Reading a few posts today made me think of something that has been on my mind for quite some time when it comes to link building strategies. Should outbound links (and I am talking the regular ones - not this no follow bullcrap) be a strategical part of your link building strategies?

My take on it is simple - Absolutely!

Some of the benefits from giving away outbound links could include better recognition from the search engines. They see that you are not selfish and just getting as many possible links to yourself as possible. If you have good content on your website, blog or forum then you do not need to worry about losing visitors clicking away from you. You should be giving them reasons to keep coming back to you because of the content. Another benefit could be that linking to a bigger site in your industry could build up your credibility with them, and they will accept your posted comments (maybe even let you anchor up a keyword if the comment is useful) on their blog as well as possibly add you to their blog roll. Linking out to other sites/blog posts/forums could get you trackback links as well. There are alot of sites that monitor and most of the bigger ones do, but you should never have to worry about getting deleted if you are being upfront and whitehat about your methods of linking out.

It all comes back to credibilty. Credibilty for your site with your readers, and the search engines. From my experience I have had better luck getting sites to rank that are not stingy with their outbound links, and really use it as a strategical part of their linking strategies.

Be careful of some sites that you link out to though as I have read linking out to certain sites can hurt your rankings. I would probably never link to a site that is not indexed in Google (besides ones I know that are brand new). You never want to link to a site that has been blacklisted, or questionable in nature. If you ever have a question about someone you are going to link to … ask yourself this question: “Would Matt Cutts link to this person?” (this link was not a no follow, but who am I kidding, Matt does not need a link from me) LOL … Have a great day!

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Im not going to post recycled directory submission info, it has definately been beaten to death. The following will be info on what to do once you get to a directory to ensure you are getting the best link possible.

We all know that google likes relevant links, meaning links that come from other sites that Google recognizes as being related to the topic of your site. That doesn’t mean that the entire site has to be related to your topic, rather a page on that site being related to your topic. Look at Wikipedia for example what is the topical category of Wikipedia? Anything and everything, each page being related to it’s own individual topic. With that in mind it is possible to find pages inside of directories that are related to your site and that will help you in your link building efforts.

Whenever you start linkbuilding you need to have your keywords and anchor text in mind, this will help you get the best bang from your link. Then you want to go to the directory and do a search in the search bar for your keywords.

I have a lot of travel sites and one of our biggest clients is going after words like Hawaii Vacation(s) and Hawaii Vacation Package(s), if I was looking for a relevant category to select for their inclusion then I would search those words plus words like, Hawaii Travel, Hawaii Tour(s), if it was hard to find anything I would go all the way down to Hawaii. If there wasn’t regional categories in the directory then I would start with Travel and work my way towards something like vacation packages, activities or another sub category similar to that.

If you are using firefox when doing this open each respective category page in a new tab so they are all organized in your browser. You then wan’t to go to each category page and compare them to find the best one for your site.

The quickest way to find the best relevance in my opinion is to take the name of the directory plus your most important keyword and do a google search, botw “hawaii vacations” This is for botw.org an (absolute must for directory submissions) plus my main keyword. You will see the number one result is botw.org/top/Regional/United_States/Hawaii/Travel_and_Tourism/ so according to Google that is the most relevant category page for my ideal keyword. Most of the time that is the page you will want. The next biggest thing to look at and that would lead you to possibly stop conisdering this page is how many links are going out on it. How many other sites are already listed in that category, if there are 100 on the page with a little number at the bottom that says next and so on, you may want to look for another page. There more links going out the less effect that page will have on your site. I would take a pr 3 page that has four links on it 1,000 times over compared to a pr 6 page that has 200 links on it. I would take a pr 0 page that has 1 or no links on it over the others as well, as long as it is getting cached regularly.

Checking the cache of the page is important if you can’t find anything by doing the google search listed above, you need to be checking to make sure that the page you are going to submit to is indexed in Google and is getting updated regularly. I use the firefox extension by SEOpen this allows you to select the check Google cache in a drop down on your toolbar of whatever page you are on. If the page shows up no cache, or url not found why would you want to be listed in it. A lot of people will pay a submission fee only to get listed in a page that is not indexed. If Google doesn’t have that page in its index then it doesn’t have your link in it either and your not getting any love from that link. If you are debating between multiple category pages, look mostly at the amount of links going out, but if one was last updated in Feb 04 and the other Oct 06 you will most likely want to go with the Oct page as it is getting indexed better for whatever reason.

You also want to make sure that the page is not in the supplemental index, you can do this by using the index tab in the seopen toolbar and it will show the index of the page and if the page is in the supp index or not. Supp index isn’t going to get you any link love either.

Some of you may think this is way too much effort for a directory link as most of the time they barely help you if at all, if you use the seopen toolbar and firefox tab browsing it only takes seconds and that way you make sure you can squeeze whatever link love possible out of that directory. This is also to go along with that fact that you should use these methods on 100 or less quality diretories instead of 1,000 low quality directories. You will get more action from 30 directories done this way than 1,000 submitted semi automatically to whatever category possible. If you are actually going to pay for a directoy why would you submit blindly to it.

Resources:

A quality directory is one that doesn’t sell sitewide or ROS links in its footer or navs, one that doesn’t allow casinos or porn or any other spammy topic. PR isn’t the golden rule but if there is a good flow of PR that means that there is good site structure and it is easy for the engines to index. Also check the index of the directory, I have seen people posting in forums to come and pay for a one way link in their directory, Ill go check it out and check the index and there is no subpages indexed at all and it is a year old site. That isn’t going to help you. A directory that requires a reciprocal link is more than likely viewed as a link farm by Google and you don’t need to waste your time with that. Usually the best quality indicator is if the link is going to be human reviewed. Also site age is good most old direcotries are the best ones.

Directories I swear by:

BOTW.org

Goguiges.org

SBD.Bcentral.com - Use multi link to help with deep links

Dir.Yahoo.com - This is a must

Incrawler.com

Joeant.com

Abilogic.com, Abifind.com - Use the multi link to help with deep link

Uncoverthenet.com - Use Multi Link to help with deep link

There are more you can find them at sites like

seocompany.ca

info.vilesilencer.com

addurl.nu

We Build Pages

*This can also be followed when looking to evalute links you may purchase, why purchase a link that is not indexed, or that is a supplemental page, or has 400 links on it.

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When submitting a press release online we often go to the main PR sites such as PRWeb.com. When only doing this we are missing an opportunity I want to tell you to be taking advantage of.

Everyone is looking for an easy way into Google News, and why not with the potential for millions of views a day. Why not go straight to the source (Google News) and find some nice PR sites to submit to?

If you go to Google News and type in a keyword that would bring the kind of releases you would be doing up pay close attention to where those stories are coming from. It tells you right on the results who submitted it. If you can find a PR site that is already in Google News then it makes it that much easier to get your story in. Go to that site and find the submit release, or submit article button (or link) and try including your PR right there. Its worth a shot and these places are normally free to submit to.

I am not saying to avoid places like PRWeb.com, but just remember that they are not the end all solution when it comes to submitting press! Good luck with this new idea!

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Just a quick note about something Utah SEO Chris Bennett (owner of 97thfloor.com) came across the other day and it got me thinking about all the things (scams) we got to be careful about in the world of SEO. If I can bring this up here and maybe save one person from not making a mistake then it will be worth it!

He had come across a page that was selling a Page Rank 10 text-link for 200 a month. Anyone involved in the world of SEO knows that is just to good to be true. Besides what it could do for rankings (for whatever word you anchor up) just imagine the actual traffic you could get from a link on a PR 10. It could be insaine.

So, just for kicks we investigated a little bit and found out the site only had a couple back links to it and virtualy NO Offsite Optimization. MSN, Yahoo and Google all showed no signs of the site even on radar. There are tools to find out if sites are cloaked and we ran some tools on this site and found out it was jacking the Page Rank from another source (which actually was the PR 10) The site in question (which I will not give any exposure here), had no page rank and like I said … virtually no back links. Crazy huh?

So the point here is to be careful when purchasing links. I would always make sure anyone is very careful about any links they mighy buy on Ebay, forums or other various search engine blogs, or domain names promising a PR 9 or 10 - yet only selling for a 100 bucks??? Ask yourself this: “Why would anyone be selling a PR 10 site for 100 bucks”? The answer is they would never. Never in a million years.

To me its amazing the forms that fraud takes on. Who would have ever thought you would have to worry about purchasing links on supposed high PR sites, only find out the site is probably banned on most search engines. Be careful and stick to the basics with link building. A link from a banned site on Google could be bad news for the future of your site, and you never want to have to deal with that!

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As a brand new internet business just starting out, there are so many things stacked against you its not funny. For example you have a brand new domain name (you probably only registered it for a year), no links, no page rank, nothing! How do you intend of getting the search engines to know who you are? Here’s a suggestion:

Create a Blog.

Any brand new website should create a blog that is maintained atleast 5 days a week and multiple posts daily (if possible). When doing this you are creating content that the search engine spiders are longing for. it also gives the spiders reasons to keep coming back to your site. They are looking for the most relevant site that provides good unique content. If you can focus on writting posts and articles related to the main keywords you want to be found for … you will start to be found for them. You will see traffic and rankings kick in pretty quickly. Alot quicker then if you did not do this–thats for sure!

Most product sites do not have the kind of content that changes alot. This could be a reason they have a hard time gaining better rankings on the major engines. Thats why creating a blog is the perfect idea for brand new site. You can provide useful information, reviews, other people commenting about your products (good or bad) … testimonials believe it or not can be one of the biggest factors of articles getting found.

You may have to get creative at times (when thinking about what to write on), but if all else fails start writting reviews about your products. Nobody knows your product better then you (hopefully). Just remember that keeping an updated and fresh blog will help any site especially if they are brand new get indexed faster, crawled more often and achieve higher rankings.

Places I use for blogging software, and free blog space:

1. www.wordpress.org
2. www.blogger.com

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I have talked before about the kind of sites to link with. Also I have given some pretty good detailed advice about how to build up your in bound links, (IBL) but I got asked the question today that I feel will make a good read.

Can linking with a bad site effect my standing with Google, and if it does how can I make sure the sites I am currently linking to are not banned?

Yes, linking with a banned site on Google can effect the way that Google looks at you. You never want to be guilty by association. Every time you give a link to someone, if its an anchor text or even just a website address that carrys a link with it, you are voting for that site. You are telling the search engines, “here I recommend this site” and that can be a bad thing for you if you are recommending a site that has been banned by Google.

There are many tools out there that will help you check if you are linking to banned sites, but its actually pretty simple and you dont even need to download program to do it. Just go to Google and type in (in the Google search bar-without the quotes) “site:www.whateverdomainname.com

Once you do this if the site does not bring back any results, but you know its a site that has been around for a while they may have been banned. Also, if you have the Google toolbar installed on your computer if you do not see a page rank and the bar is a “grey” color this is also a pretty good indication that they have been banned. Another toolbar that can help find useful information like this out can be found at SEOINC.

Play a good clean game and you will eventually win. I know there is alot of black hat techniques and people not playing by the rules that seem to always be beating you, but it will eventually catch up with them. Google will reward the site that is playing by ALL the rules.

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This is a great question. Actually the best of the week! This is an area I have been running a series of case studies on. ( I will give some specifics in a later post ) For now lets talk about the bottom line and answer the question:

Can linking to other websites improve my rankings?

Yes, if done correctly. Let me explain. Lets talk about directories. We all know that we can get a ton of low level links to directories that are basically no names that carry little if no page rank. Most of the directories that are new have little links on each category or subcategory. What if we were to link to the actual page that our “anchored text” link was on?

It works really well if you have several sites with page ranks of atleast 4 or higher at your disposal. You can just link to the specific page your link is on and improve that pages rank. Remember the earlier post on how Google ranks webpages not websites.

It does not just need to be directories, you can link to blogs you have posts on, you can link to articles that have been submitted (in your favor). You can also link to just regular webpages you may have a link on to improve the ranking of that page as well.

In turn helping these pages that link to you gain better page rank and popularity your website rankings can improve. Just make sure you are getting your main keywords or phrases anchored on the pages you are trying to improve.

This is a great strategy for improving your link popularity, increasing your traffic and getting better rankings. Keep in mind that the page your link is on needs to be pointing to a subpage on your site to help improve your “deep linking”.

Test this out for a few of your pages and you may be impressed.

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Who is guilty of describing a link incorrectly, then putting the actual link as “Click Here”? When I first started with internet businesses I know I was! It doesn’t get into too much detail about why you shouldn’t do that, but the reason you should not do it IS for search engine optimization purposes. There are better ways to promote your site with anchor text other then “click here” This is just an interesting article from w3C.

read more

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Another common question I am often asked is, “Do you have an recommendations for other link building strategies?” Yes, another method is to write and submit articles related to your website. These articles do not have to be long term papers, just more informative un-biased information that would be useful information for readers. They can be anywhere from 2-3 paragraphs to a page. Some websites will even let you include links to your website through the Article submission. All of the article submission sites will give you credit for the article, and people can find you that way and this is how you can build additional links to your site. Plus sites like iSnare submits the article you write to over 24,000 publishers (not all will pick up but with that many sites there is a good chance you will get a link or two out of it).

Article submission sites: (I use and recommend)

• www.digg.com
• www.wikipedia.org
• www.boingboing.net
• www.articlecity.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.isnare.com

Remember to be a good community member. Write the articles for people not search engines. If you keep that in mind and provide useful information on topics related to your website this method can really help you build additional valuble links. Using this method could also help get you a following of readers that will do anything you say and this makes it easier to promote your products or information to them.

Keep in mind is when you are deciding what topics to write on, go back to the keywords you want to be found for. Use them in the headlines of these articles, and make sure you use these same keywords to write the content of the article as well.

On your website it would be a good idea to have an “articles page” and include all the articles you write and submit to other places on your website as well. This will help give you credit for the article if you post it on your website first, and you don’t have to worry about Google picking it up as duplicate content if other people decide to add the article to thier website.

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