Archive for the ‘SEO Experiment’ Category

Top 25 Linking Strategy Tips

One of the factors search engines use to rank a site is the number of links pointing to it. The assumption is, the more people reference a site, the more authoritative it is, and the more likely it will have the relevant information a searcher is looking for. Here are some of the best tips to start you off with your SEO linking strategy.

  1. Submit your links to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, reddit, or digg.
  2. Put bookmark links on your page to allow users to easily submit your sites to reddit or twitter.
  3. Politely ask other bloggers if you can exchange links on each others’ blogroll.
  4. You can also ask them if you can write at their blogs as a guest. Don’t forget to link back to your own site.
  5. Use social media (twitter, FaceBook) to jump start linking.
  6. Use Flickr; generate interesting images and illustrations that link back to your site.
  7. You can also start blogs and link back to your site.
  8. Ask if your employees, family or friends maintain their own sites. Ask them if they can link to your site too.
  9. Get your own host so you can access information only found in web server logs (these are not usually available with free blog hosts, for example).
  10. Look out for 404s – this usually means a user stumbled on your site from an outside link but didn’t get what he wanted. A filename may have changed.
  11. It is a lot better if links going into your site come from unique domain names.
  12. Use forum signatures to link back to your site.
  13. Comment intelligently on other blogs. Although comments generally use a no-follow attribute, you can still get other people interested and they might link to your site from their own.
  14. See which sites link to your competitors and find out if you can convince them to link to your site as well.
  15. Have patience. Search engines will not immediately index your site overnight.
  16. Use adwords or similar ad networks and bid on your own keywords.
  17. When you see that a site directs a lot of traffic to your site, ditch the middleman altogether and contact the site directly for an advertising gig.
  18. Nor will your page rank increase within a day of your campaign. Give the results a month or so to sink in then measure it.
  19. Start a contest or a survey that gives out real prizes (an ebook is a real prize). Other people will link to your site quickly.
  20. As much as possible, use text links.
  21. Put links at both your headers and footers.
  22. Use a Sitemap. That way you can be sure that all your pages are reachable and therefore indexable.
  23. You can also use breadcrumbs. Not only do they make life easier for your readers to find out where they are in relation to your site structure, it is a great way to reference your own site links.
  24. If you’re using a blog, add a widget that will display post archives.
  25. And lastly, quality content naturally attracts other people to read, and ultimately link back to it.

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Posted in About SEO, SEO Experiment, SEO Lists on February 5th, 2010 by James | No Comments »

An Experiment – SEO Style

Here at SEO Consult we are doing something a little out of the ordinary, we are playing. As full time SEO consultants we spend over 8 hours a day focusing on our clients web sites, their SEO and their results.

We have a technique here that we apply to all of our clients sites that has proven results over a number of years, so obviously we don’t change this too often, but there is the problem, to stand still in our industry is to fall behind. We need to innovate. So playtime begins:

The experiment

We all have varying opionions on the absoluteness of our technique in gaining the results that we do, but we all agree that it works, what we want to find out is: which elements of SEO are the most effective over a short space of time?

So we have a goal, now we need competitors, and in this we have 3 members of our team: Ian, Nick and myself Dan. We are all full time SEO consultants who have proven results across many different industries.

The Rules

We have bought 3 new domains, all with the same text contained within them with the TLD of .com (Ian), .co.uk (Nick) and .net (myself). We have done this to maximise fairness.

We each have a budget of just £150 to promote the site and we can use any technique we like.

We are allowed up to 3 pages, and  the site must be built with wordpress (again for fairness – to rule out  code problems affecting results).

The prerequisites

There are certain things that are taken for granted in SEO:

a)      Content is King – We will all write our own content and it will be highly optimised.

b)      Links are Queen – We will all source at least one quality back link to our homepage.

The techniques

  • Ian
    Ian is going to be using the social networking route. He is going to be submitting to the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Digg and others. He is also going to be syndicating content from other sources, as well as writing his own.
  • Nick
    Nick is going to purchase a domain with a few years domain age, and hopefully even some Page Rank. He is also going to source an number of high quality high PR links from relevant sites.
  • Dan
    I am going down the high quality content route. I am going to highly optimise my content, images, videos etc. I expect my content to have a keyword density of somewhere in the region of 5 – 8%, which is a lot higher than what we currently aim for.
    I am also going to try and source a couple of links from higly relevant web sites with a high Page Rank.

The Results

Well we have only just begun and the websites are still in development and the ink drying on the content but we hope to launch soon (all on the same date). We are expecting to have some real results within 3 months.

I will be reporting along the way so do check back often.

Notes

The industry we are competing in does not infringe with any of our clients. Our MD has a website that is competing in the same arena, and on completion of this experiment all domains will redirect to this site.

Posted in SEO Experiment on October 9th, 2008 by Dan | 12 Comments »