In the previous post, I mentioned that it is better for you to have more websites pointing to your site than it is for you to have a ton of outbound links. And if you do have a ton of outbound links it is better that the balance is in your favor (ie: have more inbound than outbound).

Trying to establish your website and your credibility in the market can be time consuming. And normal link exchanges are good, but they create an equal balance of links (same amount of inbound and outbound links). So how do you maximize your inbound links without having to waste a lot of time trying to get others to link to you and having those links be unreliable time after time? The answer is in what you already know.

No? Well, think about it. You have a website (often times a business behind that website), then that means you have something to say, and are at least knowledgeable in some area. So why not use that expertise to create link-backs? Thousands of webmasters are doing it already. How so, you ask?

Write an article!

You have knowledge and experience about a particular area. Writing an article is a good way to employ that expertise in improving your back-links. I say this from experience. When I first started one of my sites, I had no back-links, no index, nothing. In combination with what I did using forums (more on that later in this post), in less than 20 days, I had a total of 300 back-links! That was with a moderate effort.

So you’re interested, right? There’s some information that you need to know, of course. First, when you write an article, you are writing it with the express (sometimes) permission for others to reprint it for use in their newsletters, their websites, etc. You get the credit for the authorship, of course. And when the article is published, it has a link your website in the bio. That’s how it works.

Second, often times, you don’t know where it will be published unless the publisher contacts you to let you know. This isn’t always a bad thing because if it is a good article, there will be high demand for it and it’s a good way to spread your authority and create some buzz about you and your website.

Third, if you look back at what I mentioned about how successful I was, I mentioned that it was a moderate effort. I started with a new site, original content and sought for a way to spread some of my links far and wide without going overboard. Too often site owners think that with a good hard push, generating a lot of articles will give them the best exposure. I used to think this was the case when I started out learning about the effects of articles. But as I started to learn more about the search engine algorithms, I discovered that too many links generated in a short amount of time can often have a negative effect on your efforts.

When I am submitting articles for others to use as content, I tend to remain conservative as to how many articles I write in a said length of time. This helps to make sure that I don’t have a negative mark on my sites.

If you are interested in submitting articles for others to use, check out the following websites:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com

Each site has different recommendations for articles but in general they are similar. Just follow the guidelines set by the users and you are sure to have the best results.

Forums

Now I have to say that if you aren’t using part of your time during the day to improve your knowledge in what you do, you are at a standstill. Time and time again, I see others who tend to think they know all that there is to know about something and refuse to grow.

But if I told you that growing your knowledge can also help you with back-links, would you think differently? I already know your answer. If you don’t know about the power of forums (a.k.a. message boards) take a few minutes and search Google to learn about them. The reason I say this is because not only can you expand on your knowledge and the knowledge of others, but you can also produce quality back-links using these tools.

It’s like being able to access someone else site and manually put links to your site on them. It’s wonderful! There are some beneficial things you might want to consider if you are doing this though.

First, you want to start your posting on a forum that is related to the content on your site. That way, when you are conversing with people there, asking questions and providing advice, you are using your time to grow your knowledge and creating the back-links. It also helps if the page rank of the forum is higher than most. This will ensure faster indexing of your links.

Second, in order for you to get the full benefit, you need to make sure the forum that you are posting on is being indexed by the search engines. If the advice you are posting is not getting to the search engines, you aren’t doing yourself any good. Also, make sure that the signature lines of the posts are indexed as well. Some forums boast of the ability to hide your signature and thus remove any seo benefits to you

Third, make sure you can put your website in the signature block of your posts. That is what creates the links. Often times, when you are updating your forum profile, you can add the site to your signature line and have it automatically added to all of your posts. Once again, make sure that signature line can be indexed by the search engines.

One other thing: Referring back to my earlier comment about being conservative. I do believe that with forum posting, you should be conservative. But your goal should not be to improve your rankings with these posts. These are good ways to further solidify your bottom line as far as link-backs. Eventually, some of these posts will be dropped from the search engines and it’s difficult to determine when or why. But when you post, your goals should be to improve your knowledge and the knowledge of others so that everyone benefits.

Good Luck

We often try to make others believe that our business or our websites are flawless. In reality, though, every business has weaknesses. The weaknesses are in various areas, but often times, those weaknesses extend to the search engine marketing portion of their business plan. Many businesses either don’t know or don’t plan on being in the best position in their category or keyword in the search engines. That weakness can be costing you more money than you think.

Your goal should be nothing but the best. For the right categories and the best keywords, you should strive for your website to be on the top. So, in order to attain that goal, you need to size up your competition. You need to know whom it is you are facing if you are ever to beat them at their game.

You do this by simply examining the sites that have the top rankings in the search engines for the categories or keywords that you desire. The item that we are going to discuss today is regarding link-backs.

Before I start this section, I want to help you understand that examining all of the factors listed below can be tedious. Under normal circumstances it is good for you to learn the basics of getting the data yourself, kind of like learning to do it the hard way, although there is a lot of data to examine and I have to recommend a third party software to help you weed through all of the factors. The one that I would suggest using is called SEO Elite. The creator of the software is extremely knowledgeable and has authored this software in a way that takes the guesswork out of everything. I have not personally used the software, but I have read the documentation and I know that it was built as the best software for this type of thing. It will save you a lot of time. You can get the software from http://www.seoelite.com/.

Link-Backs

Link-backs are very important to your success in the search engines. It’s comparable to a referral or recommendation. And when a website links to you, especially if that site is ranked higher, you get higher marks. So examine how many links you competition has to their sites and compare that number to yours. One other thing to look at is the page rank of those sites. How do they compare to the ones that link to your site? Generally it’s not a bad thing to have lower page rank websites linking to your website (unless they have been banned by Google) although it certainly helps if you have the higher ranked websites linking to you. And remember, those sites that are similar in content (basically include the same or similar type of information) help you even more when they link to you.

Another factor to consider is whether the links are reciprocal. Reciprocal links are basically link exchanges or mutual links. These types of links are good for getting you started in the search engines, but Google places more weight on the one way links to your website. Examining this is easy with SEOElite. In fact, the software gives you all pieces of information that you need to know regarding back-links, including anchor text. More on that to come.

Another item that you need to pay particular attention to is the anchor text. The anchor text is the word or words that someone uses in describing the link it is pointing to. I have discussed anchor text in detail in some of my other posts so I won’t waste anymore time on that. But anchor text is the spider’s sneak preview into what’s behind the link. If some one says “search engine optimization” and the link goes to this website, then the spider has a good idea that the website behind that link has information on search engine optimization. This helps because when the spider crawls your site, it sees the keywords and the anchor text of the site that referred you and sees the relevancy. Remember, relevancy in the search engines is key.

And whether or not you know, what the website that links to you does affects your ranking too. Take, for instance, a site that has been banned by Google. A link to their site from yours could hurt you. And if they have a lot of links to other websites (unless they are deemed an authority site), it can lower you as well because newer sites that aren’t deemed an authority have stronger power in fewer links.

Once you have examined some of your competitors, you have some of the information available to make changes in your own site to improve your rankings above them. Particularly, you need to focus on getting more one-way link backs that are relevant to maximize your change (and there are ways to do this very simply and easily, more on this in a later post). The change will not happen overnight; in fact it can take months. But with a little diligence and patience, you can achieve your goal of search engine optimization.

Good Luck

I always say, “Being at the top of the search engines is great, but staying there is difficult.” I say this because the search engines are in a relative state of change. They change every hour of every day because the spiders that do the crawling are always going and finding new sites and new content that changes the landscape of the competition.

In order for you to stay ahead of the game, you have to concentrate not only on doing what’s best to maximize your position, but you also have to focus on what isn’t best and stay away from it. In this post, we’ll go into detail about a few items to stay away from and remove from your site when optimizing your site.

Overfilling your Meta Tags

We discussed in a previous post that the key to the best position in the search engines is what is included in your meta tags (specifically the “keywords” meta tag). But when I advised you on this, I suggested that you be thorough, but conservative on how many and what types of keywords to put into your meta tags. The reason I suggested this is because when a search engine crawls your site, it looks at your meta tags as a way to classify your site in specific keywords.

But if you have overstuffed your meta tags with keywords, this can lead to you being banned by Google. By saying “overstuffed”, I mean using too many words in your meta tags. This can happen when you use the same variation of the same word only changing the tense, making it plural, or alternating capitalization. Another way of overstuffing your meta tags is to constantly reuse the same word in various places in the keywords. This attempt to make sure that your site is at the top by stuffing has the opposite effect. In fact, if you have a site that is ranked high, you can lose your position altogether by stuffing. Stay away from it; it only helps if you don’t want a good position.

Title Stuffing

This is one that unnerves me. It happens when I go to a website and instead of seeing a brief title of what the site is about, I see keywords in the title. Yes, KEYWORDS in the title. It’s gaudy and takes away from the quality of the site. But even then, it does more damage than that. Experts state that you need your keyword in the title tag once, no more. That is to help with the relevancy of your meta tags. But when you try to improve your ranking by putting your keywords in the title, it hurts your rankings and may cause you to be removed.

ALT Tag stuffing

This approach is less likely to be noticed by the users of the site and more by Google. If you remember from my previous post, that alt tags are small pieces of information that helps your images improve the relevancy of your site because if the pictures that you have on your site relate to the content of your site, your position in the ranks goes up. Alt tags need to be short and concise because if your picture doesn’t load or some one scrolls over the picture, the tag remains only for a few seconds. Likewise, when the search engines crawl your site, they want to see one of your keywords in the alt tag. A good example of this is if your site is about wedding photography and one of your keywords is “bride” and “photography”. If you have a picture of a bride in a dress, you could have an alt tag that says “Bride in white: Photography by EtCetera Images”. That is a good way to relate your image to your sites content.

Where webmasters can go too far is to just put plain keywords in their alt tags like I mentioned before in the title section. This is a big no-no with the search engines.

Hidden Text

Have you ever been to a website where you scroll to the bottom and they have a set of keywords sitting there? It really gets in the way of the quality of the site and has some consequences with the search engines. But some webmasters are thinking differently nowadays. They care about your viewing experience so much that they now make it blend in with the background by synchronizing the colors. This may enhance your surfing experience, but believe me; Google hates it, so stay away.

By staying vigilant about what you put on your site, you can keep your site out of the dredges and the sandboxes that threaten to swallow any chance of making any success on the search engines.

Good Luck

With this site’s primary purpose being website and internet promotion (albeit through the search engines), I thought I’d take a break from the normal posts and introduce some new technology that is set to break internet barriers in the upcoming months. While it is away from the search engine topic, it does have its roots in website promotion and content management. So here it goes…

Imagine you are a new internet business owner and you are working on the content of your website. You don’t yet have the time or experience to write all the sales copy and product information (if you are selling someone else’s product, which is normally the case). What would you do as far as the content? You want the information to be accurate, up to date, and as low maintenance as possible and you don’t want to have to copy and paste articles and information searching for author permission to do so.

Here’s another position: Imagine you are a free-lance reporter and you are looking to get your information quickly without having to wade through tons of sources to find the information that you need. You need information to be as up to date and reliable as possible because your income is depending upon it. You also need a way to distribute your article and information just as quickly. What do you do?

Or imagine that you own a blog, just like this one, and you have pertinent information that you feel could help people grow their businesses or change their lives without having to have them come directly to your website. You want it to be easy for them to get your information. What do you do?

Or imagine that you have a mailing list of people and the auto responder costs are getting to be too high and it’s too difficult to switch to a new one lest your mailing list subscribers have to opt-in again. You want to cut your cost but still be able to have the subscribers gain access to what you have to say. What do you do?

The answer to all of these is the same thing. For years there has been a technology based on this, but it has not gained interest until recently when the technology has been picked up by the blogs and by Microsoft itself (more on that later). The technology is called RSS or “real simple syndication”. The application is simple: You create an xml file with short or abridged information regarding real content on your website that you have created and when subscribers download the information from that xml file, they are able to access that information without having to go through your website.

In short, you are telling your rss subscribers about the most important or most recent information available on your website without them having to receive an e-mail about it or have to trek through some of the many pages on your site to find it.

What’s the application for you? Simple (and that’s not just a play on words), you have a website right? You either have information that you want to get out or you have a need for information in the form of content on your site. Either way, whatever you do on the internet, whether giving or receiving information, you can use RSS.

For the internet business owner who needs content on his/her site, you can use rss to add targeted content onto your website by using a parser and that information changes as soon as the rss feed owner updates his/her file. Fresh content, relevant, accurate (to a degree) and timely; what more could you want. With a few slight modifications to your code you could be receiving this informational content automatically.

And even if you aren’t that savvy about the guts of your website, there are alternatives that offer the same benefit. For instance, if you didn’t have the time or the desire to set up the rss parser for your site, you can just as easily request a javascript feed of the same information.

Also, there are rss readers available for personal use on your computer. Imagine having all the information that you might normally receive in email or spend time searching the internet to read, already at your fingertips as quickly as you can click the synchronize button. It’s that simple. RSS is making it easier and less time consuming to get the information that you need.

So, for a reporter who needs to collate his/her information very fast without having to search a lot of sources on the internet, rss can be a very helpful tool. All that information is available as soon as they need it.

And for the blog author, like me, rss feeds allow us to get our information to a mass of people without using email (avoiding spam filters) and thus saving us the time and money of auto responders. Plus, there are services available that can help you track the number of users that subscribe to your feed

RSS is definitely going to change the face of informational management as we know it (in part it already has), but the knowledge of this technology is still in its most primitive form. But there are many large prominent web sites that currently make use of the new technology mainly MSN and MSNBC, and a lot of smaller websites are adapting the technology for their use to give them a leg up before the rest of the world catches on.

While the technology might not be as well known today, information grows rapidly throughout the internet. New information, for example has come from Microsoft that their new Internet Explorer 7 (now in Beta) and their new operating system Vista (also in Beta) will enable rss to become a reality. Right now, the plans are in the making to make rss a part of their technology allowing users to download and subscribe to rss feeds quickly and easily.

And once you have been able to set up and understand a little of the XML language, editing and posting your own rss feed becomes as small as updating information on your site, quick and easy.

Right now, there is a growing wealth of information available on the subject of rss. Your best source of information is your own research. While many website have small bits about it, others can give you step by step techniques for making it the best used technology you have available