Building Links With Social Bookmarking‏

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in many niches. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like, and then other visitors can grab those links and add them to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links, and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users often do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy - not just your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance - let's say you're in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let's say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, for example. Then you'd have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn't worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear "spammy" - remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don't necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a "friends" list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn't go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. It's often helpful to keep it to ten or less per day, but check the individual site's tutorial to be sure.

After you've been a user for several weeks, you might be able to add more per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at a news site every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. This helps make your profile a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

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Top 5 Link Building Strategies for Your Site

The best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts can guide and assist you in link building strategies that will increase your website’s visibility on the internet. The following categories of backlinks give an excellent overview of the wide variety of options available for improving your site’s SEO ranking.

Links from Multiple Domains

While your link building strategies should focus on volume, your plan should not be to get most links from a single site. Instead,work towards just a few links from many sites for best results.

As search engines rank sites, they consider how relevant the content is to the keywords and search terms. When you get links from multiple domains, you demonstrate that many sources find your content useful.

This is critically important when you develop additional backlinks from authoritative domains.

Deep (Ingrained) Links

Instead of directing links to your site’s main page, use links directly to specific pages of content or images. These are known as deep or ingrained links, and they show that you have important information throughout your site, not just isolated on the home page.

Using deep or ingrained links adds to your ability to use important keywords for greater ranking in search engine results. You can spread these words throughout your site as appropriate, which will ensure a user-friendly overall appearance.

Links to Local Sites

If your link building strategies don’t include neighboring customers, you are missing out on a large opportunity. It is exciting to develop international backlinks, but it is the locals that will keep you in business.

Obtaining authoritative links from local sources is far easier than from nationwide or internationally renowned experts. Nearby specialists enjoy building their communities by working with neighboring businesses. SEO rankings will climb when you include local authorities such as the Chamber of Commerce or the Better Business Bureau for your state. Consider local organizations, libraries, museums, and similar sites as well as your local government agencies. Directories like yellowpages.com and superpages.com are also excellent options. You might have to pay a fee for the service, but this tends to be very low. Some of those you approach will jump at the chance for a quid pro quo linking relationship.

Links to Authoritative Domains

Sites classified as authoritative on a subject are those that offer expertise in a given industry or specific field. For example, nytimes.com has extensive, reliable, and accurate information on events relevant to New York. Its strong reputation as a source of specialized knowledge lends it authority on New York news.

Link building strategies that include government and university websites lead to high ratings, as these are accepted as authorities on their subject matter. They can be easily recognized by their .gov and .edu domains, for example IRS and California State University.

Authoritative domain links lead visitors to extensive amounts of quality, well researched information, and they often contain additional links that lead to good sources for further exploration.

Linking through Anchor Text

The strongest and most popular tool available today is linking through anchor text. For best SEO ranking results, be sure to make this part of your link building strategies.

They work by turning your text into hyperlinks, so as readers go along, they can click on an interesting keyword. The link directs them to the page you specify, which makes your keywords even stronger, improving your site’s ultimate ranking.

Grow Your Rankings with an SEO Expert Today

Higher rankings mean higher traffic to your site, which results in more business for you. Don’t delay in designing and implementing your link building strategies. Begin with the five ideas listed here, and consider a professional SEO expert for

even greater success.

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Outsource Link Building - A Sure Shot Winner

Outsourcing the professional services has come a long way and today we see more and more business houses outsource crucial tasks in order to get the desired results. The SEO tools such as link building, optimizing websites to the popular search engines etc are the need of the hour for every internet business and this task is too risky to try internally.

Why outsource link building?

Outsourcing not only helps a company in accomplishing a particular task but also helps it in completing the job with finesse. The process of outsourcing the professional projects grew very rapidly since the evolution of internet and surely it has produced amazing results for the benefit of everyone.

A professional e-marketing link building India Company can take up this activity and provide the best results in a short period of time. These services would require greater level of skills and understanding of various search engine algorithms and therefore there are very few companies in the open market that can deliver such quality services.

Only a set of highly qualified and professional resources at these companies are able to build the links effectively in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines for their clients. It is always safe to outsource link building projects in order to ensure that the positive results are delivered consistently. There should be no compromise as far as quality is concerned.

What difference does it make?

It is often seen that many entrepreneurs do fail in this particular step and often end up hiring a professional who is just a specialist in one or the other SEO tool and not all of them. If you hire a resource who is good in optimizing the website to the search engines and doesnt have much knowledge about article submission, link building etc then it is quite obvious there are lesser chances of your website getting popular it is always limited.

A professional company that provides internet marketing tools knows how to divert more traffic towards your website with effective and sensible linking to your business. This activity is very crucial and carried cautiously by the service provider to ensure positive results. Any lapse in this activity could prove disaster for your business.

These companies have experience in various other SEO tools such as guaranteed directory submissions which has proved to be a major traffic puller for many internet businesses. They have tie up with the popular directories around and guarantee the submissions as compared to their counterparts. You can be sure about getting loads of consistent internet traffic to your website within a short period of time with these guaranteed submissions.

By outsourcing this crucial task to a reliable company youll ensure that there are no hiccups in the revenue generation and this decision could well prove to be a sure shot winner.

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Maintain Link Building Focus by Staying Organized

Link building is not something you should do on a whim just whenever it strikes you. You need to have a plan of execution and to set aside specific times of the week to take care of all of your link building tasks. Organization is the key to effective, and efficient, link building.

I was not always so organized, and it hampered my efforts. I used to just work on link building here there as time allowed and I kept no records of what I did. Some directory submissions here, some blog comments there. Since I no record of previous work, I was constantly attempting to get backlinks in places where I had already gotten backlinks before…which is a huge waste of time! Also, I was never really sure whether my backlinking efforts were producing anything.

Just because I submitted a directory listing or blog comment didn’t mean it would ever actually go live on the site and get indexed.

Now I keep track of everything with an Excel workbook and routinely audit my work to make sure that links I’ve submitted have been published. The spreadsheet I use is very simple and takes no time to fill out while doing backlink building. In the end, the extra few seconds of work per backlink is worth it ensure that I know exactly how my link profile is shaping up and if my work is actually working.

The workbook has these fields to track work. The fields may vary depending on type of keyword:

• Keyword – The target keyword of the backlink. Typically this is anchor text.
• URL of backlink – This is the URL of the site where the backlink has been place.
• Target URL – This is the URL that the backlink points to.
• Submitted – I put an “x” here once I have submitted the backlink.
• Published – I put an “x” here once I’ve confirmed that a backlink is live. In many cases – like social bookmarking sites and auto-approve blog comment systems – this happens instantly, but in the case of web directories and other moderated websites, publishing can take time. Once a week I check to see which of these links have been published.
• Direct – If the backlink points directly to the page I’m trying to rank.
• Indirect – If the backlink points to some other website that, in turn, points to my target page.

For example, I might point some social bookmarking links at a Tumblr post which links to my target page. This builds up “link momentum” and is key in things like link wheels and such. I usually only do this with social bookmarks.

• Notes – Any additional information.

The spreadsheet covers several different backlink types with individual spreadsheets, which can be found in the tabs along the bottom. These cover:

• Directory Submissions
• Article Submissions
• Social Bookmarking
• Blog Commenting
• Website Outreach – This is when I’ve reached out directly to a webmaster to work some sort of custom link deal. Such a case might be a small niche or local site with a “Links” page I’d like to be added to, but does not offer a way to submit a link like a web directory would. Other cases might involve providing the webmaster with content, as with a guest blog post.

If you’d like to download a blank version of the workbook I use, you can right click and SAVE AS right here.

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SEO – A Link Is A Link?

A few years ago to combat blog comment spam, the search engines implemented no follow backlinks. These changes wreaked havoc for big business and small business SEO.

These no follow backlinks were suspected of having no SEO value because they don’t pass PageRank from the linking site. It now appears that although they may no pass PR, they do have value.

In the recent SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors report, a correlation exists between ranking and the presence of no follow links.The ratio of no follow to do follow links appears to be a search engine ranking factor. If do follow links greatly outnumber no follow links, the site or page link profile may seem unnatural. The search engines expect that in the normal course of link getting, links from both do follow and no follow sites are normal.

If your site link profile has a very high ratio of do follow links, you may need to get more no follow links from social media sites, no follow blogs and other sources to balance your profile.

What About Authority?

It’s probably true that PR is not passed with a no follow link. That statement may not be completely true, but let’s assume it is. My question has been for some time now, even if no PageRank is passed, is a link from an authority site related to the linked-to site valuable?

Some SEO teachers and specialist have been saying for awhile to ignore no follow and just get the link. They say that in their testing it didn’t seem to matter. I’m wondering out loud, if link juice is not passed through PR, are other signals being used to determine authority and relevance.

The Search Algorithm

For a lot of reasons, search engines are designed and tweaked to provide the best result for search queries. The algorithms look at off page and on page factors. Let’s look at factors from off page. A link from a site provides a vote to the destination site. If the link is no follow, the PageRank (PR) is gone, but I’m thinking other signals in the algorithm are present that make the link from an authority site valuable.

Google says there are over 200 factors in the algorithm, others say it’s more, why wouldn’t they be including the relevance of the link in relevance factors.

Let’s look at an example. Two sites have on page content and factors that are exactly the same. There’s nothing to choose between them. Based on on page factors, it’s a dead heat. Still, one ranks higher than the other. Why?

On site factors are the same, so the ranking must be based on off site factors. Let’s say now that both of these sites have the same PR profiles. Each has 1,000 links with the same distribution of PR, the same anchor text distribution and the same distribution of no follow and do follow links.

I am submitting that where the links come from is an overlooked factor. If the first site’s links are mostly from sites related to the content, while the second site get its links from general or non-related sites, the first site will rank higher. Few would argue this point, but it appears that no follow links may be passing relevance and authority signals even if there’s no PR value.

A New Life for No Follow Links?

So, just maybe, no follow links have value after all. I don’t know how valuable these links are, but if search engines are not ignoring these links completely (there not), no follow links must be passing signals for some reason. There appears to be link profile signals. Are there one or more relevance signals for no follow links as well? While I won’t advise ignoring the follow tag, in an SEO or local SEO program it now appears that those no follow links are more valuable than we thought.

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Why Canonicalization Matters From A Linking Perspective

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be like any other technical field of study. It is filled with specialized jargon that, to a newbie, can be more than intimidating. I recall that feeling was especially strong when I first encountered the term canonicalization.

It is a 14-letter, seven-syllable monster of a term. I first heard it spoken, and had to ask the person who said it to repeat it. It didn’t help. (It had been a long day!)

The truth of the matter is that canonicalization is not all that complicated to understand if the explanation is lucid. So let’s try to explain what it means, why it’s important, and what it has to do with linking.

What Is Canonicalization?

In mathematics, when the same data can be represented in multiple ways, it is best to standardize that representation by establishing the data’s canonical form, the one primary form in which it will be used. In the computer science field, the act of defining the canonical form of data is called canonicalization.

Simply put, canonicalization defines the one primary way you’ll use to write data, such as a URL string. As webmaster, you can choose which canonical form to use for a given URL on your site, but once selected, the chosen form should always be the way that URL is written.

Why Canonicalization Is Important

Fundamentally, you need to know that search engines do not index pages by their content. They index URLs. The content associated with the indexed URLs is brought in to the search engine database, but URLs are what possess ranking.

What complicates matters in search (and why canonicalization is important) is that the same content page can have multiple URLs associated with it.

I’m not talking about when Web spammers scrape your content and publish it on their own website. I’m talking about variations of URLs on your website all pointing to the same page.

For example, the following hypothetical URLs would likely all point to the same page (in this case, the home page of a site):

example.com

www.example.com

www.example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

www.example.com/index.html?var1=105

www.example.com/index.html?var1=105&var2=abc

As you can see, a valid URL may either include or omit the subdomain prefix “www.”, a trailing slash after the top-level domain, the default webpage name for a folder, and/or one or more URL parameter suffixes (there are even more, but these are the most common). They can also be used in various combinations. The possible permutations of the above examples can quickly add up to a large number of URLs all pointing to the same content page.

And this is not only a problem for home pages. Deep link pages can have the similar problems, such as the following hypothetical examples:

www.example.com/folder1/

www.example.com/folder1/index.html

www.example.com/folder1/index.html?product=49

www.example.com/folder1/?userID=tinytim

When search engine crawlers encounter multiple URLs successfully pointing to the same content page, the overall potential PageRank for that content page is split among the URLs crawled. After all, even though the content is exactly the same, each crawled URL will have its own number of backlinks, so the PageRank for a given piece of content will differ among the URLs crawled.

Metaphorically speaking, imagine a full pitcher of water (the total potential page rank) and several empty cups of various sizes (your non-canonicalized URLs).

When you split up the water from the pitcher among the cups, you are technically still working with the same amount of water, but each cup only has a percentage of the total. None of the cups contains as much water as the pitcher could.

When that comes to PageRank, if your site’s pages are not canonicalized, you’re not using your full potential for page ranking. Not only are your URLs competing against those of your rivals from other websites, you are also competing against URL variations within your own website!

Wouldn’t it be better if you could consolidate your page rank in one URL as you might pour all of those cups of water back into one pitcher? That’s why we need to canonicalize our sites.

Canonicalization’s Connection To Linking

“Yeah, yeah, this is all well and good. But where’s the connection to linking,” you ask? Well, as you are a webmaster, you do have a degree of control over how at least some pages link to you.

After all, your intrasite links, not to mention your site navigation scheme links (and for that matter, the links in your XML-based Sitemap file) are all controlled by you.

This means you need to comb through your site (or your content management system, aka CMS) and see how the link to each page is referenced. You need ensure each link to a given page always uses the exact same URL form.

I personally advocate using absolute (aka full) URLs in links, if only because of the plague of content scrapers. As those people are too lazy to create their own content, they are also usually too lazy to examine and change stolen content source code.

If your content is scraped, readers of that content will be brought back to your site when they click the inline links you created (you do create inline links when relevant opportunities appear, right?).

Admittedly, there are times when your site architecture requires that you use URL parameters. In that case, you can also create rel=canonical tags in the section of your pages. The href attribute of this tag will define the canonical URL for the page, so if the URL normally requires URL parameters, the canonical URL is still defined.

Note that search engines have stated they will look at rel=canonical as a hint, not as a mandate. As such, this is not the magic canonicalization bullet for your site. You still need to be consistent with your canonical intrasite linking.

Also, for URL parameter users, be sure to check out both the Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both have added options enabling webmasters to define specific URL parameters to be ignored during crawls.

Google also allows you to select whether or not you want to use the subdomain prefix “www.” in your preferred URL. I’d guess that option will eventually come to Bing as well.

Lastly, for links you don’t control, such as inbound links from other sites, you can set up 301 permanent redirects for all non-canonical URL forms to the canonical URL for each page.

Just be sure you use a 301 permanent redirect. As the 301 is a permanent redirect, search engines interpret this to mean they can safely transfer all of the page rank value from the original (non-canonical) URL to the new (canonical) one.

Note that while 302 temporary redirects will redirect users to a canonical URL, search engines will not transfer any acquired page rank! (I have written in more detail about using 301 redirects here.)

If you’re really detail-oriented, you could even look at backlink tools, such as the aforementioned search engines’ webmaster tools or a third-party tool such as Open Site Explorer, to see who is linking to you and work with the errant webmasters who are not using your canonical URL in their outbound links.

After all, as good as a 301 redirect is for canonicalization, a redirect also introduces a potential page load speed delay, although that’s not likely as detrimental to your page rank as non-canonicalized URLs)

The bottom line is this: you have the ability to consolidate the PageRank for your content pages into canonical URLs.

Depending upon how badly your multiple URLs are dividing up your PageRank today, given how competitive (not to mention how valuable) top ranking can be for a given query, why wouldn’t you take the steps needed to consolidate the page rank of your content pages into one canonical URL?

Canonicalization may be a seven-syllable monster, but it’s not that complicated, and doing something about it could improve your position in the SERPs.

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Top Six Link Building Strategies For Beginners

What are Links?

Broadly speaking Links are a ‘link’ between your site and another, so as an example you may find a site in the same niche as you links to you because you are not the same but complementary to one another – that’s the basics. You then get ‘one way links’ & ‘back links’- now stay with me on the detail here because One-Way links are also termed back links.

But the unique thing about one-way links is that they do not return a link to the website linking to them, in other words they are not reciprocal. One-way links convey a message to the search engines that the website is so interesting or useful that the other websites had to tell people about it. One way links are the preferred back link for any website owner, so hold onto the concept as we move on.

How Do You Get a One-Way Link?

One way links are achieved is when your website is deemed to have great information and unique content that other websites believe is worthy enough to be referenced by them and shared elsewhere – hope that’s clear and everyone understands it.

Bear in mind also a website will naturally link to another that has content that will consolidate its own site standing. Here are just a few ways you may be able to get or acquire a one-way link status. They are:

Top Tips for Obtaining Back Links

1. Submitting your site to the major online search engine directories such as Yahoo! and Dmoz.org. When you have your link in these websites, your site value will automatically increase.

2. Submit articles to articles directories. There are so many article directories you can submit your article to which will provide you with a back link to your website. Again, as I’ve commented before, if you are submitting manually, still stick to the key directories – that’s where the traffic and ultimately the links will come from.

You can be sure that if it contains quality content someone will click and link back to you. Also bear in mind that by submitting your articles many other website owners looking for quality content will have your article syndicated to them by the directories and in turn your resource box will contain your links back to your website. So, over time you could quite easily have a number of sites featuring your material all linking back to you. This is the power of article marketing.

3. Another way to get one-way links is to search for industry specific search directories and submit your websites to them. There are search directories that are tailored for specific industries e.g. Travel. Getting listed on these directories may be free or at a fee, so you’ll have to decide the worth if you need to pay for it.

4. Create e-books and short reports. When you create e-books and short reports, these can be given away free on the Internet through your website or other avenues. If the e-book has high quality information within it (e.g. Quick hints and tips), you can attract a lot of one-way links over time. You also have the opportunity of a really good report possibly going viral – being passed on to others, friends etc. To achieve that objective, you should include your website on the pages of the e-book or report and embed links within the text.

5. Use videos. Video is a great way to get one-way links to your site. A good video will move around very fast over the Internet. Many Website owners often take an already created video and embed it in their own site to add content and improve the overall design and look.

6. If you have a website that is good and you are confident that it will appeal to other website owners in a similar niche as yours, you can approach them and ask to have your link included on their site. However, the reason why this method should not always be relied on is that more times than not they will demand a reciprocal link. Now this can be ok but unfortunately human nature being what it is people don’t always keep their promises, so just a heads up there.

Top Tip – Also search engines, especially Google, frown on sites with too many reciprocal links. Therefore, although back links are good, if the basis of the link is always reciprocal, it might not achieve the desired result and can actually damage your rankings if you are not careful.

Hope this information helps to get you started with your own link building strategies. It’s important for your online success so don’t sweat it. Do a bit at a time and slowly but surely it will build.

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8 Best Places For Building Authoritative One-Way Links

For any online webmaster or marketer, two things will consume most of your time: rankings and traffic. Usually, these two objectives will go hand-in-hand, the higher your rankings the more traffic you will receive. However, as you probably already know, getting higher rankings and traffic can be somewhat difficult.

One of the best ways to achieve both, is to build one-way links from existing authoritative sites on the web.

Now, let’s be honest, building quality one-way links will take some effort and time on your part. However, this can be done much quicker if you know exactly where to look for those authoritative sites or places which will let you create links back to your site.

Here are some good places or sources for Authoritative One-Way link building:

1. Press Releases

Press releases have become what article marketing was just a few years ago… excellent way to get quality one-way links back to your site. You can use both free and paid press releases to get your message out. Many marketers have had success with PRweb, but it can be somewhat costly but highly worth it. A well written press release will usually get picked up and displayed on numerous niche-related sites, boosting both your traffic and rankings.

2. Wikipedia Type Sites

Such places as Wikipedia and Google Knol are also excellent sources of quality one-way links. These can also give you those all important in-content links, as well as links in the resource section of the article. Everything will be theme focused, so your links will carry more PageRank juice in the eyes of Google.

3. Powerful .edu and .gov Link

Mainly because they are seen as non-commercial and coming from prestige sites or institutions, .edu and .gov links are some of the most effective and powerful one-way backlinks you can receive. Try to go out of your way to build these types of links for your site. For example, if you went to a college or university, try getting links from any Alumni pages. If your college has a newsletter section, try to get links there.

4. How To Sites

Yes, we know, Google with its Panda Update and countless follow-up changes to its algorithm, have hit these kinds of sites hard. But the quality ones are still great places to build one-way links. Often if you write a great how-to guide in your niche and place it on these sites, you will get an instant page one Google listing. For starters, try sites like eHow and Squidoo.

5. DoFollow Social Sites and Profiles

If you haven’t noticed, the web has gone social. Some of the best places for authoritative one-way links are in these social networking/bookmarking sites and profiles, especially if you build up your followers and subscribers. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google+… will all give you opportunities to build your one-way links.

6. Memberships and Testimonials

You must always be pro-active when it comes to link building, so go out of your way to get links from any memberships you may belong to. Also, giving testimonials for your favorite site or product can be another excellent way to get authoritative links as these links are usually displayed on the main/index page of a site.

7. Embedded Videos/Slideshows/Software

Many webmasters have had great success by using embedded software, videos, awards, slideshows… to create one-way links back to their sites. For example, just look at how Slideshare.net builds its backlinks. You can try something similar or use that program to share your content and build your own links.

8. Site And Blog Commenting

While many sites are cracking down or making all their links NoFollow… commenting on blog and sites is still an effective way to get those backlinks. Many online marketers create Google Alerts for their targeted keywords and when any related links are indexed in Google, they get an email. They then thoroughly check out those links to see if it is worth their while to make a comment.

There you have it, some of the best places to help you build your all important authoritative one-way links. Many marketers simply take a few minutes of each day to build these types of links back to their sites. Over time these links will increase and you will receive more traffic and higher rankings as a direct result of these powerful one-way links.

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