Author: websiteadmin

You would think when reading some articles that there was some confusion over relevance and authority when it comes to link building. For most website owners, obtaining a link from a relevant page on an authority site is heaven. I was not aware they were mutually exclusive. Best .

A post on SEORoundTable on determining authority for link building could give rise to some confusion. More confusion could be generated given that PageRank was used as one method of determining authority. PageRank of course is a Google score that is terribly unreliable – it also ignores the other search engines.

While authority and relevance are not mutually exclusive, it is worth thinking about. Many would claim that a link from a site with authority is far better than a link from a relevant page. I would argue this point on two levels.

1: Who is determining authority? There is no reliable ’score’ that suggests one site has more authority than another. PageRank is not reliable and only indicates a Google assessment. Perhaps keyword SERP placement across a variety of search engines could be used as an indication.

2: Even if you could determine authority, if the link is not from a page that is relevant to your page, the link will most likely be devalued anyway.

Receiving links from pages with relevant content, particularly if the link uses keywords in the anchor will over time prove to be more valuable than an unrelated link from an ‘authority’ site.

Ironically, links that meet the ‘relevance’ test will help to build authority over a period of time and over time the page containing the link may well grow in authority.

Authority and relevance are not mutually exclusive and in any link building campaign I would prefer to see links that incorporate both. However, given the choice, I would prefer to see links from pages with relevance. Having said that, links are links and in a link building campaign it would be a rare situation where I would ask a site to remove a link.

Premium WordPress Themes – The Real Power

When we talk about search engine optimization there are always two topics that constantly come to the surface. One is ‘keywords’ the other is ‘links’. The two are closely related although a simple experiment can show you how the wrong keyword in the anchor text of a link can have amazing results.

One of the biggest problems we find when looking at external links is the way anchor text is used. In fact, when reviewing sites prior to commencing a search engine optimization program I am amazed at anchor text that has been used for internal links. I don’t know how many times I have seen the word here or click here used as anchor text. By simply replacing those words with keywords you can turn a valueless anchor to one of high value.

In fact, as an experiment, let’s look at ‘click here’ as a search term. In Google, there are 1.6 billion references to ‘click here’. Guess who has position numbers one, two and three?

• Position one: Adobe – Adobe Reader Download
• Position Two: Apple – Quicktime Download
• Position Three: Internet Explorer: Homepage

If you check each of these pages you will be hard pressed to find the words ‘click here’. In fact, I am pretty sure these pages have not been optimized for those terms either. So why do they rank so highly?

The answer for all three is pretty obvious. There are millions, if not billions of links on the web that say – ‘click here’ to download Adobe Reader, or ‘click here’ to download Quicktime. In other words, the anchor text in these links is ‘click here’, not Apple Quicktime for example.
This shows that anchor text is one of the most important factors regarding inbound relevant links pointing to a particular page and the value of those links to search engine results.

The careless use of anchor text in a link can rob your pages of valuable link juice. The next time you create a link, think about the anchor text. Don’t become another ‘click here to read more’ culprit.

Premium WordPress Themes – Ultimate Link

One of the most important ingredients in a good SEO campaign is link building. It can also be one of the toughest. Search engines can be a little tough on unethical link building strategies and if you add the growing use of ‘nofollow’ attributes to links, gaining quality links takes a lot of work. This list itemizes most of the link building opportunities available.

• 10: Link Farm: Link farms are outdated and generally result in search engine penalties. No longer worth thinking about.
• 09: Paid Reviews: There is an old saying in the IT world – GIGO – garbage in garbage out. Generally speaking paid reviews are poorly written articles on non-relevant sites. If you can get a good review on highly ranked relevant site then you may get value for your money – otherwise treat with caution.
• 08: Text Link Ads: There can be value in obtaining text link ads but these are generally from low ranking sites. As with the paid reviews, obtaining text link ads on high ranking related sites may be of value.
• 07: Link Solicitation: Obtaining links from related sites by solicitation can be difficult. You need to be able to prove to the site owner that there is a mutual benefit. The higher the site ranks the harder it can become. However this can provide a good cross section of related sites.
• 06: Hand Edited Directories: DMOZ and Yahoo are two of the major directories. DMOZ can take up to 12 months to get listed. Yahoo!, whilst a paid listing, remains reasonably good value. Directory links seem to have been reduced in value recently.
• 05: Article Directories: Article directories are hit and miss. You can spend hours putting together a series of articles only to find that most of them get scraped without any links back to your site. When the article is used legitimately you have no control as to the sites relevance or reliability.
• 04: Social Bookmarking: Having your site listed and voted on in some of the social bookmarking sites can provide some benefits to your link building campaign. Many social bookmarking sites incorporate ‘nofollow’ so don’t rely on them for masses of links. The traffic generated by lead to an increase in organic links.
• 03: Press Releases: Press releases can provide a quick lift in rankings. If the press release is well written and provides a little spark then you may find an increase in traffic along with an increase in organic links.
• 02: Edu and Gov sites: Obtaining links from these sites can be hard. The more important the link location the higher value. For example, a link in and Edu report or research paper is highly prized.
• 01: Blended Link Building: Blended link building incorporates a variety of strategies. The aim is to obtain links from a variety of sources, each with varying ranking factors but all from relevant web pages where possible.

Blended link building can be slow and tedious but it does produce great long term website rankings in the major search engines.

If you manage multiple websites you probably want to host them at different hosting companies. The reason is because you can get more mileage out of cross-linking them. This is especialy true if they serve the same niche, but even if they don’t serve the same niche you can still cross-link them and get more out of your links. 2018.

The search engines, especially Google, recognize that sites existing on the same IP block are related, at least to a certain degree. Even if the sites on the same IP block are not related in subject matter or ownership, the search engines may treat them like they are and ignore links from them. There is an assumption that if two sites are on the same IP block and one them links to the other then those sites are owned by the same person.

To prevent any type of degrading of your links, put your sites on separate IP blocks by using different hosts for them or using dedicated servers for them. The better solution is to use different hosts because even dedicated servers with the same web host could trigger similar IP addresses due to geographic proximity. Some search engine optimization experts go so far as to host their websites in different countries. That’s not a bad idea.

Premium WordPress Themes – How To Get Quoted

Nick Stamoulis and my search engine optimization company, Brick Marketing both are mentioned in Wikipedia several times. How does this happen?

There are three primary ways to get a link at Wikipedia:

• Get a Wikipedia entry on yourself
• Be listed as a reference
• Be listed under “External Links” on a Wikipedia article

Getting a link in any of those three ways is difficult but possible. We recently discovered that we were listed as a reference for an article on Google. How does that happen?

Getting An Article On Yourself At Wikipedia
Getting an article written about yourself at Wikipedia is probably the easiest way to get a link. It works best if you have a website, but even if you don’t have a website you can still get an article on yourself at Wikipedia. You just won’t have a link.

One word of caution: Don’t try to write the article yourself. That could get your article removed. Instead, build a relationship with a Wikipedia editor and have them write your article. Thats an easy thing to do since anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, and you don’t even have to sign up for a Wikipedia account. Be sure, however, that whoever writes your entry is fair and balanced and doesn’t write obviously favorable content that is promotional in nature. The article must appear to be objective and unbiased. Therefore, have the author stick to verifiably true facts about you.

At the end of your article, you can have the editor include a link to your websites, but don’t try to get every site you own listed – just the primary site and blog, if you have one.

How To Get Listed As A Reference At Wikipedia
Becoming a valuable reference at Wikipedia is a little more difficult. You have to establish yourself as an authority on a subject. Since Brick Marketing provides search engine marketing services, that gives us an edge on certain topics. Next, write a controversial blog post or article about something that a lot of people care about. This happened when we wrote a blog post about Getting An Article On Yourself At Wikipedia Google’s search within a search feature. That caught the eye of a Wikipedia editor and we were used as a reference for that Wikipedia entry. The result was a valuable inbound link from a highly authoritative website with top rankings in the search engines.

Get An External Links Mention At Wikipedia
To get listed in the External Links section of a Wikipedia article, you just have to be a source or reference on a topic that is written about at Wikipedia. This is just as good as being a reference listed in the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. It can actually be better because many articles have a lot of references and your link can get lost in the middle of them. But articles at Wikipedia tend to have a limited number of external links so your link could stand out more.

All you have to do to get listed in the External Links section of a Wikipedia article is to be an expert on something that an article was written about. If you are a recognized authority then your website could be linked to from an article at Wikipedia and it all begins with your expert knowledge.

Premium WordPress Themes – What Is Linkbait

Are you a linkbaiter? Should you be?

Linkbait is an attempt to build content on your website blog, forum, or other Internet property for the sole purpose of attracting links as part of a link building and search engine optimization program. It’s not something you do by accident. You set a plan, build your “bait” and wait for the links. Does it work? Should you do it?

First, yes, it does work – if you do it correctly. Many a would-be linkbaiter has tried to build linkbait and failed. Just putting something on your website that you think is cool is no guarantee that you’ll attract the links. But if you do put something on your website that a lot of other webmasters would like then it can attract a tremendous number of inbound links.

Optimally, you want your linkbait to be something that a broad number of type of people from various niches might want to link to. That way you can build a diversity of inbound links from a variety of types of sites. But even if your linkbait appeals solely to people within your own niche you can still build a good solid number of inbound links.

But should you? That’s a question that only you can answer. It isn’t easy to build linkbait. You have to have a good understanding of what people WILL link to. People won’t link to just anything. If there are already a million widgets online just like yours then you are fighting stiff competition. You want something that is unique and that isn’t available anywhere else. The more unique and the more valuable your linkbait is the higher the chance that others will link to you.

With those two things in mind, if you think you’ve got what it takes to build the linkbait then build away, build away!

When it comes to getting hacked, you might think that the guys who did that to you are real bad people. Not necessarily. It could be your pharmacist or the good looking guy next door. You know, the one who took you to dinner last weekend at the five star restaurant? You didn’t know he was a computer genius, did you? for 2018 for E-commerce, Business and Personal site

Well, he may not be. He could just have enough money to pay the real genius to hack your website and divert your traffic to his online vialis candy machine.

Let’s face it. You don’t know who the people are that are hacking your website. They could be some terrorist cell in Albania, some family in Russia trying to keep food on the table, or the taxi driver who makes his second income from selling malware and spam fighting software by hacking websites. He could be the friendliest guy in your neighborhood.

Whoever it is, though, needs to be stopped and the best way to stop them from hacking your site is to increase your level of security. Make sure your blog passwords, CMS passwords, and web host logins are super difficult to guess. Make sure your passwords are at least 8 characters with two of those characters being capital letters, at least two being numerals, and two being special characters. Those kinds of passwords are difficult to guess. Single word passwords are easy.

Learn something about web security and make sure that you password protect sensitive folders on your website. Also, don’t allow anyone the ability to write to your files on your server. Set your server settings to “read” and don’t allow your software to change them except in rare cases. Ask your network administrator before changing those. Keep your security tight and hackers will have a harder time getting in, even if their friendly and buy you a cup of coffee.

Premium WordPress Themes – What Should You Do?

If you’ve noticed a recent drop in your search engine rankings you may or may not have a cause for alarm. It’s important to understand that frequent fluctuations in the search engine results occurs. You’ll rise and fall like the tide. However, large drops that are sudden could be caused by a number of things – not all of them within your control.

One reason you could have dropped in the search engine rankings is your site was hacked and you are beginning to see keywords that are not related to your niche appear in your site content. That’s not good. You want to remove those as soon as possible.

Many times, when this happens to a website the hacker is inserting links back to his or her site. If that site contains malware then that might cause your site to lose rankings. You could also get flagged as a malware site yourself, in which case Google will block your page from being accessed by searchers. But you want to catch it before that happens.

If you suspect that your site was hacked then log in to your Webmaster Tools account and click on the link for the website that has your concern. Click on the Diagnostics link on the left side of the page. You are looking for any kind of notification that your site has been flagged for malware. Also check your links and crawl errors. If Google is having problem crawling your website for any reason that could be why you’ve seen a fall in rankings. Next, check your sitemap and robots.txt files. If anything isn’t right then fix it immediately.

Premium WordPress Themes – New Themes

Some people spend most of their time fretting over scrapers and scheming up new ways to make their world hurt. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to even worry about them. Matt Cutts agrees. But he also goes one step further and tells you how to benefit from scrapers.

I’ll save you the trouble of having to watch the video and just let the cat out of the bag. Put links in your content back to your site and if the scraper fails to deactivate them then you’ve got back links. They could boost your search engine optimization efforts.

That’s actually a pretty good idea. If you do article marketing then you’re likely using a resource box. Why not add a resource box at the end of your blog posts? You can do that with a plugin called DDAddSig. This plugin may not have been updated for the latest version of WordPress so test it first. There are other WordPress signature plugins so shop around.

Back to the scrapers …. I wouldn’t lose sleep over scraped content. Most of the time, the scrapers don’t rank for the content they are swiping. But if you do find one that outranks you for your own content, report them for a DMCA violation or fill out a spam report. Keep trucking. You’ve got better things to do.

Premium WordPress Themes – Coveted Media

SEOmoz has a great blog post about the author receiving a link from CNN. Is that a valuable link and can you do the same?

First, any relevant one way link is a valuable part of the ongoing long term part of link building and search engine optimization. Some links are more valuable than others, but if you get a link from any source be thankful. Media websites don’t have to link to you.

On the second question, can you get the same kind of link? The answer is yes, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a link from CNN. It can be a link from any media source.

Understand that a respected media organization in your local area or one that serves your niche industry, or any media organization in general, with a website is likely to be considered an authoritative voice by the search engines. Even if the media website is outside of your niche, an authoritative link is a valuable link. But how do you get them?

No. 1, you have to be an authority yourself. Journalists like authorities. They interview people for stories who are authorities on their subjects. They keep lists of sources who are authorities in their fields. You’d like to be on that list, wouldn’t you?

Here’s how you get on the list:

• Write a press release and submit it to the most appropriate journalist at the media organization you want to target
• Wait to see if the press release is published or if the journalist writes a story off of it
• If a story is published based on your press release, write a thank you letter to the journalist, make it brief, and include a statement that offers free access to your knowledge on your niche subject any time the journalist has a story about the topic
• If the media organization decides not to write a story from your press release, write a letter anyway but don’t mention the press release; instead, just offer yourself available to the journalist at any time if they have questions about your area of expertise

Will this guarantee you a spot on the journalists list of resources? No. But you are guaranteed to never be on the list if you do nothing. If you present yourself professionally, courteously, and respectfully then you at least stand a chance of winning a journalist’s nod when they need information on a particular topic in which you have an expertise.

When is the last time you check your server logs? By taking a look at your server logs from time to time you can uncover what search terms people are using to find your website through your on site search engine optimization efforts. Then you can and search for those same search terms at each of the search engines and see what you see. Why do you do this? To see what the top three search results are. Best for your business website.

The top three search results for any search query usually do a good job of answering the question the searcher has in mind when making that query. Visit those pages and see how they answer the question. Then go to your page for that search query and add content to it that answers the site visitor’s question. Make sure you put that content near the top of the page so that it can be easily found by the search engines and by your human visitors.

You might even add some keywords or h-level tags to your page to help them out in the search rankings. It might even behoove you to add some graphics with alt tags and some title attributes to your links. Whatever you need to do to help your pages rank better will increase your traffic counts and your chances of converting that traffic to dollars. Check your server logs for opportunities.

Premium WordPress Themes – Google Analytics

Serious webmasters will recognize that Google Analytics is the free web-based stats tracking package owned by Google. It’s about as essential as anything in the webmaster’s arsenal. Well, if you believe in Santa Claus then you might be interested to know that Google Analytics will be used to track Santa’s flight around the world on Christmas Eve. And who will be tracking him? NORAD.

NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command, an arm of the U.S. military.

If you didn’t know it already, NORAD has been tracking Santa since 1955. They launched a website in 1998. And last year NORAD began tracking usages of its website with Google Analytics. That means, for the first time in history, NORAD will be able to compare usage statistics of its website to previous years. And what is the number to beat? According to the Google Analytics Blog, 11 million visits.

If NORAD can track Santa and the usage of its website, which tells children where Santa is at any given time on Christmas Eve, don’t you think you should be tracking your stats with Google Analytics too?

Premium WordPress Themes – Geographic Targeting

If you have a website that is geographically targeted, you can make sure it is targeted to the right geographic market through Google Webmaster Tools. Sign in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on “Tools” in the sidebar. Next, click on “Set geographic targeting”. After that you can set your geographic targeting preferences and once they are set you will be able to market your website to the proper geographic area.

This does not mean that you should not employ georgraphic search engine optimization strategies as well. You should still optimize blog posts and website content for geographic keywords. But changing this setting inside Webmaster Tools tells Google that you are serious about geographic targeting and Google will use its algorithms to ensure that your website ranks for the proper geographic area.

This is particularly important is you are targeting your website to any country other than the U.S. You can use it to narrow the U.S. market you are targeting too, but don’t rely just on Webmaster Tools.

Premium WordPress Themes – Breaking Your Code

MSN Live is now trying to convince us that you are in danger of being hacked and malicious software downloaded onto your website for your visitors to be attacked. Is that possible? Yes. But I don’t agree with the way that MSN Live is handling this.

First, it should be noted that MSN was the victim of web hacker last year. As a result, the search engine no longer reports inbound links to your website (or anyone else’s for that matter). Meanwhile, Yahoo! and Google seem to have web security down pretty good. And so should you.

The scare tactics that MSN is using to convince searchers that they have a handle on the hacker and malicious code problem just plain stinks. You can see it in action right here.

First, I disagree with the disabling of the links. Google doesn’t do that and manages to warn searchers of potenital malware issues. Why can’t MSN?

While it is possible for your website to be hacked and malicious software downloaded, it is not likely unless you have significant traffic numbers or you leave glaring holes in your security. And it doesn’t take much to maintain website security. Just be sure you are doing the following:

• DON’T let executable files sit on your server for long periods of time
• Change your passwords from time to time
• Use firewalls and anti-virus software on your computers
• Update your software, CMS, blogs, and other Netware every time an update is offered
• Web-based software with build-in security features are better than home-grown or open source
• Password protect your important folders
• Use your CGI bin
• Put an index.html file in all of your server folders
• Use log 404 files
• Audit your security every now and then

Website security is as important as anything else you do online. Don’t rely on chance.