“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of mark-up will give us a lot more information about that.” – Matt Cutts
There needn’t be another explanation stating the importance of Link Building, when it’s been publicized by the team leader of Google Web-spam, Matt Cutts himself. For the new comer, Link Building is the art of improving the quantity and quality of links to a web-page. In the fight for rank between websites, understanding how search engines value the elements of a link, and how they factor into the weighting of links in the algorithm, is critical.
Link building is considered the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page. So sigh away the fear of link popularity losing its importance in the near future.
So what exactly is the fight for?
Global Popularity:
The more popular and important a site is, the more links from that site matter. Make sure that the contents provided are relevant and context-focused. Such a site is likely to be recommended by all. Wikipedia, for instance, has literally thousands of inbound links, which means it’s probably a popular and important site.
Trust Rank
Researchers have estimated that about 60% of the web’s pages are spam, which is no surprise. In order to weed out irrelevant content, search engines use organically improved algorithms for measuring trust, many of which are based on the link graph. Earning links from highly trusted domains can result in a significant boost factor. Universities, government websites and non-profit organizations are examples of high-trust domains.
How to top the list?
- The strategy is simple, evolve with the Penguin. Easy as it may sound, it’s the work that breaks the sweat.
- The Penguin algorithm update was designed by Google, after the Panda, aiming at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- There is but one way to improve ranking and race the search – Create something worth linking to! The problem is this isn’t simple, and far from fun. It requires planning, research, creativity and hard work. Why? Because getting 10,000 links in a week is not as beneficial as getting 10,000 links over the span of 6 months. When a site suddenly gets a ton of links, this throws up a red flag at the search engines that the site may be trying to cheat its way to the top.
Beneficial link signals:
1. Anchor Texts
One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor text . If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text.
2. Local Popularity
The Teoma search engine was the first to bring the concept of “local” popularity (or Topic-Specific popularity) into search algorithms. It suggests that links from sites that are topic-specific matter more than links from general or off-topic sites
For example, if your website sells shoes, earning links from Trademarked brands like Nike, or Adidas matter much more than earning links from an off-topic website.
3. Validity/Freshness
Link signals lose its value over time. Sites that were once popular often go stale, and eventually sink down the rank list as they fail to earn new links. Thus, it’s important to not earn links alone to your website, but also to continue to earn fresh ones over time. Commonly referred to as “FreshRank”, search engines use the freshness of links to judge current popularity and relevance.
4. Social Sharing
The amount of content shared through social network services today, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, is incredible and increasing even as you read this. Search engines treat such links differently from usual links, but they notice them nonetheless.
Where should my focus be for 2014?
1. Focus on acquiring links that require human intervention and approval.
2. Post relevant content. Give readers what they are looking for.
3. Quality, beats quality, every time!
The work may be hard and heavy, but the reward is worth it all!
The world takes a new step closer to the heights of technology; every step owes its footage to the empire of everything – the internet. Being able to establish your own share of control is more than just a simple work of design. Developers, fathom the level of control at your fingertips. The 10 commandments are not merely protocol, but are also a guide to reaching the creme of web developers.
1. Understand the concept of programming
Easy as it may sound, it is not for everyone. Understanding the concept behind the outcome of code, whatsoever the language maybe, is fundamental even at the lowest levels of web development. Mastering this makes all else light as feather.
2. Keep up with technology
Keep yourself updated about not just the technology at hand alone, but also about the rising trends in technology and development in your field of expertise. Be aware of upcoming technologies, and increase the flexibility of your work to adapt to newer platforms.
3. Be unique
Uniqueness is not just about adopting your own style to your work, but also in how you manage your problems. It’s not about finding your own solution, but about not compromising for anything less than the best solution. Let your work be your signature on the internet.
4. Know our potential
Be well aware of the things you can do, and the things you cannot. Test your limits, improve constantly, reach new horizons. This will help see hurdles in the way even before they appear.
5. Be one in a circle of developers
When the going gets tough, or if you find yourself in a lock, it is not unwise to seek advice from fellow developers. Share ideas, and counter common problems together.
6. Focus not on how Big, but on how Good
Give primary level importance to the quality of your work. Competition is inevitable even in the field of web development, it’s your product that will define and rate you as a web developer.
7. Organize your information well
The information you acquire and intend to broadcast must be concise and in the layman’s format. The way you manage and organize the information will directly affect traffic in your website. Overcrowding of information, or the lack of it are common mistakes a developer must avoid.
8. Updated information
Though it goes without saying, revise the information you provide, and also the way it is presented, once in a while. Outdated information will drag your work down.
9. Test Test Test
This being a crucial step in web development, must never be avoided. Test your product to its limits. It helps uncover holes and vulnerabilities in your work. Identify problems, rectify them, test again. Repeat this cycle as many times as you feel necessary. Then test some more!
10. Healthy body, Healthy mind
Spend time to maintain a healthy body, and a healthy mind. The lack of either could affect the quality of your work.
Decades ago, it took twenty one months to publish a few words, and another twenty one to see them acknowledged. Today, it takes an about twenty one minutes. How you ask? Blogging – Simple, sincere blogging. And there are over a 150 million bloggers today who can testify to that.
So sit back and take a deep one, the next few minutes could be the most worthwhile you ever spent online.
Why blog?
1. Get a better job
Fact – employers prefer to hire people with a positive online influence and blogging is the single best way to achieve that.
It is common for companies to mine for online profiles before making a hire. Having our own blog will undoubtedly stand out.
2. Boost your business
Whether it be a founded business, or even a hobby, blogging has the potential to make it a full-time business.
Each blog you post is a unique opportunity to strengthen relationships with existing client, and even develop new ones. This is a chance to prove your product worthy and build trust in your domain. Find opportunities to grow your business by planting passive income ‘seeds’ that could make you money, passively, for a very long time.
3. Become a recognized author
Love to write? This is your playground and your battle zone.
The best possible way to know how good you are, and where you need to improve, is to blog actively. The benefit of this activity is that you can analyze feedback from your readers, or even interact with them, and tune up efficiently.
Publishers would much rather sign contracts with a writer who already has a consistent fan base. So blogging not only improves your writing skill, but also puts you on the fast lane to being published.
4. Improve your SEO
Put up content that readers love to read, and search engines will simply pull you up the rank-list. Frequent posts of quality content are a reliable way to build traffic.
5. Stay home!
This is perhaps one of the top advantages of blogging. You barely have to step outside ever, let the benefits come to you.
These are but a few among a long list of benefits, each worth every minute spent.
Getting started: The steps are simple.
1. Find a good topic
Pick a topic that you know too well to be silent. One that you are confident about, and will spike interest in readers.
But also keep in mind to diversify your list of topics. Different topics means wider readership.
2. Plan your layout
Before you begin, cover stuff like your list of key-points, and your target audience. This will keep you in track.
3. Don’t touch backspace
Once begun, don’t stop to edit. Let’s keep the flow going. Save editing for later.
4. Revise
This is where editing plays role. Once done writing, re-read to look for breaks. If there’s something you are not sure about, leave a place-mark (like a long blank space),and move to the next. Finally return, do a little research if necessary, and fill the spaces.
5. Hit publish!
Tips to remember:
1. Be original
Simply put, dot not copy! A blog posted by you is as unique as you are. Copying simply drags the genuineness right down waste land. Believe that your blog is your identity the world will come to see. Let’s keep it real.
2. Read much about blogging
Follow top bloggers, learn simple tactics and styles. Use them to define your own style.
Also read about legalities involved with blogging.
3. Exploit your Plug-ins
Make good use of plug-ins like Akismet- anti-spam plug-in, and Sharebar- lets readers share content. But keep the number of plug-ins to a minimum.
4.Be creative
blend your posts with photos, screenshots, or even videos that you feel relevant. Make it lively and fun to read!
5. Love your readers
encourage comments to your post, and respond promptly. Show them that you appreciate it. Or maybe even visit their blogs and leave supportive comments.
And most of all,
6. Provide quality through every page.
So get started right away, and bring the change to your lifestyle from right where you are sitting!
Confused about how to recover your site from penguin??? It’s very difficult to make a safer side for you while the Google calls for new updates. Penguin is actually an algorithm, which checks certain scores: that is used to rank your website across search engines.
How does Google Penguin analyses your inbound link profile??
Google algorithm updates are completely meant for maintaining your website to different places in the SERPs. Google always selects those contents that are relevant as well as informative. A person who is searching for a particular thing within search engines for example, if he is looking for mobile applications. And if your article is very interesting as well as informative and also up to date. Then it’s sure that the person reads it, and he will surely look for more details via the link placed within your article. The link placed must redirect the person to the right destination where he gets the right information about mobile application. Google Penguin first analyses your inbound link profiles metrics. This is considered as the initial step of Google algorithm, here each anchor text is verified and checks out what deems out to be unnatural ones. So, once you are hit by Penguin it may be due to the over-optimized inbound link profile.
Three main anchor texts for a safe inbound link profile
Stuffing keywords and linking website with these keywords are outdated ones. People who follow such methods of link building have been hit by Google Penguin.
1. Naked URLs: Placing naked URLs are considered out to be the best option to be a natural link placing form. Placing such URLs are considered to be the strongest way of creating a natural inbound link profile. Here are some examples to place naked URLs to make a healthy web page.
“www. mysite.com”, “http://www.mysite.com”, “mysite.com”, “http://mysite.com”.
2. Brand Keywords: This is one another stronger way of placing safe links. Brand name of the website with latent semantic indexing makes a natural way of placing link profile. While placing
Here are some examples: My SEO Blog, then you can place links for your brand name like this ” My SEO Blog”, “MySEOBlog”, “my seo blog” or MSB etc.
3. Junk Anchors: Junk anchors or Universal anchors are list of words like: “Click here”, “Visit this website”, “Contact us”, “Here” etc are some of the most popular and natural way of anchor text.
By placing these three types of anchor text within your contents will always add an advantage, and helps you not to get “penalized”.
Facebook has added a new update to the application by adding the trending news topics box in the news streams page. This feature was released by Twitter quite some time ago and Facebook has just incorporated the same as well.
This new feature posts new trending topics or stories from within Facebook itself and clicking through these stories help you know what others are talking about the topic as well. This actually helps people to discuss about all the interesting things that are happening around the world. Also, it helps Facebook users to be updated about the trending happenings around them. Another interesting thing is that each user can personalize the topics that they would like to see in this small box so that they can decide what pops up in the news list. This way they will not have to see a lot of junk in the stream and can only see and read what they really like.
Twitter has been using this feature from a long time and Twitter users have been tweeting about this from quite some time. So there is no surprise that Facebook also decided to copy the same thing into it for their users too. We are not sure yet about how the functionality will work, but the feature has been very diligent in taking you to the right page when clicking on any news and showing you the number of likes and comments that news has received.
Since this feature is a new release, you may not be getting this directly in your news feeds page. It may take some time for this feature to be rolled out to all users. Many of the users have already got this facility and are using it. Their reviews state that this is a very useful option which helps them get latest news updates, celebrity news and more. The kinds of topics that are likely to come up in the trending topics are news updates from CNN, Google, celebrity news, shopping updates, stock updates and the like.
Since all these information and news updates have to come from various sources, it is not necessary to mention that you can also expect to see some advertisements along with the trending feeds. After all, Facebook has to rely on other sites for the news that will be paying a lot for their news to come in the top list. So it is natural that some advertisements will also be populated alongside.
This new trending topics feature will not be released worldwide immediately. It is currently being rolled out in US, Canada, India, Australia and UK. It is likely to be rolled out in other countries in the near future. But relax, it will not take too long for those in other countries to get this new feature. You will very soon be able to experience the advanced features of this new news feed option of feature. And once that is rolled out in your login page, you don’t need to visit a lot of places to be updated about topics that interest you. You can all that you need right from one destination.
There are numerous tools available in the market which helps website developers, owners, webmasters and others to optimize their pages for the search engine. If the tools are used in the right way, then there is a 70% increase in chance for your pages to be displayed in the top few of the result. Listed below are few of the SEO optimized tools that can come in handy.
1. Meta-tag and Keyword Analyzer:
Meta tags are an important aspect of the sites for best optimization. The Meta tag analyzer tool measures the ratio of keywords in the page to the ratio of content and it helps to develop the most SEO friendly Meta tags. It also helps you check how long your website takes to load. The tool gives you tips on how to develop the most SEO friendly Meta tags. It helps you find the website file size so that the loading time can be reduced accordingly. Moreover, it also checks all the links in the page for any broken links so that it becomes easy for you to fix the same.
2. Link Popularity Checking Tool:
This tool helps you to check how popular the links in your page are, how many people have access to your page and how many are directed to your competitors.
3. Keyword Suggestion Tool:
This tool helps you with good keywords based on your content and you can improve the accuracy of your site. When this is used along with Meta Tag Analyzer your keywords are well distributed in the page.
4. Keyword Traffic Estimator:
This tool helps you estimate how much traffic your keywords will generate when users search for any content with those keywords. This can help you determine the best keywords you can use on the page.
5. Broken Link Checker:
This tool will help you check if any broken links exist in your page. This way it will help you realize those links and you can correct them so that they all link to the respective sites. Also, with this tool you can check how many inbound links exist to your page and that will show you how much popularity your site can expect.
6. Link Counter:
This tool helps you count how many links exist in your page. If sites have way too many links, it may not please the readers as they have to visit too many pages to fully understand the content they are looking for. Instead, few simple links will help them get everything they need and also keep your page clean and presentable.
Mentioned above are a few of the links offered in the net to help you optimize your web content according to the SEO needs. These links are provided by http://www.submitexpress.com and each tool is free to use. Apart from this there are many other tools too which can be easily availed and used to check whether your content is best optimized to be thrown in the competitive market.
Search engine algorithms and tools are updated every now and then. With changes being made every day to various options and features, it becomes difficult to keep a track of what the algo looks for now and what we should be doing to be in the best books of Google search! Here are few of the latest updates which point out what SEO optimization actually looks for in 2014.
1. Relevance matters more than keywords:
Earlier, search engines concentrated more on keywords in the webpage. The more keywords you have, the more likely is your page to show up in the top few search results. But the latest search results do not look for keyword. It displays results based on the content relevancy. For e.g. if you search for a simple word, say bike, it gives you results to mechanic showrooms nearby, service centers available for you etc, even if the word is not present much in the result. Relevancy matters more than keyword ratio in the latest updates.
2. Keyword Data Encryption:
Google announced earlier that they would encrypt search results so that the search data could be protected. This was a big hit for the bloggers as they would not be able to see what are the keywords entered by people and thus, they would not be able to implement those in their pages. A workaround for this is available with AdWords as it allows bloggers to see which pages are gaining more traffic. This way, you may not know what exact keywords are used by the others, but you will get a fairly good idea about how optimization can be done and how you can rank your page in the top few. Google also allows some organic keywords to be viewed which can help you decide the keywords for your page. Also, other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing have not encrypted search data yet. So that is a boon a midst the latest updates from Google search.
3. Importance of reviews:
Earlier, advertisements were just displayed on the pages and no reviews were available in the search result. Now, Google has given advertisers an option to write a small review of around 60-70 words. This can also be displayed in the search page result in one line so that people searching with keywords related to your products can also see a small review before they even visit your page. This is an added advantage for many advertisers as they can promote their products well.
4. Linking your way up the ladder:
Links are a great way to help promote your page and get the page a high rank in the search results. You cannot obviously make inbound links to your own page as Google does not approve that. But you can provide links from your social network pages to your site so that users get an access to your webpage and it also gains popularity and rank in the top few list.
5. Keep the page update to date and fresh:
Google always looks for newer content or last updated content. If you develop your site and leave it untouched for a long time then the site is termed as old and may not be noticed by anyone at all. Instead, once your site is developed, spend some time weekly to just curate the content in the page or to re-write some contents so that the page is always up to date and will always be noticed as fresh content. Initially it may seem a tedious process to keep updating and you may not even know what to update every week. But as you get into the flow of it, things become much easier and you will end up spending just half an hour or so to get this work done.
6. Keep yourself well versed with the latest SEO updates:
SEO algorithms keep changing very often. Though it is difficult to keep track of all changes, yet, if it is done diligently, then it becomes very helpful to keep your site accessible to all Google search results related to your content.
Site developers put a lot of effort to create and share their content in the best possible way they can. But with changes happening across the web every other day, developers cannot just rest once they have finished the development work. You need to keep updating the content as per the latest rules so that you site is always noticed and it ranks high in search results. So once you publish your content, you could relax a bit, but not for long – you need to keep the updates going to get your site going.
