Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

In this video, Matt Cutts answers someone’s question on effective ways to generate organic link building

The origional question asked was: “can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?”

Here’s Matt’s response:

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If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

About The Author
Jason O’Connor is a Web business and marketing professional who produces The Net Gazette, a free online Web business and marketing periodical. The Net Gazette covers topics that range from blogging for business to Twitter. Read the September edition or visit the main website at: www.thenetgazette.net

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Sites like Facebook and Twitter may receive more attention in some circles, but blogs aren’t going anywhere. At BlogWorld, Blogger Product Manager Rick Klau talked to WebProNews about the state of Google’s blog publishing system, along with blogging in general and how newer communications options come into the equation.

One big thing worth noting is that Blogger recently celebrated its tenth birthday. A host of fresh features were introduced at that time to both expand how people regard the service and thank individuals for continuing to use it. And use it is precisely what they’re doing.

Klau stressed that, with regards to blogs and Blogger, we’re not talking about a static or declining environment. In fact, he stated that 290,000 words are written on Blogger per minute worldwide, which represents an increase of 10 percent versus six months ago.

Klau said that Twitter and blogs “each have their place,” too, as blogging and microblogging aren’t part of a zero-sum game. If conversations are fragmented, that’s fine. That can even be good. Twitter became the second-largest source of traffic (after Google) to Klau’s blog when he implemented software that tweeted about his latest posts. He recommended this sort of service.

Another good idea to explore is using the new “share to Twitter” feature on Blogger.

As for what, precisely, to do with a blog (if you’re new to them or just looking for some expert advice), Klau’s advice was solid: “focus on the content.” Also, don’t imitate what other people have done . . . instead find what you’re passionate about and stick with it.

About This Article:
This article was provided via WPN Videos – Balancing Blogs And Twitter on Oct 16th, 2009

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Best Practices for Freehosts

Google has made some recommendations for “best practices” for sites that allow users to create their own sites. They give the examples of their own Google Sites and Blogger. So in other words, if you run some type of site that allows users to make their own pages, you may want to pay attention.

1. Make sure your users can verify their website in website management suites (like Webmaster Tools).
2. Choose a unique directory or hostname for each user.
3. Set useful and descriptive page titles.
4. Allow the addition of tags to a page.
5. Allow your users to use third-party analytics packages
6. Help your users move around
7. Help search engines find the good content from your users.
 

When Google says, “help your users move around,” they mean let your users access their data. This is a concept that Google has become very big on. As you may have read, Google has started a group called the Data Liberation Front to address data portability, and has created a site dedicated to instructing users on how to move their data to and from the company’s various products. Basically, Google is suggesting you follow suit.

When Google talks about helping search engines find you users’ content, they mean help the crawlers. “Help us find users’ content using XML Sitemaps,” says Greg Grothaus, Staff Software Engineer on Google’s Search Quality Team. “Help us to steer clear of duplicate versions of the same content so we can find more of the good stuff your users are creating by creating only one URL for each piece of content when possible, and by specifying your canonical URLs when not.”

These may not seem like issues that a lot of people would have to worry about, but you may be (or maybe not) surprised at how often start-ups come and go, which have sites that allow users to create content. Perhaps following these guidelines would cater to an increased chance for a successful platform. More information on the guidelines can be found here.

 
About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Of people who both blog and tweet, the majority would overwhelmingly prefer to have more blog readers than followers on Twitter. This is according to surveys conducted by Darren Rowse who runs ProBlogger and TwiTip.

This is not entirely surprising, since generally, much more effort is put into a blog post than a 140-character or less tweet, but there is certainly a gold-rush for Twitter followers. Jason Calacanis for one is willing to pay a pretty penny for them.

Rowse polled both his ProBlogger audience (which is presumably comprised mainly of bloggers) and his Twitip audience (which is made up of Twitterers). As expected, the Twitip crowd favored Twitter followers slightly more, but there was still a very clear majority wanting more blog readers.

There are certainly arguments for the value of both categories, and Rowse covers them pretty well here. There are some pretty

obvious ones for blogs:
- they require more time/effort
- they provide more info
- they are most likely not going anywhere, while Twitter may be hot right now, but who knows where it will be in the future?
- the more blog readers you have, the more times your posts are likely to be linked to on Twitter anyway

There are obvious benefits to having Twitter followers too though, particularly for marketers.

- More followers is a good indication that there is demand for what you offer as a business, and that people are interested in your product(s)
- relationships easier to form (yes blogs have comments, but typically not the real-time conversation factor, and people are at Twitter to talk…they’re not necessarily at your blog to do so)

Of course people who both blog and tweet know they don’t have to choose between one medium or the other. They compliment each other, and ideally can work to each other’s benefits. Twitter can gain you more blog readers, and a blog can gain you more Twitter followers.

It’s all in the execution. Write good content that Twitterers want to link to. This has plenty of potential for getting you more readers. Include chiclets on your posts, making it easy to share your content (this shouldn’t be limited to Twitter). Include a prominent link for people to follow you on Twitter (a Twitter logo here will help draw attention).

Link to good content from others when you Tweet. If people like what you’re pointing them to, you’ll likely gain more followers. Who would’ve guessed it all comes back to content? You could also mention your blog casually from time to time. This may increase awareness of it. Just because someone follows you on Twitter, does not mean they know about your blog. That said, you probably don’t want to ram it down their throats either.

By Chris Crum 2009

About The Author
Chris Crum is a staff writer for WebProNews and iEntry Network.

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Knowing how to drive traffic to your website and actually “driving the traffic” can at times be very different. I’ll admit, I have built sites for myself and others where I did everything I was told or read to do, only to ask “Where’s the traffic?”. I feel like I’m striving for the allusive prize in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” beating bloody coconuts together and getting nowhere fast… Or dare I mention the French Taunters … “Ni”

From what I’ve seen in the last five years when it comes to the Internet, no website can remain an island. Web sites must become “connected or webbed together” with others that are simular and/or stronger than itself. This way both spiders and surfers can be attracted by numerious sources which makes your material or services more easily found.

Personally I believe that tags still have their use (Yahoo!, MSN, …), blogs seem to contain ’stickyness’ which is important to drawing readers and potential customers (WordPress appears to be one of the better choices expecially when your hosting it yourself), the term “content is king” at times tends to be a joke. Example, what about sites that get indexed in the top 30 when the webmaster hasn’t even uploaded any pages yet (doesn’t that just tick you off). And as far as Google’s natural search results go, well Google is Google! What works today …

If you are looking for an outside source for information, one that I think is worthy of mention is SitePro News. It often has good tips on how to better your site and it’s ranking in the SE’s.

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When I woke up this morning and started thinking about last night’s coaching webinar w/Alex, the first thing that came to mind was “Linking, Twitter & Blogs… oh my!, Linking, Twitter & Blogs… OH MY!” Linking I get. It was one of the things I was going to focus on today. Linking with other sites and ’social networks’ like DIGG, MIXX … fast exposure on Google, okay. Visiting and posting on similar blogs in which helps in building a reputation, exposure… it’s the people not the product, important I get it, but Twitter?

I spent (maybe wasted) an hour or so there today trying to figure out what benifit this could provide, and mainly try to find others in the “Fortunate 500″. I honestly don’t have time to just hang out there and chat. Uses: Potential customers? OK… Search Engine spiders finding my Twitter page? Alright … Can someone please comment on what else I seem to be missing here?

Blogs and blogs of blogs …
These things are amazing! I knew about blogs helping in SE rankings, but I wish I had used more of these like we are using them now. If I had, my business would look quite different I believe. I think Alex’s point about using the YouTube method and keyword searching for other potential blogs to post on was right on. Confession- I’ve never been one for casual conversation. Writing articles, now I could get into that, but to talk just to talk … I’m finding it difficult to just jump into an existing conversation (blog post). Anyone else out there feeling the same way? Show of hands … Well I guess it’s time to go knock on a few blogs and say “hello”

Oil Rig Hopping (or as I’ll call it “Crosstown Traffic”)
The Interent can be large place (like an ocean), but put in prospective, it can actually be rather small. [Que drums, background vocals and kazoos] “It’s like Crosstown Traffic …” You can be talking with, buying from, or selling to, someone next door or across the planet with a click of a mouse. Just like writting lyrics to a song, you need a hook to catch the attention of your listeners. In Internet marketing it’s very similar. You need something to attract people (potential customers or “fish”) to your PPP pages.

“Net Work” a fisherman’s story
I personally have always made the mistake of using the “shotgun” approach to fishing. Give a lot of options/choices, let ‘em have it (kaboom!) and then wait for the fish to float to the top. Doesn’t really work =( You really need one strong net, one good hook to be an effective Internet fisherman. Target your audience, cast your hook and – happy fishing.

* Kazoo background melody in Crosstown Traffic provided courtesy of the Jimi H. Experence

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