While nowadays I don’t believe in PageRank as much as I used to (it was my religion for two-three years), I can’t help but judge a site’s popularity by it. Whether I’m thinking of it’s reputation or whether I want to buy a link, in the end PageRank does affect me. The thing though, is that it’s not far from the truth.

When I see a good PageRank on a site’s main page, I’m sure that either the site’s content quality is very good, therefore getting lots of links and attention, or the site’s creator is trying to increase popularity by constantly getting new links. Either way, these are great indications that a site is still active and it would be a good resource for me to look at.

There are also times that PageRank is misleading. For example:

• A new page having 0 PageRank because it just started out. PageRank usually updates every three months, so even if a page has amazing content and gets lots of links, it will display as unranked (or 0 PageRank ) until a new update occurs.
• A webmaster pays zero attention to the content but is gathering links non-stop.
• A big company spends great sums of money for the promotion of their domains.

Again, whatever the case, a healthy PageRank is a good indication.

But what happens if we have a good PageRank on our main page and the new update shoots us back to 0? Here are a few secnarios of what might have happened and what you can do to change it.

A change in site structure

If we change CMS or some settings on our current system, our main page might change. The same will happen if we change our domain name. For example www.m0neytized.com could become www.m0neytized.com/index.php. Therefore, Google treats it as a different page even though it’s actually the same one. What we can do is give it a 301 Redirect back to the page we want. (I plan on writing an article about redirects, but if you’re in a hurry please do search google for it.) With a permanent redirect, all links will point to the page of your choice, making your rebuild PageRank soon.

An aggressive link building strategy

When we’re gathering links for our site, sometimes we might get so aggressive that Google has to penalise us for it. This doesn’t happen often, but I’ve seen it quite some times. When it does happen, most of the times the page promoted got de-indexed until someone from Google reviewed it manually. If the content of the page is useful and helps readers, Google will let you get away with it. Otherwise, who knows!? The best thing to do is to stop with the aggressive link building and focus more on content; at least until things better point to where they’re going. If nothing changes, register the website with Webmaster Tools and ask for a re-inclusion.

Completely Wrong Navigation

It’s only happened to me once, but I got de-indexed for having completely wrong navigation for my site and, as you can imagine, got a PageRank of 0 at the same time. The site was a YouTube Aggregator and had about 1500 video categories so visitors could easily find interesting things to watch. The problem was that we had 15 main categories and dozens of subcategories hidden with ajax and yet still the search engines were able to see them. Imagine every page of your site giving links to 1500 other pages… A complete mess. So it was de-indexed. In this case you can fix your navigation and ask for reinclusion at the Google Webmaster Tools.

An aggregator site that does nothing useful

Aggregator sites are amazing. They help us find information easily and categorize it all for easy “consumption”. But the purpose of aggregation is to help the visitor gather lots of information from many sites all into one page. For example, a lyrics site could have video, lyrics, band bio, upcoming shows etc. all in one page. If we created a site that just takes all the new YouTube videos and re-posts them, creating thousands of new pages, no matter how many links we would gather, sooner or later the PageRank will go to zero because zero is what we’re offering to our visitors.

Selling Links to other WebSites.

This is the most common penalty a website can get. Google doesn’t want a website owner selling links to improve the site’s PageRank value because this is “gaming” their system. In this case, the site doesn’t getting de-indexed from google, and visiting from the search engine doesn’t change, but the PageRank does go back to 0.
So if you were selling many links on your website and it got PageRank 0, that might be the case; google saying ‘let me see you sell links now!’ :P You might say: “And who the heck is Google to decide what I can and can’t do on my site?“.
The truth is that Google is just a web service. A website like yours. And if you want google to “Feature” you, you have to play by their rules. It’s as simple as that! Google doesn’t force anyone to do anything, but everyone wants a piece of the Google action. If we want their traffic, we have to adjust to their requirements. If we want to sell an ad to someone, we can make the link either a ‘no-follow link’ or a javascript link. Both links are OK with Google. They don’t pass value to the other website, only to visitors, so everything’s OK.

Participating in Web-Rings

This is an old practice but it’s still being used. Web-rings is when a handful of sites are giving links to one another so they can create a ring between them, achieving better ranks. If the ring is between 3-5 sites things should be OK, but if the ring becomes a huge one, Google will penalise it. If that’s the case, remove the ring links, inform the other webmasters to remove them too and then submit your website on webmaster tools and file for re-inclusion.

Getting hacked without you knowing it

Another very common cause of PageRank dropping down to 0 is if someone hacks your site, adding invisible links to your page and getting your site penalised for “link cloaking“. To see if you’ve had any suspicious links injected, go to your main page and view it’s source very carefully, try spotting any strange links. If you’ve been hacked, hire a professional to clean and secure your site (if you can’t do it alone) and wait for a bit. Usually the PageRank will finally go back to normal automatically.

Using black-hat techniques

Using “sneaky” ways to rank your website, hiding links and “stuffing” keywords into comments, etc. will finally get your site penalised. Don’t know what to say about this, you already knew exactly what you were doing, so you shouldn’t be surprised when your PageRank sinks to 0!

Your PageRank was low in the first place

There are many times that webmasters don’t update a website and aren’t really involved in it at all. It’s normal for a low PageRank site to go back to zero. This is because 99% of the links were probably from social networks and so after a year or so they disappear or move back to page 1,257 or so. When abandoned, I have seen sites go from PageRank 5 to PageRank 2 very fast. So, if your website had a PageRank of three or less, perhaps this is the case. Roll up your sleeves and get working! If you are involved in your website and you involve your readers with quality content, your PageRank should slowly move on up.

PageRank is very, very complicated and that’s because people are trying to take advantage of Google’s Algorythm. If you’ve never got a penalty, be glad about it! If you have been hit with the “Google Slap”, I feel you! Turn the page and make things right again.
Rock on!

What happens if Google PageRank goes to 0 and what you can do about it is a post from Moneytized Blog
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Increasing your traffic with blog commenting is part of the the Link Building Strategy Series.

We all comment on blogs. It’s natural to want to express our ideas with the rest of the people reading the same post and with the author. What if we could also increase our site’s traffic by doing exactly the same thing?

Using blog commenting, we can!

I can’t stress enough how careful you’ll have to be while commenting on other people’s blogs. While you can do a lot of good, at the same time you could really harm your own blog! So pay attention.

Google has taken many steps to reduce blog commenting spam and I’m totally on the same page with Google on that! Back when the blogosphere was just a baby, anyone adding a comment automatically got a backlink back to their own page. Spammers quickly understood how powerful that was and suddenly the web got full of meaningless comments. So nowadays all the big platforms have a no-follow tag (an HTML code that does not pass value to the linked page) in order to reduce spam commenting.

You can still find and comment on blogs that pass value to the linked page, but I would really suggest that you don’t. These blogs will be full of meaningless spamming and you don’t really want to be between Viagra and loose-weight comments. See, once a webmaster removes the no-follow tag and allows comment links to pass value (making it a do-follow blog), then it’s very easy for spam to pile up, sometimes in a matter of minutes. You don’t really want to be associated with such comments!

To tell you the truth, there are so many link building methods; commenting on do-follow blogs should not be one of them.

The second thing you should pay attention to, is the comment itself. There’s absolutely no point on commenting just for the heck of it! No one will click your link if your comment has nothing to give back to the conversation! So make sure your comments give something back either to the reader or the author of the post.

So what to do now?

One thing is for sure, you don’t want to start commenting on every post you see, adding hundreds of comments per day just for the sake of it. You all have an RSS Reader and feeds that you pay attention to. And if you don’t, please do it now, it’s one of the best ways to stay current with your niche. So, next time you see a good post and you have something meaningful to add to the conversation, just do it!

Don’t hunt down posts just to comment on them, wait for them to come to you.

As a rule of thumb, make no more than three comments per day. For commenting to help increase your website’s traffic and exposure, you will have to keep at it for quite some time. It’s not going to happen over night and you really don’t want it to become a burden.

So why go to all this trouble just to add a comment? Isn’t it just better to add a new post to  my blog instead of wasting time on comments? The truth is that everything needs to a balance. If you haven’t added anything to your blog for months, close this window now and go write something!!!

When you comment on other blogs, you:

Become a member of a community.

By commenting responsibly, you help more people discover you. And if they like your comment, they will check your website out for sure! Make an effort to meet your favourite authors on a more personal level. I can’t stress enough how important this is. On many occasions I’ve received a personal email from the author of a post I commented on, asking me about my point of view. Sometimes we even continued the conversation via email. I even got guest post offers that I wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.

Brand yourself as an expert.

Other people will be able to see that you have something valuable to say, that you are a person with a lot of knowledge and that you’re willing to share it with others. I even landed two freelancing gigs, just by commenting on someone’s blog.

Create more comments for your own blog.

Reciprocity is a great thing and it will help your blog become more interactive because it’s all about exchange. The people who read your comment and clicked your link, most likely want to comment on your own blog as well!

I shall leave you with that in mind. Commenting on other blogs is a very powerful way to grow your blog too. You should not overdo it and you should devote some time to each comment you write. After all, commenting is an extension, not only of your professional personality, but also of your blog.

How to increase your website traffic with blog commenting is a post from Moneytized Blog
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This post is part of the Link Building Strategy Series

Instead of buying websites or banners from other websites, you can use another method that may require more effort, but also requires less money.

Using dropped domains to get more links to your website(s)

There are thousands of domains expiring everyday (if not more) and there are many opportunities for web masters to re-register them and redirect their traffic to their site.

Almost every site on the internet, no matter how small or big it is, has a certain amount of links pointing to it and visitors visiting it. When the domain drops because the owner can’t devote enough time to it or can’t promote it sufficiently, chances are the owner will let it expire. This is where we come in! We can re-register the domain name and easily redirect all the traffic using a 301 Redirect.

I use a great service to find what domains expire every day, the Hot Name List. It’s a great service and helps a lot by providing categorized expired domains by niche. There are many more services out there and soon we’ll cover each one individually.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as simple as it seems. All good domains that are on the verge of expiration have a good amount of links and traffic. They are being monitored by thousands of people just waiting for it to drop, so the new owners can either add it to their domain roster or register it and then resell it. So, it will be a hard process. Try to visit sites that feature expiring domain names and see how it works for you.

One very good method that is less passive than re-registering dropped domains is to Find Dead Links. When you are surfing the web and reading an article about your niche, most of the time you will see links pointing to other sites for further reading. When you spot that a link returns a 404 error (Page Not Found) then you can contact the author of the article and inform him of the error stating that you have a similar service and you would like him to review it. Notice that this can only work when the services you offer or the articles are very close to the subject, the author is analyzing.

Try not to spend much time with those two methods, they are good methods to get links but don’t over-do it, just search for domains once every month and dead links while you browse the web.

Angel

Gathering links by buying Dropped Domains is a post from Moneytized Blog
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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.

By utilizing Article Directories, we do the exact opposite. We still get a link that helps strengthen our position in the search engines while bringing many visitors back to our own site at the same time.

How it works

When we go to an Article Directory and create an account, we can add an article straight away. Most of the article directories accept articles that are about 250-500 words long. There are some that require your article be more than 550 words. We then give it a title, add some keywords and can sometimes also add a small snippet of what the whole article is about.

After we submit our article to the desired category we must wait for approval. What most article directories (at least the big ones) look for in order to approve your article is:

• How well the article is written.
• The correct category placement.
• The proper length
• To see if you over-promote a service
• If it’s unique and not a re-post of someone else’s article or even yours.

The drawback is, as mentioned above, that the article must be unique. Thinking about it you might say “why I ‘waste’ an article by submitting it to an Article Directory, why not just posting it on my blog?” There’s no simple and clear answer to that, but there are advantages of submitting articles to Article Directories:

• You can get backlinks to your main site which you would normally “loose”, therefore helping you bring more visitors to your site with the help of Search Engines.
• You create one more way for others to “discover” your main site and what you do.
• You get more traffic back to your own website. Large numbers of people visit these article directories so, given they like your articles, the chances of them visiting your own website increase.
• You get your name viewed by more people and mentioned in more sites, rather than just your won.

Where to submit your Articles

There are two main ways to utilize article directories and I would suggest both.

The first and most time consuming way is to join the best Article Directories and post your articles there. The more you have the better, so try to write one for each, one at a time. Personally, my goal would be to try and submit at least five articles to each directory.

The most important Article Directories are:

• Ezine Articles
• Articles Base
• Go Articles
• Buzzle
• Article Alley
• Amazines

One way that worked very well in the past and still works a bit up to today, is to submit the same article in many article directories at the same time. Try to pick the “not so popular” ones and submit it at them. I have tried many tools to help me do that in the past but Submit Eaze still works the best even for article directory submission.

Worth the check

Angel

Link building using Article Directory Submission is a post from Moneytized Blog
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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. This method can be very effective, depending on how you use it. The only drawback an offline campaign has, is that you can’t keep track of your conversion rate, or how people will respond to it. One great solution I have tested very successfully in the past, is to get a new telephone number just for an offline campaign (and the next to come). This way I know that, when the telephone rings, it will be someone responding to my ad, and I can track exactly how this campaign is progressing. In the beginning, try to place ads in relevant newspapers and magazines close to your niche. Those tend to work better, because people reading them are interested in what you have to offer.
Using radio is a great example of offline promotion too. You can also do that with a twist. Use internet radio stations in your niche to promote your special offers and people will be willing to visit your page because, 99%, they’ll be on the computer while listening to the Internet Radio Station. Going to Shoutcast (http://www.shoutcast.com/) will help you identify radio stations in your niche.

Use your URL in your presentations. When you are presenting in front of audience in a niche close to your website’s content, always use your URL in the beginning and end of your presentation. If people find what you say engaging and useful, they will visit your site for more information.

There are hundreds of ways to promote your site offline and they can vary from one niche to another. You can come up with many creative ways to help engage people. Using offline methods is both efficient and at the same time cheap.

Gathering links Offline is a post from Moneytized Blog
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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!

When we purchase a link from another web property, especially if it’s a link without a no-follow attribute (thus transferring PageRank value back to our site) we have to keep it there for a long time and not just for a month. I could say that a six-month period is the minimal required. When we get links that disappear quickly, Google will tend to consider them as paid links, therefore passing less value to our site.

Purchasing links from web sites is also a costly way of promotion. Even the smallest web property owners will ask good money for a link on their site, because it passes value back to your site. For example, if we buy a link that costs $20 per month, for six months, it will end up costing us a total of $120. Instead, if we were to purchase the whole site, given the owner is willing to sell, it would only cost us a rough total of $300, allowing us to keep the link on the site forever. Additionally, we can start monetizing, seeing as the the site now belongs to us. We can now actively promote our main website, bring more visitors back to it, add more banners, promote affiliate products and generally handle the monetization process much better.
If you have a good understanding of SEO(Search Engine Optimization), you can modify the site’s on-page factors(meta elements, titles keywords etc.), quickly doubling it’s visitors, making your purchase much more valuable. This increased traffic will not only help pay off the cost of the initial investment, but once it clears it will actually be generating new profit.

If you’re thinking of starting a new website or blog by purchasing a pre-existing one, along with its niche-related articles, you will get many benefits from:

• The “value” it already has in the search engines
• The Age of the domain
• The number of “followers” it already has
• Backlinks the previous owner has already gathered. Everyone’s experience in linkbuilding, and internet marketing in general, is different, therefore previous promotional efforts and added points of view can only be beneficial.

Many internet Marketers use this method to strengthen their position and rank higher than their competitors.
Two very good sites you can use to find domain names in your niche, are Flippa and DigitalPoint Forums.

Be careful though, it’s crucial to check up on sellers before completing any business transaction. Check their reputation, their internet profile and whether they’ve sold sites online before.

Link Building by buying relative sites is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

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).

Directory submission is time consuming and I wouldn’t suggest submitting your site to thousands of web directories fast. Outsourcing it cheaply to companies will not work either because the companies will not pay the needed attention for the submissions to be as effective as you need them to.

If you don’t want to devote a lot of time to directory submission, make sure that you will be listed at least in Dmoz.org (Free) and Yahoo Directory (Paid).

Dmoz

Dmoz is one of the oldest and more respected directories of the web. It got penalized two years ago because it was found that some of it’s editors were accepting money for fast inclusion to the directory but I think that this is a thing of the past. It still has a lot of value and is one of the main metrics for the quality and the “worthiness” of a web site. Since Dmoz is free, your inclusion is not guaranteed and it might take four or five submissions to finally “make it” but it’s clearly worth it. Not only it will bring more visitors, but at the same time it will give you more backlinks and a better position in the search engines. Google uses Dmoz to display directory listings on their site, therefore it’s a very good link to have. Get your site ready and when it is at an acceptable stage submit it for inclusion.

Yahoo Directory

Yahoo directory is a paid directory that is very effective in many ways.
Yahoo directory will bring:

• A good amount of traffic because many people visit the directory itself.
• A great backlink to your site, and therefore better search engine results
• Credibility, because many people check the yahoo directory to see if a company has added their website at the directory.

To submit your website to Yahoo Directory, costs $299. Be careful though, because when you try to submit your site to the directory, you will have to pay for the first year, however, inclusion is not guaranteed, and the money you paid not refundable. I am not a fan of their policy but if people take a second look at their submission before they send it, they have good chances to be accepted.

Other directories

There are thousands of directories, many of which are worth mentioning. Submitting to many directories can be time consuming and might even hurt your rankings. If you want to submit in a few, then pick the Dmoz and Yahoo directories only. If you want to submit your site to more, then you will have to do it right.
Points to pay attention to:

1. Don’t submit on many directories in a short period of time. It’s bad for Google to see 100 new backlinks in a small period and then, none. Just try to submit to approximately ten directories per day.
2. Don’t create one title and one description and use the these for every directory. Search engines look at it as duplicated content and pay much less attention to your listing. Your best bet is to create 4-5 titles and descriptions and randomize them so that they can be as unique as possible.
3. Don’t submit in all the directories you find. Evaluate carefully the directories you submit to. A typical way to evaluate a directory is to check its PageRank, Alexa and latest submissions. You don’t want your site to be featured together with viagra and casino offers.

What I have been doing for quite some time now is to use Submit Eaze. I use it so much that I have two licenses, one for my desktop and one for my laptop. It solves all the three problems mentioned above by:

• Helping you keep track of what directories you have already submitted your site to
• Automatically mixing your titles and descriptions
• Auto updating the directories list so you can submit to the new directories added that are handpicked from the creator of the application.

Furthermore, the application is developed and enhanced non-stop for at least three years and every update always adds new, great features. It’s easy to use and it automatically completes almost all forms for a directory submission, helping you do it much faster than normal.
If you are planning on doing many submissions to directories, Submit Eaze is the only solution to help you do it easily and effectively. I have tested most of the available applications for directory submission and Submit Eaze is by far the best one. A notable drawback, is the unavailability for Apple Computers.

Link building with Directory Submission is a post from Moneytized Blog
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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”.

But not all links are to be treated equally.

The accumulated  value our domain receives from links we are given, depends on these basic things:

• The “power” of the page giving us the link
• The Anchor text of the link
• The page’s relativity to our page

To make a long story short, let’s assume that our domain has gathered some links from other websites. A website giving us a link from a page with a PageRank of Four, is much more valuable than a link from a page with a PageRank of Two. Simplified, a PageRank Four link is eight times more valuable than a Three. That applies to all values.

So what we are basically trying to do is get as many authoritative links as possible.

Rest assure, we’ll be analyzing many more ways to get links in posts to come. We’ll also be seeing how we can make our posts go “viral”, so stay tuned!

Promoting our website: Off-page Optimization is a post from Moneytized Blog
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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:

1. Press Releases – It’s a great way to inform the world that you have released a new service, competition or product. Along with your press release, you should provide direct links to your website. This way they can be easily  picked up by a journalist or a blogger interested in your site, who can then re-post them, thus popularizing your site that bit more.

2. Directory Submission – Directory submissions worked much better in the past but are still  a strong ally in your link building efforts. Most of the directories will just bring incoming links but some can bring a lot of traffic too. Consider adding your site to the top general directories and the top directories in your niche.

3. Article Directory Submission – Article directories can not only  give you more links but, if the article is good, it might even be used by other bloggers or website owners, giving you even more links back to your site. It’s a very effective way to show your expertise and get some links and traffic in the process.

4. Link Exchange Requests – Link exchange is not easily scalable but it’s been proven to be one of the steadier and most valuable methods of link building. Getting relevant links from other websites that are similar to yours is a great bonus for your site’s search engine reputation.

5. Embedded content – If you’re the creator of a feature that analyzes data or displays information about people’s pages or social profiles, creation of a widget is a must have! This useful tool, which your visitors can add to their website, will give a link back to your site, automatically increasing its value.

6. Social Networks / Viral Campaigns – Social networks are the most powerful way to attract new visitors and links  to your site. We will devote many articles on the ethics of social networks and how to best use them in order to strengthen your site’s branding and visibility.

7. Buy Links from Web Sites – This one is a bit of a shady technique. Buying links from other webmasters might seem perfectly logical to you and me but Google hates it. And for good reasons. There are people who just buy 1000′s of links just to promote their services (Viagra etc.) giving Google a bad name. Therefore we should be attentive when buying a link because, instead of giving us value, it might do exactly the opposite.

8. Forum Participation – Using your signature space to provide links to your own site, is a great way to get more exposure. Rule of thumb: Don’t just register for a forum, make a comment like “awesome post” and put your link. Try doing this with forums you’re already an active member of.

9. Blog Commenting – Commenting on posts is a good way to increase the awareness and popularity of your site.When we comment on another blog or website, we also leave our website’s URL. There’s one thing we have to remember: It’s not beneficial to comment just for the heck of getting one link. It might do more damage than “good”. Always comment when you have something useful to add to the conversation. This will give us both a backlink and added value.

10. RSS Feeds and RSS Directories – There are places  we can “ping” (=notify) when we update our website. Pinging notifies our followers and services when we post new information. There are also many directories where we can submit our RSS feed to, so that other people will be able to find it and engines will be able to crawl it.

11. Guest Posting – I am becoming a huge fan of guest posting and the reason is that it does many simultaneous things. It brings targeted traffic from relevant websites, helps new people discover you (since you provide information they want or need) and gives value to your site for the search engines.

12. Product Reviews – When you buy a product and are satisfied with it, it’s a great thing to review it. Not only do you give value back to its creator but you also get links by doing so.

13. Buy Relative Sites – Instead of buying a link from a site, you could buy the whole site itself! It might seem crazy but think about it. Links back to our site would be free for life, repetitive revenue streams would increase and our user-base would grow at the same time, helping our business expand. It’s an amazing long term investment!

14. Hold Contests – Contests can attract many visitors, since there is usually a prize to be won! It can give us many backlinks from forums and sites that post internet contests, plus it also raises our visitor’s engagement. Contests can easily become viral because the visitors themselves promote them.

15. Off-Line Promotion(Eg. Conferences, Wear T-shirt) – Since we love what we do and what we offer, it’s not a bad practice to advertise it both on-line and off-line! Wear your site’s t-shirt, add your URL to your business card and make your domain a part of your brand.

16. Create mini-sites – There are many sites that can help us create small pages that talk about our niche and give a link back to our domain. HubPages and Squidoo are the most popular examples and they can help bring both visitors and quality links.

17. Dropped Domains / Dead Links – There are domains that have many quality links but their owners let them expire because they are no longer interested. If we spot a domain like that we can buy it and then redirect the traffic back to our site, giving us more visitors and more search engine value.

18. Create Good Categorization – As we mentioned before in the ideal site structure article, it is crucial to create good internal site structure because it will help your internal links pass value from one to another.

19. Post Often – No matter how many promotional methods we use and how much time we spend on promoting our website, we can’t accomplish many things if we don’t update our site with new, fresh and helpful content. My rule of thumb now is: 90% of my time devoted to Content creation and 10% to Promotion. The opposite can benefit us faster, but in the long run it’s the worst thing to do.

20. Create a Theme – This way can be applied to many other things too. For example, you can create a WordPress theme and distribute it for free. People who like it, can use it but have to leave the footer link back to our main domain, intact. With this method we can get many links back to our site without any effort, except the theme creation.

21. Offer Free Hosting – Many hosts offer special prices or even free hosting to clients with powerful sites, as long as they include a link back to them. Why not do the same if you have the know-how and server resources? :)

22. Offer Something Free – We live in the era of free! And the faster we realize what it means, the faster we can make this work to our benefit. Giving something away for free, creates a lot of value for your brand and generates great word of mouth.

23. Distribute Creative Commons Images – If you are a photographer or an illustrator you can publish photographs or images for others to use for free with a Creative Commons License. When people use your photographs on their websites, they have to add a link back to you. The better the images are, the more backlinks you will get.

24. Link to Others – When you help others by mentioning them, you create a bond. By helping them, they will most probably help you back. There is a saying “aggression comes back to you” but the opposite is also true! :)

25. Pay for a Sponsored Post – Sponsored posts are similar to paid links. The main difference is that the author who mentions your services, decides what to write, not you. Most of the times the article will be positive but whatever the case, Google knows it’s a paid link. The best links are  organic links, but some paid mentioning never killed anyone!

26. Give Your Product for Free in Exchange for Reviews – This is a much better approach than sponsored posts because all you have to do is give away the product or service. Then, it is up to the blogger to decide what to write. You’re may not be paying for the review, you just give the product away, but still, it’s somewhat considered a paid link.

Here above are only the most popular methods of link acquisition. It goes without saying that for each method there are dozens, if not hundreds, of sites and/or services that can help you further. For example, within social networks there are numerous ways to get, give and exchange links: Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg, just to name a few.

This article serves as a gateway and entry point for more articles; each one explaining a category in depth.

Bookmark this page or Subscribe to my RSS Feed for upcoming articles on how to correctly use each of the methods explained above.

Stay tuned,

Angel

Top 25 +1 methods to enhance your link building strategy is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

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.

If we have a main page with a PageRank value of Three (3) and want to increase it by one (1) point, it will take us the same amount of effort as if we were trying to take eight different r(8) sites from zero (0) to three (3). It’s a long term process but it shouldn’t scare you if your PageRank is small or even non-existent. It has it’s ups and downs, but in the long run, you’ll be able get more points.

Using PageRank as a tool to evaluate pages.

When you want to trade links with a website, buy ad space or check up on your competition, looking at a website’s PageRank is a good indication of how much value that domain has in the search engines.

Keep in mind that the PageRank value of a website is updated every three months,s so if a website is quite new, it might not have the value it “deserves”.

Furthermore, there might be cases of popular sites getting many visitors and many links per day,  and still have a PageRank of zero. This happens because those sites were either penalized for  selling direct and paid links to other websites(something that Google hates), or for using “shady” optimization methods to rank faster and better (Black-Hat Seo).

How can I see what PageRank a website has?

You can check website PageRank values by using the Google toolbar on Firefox or  by installing a very simple  and handy plugin called Search Status(again for Firefox). It will show up on the bottom right-hand corner of your browser, indicating the PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of a given page-domain.

Things to keep in mind

When evaluating a page or website, check it’s PageRank value. It’s a good indication whether this site is worth getting links from. Sometimes though, PageRank might be misleading for the following reasons:

• The specific page we’re looking at might be new and since PageRank updates every 2-3 months, the correct value will not necessarily be shown.
• There’s a chance that the domain has been banned or penalized from Google. In this case, it will show up as Unranked or with a O (zero) PageRank value. This saves us the time and effort of getting a link from a page that would have either damaged us or offered us no value.
• Being obsessed with PageRank can be wrong. Judging everything by a value that’s quantitative, and not qualitative, is very misleading. After all, we’re not only looking for links that are valuable for the search engines, but also for links that can offer us and our readers more value.

PageRank alternative

If we want to have a second opinion on what value a page has, SeoMoz Toolbar is here for the rescue! It’s a good indicator, it also helps us discover the differences between MozRank and Pagerank, plus it’s one more number to worry about. :P

If you want my advice, stop worrying about PageRank and start building on your reputation and value as an author and business.

To our success,

Angel :)

What is Google PageRank and how to use it is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.