), just make sure that you don’t need to post everyday only to maintain your account. Subsidy from paid accounts might be cool, but you need to be aware of constant attempt for conversion from free to paid account.

Posting in forums isn’t only helpful in generating traffic through links, it’s a two way street, whereby you get to meet and hopefully help readers resolve their unresolved issues. If you cannot resolve the issue first hand, you can steer them in the right direction by sharing links to sites that have helped you in the past.

Joining online communities and posting in forums is a great way for you to start networking and talking about your business without the pressure of in-person networking. Forums give you the chance to prove yourself as a knowledgeable person in your field, and as a respected member of the community. Additionally, the high traffic nature of forums make them natural candidates for frequent Googlebot visits, which boosts the PageRank of your site as well as provides some indirect marketing for you.

Now let’s talk about online discussion forums. Not only is the traffic targeted, but if you take the time to analyze your site statistics, you will find that this type of traffic will spend longer on your webpages than other types of traffic.

A name that goes unmatched when it comes to service, depth of knowledge and of course help. You will often notice for yourself that the best forums are really those where the members are passionate about the subject the forum deals with, are successful themselves or at least very enthusiastic about what they do and there is this inherent energy about seeing everyone out there reach the pinnacle of success.

Another way is to provide higher search engine rankings and higher adsense revenue is by forum posting. This technique is most profitable for ranking high in Google. It is a good idea to link many other sites that are related to your subject as you can. You will find that some websites have achieved their top rankings with the help of links from forums and messageboards. So the idea is to find some high quality forums or message boards related to your industry and try to keep posting there. So whenever you post in forums you can post your links in the signature which can help your website to top rank in the search engines.

Social Bookmarking is the habit or practice of saving bookmarks to a web site and “tagging” .Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links.

But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

Social bookmarking is a web 2.0 phenomenon that allows users to create and share “bookmarks”. It is the equivalent of adding a website to your list of favorites, but you can use this set of bookmarks on any computer by logging into your account. The reason why it is called “social bookmarking” is because the users that create the bookmarks can also look at related pages created by other people.

Social bookmarking sites are search engine friendly and within seven days of submission, links start to appear in all major search engines. If you are serious about your sites Link Building, Ranking and Traffic Social Bookmarking is a must.

IBM’s Dogear provides an excellent example of an enterprise social bookmarking tool in action. The developers from IBM Research, David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, optimized Dogear for intranet use, resulting in tagging capability combined with authentication of the tagger. You can tag intranet as well as internet material, and your corporate-directory presence can have your tags (as can your blogs).

You can see others within your firm with the same bookmarks as well as the bookmarks of individuals. IBM added collaborative filtering to infer stuff that people might want from their tagging activity and let them know about it. IBM has also integrated its enterprise social bookmarking system with its corporate search engines, giving the user access to the benefits of both.

So, the question,? Should you pay any attention to social bookmarking?? And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web crawlers as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more votes you get.

So, visit some of the social bookmarking sites on the Internet. Learn how they work. And set up your own account. Then, create your own list of links that includes your web sites, as well as other web sites that users might find relevant or useful.

On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.

Social bookmarking sites are looking for extraordinary content, not just run of the mill stuff. It doesn’t matter how great of a writer you are, every single thing that ends up on your blog or your web page is not “vote-worthy”. Social bookmarking has become so competitive that people are asking for votes for every single thing that they put up on the Internet, which entirely defeats the purpose of the entire social bookmarking industry.

With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people tend to find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders.

Social bookmarking leverages the popular social software phenomenon of tagging. Users can apply tags, or keywords, to the bookmarks they save. In social bookmarking, tagging creates a grass-roots taxonomy for the shared bookmarks. Users can search by tags to find bookmarks relevant to their interests. Taxonomies created through bookmarking are called “folksonomies.”

Social Bookmarking websites are basically sites that categorize and store ‘bookmark links’ (links which take one to a specific website). Millions of visitors flood these Social Bookmarking sites to search for information.

The implications of social bookmarking are many, and some are not so obvious. Marketers can use social bookmarking sites to collect all kinds of demographic information from a users personal bookmarks, then personalize that user’s advertising experience (one can only imagine the companies advertising to those who have bookmarked the vanishing point site referenced above).

The result would be a much more effective advertising campaign by the vendor than the current scattershot methods, and those social bookmarking sites could in turn charge much more for their advertising space. An interesting proposition if you’re a company looking to target a niche audience.

But could social bookmarking work within the walls of an enterprise? Could a company offer social bookmarking as a reference tool on its intranet, allowing developers, sales executives, janitors, and engineers alike to create their own (or department) repositories for information relevant to their jobs? This could mean the end of the reference manual, as well as the three-hour meeting in which two of those hours are spent reviewing a projects progress. Make the project notes and reference manuals available as bookmarks on the intranet, and that meeting time and brainpower could be put to better use.

An authority blog or an authority site is one of the main places people go to for information on a particular niche or topic. If you are looking to dominate your topic, then becoming an authority in your niche is what you want to do. Let’s take a look into the inner workings of these types of blogs.

What Makes an Authority Site?

One of the main characteristics of an authority site is it has more content or pages than any other site in that niche. The search engines love content, so if we give them more content to crawl all over, then they will look more favorably on your blog. Lots of content that has good formatting with proper headings and html tags are an important for the search engines to crawl successfully over your content.

The real secret behind ranking well and becoming an authority in your niche is backlinks. When search engines see one site linking to another they look at this as a vote for the site. Each “vote” is not weighted equally however, because the more links the first site has going to it, the more that site’s vote will count.

How Do You Establish Your Site as an Authority?

One of the easiest ways to begin this is to add more content. The more useful information you can provide to your readers, the more people will naturally link to your posts. If you continuously think of your readers first and search engines second, you will dominate the rankings.

Do some homework and find out what your competitors are talking about. This is a common practice, but the key to doing this well is presenting the information in a new way or perhaps going further in depth. It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel, just repackage it or make it better.

Now that you know the topics you need to cover, it’s time to create more pages. If you are like most people, then patience is not a strong virtue of yours. You do have other alternatives such as giving the task to someone else or you can hire someone to do it.

How Can My Content Make Me an Authority?

When you write, be mindful of the posts you have already written, and link to helpful posts. This will point your readers further into your site, and the search engines love a site that links to itself. Writing a series of posts on a particular subject will keep your readers engaged and will give you great credibility with the search engines.

When writing your new posts, remember to link out to others in your niche. Not only will they possibly link back to you (giving you that extra vote), but it will also once again point your readers to useful content. It may seem ridiculous to link to your competitors; however the search engines will put more weight on a vote from a page that is related to your page. This is also a great way to build a relationship with your fellow bloggers.

Becoming an authority blog or site takes some time and forethought. With some calculated steps, such as the ones I’ve outlined, you will one day become an authority site. Remember the cliche is true “Content is King”. If you want to be #1, then you have to earn it with top of the line content.