New07 Blog Reviews » links

5 Types of Link Building

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:58:21 +0000

There are many reasons to build links to your website, and sometimes, it is hard to determine if one link is better than another, or if it is worth anything at all. For example, a dofollow link is better than a nofollow for some purposes, but not for others. And a redirected link may hold no value for SEO, but may still prove valuable. Here are the types of links that you can build to your website, and why you should take advantage of a mixture of each. Traffic Generating Continue reading →

2 Great WordPress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful Pages

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:30:31 +0000

Learning which of your published content did particularly well based on some parameters is a great way to become a more successful blogger. This way you can see which of your posts are well received in social media, which of them get linked more and which of them spur a more active discussion. This week I am sharing the two best Wordpress plugins that will offer you a huge variety of parameters to evaluate your posts: Blog Link & Traffic Analysis Plugin for WordPress This plugin digs into your blog posts and offers several variables to find the most powerful of them: post date page views per post in the previous 3 months inbound links (requires Yahoo Site Explorer Yahoo API which is quite easy to receive) Google bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Yahoo bot visits (last visit and number of visits) MSN bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Other bot visits You can sort by any of the column to find the pages that did best for any of the criteria. For example, if you want to find post with most backlinks, click > icon in the “Inbound Links” column: The best part of this plugin is that it gives you the ability to compare any of the variables side by side. For example, you can see how number of links effects the bot visits and traffic: Just a quick note: you will need to update the link count manually and the process takes quite some time, so you don’t want to do that too often. Popularity Contest for Wordpress This plugin provides a wealth of information on how well your posts are doing. 1. The summarized popularity data: The first thing you’ll see is the table containing the following data: Post unique views; Category and archive views, Comments, Trackbacks, etc (I wish the table were sortable though) 2. Recently popular pages : the section allows to see most popular posts over the past 30, 60 and 90 days as well over the past year. 3. Most viewed pages and categories : Most viewed pages; Most viewed categories; Most viewed tags; Most viewed archives; Home page views; Feed views; 4. Reactions: Most commented posts; Posts with most trackbacks; Posts with most pingbacks; 5. Averages: Average popularity by category; Average popularity by tag; Average popularity by month. 6. Popular posts within each category. The plugin also offers a handy sidebar widget that allows to list your blog most popular posts by plenty of parameters including overall popularity, archive views, comments, etc: The widget also has quite a few options that allow to exclude views by authors, (dis)able showing the popularity rank of the posts, set the search engines, adjust the popularity values, etc: Notes: The plugin gave me an error on installation but when I left the installation screen it appeared to be working just fine; After installation you will notice that new posts are much more popular than old ones. Since home and feed views have not been recorded for old posts, they won’t be ranked as highly as new posts. Any other suitable plugins I have missed? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 2 Great Wordpress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful Continue reading →

Once You Start, Can You Stop?

cgseo — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:04:16 +0000

Warning: Link building is addictive. It’s like working out. Once you get going and you see results, you want to keep on. You want to do more and more but what happens if you slow down or stop your efforts? With exercise, you’ll gain weight again, most likely. With links, it’s not as straightforward. Will stopping, or slowing down, raise a red flag? Will your past results look like they came about through spammy efforts? Will your current results remain in place when there’s no more actively driven effort? Here’s the thing about basic SEO…there are principles in place that, once enacted, can indeed produce excellent results. Theoretically, if you did practice good SEO and you optimized your site perfectly, you should rank highly and stay there. However, this rarely happens. The industry changes, as we’ve most recently seen with the amazing popularity of social media. That alone has caused many people to rethink their marketing strategies. People also game the system. Thus, if you sit around not doing a whole lot, you’re going to get passed by, and quickly. With link building, things can get extra complicated. Look at any backlink history graph and, chances are, you’ll see something that makes you wonder what exactly happened at a specific point. Why are there spikes? What happened? You’ve probably done the same thing with traffic in your analytics package. That’s because, in most cases, there was something that occurred to cause a blip of some sort. Since link building is such a well known and much abused marketing tactic, it’s only natural that this might raise a red flag. Stopping a full-scale link building effort can easily produce one of these weird little points in time on your graph. Conversely, people DO become addicted to links. They want more and more and more, never thinking about what will happen when they do slow down. If links aren’t pursued with traffic in mind, only rankings, the traffic isn’t going to match the massive increase in links most likely. That’s a bit of a red flag, don’t you think? One of the problems with always wanting more is that you end up with a strict quantity mindset. You want 50 more links, but you don’t stop to think about alternate ways to get them, or different pages to work on, or anchor text variations. You just want more links. As you probably know, all links are not the same. You can get a massive boost in rankings from one fantastic authority link, and the traffic that comes with a link like that can equal what you’d get from 1000 crappy little links on blogs that no one ever sees. So my answer is no, you can’t stop. You shouldn’t stop. However, keep going for the right reasons and don’t just get greedy. Recognize that link building is a continual effort but that, with the right links, it can certainly be easier than if you do it poorly. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Once You Start, Can You Continue reading →

Beginner’s Guide to Link Metrics

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:25:00 +0000

In the beginning, search engines were crap. I don’t mean to knock the pioneers, but they simply relied too heavily on what webmasters said their websites were about. That’s why porn sites ranked for searches like, “the whitehouse.” People are shameless – if they can scam their way into money, you’d better believe they’ll do it. Follow the incentives. When Google came onto the scene, touting founder Larry Page’s new PageRank metric, things changed. PageRank was a way to measure websites not by how relevant their webmasters said they were – but by how relevant and authoritative other webmasters said they were. Since then, links have been central to getting sites to rank in search results. It’s nearly impossible to rank without them. PageRank is definitely not a tell-all metric, but one of its core theories still holds true: Not all links are created equal. If you’re getting into the SEO game now you probably already know you need links to rank. And you’ve probably been run through the gamut on how you can build/attract them. This post assumes manual link building (i.e. everything other than linkbait) is at least part of your strategy. Link metrics essentially answer (or attempt to answer) this question: how strong is the page where the link will be published? The stronger the page, the stronger the link it passes. What follows is an introductory guide to metrics we can use to evaluate links. PageRank To learn the basics of PageRank it’s a good idea to read Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s thesis paper, The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine , from their PhD work at Stanford. Yes, it’s academic writing, so you may want to stab your eyes out with a pretzel at some point, but this document formed the basis of one of the biggest technology revolutions in modern history, so buck up. Alright, I know probably 95% of you won’t read the paper – so have a look at this graphic. It gives you the basic idea. (Arrows represent links.) Things have changed since PageRank was first conceived (quite a bit), but the basics are still in play. PageRank is basically a 1-10 score for a page based on how many links it has (and how strong those links are). It’s logorithmic, meaning it’s 10x harder to get from 2 to 3 as it is to get from 1 to 2. It generally follows that the higher the PageRank of a particular page, the more PageRank (or “link juice”) that page can pass to other pages through its links. While most SEOs worth their salt will tell you to ignore PageRank, they still secretly check it when nobody’s looking. How can you collect PageRank data? With a toolbar ( Google Toolbar , SEOQuake ) With live SERP displays ( SEOmoz Toolbar does it , SEOQuake ) mozRank & mozTrust (from Continue reading →

Put Your Content Copies Under Control

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:24:34 +0000

We are all being copied. The moment any new article gets published, it is being republished on some crappy blog (more often than not, without any credit). There’s not much we can do about that. This post is about those content stealing that is done through direct copy-pasting from the page. This is just one way to steal your content but it is used pretty often. So how do we go about people copying our content? 1. Force a link back to your Continue reading →

Cold Calling For Links: Advice from Door to Door Sales

cgseo — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:35:20 +0000

About 8 years ago, I was offered a job in door to door sales. I thought it would probably be the scariest, hardest job I could ever do. So I took it. I figured if I could spend a summer selling coupon cards to strangers on their doorsteps then I could probably do anything. I was right. I learned that selling anything door to door pretty much sucks. But I also learned that being positive and resilient is an asset in any line of work. Hell, my door to door sales pitch even helped me get hired to my first SEO job. Link builders can pull a lot out of a sales person’s bag of tricks; here are just a few of the ones that have proven true in my experience. Have a Great Opening, and a Killer Continue reading →

Find More Backlink Opportunities with Site Finder (SEJ tools)

cgseo — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:41:18 +0000

One of the most tedious link building tasks is looking for backlink opportunities. There may be plenty of ways to do that but the first thing I usually do is learning who links to my competitors. This way I both get a deeper look into the niche, analyze competitors’ link building tactics and find some backlink opportunities for myself. The easiest way to start is to actually grab the top ten domains ranked first for your main keyword and research their backlinks using your favorite backlink checker. This is exactly what Site Finder , one of the most useful features inside SEJ Tools , does. Site Finder allows you to enter a keyword phrase and then it automatically finds and ranks domains that link to the top ten Google results for that keyword phrase. It then uses a combination of ranking factors to determine how valuable a link from one of the returned domains would be to your site… So, just give it your main key phrase and the tool will return the table containing the following data: Domain name of your potential backlink provider; The site “quality” (represents the summary of the below listed metrics); Connections (number of competitors the site links to); ACRank (powered by MajesticSEO ); mozRank (powered by SEOmoz ); Page authority; Backlinks (Number of backlinks from that page). You can hide any of the metrics: You can also configure the number of rows displayed per page or use the search option to filter the table by a keyword. Additionally, you can also hide any of the lines or add it to the link manager . You can also see the list of your top competitors and some summarizing data for each of them (like Google position and retrieved backlinks): Lastly, you can export the whole table to a CSV or a PDF file. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Find More Backlink Opportunities with Site Finder (SEJ Continue reading →

Pitching Link Requests – One Size Doesn’t Fit All

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:20:11 +0000

Imagine that you are a salesperson for a shoe store. There are three potential customers in the store – an athletic male, a professionally dressed female, and a rugged outdoorsman. Approach #1: You tell all three potential customers that you have 100% authentic Australian made Ugg Boots at discounted prices. Approach #2: You tell the athletic male that Nike running shoes on sale. You tell the professional female that designer pumps are on special this week only. You tell the outdoorsman that hiking boots are on clearance. Which of the following approaches will get the most sales? And what does this have to do with link requests? You have seen them. The cookie cutter link requests that are probably sent out to hundreds of people with the same anchor text and description. More often than not, the links themselves have nothing to do with anything on the website. Since they are sent out in mass, they probably do get some results. But are the results high quality and relevant? The Link Request Sales Pitch Consider link requests like sales pitches, with the webmaster as the potential customer. How can you customize your pitch to fit each customer? Analyze the Website First, take a good look around the website. Is it personal or professional? Is it directly or indirectly related to the link I want to have added to their site? The ultimate goal is determining how the link request will benefit their site and their visitors. Find a Contact Name Good salespeople like to address their potential customers by name. So look for the name of the website owner (if possible) or find a directory that lists the name of the person who runs the website. This way, instead of “Dear Webmaster” you can send something more personalized and direct. Preferred Contact Method Each website has a preferred method of contact, whether it is by email to a specific department or through a contact form. If the page you would like to have your link added to has contact information for someone who maintains that page or directs you to their contact form, that is the avenue through which you should request the link. Study the Link Format When crafting the request, look at how links are formatted on the page your link would be placed upon. Are they using URL’s, company names, or anchor text? Do they have a short or detailed description, or additional information such as address, phone number, etc.? However they link to other sites is how your link details should be formatted. If the link details you send do not fit the mold, and the webmaster has to contact you for additional details, then chances are they are not going to respond at all. Prove the Link’s Value The thing that closes the sale is making your product valuable, and this can definitely be said about links. The link you want to place has to be a valuable to the website owner and their visitors. So if you have the option to add a description to your link, make sure the description is something that is enticing to the website’s visitors. Otherwise, be sure to emphasize how the link you are submitting is valuable to the website’s visitors in your link request. Check for Broken Links Now, for that little something extra. If there is one thing webmaster’s despise, it’s broken links. There is a Firefox plugin called Check Page Links , and all you have to do is right click on a page and run the plugin to highlight broken links. Typically, there is at least one on the page to which you want to be added. Letting the webmaster or site owner know that one of their resources is no longer available means they are more likely to take the time to edit the page. While they are there, they might as well add on your valuable link, especially if it’s a good replacement to one they just lost. Is it Worth It? Does this sound like a lot of extra work? Maybe. But you have to look at it this way. As a link builder, you could spend a lot of time seeking out a large quantity of sites, send a pre-formatted template, and receive positive responses from only a small percentage of those sites. Or, you could take a little extra time with each request you send out to higher quality sites, and receive a larger percentage of positive responses from a smaller amount of requests. Also, if you personalize the request, it will be less likely to be reported as spam than the generic sounding requests. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Pitching Link Requests – One Size Doesn’t Fit Continue reading →

Link Bait Auto-Generated

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:03:23 +0000

Warning: this post is intended to be sarcastic. It shows how some fun link-baiting article (you may see on the front page of many popular social sharing sites) can be generated with help of simple web-based free tools. By this sarcasm, I don’t mean to say that I am not guilty myself, so who be the judge? 1. Need some

How to Smartly Interlink Your Blog Content with SEO Smart Links

cgseo — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:21:05 +0000

Interlinking your sub pages is a great way to both improve your rankings by using keyword-targeted anchor texts and also increase the crawl rate and depth (as well as click-through). While linking to your older articles when writing the post manually is a must, taking advantage of some smart automation is also a good idea. The best Wordpress plugin I have ever seen that does smart, automated and highly customizable interlinking is called SEO Smart Links . SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog… SEO Smart Links looks for keyword phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages (as well as categories and tags). These phrases are then turned into the links. Let’s see it in action. The site that I’ve used it for is DailySEOTip because it has a lot of content from guest contributors which naturally should be properly inter-linked. You are welcome to browse the site and see how the pages are interlinked. Now, let’s see all the options and features. Option 1: Set Types of Pages to Continue reading →