So, I took a good 3 hours out of my day, sat down at my ThinkPad and plunged deep into the realm of the best link building services available.

What I Found And It Ain’t Pretty

It’s not like I didn’t presume this would be the case, but it was still shocking to see how many hardcore, blackhat link building services are actually out there. From one to the other the major characteristics I found were the claims of building hundreds and even thousands of links almost instantaneously.

I suppose the hardest thing for me to imagine was there are people out there who still get suckered into these services. Let me explain a little further.

More Links Does NOT Always Equal Good SEO

Let’s go back a few years to the time when reciprocal linking was actually beneficial in the search engines. At the time the most popular strategy was to BUILD, BUILD, BUILD! Eventually like it always does, the algorithm changed and those sites found pointing back to the sites in which their own links appeared on, suffered a huge slap across the face!

That’s why today when you run analysis on a domain registered for over 5 years, you will see a ton of backlinks. Their position in G however is another story and usually not a very nice one.

The Best Link Building Strategy = CONTROL!!

There’s a reason for why the best marketers retain the top rankings in the search engines and it’s got to do with controlling the links coming into their sites.

Paying a service to essentially spam your site with hundreds of links that you don’t get to pre-approve, will NOT I assure you result in anything beneficial for your site.

Instead try focusing some time on finding quality links up for grabs in some of the most popular locations like the Digital Point forum. Open a new thread asking others to contact you if they have sites relevant to your own. You then have the chance to run some analysis before proceeding usually with a link sale but sometimes a straight trade for content.

Essentially if you aren’t in control of your links, then you’re not in control of your business.

Something to think about.

You can probably tell from the amount of grammatical errors you’re about to see, that I’m typing this post on my samsung galaxy s using the latest version of wordpress for android.

Fortunately my phone already came with Swype pre-installed so I’m not having to laboriously type every letter and symbol one by one on the regular type pad.

I’m also timing how long it’s taking to complete this article for those looking to gauge the difference between this and typing up a post normally on a computer.

I thought I’d spend a little time discussing the future of blogging regarding smart phone technology and maybe offer my own opinion on what it’s like.

The actual app itself

After downloading the latest version of wordpress for android, I found it to be fairly straight forward in terms of usability. I managed to add my first blog in right away with no problems whatsoever.

Writing posts is really easy to do but one thing I did notice was the lack of options available when compared to doing it the old fashioned way. I’m sure we’ll continue to see advancements in that area in the near future though so that’s not something worth worrying about.

I did notice one really annoying thing and that was after half completely a post like most android applications I assumed that if I closed the app and reopened it at a later time it would just return to the editing section with my content already saved…big mistake!

I lost all the content and had to start again. Make sure that if you’re using the app and want to finish a post later, to click the save button at the bottom before closing it down.

SEO options

None really. No plugins are accessible as far as I can tell and the only options I can see are tags, categories and media.

If you’re on the go then the wordpress for android app is really useful, but if you need to write up an in depth post then you’re better off finding a laptop somewhere at this stage.

I’m really excited to see future development however because I do see this as the future for online bloggers.

Check it out if you have an android phone-

http://www.android.wordpress.org

PS. Time taken to type this post-7 minutes

Technorati Tags: Wordpress for android

I realized this in itself is something which most marketers eventually run into some time or another throughout their career. Inevitably I came to the conclusion that a balance must be met between time spent on general SEO maintenance and the decision to pack up shop and move on.

Determining the point at which your focus needs to shift

I believe there is a point that many sites reach where the increase in rankings begins to slow down drastically.  Of course this is completely dependent on the niche you are in.

Many niches you target may have the potential to start ranking on the first page within a month. In reality however, the majority of niches you target are a little more competitive and just take more time to get high rankings.

It’s these particular one’s that I’m talking about here and eventually a decision has to be made to stop spending too much time working on them in order to continue the growth of your business through the creation of more sites.

I believe this point in time can be accurately calculated…

The best way I have found of determining whether a site has reached that point, is when one of your top keywords is ranking within the top 100 and after building at least 2 powerful backlinks, no change occurs in the G rankings. A week should be given to make sure things have had time to propagate successfully.

It’s at that point in time that I make a decision to push back development on that site to -

1. One post/week
2. One backlink/week(either through article marketing or other more secret methods that I keep to myself )

Why I believe building more sites is more important than ranking for your current sites

In my experience, internet marketers are a lot like archaeologists in the idea that we are always looking to discover a new, profitable niche. In reality not every niche you market in will be profitable, therefore an emphasis on expansion into new niches must be the biggest focus for all IMers.

After building a multitude of sites, the one thing that stands out is the conversion rate on my selection of niches and let me tell you, it’s not that good!

For every 10 sites I build I’m lucky if one or two of them ends up making considerable money. As a result of this one discovery I had to come up with a way of determining when to decrease my time and resources on a site. Hence the time point mentioned above.

If you are currently in possession of one or more new sites that have hit the wall(for lack of a better term), then seriously consider following the method I have mentioned here.

Josh

I felt it necessary to discuss this particular topic as it’s fairly obvious a large number of marketers tend to get caught up in focusing a lot of time on a small number of specific unwanted backlinks. The accumulation of low quality backlinks is in my opinion something not worth giving any focus towards.

What are Considered to be Low Quality Backlinks?

Simply put, low quality backlinks are those which appear on pages considered by Google to be either; irrelevant to the topic on your page, blacklisted, or those which exist on a page with zero pagerank.

An example of a common low quality backlink would be that which appears on a page with pornographic material(if of course the page it is linking too on your site is not of that nature )

Links on pages with zero page rank tend not to have any affect on the quality of your site in relation to search engine rankings. Plainly put they can just be disregarded.

Blacklisted links are the worst, but extremely unlikely and again can almost be disregarded.

Can They Be Prevented?

The prevention of low quality backlinks indexed by the search engines isn’t possible. All indexing is of course outside of your control as it is done through a separate entity…search engine spiders.

The ONLY way to remove such links would be to manually contact the site in question

The Effects of Low Quality Backlinks in the Search Engines

Pointing to the best source ever, which is the reason for this whole discussion in the first place, the recent post on the Google Webmaster Blog entitled – “Dealing With Low Quality Backlinks” suggests the need for panic in relation to the discovery of poor backlinks is in most cases unnecessary.

They suggest that “if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it’s important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site.” They also mention that “unique, engaging content” is and I quote again “a huge factor” in their algorithm, leading one to believe that the weight given towards external backlinks is in some way evenly distributed among the other factors.

They aren’t lying, unique content targeting specific keyword terms and other onsite SEO construction methods do play a major role in a pages ability to rank well, however like all great PR stunts, this post is little misleading when taking into consideration Google’s ongoing desire to push marketers towards ONLY focusing on content, rather then THE most important aspect of ranking…quality external backlinks.

But enough ranting on the subject of misleading quotes. There was an important peice of information they did supply and I quote, “Generally, you as a webmaster don’t have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking” which brings us to our next point…

What to Focus on Instead

As I mentioned previously the likelihood of unwantingly gaining a REALLY bad link is very low, therefore other things should require a much larger focus. Imagine this, you have a system which is constantly building new, highly-relevant backlinks via; article directories, blog networks and forum posts. In reality for every BAD backlink you gain, you will end up replacing it with another 20 high quality ones.

In short, why focus on removing a small number of low quality backlinks when you could be spending your time focusing on building high quality ones instead?

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: low quality backlinks

In any Adsense campaign a studied approach towards the selection of keywords is vital when it comes to achieving any kind of success. Taking the time to choose keywords based on high monetary returns combined with competitive analysis, will often lead to higher conversions in the future.

So what approach should be taken when working towards finding the best Adsense keywords for your blogs?

Niche Selection

As you may already know, there is mounting evidence to conclude that a balanced approach must be taken to discover a niche based on the three key factors:

1. A High Payout
   How high the current click value is on Ads in Google for a particular set of keywords.
2. Ranking Ability
   The likelihood of you gaining high rankings in the search engines.
3. Number of Searches
   The number of searches must be high enough to gain substantial traffic.
   

The remaining 25 keywords will still have posts written on them, however the SEO campaign you create will NOT be directly targetted towards them. Over time page rank will naturally filter through to their pages, resulting in a slow rise to the top of the search engines.

Systematizing the selection of Adsense niches

I felt this process could would be a little hard to express through words, so I decided to create a short video tutorial on a process which I feel has the potential to help anyone find a niche worth getting started in.

Of course it’s not hardcore by any means and I’m certain there are better resources for finding such niches, but this one seems to do the job nicely, best of all it comes straight out of the knowledgebase of none other then Google themselves(when in doubt go back to the source ).

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: adsense keywords

A recent look into some of the case studies over at the official Adsense Blog have led me to believe that perhaps there is a way of making some solid income off a large number of highly targeted Adsense blogs.

A example eagerly pushed by Google, which I actually remember reading about a few years back is the site vangoghgallery.com. Of course not the best example but one which G decides to highlight for obvious reasons:

1. Ads are displayed in text.
It’s not difficult to understand why this approach works well, considering the fact that most visitors generally take part in reading content on webpages.

A combination of ads along with in text links(possibly named anchors in the same Adsense format at the top of your page), has the ability to ‘confuse’ readers into believing those links are in fact internal and have nothing to do with the ads on the page.

2. Google Search Bar Used Effectively

Of course this was spoken about in the case study, but you will notice the clever use of the Google Search Bar centered at the top of the page, seamlessly coming across as the sites internal search engine.  

Taking away the regular WordPress search bar and replacing it with G’s Adsense tool, can have a dramatic effect on improving conversion on Adsense pages. A very simple strategy that I always use on all my blogs.

Sidebar Positioning

Not for me, why? Again take notice of the areas of the page which are most likely to gain the most attention by your viewers. People READ webpages therefore surrounding your ads with content is going to force the reader to consciously notice them, intern increasing conversions.

Sidebars get very little attention from the reader and are therefore unlikely to convert well. I’m sure you’ve been told to blend your ads into the sidebars, with the idea that people will accidentally click them thinking they were actually internal links to other pages in your site. 

First of all you need to remember the key principle, “is this an area of the page that draws a lot of attention?”, the answer is clearly ‘no’. Secondly you’re relying on the stupidity of your audience. Without going into too much detail, how many times have you mistakenly clicked an ad thinking it was an internal link?

Me, I’ve done it about 5 times, give or take a few, and if you compare that to the number of times you have intentionally CHOSEN to click an ad, it still remains minuscule and therefore a poor approach.

Increasing Revenue On Ad Clicks

It’s no secret there remains a huge correlation between low Adsense click payouts and poor keyword research. Consider this as being the fundamental approach that Google uses for their payouts:

1. You type in and run a search for “iPhone 3G S”.

2. You follow through to a blog post which contains a review of the new iPhone 3G S.

3. The keyword term “iPhone 3G S” appears a number of times throughout the content of the post, the page title and the post title.

4. You notice an ad on the page and decide to click it.

Result – A solid conversion

Let’s break this down a little. 

Notice the traffic is coming from a search engine and not through a social media source. If the page is good enough to make it to the first 2 pages of the SERPs then it’s highly likely the content within is suitable for the specific keyword term.

This ultimately leads to a strong relationship between the content on the page and the ads displayed. Fundamentally this is what Google had in mind when first opening up the ability for a Content Network to host their ads.

Apparently another addition which I am yet to test, is to include links to about us, privacy and contact us pages. Of course the only way for Google to register those links is to make them ‘do follows’. As I said I am yet to test to see whether the addition of these links actually does increase click payouts. I have to say I’m fairly skeptical.

Remember the focus here is on increasing conversion for WordPress blogs, which are designed to provide information in the form of simple, keyword-rich articles.

With this understanding, all emphasis on conversion must be placed on three specific principles: Quality of Content, Positioning of Ads and Selection of Keywords.

I’ve already suggested the most appropriate positioning of ads and the requirement that the content on your pages must target a specific keyword. But what about the Selection of Keywords?

Unfortunately, due to my yearning desire to chi fan(“eat food” in Chinese) you’re going to have to wait for part two to find out the methods I use to discover and select keywords for my Adsense Campaigns.

Start implementing the above approach on your Adsense pages if you haven’t already and remember, TEST, TEST and TEST some more!

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: adsense pages

If you haven’t noticed it already, Google’s latest addition to their search listings(related onpage named anchors) have opened up the ability for bloggers to push their search engine traffic directly to the most relevant information in their posts.

How is this beneficial exactly?

It could be said that a potential problem with blog posts is that your visitors are required to read through the entire post sometimes before they are able to find the information they are really looking for.

Using named anchors within your posts enables you to place a table of contents at the top of the page containing links to anchors positioned throughout the post. Taking advantage of this style of page now pushes the G spider to index these links in their search results.

Having this ability creates an avenue to drive visitors directly to the information they are after, intern heightening their experience, which we all know increases the likelihood of them subscribing or at least clicking your affiliate or Adsense links.

<a name=”ANCHORNAME”>ANCHOR TEXT GOES HERE</a>

You will notice at the top of this page there is a table of contents with anchor links that when clicked take you directly to the information on the page regarding the topic it’s on.

Now let’s say you’re looking to write a post about cell phones(boring example I know but let’s just go with it for now), more particularly the post you’re intending to write will be in the form of a review about 3 different cell phone brands - iPhone, Blackberry and Palm.

You now have an opportunity to use named anchors within your post. Quite simply all you would need to do is place 3 links at the top of your page, one for each(iPhone, Blackberry and Palm), linking them directly to the named anchors positioned at the different sections of the review.

So just to clarify how these named anchors would appear in Google. Let’s say I ran a search for cell phones, assuming the Google search bot indexed your named anchors correctly, the links for iPhone, Blackberry and Palm will appear below the page description. See the image below for a real life example -

You may have already noticed the current version of WordPress DOES NOT have a function to allow you to place in named anchors directly from the visual editor, therefore you will have to use HTML.

The good thing is, it’s incredibly easy for those who have none or little experience in web-based code.

Use the HTML editor inside the WordPress Administration to enter in HTML code similar to the following example  -

You can directly copy and paste the above code into your own posts if you wish, making sure to change both the anchor names(#anchor1 and #anchor2) and the anchor text(ANCHOR LINK ONE and ANCHOR LINK TWO) You can place it at the top of the different sections on your page, effectively they will act as the titles of the subsections of your article.

For the anchor name, use something relevant to the link you are creating. It’s important to note only the anchor text will be indexed by Google.

Finally you’re going to need to create links at the top of the page to these named anchors. Most marketers tend to agree the best way of listing these links is in bulletpoint format, just how I have done so at the top of this post.

You don’t have to use the same text in these links as you did with your named anchors as these will not be shown in Google. To link to a named anchor, you can just use the link tool in WordPress and type in the following address #anchorname.

One thing I feel is important to mention is that you don’t have to use the named anchor as a section title, you can always just place it somewhere within the body of the post.

One thing which seemingly is necessary however is a table of contents somewhere on the page which is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Central blog

Very simply put, this is a new concept by Google, who are obviously trying to connect their audience with the information they are after faster. That means right now it’s rare to see related links produced from named anchors appearing in search results.

To the person scouring through the results, having relevant links to information on the page which they may be after is enticing, therefore it’s a great idea to start taking advantage of this feature whenever possible.

Of course not all posts you write in the future fit the model of a table of contents style article, however when the opportunity arises it might be worth taking advantage of it?

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: named anchors, wordpress

For WordPress blogs any link campaign should take these two factors into consideration; firstly a decision has to be made on what the most important pages are that you are attempting to rank in the search engines and secondly(this mainly applies to article marketing as a means of building backlinks) how relevant the information is on the page where the link is located.

A lot of marketers tend to get a little lazy, thinking that it’s better to churn out a lot backlinks fast, funneling them through the index page. Definitely you would have seen great results using this method a few years back, but as the competition increases, it’s only obvious that the need for a more focused SEO campaign would result.

Firstly decide which pages on your blog target the keywords that are the most valuable when considering buying preferences.

For example if you have a fat loss blog, more then likely an attempt to rank for a certain product name keyword would be suitable. Decide upon your top 5 most profitable blog posts as these will now be the main focus for your SEO campaign.

Now to take the second factor into consideration. Another time waster that a large portion of the community takes part in, is the lack of care when it comes to really deciding upon which page a link should appear on.

As the search engine algorithms move closer and closer towards extreme relevancy, it starts to become clearer that the positioning of links will play a major role in deciding their long term value.

Therefore take your time in deciding the pages where your backlinks will be situated. If you are running an article marketing campaign, match your articles up to the posts that are most relevant before publishing them with the link contained within of course.

Relevancy is vital, therefore take your time to decide now or else the results will clearly not roll in your favor.

Should you link back to your index page as well?

Yes of course you should definitely continue to create backlinks for your home page. The idea with this approach is to rank as quickly as possible for a small percentage of your pages, those of which are most likely to make you money right away.

In time as your site begins to gain some authority in the engines, you will then start to improve your rank for pages considered as the ‘major players’.  Remember if you have a silo format setup correctly on your blog, all page rank and link value will be funneled evenly throughout your site anyway.

I talked more about siloing your blog in the previous post.

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: backlinks, SEO

Alarmingly it could be said the majority of people in the blogging community would say the main reason why WordPress has taken the reigns, is because of it’s ability to function well with such a diverse range of plugins, plugins which are born almost daily out of arguably useless ideas.

Th truth of the matter is that the majority of the opensource(paid as well) plugins tend to sidetrack bloggers from the really important stuff. Mainly, “how does my site fair amongst my competitors in the SERP’s?“

If we were to run a study on all the WordPress blogs out there, attempting to find out the percentage of blogs perfectly designed for search engine listing versus those who aren’t, I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were something like 5% good versus 95% bad.

The current number of plugins in the official WordPress.org repository lists 6,705 active. It would be nice to think the overwhelming majority of these plugins were beneficial to the average blogger, but the truth is perhaps the opposite. Mainly the number we currently see before us is a result of a community members’ desire to market their own ideas through cheap, poorly designed scripts, manifested as WP plugins.

Countless blogs are being hacked everyday as a result of poorly written code on the authors behalf. The crazy thing is, if people were aware of the actual requirements necessary to creating a near perfectly optimized WordPress blog, they would more than likely steer clear of around 6,700 plugins listed at WordPress.org.

Which brings us back to our initial question, the one that this entire blog has been designed to answer…”Why is WordPress considered the leading platform for online bloggers?”

It’s simple – It has the least amount of unnecessary script out of any web-based platform, intern allowing all spiders to crawl it’s pages easily and effectively.

In saying this however, there are some things you can do to slightly improve the onsite SEO on your blogs to help gain a useful advantage over your competitors.

If you haven’t noticed already I’m currently using the Thesis theme by DIY Themes, whose intentions were to create a WordPress template set on filtering out the main problems associated with WordPress blogs, that is when taking SEO into consideration.

One malfunction in the WordPress script is it’s lack of ability to easily silo a sites Page Rank or link power.

As a rule of thumb, most blogging experts would normally agree the majority of the Page Rank streaming into a site should funnel as directly as possible into the post pages. This helps improve the chances of having your most important pages appear as high up in the SERP’s as possible.

The default settings of Thesis automatically passes a No Follow tag on all archive associated links except the category pages. This effectively means that all Page Rank flooding into your site will ONLY pass through the Category Archives before reaching your individual posts.

If you took some time to delve inside a blog struggling in the search engines, you would probably notice that a large amount of page rank is being unnecessarily directed to pages which serve no purpose when taking into consideration which pages are useful in the SERPS and which are not.

Another problem alot of blogs tend to encounter upon indexing and which indeed has an easy solution, is the Home link appearing in the header on every page.

The anchor text ‘Home’ will straight away force a spider to associate that particular keyword with your blogs home page, thereby almost nullafying any attempt you have made with your foreign links by inserting a useful keyword of which you should be trying to rank for with your index page.

Changing the anchor text of the Home link will effectively force every page to funnel page rank to your index, automatically targetting a keyword you are attempting to have it listed under in the SERP’s.

Before this post blows into an all out report I’m going to put an end to it there. The mission statement of SEOdrift.com has been published, therefore all future posts you see from here on out will in some way incorporate in that initiative.

Remember to keep up to date with everything. If you don’t have time to spend reading about all the latest news to do with SEO and WordPress, then don’t! Just subscribe here!

Until next time,

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

Technorati Tags: wordpress seo