Inbound links are one of the most controversial topics in SEO. There is no doubt that having a ton of sites linking to yours used to juice up your site into great rankings several years ago. But is that really true anymore? They search engines have gotten a lot smarter and savvier about what site should ranking well or out-rank others in the same niche. The search engines do look at how many sites are linking to yours, the quality of the sites linking to you, and consider them votes for your site. Logically, if you have a lot of sites with clout themselves linking to you there must be a reason for it and therefore will reflect well on your site. But it’s only one factor in the overall algorithm which determines how well your site rankings overall and how many of your inner pages rank well. There are activities you can do to increase your inbound links. Here are some ideas for increasing your inbound links without paying for anything:

Blog Commenting is one of the best ways to increase your inbound links. You have to do it well though, by leaving good comments, or your comments won’t be published to the site and therefore you won’t gain an inbound link. Some blogs are considered Do Follow and some No Follow which means the search engine spiders follow the links to your site from the blog. When blog commenting in general, I never worry about whether the blog is Do Follow or not because a blog comment can bring a click through to your site any ways. Google blog search is probably the best way to find niche blogs to comment on. Following people on Twitter that post article urls in a particular industry is also a great way to have content pushed to you that can be visited and commented on. Google Alerts are another great way to get new blog posts and articles pushed to you that can be commented on with a link back to your site or social profiles.

Forum signatures can be an excellent source of inbound links, as well as relevant traffic to your site. Let’s say you are promoting a product about fitness, and you have established a niche site with high quality, unique fitness advice. If you make relevant, helpful, and informative posts on fitness forums, you will build up a reputation as an authority figure on the topic. You will want to place a link to your resource niche site in the signature of your forum profile. When you do this, every time you make a post, your link is included. This is excellent for building reputation with search engines, as well as driving very targeted traffic to your website. It definitely has to be done in volume and with a concerted effort over time, if you want to get sustained traffic from this method.

Social Bookmarking is another fantastic way to build very powerful links to your niche site. As long as you are providing quality, unique information you can submit your sites to social bookmarking hubs like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Tumblr. This builds links from the social bookmarking sites to your site. In addition, it will be listed on the directory for others to find. Another nice feature is social bookmarking is that you can achieve multiple organic rankings for the same article post in the search engine, which increase the likelihood your content will be seen and possibly shared further. You should always share your articles and posts in your Facebook profile and Fan Page as well, which could get it shared further which increases your overall syndication per article.

There are many ways to build inbound links to your site and it will work to varying degrees depending on how much you are able to do it. Stay away from buying links, it’s an outdated practice and can hurt your site’s rankings. Rather, you can pump up your site with a ton of unique articles and keep up the posting effort to achieve the kind of rankings you want. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!

All websites go through an evolutionary life of their own and increase in traffic over time when effective online marketing is conducted. What they start out as is never what they end up being. Websites can go through several redesigns, but what doesn’t change really is the content. What you want to have in order to maximize your website’s traffic and overall effectiveness is a site that’s dynamically improving and also growing larger over time. Here are some strategies from my experience as an online marketer that have worked well over the years to leverage traffic to the fullest. I hope you like them!

1. Making it Very Social – Making your site as social as possible is the way to go in this day and age. There are a lot of things you can do to facilitate Social on your website, most have to do with Facebook because the majority of the social traffic is on Facebook. Facebook’s Social Plugins are absolute must for your website. My favorites are the Like button, Send button, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Comment box. As many of them as possible should be integrated into your site so your visitors and customers can share your pages and content easily on Facebook, so their friends see it. The Facebook comment Box is relatively new, it replaces old blog commenting by adding a box that posts comments right people’s Walls on Facebook and keeps it all visible on your site as well. Another good idea is having Sharing buttons to other sites like LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, and the new Google +1 button. This will allow people to “bookmark” and share your pages on those networks which tends to help you get more traffic from the inbound links it creates and other people seeing those links on various sites and clicking through. It also increases the number subscribers to your content over time which can increase your repeat visitors. The more social followers, friends, and connections you have the more people can ultimate see your content when you share it.

2. Running Promotions – This is usually one of my top recommendations to clients and anyone really that I speak to with a site and a decent amount of traffic. Running a sweepstakes or contest on your site is an amazing way to capture visitor’s information that don’t end up purchasing or becoming a subscriber. Running a promo like “Win an iPad by entering our Winter Sweepstakes” or “Submit your video into our contest to Win a $500 Gift Card” and promoting it with a graphic on the site in the layout or header will absolutely allow you to capture more people’s info than you normally would, then allowing you to remarket to them later to generate a conversion or sale. WildFire is the best technology for running these types of sweepstakes and contests. WildFire runs on Facebook as an app, is very inexpensive, and keeps track of the entire campaign. Not only do you get “leads” from the campaign in a file, you get people to Like your Fan Page which is always desirable. I have never seen anything rocket fans like this app. I encourage everyone to check it out and implement this type of thing into what you do online. Once the promotion is created you can send an email blast about it to your customer file or database and let them know to enter, which builds your Facebook Fans and Wall postings. Simply a must!

3. Building Your Site out with Content – If you know me you know I’m all about frequent, original content posting to your site via a content management system (CMS) in order to build out your site larger over time with more pages of content. This can only bring you more free traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. People ask me all the time,”how can I get more traffic to my site?” The answer simply is: Post like an beast or pay someone else to do it, i.e. outsourcing your content production. You have to have quality control in place if you outsource but it can be a cost-effective way to load up with new content for the search engines to eat up and rank. There isn’t a right way to post content or articles, just post about what you think people are searching for primarily and mix in more obscure topics which will tend to rank higher in the organic search results. Frequent posting is definitely the way to go, I usually recommend 5-10 post a day to really maximize things, but the more the better which this type of thing. Then make sure to share and bookmark your articles through a process called social sharing and content syndication, to get the absolute most out of each post or page.

4. Re-Marketing to Your Subscribers/Customers - Websites that get a decent amount of traffic and are signing up subscribers or customers, should be periodically sending out nicely designed newsletters and promotions to their inboxes on a relatively frequent basis. A lot of companies just hammer their database with promotions, but you really have to nurture your database by sending quality, informative newsletters in order to build a loyal following and get them to respond in the future. Remarketing is an art and doesn’t come without a lot of trial and error. Obviously subject line is huge to getting it opened in the first place. Make sure you deliver valuable content to your subscribers and you will build an amazing following of loyal customers!

5. Competitive Intelligence - Look around at what your competitors are doing on their websites and on their Fan Pages. You can usually pick up some great ideas from other sites in your space that are trying whatever they can to capitalize on their website traffic. Emulate the good aspects of their sites into yours and take them up a notch! This is something I recommend doing on a monthly basis. Also a good idea is to subscribe to your competitors newsletters and join their Facebook Fan Page. Then you can see everything they are posting and sending out so you can get ideas for your own site and make sure you are one step ahead of them. There are tools that will actually tell you what keywords your competitors are using in paid search, one being Spyfu. Also Compete.com can give you a good amount of analytical data on you competitors site and your own site as well.

6. Taking Advantage of Organic Platforms - Ahh organic traffic, better know as free traffic. This is simply where the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN choose to rank your site when people search for various phrases. Many people think that their homepage is all that matters and gets the bulk of the traffic, but it’s your inner pages of the site, i.e blog posts, product pages, additional site pages, that can get the majority of the traffic. Even if you don’t have great organic rankings for your “core” or most popular keyword phrase, you can still get a lot of traffic to your inner pages, which is why the amount of inner pages has to be maximized and grown over time to take advantage of everything the search engines have to offer you. There are many websites out there that have great organic rankings that you can post content on or list your company to take advantage of their good rankings and generate more traffic to your site. Some of these include: Ebay, EzineArticles.com, Merchant Circle, Craigslist, BackPage, and other sites that allow you to list your products or content on their sites. Some you have to refresh weekend, so there is effort involved. You have to dig around to find them under your core keywords and see who is ranking for this and that search phrase, then go see if you can post to that site in some way. Online press releases are another great way to expand your tentecles because they get republished on a good amount of well-ranking news sites. Over time, you can “saturate” the search engines under different topics if you post a lot of original content to a lot of different places and use the tools available to your advantage.

7. Leveraging Videos - video is half the web traffic so you should absolutely be creating videos and posting them to Youtube.com and other video sites. Videos tend to rank well in the search results so its another way to get additional organic search listings under competitive and not so competitive keywords. Creating videos has become easier and easier and there are service like Fiverr.com that have people who will create videos for cheap so you can get a bunch made and submitted cost-effectively. Video should definitely be part of Online Marketing strategy and you should decide what types of videos can be made and then make them and submit them. You can also add them as posts or pages to your site to increase content and pages. You should mention your web address in your videos so people can check it out.

8. Maximize Paid Search - Wow, paid search. VERY FEW companies in general are maximizing paid search for all its worth because they don’t convert the traffic well enough. The vast majority of targeted web traffic for you product or website is going to come from paid search, so you darn well better have a really good strategy in place for leveraging it. Most companies can’t even spend enough to get all their possible paid search traffic because their website/sales department doesn’t convert the traffic into sales well enough. Over time, as you increase the effectiveness of your website to convert people into sales you can open up the paid search budget and really get all the traffic thats out there for you. You basically have to “out-convert” your competitors in order to dominate as #1 in paid search to gain the highest click-through rate and traffic possible for all your keywords.. This is still the #1 problem facing companies in this day and age in my opinion.

9. Having a Nice Design - website design is extremely important to capitalizing on your traffic and visitors. The better you site looks the more effective it will tend to perform. Design quality is a relative thing and largerly subjective but you should look to redesign your site a few times, over time, to get a better looking site that will work better. Once you re-design your site you should look to plug in an optimization software like Opimizely.com to A/B test various page elements to see which work best.

10. Branding Yourself - This more applies to smaller sites and bloggers, but larger sites also need to work on their branding and image they are portraying to their visitors and customers. “Personal Branding” has gained a lot of momentum in the last couple of years, which refers to branding yourself as an individual, i.e. CouponMom.com. You should work on your branding over time and try to make it better and more effective. Quality is the key here, you want to look really professional and polished, that conveys that you have your act together and are trust-worthy. Marketing content and messaging is also really important to impressing people when they visit your site.

11. Retargeting Technologies - If you get a decent amount of traffic, then you should definitely look into what are called “behavioral retargeting” companies, which can essentially serve up your banner ads to site visitors when they leave your site without taking an action like buying. When these visitors leave your site and go surfing aruond the internet they see your banner ads, sometimes featuring the products they checked out on your site. This can be a very effective way to bring your visitors back to buy, especially if a promotion is offered in the banners ads. Some of the companies that offer this are: Retargeter, Fetchback, and Adroll. Google also has this technology in their Adwords campaigns. This is an absolute must for companies looking to convert their traffic better.

12. Referral Programs - near and dear to my heart, I have been using referral programs for several years with the companies I have been with and with our current agency clients. Referral programs basically turn your customers into marketers for you. This is primarily for companies but can be done on a smaller scale as well. I really like a newer company called Push44. They have an amazing platform for running referral programs thats really cost-effective too. Running referral programs on your site is a great way to maximize what you are doing and tyrn your customers or subscribers into proactive advocates for your company. With the advent of social media, it’s easier than ever for people to share about your company and earn their referral. Gift cards and cash are great motivators for referral programs.

I hope you enjoyed read this article on maximizing your website and traffic. Feel free to leave me some feedback as I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks and have a great day!

Search Engine Optimization or “SEO” has been around since the search engines like Google and Yahoo came into existence in the late 1990s. While a lot has changed over the years, a lot has remained the same regarding technique and strategy. Back in the day, it was all about having good, complete “meta-tags” on every page of your website which told the search engines what the page was about so they could catalog and rank them properly. Having good meta-tags is still a good thing to have going on, but more factors play into your website’s overall rankings for various keywords in this day and age of Social Media. SEO is NEVER a done or complete process and should be strategized on every month to improve rankings, exposure, and traffic. The search engines are still the #1 way to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog, i.e. people pro-actively searching for information or products you have available. But what are the most important aspects of SEO to focus on so you can maximize your time and effectiveness with the goal being to ranking higher in the free, or “organic”, search results better and better over time? I don’t consider myself an SEO expert by any means, just someone who has done SEO on a variety of sites over the last 12 or so years and read a lot about it. Here are some of the concepts and strategies I think are most important to gain higher search results and more free traffic.

1. On-Site SEO Optimization – Making sure your website is properly “optimized’ for the search engines is a very important task and something that should be looked at periodically. The first step is to make sure EVERY page of your website or blog has a unique page title in the meta-tags. Also, you can look to increase the length of your page titles to include keywords that may bringing in more rankings for that page. Include the most popular keywords you are trying to rank for in your homepage’s title tag, but don’t over do the number of words you are going after, keep it focused. Once you have good Titles on every page of your site, you can look at improving your on-page content on every page. Most people don’t realize that content on each page can ranking for various keyword searches, so make sure every page has good, unique content that talks about what every the page is about. This is something that can be improved upon and tweaked over time to make sure you are maximizing the rankings for every page of your site. Also, make sure you have either a site map on your site that links to all your main pages so they can be spidered easier by the search engines, otherwise make sure you are linking to all the pages on your site from other pages so they will be found and cataloged. Generally, the pages linked directly from your homepage will rank better and carry more weight, so make sure all your main content pages are linked from your homepage.

2. New Content Posting – People ask me all the time how to get more free traffic to their sites…I usually answer “post more content!” Posting fresh content to your site, on a frequent basis, is one of the best ways to maximize your free traffic because the more pages of content you have on your site the more possible search rankings you can achieve with each page. If you have 1000 pages of original content on your site and each page gets 1 visitor a day, you will be getting a 1000 visitors a day to your site. I like to use that metric when talking to people about their SEO strategy. It doesn’t always hold true, but it’s a good way to grasp the concept. Posting content very frequently is a great way to encourage the search engines to come back to your site more frequently looking for your new content, because Google always wants to have the freshest content in their search results so they have relevant search results when people search…makes sense right?? So make sure to post new content or pages to your site as frequently as possible, I usually recommend 5-10 new posts a day, but sites that I follow that post 30-40 posts a day rank amazingly and get a ton of traffic. I have done experiments where I had 40-50 posts a day posted to my sites and their rankings and traffic shot through the roof, so I know it works well.

3. Content Syndication – Once you have posted a new page or post to your site what should you do with it? In order to maximize each and every new piece of content you add to your site you can go though a series of steps that will effectively “syndicate” your content out on the Internet in various places. Syndicating your content is a must for a few reasons. Not only could that post ranking on a site you syndicate it to, but when you syndicate you are building inbound links to your site from higher rankings sites that have a lot of credibility with Google. Some of the best ways to syndicate are: posting to Facebook, posting to you Fan Page, Tweeting the post and title, sharing in LinkedIn Groups, and submitting to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. I have written posts on syndicating your content, you can check it out here. I go through a series of steps after every new content post I do and over time have noticed more traffic from those sources in my website analytics.

4. Inbound Link Building – there is a lot of misinformation out there about link building, how to do it, and whether it works or not. There is no doubt it works, you just have to do it in the right way. One of the best ways of building inbound links is to get other websites or blogs to link to your site. Blogroll links can be a great source of inbounds, but don’t pay for them or you could get in trouble with Google. Trade for them and you should be fine. Millions of bloggers trade blogroll links and its a very common practice. Another great way to build inbound links is through online press release distribution. I recommend eReleases.com because they are affordable and have great distribution. In your press release you can include a couple of hyperlinks to your site, which is standard practice. Once the release goes out you benefit from all the sites that publish the release linking to your site, which boosts your SEO rankings. Over time, if you do them fairly regularly, you can gain a significant boost to your overall SEO rankings and get more of your inner pages ranking higher in the search results, known as deep indexing if you have a lot of pages on your site. Social bookmarking to Digg and sites like that can also help build your inbound links and rankings over time. Posting good blog comments and forum signature links can also add additional inbound links to your site, boosting rankings and traffic, but you have to do them in abundance to get a great effect.

5. Saturation Strategies – saturating the search engines refers to gaining multiple rankings for a particular search phrase. Back in the early days this was easy to achieve, but over the years Google, Yahoo, and MSN have gotten smarter about who owns what sites and made it difficult to achieve saturation. However, saturation can still be achieved by posting completely different content and titles, relating to the same core search phrases, on multiple sites with good rankings. One way to do this is to post as a “guest blogger” on blogs that are related to what you do. Another way is to join sites with good rankings that allow you to have a blog like Digitalpoint forums. Also, posting unique articles to “article directories” like ezinearticles.com can be effective. Another way is to post on forums that ranking well (like this one). These are all in addition to posting on your own site own site or blog. Finding and utilizing various good ranking “platforms” to post your content is the best way to achieve saturation of the search engines.

6. Blogging – I recommend that everyone have a blog on their site for several reasons. Blogs are really just websites that use the same layout for every page. They allow you to post faster and more frequently. Blogs also allow you to categories and “tag” your posts which increases your indexed page count in the search engines. Blogs also have RSS feeds which can be submitted to RSS directories which is another great way to build your rankings and gain RSS subscribers, who will receive your content once you post it to their readers. I recommend using a WordPress blog because they tend to rank really well and have tons of free “plug-ins” that add functionality to your blog and allow you to maximize things.

Achieving good search engine optimization is a process that unfolds over time by doing the right things with your website. It’s never done and always needs to be assessed as far the effectiveness and strategy goes. Every month you should say to yourself, “What are we doing this month to improve our SEO?” You should have a good SEO strategy in place and someone in charge of it. Don’t hire an SEO firm to come in and do it for you when they will just take your money and do very little. Use that money to outsource your content writing to good writers that need the work. I hope you liked my article on SEO…do let me know what you think! Thanks!

Getting the most traffic to your website is the goal of all companies doing business online. There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website, but possibly still the best and most exciting is via the organic, or natural search results. SEO or Search Engine Optimization has been around for years, and as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have evolved so has website optimization. However, good search engine strategy hasn’t really charged too much over the years. Everything relating to getting more organic traffic is pretty darn intuitive and by using certain principles relating to content production you can acheive higher rankings and more organic traffic. Of course, make sure all your meta-tags are well done and thorough on all pages of your site. Make sure “alt text” for images is present as well. When the search engines “index” your site they are reading ALL the content in the code of your page, so take advantage of that when possible. Also, linking to the main areas of your site from your homepage is a good idea. Any pages linked from your homepage will likely rank higher than the pages deeper linked in your site. So make sure you are linking to your main areas i.e. top level categories, geo-targeted pages, important sales info…from your homepage. Inbound linking is also important and having a good inbound linking strategy in place is vital. There are many responsible, natural and free ways to increase your inbound links and this should be a constant strategy on a weekly basis. Sounds like a lot to do? You could probably staff 3 full-time people to manage good, constant SEO for your site minimum! We can go into that at a latter date…anyways, here are three main principles you should adhere to in your business philosophy regarding SEO and your website:

- Quality of Content – Making sure your site content is written as well as it can be. This can be a relative thing, but making sure each page has well-written content is always recommended.
- Frequency of Content – You should update your site with new pages of content on a daily basis. The search engines love it when you work on your site a lot, so I usually recommend adding 5-10 pages, posts or articles a day to your site. Posting multiple times a day gets the search engines, especially Google, sending their spiders back to your site to check for new content hundreds of times a day.
- Length of Post/Article – I do feel that the length of your articles/posts/reviews is extremely important so you can garner more search results per page of your site. Why not capitalize on pages that rank really well by adding more content to those pages. Always make sure to keep your content well-placed on the page, as to not distract from the ultimate goal of converting that visitors into a buyer. Several Calls-to-Actions should always be present on all of your sites pages, if these pages are intended to bring in more sales or leads. Using banner and text link placements are key on these pages. I also recommend newsletter sign-up boxes on all your site’s inner pages and other functions to get people interacting with your site like forward-to-a-friend.

This isn’t everything you need to know regarding having a growing, productive, well-ranking SEO presence, but its a nice start. I have to come to believe that the quality of your on-site content is the single most important factor in getting your site ranked higher and more pages ranking. Also, frequency of posting new content to your site is huge to pumping out new pages of content that can bring you more search traffic. Length of post is also huge because I have sites where an obscure phrase buried on the page pulls a #1 ranking and brings in a new visitor. Whether you have a new site or an old site, you can work aggressively to improve your search rankings. There is no reason at all you shouldn’t be driving thousands of visitors to your site through organic search on a daily basis. Let us know if we can help you get better rankings and more search traffic.

Just got this nice little email from Yahoo. They are going to be giving a web conference on holiday PPC strategies. Should be pretty good. Check out the info they emailed me:

Please join us on October 28, 2008 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, as we present Yahoo!’s 2008 Holiday Consumer Overview and Search Best Practices Web Conference. The free webinar will cover the following topics:

Space is limited, so sign up today!

https://www.meeting.corp.yahoo.com/system/content/folder/listing?date=2008-10-18T18%3A02%3A15.887%2B00%3A00&sco-id=2340477&set-lang=en

Google is coming out with their own internet browser called Chrome. I’m sure it will be cool and have a lot of features. It will be open-source so developers can new applications for it and it can be customized to the users liking. This is just another way for Google to get their advertisers ads more run, but it’s good anytime Google can expand their syndication.

Technorati Tags: matt cutts,seo tips,seo tools,what is seo,seo for beginners

Most of us know who Matt Cutts is, but for those who still don’t know he is currently working for Google and has been their “spokes person” for years. Matt Cutts has discussed some of his SEO tips, but people were looking for advanced SEO tactics. Unfortunately, he discussed those SEO tips, which are worthwhile primarily for beginners. But all people doing website optimization should adhere to these principles. I have added some commentary on these principles.

So, If you’re a beginner or just have started to put your foot inside SEO arena, then the following tips may really help you:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page. If you want to be found for your top keyword, make sure that term is on the page you want to get ranked. The term should be at the top as well as peppered throughout your copy. But only within the normal flow for the content. Don’t over-do your main keywords. Keyword density is a thing of the past. Make sure to build out a multi-page site with all pages containing unique content, there is nothing worth that duplicate content!
2. Fill in your meta-tags The two most important tags are Title and Description b/c that’s what is displayed in the search results. However the keyword tag is also important but keep it to like 5 or 6 terms.
3. Get other sites to “link” back to you. This is one of the most important of the 100s of factors Google considers when ranking sites. However, I don’t recommended too many reciprocal links. Post on relevant blogs and forums that are “do follow” are a great way to gain lots of free inbound links.
4. Create a blog and post often. This can help you get links.
5. Register for free tools. Cutts recommends using the tools at google.com/webmaster, as well as creating a text-based sitemap www.xml-sitemaps.com, and adding your business to Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add).

The above tips would definitely help the newbies but in our opinion, not very much useful for advanced SEOers. Basic SEO principles have not changed much in years. If you do the rigth things with your sites you will be search engine friendly and gain higher rankings. Feel free to comment about Matt Cutts’s SEO Tips and we would also like to hear your personal SEO tips if you would like to share with us here.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil.com search engine was developed by Google engineers that left Google in 2006. It boasts 3x the indexed pages at 120 billion. However the site wasn’t resolving for me, so the first thing they should do is get some more servers to handle the traffic! Check it out here: www.cuil.com.