Wednesday, October 24, 2012

7 Tips to Seize All of Your Competition's Backlinks and Rank Above Them in the Search Results in 30 days

Much has been written on the web about how to beat out the competition and rank up fast on the major search engines such as Google and Bing.  Most of what it out there borders on the shady and a lot of the information is just plain wrong.
You may ask yourself if webmasters and internet bloggers specializing in SEO are trying to deceive you or lead you astray so that you will have to hire them to do your SEO and not do it yourself since so much of what it available on the web is either blackhat (illegimate) or unwise.  I would suggest that since Google's codenamed Penguin and Panda updates to their search algorythms many SEO specialists who have gotten away with shaddy backlinks to their websites from spamsites have lost their ranking in the search and have scrambled to optimize their sites and save themselves from internet oblivion.
Listen carefully, SEO folks, I am going to share with you the secret to being completely immune to Google algorythm updates:  "just practice organic and legitimate backlink strategies and do not try to game or cheat the system.  Google will find you out and soon your sites will fall in the search like a brick."
Recently, Google posted a "disavow link tool" to enable a webmaster to get rid of bad or spammy links, you can watch their video here:   I am rather dubious about using this tool since in my humble opinion, I believe that it is just an attempt on Google's part to identify spam backlinks by getting webmasters to populate their database for them with all their spammy links for fear that Google will bust them for them.  I don't blame Google for this, I just think that they will use the information to discount backlinks that are submitted enough times and achieve a certain level of authority as established spam links.  Then, other webmasters will get nasty-grams from Google stating that they have spam links that they must disavow immediately or suffer delisting consequences.  I see it as Google's way to force people to use Adwords or not enjoy good ranking.  Far be it that a guy gets a high pagerank without paying Google for it.
If you are curious what are the main methods that I use for off-page SEO, then I will share a few of my strategies.  They are not rocket science or anything, just legitimate link building.  What a website wants in order to get a high web search rank are quality backlinks to high ranked sites and other authoritative websites that are in good standing.  Here is a list of some of my typical strategies:
1.  Embrace social media- in order to do this you will need many social media accounts and I have found that the very best way to consolidate all of them under one aggregated account using Posterous.com. Posterous will allow you to post once and after linking all of your socail media sites and accounts together, your message will go forth to all of them just by clicking Publish.
2. Find your niche- Every website has a category that it fits into which SEOs call its niche.  The easiest way to find other websites in your niche is by doing a Google search with your site's main key words.  The websites that come up on the first 3 pages of a Google search are your main competitors and are the guys that you can learn the most from in order to make your website competitive with them.
3. Forums and Blogs- Find all of the blogs and discussion forums that are in your website's niche by adding the word "blog" or "forum" to your site's keywords. For example, if your website sells baseball cards then you would search Google and other search engines for the words "baseball card forum, baseball card blog, sport card forum/blog, baseball forum/blog, etc"  These searches would give you all of the blogs and forums that deal with issues related to your website.  You should post to all of them and should save your login and passwords in a Word doc for later on when you might want to post to these blogs again.  Google rates most blogs pretty high and the backlinks you make there will count a lot toward your status with the search engines.  So, how do I get a backlink in the forums?  Well, you should read what is being discussed in the forum in question and try to join in the conversation.  Do NOT spam them with your website's link.  You will be quickly removed by the adminsitrator.  Make a few meaningful posts on each blog/forum and write a a paragraph or two and leave a link to your website.  I have had a lot of success just stating that I am building a website and really like theirs and would appreciate any pointers and suggestions that the admins and the visitors might have.  Be polite and friendly and people will respond and the admin will not delete your post along with your link.
4. Download the Alexa toolbar- It is a proven fact the the more you monitor your website's progress, the greater likelihood that you can make progress and raise your site's status and generate more traffic. The Alexa toolbar provides you will a wealth of information about your site and about every other website that you surf.  I believe that it is available for Firefox, Chrome, and IE. It will give you an idea of the pagerank of each site for Google and Bing as well as Alexa own site ranking metrics.  You can get an idea of how much traffic each site gets and what are the characteristics of good and high traffic sites.  Pay attention to the next tip, it is powerful.
5.  This is probably one of the most important strategies that I can share to really ramp up your site traffic and go up fast in the Google page rank.  You have to learn to acquire all of your competitor's backlinks.  How do I do this you might ask?  They are not going to share their secrets with me.  Well, you use the Alexa toolbar backlink tool to find the website's highest ranking and most powerful backlinks.  You can also use this link to access the Alexa backlink tool if you do not want the toolbar: http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/google.com If you use the toolbar it is very easy and quick to find out a website's major backlinks and get their "juice." You should surf each of the sites listed as their backlinks and see if there is any way to post something to their website that will include your website's link.  Of course, as I stated earlier, do not spam them and try to post something that is of substance and something that is complimentary to them so that the site admin will not instantly delete your post along with its link.
6.  Publish Press Releases- There are several paid and free press release websites that are great to, not only create a high quality backlink, but also ge tthe word out about your business.  The free press release site that I prefer is:  http://www.freepressindex.com/
7.  Quality content- Needless to say, the main reason that anyone will visit your site and hopefully buy soemthign from you is because you have something to offer.  So, create quality text and photo content. Search engines do not deal well with Flash video and flash objects so avaid them in favor of writing high quality text and images that inform, entertain, and make the visitor want to return to your site or buy whatever good or service you are selling.
Therefore, get out there and build your website and make it something that you can be proud of and something that represents your business well.  Check out one of my recent websites that I build for a client a few months ago.  It took only two months to rank on the first page of Google for several keywords that are very competitive.  Check out the site:  http://hogpredators.com
Check back with me for more SEO strategies very soon.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Hogpredators.com Combats the Growing Feral Hog Problem in South Georgia

http://www.freepressindex.com/hogpredators-com-combats-growing-feral-hog-problem-376268.html

Hogpredators.com a local South Georgia business controls the hog infestation problem while at the same time providing hog hunters with guided hunts to right where the action is.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

New to Posterous.com -- My current techie projects

I am new to the latest blogging platform, Posterous.com where you can connect many of your social media accounts so that if you blog in one place then the postings go out to all of hte different venues.  As I may have mentioned recently, if you know me, I have been working on several web design projects. 

1. A local small business http://hogpredators.com that specializes in hog control and guided nightvision hog hunting expeditions in South Georgia.  I have been building thier web pages in the Joomla CMS as well as doing thier SEO, which is coming along nicely.  We are beginning to reach the higher pages on Google and a few other search engines for several keywords.

2.  I have just started on my own personal web project. http://stanleygarland.info which is going to be an instructional website devoted to learning Spanish.  Just like my pervious project with hogpredators, it will also use the Joomla CMS with an added Moodle component.  I have just started the very beginnings of this so things are not up yet.  But, I am very excited since when I am finished I will have a fully functional online school platform with slots for 25 students complete with units and everything. 

3.  I am still working for Ashford University and teaching online college classes.  I am about to start one devoted to Teaching Methods for English Language Learners.  So, as always, I am excited about what cool things that I can do for my students to help them access the knowledge better and in more creative ways.  I have typically provided them with audio lectures as well as written resources but i am toying with the idea of doing some brief videos for my upcoming class.

In conclusion, I really like the ability to post in one place that Posterous provides and I am sure to use it much in the future.  Please stay tuned for upcoming blog posts. 

S. Garland

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