Creating Effective Title Tags

One thing that I come across almost on a daily basis is a website with a poorly written title tag. Some are keyword stuffed and separated with commas & others just include two or three words.

The Correct Approach:

When writing a title tag, it is important to bear two things in mind. The first would be the need to write something clear & descriptive about your website, this should ideally include your website/company brand along with a short description (make sure you do keep this short – save the more detailed description for the meta tag). Secondly, you need to make sure that your title is not just search engine friendly, but will also appear interesting and relevant to the human eye as this will be vital for getting the best possible click-through in any relevant search results.

photo credit: jeanbaptisteparis

Here is where you get .edu backlinks - kind of

Let’s first look at why you want to have backlinks from universities and such. The major search engines assign a rank for any given keyword based in part on the number of links that are pointing to that web site. With major search engines I mean Bing, Google and Yahoo.

And when I say in part, that is true for Google and Yahoo. Bing actually ranks web sites mostly based on the number of links. But the sheer number of links is one side of the coin. The other side is the quality of your backlinks. It is commonly agreed that Universities and educational facilities are trustworthy (The truth is they are not, but that is a different topic).

Anyhow, Google & Co. “think” they are trustworthy. So they have programmed their algorithms to give links from .edu domains a higher value. Whether this is true or not: You are the judge. Do your own research if in doubt.

Here is how to get these fruits: Head over to Google.com and squeeze the information out of that beast with a customized search query:

site:.edu inurl:blog "YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE" "post a comment" -"Comments to this post are now closed" -"you must be logged in”

Here is what this search query means:

site:.edu You are looking for web site that have .edu in the URL

inurl:blog You also want sites that are blogs. On .edu domains these blogs are very often in the directory “blog”

“YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE” Part of the search should be your keyword, as you want to post your comments on related blogs only.

“post a comment” If a web site has a comment submission form, they usually have this or a similar wording.

-”Comments to this post are now closed” It is very annoying to read a post and come up with a nice relevant comment, only to find out after you’ve hit the submit button, that the comments on this particular post have been closed 2 years ago or so. So, we filter this out with the minus sign in front of it.

-”you must be logged in” I am a little lazy, so I try to avoid blogs where I have to first create an account and then I can post. If at all possible, I prefer blogs that allow immediate comment submission.

Sounds not to difficult, huh? Just go ahead and give it a spin.

Why am I writing this post? Well, I hope that you would like to know how it is being done, but that your time is beeter invested in other things and you decide to hire me for your .edu link building.

So, to make a long story short, here’s the deal:

I find .edu blogs related to your web site and post some nice comments there for you. Leaving a link back to your site with your keyword as anchor text.

One way to get contextual links is to cherry pick web sites

One method to get contextual links is to cherry pick potential link partners. You find a web site that would be a good fit and then you give the web master a call and arrange to get a link to your web site placed on that web site.

In exchange you can offer to write an article about that web site and publish it, or write a press release or design some kind of link bait grafic that they can place on their web site.

Basically you persuade or bribe the other web master to place your link. Make sure that you only do this very selectively. If you overdo it, one of your target web masters might get very annoyed and might decide to report you to Google for link buying effort.

While you basically pay for the link here with an article or something else, this would not exactly be considered to buy backlinks by Google. But if you do this on a regular basis with hundreds of web masters, you will get in hot water quickly.

The lightest for of contextual link building is to place comments on related blogs and web sites. You will get a link back to your site with your keyword as the anchor text. That the link is not directly within the blog post does not really matter. As long as the main content of the page is related to your site, you will be fine. You need to make sure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute, or it will not count as a real link in Google’s eyes. Blog comment link building is probably the most economic form of contextual link building.

Another way to get contextual links is to find blogs related to your niche or industry and do guest posts on these blogs. Sometimes you will find a link on these blogs for guest posts and some terms and conditions that explain the process. In other cases you have to contact the web master either via email, phone or sometimes by just writing a comment on the blog.

Guest posts will give you contextual links and if you pick blogs that have authority, you will not only get a good improvement in ranking, but you will also get direct traffic and in some cases some kind of indirect endorsement of your web site. This alone is probably worth a lot more than the contextual links that you got from the guest post.

To sum it up: Yes, contextual link building is definitely worth the effort. You will get links with the best possible quality plus direct traffic and indirect endorsement of your products and services.

Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.

How does link popularity help my website?
Link popularity is a way to popularize your website on a global scale. The more inbound links that you create for your site, more traffic will be directed to your website. If more people will visit your site, there is a good chance of converting sales.

Why don’t people link to my site?
There may be several reasons as to why people may not link with your site. Here are some of them with their solutions:

• Your website may contain untrustworthy and misleading links that will not be of any use. You need to analyze your site thoroughly in order to avoid scammers.
• If there is inappropriate and unnecessary web content present on your site, this will result in less number of links. Since, link popularity is very important for search engine ranking, you should make sure that your site has high quality and keyword rich content.
• In order to make links, do not make use of software to do it for you. This will only produce artificial links that are not of good quality and will never help in popularizing your site. Instead, you can signup with reciprocal link services.
• Make sure you do not make boring and monotonous discussions on forum or social networking sites. The more interesting discussions you create, the more people are likely to visit your site.

It is advisable to produce fewer good links rather than creating unproductive links. Link popularity will help you determine how your internet marketing strategy is working in your favor. This way you will realize on what aspects you need to work to make sure your site receives more exposure on search engines.

Contextual link building is one of the newest ways of promoting your website. It is done by placing links in the content in such a way that a reader is enticed to click on it. This can be done by submitting articles on article submission websites.

All you need to do is write interesting and unique articles that can be about 300 to 500 words and submit them on famous article directories such as ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com. The article should also have a catchy title such as ‘How to lose weight in 2 weeks in a healthy way’. The more interesting the title you have for your article, the better will be the chances of it being read.

In such article directories, there is a section called author box or resource box that is usually found at the end of the article. You need to place a call-to-action sentence in this area with a hyperlink to your website such as ‘To know more about how you can lose weight in 2 weeks, click here’. You can hyperlink the words ‘click here’ so that people who want to know more can click on it and visit your site.

Make sure you make use of keywords in your article and free of grammatical errors. The article should start with an interesting title and proceed with even more interesting article and then at the end of the article, the reader should feel the urge to read by clicking on the provided link. Also make sure you have an attractive and informative website that can meet the reader’s requirements.

Even if you have a website with good content, your business may fail miserably if you do not promote it well. So, we can understand promotion is the key to successful online business. A very good way to promote your business is through building links.

By means of link building, you can help bring more people to visit your website through various sources such as article directories, web directories, social networking websites, forums, blogs, link exchanging, etc. The whole process of link building can be time consuming for you if you have a busy schedule. Hence, you need to rely upon experts to popularize your site via link building.

There are plenty of SEO companies that specialize in link building. When you seek assistance from a SEO firm for link building, you will be provided with a detailed link building campaign. SEO companies will make every effort to bring more visitors to your site through high quality links and increase your website’s visibility on search engines.

Through extensive link building, you can make sure that your business outperforms others when visitors search for key phrases and keywords associated to your business.

photo credit: Jesse Gardner

The search engine rates the websites after taking into consideration various parameters. The links that are pointing to a particular website play a very important role in the ranking of the website. The search engine likes the websites with many incoming links. But here you will have to understand that the quality and the relevance of the incoming links are very important. You cannot ignore the quality. You cannot ignore the quantity as well. You can’t sit satisfied having a few quality links. You will also have to work on the quantity at the same time.

Remember that link building alone cannot do miracles for you. You will have to make sure that you are taking care of all other relevant things as well. It includes the content of the website and the design of the page as well. You will also have to optimize the Meta tags (actually only the description meta tag). If you are taking your eyes off these things, then your link building campaign will not work well for you. If the content on your website is not relevant and has poor quality, then your links, no matter how high the quality and quantity is, are not going to do any miracles for you. So make sure that you have a decent or better excellent and user friendly website and you are paying attention to the content.

Again another thing of importance which is generally ignored by new comers is the relevance of the website from which the website is linked. Remember that the relevant websites are the ones which will help you attain the high ranking and not the irrelevant websites. You will also have to understand the method of linking. If you are using text links then you will need to use your keywords as the anchor text. Whereas when images are linked, you will have to make sure that you have provided an alternative text link as well. This is also true for flash content and for videos.

These are some important aspects for your link building. The rest is hard work and persistence. As in real life: You create your own future.

Link Building as a Search Engine Optimization Tool by Hans Peter Jeschke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Well, I am a little biased here, but I tend to recommend to hire a pro. Not that you can not do it yourself, but a pro can do it often times much faster and better and well, professional.

Now, in case you won’t listen to my advice and want to do it yourself, here is how you do it.

1. Makes sure that you page is working (mean you should have all your internal SEO ducks in line). If in doubt, read up on it on Google Webmaster.

2. Go to adsense keyword tool and do some basic keyword research. In the beginning you want to select keywords that are highly relevant to your products and services, but that don’t have too many searches. You are going for the low hanging fruits first. Something like 500 to 1,500 searches per month are your first target.

3. If you don’t already have it, install the Google toolbar. You’ll need it later for checking the PageRank of you comment victims.

4. Install the NoDoFollow add-on for Firefox . Yes, you’ll be using Firefox for this. All other browser are worthless for a successful link building campaign.

5. Now that you have all your tools in place, head over to Google and find some blogs that are related to your keyword and that do not use the nofollow attribute.

Sound simple, right? Well it is. The only thing that I did not explain in great detail is the query that you have to use in Google in order to find those high pagerank blogs that are dofollow in the comment area. But for now you can use DoFollow Blog Directory & Compendium.

photo credit: Anna Jumped

That social bookmarking is widely used as a means to try to increase link popularity, does not mean that it works. There are actually a lot of things being done in an effort to increase search engine visibility that are plain useless. One of the useless “technologies” is social bookmarking or social bookmark submission.

While social bookmarking has some small value in helping to get a site indexed, it is a waste of time, if you want to increase your PageRank or your link popularity. So far I have not seen ONE site that was on the first page of Google for a fairly competitive keyword or keyword phrase that used social bookmarks.

I have to admit that I did not check non-competitive terms. But in order to rank high for a term where is no competition, anything that you do usually seems to work. There is a saying in Germany: “Among the blind the one-eyed is king”. The same is true for low competition keywords.

So, what do you do next time one of the “smart” SEO experts tries to sell you on “link popularity building through social bookmarking submission”? Well, if you’ve read this far, you’ll say “dank u Sir” and move on. You are way better off to write some nice articles and submit them to article directories (there are only a handful that are worth to bother with).

You can also submit unique articles to various social networking sites where they are published. Try to post quality articles in various websites in order to build up your link popularity. Or you can create an event and brag about it in a press release. Press releases actually work like a charm, if done right.

If all this seems to be too much work, you might want to hire a link building service or order link building services or even buy .edu backlinks.