Elements of Link Building

There are countless opportunities for link building. Everything starts on your site. Your
site should make it easy and intuitive for anyone wanting to link to it. To increase your
chances of people linking to your site, you need to provide something of value.
Basic Elements
The following subsections talk about the rudimentary elements that all sites need to
consider.

Take out the guesswork
Take out the guesswork for your web visitors by providing the HTML code fragment(s)
for people to link to your site. Create “Link to Us” and “Tell a Friend” links. Most CMS
software includes prebuilt forms for handling these simple concepts.

Run a daily, weekly, or monthly email newsletter
Running your own newsletter provides several benefits. First, you get to remind your
existing visitors of your new offerings, whether it is content, products, or services. Plus,
the recipients of your newsletter are likely to forward it to people they know if they find
your newsletter interesting.

Provide registered services
Many sites offer free and members-only content. This model offers several benefits. If
your free content is already great, many of your visitors will also be interested in your
members-only content. The idea is that the content that is provided to members only
is of even greater quality than the public content. Many sites charge for members-only
content. Providing registered services helps you build up the email lists

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Use Intelligent Page Formatting For Seo

Try using smaller paragraphs with mixed-case text. Use boldface, italics, uppercase,
and different text color variations for emphasis. Employ browser-safe fonts such as
Times New Roman, Georgia (serif font), Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana (sans serif font).
Strategically employ bulleted lists, headings, and subheadings for clarity and information
organization. Using these options is helpful from an SEO perspective. Furthermore,
employ sufficient alignments, whitespace, and text padding for additional clarity
and web page look and feel.

Be mindful of web-safe colors. Use high-contrast color schemes for clarity and ease of
reading. Be consistent with colors. Don’t use too many colors. Try to stay away from
image backgrounds.

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Video Sitemaps Seo

Video Sitemaps are yet another extension of XML Sitemap Protocol. Video Sitemaps
can be helpful if your videos show up in Google SERPs. The following fragment shows
a basic video Sitemap with one example video:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://mydomain.com/article23423.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://mydomain.com/videos/article23423.flv
</video:content_loc>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
For simplicity reasons, just one video is listed with only the single optional tag of
<video:content_loc>. You can use many other optional tags to further classify videos.
For more information on all the optional video tags,

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Using Analytics As a Business Case for SEO

You can use a properly structured plan as the business case for an SEO project. The way to do
this is to express the target results of an SEO project in terms of financial impact. You could
include a variety of metrics in a business case,
such as:
• Revenue
• Lead generation
• Margin
• Branding value
• Reach
• Other action triggers (newsletter sign-ups, contact requests, demo requests, free-trial
acceptance, viewing a specific piece of content, etc.)
Measuring such things requires that you tie organic search engine visits to the revenue and
other conversions that result.

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Why Measuring Success Is Essential to the SEO Process

Although quantifying deliverables and measuring progress are important for external reporting
purposes, it is just as important for SEO practitioners to measure the efficacy of their own efforts
to make timely adjustments as necessary. As you will see in this chapter, numerous tools are
available to aid in this process.

At the beginning of any SEO project it is wise to establish baseline data points for the website.
This includes the following:
• Quantifying organic search traffic by search engine and keyword
• Quantifying a baseline of the major keywords that are driving traffic by search engine
• Quantifying a breakout of what sections are getting the current organic search traffic by
search engine and keyword
• Quantifying data on conversions broken down by search engine and keyword
• Identifying poorly performing pages
• Tracking search engine crawler activity on the site
• Determining the number of indexed pages
• Identifying 404 error pages and external sites linking to these pages, if any
Remember: you cannot methodically improve what you cannot measure.
Defining and mapping the path toward concrete goals are crucial aspects of the SEO process—
and over time, some goals may change. Therefore, it is also important to make sure the data
you capture helps you understand your progress against these goals.

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Google Quality Guidelines: Search engine spam

Hidden text Using invisible text specifically tailored to search engine spiders
Cloaking Presenting different content for the same URL to the web user and the search engine spider
Sneaky redirects Using JavaScript to redirect web users to a page they did not expect, usually one that is unrelated to their
search query
Irrelevant keywords Employing techniques such as keyword stuffing
Duplicate content Using the same content on numerous domains or subdomains
Badware Using malicious tactics including phishing (pretending to be another site) and malware software
(installable on the victim’s PC)
Doorway pages Pages designed specifically for search engines to rank for certain search terms. Typically, doorway pages
include a redirect to the target page of interest

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Search Engine Spam

Search engine users search to find relevant content. And search engines try to deliver
links to relevant content. Unethical SEO, referred to in the industry as spam, attempts
to boost page rank by abusing the idea of relevant content—that is, improving page
rank by doing something other than delivering quality, relevant pages. So, for example,
getting a page about Viagra to come up in a search for sports results would be considered
search engine spam.

If you are an established brand or company, your image is everything and you will do
everything to protect that image. If you are struggling to get to the top of the SERPs,
you might be tempted to use artificial, or black hat, SEO. Artificial SEO strives for
immediate benefits—usually to make a quick profit. Its sole focus is in tricking search
engines by finding loopholes in the search engine algorithms. It is this “tricking” component
that makes it unethical SEO. Nevertheless, black hat SEO practitioners are
always looking for ways to manipulate search engine results.

What exactly are such SEO practitioners trying to do? Simply put, they are trying to
use search engines to get much more traffic. The goal is as simple as the law of large
numbers. Suppose a site gets 50 search engine referrals per day. On average, it takes
about 200 referrals to make a sale. This means it takes four days to make only one sale.
Some people need better sales results than that, and they are easily tempted by unethical
techniques to attain the results they desire.

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SEO Keyword Tuning with PPC Testing

The PPC paradigm allows for fast, real-time feedback loops. You do not need to wait
several weeks or months to realize whether your SEO is working.
Say you have a list of pages with specific targeted keywords.

You can create an equivalent
PPC test campaign using exact keyword matching to see whether your pages
perform as expected. You can also use broad keyword matching to see whether there
are other keywords that you may have missed but are producing good conversion rates.
Finding mistakes quickly can save you a ton of money and time in the long run. Use
PPC platforms as your SEO testing ground.

Choosing Better Keywords
When it comes to choosing keywords, you should generally be interested in highvolume,
low-competition keywords. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool shows you
relative keyword search volume numbers. Although the accuracy of this data is questionable,
it should give you a relative baseline when comparing different keywords. If
you take this information together with the number of derived competitors by using
Google’s intitle:, inurl:, and inanchor: commands

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Utilizing blog comments, newsgroups, and forum postings

The idea is much the same when posting comments to blogs, newsgroups, and forums
as it is when submitting articles. Simply include your signature with your URL every
time you post. Note that some sites do not allow URLs. Others employ the nofollow
attribute to discourage you from placing links in your posts.
The basic rule of thumb is to be relevant to the topic you are posting about. Try to
include keywords relevant to your site. Otherwise, your post could look like spam and
you might get banned. Here are some search command tips you can use to find relevant

discussion sites:
"video games" forum
wine producers inurl:forum
"sports apparel" inurl:forum
"fishing gear" forum
Build a Complementary Site
This is not a call to create duplicated content. You want to create a complementary
content-rich site that targets many other keywords not specifically targeted on your
main site. You can utilize a free host or an inexpensive shared host when using this

technique. Go easy with cross-linking. Too much or too little is not good. Use a more
balanced, natural approach. Host these sites on different IPs as well as different IP range
blocks if you can.

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Adding Your Links Everywhere

You can do many things outside your site to foster healthy link building. You can write
articles, submit blog comments, and post to newsgroup and forum messages. What
you want to do is leave your URL within any content you create.
Submitting articles

Many sites let you submit your articles, including ArticlesBase, EzineArticles, Article
Geek, and many others. When you choose your article submission vendor, ensure that
your articles are always properly credited.
When your articles are (re)published, you want to make sure they contain appropriate
attribution by containing one or all of the following: your name, a link to your biography
page, and a URL of your choice. To find more article submission services, simply search
for article submission service. You may also want to find article submission services for
your niche. Simply add your pertinent keywords to the same query to find relevant
providers.

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