SEO Link Building Strategies 101

Plan your link building strategy, and you will probably be a step ahead of your competition. Link building can be a time-consuming effort that takes time to show results. However, carefully building your links can attract your target customer to your site. Below, I’m sharing link building tips to help you get noticed by both search engines and people. 

 

Write Compelling Web Content

In a recent Women Grow Business chat about search engine optimization (SEO), someone asked me for my number one tip about SEO. 

One chat participant chimed in, and I agreed, that writing compelling and relevant content proves extremely important. An organization can work just as hard to get 100 or 1,000 backlinks, so make sure the people visiting your site get their problem solved.

Good websites solve problems. What is the problem your content can solve? Do your potential visitors need to organize their house or get health questions answered? People won’t stay on a website or convert if the content isn’t answering their questions.

Your well-written, keyword-targeted content can help people and move your website higher in Google rankings.

Use a Tool to Help

The BatchBlue tool allows me to track my communications with bloggers and website owners.

Instead of searching through my old emails, I can view all relevant communications inside the web-based BatchBlue software. This saves me hours of time when I want to track responses and what was said.

When a blog stops publishing or contact information changes, I have a place to track those changes so I don’t waste time using old information next time. In addition, I can outsource certain tasks to others, saving myself even more time.

Ask and You Shall Receive

In a past life, I was a business and life coach.

What I noticed most in conversation with my clients was that they did not ask others for what they wanted.

One client wanted to take a class and lived in resentment about “not having time.” When she did finally ask her husband to watch their son—the spouse immediately said yes—she was able to take a class.

Have you asked that powerful website owner you admire for a link back to your site yet? If they say no, then volunteer to write a post for them (and ask if you can include a link to your site in your blog). If they still say no, then ask other people.

What is the best way to ask? Ideally, you know a little about your market. You’ve done your research about whether the site owner prefers email, Twitter, or another communication method.

You could even—gasp!—use the telephone to request a link. If you call and ask politely, you will certainly stand out from the all the other website managers sending emails.

PR + SEO = SEOPR

During the Women Grow Business chat mentioned above, chat host Shonali Burke asked me how PR and SEO could work together.

In the old days, I optimized press releases. Ideally, these press releases would appear online and the links from the press release service’s website would increase a website’s search engine rankings.

Sometimes press releases were written expressly for the purpose of getting the links, which is not a good idea.

When writing your own release, think of your organization’s story. A pitch you write for your local business journal will be far different from a release you write for your regional newspaper. Don’t overlook local news sources or stop yourself from aiming high.

If a news organization picks up your story, you may receive a coveted link from a high-quality news site. Among search engines, these highly regarded websites help your site’s credibility.

Take it Offline

I learned this from following the #pubcon hashtag on Twitter. I am not sure whose idea this was. However, I think Lee Odden tweeted it during a presentation. Find 50 Tweeps (people on Twitter) who blog and live in your local area. Organize an event around your business and invite them all. These folks will often live tweet or blog about your event later. This, as you can imagine, is an excellent want to get legal links back to your website.


 Courtesy: deborah AGER

 

Ways to Become an SEO Expert

This is part two of my article on becoming a SEO expert.You can find out the part one of this becoming SEO expert Here @ How to become SEO Expert-1.

By spending time in online marketing forums, you may find you absorb a lot more search engine optimization (SEO) information than you realize. When I joined my first tech forum, I was baffled by the techie language. Within a few months, I could hardly believe I’d ever not understood what they were talking about.

This article shares seven SEO forums and two excellent online marketing blogs. On SEO forums, you’ll find a mix of people managing niche websites, people wanting to market their brick and mortar business, black hat SEOs, and prominent leaders and “gurus” in the SEO field. As with anywhere in the world, some people will be kind and others rude.

Read on to get the list of seven SEO forums and two blogs.

1. Warrior Forum: This internet marketing forum encompasses numerous aspects of SEO and online marketing issues. You can organize networking functions in your geographical area, complain about the latest “launch buzz” in the internet marketing world, or get advice on how to get top ten rankings. The forum is moderated, though not to a suffocating extent. At the same time, be sure to learn the rules and stick to them. People get annoyed easily here.
2. SEO Black Hat: This is the only one I’ve not personally tried myself. I found out about it from Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame. You have to register before you can read any of the posts. However, it intrigued me enough to include it here. I’ll be checking this one out for myself soon.
3. Digital Point: This is one of my favorite forums. The moderator(s) is extremely laid back, and the information shared proves more useful than not. The main website, Digital Point, offers a number of free SEO tools to help you analyze and assess your online marketing work. Keep in mind that you are giving away your website information when you use these free tools, so be careful.
4. Search Engine Watch (SEW) Forums: This website, and its forums, have been on my “visit” list the whole time I’ve worked in SEO. I first started to learn the ins and outs of SEO at SEW. The site has an excellent reputation and many of the online marketing “gurus” hang out here and offer up useful information. Right now, there’s an interesting thread on a downturn in online sales. You can also find out the top 10 search terms in various categories.
5. SEO Guy: The free SEO tools offered by the forum manager set this site apart from most.
6. Thirty Day Challenge Forum: This is mostly for people doing the 30-Day Challenge I mentioned in part one of this SEO education series. However, it’s a great forum to get your feet wet and get your newbie questions answered. My only warning is to be sure that you are getting advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about — and not from another newbie.
7. SEO Chat: Like most SEO forums, this one offers the Google chat rooms towards
   the top. These forums offer multiple rooms on affiliate marketing, link popularity, MSN, Google, Yahoo, site reviews, SEO scripts and more.
8. Sugarrae Blog: Rae Hoffman never minces words when it comes to SEO or any other topic she cares to tackle on her blog. I find her irreverent tone a breath of fresh air.
9. SEO Moz Blog is read by nearly everyone I meet in SEO. The blog posts I’ve read recently have not offered the nuts and bolts and the latest SEO tips. Most of those are reserved for the paid membership. The blog does offer interesting takes and philosophical posts on subjects such as advice for startup CEOs.

Good luck creating your educational SEO plan. One day, you may find SEO offered in colleges. (I like that it isn’t yet.) Until that time, the best way to learn is to teach yourself and through trial and error.

What tools, forums, blogs do you find useful? Share them in the comments below.

Ways to Become an SEO Expert

 Are you curious about how to improve your SEO skills? Are you a small business owner who wants to know a bit more about SEO?

It is now-a-days everybody's question what resources to use and which are best for learning about search engine optimization (SEO). With some of these resources, you may wonder what is the relation to SEO. Magazines.com may seem like an odd choice, yet it works to help you with your website and SEO if you let it.

Below are the first nine of my top 27 resources, including websites and online training, that may help develop ones skills.

This list is in no particular order. Here you go!

1. SEO Book: Aaron Wall, a delightful SEO blogger, wrote the big great book of search engine optimization. If you have the time and inclination to learn SEO, then this book will get you on your way. It’ll take study and work — no magic results unless you take action — yet the rewards you reap will help you achieve your online marketing and sales goals.

2. CopyBlogger: Thanks to Copyblogger, CopyBlogger is my all-time favorite copywriting blog. It offers numerous articles about content creation, SEO copywriting, engaging your readers, and even idea generation. When I need inspiration for writing an article, I often come to Copyblogger. Top Tip from the Site: Use Magazines.com for headline ideas.

3. Magazines.com: If you create niche websites, then this is a great place to start research and uncover interests people want to know more about. You might find magazines on golf, fishing or knitting here. That, in turn, can generate ideas for you to pursue in terms of website or product creation.
What if you are not a niche website owner? You can still use Magazines.com to generate headline ideas for your pay-per-click campaigns and avoid the common AdWords mistake of not writing the right kind of headline.

4. The Thirty-Day Challenge: If you are willing to work hard for 30 days, then this FREE training may appeal to you. Over the 30 days, you will have access to videos and podcasts that teach you how to use social bookmarking sites to promote your work, how to increase your site rankings and more. It is a lot of work! So, this is only for those willing to devote the time to it.

5. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool This will provide you with limited access to keyword research results, yet even this free version gives you some great data. If you like the tool, you can purchase a monthly subscription to WordTracker, which is an economical way to test it out.

6. Keyword Discovery: This is another research tool that provides insight into what key phrases will receive the most traffic. Once you determine there’s traffic for a keyword, then you know what you should be writing about to get more visits to your website.

7. DoshDosh: I have affection for the writer of this blog. Observe how she or he uses links inside the blog posts to encourage you to visit more pages. That strategy is also known as “internal linking.” This site provides a good example of internal link strategies as well as numerous articles on juicy topics such as gaining more traffic
with StumbleUpon. I read DoshDosh on a regular basis.

8. Bloglines: Bloglines offers a way to organize your subscriptions to various blogs and RSS feeds. I’ve created folders called ‘internet marketing,’ ‘poetry,” and a few others to help me keep my feeds organized. Once you have your folders set up, you can easily add new feeds to them and then scan through several blogs in a short period of time to check out items of interest in your field. I use Bloglines to help me keep up with the latest in SEO and underwater basket weaving. (Just checking to see if you’re awake.)

9. Social Poster: This tool is free and allows you to post your articles to social bookmark sites quickly. If you’ve socially bookmarked your articles before, then you know how time consuming it can be to copy and paste the headline, URL, tags and so on each and every time. Social Poster removes some of the drudgery by allowing you to input the information one time. Your information either appears automatically or you click and drag to input it.

Do you have favorite SEO resources? If so, we’d all love to hear about them. Please post your favorites in the comments below.