Blog SEO Expert » Blackhat

Generate links to your blog through WordPress and Blogspot

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:32:54 +0000

Importance of inbound links

Links pointing to your blog or website are extremely important for SEO. (Check out “Backlinks – The fastest way to good SEO” for more)

They help you get indexed faster by Google and other search engines by providing a pathway to your blog
They make you an authority site in the eyes of search engines
The backlinks drive traffic to your blog

Links To Blog

How to get the backlinks?

For best SEO, backlinks should be obtained from varied sources, and the sources of the backlinks should preferably be websites and blogs having a similar topic.

(Check out “Where to get backlinks from for good SEO” for more details on this)

(Image source)

But getting backlinks might be a little difficult when you are just establishing your blog. Once you get famous by providing good content, backlinks would pour in from other blogs.

But in the beginning, you can start by giving it a little push yourself.

Start your link building

When you want to get your blog indexed by Google, or just want those initial few backlinks, why wait for others to provide them?

You can start by starting an announcement blog at free blogging sites like WordPress.org and Blogspot.com! And what should you do with these blogs?

1. Link to your actual blog or website

On each of these blogs, you can have a post announcing your actual blog – and this announcement post should contain links to your blog with keyword rich anchor text.

These posts can be in the form of a press release informing people about your blog.

2. Link form the Blogroll

These new blogs would have their own blogrolls in the sidebar. Put your actual blog in these blogrolls – again, with keywords.

(For example, BlogSEOExpert.com would be in the blogroll as “BlogSEOExpert.com – SEO for Blogs” or “SEO for Blogs” instead of just “BlogSEOExpert.com”)

3. Category and Tags

On the WordPress.org and BlogSpot.com announcement blogs, you would need to provide a category to your announcement post. You can also provide various tags to this post.

Name the category and the tags carefully – they should be your keywords.

Advantages of blogs on WordPress.org and Blogspot / Blogger

There are multiple benefits of this strategy.

You get keyword rich backlinks to your blog or website.
Google and other search engines index WordPress and Blogspot very regularly.

Your announcement blogs would get listings on WordPress.org and BlogSpot.com under the tags and category you have specified. Since you would have specified your keywords here, people would come to these announcement blogs when they look for your keywords.

And since these blogs would have a post linking to your original blog, there is a fair chance that they would come to your blog – which means additional traffic!

Exercise caution – Don’t go overboard

Yes, there are many benefits. But please be advised that you can’t overdo this. That would be spamming.

Having one or two announcement blogs / posts is fine, but starting many such blogs just to get backlinks would take you to the “not so good” (read: blackhat) territory.

Readers who found this post were searching for:

blogspot category, Blackhat blogspot, seo tips inurl:blogspot

How to reduce bounce rate on your blog and improve SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:41:38 +0000

Reduce Bounce Rate

High bounce rate hurts your SEO

When a visitor sent to your blog or website by a search engine bounces, it means that he did not find what he was looking for at your blog or website.

The search engine views this as a vote against your site, and pushes your blog or website down on its SERPs!

(Image source)

(Check out “Reduce the bounce rate, improve your SEO” for more details on this)

How to reduce the bounce rate

There are a few simple things that you can do in order to reduce the bounce rate.

The question that needs to be asked is: Why do visitors bounce? It can be because:

They did not find what they were looking for
They found what they were looking for, but still didn’t see any other page or post

Well, there isn’t much you can do for the first. At times, your blog or website can come up in the SERPs for irrelevant searches.

(For example, my post “Keyword density – What is right, what is wrong” often comes up in the SERPs for the search term “What is right what is wrong”. Now clearly, this post is irrelevant for the people searching for this term – and they mostly bounce)

But there are some things you can do for the second category of people.

1. Have meaningful internal linking of posts

The idea here is to have various means of highlighting the content of your blog to the visitors.

Maybe you can have a list of related posts at the bottom of each post, or you can have a “people who liked this post also liked” type of list.

This way, your readers would come to know about other content of your blog or website without having to search for it.

This would increase the chances of them reading more than just one post or page on your site, and therefore, decrease your bounce rate.

To know more about different ways of highlighting your content, please read “7 ways to implement internal linking of your posts for better SEO“.

2. Have a welcome message for visitors

Now this is a little extra that you can have for your search engine visitors.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could present a customized message to the visitors from search engines, and highlight your best posts there?

The good news is that you can! You can show a message specifically to search engine visitors, and list your best posts there. Or, you can list posts that are relevant to the search terms used by the visitor!

There are many plugins available for this for various blogging platforms.

What not to do to reduce the bounce rate

We saw the ways of reducing the bounce rate – using these techniques, you can decrease the bounce rate meaningfully.

However, many people try to reduce the bounce rate artificially. Some examples:

“Click for more” or “Read more” links (on pages other than archive pages)
Posts broken into multiple pages, each page containing just a few paragraphs

If at all, these methods would artificially decrease your bounce rate. However, it is more likely that visitors would get annoyed by this, and would never come back!

My advise – stay away from these, and employ only genuine ways of reducing your bounce rate.

Where to get backlinks from for good SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:00:16 +0000

Backlinks For SEO

Where should you get backlinks from?

Backlinks have a lot of importance in the algorithms of modern search engines like Google. The more backlinks your blog has, the better is your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Of course, if you have your keywords in the backlinks, your rankings would be even higher.

(Image source)

But where should you get these backlinks from? What should be the source? Is it fine to get the backlinks from any website or blog?

No! The type of sites from where you get these backlinks affects your ranking – and has the potential to even harm your rankings!

So, follow these principals in your link building exercise:

Site / Blog having content on a related topic

Try to get links from blogs that write about topics similar to yours.

For example, if your blog is about celebrities, try to get links from blogs about celebrities, celebrity fashion, or even movies.

Having a link from sites having related content adds extra weight to that backlink in the eyes of Google. (And if you can have your keywords in the anchor text of the backlink, it’s a big bonus!)

Site / Blog having a good Google Page Rank

Page Rank is an assessment of a webpage by Google. It ranges from 0 to 10, and the higher the number, the better is the page from Google’s point of view.

A page rank is assigned to each individual page (URL) of a blog or website. Thus, every webpage of a blog or a website has a different page rank.

Try to get links from pages or posts that have a high Page Rank. A backlink from a high page rank webpage carries a lot more weight than a backlink from a low page rank site!

However, in your link building efforts, do not focus just on high page rank sites – if Google sees that all your backlinks are from high page rank sites, it would assume that the links are not organic (that is, they are purchased). This can harm your rankings.

Therefore, have the backlinks from sites having different page ranks so that the distribution seems natural to Google. But you can put in slightly more effort in getting backlinks from high page rank sites!

Link farms?

There are many sites that exist only for providing links to other sites. These sites have thousands of outgoing links, pointing to all kinds of sites!

Such sites are called link farms, and are considered “bad” by Google and other search engines. (They are also known as “bad neighborhoods”).

Avoid getting links from these sites. A backlink from a link farm would have a negative impact on your SEO efforts – your rankings would actually suffer due to this.

Web Directories?

Web directories are also sites linking to other sites and blogs, and are usually arranged based on topics and subtopics. (Yahoo is a web directory)

The problem is that there is a very thin line between a link farm and a web directory.

Therefore, please avoid directories that include any and every blog in their listing. Submit your blog’s link to only those directories that have a manual or human review process for inclusion of links.

Conclusion

Follow these simple guidelines, and you should be achieving top rankings in the SERPs soon!

Do you think there are other types of sites from where links are desirable, or from where links are avoidable? Please let me know through the comments.

Readers who found this post were searching for:

where to get backlinks

Keyword stuffing – How much is too much?

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:55:08 +0000

Keyword stuffing

Importance of optimal keyword density

Having the right keyword density is very important for successful SEO. The optimal keyword density is between 3% and 5%.

(Image by Tambako the Jaguar)

This density gives the best visibility to your keywords in the post in the eyes of the search engines, and thus gives you the best ranking in the search engine results page (SERPs).

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing means having the keyword occur too many times in a post or webpage.

For example, if the keyword density is 20%, it is treated as being too much – naturally written text would never have any word (or group of words) repeating so many times.

So, it becomes obvious that the text of the post has been written (or manipulated!) with SEO in mind.

Why should you avoid keyword stuffing for good SEO?

When keyword stuffing is done, it seems rather unnatural to the search engine spiders, and this has a negative impact on your SEO – in fact, your post would be penalized by the search engines for keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing would also make the text of your post hard to read – it would not be reader friendly. And search engines only reward good writing.

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique – meaning that it is implemented specifically to fool the search engine spiders or bots.

This used to work in the past, but today’s search engines like Google are very, very intelligent. They can detect such techniques very easily, and would end up penalizing your post for this.

In fact, if excessive keyword stuffing is detected, Google can even throw your blog out of its index altogether. Now that is not something we would ever want!

Bottomline

Keyword stuffing doesn’t work. Period. In fact, it harms your SEO efforts.

Stay away from it!

Readers who found this post were searching for:

keyword stuffing tool

White hat and black hat techniques for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:01:57 +0000

White Hat & Black Hat SEO

Why SEO?

The aim of SEO is to attract more visitors to your blog through organic search engine traffic.

(Image by zeevveez)

This goal is attained by achieving higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP) of popular search engines like Google for your chosen keywords.

The good and the bad of SEO

Over time, people have come to know of the various factors that contribute toward search engine rankings.

And through their SEO efforts, people try to build on these factors for ranking higher in the SERPs.

The problem is – there are good and bad ways of doing this!

White Hat SEO

The right ways of doing SEO are called White Hat SEO. These means are acceptable by the search engines, and also result in a better user experience for your readers.

For example, providing good content and writing blog posts focused on particular keywords are legitimate SEO techniques, and are therefore white-hat techniques.

I would be discussing many white hat SEO techniques on this blog going forward, so that you can utilize them for the search engine optimization of your blog.

(Please subscribe to my RSS feed to get instant updates when a post is published).

Black Hat SEO

Many times, people want short cuts. Therefore, they employ means that are not genuine. This is true for the physical world, and it is equally true for the online world as well!

They employ methods that are aimed at simply fooling the search engines into believing that the blog or website has good content.

Such techniques are known as black hat techniques, and the SEO based on such techniques is called Black Hat SEO.

Modern search engines like Google are very smart, and can detect most black hat SEO techniques. Once a search engine detects that a blog is employing black hat SEO, it would immediately ban the blog and would remove it from its index.

People who promise very quick results through SEO usually employ black-hat techniques – therefore, please stay away from them! You might see an initial increase in organic search engine traffic, but trust me, your blog would get banned in no time.

I would be discussing many black hat SEO techniques on this blog, so that you can avoid employing them even by mistake! Please subscribe to my RSS feed to get instant updates when a post is published.