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As noted earlier in this book, Google gives websites a PageRank between one and ten, with a higher rank indicating more value placed on a given website.

Another opportunity in the blogging world is the creation of quality inbound links with forum participation. By participating in relevant conversations on various forums, you can establish yourself as an expert in your niche, driving greater awareness and increased traffic to your website while increasing your incoming links at the same time.

I highly recommend you go to a site such as Boardreader (www.boardreader.com) and do a search for forums that discuss your targeted topic. Once you identify a few that seem relevant, you should sign up and occasionally participate in the conversation. When you submit a comment, you should always have a link to your site placed within your signature. After you’ve submitted a few comments, the forum moderator will typically feel comfortable enough with your level of contribution to begin allowing the links to be picked up by Google, which will benefit your SEO efforts.

You can really make an impact on the search engines with a strong blogging and forum-participation strategy that helps you build a robust incoming linking profile.

 SEO Challenge #8: Blog Set-Up

Set up a blog with either Blogger or WordPress. Did you choose to use their domain or set up your own?

 Tools And Tricks

Blogging Content Management Systems (CMS)

A blogging content management system is a free, web-based software program anyone can use to build and maintain a blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog.

 WordPress (www.wordpress.com) 

 Blogger (www.blogger.com)

Blog Content Writing Services

These services can provide quality article writing and web content for a very low price. If you’re in need of content to help market your website and are short on time, these services can be a great option.

 iWriter (www.iwriter.com) 

 99 Cent Articles (www.99centarticles.com) 

 Article Ninjas (www.articleninjas.com) 

 Articles on Tap (www.articlesontap.com) 

 CC Articles (www.ccarticles.com)

Hiring A Blog Content Writer

Businesses can use these websites to post jobs, search for freelance professionals, and solicit proposals. You can evaluate the contractors applying for the job by reviewing qualifications, work history, ratings, portfolios, and skill test scores.

 Elance (www.elance.com) 

 oDesk (www.odesk.com)

Blogging Community Resources

 Triberr (www.triberr.com)

Triberr is an online blogging community using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and many others. Bloggers join similar groups or tribes and share each other’s blogs and content. Bloggers on Triberr can provide comments on your blog as well.

 Blogger Linkup (www.bloggerlinkup.com)

When you join the Blogger Linkup list, you will receive weekly e-mails listing bloggers looking for expert sources and contributors for their already established blogs. When you see a request you want to fulfill, just respond directly to the requester. It’s that easy.

 My Blog Guest (www.myblogguest.com)

My Blog Guest is a free community that connects guest bloggers to blog owners. By joining this community for free, you can gain tremendous exposure from guest posting opportunities.

 Board Reader (www.boardreader.com)

Board Reader is a search engine for forums and community boards. Simply type in a topic related to your website, and you will find all kinds of discussions you can contribute to, becoming an authority in your space and generating a stronger link profile. This can be a powerful method for obtaining links and gaining authority on the search engines.

Online Traffic Analysis

 Alexa (www.alexa.com)

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed to determine the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. This is a reliable and powerful information source for evaluating the traffic volumes of websites (especially if you’re going to the trouble of contributing a blog post to a particular website).

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<a href=“http://www.sovomedia.com”>Seattle SEO Agency</a>

By using this HTML code, the term “Seattle SEO Agency” can be placed in a blog or article as a text link with the link pointing to the website URL: http://www.sovomedia.com. This serves to inform the search engines about the subject matter of the article while building a stronger link profile and more credibility online at the same time.

When it comes to blogging, the benefits experienced from increased exposure and incoming links will be closely aligned with the size of the audience actually reading the blog. Hence, it’s imperative that a good amount of effort is placed on building up a following. Having a large readership will not only help with the overall goals of SEO but will also serve as a great motivator to diligently update your blog, as you will not want to disappoint all those loyal readers.

In this regard, Triberr (www.triberr.com) is a great tool to help you increase your overall audience by leveraging the networks of other prominent bloggers. Triberr groups people into niches or “tribes.” Every time one of the tribe members makes a blog post, a tweet is sent by all of the other tribe members to inform their blog audiences. This extended reach can be instrumental in helping small- and medium-sized bloggers band together and share each other’s audience. If you recall from Chapter 8, I recommended a tool to help increase Twitter followers called Tweet Adder (www.tweetadder.com). Using this tool to build up your Twitter following, you will increase your ability to join some great tribes to help you promote content you post to your blog.

It’s important to note that Triberr will not allow any random person to sign up. First, you have to be accepted into an existing tribe. Either you search tribes and request entry into the tribe, or you receive an invitation from an existing tribe chief. You can search based upon categories to find a tribe that is a fit for you.

Therefore, the more Twitter followers you have acquired, the higher the probability that you will be accepted into the best tribes with the biggest reach.

Another great opportunity when it comes to blogging is to write guest posts for relevant blogs. To identify high-value sites for contributing content, you can use resources that connect bloggers with potential blogs, such as Blogger Link Up (www.bloggerlinkup.com). Here, you can get on a free e-mail list where people post requests for blog contributions. Another reputable resource is My Blog Guest (http://myblogguest.com). This site will also put you in touch with respected bloggers who regularly need content related to specific areas of interest. If you write something, they’ll give you a link back, which will help with your link profile.

Before going to the effort of contributing to other websites, always be sure to check out the site and its traffic statistics. You can use a tool like Alexa (www.alexa.com) to find relevant traffic information.

For those not familiar with Alexa, it’s a great tool. The Alexa Rank is a statistic used to evaluate traffic volumes of websites. Alexa ranks the top hundred thousand websites on the Internet in terms of popularity. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the web usage of millions of Alexa users. It’s basically like the Nielsen ratings of the Internet. The lower the number, the more traffic a website receives. For example, Google has a ranking of one according to Alexa, meaning that it receives the most Internet traffic out of any website in existence.

Another great opportunity to spread your content involves blogging on Web 2.0 sites. A Web 2.0 site is essentially a website that allows users to interact and collaborate with each other as creators of user-generated content in a community environment. This stands in contrast to the typical website, encouraging passive viewing of content by its users. Thus, the name Web 2.0 was created to label this new breed of interactive website that focuses on community-generated content.

These Web 2.0 sites have created a great opportunity to distribute your content in a blogging format. This will help generate links across highly visible websites with strong credibility in the eyes of Google.

Here is a list of 15 websites that can provide you with additional opportunities to distribute your content:

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Chapter 10

Getting Blogged Down

Blogging can help your SEO efforts in a few different ways. When you blog, you’re creating unique content that will help the search engines identify your site as an authoritative resource on your subject matter. And when you contribute to other blogs and forums, it can help you build up your link profile.

I highly recommend that you have your own blog. The two biggest players out there, the services that by far facilitate the most blogs for the biggest bloggers, are WordPress (www.wordpress.com) and Blogger (www.blogger.com). The good news is that both of these services provide options that are free or very inexpensive, and both are extremely easy to use. If you want a blog as part of your website, I strongly encourage you to go to WordPress or Blogger and set one up.

When you sign up with these services, you will be offered a free option hosted and supported by the service you choose or an inexpensive option that allows you to set up the blog on any domain that you want to use. If you are serious about getting into blogging, I highly recommend you set up the blog on your own domain. Once you start to amass traffic and an audience, it will be very difficult to flip a switch and transfer all that you have built to your own domain down the line. It is completely up to you, based on how much blogging you think you will actually do, but using your own domain name is definitely the preferred way to go if you plan on making blogging a significant component of your online presence.

Once your blog is set up and ready to go, you will need to create content for it. Update your blog at least once or twice a week. No need to overdo it, but you should definitely keep your blog active.

When it comes to blogging, the bottom line is that you’d better like to write—or work with someone who does. If you don’t have the time or ability to maintain a steady flow of blog content, try to make time. It can pay off substantially.

If you want to hire a company to help with this writing, you can always contract an outside vendor to help or use some of the same companies listed in Chapter 6:

• www.elance.com

• www.odesk.com

• www.iwriter.com

• www.99centarticles.com

• www.articleninjas.com

• www.articlesontap.com

• www.ccarticles.com

• www.myarticleexpress.com

As mentioned earlier, the quality of these article-writing services and vendors can vary greatly. Depending on your industry, this can make a big difference. If you work in a complex field such as finance or law, it would be advisable to write all of the content yourself. However, these writing services are typically very inexpensive, so you really won’t risk much by testing them out to see if they can write content that meets your standards.

One thing that can be said about these services—if they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t exist. There’s obviously a glaring demand for assistance with this type of writing, which is why so many of these services are able to survive.

If you find that none of the content produced can match your finely tuned professional abilities, then I encourage you to spend a few hours a week writing strong content for your own purposes. You’re going to need quite a bit of content to properly market your site, whether you post the material on your own site, contribute content as a guest blogger, distribute your postings across article sites, or use your writings to answer questions on forums. There’s quite a bit of thought and effort that goes into content creation, but the payoff can be huge.

It’s important to keep two things in mind when generating material. Don’t continually repost the same blog entry. The search engines pick up on these activities. Also, don’t create spammy articles, poorly written pieces with little value that overuse the intended keywords. If a reader would come away from your post with little to no value or added insight, then it probably shouldn’t be written.

Now that we’ve explored how to set up a blog and various options to create the content needed, let’s focus on how we can leverage these tools for our purposes.

First, use your material for internal linking. Within your own website’s blog, if an article mentions a topic or service that exists elsewhere on your site, make sure the article links to the page in question.

Next, constantly create new content; one to two new articles a week, optimally. Your posts don’t have to be incredibly long-winded, but they should center on topics specifically related to the search terms you are targeting. This is extremely important to keep in mind as you develop your content.

As mentioned in Chapter 6, link building is an instrumental part of article writing. Apply anchor text—wording that provides a link back to your site—for appropriate keywords to get a decent ranking.

As a reminder, anchor text is the visible characters and words that create a hyperlink display when linking to another document or location on the web. Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document.

This is such an important part of link building that I’d like to cover it again (even though it was mentioned in an earlier chapter). Here is the HTML code that would be used to properly insert an anchor text link:

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Now that we have a large list of directories to which we can submit our website, let’s walk through how this process will look.

With most major directories, there’s an option to submit a link, submit a site, register a company, or some variation thereof.

Once you do this, you’ll typically be given instructions on the submission process and requirements. For example, on DMOZ you’re instructed to go to the home page, select the single best category for your website, and then hit the Suggest URL link once you’ve reached the category you believe is most appropriate.

After you click Suggest URL, you’ll have the opportunity to give details on the business itself, which will serve as your listing in the directory listing being set up.

Simply input your e-mail and you’re good to go.

Make sure that you mention your main services and products when creating your description. This is similar to the descriptions you used on the local map citations earlier.

Now just repeat a few dozen times and you’ll have mastered the directories to increase your search engine rankings.

 SEO Challenge #7: Directory Submissions

Submit your website to both DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Did you have any trouble finding the right category when submitting?

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Chapter 9

Directory Submit,

Rinse, Repeat

During the early days of the Internet, directory submissions used to play a substantial role in search engine rankings. In today’s more complex world, search engines have gotten much more sophisticated in the way they determine rankings. That being said, there is still some value to submitting your website to directories.

The goal with this chapter is to help you identify how to find directories that will have the greatest impact on your link-building efforts and how to do so without paying a dime to the directories for inclusion. So let’s cut through the clutter, save time, and focus on directory submissions only where and when it makes sense.

It’s important to be very careful when submitting your site to directories. The practice of obtaining links from online directories has changed dramatically over the past few years. Poor-quality, spam-induced directories currently flood the Internet, and an unfocused effort to obtain links from these all-inclusive directories can actually harm your SEO efforts. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have an evolved and focused strategy when engaging in directory submissions.

Let’s begin with what directory submissions are and how they can positively impact your search engine rankings. The concept is actually quite simple. You find a directory, such as www.botw.org, you select a category relevant to your site, and you then list your website info. The profile typically consists of the site’s title, a short description, any relevant key search terms, and the site’s web address. Once you fill out your information, you hit submit and you’re up on the directory once approved. Sounds simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, like so many things in life, it’s a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface.

First, there’s the process of finding directories and manually submitting requests to each one over and over again. There are bulk services out there that offer to do this for a nominal fee. Most of them are complete scams, though. Stay away from them and the information in this book has already paid for itself.

Second, there are always multiple options with these directories. Typically, the options involve paying for a link, adding a link on your own site in exchange for receiving a link, or submitting a regular link without the above requirements. Would you ever pay or add a link on your site if you didn’t have to? Probably not. Often, the directory threatens to take up to six months to get you listed, if they even allow it at all, unless you offer to pay for inclusion or include a link on your website that points back to the directory. Don’t worry about that.

My advice is to never add a link to your site or pay for inclusion; the benefit is almost never worth the cost. The best-quality directories provide free links because it encourages more businesses to register, which in turn makes their directories more useful. Also, adding a link to your site could actually harm your SEO efforts, as Google penalizes sites that are viewed as having lists of links with no relevant value.

So now that you’ve been thoroughly frightened with the potential perils of directories, let’s dive into the process and discuss some things to look out for.

Anyone interested in increasing his or her business or entity’s online presence should consider actively submitting to some directories with a high page ranking.

In this book you will find a list of two hundred free directories to which you can submit your site. I would recommend starting with the highest-valued directories in terms of page rank and then moving down the list. All of these directories should offer the opportunity to submit your site for free, but be aware that your site may take some time to show up and get placement.

Before going too crazy with the directories listed below, I’d like to add a word of caution about directory submissions. Recently, Google has begun penalizing sites deemed “over-optimized.” What this means is that if your site appears to have tremendous amounts of directories pointing back to it for no other reason than receiving a link, it could harm your efforts. Therefore, I strongly recommend you submit to ten or so on this list, review your progress for a month, and then submit some more. Slow and steady can definitely help you win this race.

With that being said, here is a list of two hundred free directories:

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Social Media Management

 Tweet Adder (www.tweetadder.com)

Tweet Adder is a powerful tool to effectively build a community of Twitter followers interested in your topics of choice. You can open an account and look for people following topics related to your website. Add them, and they will add you in return. This is a great way to engage with people interested in what your site offers. You share with them, and they then pass your messages on, helping you generate incoming links as well as interest in your business or website.

 Hoot Suite (www.hootsuite.com)

Hoot Suite is a premier social media tool that helps manage and measure the biggest social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In a complex social world, a tool such as Hoot Suite can be invaluable for keeping track of your online social presence and scheduling messages through your social media accounts.

Social Media .Content Distribution

 Tribe Pro (www.tribepro.com)

Tribe Pro is an innovative content syndication platform for social media. This resource will help you find a community of bloggers, social networks, and online marketers who are helping each other to succeed on the Internet by bookmarking and sharing each other’s content across various social media outlets. There is no better way to build up your social profile than to connect with a like-minded group of online marketers who are willing and able to reach out to the very audience you are seeking to attract.

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While Google Plus is still fairly new, it appears Google will be integrating more heavily into some of its searches the social signals it collects from Google Plus. Since Google owns this platform, it will be easier for them to measure the social signals they extract. Also, it will be easier for Google to tweak Google Plus to get the types of social signals they deem important for their search rankings. Furthermore, Google has been trying to become a major factor in social media since 2004 and will be heavily invested in making Google Plus a success. There has already been some testing regarding the effects of building a Google Plus following on increased search engine rankings, and there appears to be a correlation between the two. When it comes to SEO tactics, you want every advantage for ranking on the search engines. Therefore, I highly recommended you implement the Google Plus One button on your website and encourage your audience to join your Google Plus circle, since this could very well be something that is heavily integrated into future searches. Getting a jump on this now could provide a tremendous competitive advantage.

There’s one other thing I would like to discuss regarding social media. In terms of your ability to drive awareness, gain incoming links, and use this to your advantage to increase search engine rankings, the size of your audience is very important. If you only have a few followers on Twitter, a couple of fans on Facebook, and no one signed up on your Google circles, social media won’t do much for your online ambitions. There is a tool, though, that can be very helpful in expanding your social reach and driving the natural sharing of your content, which is very important in the online world. If you’re interested in experimenting with social media sharing, sign up for a trial account at TribePro (www.tribepro.com). There, you’ll have the ability to join niche groups where you share out members’ content with your followers and they reciprocate in kind. This can be a powerful way to spread your content without having to rely solely on the community you have built. So feel free to give it a try and do your best to get your content to go viral. You’ll be very surprised at what you can accomplish.

While it can take a while to build a stellar backlink profile relying on social media sites, they do have some influence over search engine rankings and are growing in importance all the time. So get social and win friends, because link building really is like a popularity contest.

 SEO Challenge #6: Social Bookmarking

Sign up for an account at Delicious.com and get your website bookmarked on the site. How long did it take you to complete this process?

 Tools And Tricks

Social Media for Business

 Facebook (www.facebook.com/business/build)

While everyone knows about Facebook these days, it is still significantly underutilized by businesses. With a strong Facebook presence, you will be able to build relationships with your customers, reach new people, and drive sales. Over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day on Facebook. When you have a strong Facebook presence, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing—recommendations between friends. Furthermore, Facebook can be great for getting information shared virally while increasing your incoming links at the same time.

 Twitter (https://business.twitter.com)

While Twitter is a well-known social tool, most businesses don’t realize how invaluable this resource can be for engaging with current and prospective customers. Twitter is an information network that brings people closer to what’s important to them. Every day, millions of people turn to Twitter to connect about their interests, share information, and find out what’s happening in the world. I highly recommend that any business looking to increase their customer base take full advantage of this vast communication network.

 Google Plus (http://www.google.com/+/business)

Although Google Plus is fairly new to the social media world, it is owned by Google and starting to demonstrate some heavy influence on how social signals impact everyday searches. With over five hundred million active users and the ability to set up specific categories for your followers with Google Circles, this platform is quickly becoming a necessity for any business looking to gain an advantage in increasing search engine rankings and overall awareness.

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