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.

Start living your dream before it faints

Internet marketing is getting huge attention and many people every day start learning more and more about it.

The reasoning behind it is very simple and at the same time very powerful.

By living the internet marketing “lifestyle” you are able to:

1. Work wherever you want
2. Work the exact time you want
3. Work for as long as you want
4. Work with whoever you want

That four points are my mantra and I will always try live by those rules as far as my career is concerned.

Don’t get me wrong, i am not “dreaming” of doing nothing and getting paid. You might think that that’s the case if you combine all the four elements together but:

How to Evaluate an in-house Project

It’s been some time since I’ve turned my back to most paid projects for others.

Why? Simple mathematics…

It’s all based on a simple equation:

X Time = Y Money

Need more Money? Then you have to spend more time!

It’s simple and sad. Sad that it took me years to understand that this business model is not good, at least not for me.

There was a time that I pushed myself to the limit just to be able to undertake more projects. Projects need more people and that means greater expenses… It’s a vicious circle that can only end if and only if you are able to position yourself at the top companies in your niche or by deciding to stop wasting your life in the process and get over it.

I did the second.

When my team and I withdrew from taking any more projects and decided that we will only do in-house work, many people came to us with ideas.

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.

How to write for the search engines

After the Meta Elements article about the on-page optimization factors, here comes the most important factor. The actual content of the page.

Generally speaking, writing content is the hardest part on the website creation check-list. But then again, it’s the most important.

Since we’re in the SEO field, I just want to say one thing. No matter how good your On-Page Factors are, if your content is not of high quality, then your overall SEO efforts will not blossom.

To further explain myself and avoid misunderstandings, let’s take a look at case study scenario.

Meta elements

On the first post about Search Engine Optimization I mentioned the use of meta elements on the On-Page optimization tips section. Meta elements play an important role when you want to optimize a page for the search engines or even your visitors.

As seen from the image above, meta elements are added at the end of the head section of a page and before the body section. If you are using a web creation application such as Dreamweaver or creating your pages by using only code, this is very useful to know. But since most of us nowadays create pages with CMS, we only need to see how writing the meta elements better can improve our ranking in search engines. Let’s see how we can use them effectively.

What is a CMS?

Nowadays, the amount of information increases exponentially. This includes the information available on the internet that many organizations expose. A never-ending cycle, it implies that:  a source exposing more information makes the source more influential, resulting in even more information being exposed by other sources. In order for this information to be managed, several systems have been implemented to facilitate the creation and, most importantly, the taxonomy of it. Therefore, any modern web site of dynamically managed content should implement a content management system (CMS).

The most popular CMS are:

1. WordPress
2. Joomla
3. Drupal

Let’s take a look at them and see what each one has to offer.