Backlinks are the key!

Welcome back guys. Today is going to be all about the importance of gaining backlinks to get your site higher in the rankings for search engines. Just a side note is that today is my birthday so I’m pretty happy. Let’s get started on today’s lesson.

You Need Backlinks to Win!

Remember way back when we were still doing research? It seems like a while ago but it wasn’t that long ago. Well part of our research was on our competition and one of hte things we looked at was backlinks. This was an important number because it was something we could look at and target for our own promotion. Now we can look back and see how many backlinks should get us near the position of Google, of course there are many other factors other hten backlinks but this is one of the most important. 

We’ve talked about getting our links in the bookmarking services that are on the internet. This is just one way to get your link out there and today I will talk about another method that is very effective. This method is called “blog commenting” and it’s really easy to do. It is exactly what you would expect. You go to other blogs and comment on them leaving your link in the comment area. However, there’s a little bit more to it then that. In order to find these blogs I usually just do a quick Google search on, “keyword blog”. This usually allows me to find at least one good blog to comment on. The first thing is that you need to make sure that you are commenting on blogs in your niche. What’s the point on commenting on a dog training blog when you run a site about working out? It wouldn’t make much sense at all. The second thing is that you comment on the higher ranked blogs because that link will be “worth” more in Google’s eyes. You could waste your time getting 100’s of low ranking backlinks but if you get just a few high quality backlinks then you will be on your way. The last thing is that you have the keywords you are trying to rank for as the backlink text. It’s called the “anchor text” and it helps to rank better for your targeted keywords. If you can do those 3 things you will be looking good.

One thing that I must stress however is that you never, and I must say it again, never, ever, spam anyone’s blog just to promote your site. When you comment make sure it’s meaningful and that it will give back to the article or add to the conversation on the article. I personally hate spam so much and once you get a site you will also understand how annoying it is also. So please, for the sake of everyone, don’t spam anyone’s blog with comments, it just isn’t cool.

Well that’s it for now, building backlinks is so important so you need to get on this now. The sooner the better. Backlinking your site is an on going process that never really ends so you need to get in the habit now so that you can continue doing it later down the road. Tomorrow we will discuss another way to get your backlinks in another popular place.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: backlink, promotion, SEO

Time for some Promotion!

Well we’ve done a lot over the past two weeks or so and now it’s time to get our name out there. We’ve taken all the steps to research and write up to this point and now it’s time for promotion. We want to get our site noticed right? Yes. Let’s go.

Digg is the Key

Digg is probably the best known social bookmarking website on the web. It’s no wonder why either, it has tons of traffic and tons of new website news everyday to check out. The major benefit of social bookmarking sites is that you get a nice backlink and that the users who come to your site are usually targeted. That’s the best of both worlds. Now we just need a way to capture those people and get them to come to our site and that is where we begin.

First thng we need to do is sign up to Digg. It’s a simple registration process so just go on over and sign up. Now, if you have Sociable on your blog then you can simply Digg each individual post very easily but if you don’t there’s still a simple process. When logged into Digg click on Submit New and enter the URL of the post and click News Article. Then you type up a title and description for your submition. Then pick a topic that’s closest to your niche. Then just submit it! That was easy huh? Now if you have Sociable then the process is 1 step shorter but it is the same process.  

Now that we know how to Digg something let’s go ahead and Digg each post. After that make sure to Digg the actual URL of the site because we want the actual site to get dug too. Each of these submittions helps with our SEO also because more backlinks gives us more authority. Not only are these just backlinks but they are also a great way to get spidered really fast! Most Digg submittions, that I do allow, Google to index my site so much faster then just waiting for the natural spidering. This is always a good thing. 

Okay so now you should go and Digg probably like 5 of your posts, if you have more then you can do more but you don’t want to do too many. Then when you have finished do doing your site go to your 5 favorite websites and Digg them because then it will look more natural. It’s always a good idea to Digg other sites so everything looks natural. After that you are done for today. Maybe you should write some more content. See you tomorrow.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Tags: digg, promotion, SEO

Permalink Settings

Today I am going to discuss something that I wasn’t planning on until it was brought to my attention. Since I really want this blog to get noticed then I have to do everything I can to make sure my on page SEO is the best that it can be and when something was brought to my attention that showed that my SEO wasn’t as strong as it could be it caused me to take immediate action to keep my SEO the best it can be. Now I want to show you how to do it so you don’t make the same mistakes. 

How to Set Solid Permalinks

Well permalinks are the URL links of each of your individual posts, for example the permalink for this post is http://websitedevelopmentology.com/2009/01/18/permalink-settings/ . This is important because we want to make sure our article titles stay in the URL for increased SEO benefits.  The default for WordPress permalinks sets your posts as .com/?p=23 where 23 is the number assigned to the post and as you can see that’s not very good for your SEO because that doesn’t mean a thing to me or the search engines. Now I will explain the steps to checn your permalink settings.

1. In your WordPress admin area go to Tools and then Permalinks.

2. Click on Day and Name and then click Save Changes.

3. If your .htaccess needs to be changed, which I needed to do, then do this. 

3a. Open Notepad.

3b. Paste this,

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

3d. Save as .htaccess

3e. Upload to your public_html folder.

4. That should be everything, refresh your permalinks settings page and see if the changes were saved, it should say so in the top left corner of the page if you did it correectly.

Now that you have done that you will have much better on page SEO and you need to make sure you do this very soon because your previous links will lose whatever is attached to them so switch over to get yoru new links some juice. That’s it for today and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for some template talk.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Basics, development, SEO