emboodo official blog

Popularity contests don’t end in high school. Rather, the importance of being popular stays with us through adulthood. Search engines understand the importance of being popular, and deem those sites more valuable.

Link building is an important method to build popularity (and thereby more traffic) for your site. However, in the same way that having 100 nerds like you means nothing whereas 1 friendship with a movie star can make you the most popular kid in school — not all links are created equal, and in the world of link building quality is much more important than quantity.

Black and gray hat SEO methods have influenced search engines and forced them to modify their algorithm about how they view links. Automatic links, such as farm link sites, will not help your site and may actually hinder you if you are penalized.

A quality link should be relevant to your site. Likewise, the link should be embedded in relevant content, and the link text should be the keyword you are trying to rank for. Authority sites such as “.gov” and “.edu” tend to be more worthwhile. Diluted sites with long lists of links are usually not valuable.

Nofollow links are links that direct users back to your site, but are not given any credit by the search engines. They are usually used to prevent spammers by sites such as WordPress or Wikipedia. Despite the fact that the link is not credited, Wikipedia is such a popular site that the links still tend to be worthwhile. SEO people can use nofollow links to sculpt a site and direct people to certain pages.

Internal linking is an effective method to help push up other pages on your site. By cross linking, you will send the spider to conversion pages instead of your homepage. For example, e-commerce sites can use internal linking by recommending products. Additionally, do not use popup pages that do not link anywhere or a javascript popups that google cannot follow, instead use modular popup pages that contain information already seen by robots on the page, but invisible to humans until it is opened.

Methods to Acquire Links

Since search engines try to prevent unnatural link building efforts, it is important to think outside the box for your link building campaign.

To begin you link building efforts –

• Post links on directories. Directories that require approval before accepting you tend to be more valuable.
• Use sites such as Digital Point to acquire links from relevant sites.
• Join forums and contribute to them to create targeted direct traffic.
• Create and distribute content that is linked back to you.
• Submit links to social media sites such as Twitter, Digg, and Reddit.
• Distribute press releases when you have something to share. Services such as PR Web charge a fee, but will distribute your release throughout the web, including news sites.
• Research sites to determine their worth by their Page Rank, Alexa rank, number of back links, and date they were founded.
• Check the sites IP address using a tool such as My IP Neighbors if you think sites may be connected, because links will not get “credit” if they are on the same server.

Encourage people to link back to you by creating interesting and useful content with methods such as–

• Post controversial content that can be used as “link bait”.
• Send bloggers or site owners free products that they can review and then link back to your site.
• Find out what is currently trendy by looking at Google Trends or Hotsearches.
• Hold a contest that requires participants and winners to link back to you.
• Sponsor a contest on an authoritative site.
• Create a relevant and useful widget (interactive tool with light coding) that automatically links back to you.

Returning to the metaphor of becoming popular – it is important to take your time when it comes to link building. In the same way that you cannot become popular overnight, link building should occur over an extended time period so that it appears natural.

Link building sometimes gets a bad name, but by using these methods, it can be an extremely effective tool to increase traffic to your site.

You may have noticed that the subject of duplicate content has been a popular subject of debate in recent times.  I aim to explain simply what duplicate content is, why it is best avoided and how to prevent your website being penalized by search engines. (By penalized I would like to point out I do not mean Google will remove your site’s index from its search results; rather it will filter out all pages other than what it deems to be the ‘master’  page.)

Duplicate content is identical content which appears in more than one place either within your own site or on different external sites.  Some people assume that having duplicate or similar content on multiple pages or sites will increase their chances of being listed in search engine results.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, search engine robots crawl through pages recording all content along the way.  Where duplicate information is found, search engines often remove or filter the duplicate listing altogether, classifying it as spam.

So now we have established why duplicate content issues are not desirable, we must discuss how to avoid them.  Where the duplicate material appears within your own domain the solution is simple.  Avoid repeating material where possible. Ensure the url of the preferred/master version of the page is listed in your sitemap.  And manage all internal linking carefully, ensuring all minor pages link back to the preferred/master page.

Where the duplicated content issues are found on external domains there is still a lot you are able to do to manage the situation.   There are sites specially set up to help you check for other domains with content very similar to yours.   If you find that someone has published your content without prior permission, I suggest you write to the website owner, requesting that they remove the said text.  If you receive no response and wish to escalate the matter further you can report it to Google.  As a last resort, consider modifying your own text, perhaps even improving it further!

The duplicate content filter used by search engines can sometimes punish innocent  sites’ who have no intention of spamming them.  What is clear, however, is that it is in your website’s best interest to ensure all published information remains as unique as possible.  Eliminate and avoid duplicate information as much as possible and try to keep all published text new and fresh.

Social Bookmarking is the latest craze in the world of Social Media. You will probably have heard the names of some of the largest sites – Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Delicious. The popularity of these Bookmarking Social sites is big and on the increase, which is why anyone interested in SEO needs to understand how to make them work for you! So what exactly is Social Bookmarking SEO? Well, bookmarking is the practice of saving links to websites you would like to remember. Social bookmarking is making those ‘bookmarked’ websites available for others to view and follow. 

When you register with a social bookmarking site, you are essentially telling other members what you have seen, what you have liked and why, and inviting them to view your favorite sites. In this way bookmarking sites have begun to act like ‘real-time’ search engines.  In many cases bookmarked web-pages have not yet been noticed or indexed by traditional search engines. There are some bookmarking sites that allow you to have more private accounts where information is only shared with specified people or groups, but these are not really relevant to us in terms of SEO benefits. 

Most bookmarking sites invite their users to organize their saved links with tags, or keywords.  Viewing of others bookmarked sites is also often done via these tags allowing members to find sites most relevant to them. And it is here where the Social Bookmarking SEO benefits become apparent. 

Benefits

By bookmarking your url and tagging the link correctly, you can draw substantial traffic from members interested in your product/service. The best thing about this traffic is that it is from relevant and high quality members of the bookmarking community.

Building links to your site is crucial for effective SEO. Every post with a link on one of these Social Bookmarking sites counts as a link to you. If other members follow the link and like it they too may bookmark your site; and as the popularity of the bookmark grows, so too will traffic to your site.

Don’t Get Carried Away…

It must be remembered, however, that bookmarking in no way replaces any other form of SEO or Social Media Optimization. These sites are still relatively young and long-term positive effects of their use are yet to be proven. The most important thing to work upon remains the website content – there is no point attracting any traffic if the content on your site is not going to keep visitors there! 

Here at Emboodo, we understand the potential benefits of these sites. We have added Social Bookmarking to our giant toolbox of SEO methods, and will be monitoring its performance.