MarkBeljaars.com

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.

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.

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.

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.