The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘Organic SEO’ Category

Recently, we were questioned about an SEO technique that is commonplace - Blog commenting and forum posting. So before we dive into the issue, let’s look at what this technique is. Blog commenting is the process of making comments on other people’s blog with the primary intention of generating backlinks pointing back at your own blog or website. Secondarily, it also generates “buzz” for your website and people get to know about you.

Now, everyone comments on blogs and that’s definitely not a bad thing. However, when you spam somone’s blog just for the backlinks that is certainly spamming. These days, there are several plugins and tools that are available to bloggers to block comment spam. One of the best available is Akismet
- http://akismet.com/. These do a pretty good job of blocking out comments that are either stuffed with keywords, not relevant to the blog post or use a weird-looking name or URL. Another technique for discouraging comment spam is the use of no-follow tags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow) on blog comment links. These have proved quite effective as well.

However, there are other kinds of comments that are less obvious and in fact, many consider them perfectly acceptable marketing techniques. If a marketer visits blogs that relate to their website and post relevant comments on these blogs with backlinks pointing back to their sites that cannot be considered spam. Some still do. Perhaps it’s because when used as a backlink generating technique, they usually don’t just go about commenting on any relevant blog. They specifically target the ones that are popular and the posts that are related to their niche. They also try to find blogs that do not use the no-follow tag. Further, the point that really makes it debatable is that they don’t really desire to share thoughts on the blog posts and are doing it just for the sake of the backlink. So, is that spam?

According to us, it is not. As long as it is done the right way. Here’s the reason why. Television, radio and any other media advertiser tries to target their ads to the right market. Not all marketing is on TV or radio. Nike pays movie makers a lot of money to get actors to wear their apparel. Iron Man only drove Audi’s. So, is that spam? Not really. So when commenters try to target blogs and comment on them for popularity, why is that spam? The thing about do-follow. OK, that’s a no-brainer. The idea is good, but it really doesn’t help anyone that wants to improve their blog’s search engine popularity. Any who doesn’t?

Bottomline. Don’t get carried away. Remember that your blog could be spammed as well. Your competitor could use blog commenting too aggressively and beat you at the rankings race. In order for this to be a viable technique, this needs to be the same for everyone. Comment, but be relevant. Add to the content of the blog. Add thoughts, opinions or information that will be valuable to the reader of the blog post. Resits the temptation not to do so. If that makes you post fewer comments so be it. You can at least know that you are doing the right thing. That way, everone gets what they want.

So, where do you stand - the clean and clear side of things or do you dwell into the darker, questionable kind of things. There is always a gray area. In most professions, and even in personal life, we often run into decisions that we have to make where there really is no wrong on right, at least the law doesn’t mention it. That’s when we have to take one side, the side that we believe in and touches us stronger than the other. That’s when we need to decide whether we let ourselves get greedy and carried away or stand by and do the right thing.

One such situation the choice between Black Hat SEO versus White Hat SEO. In the world of SEO, there are several techniques and methods that one can use to get higher rankings on search engines, that are not conventional. They attempt to get the better of search engine algorithms and artificially achieve rankings that the page may not otherwise rank for. These are called Black Hat SEO techniques. Some of the common ones are mentioned here for your reference:

1. Keyword stuffing 1: Invisible text: Use keyword text that is the same color as a page’s background
2. Keyword stuffing 2: Hide the text: Add keywords behind other visual elements such as images so you don’t see them on the page but they are there.
3. Keyword stuffing 3:  Small font text: Keywords in really small font placed along the top, bottom or sides of a web page.
4. Doorway Pages: Pages that never display to the visitor but are there only so search engine spiders can see and list them. These pages redirect to the actual page that sells the product.

There are plenty more of these to go by. There are entire forums dedicated to these techniques - http://www.blackhatworld.com/. But here’s our stand on this: DO NOT DO IT. The reason should come from your business ethics, but if that’s not enough, just know that search engines are not stupid. They will get you and when they do, you will lose all your work because of a little bit of greed. About.com puts it well

Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO. Here’s a few articles that can get you on the road to knowing search engine optimization:

In reality, every professional SEO knows to stay away from these for the long-term. There are sites that sometimes need to be successful only temporarily, for instance, before the day of the elections, Etc. However, even for those, there is no point in using Black Hat. Search Engines could block out an entire IP. If you are on shared hosting, that could affect other sites using the same IP. You could be doing harm for you and others.

There are other harder decisions. Ones that are no all black or white. These are the hardest. Our next topic is regarding practises that are commonplace but debatable.

First of all, what are backlinks? Backlinks are simply links pointing to a page. So why are they not called just links? Well, you could call them that, but looking at it from your site’s perspective, you have links on your page, for instance, this link to the best raleigh internet marketing company (ok, i had to insert some propaganda, afterall, i want to make money too is an outbound link whereas any links pointing to this page (like the one you should add on your blog is a backlink.

Backlinks are also called inlinks (by Yahoo), inbound links (by Google) and so on.

So why are they so important? Read this post about search engine ranking factors and you’ll see that we said quality backlinks are the #1 factor in ranking pages higher on organic search results. Quality backlinks can skyrocket your website’s popularity and help your drive tremendous amounts of web traffic to your site. If you are serious about your business, whether is is online of offline, you need to know how to generate quality backlinks for your site. For that you first need to know what quality backlinks are.

Here you go, the seven qualities of a quality backlink:

1. Popularity: The page where the link is situated should be popular. In other words, that page should in turn have a lot of quality backlinks itself. It is emperically proven that SE’s look at at least 2 degrees of link popularity to determine rankings. Google page rank is a good measurement of the popularity of a page even though these days its accuracy is being questioned. So, if this is all too confusing for you then just know that you should get at least a few links from pages that have a google page rank that is higher than your page.

2. Outbound links: The page that you are getting backlinks from should not have too many outbound links on it. The recemmended number is 25 of less, in general. This is what makes the links from directories relatively less useful since directories typically have several dozen links on one page.

3. Age: The older the link that is pointing to your page, the better. This way search engines know that you are not buying links temporarily form a website to drive your link popularity.

4. Do Follow: Some websites mark some of their links as NO FOLLOW within their HTML coding or using other SEO techniques. They usually do this to avoid spam. No follow links are basically avoided by search engines when they determine rankings for a certain page.

5. Relevance: The link should be on a domain that is relevant to yours. It is increasingly becoming apparent that search engines understand link neighborhoods. In other words, if you are florist website and get a link from a website that talks about flowers, the link has more weightage than a link from a car mechanic shop. Now, your car mechanic might genuinely love the flowers he buys from you, but say sorry to him, search engines don’t really like his link all that much.

6. Location: Links that are mingled inside content (also called content links) are better than links that are on the footer or the header of sites or on a popup window for instance.

7. One way: Now this should actually rank pretty high up in this list but it’s down here because it is sort of obvious these days. Reciprocal links are less useful towards the link popularity of your website than one way links.

Now that you know what quality backlinks are, your next goal should be to find out how to get them. There are a lot of resources on the web that talk about this, but I’ll give you my 2 cents in a future post..

If you have an online or offline business that has never used the Internet for marketing on a large scale, there are a lof of things you can do to start on that journey TODAY, NOW, not later, not next week. By the time you end reading this short post, you will have the knowldge to start promoting yourself online.

STEP 1: Google Local/Maps: Go to http://www.maps.google.com and search for your business in your location. If you find that your business is already listed, great; if not, create one. You simply need to log in using your google/gmail account (create one in 2 minutes if you don’t have one) and complete the entire profile. This helps in a big way. A lot of people search Google or Google Local to look for businesses and the information that you enter is what gets searched. Make sure that you enter all your information in detail and upload pictures if possible.

STEP 2: Reviews: Send email to 10-25 friends/customers and ask them to write a review on Google against your business. This will help your business rise to the top of the listings. Here you go, you have a secret from us now!

STEP 3: Local Directories: Think about what your potential customers would search on the net to find your business. For instance, for a florist in Raliegh, it would be “Raleigh Florist directory” or “Raleigh Red Roses directory” or something similar. Search for those terms and observe the results. Usually, there should be at least a few listings of sites that you can submit your business too. These are called diretory sites and are like free Yellow Pages. You can list your business there and increase your brand’s prensence on the ‘Net.

After you are done with these steps, now that your business is online, the next step is to consult with a web designer or a Raleigh Internet Marketing firm to get a simple website. You should be able to get a basic one for about $500-$700. Make sure that the website is developed to be friendly to the Search Engines. You can find more information about this at http://www.theclickdepot.com

There are hundreds of things you can do to promote your blog. These 3 are the easiest ones that you can do within 5 minutes. So for something that can be done in 5 minutes, including reading this post!

3. Ping Site Update Services

Login to your wordpress backend. Go to Settings > Writing (in v2.5), and copy-paste this list

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/b…ter/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

Every time you post, your blog will automatically ping these sites and they will know that you posted and their readers will know that you posted. How cool is that!

2. Ensure your URL’s are SEO friendly

Go to Settings > Permalinks, Select Custom Structure and past /%category%/%postname%/ in there. Your URL’s are now SEO friendly. Ensure that your .htaccess is writeable.

1. Install the Headspace2 plugin

Headspace2 is THE best SEO plugin out there in my opinion. It offers a TON of functionality. Even if you can’t do it all in 5 minutes, just installing it on your blog and knowing that it is THE way to go is half the battle won. Next when you get a chance, visit their site - http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/ and watch their videos. Get started, it it worth the time. They got Google Analtics integration, Meta tags optimization, Etc. all in one place.

Hope this post was worth your 5 minutes!