Google has gone too far with over optimization penalty. I am sure every Webmaster who has been hit by Google would say those things after each update but today I am going to speak from Google’s users point of view and not from a Webmasters point of view.

Last few days I have been reading lot of articles all over the Internet about the impact of over optimization. Webmasters will talk more about impact on traffic but when you are talking from user’s viewpoint then what matters is the quality of search results.

The Impact

Google has been penalizing so many sites that many queries started pointing to parked domains or blank page websites.

Searching in Google for the term Make Money Online leads to parked domains and blank pages in the top search results. Check out the article High Quality Empty Content Pages by Aaron Wall.

Arguing in favor of Google terms like Make Money Online – the top position can be taken by highly skilled SEO people and so chances of being over optimized cannot be ruled out but SearchEngineJournal analyzes the term something where searching for something pops up the site that showed in first position was a one page website. Read “Something” is Wrong with Google (since 2004)

Few more articles on bad Google’s search results.

• Another Terrible SERP
• WordPress, Penguin, Google and Matt Cutts’ take on WPMU.org

Is Bing a Solution or a Bigger Problem?

Now you tend to get the feeling it is time to move to Bing but then I did not find satisfactory results with Bing either. In fact Bing disappointed me more than Google yet again.

Indian Premier League or IPL 2012 is undoubtedly one of the trending terms now and if you search IPL 2012 in Google, I see a site on the first page of Google and it is ranked on 8th position.

Remember we are talking from view point of Google customer and not from view point of Webmaster and so I will not analyze the site for keyword research or link analysis because that has been done by most of the links I shared above and so let us visit the site as Google’s user.

We see a black banner at the top with logos of all IPL teams and an H1 tag to blend the content with the banner with keywords for users to understand that this is site all about IPL 2012.

Now I searched the same term IPL 2012 in Bing and this is what I see.

Not even worth discussing because the official site IPLT20.com is not among the first 3 results and some WordPress site on .in domain is top of the list even beating Wikipedia.

Question to Readers

Are we Google-ing by Choice or by compulsion? Sound off your choice in comments.

More Related Posts:

1. Google Say – Bing Copies Me. Do You Agree?
2. Why Google +1 Will Fail in Google SERPs
3. Google Instant and Its Impact on SEO and PPC

My friend’s 6 month old site saw a traffic dip around 20th March when Google Announced penalizing over optimized sites.

The very next day I got a call from him saying that he did nothing to trigger over optimization penalty. He wanted me to have a look into his site’s Analytics and Webmaster tools to see if I can come up with a reason for such a hit in traffic from recent Google update.

Why the Drop?

After digging Google Analytics and Google’s Webmaster tools I realized that he has done a very common thing that many of us do that could be the only reason to trigger such a fall. He has few sites in the same niche and all he did was place a site-wide link to the new site from all those established sites.

I was very keen on knowing the exact cause of such impact because the question that I had in my mind was – Can a site-wide link impact the penalty of over optimization. As far as my understanding of over optimization goes the site and blogs for giving backlinks were penalized and de-indexed (I updated my Link Building Strategy to avoid such Blog network).

In fact I also link to my sites site-wide from related sites. As an example IMTips is linked from my MBA Forum site-wide in the top yellow bar but there is no major impact on IMTips for over optimization.

The Real Reason

After discussing the links details I realized that he had a do-follow site-wide link and IMTips incoming site-wide link are all no-follow. It could be the only reason that his site is penalized but IMTips is not penalized. Apart from that site-wide links means there is no variation in anchor text link and March Google updates were more focused on Anchor Text enhancement.

Now we probably know the real cause of fall in his traffic.

So what’s next?

I asked him to remove links from those sites or at least make them no-follow i.e. links for traffic and not for search engine benefits and after 3 week’s his feedback is his traffic is recovering from Google but very very slowly.

Share your March traffic impact from Google in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Effectively Build Links to New Website
2. Check Site Performance with Google Webmaster Tool
3. vBSEO Review – Is “Google SEO” Only Off-Page Optimization?

In SEO for WordPress post I mentioned that Thesis theme (Aff Link) for WordPress is the best WordPress Theme. At that time it was based on my experience and not based on facts but today I have the data to show results and impact of thesis on my blog and help you understand why thesis theme is being used on more than 40,000 blogs Worldwide.

The SEO Impact of Thesis Theme

February 12 2012 is when I rolled out new Design on my Technical Analysis Blog. The new design is based on Thesis framework and Google Organic traffic is up by 30%. Remember it’s not even a complete month as of today when I implemented the new design.

Note: There are very little changes done to the actual design elements on the blog. Thesis theme has been designed to look similar to my old theme with slight changes like removal of carousel from the home page and other such minor changes on the home page but posts pages have the same content and design as the earlier design.

Why Thesis is so good in SEO?

If you are using Thesis theme, you don’t need to use any other SEO plugin for WordPress because it has lot more to offer than any other SEO plugin adds to your blog. Let me share few things that Thesis adds more than those SEO plugins to WordPress.

1. SEO for Posts

Any SEO plugin provides you with the options for Title, Meta Keywords, Meta description but Thesis is one step ahead of such plugins. It gives you the option to make your Read More link text customizable, which means you can make your anchor text from the home page, category page and tags pages to your post better than “Read More” Anchor text giving you more benefits for SEO.

2. SEO for Category Pages

SEO plugins allow you to make your category pages noindex because those pages are nothing but links to other posts in your blog but Thesis Theme has other options as well. Introductory content for your category pages. Instead of just list of posts in the category pages you can add content to it and make it more SEO friendly as well as user friendly by letting your user know what to expect from this category of articles. It helps in SEO because Google wants to send people to the information pages and not to a list of links pages in your category. You can turn your category pages into resource pages with Thesis theme.

Final Thoughts

All my blogs are now on Thesis Themes and I think it is the best choice I made for my blogs. I also recommend the same to other bloggers as well.

Do you use Thesis theme for your blog? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Free or Premium WordPress Theme?
2. Thesis Theme Affiliates Move to ShareASale
3. SEO for WordPress Categories

Keyword research is the most important aspect of search engine optimization or SEO but many SEO people have a misconception that keyword research is a one time process for a website. The process they follow is do keyword research for your website to get good keywords for your site’s home page and you are done with it but that is absolutely not true. I decided to do keyword research for 100 odd articles for go4expert and this is what I see when implemented.

You may argue that Go4Expert is a well established website with thousands of links pointing to the domain home page as well as internal pages and so it can get lot of boost with minor changes with keyword research and if you have such doubts about keyword research see below.

It is a brand new website but I cannot share the website details here because I am not complete owner of this website. This domain is registered in November 2011 and all we have done is added 200+ keyword researched articles to it. You can see how 3 month old website created in WordPress is growing in traffic.

1. Getting started With Keyword Research

All my blogs and forums combined have thousands of articles and so I need to have a strategy in selecting the right articles for keyword research and SEO. The way I do it is visit my Google Analytics Account to see what all queries drive traffic to my websites and what is the average position for those keywords.

From that report I select keywords where I am anywhere between number 4 position to number 10 position (or even 20 for less traffic sites) and come up with list of keywords that I can work upon and better my Google Ranking to drive more traffic to my site.

2. Analyze Keyword Competitions

Once you have a keyword that is driving traffic to your site the next thing to look into it is if you can outrank some of those sites that rank above you. I use Market Samurai’s (Aff Link) SEO Competition Tool to see what all sites are above my site and see if I can out rank them. Market Samurai is a paid tool but it does give you a free trial for few days as well. As you can see in the screenshot below I’ve the full version of Market Samurai because it is very handy SEO tool for analysis.

Let me first explain the short codes you see in the image above. Some are pretty self explanatory.

• DA – Domain Age
• PR – PageRank
• IC – Index Count
• RDD – Referring Domains – Domains i.e. number of unique domains linking to the ranked domain.
• RDP – Referring Domains – Page i.e. number of unique domains linking to the ranked page
• BLP – Page Backlinks
• BLD – Domain Backlinks
• BLEG – Backlinks from .edu/.gov domains
• DMZ – Listed in DMOZ Directory
• YAH – Listed in Yahoo Directory
• Title – Keyword Used in the Title tag?
• URL – Keyword is present in the URL?
• Desc – Keyword is present in Meta Description or not?
• Head – Keyword is present in Hx Header Tag?
• CA – Bing Cache Age

Red color means high competition, yellow means moderate competition and green means low competition. You should focus on keywords where you see lot more green in the SEO competition matrix.

Coming back to Go4Expert analysis – We see that Go4Expert is ranking in 5th position for the keyword “Ethical Hacking” but then the sites that rank better than Go4Expert are very established sites like Wikipedia and techtarget. So it does not make much sense trying to outrank them, instead I will go and work on another keyword from the list of keywords we have generated from Google Analytics.

The process continues for phrases and list those keywords where I see opportunity to rank higher fairly easily.

This article is about Keyword research but I would like to add a line about one of my favorite feature of Market Samurai’s SEO Competition Analysis that is Anchor Text Analysis. It analyzes any website or page and shows what all sites link to that web page or web site and what is Anchor text for each of them.

3. The Keyword Research

Till now we have been talking about having some keywords and build on that list to make your site more popular but for new website there is no point in starting with a keyword and then improving the ranking because normally if you are new to the site you don’t always end up with the keywords first and so the process should start with finding the keywords first and then building on that keywords to have something that is more easy to rank and drive traffic yet has very low competition.

Let us say you are a movie fan and plan to have a movie reviews site. Movie review is very competitive and so let us come to a micro niche site in the movie review category.

1. We use Movie Review as the keyword to start with and then we generate keywords.
2. Once we have the list of keywords for the Movie review we select phrase length to be minimum of 3 keywords.
3. We choose only keywords that has movie and review in the keyword because it eliminates keywords like watch movie online etc. which are not related to what we are looking for.

Now we do the keyword analysis of the generated keywords.

There are lots of parameters in Market Samurai but as this is more about keyword research we will focus on four important aspect of the above report that is

1. SEOT – SEO Traffic which is the traffic the first ranked website can get daily.
2. PBR – Phrase to broad ratio, which means percentage of people searching for that exact keyword to the broadly matched search for that keyword.
3. SEOC – SEO competition i.e. competition for the phrase.
4. Trends – Monthly traffic trend.

Looking at the above matrix we can see that terms like inception movie review, black swan movie review and other named movie review terms have trend going down and this is because those keywords were having good trends when the movie was released. Getting those terms out we come to the conclusion that Hindi Movie review or Tamil or Telugu movie reviews is very less competitive and yet has better traffic levels and so we can target those terms in our site or even make those as categories for review and review some movies into those categories to generate instant traffic to your site without much of an off page SEO efforts and still start generating traffic to your site in a niche which is very competitive.

4. Semantic Keyword Research

We have generated keywords related to movies but then there can be more terms which are semantically related to movies but does not have movie as a keyword – terms like films, cinemas … You can use those phrases like film reviews, cinema reviews and generate more keywords for your website using the above process and generate instant traffic for your site.

FAQ’s About Keyword Research

How many keywords should I put into my <title> <a> <h1> … <h7> tags?

The answer is one to two phrases per page. So if you have a page on your website, you can target one or two phrase for that page and add the same in title, Hx and in Anchor text for that page.

Using automated SEO software cause a website to be penalized?

No. It is a common myth among newbie SEO people that is floating around a lot in forums. If it were true you could get your competitor penalized or banned by using automated SEO softwares. Naturally this does not happen (nor should it).

Some webmasters will try to say that Google says in their guidelines that you shouldn’t use automated softwares. The reason Google says is because most of such automated SEO tools scrape Google’s search engine results pages to find your site’s ranking and other information. This is violation of Google’s usage terms. Google offers only certain quantum of data for querying through API and this is the only reason for Google saying to avoid such automated SEO tools.

Apart from that if you constantly use SEO software to query Google’s servers they may ban your IP address or you may need to enter Captcha to make searches in Google. However, this has no effect on your web pages’ ranking. Market Samurai does not query Google using your IP and it uses their own server’s IP to scrape Google result and so you should not have any issues on that front either.

Share your views and feedback in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Do serious Keyword Research
2. Keyword Winner Review – Little Secret Behind Great Titles
3. Why I don’t Recommend Google’s keyword Tool for SEO?

Let me share my little secret to writing great blog titles – Keyword Winner. I will Analyze Keyword Winner with stats, facts and figures to help you understand what it’s all about and show how you can also use it to generate SEO friendly titles that can rank well in search engines.

Before I review the product some official details.

Official Website: www.keywordwinner.com
Program Author: Dan Lew
Price: $47.00 For Single License, $97 for Multisite License [Click Here for Details]
My Overall Rating: (4.5 star)

What is Keyword Winner?

Keyword Winner is a paid WordPress plugin when installed on a WordPress blog, can help you do Keyword Research WordPress admin area and help you analyze the competition for the keywords and the number of backlinks you need to rank well for those phrases. It also helps with keyword suggestions to fine tune keyword research and find the ultimate title for posts that can rank well in Google and generate more traffic.

Though I mainly use the keyword research functionality of Keyword Winner, it does have other modules like rank tracking for posts and how you are doing in search engines.

Where I use Keyword Winner?

I have purchased Multi-site license and so I use it on all my blogs. You can see it in action here at IMTips

Keyword winner on Internet Marketing Tips blog

And on my Technical Analysis Blog.

Keyword winner on Technical Analysis blog

One thing you may notice – everything is red in IMTips and the main reason for it is – You would hardly find keywords that is low on competition but then you can use Keyword Winner to find titles that can rank you well even when the competition is fierce like I do.

How I use Keyword Winner?

From time to time I visit my blog posts that gets some traffic and optimize them further to generate more traffic. When I re-visit my old posts my main focus is on the headlines because having a good headline is critical to getting people to read your blog post after they see the headline in Google.

Let me show you an example where I am generating 10 times more traffic to one of my post just because of simple change in title.

I purchased Keyword Winner few months’ back and have started using it on my blogs but this actually means I don’t have optimized titles for my old archived posts. From time to time I visit my blog archive to find posts that get some traffic and edit the post to optimize the title further so I can generate more traffic.

Normally I edit posts title and so cannot show you exact stats before and after the edit because I don’t keep track of date and time of change but for one post I thought of not changing the title but making a fresh new post because old post needed improvements on some points. Looking at the stats I was shocked and I am sure you will also experience the same shock now. So be prepared.

Couple of similar posts on IMTips

• BlogSpot Vs WordPress – Published on September 7, 2009
• Blogger or WordPress – Published on October 8, 2011

When I revisited the old post few months back and hit the Get Keyword Winner Suggestions buttons I am sure I saw something like this at that time as well.

Very clear that Blogger would be better keyword than BlogSpot and Google Analytics confirms the same.

Blogger Vs WordPress is 4th most popular post of IMTips and generates almost 10 times more traffic than BlogSpot Vs WordPress.

Keyword Winner FAQ’s

What does Red / Green, Yellow Color mean?

Red color means high competitive term, yellow means moderate competition and green means low competition. The number of pages competing for the term determines competition. Green means less than 100,000, Yellow means 100,000 to 10,00,000 and red means above 10,00,000

Isn’t this contradicting to the theory – Write for humans and not for search engines?

Doing a keyword research does mean you are looking for terms that people are searching but are not getting what they are looking for and rank for those terms. So do keyword research for getting more readers (humans) to site.

If you have more questions about Keyword Winner, Add them in comments below and I will be more than happy to answer them all.

What not to expect in Keyword Winner

1. Keyword Winner is not a complete keyword research tool. It is just a handy tool inside WordPress admin area and can be used to find titles for posts. For complete Keyword research you can use tools like MarketSamurai (How I use it here). As keyword winner is not a complete keyword research tool you cannot use it to find keywords targeted by competitors and other such complex SEO operations.
2. Keyword Winner shows backlinks needed for a page to rank. Taking that number too seriously will not help and so make sure you only use that number for comparing two terms in keyword winner interface and nothing more than that.

Final thoughts about Keyword Winner

The best thing I like about Keyword Winner is, it just sits in WordPress admin area and helps you get the keyword ideas as and when you are writing a post, so you don’t need to pull out applications to know the basic information like competition and search trend about a keyword that just hit your mind in the middle of writing a blog post.

Choosing a keyword is the most important weapon to bring traffic to your site and Keyword Winner just helps you get that done easily without any hassle and inside your WordPress admin interface.

More Related Posts:

1. Do serious Keyword Research
2. Keyword Research For SEO – A Complete Guide
3. Why I don’t Recommend Google’s keyword Tool for SEO?

2011 has been game changer for SEO where I have seen sites loose 80 to 90 percent of Google traffic. So let me share what I think will be best SEO strategy in 2012 but before that let me review my site traffic in 2011.

Go4Expert traffic from Google is near its all time high.

MBAGuys has lost some of its traffic but the changes done to the site has actually allowed it to remain where it is now.

SEO Strategy in 2012

According to me Google bot is trying to be as HUMAN as possible. +1 currently has very little impact on Google SERP’s but I expect the impact of Google+ and +1 to go higher in 2012. This means focus more on getting more people to your site and let them get engaged with your site content (read make them click on +1 button).

Links always has been the dominating aspect for Google SERP’s but I think it will be diminishing in value to +1 when ranking pages soon.

Unlike twitter, Google is making sure Google+ and +1′s are not spammed. According to me twitter is more of spam and automated posts than real human posting.

So my one SEO in 2012 will be to focus more on getting people engaged. what you think would be the right SEO strategy in 2012? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Google traffic down? Things you should do.
2. Effective PPC Marketing Tips – Things you should do.
3. Internal Linking & Organic SEO

Online Reputation management is a very common term used by SEO experts these days and so I am going to give you real live example to help you not only understand online reputation management but also enhance your online reputation.

What is Online Reputation?

When you search in Google for the term Apple, as expected you see everything about the Apple Inc and nothing about the Apple as fruit.

Couple points to notice in the screenshot above.

1. Apple beats Wikipedia for the term Apple.
2. Apple Inc page of Wikipedia beats the Apple page of Wikipedia

Online Reputation Management

The goal of online reputation management is to suppress the negative mentions (or other mentions) by pushing them lower on search engine results pages and push positive mentions higher on search engine results page to decrease the negative visibility of the person, company, business or brand.

Now the same reputation management effect is happening to my Sharekhan PMS Review.

I rank pretty well in Google for the term – Sharekhan PMS review.

But I was pretty much in the first 3 results even for the term Sharekhan PMS but over time my article is being pushed down. Currently is on 9th spot. I don’t care much but the ranking for the term Sharekhan PMS but this is how you should be working on getting your online reputation managed. Well done Sharekhan.

How to Manage Online Reputation?

The answer to the question how I am being pushed down the search engine results page will help understand how you can manage your online reputation.

1. I am seeing lot of one page websites are being created. Domains like www.sharekhan-<keyword>.com. Just to mention few domains –  http://www.sharekhan-india.com/, http://www.sharekhan-pms.com/, http://www.sharekhan-tradetiger.com/, http://www.sharekhan-firststep.com/ …
2. Those domains are not hosted on the same server as the main site but mainly on different shared hosts. Different IPs and different hosts. You can even make whois private if you want. Note: Sharekhan uses BlueHost which is one of my recommended shared hosts as well. See iPage Review.
3. Apart from secondary domains some sub-domains are also created to boost the number of results in the search engine results page. Have some sub-domains for your site that makes sense.
4. Build links to positive reviews that are ranked in search engines but not very highly ranked. Find positive reviews that are on second or third page of search engine results page and try building links to those sites to boost their ranking higher to improve your online reputation.
5. Create keyword rich content for the authority website in the niche. This content can rank well in Google almost instantly because of the authority of the website.

Do you know of other ways to improve online reputation? Please share them in the comments.

More Related Posts:

1. vBulletin 4 SEO Tips
2. Common Marketing Mistakes
3. 10 Tips on How to Promote Facebook Pages

Search Engine Optimization is no longer just confined to

• Create unique content
• Get bunch of backlinks

Definitely the above things needs to be done but then you have to add one more factor of Social Media to your SEO efforts these days and so tracking your social media efforts is very important.

The most used statistics tool by webmasters is definitely Google Analytics but in Google Analytics you don’t have the Social Media Tracking added as default option and understandably so but using the advance segments you can track all your social media traffic in Google Analytics very easily.

Create Social Media as Custom Segment in Google Analytics

Under Advance Segments Create a New Custom Segment. Advance Segments Link can be found just under the navigation menu.

Add an OR condition for each social media site as source of traffic.

Give a name to the segment and save it. Once saved you can compare your custom segments you just created with the default segments provided by Google Analytics.

And track vital statistics for your social media campaigns.

Update: In old Google Analytics interface you will find the Advance Segment Option is in the left panel. Rest is pretty much same as new interface.

What are the other ways to track social media traffic? Share in comments below

More Related Posts:

1. What is actually Social Media Marketing?
2. How to Track AWeber Conversions with Google Analytics
3. Email Marketing Vs Social Media Marketing

Guest post by Lior Levine who works for MA in security program in Tel Aviv University, and also advises for their MA in Political Science program.

Out-of-the-box LinkedIn profiles are relatively search engine friendly but to get the most out of your profile you need to put a little more work into it. Don’t worry it’s nothing too technical and you won’t need a Degree in the dark arts of search engine optimization to make your profile a whole lot more SEO friendly. The following 8 tips are more than enough to get you moving in the right direction.

1. Blog Regularly

You can blog on LinkedIn and you should blog on LinkedIn. Google loves blogs as it stands and it adores blogs that are updated on a regular basis with lots of useful and unique content. Now that doesn’t mean you need to update your blog twice per day (although if you did that would be awesome in terms of SEO) but if you can post something new once per day you’re ahead of 90% of the LinkedIn posse.

Stuck for blogging ideas? Checkout some of the better blogging tips by Shabbir.

2. Profile Keywords

The search engines will scan through your profile and what you’ve written there does matter. You need to find the keywords that best represent either your skills or the services provided by your company and include them in the content on your profile. Try to avoid what’s called keyword stuffing where you try to force keywords into your profile in an unnatural way – just sprinkle the relevant keywords around into your content and you’ll see the benefits in short order.

3. Tweak Your URL

LinkedIn provides you with a dynamic URL which means that instead of containing keywords or relevant information about you it is simply a string of numbers which has almost zero SEO benefit. All you need to do to change this is go to Profile -> Edit Profile and look for your Public Profile link on that page and click on the Edit button just beside that and then click on Customize Your Public Profile URL on the right hand side of that screen. And hey presto now you can add some relevant keywords to your LinkedIn profile URL.

4. Related Groups

Join groups that are related to your industry and participate in them – having the name of the group associated with your profile won’t do any harm. Plus you’ll find useful keywords in these groups to include in your profile content. It’s a win-win for you either way.

5. Interact

Answering questions for other users on LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to provide a link back to your profile. Could search engines like Google simply filter these links out? Of course! Do they? Well nobody is certain but every links does help – despite what Google’s official line on that is.

6. Specialize

The Specialties section in your LinkedIn profile is another ideal place for including keywords because there is a lot of evidence to point to the fact that Google does index this particular part of LinkedIn regularly.

7. Optimize Your Headline

Search engines tend to read a page of text from the top down and left to right – the same way a human reads text so you need to make sure your headline includes a number of your main keywords used in a natural way. Again don’t stuff keywords in there – it has to look and sound natural to both human visitors and search engine spiders.

8. Customize Your Anchor Text Links

The defaults for the links to your company website or external blog are the usual “My Company”, “My Website” and “My Blog” so why not customize these to include relevant keywords for your sites? LinkedIn has a lot of Google TrustRank so these links will count in SEO terms.

You can get a whole lot of SEO benefit for just spending maybe an hour or two tweaking your LinkedIn profile and from where we stand it’s a very worthwhile effort to make.

More Related Posts:

1. 1000+ Connections in LinkedIn – Join My Network on LinkedIn
2. 11 Easy Ways To Build 2000+ Backlinks
3. Make Your Elance Profile Stand Out

I get this query quite often from new webmasters and online entrepreneurs – How do I build links to my website? This guide will help you understand what link building strategies webmasters use building links.

This article is really long (over 2000 words), but I am sure you will get your money’s worth . I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later reading.

Why Link Building?

Link Building is a process of creating more and more inbound links to ones own website. The site or web page that has more incoming links has more authority in Google organic search results than the site or web page that has less incoming links given all other parameters for ranking the pages for a particular keyword remains the same.

In short if you have more incoming good quality links, you have more authority of ranking higher in Google organic search results. Period.

So if you want to rank your site higher in search engine’s organic listing you have to work on getting incoming links to your site.

Apart from search engine benefits links offers lot more benefits if done in the right way. It helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites and help create awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.

So let me try to explain all the method of getting links to your site. Some of them are White hat, some grey hat as well but I have tried to avoid any black hat method of link building in this guide.

So let us begin.

1. Guest Posts

Backlinks from related authority blogs can help new websites get lot of boost in search engines and guest post is the most effective way to get your site linked from authority blogs. Guest posting happens between a blogger and a webmaster (webmaster can be blogger as well promoting his blog instead of a website) where webmaster writes unique content to be published on the blog and this makes him a “guest blogger” on the authority blog. When webmaster writes unique and good articles for free for their blog, blogger’s are more than happy to give you a backlink in the by-line in return for the content.

Guest post by guest blogger mutually benefits both aka the blogger and the webmaster. Blogger gets new and unique content for his blog and webmaster in return for his quality content not only generates related links to his own site / blog but also gets exposure of his website to the audience in the same niche.

The idea for guest posting is not confined only to the link and search engine benefits but also the exposure in the niche using the authority of the blog.

2. SEOLinkVine

What if the best blog in your target niche does not accept guest posts or is not really keen on publishing your content? Many people outsource the process of finding related blogs to publish articles but what I prefer is use services like SEOLinkVine which helps building links to your website by allowing you to submit your articles to related blogs and get thousands of high quality, one-way in content links pointing to your website. Needless to say, SEOLinkVine costs much less than outsourcing option and provides lot more control on the incoming links. It can help you save time and effort needed to finding blogs and getting them published and still maintaining the same quality.

Update 26th March 2012: Blog networks are being de-indexed by Google and so it does not make much sense to be going for services like SEOLinkVine.

3. ReviewMe / LinkWorth

What if you don’t prefer writing content for minor niche blogs? One option is you have is to outsource your content generation to other freelancer or the other option is you can ask the blog owner to write content for you and link to your blog. Sites like ReviewMe or Linkworth can help you find niche blogs and ask them to write content and review for you and link to your blog.

There are many advantages of using sites like ReviewMe and Linkworth. One of the advantage is you can get started building links to your site for as low as $5 per link but remember if you try getting links for least possible price level, you may end up getting links from blogs that have no actual readership and are online just to make those $5 per review. Ideally use ReviewMe or Linkworth to find blogs that have good readership and get your site out to the audience along with the link. Don’t opt for cheapest links on such sites because that may not help and can even work against you.

4. Link to Authority Sites

Yes you read it rightly. I am talking about linking to authority sites and blogs without asking anything in return from them. The only reason you are linking to authority sites and blogs without anything in return is because you think it will help your site readers and users. As webmaster of the linked site notices in the stats (every webmaster looks at the stats) about your link driving him not only traffic but also giving him search engine benefits, they may return you the same favour any time soon.

5. Article Directories

If you are looking for better links from your content, article directories is the right way. Yes I agree that there are highly spammed directories out there but there are definitely few that are very well moderated and are worth looking for. My favourites are Ezine articles and Go Articles. EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com have very strict article submission guidelines. For new authors they manually review each article which decreases the spam considerably and so if you submit good content, you can get a great link in return.

I outsource this tasks to freelancer’s and I pay them for each article published (reviewed successfully by Ezine) for me under my account.

Many webmasters prefer to replicate the same article to multiple sites and get lot more incoming links instead of just one link but I don’t prefer doing that.

6. Buy Links

Google’s don’t recommend paid links and so buying links is grey hat method of link building.

Contact webmasters and ask them if they want to have your site link place on their page for a payment. You can always have few paid links from great domains and authority sites to your boost your link building efforts but make sure you don’t over do with paid links as it is one of the non-recommended things by Google.

7. Online Profiles

Many social networking websites like Twitter / Digg / LinkedIn allows adding link(s) to your site from your profile. You can create new profile for each of your site, link to your own site and generate few extra links.

I am not suggesting you to spam those sites with fake profiles with a link but what I am suggesting is – you can always create a new profile for each of your site like I have twitter profile for each of my site - For MBAGuys.net, For Go4Expert.com, For CodeItWell.com …

8. Forum Signature

Majority of forums including Go4Expert.com allows you to add signature to your posts. Signature is small piece of information that you want to include at the bottom of all your posts. Many forums allow you to include pictures and links to your site(s). Each post that you contribute in forum adds a backlink to your site.

I know many people would argue that the forum posts pages have too many signature links which actually dilutes the benefits from forum signature link. I agree with that but if you are really helpful in forums you not only get links to your site from signature but you also drive lot of good quality traffic to your site. See the stats for my friend’s blog. He is active member on one of my forum and that forum drives him really good quality traffic.

9. Blog Comments

There is a lot of misconception about blog commenting, nofollow and dofollow blogs.

A nofollow blogs are those which add a rel=nofollow to the commenter’s website links and Google don’t follow the rel=nofollow links. This means Google does not transfer PageRank (not the toolbar PR) or anchor text benefits across these links.

So people prefer to comment on blogs that don’t add the rel=nofollow to the comment links. Those blogs are termed as dofollow blogs.

In general blog comments (nofollow or dofollow) can help you build good number of links to your website but you should understand that if your blog is about health and fitness and if you are commenting on web development dofollow blogs, obviously the amount of traffic will be very little but link benefits will be close to nothing. The most important aspect of blog commenting is to find authority blogs in your niche and be active on the blog. The authority blog in the niche will always be nofollow blog so the idea is to comment on authority blogs and not find dofollow blogs.

10. 3 Way Link Exchange

Google does not recommend link exchanges i.e. link to me and I’ll link back to you but if you make link exchanges such that you create two sites. Site A and Site B. If anyone links to your Site A, you link them back from Site B. This way Google can never detect your link exchanges provided you use a different hosting for both of your sites. Link exchanges worked in 2005 but are a very outdated technique that search engines are well aware of but 3 way link exchange is a work around for link exchange.

Note: When doing link exchanges try to vary your anchor text as well as the url based on the profile of the website that is linking back to you. As an example if I want to do a link exchange for my MBA Forum I would ask the webmaster to link to the part of the website that is most relevant to his site. For example if the site linking to me is a CAT Exam site I may ask them to link to my CAT Exam forum instead of home page.

Apart from that I will not insist too much on the anchor text for each exchange but would prefer to have the link live. All links help your rankings in general, so don’t be afraid to get links that looks like http://imtips.co/

11. Free Websites

There are many sites like Blogger, Hubpages etc that give you options to create pages online. You can sign-up with those type of sites, write whatever you feel like, and link to your main site.

I use DevHub (See my Devhub Review) to host my extra domains and add links to main site. See http://shabbirbhimani.com/ where I drag dropped my twitter and RSS feeds along with ways to contact me but the most important part is linkroll i.e. sites I own. This looks very natural to Google.

12. Reviews

You can write honest reviews about a product and you can end up being linked from the product website itself. As an example I Reviewed BuySellAds from a publisher point of view and see how I got featured on BuySellAds Blog

Or my vWorker review is linked from vWorker’s official Wiki Page.

The above examples may give you the feeling that positive reviews can generate lot of links but that is absolutely not true. See my ShareKhan PMS  review (Financial Portfolio Management Service review of a top Indian share market broking house) generated lots of links from fellow bloggers like Manshu of OneMint or Manish of JagoInvestor and many others.

13. Interviews

If you interview fellow bloggers and publish the interview on your site, there are very high chances that the blogger would link to your site. On the contrary if you are approached by any blogger to be interviewed you should positively respond to it because it can get your blog not only good traffic from the other blog but also valuable links. See how DailyBlogTips has my link on his blog for answering few questions about my Adsense experience.

14. Create Great Resource

Last but not the least is to have good great content which builds link naturally to your site. I am sure you liked this post or else you may not read to this length. So why not link to this post from your blog or site and share the link with us.

Final Thoughts

Avoid building links too fast using spammy resources. You can’t control who links to you, but make sure you avoid getting yourself linked from spammy sites. Share your feedback about the article in comments below.

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1. Link Bait – Be Odd & New
2. Building A Blog or Building A Forum – Which One is Easier?
3. Website Marketing Strategies