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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