Link building using Article Directory Submission

This post is part of the Link Building Strategy Series

Article Directories are very similar to normal Directories, their main difference being that in an Article Directory you can submit only articles. Apart from this obvious difference, there are also many advantages of using article directories.

In a normal Directory, we create an account (if necessary) and then submit our site’s main page to their index, in the appropriate category, and that’s pretty much it! We get a backlink and that’s all very well, but we get no additional value aside from what the search engines give us. In 95% of given directories we’ll get less than one visitor per month.

Gathering links Offline

This post is part of the Link Building Strategy Series

Let’s focus our efforts for link building, somewhere else. The offline world!
You’re doing everything possible to promote your personal or corporate website. Given the fact that you love what you’re doing, why don’t you transfer your efforts to the offline world? You can do many things including:

Wear your site’s t-shirt. It’s a great thing to do, especially in conferences and events within your niche. People who have seen your site before will identify you, while many others will be curious to find out what your site is all about after seeing your URL printed in nice fancy letter on your back or chest!

Create a new Business Card. You don’t have to go all out like I did, but even a plain and simple card containing your site’s link is enough to associate you with your website. The more eccentric your card is, the higher the possibility of someone visiting your link. This is my card for example, please use it to contact me for anything you want- but please don’t abuse it

Put an offline ad in a newspaper, magazine or on the radio.

Link Building by buying relative sites

This post is part of the Link Building Strategy Series

Thinking about it, an effective Link Building Strategy can take a lot of time, money and effort. Especially if you’re purchasing links from other sites in order to build link value and bring more visitors to your site, it can be very expensive. Buying a whole site as it is, instead of just a banner on it for example, is a great idea for lowering costs. It might sound crazy and cost-ineffective, but stay with me and you’ll change your mind faster than you think!

Link building with Directory Submission

This post is part of the Link Building Strategy Series

There are thousands of Link Directories on the web. Their purpose is to help you promote your website. Directories typically have hundreds of categories so that we can pick the most suitable. A link from a web directory is relevant because the category that our link is placed, is strongly related to what our company or website offers. Lately, web directories tend to influence search engines’ algorithms less but still can work to our advantage. Simply put, if your competitor has used every promotional method you used too but not submitted his site to web directories, you can have a clear advantage to pass him in the S.E.R.P.s(Search engines result pages).

Promoting our website: Off-page Optimization

After setting up our web site and ensuring that everything can be Crawled, we must make sure our users can navigate it efficiently. Which can only mean it’s time to move to the Off-Page Factors that will help our site rank better. Having a new site and ensuring that all On-Page factors are optimal, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see an increase of visitors and an improvement of ranking positions. Even though search engines can crawl our site, in a competitive market that alone is not enough. A site has to have links from other relevant websites. This is so it can gain “value”.

Top 25 +1 methods to enhance your link building strategy

After explaining what PageRank is and finishing with the on-page optimization factors, now it’s time to move on to off-page optimization. And that’s all about links and how to “get” them.

There are many ways to plan an effective Link Strategy and in this post we will try to understand how each method works. Soon we will analyze each one individually and in depth, explaining how to use each method correctly.

The main categories of link acquisition are the following three.

Organic links are the ones we gain automatically when someone likes our content and decides to share it with others by posting it on their own site or blog,  tweeting it, leaving it as a comment etc.

Paid links are the ones we buy, not only to strengthen our  brand value and better our position in the search engines, but also to increase awareness of our products.

The final category is the mutual exchange of links between two or more sites.

To be more specific, the Top 26 Methods to get people to link to you with no particular order, are:

What is Google PageRank and how to use it

Google has an algorithm to represent the “value” of each page of a website, called PageRank. PageRank goes from Zero to Ten. The more links a page receives, the better the PageRank it will get.

This figure is more quantitative than qualitative and raising your PageRank is not as easy as it seems.

Planning for the ideal site structure

When we start creating a website, it’s a common practice that we immediately start with the creation, template, plug-in selection etc..

What we almost always forget is to plan our site’s structure.

From the image above, we can see an ideal structure for a website. To explain myself better, we have to analyze some of Google’s rules and best practices.

About Cloaking, H1 Tags and more

On page optimization factors series continues and now’s the time to cover up some more advanced stuff.

Cloaking is the method that some webmasters use to alter what the search engines see and make it different than what really exists on a web page. Cloaking was used much more in the past and is part of black-hat SEO methods(black-hat are the methods that are not in compliance with the Search Engine’s rules and their aim is to trick them and gain better ranking without much effort.).

From the point I see it black hat seems cool. You can get better rankings much faster and without much effort. But in the end you will get caught. If you’re trying to build a business out of your site, don’t try to trick the engines, people behind them work day and night to ensure that they’ll be one step ahead of you

After all you are creating a web site and want it’s reputation in the search engines to last for the years to come.

Are images more important than text?

Moving on to the third post about on-page factors, there’s one thing we haven’t yet covered: Images.

Images are one of the most essential parts of your content and on-page optimization factors. Content is king and I am not going to deny that, but the combination of content and images is killer. An image will grab the attention of users when they enter your site. It’s the quickest and easiest way to illustrate the nature of your post and what you’re going to be talking about.

Believe it or not, posts that also contain images get more votes in social networks, therefore more visitors and links.