Link building and SEO

I build websites and develop them for fun and profit. The wellspring and catalyst for both factors is people or what we call traffic.

The more people visit my web site, the more money I can possibly make, and perhaps the more fun I can possibly have.

Today, many websites had their Google PageRank reduced and many bloggers have been speculating about the causes.

Introspection is often forced. We don’t think about sustainability and our actions until unfavorable circumstances arises. If you only consider how a PageRank shift will negatively affect you after it has happened, you’re already screwed.

Linkbait refers to content that is created with the aim of getting people to link to it. A component of search engine optimization and marketing, linkbaits work to increase search and referral traffic to a site and eventually sales or ad revenue, if it is monetized.

Usually developed in the form of a thought provoking or entertaining article, a useful application or a list of helpful resources, linkbaits work best when they add value to visitors to the web site.

New websites need links to develop any sort of search engine visibility. Links pointing to a new website can get it indexed and help it to start ranking for low to medium competition long tail keywords.

These keywords will send visitors searching for information on a specific topic to your website and allows you gain a new reader or make some money from whatever affiliate program or ad scheme you are running.

I’ve recently set up several websites for some friends and link building was my main concern because I needed links for the webpages to be indexed and start showing up in the search engine.

The benefits of increasing search engine traffic to any website are many. For online retailers and affiliate marketers, this means a higher potential for greater product sales and referral commissions.

For the average blogger, the increase in search engine traffic means a bigger audience and possibly more long term profit from the display of on-site or privately arranged advertisements.

Understanding how to consistently send more search engine traffic to your website requires an appreciation of the Long Tail theory and subsequently the effective manipulation of traffic-directing long tail keywords.

Just a short post to let everyone know that you can submit your website or blog to Snap, a search engine that allows you see preview images of search results on a separate viewing panel before you click on them to visit the website.

I’ve recently discovered this nifty search engine and was a little amazed to find that Dosh Dosh wasn’t indexed and included in their search results at all. I’ve tried searches for the blog title and URL but nothing came up.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has written a terrific introduction to Google PageRank that deserves to be read by anyone who’s interested in learning the details behind how Page Rank (PR) actually works as well its relevance to your blog or website.

With most webmasters eagerly anticipating the upcoming PR update, this article dispels several unfounded myths and situates the focus on PR within a balanced link building/SEO strategy.

Written for both internet searchers and webmasters, Danny uses a large variety of official documents from Google to come up with various explanations which define PageRank and examine it’s relationship with search rankings.

Google’s Blog Search is a blog search engine that indexes your blog posts by crawling XML feeds instead of the actual blog html page. The Blog Search includes all blogs which publishes a site feed: If your blog is not included in the Blog Search, you might want to ping them.

I’ve gotten some traffic from Google’s blog search but I haven’t thought too much about it until I saw a link on Conversion Rater which sent me to an article about search result rankings.

Stephen Spencer has just released what he views as the most important Wordpress plugin for SEO. As you probably know, title tags are given a lot of weight by search engines and one of the main on-site factors which can affect your search engine rankings.

To put it very simply, title tags are simply the words that you see at the top of your browser window. In the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), this little description will appear as the title of the webpage.