I hope enjoyed this backlink trick!

As I mention in the video it is important to create a diverse backlinking structure for your sites, as this looks more natural to Google and the other major search engines and will help you get higher search engine rankings.

Also getting links from government and education domains is also valuable, so do some hunting and create as many of this high quality backlinks  as you can.

One thing to keep in mind when building this links, is that if they are on a PR 0 page, as long as it is in the forum thread itself it should be fine, in that your links will be discovered by Google eventually, however it’s not a bad idea to send some bookmark links or even RSS to a PR 0 page to help get the search engines attention quickly.

Just remember that this backlink trick is one of many that I use, so don’t rely on this trick alone but instead add it to the  mix and keep building links, as the people that are patient and consistent with backlinking are the ones that win in the end, it reminds me of the tortoise and the hare children story I read at school!

Also please note that when commenting on forums you should always ensure that you add value to the forum by making a good comment and not spamming the forum for a link. If you are commenting in another language the Google translation tool can help you interpret the thread.

Enjoy!

]]> http://mattsmarketingblog.com/backlinks/backlink-trick/feed/ 132 http://mattsmarketingblog.com/backlinks/professional-link-building/ http://mattsmarketingblog.com/backlinks/professional-link-building/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 05:37:44 +0000 Matt Carter http://mattsmarketingblog.com/?p=1001 Hey guys,

In this post I am going to share with you some important aspects of professional link building, which you need to make sure you are using on your sites.

Google and the other major search engines are not silly. They have some of the brightest minds in the world working for them, who are always coming out with new ways to ensure that the results their search engines display for their users are quality.

We all know that getting backlinks to your sites is a key part of getting top search engine rankings, and at this stage the volume of links you can get seems to play the biggest role. However with that said, there is more to it than just the number of links you can get.

Mixing Up the Anchor Text

When ever you build links to your pages, you have to use good keyword rich anchor text for your links. However if all your links have exactly the same anchor text, this can start to look very unnatural, and something Google dislikes.

If you ever analyze the top sites in any niche in Google, by checking out the anchor text of their links, you will often notice that there is a vast mixture of different anchor text.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to vary up your anchor text in your links, because if the links to your site were developed naturally, which is what Google is looking for, then the chances of them all having the same anchor text is very low.

Therefore a rule of thumb that I work on is, 80% of my links are the exact keyword I am trying to rank the page for, while the remaining 20% are slight variations of this keyword.

For the 20% that make up the variation, I will purposely make spelling mistakes or just a variation on the main keyword I am targeting.

No Follow is Not All Bad

In order to deter people from placing links on their sites, some web masters have the ‘No follow’ on. This tells the search engines to ignore all links leaving the page. Obviously this is not the best thing for your SEO, and relying on these kind of links will not get you top search engine rankings.

However it is still a good idea to get the odd no follow link. Once again, the reason is that this looks more natural. If all your links were not ‘no follow’ this would be odd, and may raise red flags at Google.

Link to Your Links

I have mentioned this last point in a previous post, however I want to repeat it here, because I am starting to realize just how important this is. What I’m referring to is making sure that some of the pages that contain links pointing to your pages, need to have links pointing to them also.

If all the pages that link to you, have no links pointing to them, then once again this will not look natural. What I do is add a second layer of links pointing to these sites and this reinforces the integrity of my overall link structure.

The Danger of Bad Link Neighborhoods

I receive a fair amount of emails from people worried that they have ruined their rankings by creating links on sites that Google doesn’t like. Some people become very worried about this, and rightly so, as losing your rankings is never a nice thing.

However I have a couple things to say about this matter, and this opinion is shared by a lot of my friends in the industry also.

The first thing you need to know is that SEO is not instant. By this I mean, just because you do one thing today it does not mean the result tomorrow was caused by what you did the day before.

The danger you run into if you think that what you do today must have caused the result the next day, is that you might change your plan based on the wrong infomation.

For example if you build some links from certain sites to your pages, and the next day your site drops in the rankings, it does not mean that building these links had anything to do with it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: With that said though, I strongly believe that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to your rankings, if you build links from sites that you might consider to be of low reputation. So if you somehow get a link from a site about “Viagra” then don’t worry about it.

The reason I say this, is that if it were that simple to get a site penalized by Google, then all you would need to do, to get all your competitors out of your way, would be to build a hand full of “Viagra” links to their sites!

Seems a little unfair don’t you think. Imagine if you worked really hard to get to the top of the search engines, and then one day some new site decides they want your top spot, so they just build some dodgy links to your site, and bang, you’re gone!

The only thing you need to be careful of, is NOT to reciprocal link back to a site that is linking to you, as this can cause a penalty from Google, as it doesn’t look natural.

That’s all from me!

Matt Carter

I am going to continue today with some training on my favorite topic, and in case you hadn’t worked it out already (Matt’s attempt at sarcastic humor) it is the topic of link building.

However in this post I want to explain a concept that most people do not understand, and that is linking to your links! Where we create a spider web type effect with our links.

Sounds a little funny I know, but what you need to be aware of when you are building links to your websites, in order to increase their search engine rankings, is that if Google thinks that you are creating all these links, which is what everyone does anyway, then it can get a little funny sometimes about that.

Now of course this usually only matters if you are building links in large numbers, but it is important to understand the concept. One way to make your links look more natural is by making sure that all the links that link to you have some links coming to them also.

This way those pages linking to you will look like they are credible also. Not only that though but they will pass some page rank to your site, and the power of that link will become stronger!

So How Do We Link to Our Links?

Well I don’t get carried away with this to be honest, as link building to your sites can be tough enough as it is, so what I do is whenever I submit an article to say Ezinearticles, once approved I take the URL of the article and I bookmark it, and then also submit it to RSS aggregators, which takes no time at all and gets that articles some links.

You can do the same thing for blog posts, web 2.0 properties etc….but I need to stress that you don’t need to get too carried away with this, however it is just an easy way to reinforce your second tier of links, so that you overall link
structure looks natural and strong!

Vary Your Anchor Text

A few other points that you should also consider on the topic on ‘natural looking links’ is that it is also a good idea to vary up your anchor text, so that not every link to a page has the exact same text anchoring it. Once again this is only need when you are building large amount of links, and not so much of a problem if you links are below 100 to the page.

However let’s say that you are trying to rank for the term “acne remedy”, you obviously use that text as your link anchor text, however 10% of the time, you might use: “best acne remedy” or even “acne remedies”

No Follow Isn’t All Bad

Finally my last piece of advice for you is, although getting links that have not got the “No Follow” tags turned on is important, if all your links are not “No Follow” or as some like to say are “Do Follow” then this again will possibly raise red flags with Google, as it just doesn’t look natural, so don’t shy away from the odd “No follow Link”

That’s all for me for this update, there will be more on the way!!

Have a great day all

Matt

It has been a few weeks since my last update on the blog, my apologies for that, however in today’s post I am going to make up for it, by showing you a neat little trick, which is free by the way, that you can start using today, to find high page rank pages, that you can potentially get back links from.

First of all, why would we want high page rank back links? Well it’s simple and I’d be surprised if most of you didn’t know this, however if you have back links from high page rank pages, they can help your seo ranking much more than low page rank zero or even worth n/a pages (less than zero).

So how do we find these pages? We will be using a few tools that will help us find high page rank forum and blog posts that we can comment on, and leave our links at the same time.

The first thing you need to do is install a free Fire Fox addon, called ==> SEO Quake <==

Once you have downloaded and installed the plugin, you should see a small little icon in the bottom right of your browser that I have shown in the image below:

When you click that icon, it will change color, and when you are in a Google results page you will see a whole lot of extra stuff all over the page.

Most of this extra information will not be needed for this exercise, however might be something you want to explore for yourself.

The next thing we will do is open up Google, and then just start searching for forums. You can do this by simply typing in “KEYWORD Forum“, the word KEYWORD is obviously replaced with the keyword you want to find forums on. (you don’t have to only find forum related to your niche either, I don’t).

For example “Business Forum” or “Health Forum” etc…One tip would be not to go too specific, otherwise you wont find many good forums.

Once you have some results pages showing from Google, all you do now is select the url of a forum, by copying it. Next we will be analyzing this forums domain for the highest page rank posts, so we can comment on these ones.

Next step is to click on the Google “Advanced Search” tab:

What this allows us to do is search for pages in a domain by certain keyword phrases. Remembering that we are looking for pages inside this forum that allows us to ‘reply’ to posts, a good keyword to type in the search field would be the word ‘reply’ or perhaps ‘replies’. Also make sure that you paste the domain url that you copied into the “search within a site or domain” field at the bottom.

Here’s an example for you:

When you click search, Google will display its results for pages in this domain that have the word reply on them and hopefully these should be posts that you can post a reply to, and leave your links in your signature.

However this is where our trusted friend SEO Quake comes into play. If you haven’t already, then click the icon for this tool in the bottom right and turn it on. Now you see results like the image further down the page below.

You will notice that I have highlighted two places with the red circles in the image. The top circle is where you will find the switch to rearrange the results in order of page rank.

By clicking the down arrow, Google will then show the pages in this domain that have the word reply on them, in order of highest page rank to lowest.

The top result I found by doing a quick search as I write this post, took me about 2 mins, is a page rank 2 post. When I click on that page I can read the post and then sign up a make  helpful reply to it, leaving my links in my signature.

NOTE: You must make a helpful reply to posts, otherwise you run the risk of getting your account deleted as SPAM. So if you don’t know a good answer, then do a quick Google search and see if you can find some helpful information. What you will find is that people often ask questions in forums, with out doing much, if any Google research first. So often the answer is not hard to find. Avoid forum on technical stuff like PHP or something, because that will be harder.

That’s all there is to it. All you need to do is keep repeating the process and finding posts with page rank, so that you can get more and more links. Keep in mind that you need a lot less links to get good search engine results, if the links you have are high page rank. Anything of page rank 2 or above is great, because most people get links from page rank zero pages, and just get 100’s if not 1000’s of them.

This technique takes some practice and time, but it is worth it.

I must also give credit where it is due and state that I first learned this technique off my good friend and fellow marketer Mark Ling from: ==> Affilorama Premium <==

Hope this tip has been helpful,

Chat soon, and have a great Christmas.

Matt

(links in this post are sponsored affiliate links, I make commission if you purchase after clicking)

In Today’s post I am going to discuss some more SEO techniques, that will ensure that all your hard work in building back links to your sites is worth it.

You see what some people don’t realize, is that just because you build a back link does NOT mean that Google or the other major search engines will find and index that link. If they can’t find it, they can’t count it as a vote for your site, and that is not a good thing for your rankings.

However, there is a few things that you can do to help the search engines find your links. One way is by creating RSS feeds for your content that has your links in it, and sending these RSS feeds out via sites like Feedagg or your choice of RSS aggregator.

This is very easy to do, if you placed your link on a blog that already has an RSS feed, which you can see in the URL bar as the little orange icon (see image below).

All you need to do in this case is click the icon and then take the feed and submit to your RSS aggregator and they will send the feed out for you. This will help the search engines find that content and of course index the new links in it.

But what if the page you have put a link in, is a static HTML page with no RSS feed? What can you do?

A neat little FREE service I use is Feedage.com. What this does is take the static HTML page and create an RSS feed for you. The next thing you should do is check that the feed is valid, so that it will work when blasted out with your chosen RSS aggregator. In order to do this, I use  a feed validating service, such as W3C Validation, and run my freshly created feed through here and make sure I have a valid feed.

Another thing you can use this system for, is if you have written a new article on goarticles.com and want to make sure it gets indexed fast. Unlike ezinearticles.com, goarticles does not give you a unique RSS feed, however following the process above can solve that problem.

Now that might sound a little confusing at first, but really the whole process takes less than a minute to do. If you are building links on sites that are not likely to be crawled often by search engine bots, then doing this can speed up the process and help ensure your links get found.

Link Diversity

The next crucial point I want to discuss is link diversity. A common mistake that people make when building links for SEO, is that they do not have enough diversity in the IP addresses that their links are coming from.

You see if you comment in one forum and have a link in your signature, that link will count for SEO, if it is ‘Do Follow’ of course. However if you make 1000 comments in that same forum, and henceforth have 1000 signature links dropped throughout the forum, in my experience this will not do much more for your search rankings.

The key is to have a variety of different links from different IP addresses. Sometimes when I am doing SEO on my websites, I often beat a competitor who has a much greater overall back link count than me, and this I assume is partly, but not solely, due to the IP diversity that I make sure my sites back links have.

Another critical role in getting good search engine rankings, is doing your ‘On Page SEO’ well. I am going to discuss this in detail in a future post soon, however briefly, you must do the basics properly, such as having the keyword phrase in the Meta Section, H1 tags, Content and Title Tags, but there is also more to it than just these basics (more on this soon).

On Page SEO can help you outrank a site with much more back links than you may have. I like to refer to it as working smarter and not harder, after all  back link building can be tough going, so I like to make sure I only get the minimum I need. That is why using the RSS trick, and On Page SEO are things I take the time to do well.

Until next time!

Matt Carter

Finding one way back links that pass page rank on to your site can be difficult and somewhat of a tedious task. Therefore in this post I am just going to give you a list of free one way back links. Before I do though I would like to point out that when building back links it is a good idea to have a variety of them coming from different sources, as this looks more natural in Google eyes.

There are differing opinions on whether ‘off page’ SEO, which is what gaining one way back links is, done badly can hurt your rankings or not. I know some people that claim it does not, and their reasoning is that if it did, then the internet would turn to chaos, because you could build ‘dodgy’ back links to your competitors sites in order to hurt their position in the search results, and in turn they could do the same to you!!

Other people however believe that building links too fast doesn’t look natural to the search engines and can draw a penalty. How fast is too fast? Well I am not sure but I think if you are building 100’s of links a day to one page and not remaining consistent at that pace, then I think that might be a problem.

I can see the argument from both sides and therefore I always play it safe and build links at a steady pace, and I do not buy one way back links from link farms.

With that said here are some sites that you can use to get free one way back links to your site now.

Directories

I don’t spend too much time submitting my sites to directories, as a lot of the free ones don’t allow me to submit deep links to pages inside my site, ie. anything other than the home page.

However they are still a useful place to get easy free one way back links, so here a few to get you started:

• dmoz.org
• open-site.org
• popsz.com
• e-mediate.org
• bloggernity.com
• directory.brainontology.org
• onlinedirectoryweb.info
• femina.com
• viesearch.com

Education and Government (.edu/.gov)
One Way Back Links

In case you didn’t know already, not every link that you create holds the same value in Google eyes. A link from a .edu domain, or a .gov domain are worth a lot more for your search rankings. However these websites, that allow you to get a back link from them, are hard to find.

With that said though, here is a quick tip on how to search for them in Google:

By typing in the following search query and replacing ‘keyword phrase goes here’ with your actual keywords, you should find wordpress blogs that are on .edu or .gov domains.

“keyword phrase goes here” “powered by wordpress” site:.edu

“keyword phrase goes here” “powered by wordpress” site:.gov

Keep in mind that not all of the websites you find will allow you to post comments and not all of them will be follow links, so you will have to test them out.

Article Site One Way Back Links

Writing and submitting articles to top article sites is also a good way to diversify your back link portfolio. I recommend however that you get a tool like Magic Article Rewriter and Submitter (eamarketingtools.com) to help you do this. The reason being that writing content is VERY time consuming and working smarter with a tool like this will speed things up super fast.

The great thing about article spinners like Magic Article Rewriter, is that you can use the content for other sites, and not just submit them to article directories. I will explain this in more detail in the next section when we look at web 2.0 sites.

For now though here is a list of top article directories for easy one way back links:

• ezinearticles.com
• buzzle.com
• goarticles.com
• articledashboard.com
• a1articles.com
• articlecity.com

Web 2.0 One Way Back Links

Another way to get free back links is to post content onto web 2.o sites. These sites are free to join and allow you to build pages within them, and much like article sites, contain your links.

As I mentioned above, when I have written and spun an article in Magic Article Rewriter at: eamarketingtools.com (sponsored affiliate link). I them take a few of the 100’s of unique copies of the original article that it automatically generates for me, and simply copy and past them into other web 2.o sites. This saves me a lot of time!!

I also advise you to make sure you read the guidelines for each site and make sure you abide by their rules, as rules vary from site to site.

Below is a list of great sites that you can participate in:

• squiddoo.com
• spongefish.com
• blog.co.k
• easyjournal.com
• tumblr.com
• friendster.com
• youbundle.com
• multiply.com

Social Bookmarking Back Links

Getting links from social bookmarking sites is possibly the easier way to get links, but keep in mind that if all your links are set up from the same IP address, Google knows this and I assume pay less attention to them. However if you can get other people to bookmark your sites, then that can help.

There are 100’s of social bookmarking sites, however once again, here are a few to get you started:

• del.icio.us
• spurl.com
• digg.com
• linkagogo.com
• backflip.com
• technorati.com
• blinklist.com
• diigo.com
• folked.com
• jumptags.com
• propeller.com
• mixx.com

There are many more ways to get quality one way back links, however I hope this post has helped you in some way with the task. If you have more examples to share I encourage you to add a comment below so we can all benefit, because as I mentioned in my last post, networking is key, so lets help each other out.

Matt Carter