SEO Dance

Aaron Wall, an SEO expert and author of SEOBook has just announced his additions to his ebook. Among the updates he has included are mostly about link baiting.

The part of the link baiting post that caught my interest most is the method of formatting a link bait, which Wall has discussed in utter detail.

It’s not rocket science how a list becomes so viral in no time, but here’s how Aaron Wall puts it:

By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you make a list of 101 ways to do x people may give a few ideas and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383 ways to do x.

The power of a magnetic headline can’t also be discounted if a successful linkbait is one’s goal. According to Wall, it’s the behavior of the social news users like of Digg, that makes effective or interesting headlines trample those with great content but lame headlines or titles.

More link baiting wisdom from Aaron Wall.

linkbaiting, SEO book, Aaron Wall, headline writing, SEO copywriting

One of the most popular link brokerage services Text-Link-Ads has released shiny new features mainly for link buyers in the form of:

RSS/Email Inventory Alert System

Link buyers can sign up to be alerted of new TLA inventory additions directly throug their RSS readers or e-mail inbox. An inventory watchlist is made available, which could be helpful to SEO people aiming to acquire more inbound link juice options.

Previously Purchased Inventory Marking

Link buyers previously purchased links are now marked red to avoid duplicate purchases.

More from TLA’s Link Building Blog

TLA, rss, link building blog, link buying

SEO contest participants use various SEO techniques including giving away Superman tickets to those who would help them with their link development efforts.

Others would easily give away a PR6 link to get that Google shirt:

I was coaxing him to give me the shirt in exchange for a PR6 link but I was turned down! -Alleba

And so, the following link exchange effort would not hurt, right?

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For the uninitiated, linkbaiting is that SEO strategy that makes use of various, often sneaky methods to gain IBLs or inbound links and consequentially, gain more traffic. It is a form of viral marketing, Internet-literati style.

For a link bait to be successful, a hook is required. A hook is that thing that drives publicity, good or bad, it still is publicity. Black hat or white hat, it still is SEO.

Examples of linkbaits include delivery of the freshest news, nowhere-else-to-be-found how-to’s, lists (top 10 people with the most polluted mind, why Google will never outdo MSN, top 10 Firefox plugins you’ll never use), controversial or humorous videos, etc. You get the idea?

For the initiated, it’s not new that more and more are making linkbaiting a full-time job. Here are some of ‘em gifted ones:

- Stuntdubl Linkbait Service($5,000)
- Text-Link-Ads Link Service ($5,000 - $10,000)
- SEOMoz LinkBait Development ($5,000 - $50,000)
- Andy Hagans Link Baiting Service ($4,995)
and the most recent player of the link bait game:
- Eric Ward Link Bait Strategy ($2,000)

$2,000 to $50,000?! Lucrative, eh? But how do you measure the success of a link bait service, really? Anyone has ever availed of such SEO service? Feel free to throw in your 2 cents.

link bait service, linkbaiting, Eric Ward

If you are faced with the dilemma of what to give more attention to in optimizing your website or blog for better search engine visibility, on-page or off-page SEO, one SEO study showed results that search engines favor more the off-page SEO efforts of webmasters.

SEO experts of Fortune Interactive used its SEMLogic technology to acquire information on what SEO factors search engines find important. The study used the highly-competitive keyword “laptop” and checked out the top 100 search results from the Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The data was analyzed last June 30, 2006.

Here are the results of the study:

- *IBL Quality is the most important factor across the board.
- IBL Quantity is of least importance relatively among the off-page factors across the board.
- Achieving the **coveted trifecta of ranking well across the search engines requires strong values in the two most important influential factors for each search engine.

*IBL stands for inbound link
**coveted trifecta - ranking high for the three major search engines

Here are more details on the results of this study about SEO factors.

IBL quality, coveted trifecta, on-page SEO versus off-page SEO, SEMLogic, Fortune Interactive, SEO study

Using link farms for link building is widely-known as a big no-no. Why? Google included it on its webmaster guidelines that link exchange farms are a big no-no if you would not like to be labeled as a black hatter.

White Hat Link Building?
But there is one manual method of link building that used to be most favored by search engines. However, the SEO world quickly evolves and search engines are getting smarter each day, or are they? But whatever the case may be with how all the major search engines rank websites, one old school SEO technique that is currently getting less and less popularity is reciprocal linking or asking for link exchanges.

Value of Reciprocal Links in Link Building NADA?
Now if you are still a big believer of reciprocal links as a link building scheme, some SEO gurus would assert that reciprocal linking is now more of a way to gain more traffic and not to increase pagerank. That information is subject to debate but whatever floats your SEO boat, right?

Webmasters’ Apathy with Link Exchange Requests
Getting into the vein of this blog posts title, yes you don’t have to send an e-mail to webmasters of sites having high pageranks saying “please exchange links with me. You and I will both benefit from this link exchange.” (But more for me, really.)

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Link building does not have to be done solely off-page. On-page optimization also requires link building within the pages of a website. This is what internal linking is for. Proper internal linking makes it easiers for readers to jump from one page to another or in case of a blog, from one blog post to another.

So if you’re wondering whether this SEO technique is a black hat or a white hat one, don’t fret. Internal linking makes it less difficult for visitors to navigate a website, and that means it improves the usability of a website. So, yeah it’s a white hat technique. And that holds true for search engine spiders, too. Remember those mechanical bugs that consistently checks a website’s content to report whether a search engine should index your site’s content or not?

To better prove that internal linking is a white hat SEO tactic, Google’s webmaster guidelines for SEO clearly include internal linking:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

So how do you actually make internal linking work for your site or blog?

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Launching a successful SEO campaign requires covering the 2 factors of SEO: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page SEO is employing a set of SEO techniques that is limited to tweaking only the web pages of a web site. An HTML-challenged person will experience some difficulty accomplishing on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is the use of optimization methods that will make a website look good with the search engines through link building. Link building is time-consuming but can be very rewarding as long as one knows how to execute it properly.

Seth Godin also has a brief explanation which might also help make it easy for SEO newbies to understand the difference between on-page and off-page SEO. Actually Seth tagged these SEO factors as active and passive SEO.

These two SEO campaign aspects are of course not without the tendency to succumb to the bi-hatted nature of SEO techniques.

Specific on-page and off-page SEO techniques and which of these SEO factors is known to be better than the other in making a website get a good search engine placement will soon be discussed. Stay tuned!

on-page SEO, off-page SEO, SEO techniques, Seth Godin

One of the latest Keyword Tools is EBrandMarketing Keyword Advisor

This SEO tool offers the unique benefit of an estimated number of text links or backlinks needed for a site to rank high for a certain keyword.

Aside from that link building advice, Keyword Advisor also provides the following information for SEOs:

- Listing of top 10 ranked websites on a search engine for queried keyword phrase.
- Listing of link popularities values of the top 10 websites.
- Listing of PageRank values of the top 10 websites.
- A competitive rate for your keyword, indicating whether you should invest on it.

Here is the result for SEODance.com for the keywors “seo dance.”

The summary of SEO Dance’s competitive keyword research result includes that this SEO blog acquire 15 quality backlinks. Hmmm…

keyword advisor, keyword tool, ebrandmarketing, seo dance, link building tip

SEO forums are one of the great sources of SEO tips. And just this morning I have come across some optimization information about how long will it take Google to index or recognize that a site receives inbound links from a site with a high page rank.

Here’s what a WebmasterWorld forum member speculated:

For a high-quality link from a site with “a lot of trust” I have seen it affect rankings in as little as a week.

Another SEO forum member mentioned that what makes it easier for Google to index a site with IBL from a high page rank site is its “age”. Does it mean that it will take ages before the Google search engine finds out that it should be doing its work and show the site on its SERPs already?

I’ve been a witness to that less-than-a-week speed of Google to recognize that your site is receiving some sweet Google juice from some trusted sites. But I’d want to know if the level of page rank will also affect that speed, say how long will Google index your site if you receive a .edu or a .gov (which are said to be “very trusted sites” inbound link or a link from a PR 8 or 9 sites.

You can follow this Google link building recognition discussion by visiting the WebmasterWorld forum.

Google, link building, search engine, indexing, WebmasterWorld, SEO forum, SEO tip

(image from comit-hosting.com)

Kamrul was cool enough to include more points on what other factors affect a site’s page rank.

“I think not only inbound link but also Number of visits, the site the link is coming from is important. Means If your inbound links comes from low ranking site you won’t get that much credit and if accidentally inbound links comes from blacklisted sites, your sites future is in trouble. Since not only Google but also other search engines don’t like bad neighborhood’s. Kamrul’s comment on increasing PR of a site

Bad Site Equals Low Page Rank
Indeed, inbound links from blacklisted sites which Google has penalized is told to be one way to lower a website’s page rank. The bad neighborhoods that Google despise include porn sites, sites with duplicate content, link farms and other banned sites.

Reciprocal Linking for Higher Page Rank Tips
Link exchanges is being practiced by many search engine optimizers to increase their site’s page rank and also to drive more traffic towards their sites. However, reciprocal linking or link exchanges requires precaution. The trick to be successful in increasing the page rank of a website from reciprocal linking is through making sure that the site contains relevant content AND more preferably the page rank of the site that you will be exchanging links with is higher by even just one level than your site’s page rank.

blacklisted site, increase page rank, link exchange, reciprocal linking, relevant content, tips

If you have installed the Google Toolbar you will be able to see the pagerank of every site you visit in your browser. How? It has that PageRank icon with some green part or can be as white as a ghost depending on the PageRank of the website you are viewing.

What is page rank? Here is how Google explains it:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Ok, enough of the vote-vote important-important Google jargon about page rank. Simply put, page rank is the grade or mark that Google gives to a website. Now how is a website ranked? One popular SEO notion is that a website is given a page rank depending on the number of inbound links (IBL) it gets from other websites. So, to get a high PR (0 as the lowest page rank and 10 as the highest), link building is a key move.

So why would you want a high page rank? Here are what I believe the two best benefits of a high page rank:
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Bloghopping led me to this set of tips to make your blog launch a success. It dealt with the following aspects of blog launching:

The First Impression (which made me feel sad that I haven’t been able to post enough content yet)

RSS and Subscriptions (discussed about the “above the fold” requirement for RSS feed links to be found easily by readers; also reminded me to ask the boss for an e-mail subscription section)

Social Bookmarking (reminded me of a co-451-blogger’s Fark success)

Getting Networked

Link Building (one of my most favorite SEO chores)

Finishing Touches (this I’ll never be able to finish since I’m a very tweak-happy person considering the fact that I’m html-illiterate :()

Here, read all of ‘em 21 techniques to make blogging a lot more rewarding while I’m starting with the 2nd tip:

“Don’t get seen naked: Never launch a blog with fewer than 5 posts.”

blog promotion, blog SEO, link building, blog tip, RSS feed, social bookmark, Fark

Aside from the recent SEO contest I’ve joined, getting my SEO blog to show up in the first few pages of the SERPs is one of the most challenging SEO endeavor I’ve ever gotten myself into. Thanks to the one who chose my domain name SEO Dance, (Is it Chrispian?), this will be one hell of a roller-coaster ride. Haha!

One of the first few SEO steps I have accomplished is to try to get as many IBL (inbound links) directing to my blog. It’s one tried and tested method to get out of the sandbox.
Link building translates to building trust as how many SEO gurus would preach. Whether they call that getting trapped in Google algorithm’s quicksand a sandbox or trustbox, one thing is for sure, everyone needs to get out of the darn box!

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