Seo Details
SEO
1. Introduction to SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a technique used by webmasters to boost their search engine rankings. By just creating a website doesn't mean it will appear in the search engine result page (SERP) straight away. You need to do a little SEO for this to happen.
Of course, why stop at that? You will want to improve your ranking to increase your organic traffic (traffic from search engines). This topic is rather large and changes will always be made to the search engines ranking algorithms (formulas to calculate your ranking).
The 3 major search engines are Google (approx. 49%), Yahoo and MSN (both for approx. 47%). The rest are smaller search engines. Generally, if you can do well for these three and you will do well for the rest of the smaller search engines.
There are 2 ways of optimizing your website, onpage and offpage, both of which should be practised for maximum effect. When doing SEO, make sure that your website is not one of the following type, or else work will be extremely hard or near impossible.
- Full Flash or Flash Navigation
- JavaScript generated content
- Graphical, with little or no text
- Frames or iFrames
- Dynamic URL (database driven with ?example=123)
- Password protected
If you have read the Top 10 Mistakes in Building Websites, you should have avoided most of these. If your website is password protected, decide if you want access for everyone or only for members. If it is to be restricted to members, use robots.txt to prevent search engines to cache your restricted webpages.
For the other types of websites, you will have to use cloaking to change your dynamic URLs to static URLs. Read .htaccess for more information.
SEO only deals with such websites as that is what search engines are looking for. The crawlers simply can't read graphical text, JavaScript or Flash. They cannot cache dynamic URL webpages too as these are temporary ones generated by the database.
Once you make sure your website is search engine friendly (conforms to what search engines want as said above), you are ready to start SEO.
2. SEO Terms
In the Internet, abbreviations and lingos are bound to be everywhere. SEO is no different. Before you start on this topic, I will now brief you on all the SEO terms so that you will not irritate others on webmaster forums by asking silly questions.
- SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Techniques used to increase organic traffic by optimizating webpages to give search engines the impression that the webpages are highly relevant and important.
- Organic Traffic
Website traffic that comes from search engines.
- SERP - Search Engine Results Page
The results page of a search engine for a search term.
- SEF - Search Engine Friendly
A website that is properly designed for Search Engines to read, cache, crawl and index.
- Crawlers/Spiders
Web bots of search engines that 'crawls' your webpage, creating a cache of it for their database. It will also index it (include your website in their database) if it haven't done so.
Optimizing by controlling ranking factors on your webpages.
Optimizing by improving ranking factors outside of your website.
This is a link on another webpage that links to yours. There are 2 types: one way backlink and reciprocal backlink. One way means they link to you, but you did not link to them. Reciprocal means both parties link to each other.
- Internal Links
Links that point to another webpage of the same website.
- Keywords
The word or phrase that your webpage is about. You optimize your webpage for these keywords so that when users search for them, they can find your website from search engines.
This is an indicator of how 'important' your webpage is through the number and quality of backlinks. 0 is lowest, 10 is highest.
- Alexa Rank
Shows the traffic of a website compared to others. Highest rank is 1 and means that your site has the highest traffic among all the websites! 1,000,000 means the 1 millionth highest traffic website.
- Compete Rank
Ranks a website based on the number of visitors per month. Not so important right now, currently a new ranking system of not much attention to it.
There are of course more terms to go, but these are the more general ones. As you read on, I will introduce more in-depth terms and explanations.
3. Keywords Analysis
What are Keywords?
Keywords are phrases that you want your website to be found through search engines. These are phrases that people type into the search engines to find websites. Notice that I used 'phrases' to describe keywords. It is simply too diffcult to use a one-worded keyword for your website.
Lets say your website is related to the fruit mango, and you optimized your webpage for the keyword 'mango'. Bad mistake. A search on Google shows a whopping 25,000,000 results for the search term 'mango'. That means competition is extremely high and almost impossible to rank well for this keyword
You will want to use a phrase as keywords instead. Two reasons for this. The first is obvious, the more specific a keyword is, the lesser the competition. The second reason is that one word cannot describe a webpage well enough. Mango can mean anything, it can be mango plantation, mango recipes, books on mango, etc. Simply put, the keyword is not targeted enough.
Selecting the Right Keywords
The ideal keyword is one that have high search volume and little competition. It must be closely related to your website too. You do not want someone searching for mango plantation and end up coming to find your website selling mango ice cream.
You will want a target audience that will stay on your website instead of leaving in few seconds. With that in mind, ask yourself this: what search terms do you expect people to use to find your website? If you are selling a product, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. What would you search for?
In general, a longer keyword has better targeting and less competition. Good keyword phrases are generally 2 to 5 words long. Most people think that they need to rank high for generic terms and focus way too much time on it. Generic terms do not convert as well as specific search terms because the traffic is not well targeted.
Here is a comparision of generic and specific search terms:Generic Keywords
running shoes
Specific Keywords
new balance running shoes
buy new balance running shoes
new balance running shoes store
buy new balance running shoes online
Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to how much keywords are present in your content. This is calculated in percentage, the total number of keywords are divided by the total number of words.
There is no correct density to follow and I advise you not to get overly obssessed with this number. I am not saying placing keywords in your article is not important. Just write your article naturally and stuff in some keywords only if it makes sense. If you really want a number, 2-4% density is good enough. Never go too high or you might get penalised by Google for keyword stuffing.
Keyword Analysis/Research
Keyword analysis or research is the process used to find suitable keywords. That is, keywords that have poor competition and reasonable search volumes. The best free keyword research tool used to be the Overture by Yahoo, but that has been down at this moment of writing. So you can use these two free tools Keyword Discovery and MIVA instead. They do not provide as much statistcs as Overture though.
If you have deep pockets, I recommend you to go for WordTracker They have the most comprehensive statistics that the free tools cannot provide.
For a start, you will want to target keywords that have search results of less than 500,000 in Google. The search volume per day should be at least 50, if there is such keywords in your niche. Sure, the traffic from these keywords may not be high, but you can rank #1 easily for them. If you had 10 webpages that target such keywords (each webpage has its own keyword) and manage to rank high for them, you can get 500 visitors per day.
Once your website gains traffic, popularity and link authority (more backlinks), you can start to challenge for harder keywords.
4. SEO Onpage Optimization
Onpage optimization is one of the two ways you can optimize your website. Onpage optimization does not boost your position in SERP as much as offpage optimization but is nonetheless extremely vital to get a good position.
Onpage Factors
You need to have some knowledge of HTML to understand the following onpage optimization tips.
URL, File Name
The URL of your webpage is looked at by search engines in trying to determine
the keywords of your webpage. A webpage named internet-marketing.html is
definately more relevant to internet marketing than a webpage named
article24.html.
Place keywords into your file name and you can get a slight advantage over most competitors who don't know SEO or onpage optimization.
Title
The title of your webpage is the most important onpage factor. Your title should
not have more than 80 characters and do not contain repeated words. Search
engines place high importance on the title of a webpage and if you use the
right keywords, your webpage can get a substantial boost in the SERP position.
Try not to use unneccessary words such as 'Welcome to my website'. The words used in your title is precious and the more words it have, the more diluted the importance of each word holds.
Only use keywords in your title, don't waste it! Lets look at the following example:
Welcome to Mike's blog
Now, how many people will search for 'welcome' and how many will search for the name 'mike'? This is an example of wasting the precious title tag. The title is telling search engines that the website is a blog from Mike and nothing else. Take a look at the next example:
Blog on Fitness and Health
This is much better. Search engines are able to tell that the blog is on fitness and health. Improvements can be made further. Words like 'to', 'and', 'a' and such are not neccessary and should be removed from the title.
Fitness | Health Blog
What happens here is that words like 'and' are replaced with characters like '|'. '|' and '-' are not considered as words and will not have a diluting effect.
A short description of the webpage for search engine bots to read, not exceeding 280 characters. This description will appear in the SERP if provided. If the meta tag does not exist, the crawlers will just extract the description from the webpage itself.
Having a good meta tag description can encourage the human users to click on your website when they use the search engines. Crawlers are not intelligent enough and might include gibberish information. Take a look at what Google shows for this website:
Copyright Make Money Online 2007-2008. Powered by Larvos.com. Navigation. Home � How to Make Money Online � Contact Us � Site Map � More Links ...
Not every descriptive huh? This meta tag will not have any effect on your position in the SERP, but you might want to put a little work on it to improve on the human experience.
This is bascially a list of keywords for your webpage. It is not important anymore as the major search engines don't look at them. They look at your content to associate keywords with your webpages. Placing this meta tag will have no effect.
Heading Tags - H1, H2, H3
Heading tags are very good formatting tags to use. The text enclosed by such tags are highly regarded by search engines. For example, if you had a <h1>Cars</h1> in your webpage, it will be associated with cars.
By placing relevant keywords in it, you can rank higher for that keyword. The common practice is to place your primary keyword in h1, and secondary in h2. Make sure you use only one h1 tag per webpage.
Formatting Tags - bold, italic, underline
Other formatting tags that are not as highly regarded as headings are the bold, italic and underline tags. Formatted text tells search engines that these are to be taken note of.
By placing keywords within them, you are highlighting the keywords to search engines, making your webpage more relevant to these keywords. A favourite formatting tag for webmasters seems to be the bold tag. When formatting your keyowrds, don't be excessive. Apply the bold tag on 1-3 occurance of the keywords will be adequate.
List, ordered or unordered
Content in a list form are regarded to be important by Google (and maybe Yahoo and MSN), so place your keywords among the list, and bold them for maximum effect. Just make sure not to overload the keywords and make it look like spam.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is very powerful in determing the keywords for a webpage. Lets say
you place a link that says 'SEO Tutorial' and it points to a webpage of
yours called seo-tutorial.php. The keyword 'SEO Tutorial' will be associated
with that page, making it more relevant and rank higher for the keyword 'SEO
Tutorial'.
Combination
You can have very powerful internal anchor links if you combine them with the
onpage factors I mentioned above. You can bold your anchor links, place them in
headings or even in a list. This makes the anchor link highly valued by search
engines.
Alt Attribute
The 'alt' attribute is used for the 'img' tag. When placing an image on your
webpage, use the 'alt' attribute to describe the image. Place keywords in them,
but do not overdo it. This is a common spamming technique and can be detected
by Google easily. Also, do not use the same text for the 'alt' attribute at a
webpage. Do some variations and make sure the text descripts the image at the
same time.
Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the percentage of your text that are keywords. A
simple calculation is total number of keywords present divided by the total
number of words. There is no corrent percentage for your keyword density. Some
claimed as high as 8% while most follow in the region of 2-6%.
I believe you will be safe at 2-3%. That means, for every 100 words, 2-4 of them have to be your keyword. Of course you are not going to count, you can use an online keyword density tool to do the job. Never exceed 8% or you will be banned by Google for spamming keywords.
5. Google PageRank
What is PageRank?
PageRank (PR) is one of the many factors Google use to rank your webpage. Yes, webpage. Each of your webpage can have different PR. PR is determined by calculating the number of links to the webpage. Each link is considered as a vote for that webpage, so the more votes it gets, the higher the PR it will have.
You can view the Google PageRank of a webpage by installing the Google Toolbar or by using online tools such as PR Checker. Get Firefox with Google Toolbar Be aware that the PR for your viewing is updated every 3 months or so by Google, so you will not see any immediate increase or decrease until the next update.
There are 2 ways to increase your PR. The easiest way is to have a good internal linking structure so that PR is spreaded around your own webpages. If you link to an external website, you lose some of your potential PR to that website.
Confused? Lets take a look at the formula for calculating PR. Note that this is not the actual formula (only Google knows it) but a rather close estimate.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
where...
A is your webpage
T1 to Tn is the webpages that links to webpage A
PR(x) is the PageRank of a webpage
d is a damping factor between 0 and 1
C(x) is the number of outbound links on a webpage
As you can see, by having more links (represented by C) in a webpage, the PR of that webpage will be spreaded out thinly to the webpages it links to. So if a webpage has a PageRank of 5 and have 5 links to 5 different webpages, each of them will get a spill over PR of 1 (for example). Have 10 links and each one will get a PR of 0.5.
Generally, a link you get from a PR7 webpage is equivalent to 6 links from a PR6 webpage, assuming the outbound links are the same on both webpages. So a high PR link will benefit you more than a low PR link. Note that even a PR0 link is still valuable, as it may not be exactly 0, but 0.4 for example. Google only shows you a rounded off PageRank and there is no way to get the real number.
PageRank Distribution
Now, back to issue of linking to other websites. If you had a link exchange with another website, you lose part of the PR to this website. Instead of distributing this PR to your own webpages, you allow others to get a slice of it.
Lets say partners.html of PageRank 4 have 10 outbound links to other websites. Each of these website will get PR 0.4. By increasing the number of internal links on partners.html, you can reduce the PR you lose. Place an additional 10 internal links (to your own webpage) on partners.html. Now the PR is split into 50/50. You lose half of the PR to other websites, yet retain the other half.
An alternative is to use the nofollow attribute in your HTML code.
<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Outbound Link</a>
This practise is not allowed when you are exchanging links with other websites. Though unspoken, it is accepted that you do not use nofollow when you are doing reciprocal linking. On the other hand, if you are placing an outbound link of your own will and with no obligations, go ahead and use it.
Having a good navigation system can increase the maximum PageRank of your website (total PR of all the webpages). You see, PageRank can be distributed within your own website. So if you had a PR 5 webpage and you had no links at all to your own webpage, you lose that PR 5 for good.
However, if you had some internal links to other webpages, that PR 5 is spread to them. These webpages will get a higher PR, and the webpages they link to will get a higher PR... The cycle goes on and on!
Remember that it is not advisable to have too many links (internal and external) on a single webpage or it might be banned by search engines as link farms. As a rule of thumb, have less than 80 links per webpage.
More on the maximum PR I just mentioned. By having more webpages, you actually increase the maximum PageRank of your website. Most of the PR 8-10 websites have hundreds, if not, thousands of webpages. So if there are 50 webpages linking to one webpage, the PR distributed will add up to a significant number!
Do bear in mind that creating many poor content webpages will make matters worst. Only create original content-rich webpages.
Much to the confusion of many, PR acutally differs from each of the Google datacenters, resulting in a different PR of your website in different regions. This is normal, so do not worry about it.
Still want to know more about PageRank? Visit PageRank Explained for an in-depth on PageRank.
6. SEO - Offpage Optimizing
Offpage Factors
Offpage optimization refers to improving SEO factors that improve your SERP position. The factors are offpage, which bascially means factors outside of your own website. Offpage optimization usually do not come under your own direct control unless you do Blackhat SEO.
Offpage optimization is dependent on how other websites link to your website. This is therefore harder to accomplish than onpage optimization.
Unfortunately, the major search engines take high emphasis on the offpage factors of a website. The factors refer to backlinks pointing to your website, what type of backlinks it is, the nature of the source of backlinks and more. A backlink can be considered useful only if it comes from a website related to your niche or keywords.
Types of Backlinks
If you have read Google PageRank, you will know that having more backlinks increase your PageRank. Besides the quantity of backlinks, there is also the quality. Despite being a simple anchor link, backlinks have many characteristics.
Anchor Text
The anchor text used in the backlinks are the most important factor in the quality of the backlink. You will want people to link to you using keywords you are trying to rank for.
So how do you make sure the anchor text is what you want? Usually, when you build backlinks by doing reciprocal or directory submissions, you can choose the anchor text. In reciprocal linking, just provide the HTML code with the desired anchor text to the webmaster. For directory listings, place your keywords in your website name when filling in the submission form. This will be used as your anchor text.
IP of Backlinks
Search engines place more value on backlinks that come from many different IPs. If you had a bunch of backlinks coming from the same IP, the search engines will not place so much value on them as compared to those that comes from unique IPs.
This can be due to the existing method of creating backlinks for yourself. You can easily make a new spam website and place several links on it pointing to your main website. Since all these backlinks come from the same website (and IP), it will not be valued much. This is a protection against manipulating search engines to believe a website have many backlinks when its not.
One Way or Reciprocal
One way backlinks are links pointing to your website but not having yours linking to them. It is the direct opposite of reciprocal linking. As search engines like Google already know of link exchange schemes, they decided to place more value on one way backlinks than reciprocal backlinks.
You see, Google perfer backlinks to build up naturally instead of being engineered. In turn, webmasters have thought of a way to bypass this, doing complicated 3-way linking. Example of 3-way linking: Website A links to Website B, which in turn links to Website C. C than links to A. In this manner, there is no reciprocal involved although the intention is there. It is believed that Google can now detect 3-way linking too.
Deep Links
Deep links are backlinks pointing to your inner webpages (for example:computers.html) instead of your homepage (index.html). Deep link ratio (DLR) is the total number of deep links for your website divided by the total number of backlinks (deep links + links pointing to homepage).
Some SEO experts talked of a perfect or correct deep link ratio but there is no proof that there is such a figure. Always keep in mind that your website needs BOTH types of backlinks to rank high. You should always try to gain more backlinks and not worry about the DLR.
Source of Backlinks
A backlink that comes from a website related to your niche is more valuable than one that comes from a unrelated website. This is because backlinks tell the search engines what a website is about. If your website is about golf, you will want golf-related websites to link to you.
Also, different domains have different values to the search engines. Some domains are so highly valued by search engines that they can easily rank well for any keywords they are targeting. An example? Wikipedia. These websites are what we called authority websites. Having links from authority websites are almost impossible, but is highly valuable.
Other sources of backlinks that are highly valuable are those that comes from .gov and .org domains.
Why Backlinks are Valued
Backlinks do not just increase PR, it serve more purpose than that. In fact, the most important factor to rank high is through backlinks. Search engines determine what a website is about through backlinks. If a website have 50 backlinks with the anchor text 'free games', the website will be linked to the niche 'free games'.
That is why you should be looking for backlinks from websites in your own niche. Make sure the website is search engine friendly. Having a backlink that cannot be read by search engines will not help in SEO. You can read more about building backlinks.
7. Blackhat SEO
Blackhat SEO refers to techniques used by webmasters to optimize their websites that are not approved of by search engines, Google in particular. Why not? Because these techniques often produce websites that are not relevant to the user experience. The websites contain spam, ads and duplicated content that are markov (rewritten in glibberish manner). Nothing which interests you I assume.
This is against what Google or any other search engines is trying to achieve. They want to give relevant results for searches and blackhat websites are simply not what a user wants. Hence, using blackhat techniques can get your website banned fast if you are not good at it.
Blackhat SEO involve the use of 1 or more methods to 'cheat' the search engines into thinking that the website is relevant with the keywords, such as spamming it with keywords that are not related to the topic.
I shall not go into too much of Blackhat SEO as it is very in-depth and you might get your website banned in few days. Instead, I will talk about the common ones that you might use without even knowing it.
Keyword Stuffing
This is when you use as many keywords as possible in your article, spamming it to increase the keyword density, resulting in illogical reading for users. Write your content naturally, do not attempt to squeeze in unneccessary keywords and you will be safe.
A more common usage of this is to stuff keywords into the webpage title. Never ever repeat the same word in the title tag, and limit it to less than 80 characters.
Hidden text
Some webmasters hide their text from visitors. Why would anyone do that? Simple, because the text doesn't make sense and is meant for search engines. Usually, this is text that are stuffed with keywords so that the website is associated with these keywords when it is not. Common methods of hiding text are by placing them on a same coloured background (e.g white text on white background) or using CSS to hide them (display:none).
Link Farms or Blog Farms
This is highly dangerous as inexperienced webmasters might link to link farms, getting their website banned. Link or blog farms are websites with webpages that have a high number of outbound links (more than 30, maybe around 100+). The purpose of them is to add more backlinks to other websites in the hope of increasing the Page Rank.
Link farms and blog farms are usually banned by Google in little time. Any website found linking to a banned website will be associated with it, resulting in a ban too.
However, the websites that a banned website links to will not be banned. This is to prevent people from sabotaging their competitors by creating a banned website that links to them.
How this affects you is that you may unknowingly link to a link farm or even create one yourself. Some websites just dump all their reciprocal links onto a single webpage, resulting in an unintentional link farm. Spread your outbound links around a few webpages. Lets say you exchanged links with 50 websites. Place 25 on 1 webpage and the other on a second webpage.
URL Cloaking
This is used to show 1 version of the webpage to visitors, and another to the search engines. The version for search engines are highly optimized (such as keyword stuffing), but doesn't make sense to a human visitor, hence the need to hide it from them.
Cloaking can be done to change dynamic URLs to static URLs, so it is not neccessary blackhat. It can be used for hiding affiliate links too. Use it for the right purpose and you should be safe.
Automated Link Networks
There are websites that participate in link programs where they gain backlinks from other members websites automatically. In return, they have to link to other members' websites. This type of mindless linking to websites can benefit you as you build backlinks easily and quickly.
Although these networks not banned by Google yet, there is a high possibility that it might change in the future. These are sophiscated link networks that require a coding file to be uploaded to your website, so that backlinks can be added to your website through this coding without you manually doing it.
I would advise you not to join such networks as this coding file is a foot track left behind for using this blackhat method of building backlinks. Search engines can easily track down the foot track in your website and ban it if they want to.
Here is what Google have to say on this:
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Over-Optimization
This is not really blackhat, but your website can be penalized by Google if it is over-optimized. Yes, doing too good a job is not so good after all.
So how do you prevent over-optimizing? Never increase your backlinks at a fast rate. For example, gaining 100 backlinks in a week is way too much and will raise a red flag too Google. You should always build backlinks slowly.
Another sign of over-optimizing is when a new website had a lot of backlinks before it even gets indexed by the search engines. Before your website is indexed, avoid buying backlinks or submitting your articles to every single article directory you can find. The large amount of backlinks for a new website can also set off a red flag to Google.
Quick Look at Google Guidelines
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don't send automated queries to Google.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
8. Banned by Google
So your website has been banned by Google? This is usually when you practise 1 or more blackhat techniques, or that the domain name you brought has already been banned by Google before you had it.
The best way to get your site back to the main Index is to contact Google. Make sure your website is clean with no black hat stuff before you email them at help@google.com.
A search on the Internet for this particular topic points me to an interesting case. A website, phillyfuture.org, is banned due to misuse by the previous owner. The new owner brought the new domain without realising it has been banned. When he did, he emailed Google to explain the situation. After some weeks, Google finally unbanned the website and it got listed into the Google Index.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts (an engineer with Google, a well-known blogger too) in a reply to phillyfuture.org predicament:
Karl did the right thing with a reinclusion request on 3/18/2005 to us, because that goes to someone who can verify that the site is now good. Because of the large volume of correspondence we get to user support, it really helps us to send the request with the right terms if you suspect a domain has been spamming in the past ("reinclusion request" in the subject is enough).
After getting that reinclusion request it was approved in under 72 hours, but I understand that we could have done better in this case, because Karl first wrote us more than 2-3 weeks ago.
Karl, I understand your frustration because you just bought a domain and wanted it to rank where it should. I'm sorry that the previous life of this domain as spam affected you.
*Karl is the owner of phillyfuture.org
In short, email Google with the header "reinclusion request" and explain the problem to them. Be polite, tell them you have read their webmaster guidelines and had since cleaned up your act (blackhat SEO).
Alternatively, use the Google Webmaster Tools to request re-inclusion. Read Google - Request Reconsideration for more information. Your website should be indexed in a few weeks time if all goes well.
9. Building Backlinks
In Offpage Optimization, I talked about backlinks and the types of backlinks you can receive. Now I shall share with you one of the hottest topic in SEO, building backlinks.
Text Link Ads
How do you build backlinks? There are the paid and free methods. Of course, by paying, you can get more valuable backlinks from high PR websites easily. Start by going to Text Link Ads, a network of advertisers and publishers, to buy links from publishers. Through TLA, you pay the amount they want and in return, you get a static HTML link that is readable by search engines.
Using TLA is much faster than emailing the webmasters and asking if they want to sell links on their websites. The negotiation part is cut out and you can find websites selling links straight away.
Web Directories
Another source of buying links is from web directories. Most web directories have a paid listing included and you have to pay to get listed. If you are working with a budget, you can use the free listings instead. The review time to get listed is longer and your website is not guaranteed to be accepted.
There are so many web directories out there that I cannot list them all. You can search in Google for 'web directory' or 'directory of directories'. Submitting your website to web directories is simple and requires an email address. Usually, you need to fill in a form asking for your website URL, name, email address, description, meta keywords, URL of reciprocal link (if required), etc.
The task is simple yet time consuming if you are looking to submit to 100+ directories. You can either pay someone to submit for you (around $5-10 usually, depending on the number of submissions) or you can use a free software called Directoy Submitter to submit to 350 directories.
Deep Link Directories
These directories do NOT want your homepage. Unlike most directories that only list homepages, deep link directories list your webpages instead. Why submit to this? Because building backlinks on your homepage only is not going to work out in the long run. You need deep links to your inner webpages. There are only a few of such specialized directories for free. Most web directories offer this additional serivce, for a price.
Here are some that I use:
- Deep Link
- Deeply Linked
- Free Deep Links
Buying Links
I personally do not like paying to get listed. Why? Because if your motive is to increase your ranking in Google, you are cheating Google by paying others to link to you. But it can also be seen as a way to get traffic from these websites linking to you. For the time being, buying links is safe, and seems likely to continue for quite a long time.
Does that mean link exchanges and reciprocal linking are safe? Nope, all these practises are grey hat (between white and black hat) and might be banned by search engines one day. Unless you do this on a large scale and balantly selling/buying links on your website, you should be safe.
Reciprocal Linking
Contact webmasters of websites related to your niche and tell them you want to exchange links. Some tips to help improve your chance of being accepted:
- Use an email header that sounds less spammy, mention their website name so they know its not automated
- Tell them a thing or two of what you like about their website, to show you are really interested
- Use proper English, be polite
- Place a link to their website and let them know the webpage it is on before emailing
- Tell them how to link to your website, include the anchor text (usually your website name), the URL to use and give a short description should they want to include it
- Try not to act smart and teach them things like benefits of backlink, PageRank, etc. They might be better than you!
Forums Signature
If you join a forum, remember to post your website link in your signature. This is by far the most easily obtained free backlink. Do not spam the forum when doing this though. Remember to use keywords in your anchor text even when its your signature. An even better method is to post in forums related to your niche. Not only can you build backlinks, members of the forum might visit your site. Free traffic!
10. More on Building Backlinks
Article Submission
If your website have original articles, you can submit them to article directories. When accepted by the editors, your article will appear in their directory. By placing links to your website, you get free backlinks from them. Also, there is an author resource box at the bottom of your article. Place your backlink to your homepage and the webpage where the original article can be found.
By doing so, you can get free backlinks and deep links! Furthermore, when others use your article in their own website, they will have to include this resource box, meaning more backlinks.
Before you go submit to every single article directory you can find, I strongly advise you to submit any article ONCE. Yes, only once to any of the directory. Submitting the same article to multiple directories is not going to have any advantage.
Sure, you might get more backlinks from the article directories, but you can get penalized for duplicated content since search engines cannot determine which is the orignal source. A way to prevent this is to have 2 versions of the article. One for your own website, the other for article directories.
Here are some article directories:
- Ezine Articles (recommended)
- Buzzle
- Article City
- Article Biz
- Find Articles
Press Release
Press release is somewhat like a news article. They are for announcing something, such as the arrival of an event, the launch of a service (such as your website service), etc. Submit the press release you write to a distribution service and when people use your press release, they must link back to the original article (you, that is). Some press release distribution services:
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a type of service provided by various websites for community members to share their bookmarks with others. It is a way to tell other community members that this website is good and you should look at it. The more bookmarks a website receive, the higher it appears up the listing.
Some Social Bookmarking Websites:
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