Should You Link To Your Google Places Page?

A reader asked Mike Blumenthal if linking to her Google Places page would make it rank higher in the search engines.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

Can Microsites Provide Good SEO?

You could call 2011 The Year of the Panda. Panda in this case is a reference to Google Panda, the algorithm update that killed hundreds or thousands of websites instantly, many of them big name websites. It also did in some microsites.

And that makes us ask the question, are microsites good for SEO?

My answer is, they can be if done right. The problem so often is that website designers do not often do them correctly.

So, What’s A Microsite?

A microsite is a small website that serves a specific purpose. It is usually defined as a site that consists of only 3-5 pages not counting the terms of service and privacy policy pages. The focus is very narrow and specific.

You can build a microsite that targets a narrower niche within your broad company website’s niche. But what has killed many SEOs trying to use microsites is they linked them all together in a massive link building scheme. Google caught on and all their sites were de-indexed. Rather quickly.

If you build microsites, build them as standalone webites, not as link satellites for your larger site.

The Real Benefit Of A Microsite

The real benefit to having multiple microsites is not that you can use them to build links to your major corporate website. The real benefit is that you can use them as separate websites that achieve search engine rankings on their own.

If you have three microsites that each target their own specific keywords, that’s 6 times the number of opportunities to rank well for the keywords that you are targeting. That’s in addition to the ranking opportunities of your main website. And that’s if you don’t link them together.

You have to make sure your microsites aren’t associated with each in any way. Treat them like separate businesses and promote them as such.

Use Blogger For Your Own Personal Article Directory

Now that Google Knol is dead, is there an alternative that you can use for your articles?

Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.

You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.

First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.

Both strategies work well.

Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.

Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?

The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.

What Online Marketing Methods Are Important For 2012?

If you plan on doing any online marketing in 2012, what are the important methods of marketing that you should focus on? What should you stay away from?

First and foremost, SEO is definitely not dead. You shouldn’t give up on that yet. But it has changed in the last five years.

For instance, if you are out prowling for links and looking for high PR do-follow links, then you are probably wasting your time. But if you are focusing on placing your unique articles on high profile, high traffic websites where they will be seen, then that is a much better way to go about link building in 2012.

Social media is another online marketing tactic that isn’t going away. However, don’t just sign up for a bunch of social media websites and forgetting about them. Stick the large sites with current traction and high traffic. For most businesses, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. If there are niche-specific sites that you can focus on, join them too.

Whichever social media websites you decide to join, stay active.

Video marketing and mobile marketing are two other online content strategies that are gaining ground and look to be effective in 2012.

Online marketing hasn’t changed much in the last five to ten years, but it has changed. Make note of the changes and keep promoting your content far and wide.

Why External Links Are Good

Most SEOs will tell you that the way to boost your rankings in the search engines is to build lots and lots of inbound links. Don’t build external links – those that link out – because they drain your authority juice away. Build your inbound links with great anchor text from relevant high authority websites and you’ll be the golden boy of SEO.

That advice really sucks. I’ll tell you why.

Google has long caught onto the practice of spammy links that follow all the rules of the book. They’ve done changed their algorithms at least a couple of dozen times to prevent those links from helping websites that shouldn’t rank. So do all the crafty link building you can following all the usual rules. It won’t work.

What does work is linking out to other sites within your niche. Don’t worry about draining your authority juice. You probably don’t have any yet.

Rather, consider yourself an authority in your niche and act like it. Would an authority link to a resource off site that would help a reader more than anything else you can post on your own? Of course he would. Then do that. Real authority websites link out promiscuously. They link to websites that are helpful to their readers.

That’s not to say you should link everywhere you can. Be selective about your external links. You don’t want to send your readers to warez sites or sites where they’ll pick up a malicious virus.

Set your standards for excellence based on common sense. Link to sites that add value to your niche for your readers. Become a real authority, not some fake authority based on spammy links that get you nowhere.

Is Link Building Dead?

Leave it to Aaron Wall to come up with the link building is dead infographic. But the veteran SEO has been chiding Google for its policies for several years now. Still, I think he has a good point. This infographic illustrates how traditional link building is dying. (I’d embed it, but the smallest option – 640px – is too wide for this blog.)

What I think this infographic is saying is that Google is favoring big corporations at the expense of small businesses. Do you see that? Do you agree?

Something else that Aaron Wall does not mention in this infographic is Google+. I believe it is Google’s hope that everyone will start using Google+, then they will know what your interests are intrinsically. Link building won’t be necessary if Google can rely entirely on social cues to deliver you the content you’d be most interested in. And companies that spend their time building links for SEO purposes will just be wasting their time.

This makes me wonder what kind of Web we’ll have 2-5 years from now. Will link building be completely dead? Will the Web be entirely social and will the Web’s biggest search engine deliver all its results based on how you interact with Google+?

What do you think?

9 Creative Ways To Acquire Image Links

Not all links have to be text links. Of course, text links are more valuable than image links, but when building out your link portfolio, think diversity. Images can diversify your links and do it in ways beyond the obvious kinds of links. Some websites might never link to you textually, but might use an image you offer while compensating you with an attribution link.

Here are 9 creative ways to encourage other webmasters to link to you with images.

1. Create an image resource center on your website and allow anyone to use them as long as they give you a link back to your website.
2. Use your own images in your blog and use a keyword phrase in the image’s caption to link to an internal page on your website.
3. Send an e-mail to websites that hotlink your images and ask them to download the image and upload it to their own servers, then link back to you. If they refuse or don’t answer, send them a follow up reminding them that your suggestion is better than being slapped with a DMCA complaint.
4. Start a Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa account and include instructions to anyone who wants to use your images showing them how to link to you.
5. Create an image widget and allow others to use it on their websites.
6. Run an image contest
7. Start an image blog
8. Send out a social media release to Pitchengine.
9. Send your images to photo bloggers and ask them to review your image gallery.

Link building is an important part of running a website, but doing the same old thing can get tiresome. Try a few creative methods of link building with images.

Isn’t Killing Knol Pages Fun?

Google has announced that Google Knol is going away. But not for good.

In actuality, they’re just changing form. But there may be more to it than simply a metamorphosis. It looks like a complete branding job and Google is getting out of the picture.

It appears that Annotum intends to keep the basic format of Knol while changing its platform to WordPress. But it’s unclear what else will change beyond that. Currently, Knol pages provide a link building benefit for authors – the few – who use them. But will Annotum continue that? Will Google place a higher priority on content published on Annotum? Those questions have yet to remain unanswered.

Furthermore, Annotum seems interested in targeting the scientific and scholarly communities, which is how Knol started out. But because Google didn’t put strict guidelines on the content, much of it became commercial. And that appeared to be by design. Some people suspect that Google encouraged commercial content. Whether they did or not is neither here nor there since the Knol domain will no longer be active after May 1, 2012.

Change is something Internet marketers have come to expect. And Google giving up on products not doing well is another. There’s no real surprise here. But if you have Knol pages, then you should either import them to Annotum or download them for other uses.

Is Article Marketing Or Social Media More Effective?

Define “more effective.”

Article marketing has been around a long time. At one time it was the preferred link building method of savvy online marketers. Then social media came along.

Social media has never really been about building links, per se. It was about making connections, but it had the side benefit of helping you build great links – if you did it right. And article marketing could lead to great connections that increased your bottom line.

So which one is more effective?

If you’re talking about sheer marketing power, I’d have to say article marketing. Only, today we do it differently.

If you write great articles and get them published on high traffic websites with a lot of authority, not only can you build great inbound links for your website, but you can also drive loads of targeted traffic to your website. The key is to target the right venues for your articles. And if you do that right, those articles will be online for years allowing you to reap the benefits of article marketing for a long time.

Social media has its benefits too. Reputation management, authority, relationships. But you have to keep your marketing in perspective. What works best for you?

Where To Publish Articles For Links

SEO is a science/art that changes over time. Strategies that worked ten years ago may be employed differently if you want to see the same results. Article marketing is one SEO tactic that is still useful, but successful Internet marketers aren’t doing it the same way they used to.

Let’s be clear about what is the purpose of article marketing. It’s actually three purposes.

1. Link building - Yes, article marketing can help you build inbound links to your websites, but it’s just one reason you write articles and seek publication on other websites.
2. Reputation building – Articles are also great for building your reputation as an authority in your niche.
3. Pre-selling – If you write your articles the right way, your prospects will be pre-sold. That is, they’ll almost be ready to buy when they land on your website.

Ultimately, you want to drive new traffic to your website. That’s why you write and publish articles. So why not go to high traffic publishers with a high authority rating? Three such websites are listed below.

Knol – Google Knol pages are great because you can put your links right in the article.
HubPages – Build knowledge hubs where each article focuses on a specific topic within your niche.
Squidoo – Created by Seth Godin, Squidoo allows you to build lenses around specific topics where each lens consist of multiple articles that link back to other places on the web.

All three of these high PageRank websites are great traffic generators and awesome link building tools. They’re perfect for article marketing.

Anchor Text: Exact Match Or Partial Match?

For years, leading SEO firm SEOmoz has recommended to search marketers that exact match anchor text is the way to go when building links. Yesterday, in a video and blog post, they reversed that advice and said that partial match anchor text will be important for future search marketing.

Here’s the video. Listen carefully.

So what’s he saying? Here’s how I interpret the message.

The most important factor in the way that you build links back to your web pages is to think like a human, not a robot. In other words, what comes naturally?

If you were to link from one page on the web to another without SEO being a factor – let’s say you just wanted to build a link that encouraged readers to click it and go to your page – what phrase would you use to create that link? It’s different in every circumstance. That’s why anchor text diversity is so important.

When you consider anchor text diversity, it’s important not to get into a This vs. That mentality. The question isn’t so much about whether exact match is right or wrong or whether partial match is better than exact match, but rather that both are necessary in certain situations. Your job as a search marketer or webmaster is to determine which is most appropriate for a given link on a given page.

4 Big Benefits To Social Media

When you think of social media, what do you think about in terms of benefits? Most people are wrapped up in the idea of engagement, and that certainly is a benefit. But is it the only one?

Here are 4 of the most important benefits to using social media starting with audience engagement.

1. Audience engagement – When you participate in social media – whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or something else – audience engagement is one of the most important benefits. Done correctly, you can have your audience hang on your every word.
2. Reputation Management – Another benefit is the increase in your social stature. Reputation management can cut both ways so you should watch you Ps and Qs.
3. Link Building - Many social media websites are do-follow, but beyond that even you can build links through social media just by being interesting. Some people will link to your content through their blog if they like what you are doing.
4. Traffic - Finally, traffic. If you don’t have enough traffic to your website, then engage in social media. If you are effective, you’ll see your traffic go up in great numbers.

These are just a few of the benefits to social media marketing, but they are important benefits. If you are ready to take advantage of them, get involved right now.

Infographics: Visual Information Sells

Online, visual information is powerful. Images, they’re very powerful. Videos are even more powerful. But infographics may be the most powerful images of all.

Infographics rely on two things – both powerful in themselves.

1. Information
2. Graphics

An infographic is simply a set of facts – or information – packaged visually. The information is cast as an image, or graphic, so that it is easy to consume, doesn’t take a lot of time to analyze, and provides a visual look at a load of information that might be more difficult and detailed to analyze in simple text form.

The downside to infographics is that they are difficult to SEO. Because they are an image rather than text, you have to treat them like an image for the search engines. The upside, however, is that a powerful infographic can attract a huge amount of links, which is outstanding SEO. You can actually use an infographic as link bait and improve the overall SEO of your website.

You should also include an alt tag for your infographic to give it that image SEO quality you desire.

Once your visitor shows up to your site to see the work you’ve put into the powerful visual presentation of your information, you should get them to share it with their friends by providing social sharing buttons. That can be additional SEO and a huge source of traffic.

Get Your HubPages Subdomain

Google Panda has all sorts of websites trying something new. And about every 3-4 months now, Google updates its update and you’ll hear a little murmur ripple through the blogosphere. Well, HubPages is taking a different approach. They’re assigning subdomains.

Assigning is correct, unless you claim your own subdomain by August 10.

This is a great article marketing opportunity for Hubbers. If you’re not currently a Hubber, then you can still get the online reputation management benefits.

The way HubPages works, you can put links in your articles, but your articles better be quality articles and not spam. If your articles are low quality, then your subdomain will be low quality and will likely have low search engine rankings if any at all. Bottom line: If you want your subdomain, and your articles, to rank well, then you’d better write high quality articles. Period.

That’s the way article marketing should be. Your high quality articles will produce links for your web pages, send traffic to your website, and provide you with a strong voice of authority with an equally strong reputation.

Start building your HubPages now. Be diligent in your efforts and you will see a huge increase in your reputation and get the traffic and links you want.

Anatomy Of An Online Marketing Campaign

There are different ways to skin a cat, as they say. But when it comes to kicking off a brand new Internet marketing campaign, there are certain things that you definitely want to include in that effort. Leave them out at your own peril.

Here are the steps you need to take in your online marketing campaign. Some of the steps can be performed in any order while others should be performed in the proper order stated. I’ll let you know when it’s OK to veer into a different direction or rearrange the order.

• Competitive research – Start with understanding where your competition is and what they are up to. Someone was in your space before you. Find out who they are and what they’ve done and are doing.
• Keyword research – You should include keyword research along with competitive research, but it does extend beyond competitive intelligence. You want study the competition’s keywords, but you also want to do your own independent research.
• Pay Per Click – PPC advertising will be your first test of your keywords. It’s fast and gets you the information you need quickly, plus you can drive instant sales with PPC.
• Search engine optimization – Next, take what you’ve learned from your competitive research, keyword research, and PPC and build a solid SEO campaign. You can do SEO before PPC, but I recommend performing PPC first so you can us it to test your keywords.
• Social media marketing – You want to save your social media campaign for later in the game. It’s a lower threshold type of marketing. It’s good for branding and building relationships, but you want to get your SEO and PPC going first so that you can use them to test your keywords and strategies.
• Video marketing – With videos, you can market with them before social media or after. It makes little difference, but you don’t want to start your video marketing campaign before SEO or PPC.
• Link building – Other forms of marketing like articles, blogs, and link building efforts are ongoing. Start them as soon you get your SEO campaign going and don’t ever stop.

5 Ways Your Blog Comment Might Be Spam

It’s hard to believe that many SEO companies, Internet marketers, and companies online are using blog comment tactics from 2005 – tactics that aren’t at all effective and could hurt your reputation. On a daily basis, Reciprocal Consulting deletes spam comments, and some of them are from other Internet marketing consults who should know better.

Here are 5 specific ways that your blog comment might be considered spam and sent to the spam folder or the trash bin:

1. Your comment is generic and adds no value to the blog. I see this all the time. Comments that are written and are so generic they could appear on anybody’s blog. If you aren’t commenting on something specific within the blog post you are commenting on, then your comment could be considered spam.
2. The name you add to the comment form name field is your company name or a keyword. People like reading comments from other people. Companies and keywords don’t interact well with people. You’ll get more respect for your comments if you add them under your own name.
3. Your e-mail address doesn’t match your domain name. This one is particularly puzzling when I see a comment from a Web marketing company representing a client and the e-mail address is from the Web marketing company’s domain rather than the client’s. I delete them.
4. Your comment is full of links. The reason we ask for your website address is so that you can get a link back for your comment. There’s no need to add multiple links to your comment. We consider that spam.
5. Your comment is in a foreign language. I see this often enough that it’s worth a mention. Why comment in Japanese or Spanish when the blog you are commenting on is English? I’m just saying.

With all the valid link building strategies available today, blog comment spam isn’t necessary. Why waste your time?

Link Diversity And Your Link Portfolio

One of the most confusing aspects of link building for a lot of webmasters and search engine optimization professionals is how to build diversity into their link portfolio.

The reason this is confusing to so many people is because many webmasters trying to do their own SEO get stuck on a single keyword phrase for their anchor text. If you focus only on your primary keyword, then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Also, a huge mistake is to focus all of your link building efforts on your home page. More natural link building involves building deep links to your internal pages.

Here are six things to keep in mind when link building so that you build a more natural and diverse link portfolio:

1. Vary your anchor text. It is best to use between 5-20 different anchor text key phrases for each web page you build links to on your website.
2. Do not just link to the home page. Most of your links should point to internal web pages on your website.
3. Seek out links from a variety of types of websites (blogs, directories, forums, etc.).
4. Don’t just target high PageRank websites. You should have a good number of links from low and mid-range authority sites.
5. Build a few links from websites outside of your niche.
6. Use non-keyword types of links too. “Click here” and “go to” type links can be effective in driving traffic and are natural link building phrases. Just don’t do it too often.

A diverse link portfolio consists of high authority links, low authority links, links from a variety of different types of websites, and a diverse set of anchor text phrases.

The New Linkbuilding Isn’t So New

Debra Mastaler lists several “new” linkbuilding methods, but it seems that these methods aren’t so new after all. In fact, if we run through the list, we’ll see some pretty common strains:

1. Document sharing (used to be directory submissions)
2. Retweet buttons
3. FutureTweets (or scheduled tweets)
4. Use tools to determine when your Twitter audience is most active and schedule your tweets and retweets for that time.
5. Use Twitter Search to find hot topics (or Google Trends) and write about those topics on your blog, then retweet them during peak Twitter times for your audience.
6. Grow your Twitter base.
7. Use linkbait.
8. Run your pages through Copyscape and request content thieves to link to you (and I’d add, if they don’t do so, ask them to remove your content).

Essentially, what Debra is suggesting that link builders do today is the same as what they’ve always done except that the tactics are updated for a social media world – particularly Twitter (isn’t that the same as saying that social media IS SEO?).

Here’s the bottom line: Keep building links, but you don’t have to abandon the old ways of doing it. Just update your methods to take into consideration current popular and trending social patterns. Let the search algorithms take care of the rest.

A Free Link Checker For Link Builders

When it comes to link building, measuring which links are taking hold and which ones are not is very important. Yahoo!s Site Explorer has been a tool that webmasters have used for many years and it has been considered the best free online link checker available. But it’s changing.

Exactly how Site Explorer is going to change is anybody’s guess, but Yahoo! has announced that its integration with Bing will lead to an inevitable change in Site Explorer some time in 2012. Here’s a snippet from the announcement:

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites.

The bold text is mine.

Just what are these new features? No one knows. But if they improve Site Explorer, then they are welcome. For now, however, webmasters can go on using Yahoo!s Site Explorer as they always have – analyzing their inbound links and looking for new link building opportunities. My hope is that these features will not go away.

Can You Improve Search Engine Rankings Overnight?

Is it possible to improve search engine rankings overnight? Let’s say you have a few keywords that are attracting search engine traffic, but you know that you rank at the bottom of page one or on page two for those keywords. What should you do?

Consider that about 90% of searchers click on page one results. Also consider that more than 80% of searchers click on one of the top three listings on page one. It makes sense to try to increase your rankings for those keywords that are moderately successful.

What you want to do is identify those keywords that are sending you traffic but whose search engine rankings are below the top three positions on page one yet not further down than page three. Got that list? Now, start a link building campaign that focuses on building solid anchor text links for those specific keywords.

This process should take no more than a month or two. If you build good links – that is, focus on links from high authority web pages, use specific anchor text, stay away from spam in any form, and stay consistent and steady – then you can increase your search engine rankings in just a short time.

Link building is a time consuming process, but it is well worth the effort for the pay load on the back end. It won’t happen overnight, but it can happen.

Why Your Content Needs Links

Content and links go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or like a hot dog and mustard (or ketchup if you are under 10 years old).

Seriously, building content is one thing. You can write great content and even make it shine for the search engines as you sprinkle it with your favorite keywords, but you’ll find that your best content really takes on a life of its own when it starts to attract links.

Links serve some very important purposes:

• Inbound links are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page relative to other web pages on the same topic
• Links are a reflection of your brand
• Links can serve as a reputation management tool
• Links are a very important path for traffic to your website
• Links often serve as a clue to website content readers about the nature of the content on a web page being linked to
• Outbound links can be a way to attribute a source upon which your own ideas are based.

Links serve many purposes, but they are important because search engines use links to crawl the web. A web page cannot be crawled by search engine robots – hence, cannot be indexed – unless there are links pointing to it.

When it comes to building your content, don’t just think about the content itself. You should also consider how links – your own as well as any the content itself might attract from somewhere else – can be used to enhance the content and make it more valuable for your audience.

The Best Article Marketing Money Can Buy

A lot has been said about article marketing. Good and bad. It used to be the preferred online marketing method for serious Internet marketers. For some people, it still is. But when I say “article marketing,” what do you think of? Yeah, that’s what most people think about – link building.

There’s nothing wrong with writing articles and submitting them to article directories in hopes that you’ll attract inbound links to your website. And there’s nothing wrong with writing guest articles for other blogs and websites for the same reason. But ask yourself this question: How much time do I spend seeking inbound links via article marketing and guest blogging versus writing content for my own website?

If you spend more time seeking inbound links through articles and guest blog posts than you spend writing quality articles for your own website, then I’d say you aren’t spending your time wisely.

The reason I say that is because there is no content more valuable than the content you write for your own website. Search engines can always change their algorithms to devalue links that you spent hundreds of hours chasing. We’ve seen that several times over the years. But if you write quality content for your own website, you will seldom see a change that devalues that content. The key word there is “quality.” In other words, not spam.

Never forget this: Content is king. It always has been and always will be. Links are good, but the best article marketing you can ever do is to write quality content for your own website.

The Bad SEO Advice NAR Gives

If you are a real estate agent or broker, you might feel more comfortable getting your SEO advice from another real estate agent or broker, or from the National Association of Realtors. That might not be such a good idea, however.

Think about this: Would you caution your real estate clients against getting real estate advice from anyone other than a real estate agent? The reason is obvious, isn’t it?

The NAR recently posted SEO advice for real estate agents in an article on its website. The problem isn’t so much in the general advice NAR gives, but in the specific advice.

For example, its six recommended SEO practices include:

• Write better page titles
• Broadcast your links
• Use keywords generously
• Reword outgoing links
• Develop a site map
• Tweet about it

That’s a mediocre list, at best. What’s not on that list and should be are: 1) list your site on local directories; 2) claim it on Google Local, Bing Local, and Yahoo! Local; 3) and start a blog. But the nitty-gritty details of these bullet points isn’t much to be desired either.

For example, hear what NAR has to say about keywords:

Your main keywords should appear at least 10 to 13 times per 700 words on a page, says Mark Menzella, who runs RE/Advantage, a real estate Web design company in Fairfield, N.J.

In industry speak, this concept is called “keyword density.” The problem is, keyword density is a huge myth. It doesn’t work. There is no optimal number of times a keyword should appear on any web page. That’s because the search engines use almost 200 criteria for determining where pages rank for a specific keyword.

Let’s look at what NAR says about tweeting:

“Now that tweets are indexed in Google, Twitter has become an important part of SEO strategy,” says Misty Lackie of Go Smart Solutions, a technology consulting firm in Grover Beach, Calif. So get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and create useful tweets that happen to include your business keywords and links to your site.

Honestly, I’ve never seen much SEO benefit from tweeting. Keywords in your tweets don’t help you much in terms of your website’s SEO. Even anchor text in your links from Twitter are low grade since those links are no-follow links. That’s not to say that Twitter is a bad marketing tool. Rather, it’s a highly effective marketing tool for getting you some local exposure, but for SEO, it’s not a must-have tool.

Your best bet for good SEO advice is not to rely on industry professionals within real estate. You should get your real estate advice from real estate agents and brokers, but get your SEO advice from professional SEO consultants.

Q&A Sites And SEO

SEOmoz is a leading SEO blog and they recently posted a very thoughtful essay on Q&A sites and the value of SEO. I encourage you to read the entire blog post, but I’ll offer a few highlights here.

For starters, there is a general encouragement that, despite Google’s recent farmer update, Q&A sites still are a great opportunity to build your own reputation and to do some back linking. If you’re not familiar with the farmer update, let’s just say that Google introduced an algorithm that put a slap on some of those how-to sites, what are generally referred to as “content farms.”

Interestingly, many of the sites that were affected are sites that are written by average Joes. These sites are HubPages, Squidoo, and Associated Content. Even EzineArticles, the popular article directory (and a few other article directories), took a hit. But many of the Q&A sites did not. This forms the basis of Pavel Israelsky’s argument.

I’ll have to hand it to Pavel. He does a good job of outlining why Q&A sites represent a great opportunity right now. Here are his six reasons:

1. People Google more questions than generic keywords
2. Q&A sites have grown in popularity in the last year
3. Q&A pages rank high in the search results
4. They also offer great diversification opportunities for your link portfolio
5. People prefer to link to Q&A pages than to corporate-sponsored pages
6. Targeted traffic means better conversion

I can’t really argue with any of those points. Keep in mind, however, that if you use Q&A sites to target your important keywords, be sure that you find out which questions related to those keywords are being asked in the search engines. That will be key to optimizing your Q&A posts. If you answer questions that are asked, try to optimize your answers as well.

Q&A sites are a relatively recent phenomenon. If they start getting spammed with useless content, you can expect another Google slap down, so don’t go hog wild. Just see the opportunity for what it is and approach it intelligently.

The Inherent Danger Of Paid Links

Website owners have been trying various tactics to build inbound links ever since Google started ranking pages.  There have many different tactics used, some ‘white hat’ and others ‘black hat’.  The New York Times recently ran an article titled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,” which discussed the link building program of J C Penny.

According to the article, J C  Penny engaged in a wide campaign of securing links to specific internal pages. The problem was, these links fell under what is generally termed ‘paid links’, a link building method that Google has stated is against their terms of service. For J C Penny, the campaign worked well with their websites ranking number one in organic search for a wide range of keywords – and they did so throughout November and December, the peak online buying season.

In fact, they would probably still rank number one if it hadn’t been for the New York Times article.  The inherent danger in any paid link campaign is that detection is always around the corner – and once detected, your web pages could faced severe penalties (note – Google doesn’t use the word penalty, but there’s no other word for it really).  BMW suffered a Google ‘correction’ several years ago that resulted in their web pages being removed from Google’s search index completely.

J C Penny have got off lightly in comparison with their search ranking dropping from number one to number fifty – that’s a drop from page one to page five or six. That’s still enough of a drop to see their online traffic dry up. Link building using any black or gray hat activities is a risky approach. While white hat approaches will take time, once you do work your way to a reasonable search position, you know you’re there legitimately, and that you’re not going to be knocked down tomorrow. Sites that buy links could go from hero to zero overnight – how much are those links worth then?

What Is The Value Of A Link?

Infographics can be helpful or just a sad attempt at link bait. But one thing is for sure, if they are helpful to others then they can helpful to you. This infographic by Vertical Measures illustrates that very well.

What makes this infographic so useful is it’s awesome simplicity. Right away you’ll notice that there are two categories of links based on this graphic. There are PR values and there are link types. The graphic breaks link types down into these categories:

• Content
• Blog/Forum comments
• Purchased
• Reciprocal
• Embedded
• Reclaimed
• Natural
• Requested

But which ones are the most important, or most valued?

This is really subjective, but Vertical Measures ranks them according to two metrics – difficulty and quality. In general, the more difficult it is to obtain a link of a particular type then the higher quality that link will be, which translates into more value for the link builder.

From easiest to most difficult, VM ranks them this way: Content Distribution, Blog and Forum Comments and Purchased Links are easiest to obtain. Next are reciprocal links. The third level of difficulty is populated by social media links, embedded content and reclaimed links. Natural links are the next most difficult to obtain and the most difficult links of all are link requests. This is almost a no-brainer.

From lowest to highest again, quality scores are broken down this way:

• Reciprocal links are in the lowest position (note that they are second level in order of most difficult or easiest to obtain)
• Purchased links and comments are slightly higher quality than reciprocal links
• Distributed content and social media links are next on the quality scale
• Embedded content is a bit higher quality than social media and content distribution links
• Finally, the highest quality links are reclaimed, natural and requested

Notice some slight jumbling in the order but generally following the same parallel between quality and ease of obtaining?

The most interesting part of the value score that I find, however, is the break down of PR values. A PR1 link, for instance, is the equivalent of 11 average links, according to the infographic. That begs the assumption that the PR1 link you get is above average. The question is, What’s average? Would that be a 3 on the quality scale? If so then that would include social media and distributed content links. But some of those types of links can themselves be extraordinary, can’t they?

Vertical Measures places a PR10 link to have the equivalent value of 28,080,881 average links. In other words, get one PR10 link and that could be enough to push you up to a respectable search engine ranking.

Getting the picture yet?

I think the point is to get you thinking about what types of links you should be going after. Personally, I think you should pursue any links you can get. Many Internet marketers in recent years have tried discouraging their clients from chasing reciprocal links because they aren’t valued as highly as one-way links. But the fact is they do carry value. Get a reciprocal link from a PR7 site when your site is a lowly PR4 then that will be a valuable link.

I think you can over think the question. To build a solid link portfolio you need to build diversity into it. That means not focusing on any one particular type of link or link from sites with a high PR. After all, PR1 links carry value too. And some day that PR1 site might become a PR8 site. Your link will still be there.

When it comes to link building, just do it. Do it smartly, but don’t over think it.

5 Internet Marketing Terms You Should Know

If you want to become an Internet marketer, whether your interest is in affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing or you intend to promote your small business through Internet marketing strategies, then you need to become familiar with Internet marketing terms. Here are 5 terms every Internet marketer should know before starting their IM career.

• Keyword – What’s a keyword? If you don’t know what that means then you’ll have a difficult time figuring out how to market yourself online. It’s a very basic concept and an important one. A keyword is any word that you would like your website to rank for in the search engines.
• Search Engine Optimization – Also called SEO, for short. Search engine optimization is the utilization of keywords and links to help your web pages rank better in the search engines.
• Social Media Optimization – You’ve no doubt heard of social media. Maybe you’ve heard of social media marketing. But have you heard of social media optimization? This is the practice of producing your content in such a way that it has an increased chance of spreading itself around in social media circles.
• Link Building – You cannot maximize your SEO efforts without inbound links. These are links that point to your website without a reciprocal link back to the linking site. Also called one-way links. Link building is the process webmasters utilize to build their one-way link portfolio.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online paid advertising where you bid on keywords and you pay for the advertising after your target audience clicks on the ad and visits your website. Other forms of PPC-like advertising include pay per action (PPA) and pay per view (PPV), or CPM (cost per thousand views).

These are not, by any means, the only terms you should be familiar with. There are others – viral marketing, video marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS (cascading style sheets), and many more – but these 5 Internet marketing terms are so basic that no one should start their Internet marketing plans without being familiar with them.

Take the time to learn if you want to earn.

How To Manage And Enhance Your Reputation With Links

One aspect of link building that rarely gets talked about is online reputation management. Of course, in many ways, the reputation management benefits of link building are ancillary – they aren’t the main goal. But if you are cognizant of the impact that links can have on your reputation then you can influence your reputation online just by adding a few inbound links to your important reputation enhancement web pages.

For instance, let’s take your About page. Your About page likely has information about your professional reputation that you want your site visitors to know. But do you promote it?

Many webmasters spend a lot of time building inbound links to their important landing pages, as they should, but neglect to build links to their Contact page and About page. Instead, they let their internal website links serve as the means of driving traffic to those pages. But you can actually build reputation enhancing links to those pages as well. How?

Here are a few ways you can build inbound links to your reputation enhancement pages and use link building as a reputation management tool:

• Press Releases - When you send out a press release to online press release distribution websites, make sure that you include a link to your About page with important anchor text regarding your name or reputation. You might include a sentence like this in your press release:  “(Your Name) is a recognized expert on guinea pigs.” Let “expert on guinea pigs” be your anchor text.
• Social Networking Profiles - When you link to your website from your social networking profiles, link to your About page. You might say something like, “For more information about raising guinea pigs see (Your Name)’s online bio.” Link “(Your Name)’s online bio” and let it serve as your anchor text.
• Social Bookmarking – Why not just social bookmark your About page at some of the popular social bookmarking sites? Ask your friends and most valued customers to do so as well.
• Like Button – Add a Facebook Like button to your About page.
• Request Links – Request links to your About page. You’d be surprised how many people actually will link to your About page if you ask them to. You might even provide them with some choices of anchor text for their links.
• Blog And Forum Signatures – When you comment on blogs and forums, occasionally link to your About page instead of your home page and other landing pages. You should vary your links anyway. Just be sure to throw your About page into the mix with appropriate reputation enhancing anchor text.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important online. Why not use the activities you are already engaged in to improve your reputation and the perception that others will have of you and your business?

5 Websites You Can Build Related Content And Inbound Links With

Internet marketing has grown so much more competitive and sophisticated in recent years. Beyond your own website, there are several places online you can go to build more content related to your niche and even include inbound links to web properties you own. Here are 5 such websites where you can go to building related content.

1. Squidoo - Squidoo is more than a content tool. It’s an online marketing and money making tool to. You build “Lenses” around a particular topic and can include links to any online resources that you choose. It’s great to use as a link building tool because you can make your Lenses relevant to your niche topic and website AND it has a PR 8. In addition, you can add AdSense code and affiliate links so that your Squidoo Lenses make money.
2. HubPages – HubPages are almost like Squidoo Lenses. You can build them around a niche topic and earn money from them. However, they are most effective when you build shorter pages (Squidoo Lenses work better as longer articles) with several of them on the same topic linked together to form a hub.
3. Knol Pages – Knol Pages are not as monetizable as HubPages and Squidoo Lenses but they are good for building links. Write a high value article on a given topic and link to your own web properties. It’s a great link building tool.
4. Associated Content – Now owned by Yahoo!, Associated Content is a lot like HubPages. You create content around a specific topic and link out to your own web properties or other web properties. You can monetize your AC pages with AdSense ads and share the revenue with AC.
5. Examiner – Organized sort of like a newspaper (can you tell by the name?), Examiner is the local version of HubPages. You can create content on a single topic for a local audience and it’s a great tool to use for building a reputation within your niche, which is better than direct monetization.

With these 5 websites, you can become an expert in your niche above and beyond your own website and even use them to make money, build your reputation, drive traffic to your websites and increase your inbound link popularity.

Why Reciprocal Links Are Not Evil

Back in the old days of link building, two sites would get together and agree to link to each other using their most desirable anchor text and promising to link from the page with the highest PageRank. Often, those sites wouldn’t even be related in content. The practice worked – for awhile.

Today, that practice will get you penalized. As a result, there are thousands of SEOs running around telling people not to accept reciprocal links because they are “black hat”, “evil”, “not good”, “bad practice”, etc.
But, they’re not.

Reciprocal links are still valid if they are natural links. That means, if you would link to each other anyway because it’s good for your customers then it’s a good link, reciprocal or not.

Problems with reciprocal linking come in when site owners try to game the PageRank and search engine ranking system by trading non-relevant high-PR links. These links rarely do what they’re supposed to do if you approach the topic with some level of common sense and go about it naturally.

Ask yourself this question, “If I link to this website will it benefit my visitors?” If not then don’t do it, even if the other website owner promises you a high value link. If you can answer the question in the affirmative then go ahead; even a reciprocal link will be better than no link.

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