Archive for SEO articles

Link Building Using Search

Feb 132008

published by Hannah in Back Links | Link Strategies | SEO | SEO Tips with 3 comments

If you are running out of ideas for your link building campaign and have done the usual methods of hunting for links you might be relieved to know that there is another simple method you might have missed - link building using search.

Link building using search is might be a little time consuming, depending on the amount of results you get, but it does work pretty well. So what exactly should you search for? You should search for:

your company name;
your website title;
your website’s URL; and
your name

The reason why you should search for these is to find the websites that mention any of the above but fail to link back to you. In most cases (unless you find scrapers) asking the webmaster of that site to link back to your site using the above fields as anchor text will end up in new inbound links for you. If you think about it, it is much easier to get someone who has already mentioned your site to link to you than someone with whom you have no credibility at all.

Problems that may be encountered with this strategy though include:

getting too many results - It will be time-consuming sifting through all the results to find the sites that does not link back to you.

having a common name - If your name is pretty common you will get too much noise in the results. Figure out a way to narrow it down so that the results will more or less yield articles that actually mention you and not some other famous person with the same name.

keeping track of new articles/post mentioning the above search terms - To make sure you keep track of these use Google Alerts for all the search terms you used. This will save you time and effort in the long run since you won’t need to sift through SERPs periodically just to see if there is anything new. As soon as someone mentions you, your company, or your site, you will be immediately become aware of it (at least if indexed by Google - and if not it won’t affect your page rank anyway so there’s no point in running after those) so that you can check whether you got a backlink or not on the spot.

Popularity: 44%

Short Takes

Feb 132008

published by Hannah in News | SEO | SEO Tips | Wordpress with 1 comment

Been doing my usual round of reading and thought that I would share a couple of blog posts that caught my eye.

11 Tips for Appearing at Google Definitions by Esteban Panzera - The post outlines how you can define words in your site and have them appear as a search result in Google definitions. One [...]

Popularity: 39%

Continue reading “Short Takes”

SEO Blogs Banned from Wordpress.com

Feb 122008

published by Hannah in SEO | Wordpress with 5 comments

I recently read a post by Lee Odden on how Wordpress classified blogs as either “popular” blogs or “banned” blogs. As the title suggests, SEO blogs actually fall under banned blogs. Gasp!
Not surprisingly the post generated a lively discussion where in some agreed with Odden about how the term SEO blog was misleading and with [...]

Webmaster Tools Content Analysis Feature

Feb 92008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Tools | Website Design with No comments

For those who haven’t noticed or did notice but didn’t use the new features that came out last December here’s a quick overview on the Content Analysis feature. As the name suggests the new feature is very useful at analysing the content of your website. So what exactly does it analyse? The content analysis feature [...]

Underscores Versus Dashes in URLs

Feb 92008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Tips with 2 comments

The debate on whether to use underscores or dashes in URLs has been a pretty old one. Google finally cleared up the difference on their interpretation between the two. Their answer is simple: Dashes are considered are separators while underscores are not.
What this means is that for our URL
http://www.phoenixrealm.com/options-for-removing-url-from-google/
it is clear to Google that each [...]

Losing Money on Ad Campaigns and Sub-optimal Pages

Feb 62008

published by Hannah in Pay-Per-Click | SEO with No comments

Sometimes even after redesigning and optimising ones pages and they look pretty good statistics will show you that you still need to do some tweaking and that it isn’t really as optimised as you want it to be. This wouldn’t be a problem if you are merely going for one-time visitors but is a big [...]

SEO for the Yahoo!-MSN Search Hybrid

Feb 42008

published by Hannah in News | SEO | SEO Tips with 1 comment

If (or when) MSN acquires Yahoo! it will surely affect the search scene. But by how much? We don’t really know, especially since even with their combined market share of 32.7 percent they still lag behind the Google’s market share (58.4 percent). For those of us in SEO though it is important that we already [...]

How’s Your Site Doing in Yahoo?

Jan 312008

published by Hannah in Google Page Rank | News with 7 comments

Last week Yahoo! announced that they have been making changes on their indexing and ranking algorithms warning everyone to keep a close eye on the effects on their own site’s rankings. It’s been more than a week and I wonder if you have noticed any changes in your site’s ranking in Yahoo. I realised that [...]

Over Optimised: Is There Such a Thing?

Jan 302008

published by Hannah in SEO Basics | SEO Mistakes with 2 comments

Some SEO folks, when talking about keyword stuffing, pertain to the page as being over optimised. But is there really such a thing as over optimisation? I was mulling this over and realised that the term is contradictory. After all anything that is less or more than it should be simply isn’t optimised. Just for [...]

Options for Removing URL from Google

Jan 252008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Tools with 2 comments

I don’t know how I missed Matt Cutts’ video on Webmaster Central Blog on removing your content from Google. Anyway it’s not too late to give a summary of the talk especially since it is very useful.
There are several options for removing your content from Google although not all options are very good. Dan, [...]