Link Building With Articles

A many different ways for link building. One of the huge rewards is writing and submitting articles. The article submission is one of the best of the link building methods is that it not only functions as a link building exercise but also a traffic source. Honestly, can you think of a better use of your online marketing time than a tactic that provides for traffic and which can help improve your search engine visibility? Neither can I.

That being said, simply whipping off an article and putting it up on your site is not going to do it. There are a few crucial steps to making the most of your efforts. It may take a bit longer to do it right but the rewards will be much higher as well. Here are the basic steps to writing an effective article that gets well picked up and can provide you with some solid traffic and links.

Pick A Topic

Picking a topic for your article can often be harder than it sounds. When you're selecting a topic you can't simply write about the first thing that pops into your head. There are two questions you need to ask yourself when you're selecting your topic:

1.Will the editors care? If the editors of related websites aren't going to care about your topic then it's not going to get published. If it's not going to get published then you can probably find better uses for your time – like golf or shopping for blue widgets online.
2.Will bloggers care? The second questions is whether other online publishers will be interested in the content. If an editor publishes your content and other link to it, that makes the like to you on the publisher site all the stronger.
Something I've found handy is reading through your FAQ's. If clients and site visitors regularly ask you the same questions, these are likely good topics for your article (though an article on your shipping policies probably won't get picked up too widely). Another great place to start when thinking of a topic to write about is your own brain. Are there questions you've asked that took a ton of time or research to answer? If so – answer the question for others and cover the research and you're likely to get well picked-up.

Write The Article

While picking a topic can be hard, constructing the article can be all the more difficult. An article needs to have a specific point and must provide the reader with a means to understanding why you're making that point.

Let's take this article for example; once I knew I wanted to write an article on how to use article writing as a link building method I knew what the tone would be: instructional. After that it was a matter of deciding what I wanted to cover in the article (picking a topic, writing the article, testing the article and article syndication). After I'm done writing this article I'll have it proof-read by a couple people who aren't involved with our site and then I'll syndicate it in hopes of developing some solid, highly-relevant links and secure some equally relevant traffic.


Testing

I don't have a ton to say on this topic. Get people to proof-read your article. Ideally you'll find people from inside and outside your industry to proof the article.

Also, watch the pickup rates on your different articles by searching for it after submission. Pay attention to the types that get picked up and where and focus future articles for the best outcome (whether that's links or traffic or both – you'll have to decide based on the statistics generated by each articles)

Article Syndication

And now for the entire purpose of the article – the syndication. There are two main avenues you can look down (and should) when looking to syndicate your articles. You can find an article syndication service for submissions (very good for a large number of article directories) and you can seek topic-specific sites that will accept your articles.

As I am affiliated with an article syndication company I won't list your options there for fear of a conflict of interest and thus diminish the article. Instead I'll focus on finding specific sites to submit your article to and will assume you will select your own large distribution options.

To find sites to submit your articles to you may need to think outside the box. You'll need to run a number of searches for related phrases that will yield the best results. For example, if I worked for a web design company I might search for places that accept articles that are related to web design, hosting, SEO, small businesses and anything else I could think of. For example, I would begin my search on Google with “web design article submit” and extend it from there.

If you list your results in sets of 100 you can order them by PageRank or Backlinks and go for the higher valued sites first.

Once you've got a solid list you can complete your submissions to it. Don't forget to document your submissions as well as any account information for future reference as you'll likely want to submit another article down the road. Also, you'll want to add a few sites each submission so you've got a constantly evolving list with more and more backlinking domains.

How to use Meta name "robots" tag

How do you explain a spider of a search engine you only want him to index just the first page of your website or he is allowed to index the whole website. You use the so called ROBOTS tag.

The robots meta tag is not the same as the file called robots.txt You should use these two together. Both are used by the seach engines like Yahoo and Google. If you use this meta tag the wrong way you might shut the search engines out. So the influence of this meta tag is significant.

<meta content="selection" name="robots">

Example meta tag robots

Add the following meta tag in the HTML source of your page:
<meta content="index, follow" name="robots">

The spider will now index your whole website.
The spider will not only index the first webpage of your website but also all your other webpages.

you are also allowed to type it like this:
<meta content="INDEX, FOLLOW" name="robots">

<meta content="INDEX, FOLLOW" name="robots">


<meta content="index follow" name="robots">

By changing the index to no-index and the follow to no-follow your are able to influence the behaviour of the spider. If you don't want the search engine spider to crawl through your whole website you use the following meta tag :
<meta content="index, nofollow" name="robots">

The spider will now only look at this page and stops there.

<meta content="noindex, follow" name="robots">

The spider will not look at this page but will crawl through the rest of the pages on your website.
<meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots">

The spider will not look at this page and will NOT crawl through the rest of your webpages.

This metatag can also be typed with the / in the end of the tag:
<meta content="index, nofollow" name="robots">


<meta content="noindex, follow" name="robots">


<meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots">

Where do you add this robot tag?

You add this robot tag on the first index page and you tell the spider if you want your whole website to be crawled or not.
Make sure that on every page relevant meta tags are added. Add keywords and phrases that are relevant and correspond to the text and the language on that specific page. It might be a lot of work to add specific meta tags to each page but you will notice in time that it works!

Meta tags Summary - Important SEO things to remember
We suggest that you use the Meta tags in your index.htm or index.html page. Than in all other important pages and last but not least in all the pages of your website. Make sure to put some extra effort in it, it will attract extra visitors to your webpage. Create relevant different meta tags for each and every page.

What a Search Engines Spider Does?

The first thing that you need to understand is what a search engine "spider" is, and how it works. A "spider" (also known as a "robot" or "crawler") is a software program that search engines use to find what’s out there on the ever-changing web.
There are many types of spider in use, but for now, we’re only interested in the one that actually "crawls" the web finding pages. This is a somewhat oversimplified picture, but basically this program starts at a website, loads the pages, and follows the hyperlinks on each page. In this way, the theory goes, everything on the web will eventually be found, as the spider crawls from one website to another. Search engines may run thousands of instances of their web-crawling spider programs simultaneously, on multiple servers.
When a "crawler" visits one of your web pages, it loads the page’s contents into a database. Once a page has been fetched, the text of your page is loaded into the search engine’s index, which is a massive database of words, and where they occur on different web pages.
So there are really three steps. It starts with crawling (fetching pages), then indexing (breaking them down into words for the index), and a final step where the links (web page addresses / URLs) that are found get fed back into the crawling program to be retrieved.
When the spider (some of them will check later to verify that a page really is offline) doesn't find a page, it will eventually be deleted from the index. This is one reason why it’s important to use a reliable web hosting provider.

The Best Top Ten Tips for SEO To Improved Search Engine Placement

Read Website Optimization in Ten Easy Steps
1.Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to.

Due to Google's aging delay for all new domains, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all possible. If you're redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.

2.Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines.

This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those "someones" are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet target audience needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

3.Research your keyword phrases extensively.

The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as our Keyword Search tool, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as "travel" or "vacation," as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.

4.Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research.

Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let's say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they're looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child's stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as "preschool toys.") Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site's navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.

5.Program your site to be "crawler-friendly."

The search engines can't fill out forms, can't search your site, can't read JavaScript links and menus, and can't interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn't mean that you can't use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You'll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you'll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There's nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard tags, as the search engines can follow image links just fine.)

6.Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes as clearly and descriptively as possible.

Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Don't make them guess what's at the other end with links that say "click here" or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

7.Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see."
This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn't be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn't going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

8.Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag.
Title tags are critical because they're given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you've written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it's on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

9.Make sure your site is "link-worthy."
Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site's overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking. It's fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

10.Don't be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings.
If you've done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. It certainly won't hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don't simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something.

It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!

How To Submit Your Site To Search Engines

Nowadays, it's not absolutely necessary to submit your sites to search engines, mostly because once your site is up and running, it will (usually) be found by search engines regardless of whether you went through the submission process or not. However, submitting your site to Web directories is still recommended. It's not difficult, but does take a bit of time. Here are the very basics of what you need to do to submit your site to a Web directory.

1. Pick the directory that you're interested in, and find out their guidelines for submission. Examples of Web directories are Google Directory, Yahoo Directory, and the Open Directory Project.
2. Are there any rules or regulations that affect your site content? If so, adjust accordingly.
3. If there are limitations that you need to adhere to, find out what they are and stick to them. These could be a limited number of categories, or a limited number of times you can submit your site in a 24-hour period.
4. Find out how much money, if any, they are charging. This is when you'll have to decide if you want to pay-for-inclusion, or submit it for free (this will depend on the needs of your site).
5. Locate the most appropriate category for your site, and see what other people are doing. You might get some ideas for better design or content.
6. Write a brief (200 words or less) description of your site. Be as precise as possible. Don't use "sales" language; instead, use keywords and phrases that appear throughout your site and present your site in such a way that users will want to visit it.
7. After submitting your site, check back about once a week to make sure it's there. It can take a while for your site to initially show up, so be patient.

Tips:

1. Rules are there for a reason. Find out what these directories want from you, and follow those rules to the letter.
2. Use the nifty spell check option on your computer before submitting anything. It really does make a difference.
3. Make your description as precise, compelling, and keyword-rich as possible.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations
• Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

A lot of what is known as black hat SEO actually used to be legit, but some folks went a bit overboard and now these techniques are frowned upon by the general SEO community at large. These black hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web site that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that.
Black Hat SEO Techniques To Avoid
- Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines. Learn how to find and place keywords and phrases the right way on your Web site with my article titled Learn Where And How To Put Keywords In Your Site Pages.
- Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.
- Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher. Read more about doorway pages.
Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.

Measuring Relevance and Popularity

Modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR). That science has existed since the middle of the 20th century, when retrieval systems powered computers in libraries, research facilities, and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:

Relevance - the degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheaders.

Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other document that references it.

These two items were translated to web search 40 years later and manifest themselves in the form of document analysis and link analysis.

In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the title, the meta data, the heading tags, and the body of text content. They also attempt to automatically measure the quality of the document (through complex systems beyond the scope of this guide).

In link analysis, search engines measure not only who is linking to a site or page, but what they are saying about that page/site. They also have a good grasp on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the site's registration records, and other sources), who is worthy of being trusted (links from .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason), and contextual data about the site the page is hosted on (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).

Link and document analysis combine and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tells the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithm then determines scoring for the documents and (ideally) lists results in decreasing order of importance (rankings).

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google's results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search - people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site, carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization's success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

Why can't the search engines figure out my site without SEO help?
Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.