Link Building: Tested and Proven SEO Technique

This is an SEO technique that has been proven to work for a blog which is now ranked number 2 for the keyword blog marketing.

Link building is the most effective SEO technique to promote your web page visibility.

Link Building the Right Way

However, there is the right way to link building and there is the wrong way. The right way consists of methods “approved” by the search engines e.g. Google and Bing.

Here’s the 13 methods which have proven to work for Blogopreneur.

1. Comment on someone’s blog
2. Write an article – submit it to Hubpages.
3. Write another article – submit it to eZineArticles.com
4. Submit a press release.
5. Answer someone’s question in Yahoo! answers.
6. Email webmasters. Ask for a link.
7. Write something interesting on your site. Tweet the URL out to your friends.
8. Participate in forums – change your forum signature to include your link.
9. Submit your site to directories.
10. Guest blog for someone.
11. Get your site listed in one of your local club’s website
12. Submit a WordPress theme/plugin
13. Submit a YouTube video

Source: Link Building: The Key to Exploding Visibility

You have a higher change of getting higher PR when you blog. The reason is quite simple, more web pages will link to your pages because blog is designed with that feature from the start. In fact, trackback was invented because of blog. And RSS becomes popular because of blog.

If you used WordPress, you will realize that you can tell what other blogs link to yours.

I did not solicit backlinks from these blogs. So these are one-way links. I guess many of these blogs are scraping content from RSS feeds and link to my pages. Yes, these scaper pages are really useless in terms of SEO for Google. However, there are still a good number of legitimate web pages that link to this blogs. And I am really grateful.

So I am going to mention these blogs here:

Delicious Weekender – Food and eating place recommendation from all around Singapore.

Now that I returned the link – it no longer one-way link.

Anyway, it’ alright. Since this blog has achieved a good position in Google and Yahoo.

In fact the top positions are occupied by many Internet marketers such as Andy Jenkins of Yahoo Store Builder, Mike Filsaime, Russell Brunson, Jonathon Leger and others who I’ve not heard about.

I think it will be a challenge to be ranked in the top 10 for this search phrase – coolest guy on the planet – since some of these guys are real SEO experts and not just Internet marketers.

The Number 1 Coolest Guy in Google is Not in Yahoo

You know what? Brad Fallon may be the coolest guy ranked by Google but he is not found in the top 30 in Yahoo search for the “coolest guy on the planet“. Well, it just proved that Google and Yahoo have different ranking algorithm. Apparently, Yahoo placed more emphasis on the domain name and title tag for the keywords.

Russell Brunson seems to be the real cool SEO guy. He is in No. 2 in Yahoo and No. 3 on Google.

Coolest Guy On The Planet SEO Contest

This will be fun. To create a web page and target for this coolest guy search phrase. Drop me a comment if you are interested to compete for this phrase. I already have some ideas what to do and try going for these terms: coolest; guy and planet.

If you visit the above blog, you will probably be curious why only this page is PR5 and the main page is only PR4. Well, I have more backlinks to this particular pages than any other pages. One of these backlinks was promoted to PR5 and many others to PR4, so this was how this page got a PR5. Hopefully, it will survive the next pagerank update.

Meanwhile, let’s make full use of it. If you need a good quality PR5 backlink, I can help. Here’s the 5-step to Higer Pagerank:

1. Write a short post, at least 150 words and not more than 300 words about the page that you want me to point to.
2. Your short post must mention “free directory submission” or “submitting to free directory” e.g. I’ve also tried free directory submission to boost the link popularity of the website.
3. Email your writing to freedirectorysubmission at gmail dot com.
4. Wait for me to review your post and edit it before adding to the FreeDirectorySubmission blog. Once approved, I will inform you the URL of the blog post.
5. Blog about my FreeDirectorySubmission blog and link to it, I will appreciate a link to http://freedirectorysubmission.blogspot.com

It so simple. We help one another.

However, do you know how many backlinks you’ll need to score a PR1 for a brand new webpage?

Here’s a chart from www.checkpagerank.net/linkpack which gives you an idea the number and pagerank of the backlinks we should be going after.

For example, if you want your web page to score PR5, then you’ll need to get backlinks from at 19 other web pages that are already ranked PR5.

However, it is wise to have backlinks from web pages with different pagerank values and not just from the higher ones.

1. Get Backlinks
2. Drive Traffic
3. Establish Reputation

In fact, more webmasters are doing it for the first reason than 2 and 3. And I believe this is causing a problem – poor quality articles.

What You Should NOT Do

Articles that are solely written for the purpose of search engine spidering, indexing, link popularity and PR ranking. Usually, these articles have not been researched or the authors have little experience in that topic. Such articles seldom get read lest being published at reputable or authority sites.

You need to put in some good writing skill and some wealth of experience to make an article interesting. Otherwise, your dense article does not get read and your effort of writing the article goes to waste.

In order for your readers to enjoy reading your article, you must first enjoy writing it.

Do you have that smile in your face when writing the article?

Try this with your next article. Put a small mirror in front of you and make sure you keep smiling. Write about 400 words on a topic that you enjoy. Submit it to article directories such as

• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com and etc.

The Science of Article Marketing

Monitor and track your article, make a record the number of websites that published your article over a 3 to 6 months period on a weekly basis and you will know if your article is well received.

When you have the hard figures from your monitoring and tracking, you then can measure your result and tweak your future articles for better performance. That, I believe, it the science of article marketing.

Automate Your Article Submission

Article marketing is a numbers game. Once you get the hang of submitting to the recommended article directories mentioned above, you will want to expand your reach and submit to as many directories as possible. To automate your article submission, go try SubmitYourArticle.com

EzineArticles.com is one of my favourite article directories. It’s free to submit your articles – all you need is to register an account. Here’s an article that I submitted to EzineArticles.com recently, it’s about Optimizing Web Pages for Search Engines.

When submitting article, you’ve to be careful…

1. Choose a topic that is relevant to the target web page that you want to increase link popularity.

2. Your article has to be at least 250 words long. I would recommend between 400 and 600 words.

3. Use the rules of SEO copywriting. Do not keyword stuff, write naturally. Your article will only be published on others’ websites if it’s well written and informative.

4. Use the targeted keywords the Title of the article.Usually it may not be possible to use the exact keywords, so be creative and weave those words(or variant or related words) into the title. For example, the targeted key phrase is “SEO company” and the title is “How Companies Can Optimise Their Web Pages for Search Engines“.

5. In the resource box, make sure you provide a link to the web page which you want to increase link popularity and PR. You can do this: http://www.yourdomain.com and it will be converted to a hyperlink.

A better way is to embed HTML codes – <a>…</a> to include your targeted keywords for that web page.

For example,
Shi Hengcheong is not a sought-after internet marketer but rather a SEO guy trying to make a living. He can be found optimizing <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Your Targeted Keywords</a> and building up content websites with useful information.

Pagerank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value…

Now that we know what pagerank is, let’s see how we can improve our web pages pagerank values.

Pagerank is important as a measure of votes of confidence. It is important that you get as many links from other web pages as possible. Note that I said web pages and not web sites. Pagerank value is given to individual web page, not to the web site. So it is important that you get links from pages that share the same topic as your web page.

Usually, you will solicit backlinks to your homepage. However, you should also get backlinks to your internal pages. As a rule of thumb, you can spread your inbound links in the ratio of 60:40 – 60% to your internal pages and 40% to the main homepage.

In order to get links to your internal pages, these pages must have useful and interesting content. It is important that all pages are planned before you starting writing your first word. This is to ensure that your web pages are linked in a relevant manner. So that you can score better for Google’s Hypertext-Matching Analysis:

Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Well, let me emphasize that you should focus on getting more quality links than worrying about your pagerank value. Google usually updates the pagerank value for all web pages every 2 to 3 months so you will be stuck with your current value for a long time before you’ll see any changes. However, as you are building your backlinks, the SERP of your web pages may have already improved and you will see increase in traffic before you’ll see an increase in your pagerank value.

The Old Ways of Getting Links

Traditionally, you can get backlinks by submitting to free and paid directories, include partner links or resources pages and solicit for reciprocal link partners.

Don’t get me wrong, these traditional methods are still effective and can grow your link popularity over a period time.

Links building is a tedious process. So you may want to make use of reciprocal link partners software and link analysis software such as SEO Elite, Arelis, Optilink, Traffic Travis and etc. to help you save time and automate some of the tedious process.

Links Building – There are Better and Faster Ways:

• Link Bait
• Press Release
• Article Distribution
• Blog Trackback

Since these are advanced techniques, I will discuss more in depth each of these methods in my future posts.

You should. Because I can get a PR1 web page ranked in the top 30 results of Google for your targeted keywords. Isn’t it how you’ve found me on the web to ask me this question?

In fact, I see SEO ranking and PR as the “chicken or egg” paradox.

Let me explain.

If you don’t have good search engine visibility, how are you supposed to grow your backlinks and have high PR; but if you do not have high PR you will not be able to rank well for competitive keywords.

And the common belief is that when you have high PR, you will do well in the search engines. This is but half true. PR is a value given by Google and has nothing to do with Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.

Read my yesterday post if you want to know more about the relationship between pagerank and SEO ranking.

I do not have pages with high PR, my highest attained PR was 5. Why? I have not spent much time and money on link building campaign yet as I choose not to compete for popular keywords. So there is no need for high PR to give me an extra edge. I just want to solve your practical problem, I want to use the most direct and simplest solution that costs me the least resources. If on-page optimization is all you need to get into the top 30 then do that first and worry about the more expensive off-page optimization later.

The home page at ShiHengCheong.com is ranked No.1 for the keywords Singapore SEO Specialist in Google and it is PR1. Get the point!

Getting Backlinks TO Boost Your Page PR Value

Now if you want to get a couple more backlinks. You can use one of those free online TO DO list and add a couple of URL pointing to your web sites. These are not text links, just URL. And the one that I’ve tried is http://www.tadalist.com which is PR7. Once you’ve registered a free account, you will be given a subdomain based on your username e.g. shi.tadalist.com. Remember to share the TO Do list you created and get it indexed by sticking them in one of your active blog. Since this is a subdomain from a PR7 web site, you new subdomain should be recognised and indexed quite quickly.

Here’s my new subdomain and host my To Do list:

==> Things To Do Today

and there is also RSS Feed:

http://shi.tadalist.com/lists/feed_public/400863

P.S. If you actually follow my advice and sign up at www.tadalist.com, please create a list “Future Things To Do” and add these entries so that I can get a couple of links:

• http://shi.tadalist.com/lists/public/400863
• http://www.timmguru.com/2006/09/backlinks-from-your-to-do-list.html

Then post me a comment and I will make sure your new subdomain will be indexed.