There is enough confusion surrounding what’s acceptable SEO and link building practices according to Google. However, if you look at it closely, Big G’s principles are actually easy to follow despite being ambiguous at best.

One of the ambiguous principles is Google’s reciprocal link exchange policy. How ambiguous? Just check out Google’s explanation regarding reciprocal link exchange that violates Google’s webmaster guidelines:

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

The number one question regarding the violation: How excessive is excessive?

Only Google knows how to measure and quantify ‘excessive.’ But we can definitely use our common sense to ‘classify’ what ‘excessive-ness’ of reciprocal link exchange:

• Avoid reciprocal link exchange with unrelated sites and/or sites that are in bad neighborhood.
• Avoid making your reciprocal linking the majority of your link building activities.
• Avoid using automated system to do bulk reciprocal link exchanging.

What if I insist to do any of the above? Well, you’ll increase your likelihood to be penalized, even banned by Google.

Here are a couple of ideas for a better link exchange campaign:

• Do inner-page link exchange – for instance: Suppose Site A and Site B exchanging links; Site A’s URL is on Site B’s page 123, Site B’s URL is on Site A’s page 789. This looks more natural than the conventional Site A – Site B top level domain link exchange.
• Do 3-way (or 4-way, even more) link exchange – for instance: Suppose Site A and Site B exchanging links; Site A’s URL is on Site B, but instead of Site B’s URL on Site A, it is placed on Site C.

Be cautious, though – even doing inner-page or 3-way link exchanging could trigger a red flag by Googlebot. Again, use your common sense – do this occasionally, and be sure to mix-and-match in backlinking – links from forums, directories, social networks and other related sites.

You recognize that to get your internet site higher-ranking on organic searches, you require to build backlinks to your internet site. There’s no easier method to build these backlinks than employing a directory submission software. Directory submitters have accumulated the top directories over the internet and imparted them to an easy to apply software that will submit your internet site to these directories. This can possibly save you 100s of hours of submission time, providing you to concentrate your efforts on other link building techniques. However, there are various directory submitters on the market, how do you select the best one?

Number of directories

This is a perceptible feature you want to look at. How many directories does the software submit your site to? The best software will be the one that’s a high number of directories. Presently, the best submitters are submitting to about 3000 directories.

Features

The additional features that accompany the program are another big affair you should consider. Does the program bear an auto mode, does it have an electronic mail validater inbuilt, and does it have submission history, how about multiple descriptions and title per internet site? It’s ever nice to have a submission report you can download and maintain for your records. The top directory submitters ought to have this feature. These are all important things you require to consider in order to make certain the program you get is the most effective and preserves you as much time as possible.

Directory Submission Software – Why Use It?

The SEs are acquiring at a rapid speed, hence SEO is becoming progressively hard. Search engine optimization specialists face the massive challenge of attempting to keep up with the dynamic landscape of the search engines. Even though some traffic generating techniques are no more effective, one tested technique of getting more traffic is by delivering lots of quality, one-way links pointing to your internet site. This method will most probably be a stable and essential optimization step for years to come.

You can get one-way links to your internet site using several different techniques; however submitting to directories is one of the easiest and cheapest. One reason why directory submission is significant is since they’re edited by humans, consequently search engines anticipate these directories to sustain the value of online sites in their SE results. Submitting to directories is also an expert strategy for marketers to get their internet site indexed fast.

Submission to most directories is free of cost, but it’s an arduous task and time-consuming which needs serious patience. Submission to all directories will take minimum couple f minutes if not longer, so the idea of being forced to submit to 100s of directories can be quite discouraging. Directory submission software is surely a less time-consuming and viable option to manual submission and is now being used by hundreds of SEO specialists. The old saying, “time is money” is more applicable, particularly for online marketers in an age of uttermost competition. Any time-saving techniques or tools are surely beneficial and welcomed.

Most SEO specialists acknowledge that directory submission is a key step in ascertaining that a well-built, extremely optimized internet site will enjoy lots of visitors. Submitting to directories is long and boring, but there are a number of cheap directory submitting programs and services that perform well and will preserve you lots of valuable time.

For Webmasters and SEO Specialists, web directories are considered as a link building tools (directory submission for backlinks) rather than what directories should be: Web guides.

An ‘old-school’ or classic Web Guide is a place where you can find useful and quality sites or pages listed under specific categories. For some authority directories, this ‘art’ is not gone, yet. Web directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, BOTW, DirJournal, CannyLink, and many more can present you with both quality backlink, as well as great exposure in term of traffic to your listed sites.

A quality web directory listing can lead you to the right direction, in term of SEO and web traffic:

SEO

For example, getting your sites listed in DMOZ can get you a high-quality one-way backlink. Compare that to a listing on a web directory with hard-to-spell, let alone meaningful domain name – the former will rank you high, the latter is useless. Google also agree to this: Despite directory submissions are regarded as short-term low-quality ways in getting backlinks, submitting yours to quality web directories still have some value.

Web traffic

Getting listed in web guides a.k.a. web directories mean more highly targeted traffic coming into your site. If your site is selling or promoting something, this means more business for you. Again, compare the listing on, say, BOTW.com with the listing on, say, krgyxzgwzky.com; the former will get you highly targeted traffic, while the latter will get you nothing in term of traffic (and insignificant in term of SEO.)

If you are web directory owner, you might want to develop Web Guide instead of a mere directory of links, because that’s just the way it is: old school prevails. Adding a blog, a news section and other informational material could do the trick.

It seems that backlink quality is favoured over quantity these days. But for those of you who are still care about getting tons of lower quality backlink to your site, I do have a site to recommend you: Backlinks.iTamer.com.

How it works

In essence, what the site does is automatically submit your URL to 347 (updated from previously 120) sites, such as website valuation sites, WHOIS checking sites, and other stats sites. Submitting yours to those sites will offer you 2 things: Some valuation or stats of your sites and free backlinks to your sites.

Regardless of what people say about the value of automatically generated backlinks, the upside for this is quick, simple and they won’t hurt your ranking because these site valuation sites tend to be neutral in the eyes of search engines – even considerably better and safer than submitting your URLs to search engines using automated submission tools.

Some backlinks from the 347 sites are either nofollow or need another manual step to complete. Sure, the nofollow links may have little value to Google (yes – nofollow links are still having value with Google!) but this might not be the case to other search engines.

All you need to do is to add your URL and watch yours submitted automatically – neat!

Get the 347 free backlinks »

If you are into domaining (domain investing) or interested in getting a big picture on your (or your competitor’s) sites, you might want to check this fake PageRank checker tool.

Okay – I admit it; Google PageRank is overrated. One reason: It’s Google’s. Yahoo, Bing and other search engines ignore PageRank, despite all measure a site rank-worthiness using some kind of (secret) algorithms – thus your site ranking can be widely vary from one search engine to another.

Nevertheless, if you are doing domaining, optimise for Google, and doing some investigation on your competitor’s sites, this tool can help you with a big picture.

Check out this free SEO tool: RankChecker.com. The owner claimed that it is the fastest PageRank (and backlink) checker tool on the planet – so I’m curious and will give it a try.

Blimey! I check it on My Site Ranked and before I blink my eyes, the results are in – with a concise PageRank validity report, traffic report, backlink report, DMOZ/Yahoo directory listing, and domain age report. Fast and accurate; pretty neat, considering the widely available fake PageRank checker tools today share these 2 criteria: They are either broken or slow.

The owner said that it will be updated with more report to help you better analyse a domain name. So, rest assured, this fake PageRank checker tool can be a nice tool to help you in any of your SEO/link building endeavours.

Google and its team are always telling you this: Create top quality content that people want so that they will link you and recommend you to others. This seems no longer working, despite how much Google is trying to convince you the otherwise. Here’s why.

Darko Johnson, the owner of MixTheNet, did just that – for 6 months, he built great content on MixTheNet, with 90% focus on the content and 10% on manual link building.

The content themselves are great – they went to Digg front page several times, and one even gets 800+ diggs. The same also happens with StumbleUpon, in which an article is getting 110,000+ views.

However, views don’t seem to be translated into stronger backlinking. Darko barely got 2-3 links from PR2-3 sites, while one link is a PR7. Putting 10-day writing high quality content effort and getting 400,000 views to get such number of links is simply a poor Return-On-Investment in term of link building.

Bottom line, link building using social bookmarking sites sucks.

Darko concluded, “Google mantra ‘Build great content and users will find you’ isn’t valid anymore. The fact they still spread this propaganda makes me sick.”

My opinion

Well, in my opinion, link baiting with your blog is no longer as effective as it was. Hoping for someone to link to your quality content is just the same attitude of “just build it and they will come” in off line world: It has proven to be not working and it also won’t work in the future.

Just like in the off line world, you need to market, promote, evangelize your “products” (in the case of blogs, blog posts.) Creating great stuffs should be every blogger endeavor; but creating great stuffs hoping for quality back links is just a waste of your time.

Like what Darko mentioned in his case, there is a disturbing trend that people are excessively using the “nofollow” tag, especially the big sites, hoping for them preserve their PageRank by preventing link juice to leak to other sites. This will make natural link building a more pain in the @ss, if not useless.

As of for me, I think I should look more on non-natural whitehat, greyhat, even blackhat link building techniques. Why? Because whitehat SEO is not longer valued as it was (and should) by Google.

Read and reread Darko Johnson’s full article here: Case Study: I Listened to Google and I Failed.

Any opinions on this? If so, please leave a comment to this article.

Webmasters and site owners: Are you fed up doing SEO/link building and content writing to get your blogs rank well and make you good amount of money? Well, you should take a break and start to think “greyhat” money making online for a chance.

Playing honest with whitehat methods can be tiring, because those methods champion long-term efforts. In the other hand, playing dirty with blackhat methods can be depressing, because you always wonder whether you will get caught by Google and the likes or not.

Well, here’s a solution for you: try this greyhat methods in site building and make money online – courtesy of Rob Benwell’s Blogging Espionage.

Of course, I have purchased the ebook with a hope that I can increase my income and decrease my effort in site building; I have to say that I’m impressed.

Rob Benwell – one of the top product launchers – claims that he will give you $100 plus a refund of the ebook purchase price of $47 if you have heard this money making techniques before. Never-heard-of guarantee, and I thought, he must have something to offer here with such strong claim; so I did buy the ebook.

Reading through the 40-page ebook is like having a revelation – sure, I’ve implemented part of the techniques before, but I never think about some of the techniques. This is silly because the loopholes are there under my nose, but I can’t simply hit that “Eureka!” moment, until I read Blogging Espionage.

Loopholes?

Yes – Blogging Espionage shows you greyhat ways to monetize your blogs through loopholes found inside the systems, in such a way that your blogs can make the most money for you. The interesting thing is, the loopholes are not obscure – they are there for you and I to discover; no Easter eggs here.

Rob guarantees that you’ll get $1000 in the first week after implementing the techniques, and all I can say is: he speaks truth. I’ve done it, and it worked (and will continue to work in the future.)

So, if you are dying to learn how to make way much more money from your blogs, I genuinely recommend Blogging Espionage for you.

Click here to get Blogging Espionage now!

While browsing for SEO tips I encountered an interesting article about quality link building tactics coming directly from the Google Team.

The article is actually on Google Webmaster blog’s recent article about their views on earning quality links to your site.

Here are some points I found interesting and most useful for you who are wondering whether you are doing SEO and link building the right way:

1. Get involved in a community

Joining and being active in online communities, such as Facebook and Twitter, allows you to build credibility that will help you in getting links – people will link to interesting, trusted sites, won’t they?

2. Create content that solve problems

Creating tutorials, tools, surveys, etc. will help readers and site visitors to solve their problems. Due to this, people are more than willing to link out to your site and to recommend your content via various sharing methods, like Retweet, Facebook “Like”, etc. to the others – this will lead to more back links to your sites!

3. Focus on long-term link building, not short-term

Link-baiting methods, directory submissions, link exchanges, buy links and such are good ways to build links, but they are considered as short-term fixes.

Now read this well and clear:

Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time.

Yikes!

Here’s another one:

Mass submissions (to directories, social bookmarking sites, etc. – ed.), which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.

Argh!

4. Learn what the top ranking sites are doing

Those top ranked sites are there for a reason – analyze those sites and learn from them; better yet, copy their methods. Of course, be sensible – copying what big companies due is rather impossible, unless you have thousands of dollars to spend on link building campaigns. Try to look for those small guys who quietly rank at the top of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) without any involvement in PPC campaigns (e.g. Google AdWords.)

5. Make it easy for people to share your content

Related to #2 above, you need to expose your “share” buttons and links well. Position the Retweet, Facebook “Like,” and other buttons/links in location that has a great visibility. Those tools can be responsible to make your content go viral, which means two-fold benefits for you: more inbound links and traffic.

Well, I don’t know how about you, but no matter how I hate Google so much, big G is important in your and my sites’ presence, especially if you are making money online.

Is SEO Real, or Simply a Figment of Big G’s Imagination?

Firstly I should point out that I am a proud “SEO’er”, spending 7 days a week (or more!) on Google. It is in this schedule I have had several years, which I have begun to question Google’s need, priorities and underlying meaning.

Before I start on my thoughts, I want you all to question what SEO really is. It’s said search engine optimisation is simply “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results, as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (“SEM”) which may deal with paid inclusion”.

In my opinion, SEO is “identifying, researching and implementing whatever is needed, in order to gain the rankings your site/blog or company needs to deliver its online sales plan.”

So here’s My Angle…

The search engines themselves, ultimately decided SEO would be the description of gaining rankings through strategic changes to a website, in order to ultimately affect the way in which the site is viewed by the search engine. This leads me onto my first gripe…

Why would a search engine want to dictate the overall strategy behind manipulating its own algorithm?

You are Mr. Yahoo or Mr. Google and you want to display in your SERPs, the best results for each individual search, you judge this by using hundreds of algorithmic specifications that deem whether a website is worthy for each search. But, and it’s a big but, you have hundreds of thousands of people around the globe who’s prerogative it is to understand, interact and manipulate your specifications, in order to gain an advantage over their competition. What do you do? You can’t beat them, it’s a fact.

No matter how much Google changes its algorithm, its people or its process, people like you and me will always be able to gain some advantage by understanding how it works. It’s the same as a million other things in this world, you can’t cook Spaghetti Bolognese, so you watch Jamie Oliver cook up a storm, you read a recipe book and look online. Now you know how to cook spag bol, or at least you have a better understanding of how to do it.

This would be the same as telling a child they are not allowed to play computer games and giving them an Xbox.

Here’s why, in several of Google’s guidelines, you will see SEO good practice, good practice for page title tags, how to make best use of the “description” Meta tag. These go on and on, surely this is messed up? Google’s objective is to:

A. Make money by making it harder to rank naturally and so switching people onto AdWords.

B. Make AdWords more “clickable”, as we have seen by recent size, position and some colour changes.

C. And thirdly to deliver the best results possible for a single search by a single searcher.

Google’s Hidden Agenda

Fair play to Google, they are very clever, they have the market cornered and short of a huge push by Microsoft’s Bing, they will continue to the market leader for years to come.

But really, do you think all the “carrot dangling” is for our benefit? No. Big G has basically told us they will penalise anyone’s site that tries to optimise too much, this is stupid in the real world. It is common sense that people are going to try as hard as they can. Will people who try their best in the World Cup be substituted?

Unless your site is dabbling in the dark art of SEO you will be fine, though please do not try too hard, whatever too hard is!

Let’s look at the real point behind this.

G has us by the balls! With billions of searches every day worldwide and even more billions of results, I would guess 98% of these have been manipulated in some way by an SEO guy. We all use Google, we all search and most of us have Analytics, AdWords accounts, web master tools and Gmail. All of which, in my opinion, are Google’s armoury, a defence and a pro active means of understanding people who manipulate its SERPs. Who better is there? Google can make all the tweaks they like but in the end we will find a way, we are the real meaning of SEO, SEM or whatever it is called these days

So what should you think?

You should think whatever you like, after all this is only my opinion. But in my eyes Google has 2 options, stay exactly the same, but spend more time concentrating on the websites that show a blatant disregard to the visitor or are ultimately being naughty in SEO terms rather than penalising lots of sites on a daily basis simply because they change their title tag.

The second option would be to stop telling us how we should do SEO and then judge us when people try too hard; obviously I am only talking in an innocent manner.

Anything else?

Luckily for you guys I am not going to refer you to my SEO site for more information, I don’t even have a site, I don’t believe in wasting my time promoting how good I am at SEO and trying to rank for “SEO”. I believe in doing the best for my clients, spending all my time on their gains and preaching my opinions on SEO. But what I will do is leave you with a couple of links that you can use to find me if needed for any reason. Thanks.

dannychapmanseo@googlemail.com

New Venture – Accident at work Claims

Business – PPI Claims

Hobby – Carp Rigs

Original article: SEO Tactics

After half a year of hard work and three release candidates, WordPress 3.0 is finally released. This is the 13th major WordPress release, and we are all (and should) know that WordPress as a blogging platform and CMS (Content Management System) is here to stay.

The major highlight of this release is the merge of WordPress MU (WordPress for multi-user or blog network) and WordPress single user – now you can have one blog or one million blogs on one single installation – a convenience, indeed!

The Admin Panel itself is sporting a cleaner look and less cluttered – help texts can be found easily on every screen to ensure you can operate your WordPress blog easier.

Another less-significant-but-important-nonetheless addition to WordPress 3.0 is the addition of a new default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten – The clean, professional look of the theme can easily contend with those Premium WordPress Themes.

Check out the video tour on WordPress 3.0 from the official blog:

Check out the official update regarding the release from WordPress.org official blog.