I really wanted to keep this one short, but backlinking is such a complex topic. I touch on dofollow and nofollow below and will endeavor to explain further in later posts…

Within the SEO field, there are three main reasons why we create backlinks – traffic, recognition and authority. Traffic is generated when someone follows the link to your site. Recognition tells Google your site exists or has undergone a change. It is created through high quantity, low quality backlinks (quantity vs quality). Authority tells Google you know what you are talking about and thus helps with your rankings. Authority links are achieved through high quality backlinks from high PR, .edu or .gov sites (quality over quantity). Both are valid SEO techniques. With a healthy mix of the two, you can ensure that your posts are quickly indexed by Google and that they index well for your given keywords.

Quantity backlinks include:

• Free directories – there are literally thousands of free RSS, article and post directories.
• Social bookmarks – like Digg, Propeller or Reddit.
• Commenting – gaining links by commenting on other similar blogs is common practice.
• Free blog sites – such as Squidoo, Hubpages or Blogger. Note that with a lot of work, these links may be promoted to quality links.

Quality backlinks include:

• High PR directories – often these types of directories cost money or have long wait times.
• Articles
• .edu and .gov sites – dofollow links of this type are difficult to obtain.
• Links from high PR and relevant blogs.

It is also worth noting that low quality backlinks also count towards authority. For example, ten low quality links may be worth that of one high quality link. Also worth noting is the follow and nofollow link attributes. Links marked as follow will count towards authority and recognition. Links marked as nofollow will count toward recognition, but not authority. Many sites mark links as nofollow to stop people posting comments just for the purpose of backlinks. As the name implies, nofollow links tell the search engine bots not to follow the link to the destination. It has however been proved that many bots do in fact follow nofollow links.

So to summarize, quantity links are fairly easy to obtain. Software such as Social Bookmarking Demon make this task even easier. Quality backlinks on the other hand are like gold and can only be achieved through hard word, great content or money (eg by using services such LinkVana).

As a final note, I should mention that I offer a free service to anyone who wishes to add a one-way backlink from my site to yours. See Call for SEO Related Articles for more information.

Forget creating a throw away WEB2.0 site to help drive traffic or increase page rank. I am extending a unique free opportunity to all who wish to advertise on my site…

I will happily publish and appropriately accredit articles written by any author as long as they meet the following requirements:

• The article must be in good taste and contain useful information. To this end, I will vet all articles and only post those that I think will offer value to my readers.
• All articles must be on-topic. The main theme of this blog is SEO marketing, SEO tools, common or new SEO techniques and general website creation techniques and tips.
• All articles must be original.
• The article should be at least 200 words, however shorter articles may be accepted.
• Articles may include as many links to your site as you like, however the links must be relevant and appropriate.
• The article may include a header or footer containing your site’s ad copy, name, link or whatever else you like.

I believe this to be a great opportunity for both advertisers and readers alike. Within two months of the blogs creation, Google had accredited the site with an overall PR3, with some pages achieving PR5. Two months on, the number of quality backlinks has trebled, and as a result I believe the overall PR is now higher (although I will not know until Google releases the next PR update).

If interested, please post articles to imarket dot article at gmail dot com (replace dot with . and at with @)

Thank you,
Mark.

SEO is one of those games that you can spend a lot of time at for very little reward. It is all too common for new players to spend hundreds of hours promoting a website using backlink building techniques only to find that traffic does not equal conversion. Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure how well your site will convert before spending all those hours? Well, there is one method that is commonly used for this very purpose. With almost no effort at all you can drive several hundred visitors to your site within a couple of days. The catch…it costs money.

For those who are fortunate enough to have a spare hundred dollars or so, it is wise to spend that money up front to test your niche before spending precious hours on a dead end. The simplest way to do this is to create a Google Adwords campaign. The advantage of this method is that you can run the campaign to generate 500 or so visitors, then immediately end it. Statistically, 500 visitors will enable you to review the worth of your niche. Simply divide the number of sales by the number of visitors to obtain your conversion ratio. Through experience, I have found the following:

• Conversion Radio < 1% – forget it, you will be wasting your time pursuing this niche unless you replace your product, site copy or both.
• Conversion Ratio < 1.5% – your niche has potential. Generally we look for a minimum natural conversion ratio of around 1%. Adwords artificially inflates this result as people who click on ads normally do so to buy. Therefore, an Adwords conversion of 1.5% is marginal.
• Conversion Ratio > 1.5% – go for it. You have a good niche and your time will certainly be justified.

Creating an Adwords campaign is very easy and can be done in less than 10 minutes. If you are serious about SEO, you will have already performed your keyword research and will have a couple of 2-3 word target keywords and several long-tail keywords. These keywords should be used in your AdWords campaign. Be prepared to spend money though. I find that a limit of $60 per day and a cost per click high enough to propel your add into positions 3 to 5 works well. Create several ad copies and don’t be tempted to add loads of keywords. Use only the keywords you have chosen for your niche as these will be the keywords you will target naturally if your Adwords campaign proves yours niche valuable.

Run your campaign only until you generate 500 visitors. If you are targeting expensive keywords, 250 visitors will also provide an acceptable statistical guide. Be prepared to spend between $100 and $200 US. It is expensive, but if it saves you 100 hours of work, that is only $1 or $2 per hour.

In my next article I will discuss how to create an AdWords campaign and most importantly how to create a successful AdWords ad copy.

Alexa “The web information company” specializes in the collection of Internet based information and freely releases a daily updated Internet popularity ranking called the Alexa Ranking. This measure is often used by SEO marketers and affiliate merchants as a gauge of a sites popularity, and hence its earning potential. Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5 million+. Sites in the top 10 include Google, Youtube and Facebook. Amazon ranks around 20. The full list is available here and the top 1 million sites can also be downloaded as a CSV file.

Alexa derives site popularity by determining the overall percentage of Internet users who visit a site in any given day. For example, Alexa has determined that 0.001% of all Internet users visited my site yesterday, and therefore that earns me a ranking of 385,625 meaning that there are 385,000+ sites that receive more traffic than mine. Overall this is a great result for a site that is less than 3 months old, but it is not correct as I will explain below.

Alexa gains traffic information from users who have installed the free Alexa toolbar. When a user installs the toolbar, the user is requested to supply information such as gender, age, education and so on. Once installed, the toolbar offers information to surfers as they visit sites such as 6 month traffic trending, ranking and so on. The information gleamed from users is alo available to webmasters to help determine visitor demographics. My statistics are shown below…

Astute readers may have noticed that there is a major flaw in the Alexa Rankings. People who tend to install toolbars are more savvy than your average Internet user and as such Alexa Ranking results are heavily skewed towards technical sites such as mine. For this very reason, Alexa Rankings should not be used as a golden measure of a sites popularity but instead be looked upon as a rough guide.

Way back in the 90’s SEO was easy. Search engines relied heavily on page content. The more dense the content was for a given keyword, the better it would rank. Those of us who are old enough will remember web pages with streams of hidden keywords repeated over and over again. This worked OK for many years, but as the number of web pages grew something had to change. Enter Google.

What Google did that was introduce authority, relevance and backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. The more the better. Relevance is normally determined from on-page content and backlink anchor text (ie the link between the <a> tags). Authority is determined by factors like the number of backlinks, the size and age of your site and the rate at which it is updated.

The generation of backlinks and authority is commonly referred to as off-page optimization or link building. It is often said SEO consists of 10% on-page and 90% off-page optimization.

OK, so now we know how important backlinks are I’ll present some techniques on how to acquire them. The following techniques are widely practiced but do come at a cost. They all require either time or money. As with all SEO techniques, there is always a trade off between the two.

1. Create Worthy Posts

If you generate quality posts often, chances are that other people will create backlinks to your site for you (hint, hint).

2. Participate in Forums and Blog Comments

Most forums and blogs allow you to include a link to your site as a little thank you for posting a comment. Comment as often as you can but do ensure that your comments are constructive and offer some worth to the readers of the site. Most webmasters (me included) vet all comments before they are published. Although not strictly necessary, try to post to forums or blogs that are relevant to your site. The more relevant the site, the higher the backlink weighting. For example, one backlink from a relevant site may be worth five from a non-relevant one.

3. Submit To Directories

There are literally thousands of free and paid web directories. Google publicly states that they do not agree with paid directories, but they do not punish you for using them. Paid directories often have higher authority. You may also pay a company to hand enter your site to free directories or use a free service such as http://www.easysubmits.com/. The more directories your site is accepted into the better.

4. Social Bookmarking

I personally believe that social bookmark backlinks from sites like Dig, Propeller, Mixx, Twitter and so on have a very low backlink weighting. They do however speed up the indexing process and I make a point of social bookmarking all my new posts . I highly recommend the Amplify Firefox plugin as it can be configured to automatically create several social bookmarks in one press of the mouse button. It can also be coupled with Posterous to save buckets of time. Paid software such as Bookmarking Demon also save a lot of time as they typically submit multiple articles and feeds to hundreds of social bookmarking sites in one go.

5. Create Some Web 2.0 Free Blog Sites

There are many free blog sites such as Wordpress.com, Squidoo, Blogger, Weebly, HugPages and so on. Create multiple keyword and SEO optimized blog sites on each and link them back to your site. Ensure that the content on each site is unique but relevant. The weighting of backlinks from copied content is very low (or the backlink may not count at all). There are other linking methods you can use with Web 2.0 blogs as well such as building a link silo (see this video). This takes a lot of time and effort.

6. Ezines

Write stand alone 500+ word articles and submit to ezine directories and article hosting sites such as EzineArticles. People are free to copy your articles and place them on their website as long as they include a link to your website. You can also use paid ezine submission services such as Unique Article Wizard. Although generally expensive (US$100+ per month), the number of generated high quality backlinks can be huge.

7. Link Building Sites

Quality link building services such as LinkVana can cost a lot of money (UD$140+ per month for an unlimited number of sites) but they are definitely worth the cost if your site relies on search engine rankings to make sales. Link building sites add articles (written by you or one of their staff) to a massive collection of websites to produce a near unlimited number of quality backlinks.

As can be seen from the list above, there are many methods for creating backlinks. Try to use them all for best results.

Michael Chancey put me onto a great site called Woo Themes. These guys have heaps of free and paid high quality themes that are extremely flexible and easy to use. I hacked the theme every so slightly (but had to redo most of my pages and posts as the width has changed ) and added some additional plugins like SocioFluid and the cool WP-Cumulus. Please let me know what you think.

On another note, I must be a complete sucker for punishment as I have just purchased 6 new domains as part of my personal rapid buy, create and rank challenge. The plan:

• Spend 3 hours researching 6 completely different keywords. After the research effort I will need 3 long tails for each keyword. Of course finding affiliate vendors is part of the research. This bit is done.
• Spend 12 hours creating 6 websites.
• Spend 2 hours creating backlinks. Sounds rediculous, but I’m trialing a new link building system that does all the work for me. They write the articles, create the links, socialize and so on. It’s not cheap, but if it works I should be able to knock out 2 sites a week and work at the same time!
• Wait 3 weeks. During this period I want to spend minimal effort on these sites.

If this plan works, I’ll share the results including how I did it, how much it cost and how much I earned.

Anyway, seasons greatings to you all and please stay safe.

We all know how essential it is for your site to rank on the first page for your chosen keywords. This is why SEO plays such an important role in all web based commercial and social endeavors. In July 2008, Google announced that it had indexed over 1 trillion web pages each of which is a potential competitor. Most ranking algorithms currently determine the order in which sites are displayed for a given search term by taking into consideration relevance and authority. Search engines determine relevance by reviewing your site’s content. A search engine would quickly go out of favor if you search for baby food and are returned a list of sites describing Russian coins. Authority is generated through off page techniques typically including backlinks from other sites containing the same keywords (AKA authoritive or quality backlinks).

Making sure your domain name includes relevant keywords is a form of SEO keyword optimization. Keywords in the domain name however have a much higher weighting than keywords in the content. I have personally conducted an experiment to rank a keyword optimized domain and a non keyword optimized domain using the same techniques in both cases. Even after obtaining double the number of quality backlinks , the non-optimized domain did not usurp the optimized domain. The conclusion: keyword optimized domains are an extremely important SEO technique.

There are 184 million domain names currently registered and approximately 100,000 new domains registered every day! With these statistics you can be sure that most competitive and relevant domain names will have already have taken. Short of purchasing a domain name for a domain name hoarder (I don’t like those guys), there are a couple of techniques you can use to ensure your domain name remains SEO relevant.

1. Localize Your Website

If you are targeting a local audience, consider obtaining a localized domain name. For example, if you are selling to Australians only, try to purchase a .com.au keyword relevant domain instead of a .com domain. This has an added benefit as most search engines will rank localized sites higher as local sites are typically more relevant. A google search for fishing rods in the US and the same search for fishing rods in Australia highlights this point.

2. Add a Prefix or Suffix

Adding a prefix or suffix to the keywords is a common technique for obtaining a keyword relevant domain. For example, if you are targeting baby food, domain names such as mybabyfood.com and babyfoodco .com are still highly relevant. Be careful not to add too many letters though as relevance will diminish with each character is added.

3. Add a Dash Between Your Keywords

Use this technique sparingly. Too many dashes may make your site appear to be spammy in the eyes of potential customers. Do not use this technique if you are targeting repeat visitors. Repeat visitors will often forget to enter the dash into the domain name and accidentally find themselves on your competitors web site. Dashes appear to most search engines as a space and can therefore be used to separate keywords. Say for example you have a site promoting a business specializing in engraving words on keys (such as “front door”). The keywordshop.com domain name may appear to a search engine to be relevant for “keywords” and “hop”. key-words-shop.com may produce a better result.

4. .net or .org Extensions

There is no evidence that search engines give priority to .com extensions. Traditionally .org extensions were used by not-for-profit organisations and many potential visitors may still think this is the case. As with dashes, repeat visitors may automatically add .com to your domain and accidentally navigating to your competitors site.

5. Keyword Optimized Path

Lastly, you may consider adding a keyword optimized path to your existing non-optimized domain. For example, www.thefoodcompany.com/babyfood will rank for baby food. If the example site only sells baby food, a permanent redirection from the home page to the babyfood page will also help in the keyword rankings. As explained in item 2, additional characters in the domain name will however reduce the keyword relevance of the domain name.

Domainsbot.com is a free service that can be used to help find that killer domain name. Just enter your keywords into the text box and Domainsbot will produce a list of SEO optimized domain names. The results are sometimes unexpected or event funny but often serve as a good starting point.

To conclude, if you are serious about SEO make sure your domain name is keyword optimized.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have released my latest plugin called iRobots.txt SEO.

iRobots.txt SEO is a SEO optimized, secure and customizable robots.txt virtual file creator.

Full details of the plugin can be found at http://markbeljaars.com/plugins/irobotstxt-seo/.

This plugin started life as a selfish need to easily create out-of-the-box SEO optimized robots.txt files for my websites. Since the initial conception, I’ve added features to inhibit specific bots and create customized records. No other robots.txt plugin delivers this level of flexibility.

I’ve also spent a lot of time developing a standardized settings interface. The setting page looks like a standard Wordpress Edit New Post page with expandable and retractable sections. Comments on the interface would be appreciated as I am planning on retrofitting Table of Contents Creator with this new style.

Anyway, I’ve blabbered enough. Please give the plug-in a try and let me know what you think.

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website

…and what’s more, the shortened URL is prefixed with your website’s domain name. This blows tinyurl.com and bit.ly out of the water and has obvious SEO benefits to boot. Pretty Link was originally borne from the need to neaten up those ugly affiliate links that often scare off would-be purchasers. With Pretty Link, you can make a URL that looks like this http://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=16526&userID=363159&productID=466062304 into one that looks like this http://beginnerchess.org/chesshouse-22.

Once a link has been “prettisized” (I’m sure this is not a real word), it can also be tracked as per the screenshot below. This allows you to tell how often your links are clicked and which links work better at attracting potential buyers than others. This is an extremely powerful tool for all Internet marketers. What’s more, Pretty Links with different names can point to the same actual link. This is useful for example if you want to track whether people are clicking on your left side banner add or the link in your article. With this sort of tracking information you can determine which add copy attracts the clicks and which products people are generally interested it. You can then adjust the add copy that doesn’t work and rotate out the products that nobody wants.

Pretty Link couldn’t be simpler to use. Once installed and activated, expand the Pretty Link Settings group and select Add New. Put the messy URL in the Target URL section and a nice human readable slug (a tag that contains no spaces, but can contain a dash) in the Pretty Link text box. If your messy URL contains a question mark (a ? denotes the start of URL parameters) then you must ensure that you select the Standard Parameter Forwarding radio selection in the Link Options section. To use the new Pretty Link, you simply use the Pretty Link instead of the original link. For example, if you click on either of the two affiliate links given in the introduction you will notice that both take you to the same destination.

Another great feature of Pretty Link is that it allows you to update the target URL without modify the Pretty Link slug. This is useful if you want to modify your affiliate link without updating your article or add copy. This may be the case if you have found a cheaper or better product for example.

Pretty Link’s SEO benefits include an option to nofollow your Pretty Link which is useful if the linked URL is not optimized for your keyword. Another benefit is that you can chose the name of your Pretty Link slug, allowing you to add more keywords to your page in the form of links.

There is also a serious side to the Archive. Most people work hard (scammers, spammers and some affiliate markers excluded) to provide web pages that contain useful or informative material. It is sad to see this information disappear if the site is closed down. The Way Back Machine ensures that the material will live on forever. This is extremely important as Yahoo’s Geocities was shut down in October 2009. Geocities has been long running and as a result thousands of pages that used to exist are now no more. As many authors have now moved or passed on (check out the poetry from this author who passed at an youngish age and who inspired reocities – a dedicated Geocities archive) this information has not been replicated elsewhere and would now be lost forever if not for projects like the Internet Archive. I am an editor with the DMOZ project and have personally had to delete Geocities sites from the archive with no replacement. This is frustrating.

Finally, the Internet Archive can also be used as a source of inspiration. I look at sites that have been operational for a few years and gain tremendous inspiration from how poor they looked a couple of short years ago. It is important to remember that your sites will not be best in class from the onset.