Do Not Be Obsessed With Reciprocal Linking

May 25, 2009 at 1:39 pm | Posted in SEO | Leave a Comment

I’m not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it).

It’s not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad – if I link to Aaron’s SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me, that’s not what I’d call “reciprocal linking.”

I’m referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites – the “you link to me and I’ll link to you” phenomenon.

These aren’t hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic.

What Is Cannoical Url Tag?

May 17, 2009 at 1:28 pm | Posted in SEO | Leave a Comment

The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new “canonical url tag” to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps.

It’s rare that we cover search engine announcements or “news items” here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.

To help new and experienced SEOs better understand this tag, I’ve created the following Q+A (please feel free to print, email & share with developers, webmasters and others who need to quickly ramp up on this issue):

How Does it Operate?

The tag is part of the HTML header on a web page, the same section you’d find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag. In fact, this tag isn’t new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example:

This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.seomoz.org/blog and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Source: SEOmoz

4 Hot Tips To Increase Web Traffic

May 11, 2009 at 1:24 pm | Posted in traffic | Leave a Comment
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The four ways discussed in this article are sending an email to your mailing list, paying for traffic,joint venturing with another website owner and social bookmarking with web 2.0 sites.

1. Emailing your list is a method that becomes your greatest asset with time.

No overheads are involved and you can create a flood of sales every time you email your list. You can expect between 10 and 30% of visitors to your option page to sign up to your mailing list.

By having an autoresponder you can attract these visitors back to your website again and again by giving them valuable free content. There are various opinions as to how often these emails are sent. In between sending them content you can ask them to buy.

You create a relationship with your list and because they receive valuable information from you, you become like a trusted friend to them and they accept you can provide them with what they are looking for. There is a good chance they will buy after a few visits.

2. By buying traffic, you can target the people already looking for your specific product.

The biggest player here is Google. Although for beginners to PPC (pay per click) I would recommend starting with the smaller search engines as the ad cost will be significantly cheaper.

When you perform a search on google the results on the left of the page are the natural or “organic” results which are the free listings and they are in order of their importance as determined by Google according to their criteria.

The listings on the right of the page are the paid results and can be bought by anyone. You can have traffic going to your website within 5 minutes of setting up a Google adwords ad. The next step is to monitor results, you can track the number of hits from various sources in order to focus on those that produce the most sales.

Every type of advertising must have the ability to be tracked. Constantly testing and tweaking your ads is one of the keys to success in this field. The advantages of paying for traffic is that is a fast method of driving traffic to your site and it can be made extremely targeted traffic.

3. Joint Ventures with another website owner.

You send their links to your list and he send your links to his list. JV deals allow you to create a lot of traffic to your site in a short period of time and to build your email list very quickly.

You can receive JV support from established marketers in your field if you approach them correctly by selecting potential partners on a similar level as your own, making approaches very personalised to that particular person, offering a deal that favours them (not just yourself) and by making as easy as possible for them by creating email,banner ads and all the other promotional material they may need.

By doing all the work for them they are much more likely to respond to your JV offer.

4. Social bookmarking

Get social on web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Digg, Technorati and many others is the hottest new way to obtain traffic to your sites.

As humans are social animals it is likely that these social sites are here to stay and they will attract increasing numbers of users, all potential traffic that can be directed to your site.

Chris Deltise introduces your Free Report on how next generation marketers are using Web2.0 secrets to stampede herds of 100% targeted buyers straight to their website. http://www.web20trafficstorm.comArticle

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/4-hot-ways-to-send-a-storm-of-traffic-to-your-website-900730.html

Increased Web Traffic From SEO Benefits Small Businesses

May 6, 2009 at 1:10 pm | Posted in SEO, home business, search engines | Leave a Comment
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While it had a successful brick-and-mortar store, R.A.G. New York couldn’t get its website’s sales off the ground until the company turned to search engine optimization (SEO).

Jay Greenstein, president of R.A.G. New York says that while he has six physical locations for his stores, his website was generating only three sales per day. But after implementing an SEO campaign, Greenstein told the New York Daily News that sales went from $2,000 in August to more than $12,000 last December.

SEO works for small businesses by making sure the company’s website appears on the first page of Google or any other search engine’s result page. As Gabriel Shaoolian, creative director for Blue Fountain Media told the news provider, “page two is useless.”

Greenstein told the paper that he paid $30,000 to get the project going and now spends $1,000 each month to make sure his website stays high in search results for specific keywords.

It appears that many retailers are turning to SEO to help generate website traffic and increasingly turning their back on paid search. A recent study from Internet Retailer found that 55.3 percent of respondents said they would increase their SEO budget in 2009 while only 24.2 percent said they would boost their use of paid search.

Source: NEBS Newsdesk

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