My first few times at trying to catch a wave were unsuccessful but after figuring out the search function I was able to hone down to a few waves of interest and of course since I’m kind of a nut for all things link building I was able to find a few wave’s on the subject.

Link Wheels

On one of theses waves I found mention of the term “Link Wheel”. The first thing that came to my mind was a pdf that Howie Schwartz  distributed a few months back that showed a hub & spoke linking method using web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages and Weebly to create authority links.

Lynn Terry’s post Link Wheels and Money Sites Explained puts in to plain words that the concept of the Link Wheel is that you have a money site, and everything else you create is for the purpose of linking to and boosting the ranking of this money site. The money site being where you promote and sell something, the spokes or other sites being relevant content that funnels visitors into that site.

More Information About The Link Wheel Strategy

With a diverse variety of link building sites available on the internet, it can be quite confusing to choose a good site. It is then that an SEO executive can take advantage of a link wheel strategy. But before learning how link wheel …

Sharing Waves

How to share Waves on your self hosted Wordpress Blog

A few months ago I did see waves showing up in search reults but they have all since disappeared. Regardless of the sudden appearance and then disappearance of wave’s I have thoughts that the results will eventually return in one form or another.

I wonder if embedding a wave on a blog will help them rank stronger when Google takes the block down?

Only time will tell.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Wheels and Sharing Google Waves

Well then this is just what the doctor order.

Textlinks is offering 25 one-way links, for free.

Here’s the deal. It’s a free 21 day trail offer but you don’t have to give Textlinks any payment information. Zip. Nada.

You can link to your homepage or any internal page you’d like, TextLinks DOES allow for deep linking. And yes, you can use your own anchor text!

It’s as simple as that and the links you get you keep for life.

This is a pretty cool deal. I’ve done it already, so this is a recommendation based on actually using the service.

Need links, right?!  Jump on this!

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

How To Get 25 One-Way Links

What should be done about black hats?

Can I be “slapped” for over optimizing anchor text in my incoming links?

Do social networking sites work for leveraging traffic to your site?

50 SEO’s One Question

What should we do with the Black Hats? My buddy went to Search Engine Strategies 2009 in London and asked every SEO the same question.

Avoid the Google -50 penalty with anchor text variations

Christoph C. Cemper talks about the recent Google changes on Aug 2009 and Sept 2009 and the newly changed -50 penalties on a keyword & page level due to over optimization of anchor texts.

SEO Tip Utilizing Anchor Text

Not all sites will allow you to utilize anchor text and links to boost your popularity but you still can use the sites to your advantage to get the word out on your web site.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Banned to Australia, Leveraging Social Network Sites and the Google -50 Penalty

Over this past weekend I was visiting a popular forum where a new member asked if external  links they created counted to the overall link count of their page. The first answer they got was “only if the link is a dofollow”.

Up until now I haven’t really weighed in on the nofollow debate but I just can’t sit on the sidelines when advice is given based on just opinion. I’m of the thinking that if your going to offer advice at least back it up with some proof.

Like I said no proof was offered that the nofollow attribute actually is bad for your site. Rather I think it was offered based on mis-information that the user offering the advice has read somewhere in the millions of pages on the topic.

IMHO this kind of advice is total crap!

I’m not going to get into the history of nofollow as there are as many theories on the attribute as there are theories about the Tunguska Event. Instead I’m going to offer “proof” that the attribute has little effect on ranking position. To be totally clear this is not about page rank (PR) it’s about ranking position.

So let’s get to it…

I chose the search term “personalized gifts” and since everyone seems to be fixated on Google I used their search results.

Next I used the Majestic-SEO tool to find the total count of external links to the top 2 ranked sites including the nofollow data. Although this tool might not be the greatest for discovering data I used it because a) it’s free and b) so you could check the results for yourself.

As you can see from this  screen shot the #1 ranked site has over 1 million external links of which 12,492 are reported as nofollow.

The #2 ranked site has 224,616 external links of which 9,968 are nofollow.

Clearly the first site has a lot more nofollow links pointing to it but yet it’s in the #1 position in Google.

Looking a little closer at this data the first thing that jumps out is the total number of backlinks for site #1. This alone may be why they hold the #1 position for the given search term but that’s a post for another day.

Now a day’s I really don’t give a rats butt about pleasing the search engines(sorta). I care much more about the human visitor. Besides, less than 1/100th of 1% (or less) of the people that visit your site even know about nofollow/follow. The normal visitor to your site is there for the content.

If you’re business is new to the web do yourself a favor and don’t get caught up in the nofollow party. If you write/offer great quality content that is worthy of a link people will come check you out regardless of your SEO manipulation.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Enough With This Nofollow Crap

Keyword Research

• Tier 1
• Tier 2
• Long Tail
• Stemming
• Plurals
• Derivatives
• Voodoo (LSI)

Onpage

• Title Tag
• Meta Tag
• Keyword Density
• Style Sheet Emphasis
• Link Text
• First Link Priority
• No Follow

Offpage

• Keyword Targeting
• Link Text
• Authority Linking
• Page Rank Sculpting

Link Building

• Social Sites
• Authority Sites
• Directories
• Press Releases
• Syndicated Content
• Article Distribution
• Multi-Media Distribution

Competitive Analysis

• Trends
• Spying
• Market Data

Site Structure

• No Follow
• Silos
• Theme Vectoring
• Interactivity

Content

• Uniqueness
• Informational
• Descriptions of Product
• Category Assignment
• Usability Balance

Source: MindMapOfUltimateWoe via Andy Jenkin’s Blog – Irreverence Rebellion and interweb marketing

The next time somebody says you just need a few keywords and incoming links think of this list and ask yourself if the person who Tweet’d “bold your keywords” really has a clue about SE algorithms and the many, many things that solidify top ranking.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

The Many Faces Of SEO

Link building is probably the toughest thing for a webmaster to do.

This single task is thought by many to be the single most important thing when it comes to your sites ranking in the search engines. A time consuming, arduous task that should not be ignored.

I learn a lot about building back links by simply reading content produced by fellow bloggers. Since there is a lot of good content on the subject out there already I thought I would reference a few here for your reading.

In Link Building, Quality Trumps Quantity

Too many bloggers have been discouraged by the difficulty of link building. They build their first two or three links and it takes them much longer than they had estimated. They stop building links because they believe they don’t have …

Link Building Evaluation Guide

Link building is by far one of the most important and often misunderstood elements of optimizing a site for search.

20 Link Building Tips & Strategy For Beginners

During the course of July I’ve published simple link building tips for beginners that won’t get your site into trouble and will help your rankings improve and should deliver targeted rankings and traffic.

Friday Link Building Tips

There’s also this new software I think is pretty cool for doing a lot more with your link tracking. I’m going to talk more about it in a video review soon.

Link Building Through Article Marketing – 7 Must Know Tips

Searching for inbound links?Want to improve your ranking on Google? Are you looking for a solid, reliable method to consistently build large numbers of inbound links.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Building Tips from Around the Web

They jumped in without a plan and ended up with a half a dozen weak links from social sites and a few out of the way (off topic) forums. Let me tell you, getting links is much more than forums and bookmarking sites.

Links are not so much about quantity as quality these days but if your  market is very competitive you will still be competing with the 900 lb Gorillas that have a lot of  high quality targeted links pointing to them. You had better have a strategy for your linking building campaign to compete at  this level of competition.

While cruz’in the net today I ran across a few resources to help you better understand the importance of planning your link building to attain those links that really help you and avoid getting the ones that don’t.

Why do my most companies fail in their link-building?

In my experience, many companies fail in their link-building, even when they know it’s important, because an integrated approach is not used. (Many other companies fail because they don’t know the importance of backlinks to SEO, …

Link Building Strategy: Content Creation

Focus on content creation and be sure to do a great job of linking to other content across your site with keyword descriptive links.

Improve Your Link Building Strategy – Better Backlinks Series

Improve your link profile by having a better link building strategy.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Building Strategies

In order to understand what drives website rank you must first look at Google and how it views the web. You have to remember that Google is a computer algorithm, a program. It cannot read a web page like you and I and tell what the content is about and what should be ranked highest.

How can Google tell who should rank in the #1 spot?

There are many factors that effect rankings including keywords, content and site structure but to look at this a little closer we need to look at Google’s explanation of PageRank^TM.

“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank^TM algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

“PageRank^TM also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.”

Source

In part it can be deduced from the above explanations that Google looks at links pointing to your website and determines what the page should rank for, in part based on who is linking to you and more importantly HOW they are linking to you.

As I said earlier, in my opinion links play the largest roll in ranking. But not all links are created equal. A link from a lawyer’s site when you are a florist does little to help your rankings. The best links come from websites that have the same theme or topic as yours, uses your keywords in the anchor text of the link and has a lot of quality incoming links from the same theme/topic related sites as their website and yours.

If website rank depends on links, then keyword specific rank must be dependent on keyword specific links which means effective links are links pointing to your website using the phrase or keyword you want to rank well for in the anchor text of the link.

Assuming I wanted a website to rank for “screen capture tutorials” I would seek out other websites in my topic and format the link to my site something like this:

Five <a href=”http://www.mysite.com>PC Screen Capture Tutorials</a> by Tim

The link ends up looking like this:

Five PC Screen Capture Tutorials by Tim

Note: Your link appears more natural by using word besides your keywords. This goes along way with your link reputation.

It’s not enough anymore to just have links as Google is looking for much more:

• Link popularity
• Link age
• Link authority – links from a site that are ranking high
• Link reputation – crosses over into authority
• Link growth rate – how often are links being added – to fast will hurt you here
• Linking within a topical community – stay within your topic/market
• Link anchor text – natural keyword rich text

So to wrap it up the website with the most and “best” links pointing to it using the proper keyword anchor text will stand the best chance of ranking for that keyword.

Understanding what factors affect rankings and how to effectively include them in your search marketing strategy will help your pages rank well and get the laser targeted traffic that any red-blooded webmaster wants.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

What Actually Drives Most Website Rank

Over the past few years it has become apparent to me that search engines rank web pages in relation to a keyword based on their perception of the authority of that page in relation to that keyword. What a mouth full huh?  In layman’s terms; If your site is about courier services then the content of  the website or page page should be on that topic.

There are a lot of definitions of authority but I believe Google views authority in terms of quantity and quality of links that point to your website. Also from websites that also has quantity and quality pointing to them.

Here are a few of my views on what factors make up a good link -

• Static one way links are better than reciprocal links
• Links from higher PR websites (more authority) are better
• Links from websites with the same theme relevance as the websites they link to are better
• Links that contain the keyword phrase are better
• Links from .edu and .gov rock!

Authority

Authority is a indicator of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered the “go to” source on a particular topic (keyword).

Back link

Back link, or incoming link, is a term used to describe links that are on other web properties pointing your your website.

Static link

A static link is a link from a website that points to you but you don’t have a link on your website pointing to them. If you have a website that has a large number of good quality static one way back links pointing to it then Google will perceive that that website has authority in relation to the keywords that the website is optimized for.

Reciprocal link

A reciprocal link is when you link to them and they link to you. I wouldn’t recommend exchanging links with other websites.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the words used on other peoples web site that form the link back to you. Good anchor text is not the words click here or check this out, rather good anchor text contains the keywords that are relevant to your sites theme and what you want to rank for.

Theme

Lets say your websites theme is  about courier services. You would not want a link from a website that was perceived by Google to be about seo, nor would you want to link to a website about seo. There is no relevance between the two sites and the link, thus is given less consideration.

.edu – .gov

Back links from .edu and .gov are much harder to get but if you can get them they are golden!

There are other factors that might lead to ranking such as the age of the domain, on page optimization and content but by far the websites that rank highest in the search results tend to have the most back links.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Building Factors To Obtaining High Rankings