Google Alerts

Ever wondered how often people are searching for things on Google? or what time people are searching for specific items?

Now Google has just introduced Google Alerts!

The main plan is to allow people to set alerts up to keywords when they are searched and email a summary of the results they produce. Not really 100% sure on the point but its an interesting experiment.

Check it out http://www.google.com/alerts

Generate Backlinks From Blogs

With many new blogs and websites becoming visible to the public online on lots of content to read it is a good move to utilise some of the like minded blogs to produce links back to your sites. This is where creating backlinks from blogs comes in handy.

The main method for this is to create comments on certain blogs which are of interest. The basic process is:

1. Locate blogs on topics which match your blog
2. READ THE POST – this step is important
3. Post a relevant comment
4. Keep following the blog to see any changes or options for more comments.

The 4 steps are easy to follow, but step 1 does require some tools which can be incorporated into the firefox browser.

Tools

There are two main tools I use for locating blogs which will give me the best return for my time on them, these are SEO Quake and NoDoFollow.

SEO Quake aims to show you the results from your web search so you can order them and find out more information such as, number of backlinks, link popularity, page ranking etc. This will give you a list of potential blogs to post comments on.

NoDoFollow is more of a technical nice to have tool. It aims to highlight those links which the search engine spiders are not allowed to follow. The reason for this is that is it worth posting on a site which will not allow a spider to trawl to your website, or find a better site to link from.

Finding Blogs

A trick I have picked up is to use Google to find blogs created using wordpress. Since wordpress puts at the bottom of each site ‘Powered By Wordpress’, this gives us a head start in finding the blog. By typing, your keyword, then ‘Powered By Wordpress’, then ‘comments’ will give you a list of details.

So, if you typed the following into google (including the quote marks):

“SEO Backlinks”,”Powered By Wordpress”, “ Post a Comment”

This would return a list of blogs which relate to your keyword, created in wordpress which have the comments section enabled. SEO Quake should now have woken up and given you a nice tool bar across each link. We can now sort the pages by Yahoo links (so, links in the Yahoo Search Engine). Click on the up down arrows on the first toolbar with sort next to it. This will order the results.

Once you have clicked the blog, it is time to check the links. Hopefully, there have been a few comments added already. This will allow us to check the NoDoFollow rule. Go to Tools > NoDoFollow to enable the plug-in.

Look at the hyperlinks now, if they are in blue, it’s a good site, if they are red, its not going to follow so its not worth adding a link. Find another page in this case.

Posting Comments

Now you have found the blog, it is important to read the page. Do not post comments on a page which has nothing to do with your subject, it’s a waste of time and effort and anyone who is moderating the comment won’t allow it.

Likewise, add a comment which is relevant to the post, don’t post “I like pies” and expect a comment to be moderated and added (unless it’s a blog about pies). Keep it relevant, short and offer some advice or a comment about how well the article is written.

Continue this process until you have built a few links, wait for the results to come into your Google analytics account.

No Follow, Not Strictly No Follow

Above I said about no follow being a bad thing. That’s not 100% true. It is true that it makes life difficult for the spiders to get to your site, but in SEO terms, there is no such thing as a bad backlink! Just some are better than others.

Even if all your suggested links are no follow don’t be disheartened, these are still a vote for your site, just not as strong a vote.

Deep Link Generation

Since we are all well aware that links are the key to decent traffic to a website, then deep linking will allow a site to link to specific articles which are of relevance.

If you were to link to a specific page constantly, say onemillionbacklinks.com then the search engines would begin to think, hmm, there must be something on this page, lets take a look at that single page.

Now, should you decide to do deep linking, then each link will point to a specific item. From a human point of view, this is more natural since when you say, have you seen x on the news pages and send a specific link, it shows that you should be looking at that item. If you just say its on a news site, your pointing to the front page and leaving it to chance that someone will find it, you want a specific person to get to a specific page.

Search engines also like this technique. If you get 50 links to different pages on your site, not only have you got 50 links to your main domain, but also the search engines see your site as having relevant content and thus more important.

S0 the next time you are building backlinks to your site, point to specific pages and this will increase your ranking. For more information, take a look at this blog.

SEO Basic Steps - Part 4

Over the past month I have talked about my current techniques to optimize sites. Although I am no expert I have gained proven results in generating content this way. This is the 4th part in the series and will cover the remaining topics, these being:

• Submit to Search Engines
• Submit To Directories
• Purchase Additional Domains
• Wait For Results

So, lets get started with the first point.

Submit to Search Engines

Although the spiders will find a site eventually its always a good idea to help them along. The idea is to point them to your site and using the sitemap we generated in the last article, we can tell the spiders exactly where to look.

Google makes this simple for us using their webmaster tools. Sign into this and add the file to your site and google know where to view the items. You can then submit a sitemap to the system and your site will eventually get found. Remember though, this is not an instant win solution, your site might be in what google refers to as the sandbox, an area where they are still unsure of your site but will not release it to the wide world in case it has errors.

Bing has a similar solutions for their webmaster tools, allowing you to submit a sitemap to their spiders. Other, less advanced search engines are still done the old fashioned way. A quick method to fix these issues is to use a submission service. These simply submit your site to the engines quicker and allow for their spiders to search your site. A product called Web CEO will allow you to perform this quickly and easily and also view your rankings using other tools.

All these are simple to complete but do not overlook the smaller engines! What if someone has an ask toolbar? if you haven't submitted your pages, it won't get found!

Directory Submissions

The main aim of submitting to directories is to get simple back links to your site. Google See's a back link as a vote for the site so the more you have, the better the ranking (in a simplistic way) so the more you get,the better.

A simple way to do this is to use a directory submission service. These will fill the forms in for a fee and allow you more time to sit about. You can do this manually. If you Google for directories, you will get a vast list. Simply pick some and submit your details of your site. Make sure you go for a lot of the directories since maybe 10% will actually get indexed and found, but a backlink is always useful just in case.

If you are a local business, there are thousands of local directories which you should use. Search engines are moving more towards local searches and returning results with geo-tag information. So, the more location specific you submit too, the more chance you have of getting people to visit your site.

Additional Domain Names

If you have a promotion on a specific item such as free SEO, then it is helpful if you can purchase the domain name, freeseo.com or .co.uk etc. If they are available that is!

The aim of this is to give people a chance to find your site based on an advertising campaign or a search term. Since the site sheep.com for example, should contain information on sheep, search engines will return this first since the content should be relevant, get the correct domain name, and people will flock to your site.

That's all my tips so far for generating traffic, I will come up with more and add them to this blog, but currently, these are the current ones I am using. Now its time to sit back and wait for the traffic to come to your site.

Thanks

Links

• Google Webmaster Tools - www.google.co.uk/webmasters
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3